[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 123 (Wednesday, September 16, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H7903-H7905]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             RESHAPING THE INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, first of all, let me apologize for keeping you 
here after 10 o'clock at night. Also, let me apologize to the staff. I 
do not ordinarily talk to myself in an empty room, as the other two 
gentlemen have been doing for an hour. But there is something tonight 
that I feel I simply have to get off of my chest.
  Mr. Speaker, I intended to speak tonight to address some of the 
institutional failures that I believe are besetting this country as we 
deal with the matter involving the President. The Speaker's recently 
announced guidelines about what comments are permissible about the 
Starr report that we voted to release, and the President's conduct, 
prevent me from saying on the floor certain things that I wanted to 
say. In deference to those guidelines, I will honor them. But the whole 
text of what I intended to say will be available in my office.
  Mr. Speaker, Friday night after 2 hours of reading, after our vote on 
Friday, I began to wonder about the correctness of my vote earlier that 
day in light of my concerns about the appropriateness of what should be 
electronically directed into people's homes in this country. Taking a 
break from my reading, I turned on the TV to see, as an unreconstructed 
Cubs fan, if I could find out whether Sammy Sosa had hit another home 
run again. The tube came on, and within seconds I heard a CNBC reporter 
using language that I never expected to hear on the Nation's national 
news programs, or what passes for them these days. And at that moment I 
reached the same conclusion that millions of Americans have probably 
reached. I have had it. Not just with this story, but with something 
far more disturbing.
  What I felt was a conclusion that has been building within me for 
months, even years. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that our society 
and our country is faced with nothing less than the accelerating 
failure of institutions that are central to our functioning as a decent 
society and as a democracy that works the way our Founding Fathers 
wanted it to work.
  Mr. Speaker, please do not misunderstand. This is a great country. In 
many ways, it is a good country. There is much that is good in our 
society and we have had much good economic news in recent years. 
Nonetheless, I believe that most crucial institutions and institutional 
arrangements in this country and in this society are failing in their 
responsibilities. That failure is affecting our economy, our culture, 
our political system, our long-term environmental security, and even 
our own spirituality.
  The evidence of the failure of our most important institutions is all 
around us in this and other events. At the moment our Nation is 
transfixed on this episode, global challenges face us everywhere. The 
world's economy is in turmoil. We have almost no tool but persuasion to 
move the Japanese Government off a course of economic and fiscal 
impotence and incompetence that threatens the economic health of all of 
Asia and indirectly threatens our own economic health as well.
  International financial institutions such as the International 
Monetary Fund are being overwhelmed by changes in the world economy, 
changes in currency relationships, changes in capital flows that each 
day weaken the ability of the major institution the world has to 
stabilize economic relationships between nations, the IMF.

  The Nation with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons that could 
possibly one day be arrayed against us, Russia, is experiencing 
political and economic chaos. Much of Europe is focused on that chaos, 
but here in America we give it only intermittent attention and 
analysis.
  The most irrational, paranoid, and dangerous government in the world, 
North Korea, is facing military, political, and economic instability 
that could easily threaten the lives of 50,000 American servicemen and 
women stationed in South Korea, and hundreds of thousands of other 
human beings.
  Our ability to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons has been brought 
to the edge of failure by events on the Indian subcontinent and in 
Korea. And yet the discourse in this country about how to deal with 
that issue is shallow and in some cases down right dangerous.
  The best chance in a generation for peace in the Middle East is 
slowly but surely sliding away, and this decade has produced the 
hottest known global temperatures in years with huge potential 
consequences for worldwide agriculture, fisheries, economic 
dislocation, public health, and environmental stability. And yet 
commercial disputes about profit levels are threatening our ability to 
take even marginal action to minimize potential catastrophe.
  On the home front, the Supreme Court, the institution that we in the 
end rely upon more than any other to preserve the balance of forces 
that protect our democratic processes and our liberty, has handed down 
two very different sets of decisions that have crippled the ability of 
our political system to function as a democracy should.
  First, the spectacularly myopic decision by the Court in the Paula 
Jones case that the government would not be distracted if that case 
went forward now rather than 2 years from now and the President was out 
of office.
  Second, the mind-bogglingly naive decision that the constitutional 
rights of Americans to have a political system that functions for them 
would be protected by a series of naively libertarian decisions that 
equate money with speech, establish absurd legalisms about campaign 
financing that have no relationship to reality that have turned 
politics into a money chase and political campaigns into the 
competition of dollars rather than ideas.

[[Page H7904]]

  Other domestic institutions are also failing in their fundamental 
responsibilities. Large sections of corporate America are making 
economic decisions devoid of any values except the maximization of 
financial benefit to the management and investment elite of this 
country, in almost total disregard of the impact of those decisions on 
low workers, their families, and their broader communities which have 
nurtured them.
  These decisions and policy decisions by government have together 
produced the greatest disparity between the economic well-being of the 
wealthiest 5 percent of our people and everyone else in the modern 
history of our country. If we as a people are concerned with moral 
outcomes, should we not be just as concerned about how the Nation deals 
with poor people and sick people as we are about how we deal with each 
other on matters of sexual intimacy?
  The political elite has largely debased what passes for political 
dialogue on many crucial issues. It has allowed its reliance on the 
community of pollsters and consultants to produce the lowest common 
denominator discourse in which winning and holding power drive out 
almost any consideration of the need to educate and enlighten the 
public on every front.
  Is there no length to which we will not go to hold or seize power? Is 
there no amount of pain we will not inflict on each other for political 
gain?
  More and more individuals are entering Congress and other political 
institutions who see issues not as problems to be confronted, but 
concerns to be manipulated and toyed with around the margins in order 
to seize and hold power.
  So many debates are split along party lines and driven by the 
ideological enforcers, the modern-day American counterparts of Mikhail 
Suslov, the old guardian of the purity of Soviet orthodoxy, that when 
bipartisanship does occur, we are almost startled by its appearance.
  The focus and limits of much of that debate is set by political 
elites in both parties who rub shoulders with the financial and 
economic elites of the Nation far more often than they do with everyday 
working people. The press itself, with all too few lonely and valiant 
exceptions, some of whom work in this building, has fallen into the 
same bad habits it legitimately criticizes in the politicians it 
covers.
  The press too, especially the electronic media, drawn by the 
realities of the marketplace has often become little more than the 
public affairs entertainment division of profit-making corporations who 
will do almost anything to preserve market share instead of responding 
to the public's needs to understand the substance of issues before the 
country.
  The press, driven by market surveys and polls, produces story after 
story that portray politicians as gladiators and celebrities, rather 
than problem solvers, responding to and strengthening some of the most 
unhealthy public biases on the landscape.
  For every question that I get from a reporter on the substance of an 
issue, I get five from other reporters about the politics of that same 
issue, reflecting both a laziness and a shallowness that this country 
simply cannot afford. And worst of all, some reporters cannot resist 
using any device to win a point, no matter how much damage they do to 
the country and innocent individuals in the process.
  One need look no further than the reporter who last Sunday on a 
Sunday talk show in an interview with a guest snidely asked that guest 
what his wife's definition of sex was. That reporter owes his own 
profession, his viewers, and the wife of that guest a public apology 
for his own inability to resist his Dennis the Menace impulses which 
have increasingly made that reporter a caricature of himself. Is there 
no length to which some members of the press will not go in order to 
humiliate other human beings, all in the name of news values? I wonder.
  Even religious institutions have allowed themselves to fail the 
Nation in too many instances and have allowed politicians to manipulate 
religious concerns more to find political advantage than to find 
spiritual answers.

                              {time}  2215

  Debates and discussions about the nature of humankind and our 
origins, our purpose and our relationship with our creator are 
essentially conversations about the unknowable, at least in this life. 
Yet the certitude with which some political and religious figures 
attack those who have legitimate differences of belief are 
disheartening and appalling and border on the sacrilegious. Too many 
political and religious leaders alike have allowed religion or the 
superficial reference to religion to be used for nonreligious purposes. 
They wrap political, commercial and ideological preferences in 
religious ribbons and desecrate both religion and politics in the 
process. The 10 Commandments represent a guide for living and for the 
treatment of others. They are not supposed to be a road map for human 
beings or politicians to destroy each other. They are not a political 
program or an economic program. As Mario Cuomo once said, ``God is not 
a celestial party chairman.'' To the best of my knowledge, God has not 
yet taken a position on capital gains or other tax plans. But you would 
never know it by listening to some of the self-promoting political 
manipulators who pass themselves off as the clergy of the tube. 
Politicians have no special qualifications to judge the private lives 
of other people. In the end, only God can do that. The nuns at St. 
James taught me a long time ago that we have enough to do worrying 
about the stewardship of our own souls to pass judgment on the private 
lives of others. Neither do religious leaders have any special 
competence to judge the specific mechanisms by which elected officials 
in a democracy accomplish decent public ends. Those of us in public 
life owe due consideration to their opinions, but we have, after all, 
taken an oath to uphold the Constitution in accordance with the 
dictates of our own conscience, not someone else's. That is our own 
sacred public duty under the Constitution. We religious and political 
leaders alike have allowed debates about religious truths and values to 
be used all too often as weapons to inflict pain and gain political 
advantage rather than as tools to find moral answers that take decent 
account of the moral values of others as well as ourselves. We have all 
too often allowed the substitution of moralizing for morality, and have 
allowed the search for God to become a journey that develops hatred and 
contempt rather than love for our fellow searchers.
  Example. On abortion, an issue which we will be debating again for 
the thousandth time tomorrow, perhaps the most agonizing, troubling and 
divisive of all moral debates in the public realm. On that issue, both 
sides have allowed their own certitude about the will of God or their 
dedication to unbending individualism, their desire for tactical 
advantage, to get in the way of their responsibility to recognize good 
intentions and honest nuances of conscience. And so that debate has 
become more and more a political manipulation of the legislative 
process rather than a search for areas of agreement that would reduce 
the world's acceptance of abortion at the same time that it recognizes 
the dignity of individual conscience.
  All of these institutional failures, I believe, are rooted in two 
fundamental shortcomings: One simply, a lack of knowledge or 
understanding about how the world and institutional relationships are 
changing; the other is the triumph of a me-first rampant materialistic 
individualism that prevents the leaders of almost all of our social, 
political, commercial, informational and religious institutions from 
really focusing on the answers to one simple question: In addressing 
whatever decisions confront us, how can I or we take into fair account 
the needs, concerns and interests of those who are not just like us in 
social or economic standing, cultural outlook or political or religious 
beliefs? That is the important question.
  We desperately need to address our key institutional shortcomings, 
because institutions are the major tools available to any culture, to 
any nation, and to any society to shape its future. Yet we continue to 
be transfixed on the Starr-Clinton-Lewinsky soap opera. The Nation has 
been moved to this focus because of two people largely. First, Mr. 
Starr. On a number of accounts, Mr. Starr represents the overreaching 
zealotry of a personally upright but ideologically and politically 
partisan individual who before he was

[[Page H7905]]

appointed special prosecutor was already contemplating filing a court 
brief on behalf of Paula Jones and who had indicated he was planning to 
join Pepperdine Law School, an institution financed in large part by a 
person who has contributed millions of dollars to try to bring down the 
President. Mr. Starr from all reports is a fine, upstanding human 
being. But a person of his partisan and ideological mind-set should in 
my view never have been appointed to a position that calls for, above 
all, unquestioned fairness, balance and judgment. President Clinton is 
the second person. Up to this point he has been the most personally 
talented politician of his generation. He appears to be a person of 
good heart and courage who wants to do good things for the country. But 
it has often been noted in the press that the President's causes have 
been both promoted and crippled by a tendency to use language in ways 
that are technically in conformance with the truth but often result in 
obscuring rather than clarifying.
  As frustrating as I feel about parsing of language in this episode, I 
am even more unhappy about the lack of candor demonstrated by both the 
President and congressional leaders in jointly obscuring the real 
effect of the budget agreement they both sold to the Nation last year 
on our ability to meet our domestic responsibilities in strengthening 
education, health, environment, housing and social service. Why does 
that frustrate me more? Because the second was a public event which had 
direct, substantive consequences for American citizens and their 
families on questions that we will be voting on every day.
  At this point, some things are clear to me and some things are not. I 
cannot really reach a final judgment on this depressing matter until I 
have had an opportunity to have all of the appropriate information. But 
my first impressions are these. First, after four years and the 
expenditure of over $40 million since Mr. Starr was first appointed to 
review the facts surrounding the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas in 
the 1970s, we still have no finding of illegal conduct by the President 
in Whitewater, no finding of illegal conduct by the President in the 
investigation of the White House travel office which Mr. Starr 
subsequently undertook, no finding of illegality by the President on 
the matter relating to the FBI file case. At this point all of the 
Nation is focused on something which had not even occurred when Mr. 
Starr was first appointed independent prosecutor.
  At this point, Mr. Speaker, I intended to comment on some of the 
concerns I had about both Mr. Starr and the President, but I am 
precluded by the Speaker's guidelines from doing so. The complete text 
of what I had to say on this point will also be available in my office, 
but I will not address them here.
  As we ask the question, what is the proper action for Congress to now 
take, I will say that this episode in many ways is very different than 
Watergate. The actions in Watergate involved burglarizing and 
wiretapping political opponents, attempting to use the IRS to 
intimidate political opponents, financial payoffs to defendants in 
criminal cases, and other uses of the levers of governmental power to 
subvert the very democratic processes that underlie the essence of 
America. In considering an appropriate action for the Congress to take, 
I would urge the House to consider the course it took in another case a 
year earlier. At this point, what is important for us to determine is 
what is the best thing for the country. A congressional reprimand or 
other sanction may prove to be the most appropriate action, especially 
if it allows Congress to end this matter in a much shorter period of 
time so that the Congress and the presidency can refocus our attention 
and activities from issues of the past to the future public needs of 
the Nation and the people we are supposed to represent. I do not know 
how this sad chapter will end, but I do know that this episode and the 
way it has been handled by the leadership circles of our major 
institutions demonstrates a desperate need to examine how we can renew 
those crucial institutions.

  In two years, the millennium will draw to a close. This Nation's 
institutions are simply not ready to lead the country into a new one. I 
would never in three lifetimes call for a new constitutional 
convention, because this generation of political leadership in my 
judgment is highly unlikely to improve on the work of the Founding 
Fathers. It is much more likely to muck it up. But I do believe we need 
to have millennium conventions convened for the purpose of examining 
ways to reshape, redirect and refocus almost all of our institutions, 
economic, corporate, political, communication, religious and even our 
international institutions, such as the IMF, the U.N. and NATO. In the 
political arena, we need special attention paid to the presidential 
nominating process to try to find ways to reduce the importance of 
candidates' media skills and increase the role of peer review by people 
who know the candidates best if both parties are to produce candidates 
with the qualities necessary to lead this country.
  I do not know how we can change the human heart, but we do need to 
find ways to reshape the major institutions of this society so that 
there are more incentives to produce a new focus on selflessness. That 
is the major task we each face as individuals on life's journey. We 
need more help and less hindrance from the institutions that dominate 
our lives along the way.

                          ____________________