[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 143 (Sunday, October 11, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H10527]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 DEMOCRATS NEED TO GROW UP AND HELP REPUBLICANS SOLVE NATION'S PROBLEMS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Salmon) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SALMON. Mr. Speaker, I would like to say it is wonderful to be 
here today, but I like most of you on both sides of the aisle would 
much rather be home attending church with my family, but we cannot be 
there because we have got work to do. I am not going to stand here and 
say that this Congress has accomplished everything that I wanted it to 
accomplish. In fact there are a lot of things that it could have and 
should have done that it did not. But as far as the rhetoric is 
concerned, when I listened to some of the folks, especially those on 
the other side of the aisle flailing their arms around and squealing in 
high decibels much like Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, I now 
know why people are disenfranchised, why they decide they do not want 
to go to the polls. They are sick and tired of these people back in 
Washington, D.C. acting like a bunch of juveniles. For the last 4 years 
since I have been in Congress, I think of all of the things that the 
Democrats have said about the Republicans. Number one, that the 
Republicans want to starve the children. Remember back with the school 
lunch program, that we just want to decimate all the programs for the 
kids because we do not love kids. We must be child haters. That we 
wanted to pollute the environment. Somehow that we who are Republicans 
have some different kind of biological system that is impervious to the 
pollutants and carcinogens in the atmosphere and in the water, that we 
somehow would like to pollute the water, that we get glee out of making 
people suffer, that we want people who are being covered by health care 
to die, to be sick, to be thrown out of the hospitals, that we do not 
want to educate the children. If you believe all of these things that 
the Democrats are saying, then you must believe that we are the worst 
kind of human beings, somewhat a combination of Jeffrey Dahmer and 
Charles Manson. You guys need to give it a rest. You get on the verge 
of being ridiculous. Nobody believes that there are people like that in 
this country that want to come back to Washington, D.C. and cause 
mayhem on the American public. It just sounds silly and you need to 
stop it. I came here as an American first, not as a Republican, as an 
American, to come here and get the job of the people done. I have four 
kids in the public schools. I am proud of the job that my public 
schools do for my children. But I juxtapose that with what I see the 
results of the American education system producing. Forty percent of 
our children are dropping out of school across America. Then I look at 
the TIMS report, and I see that we end up 20th in the math and 
sciences, scoring 20th, and we are beaten by war-torn Slovenia. Why is 
that? If you believe what the Democrats are saying, they want to just 
go ahead and give you more of what we have been getting. Keep dumping 
money into this bureaucracy back in Washington, D.C. Keep giving you 
more of what you are getting. Forty percent dropout rate, 20th on the 
international test scores in math and sciences. Enough is enough. What 
we are doing is not working. Let us give parents a little bit more say. 
Let us give the local school boards and the local teachers a little bit 
more say in how to handle the classrooms. I think it is a crime that 
teachers have to go to school worried for their lives. I think it is a 
crime that we have so tied their hands in the American political system 
that they cannot discipline children, that when children try to poison 
them or children try to hurt them, that they cannot really do anything 
for fear of lawsuit. We have a lot of work to do. I think it is a crime 
that a teacher can be a terrible teacher, can produce the most 
substandard of results and not be fired, that a teacher can be grossly 
incompetent and because of tenure, they are protected. I think there 
are a lot of things that are wrong with our system. I do agree, I think 
that we need to dedicate more resources when it comes to education. 
Again I am going to restate, I have four children in the public school 
system, two of them in high school, one in junior high and one in 
elementary school. I believe that we need to give our teachers more. 
But I want to give them 100 percent. I do not want to filter it through 
Washington, D.C. and send through a pittance of it back to the teachers 
and back to the classroom to help my children. We want to sit down at 
the table. We want to fix these problems. If the President were here in 
Washington, D.C. instead of off campaigning and raising money from 
special interest groups, if he were here, we could solve these 
problems. We would like to do that. Because there is so much at stake, 
so much more at stake than these elections that are going to happen in 
the next 3\1/2\ weeks. But you would think that Armageddon is about to 
happen, that we Republicans are back here like Simon Legree trying to 
figure out how to poison the water, how to fail the children, how to 
poison the senior citizens, kick them out of the hospitals, feed them 
dog food. Come on guys, you need to stop it, grow up and let us go on 
and solve the problems of the American people.

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