[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 147 (Thursday, October 15, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H10996-H10997]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              COMPROMISES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. For those of us who grew up in the late 1960s and early 
1970s in the conservative movement, Ronald Reagan was our hero along 
with Barry Goldwater and William Buckley and a few others, and I 
actually was one of these conservative right wingers who came to 
Congress who was inspired originally by Ronald Reagan's speech for 
Barry Goldwater when I was merely 14 years old and formed one of the 
earliest high school YAF chapters and Americans for Freedom chapters 
the country, and, as you look at what we are about to face, this is 
what Ronald Reagan faced for 8 years.
  I am not going to stand up here and say that I like this budget 
agreement any more than Ronald Reagan, as President, liked the budget 
agreements he was given in 8 years in Congress. Yet he signed those 
budget agreements. The first year he got tax cuts, the other years he 
did not even get tax cuts. He got increased defense spending because he 
knew Congress wanted to spend more, and did we.
  One of the questions conservatives have to ask themselves as they 
vote on this budget is why are they so much better than Ronald Reagan, 
who they admire, if they vote ``no'' on this budget? Compromise is an 
unfortunate part of the political process. There are going to be many 
things in this bill that I am appalled by. I cannot believe that 
Members of Congress continue to take advantage of the legislative 
process when we are all under tremendous pressure to get special things 
for their

[[Page H10997]]

friends and their district that might not be able to withstand 
scrutiny. I am very disappointed we do not have tax cuts in this bill.
  I cannot believe that we cannot even get an effective limitation on 
taxpayers' dollars being used to fund referendums overseas to overturn 
laws that are protecting innocent children from being aborted. American 
tax dollars are being used to fund pro-abortion referendums around this 
world. We have it tied to funding for the U.N. and for State Department 
reauthorization, but that to me seems like a no-brainer. But as long as 
we have the President we currently have in the White House, that 
becomes a very difficult victory.
  So I am not going to stand up here and say I like everything in this 
bill, but there are some things that in fact are important changes, and 
that is the art of compromise, and the President did give some ground, 
the Democrats in the House and Senate gave some ground, and we had to 
give some ground.

  In the education area in fact we made a lot of progress. The 
President will stand up and say he got 100,000 teachers or 40,000 
teachers or whatever, but the fact is it moved back to the state level. 
We gave flexibility, and as the chairman of the Education Committee, 
Mr. Goodling, keeps pointing out, that in fact is what we were driving 
towards. We also have a ban on national testing so kids around this 
country are not slammed in under one major test.
  We have level funding on the National Endowment for the Arts, number 
of other things they worked with in the Education Committee.
  In addition to that, there are many of us who are very concerned that 
we have not developed an adequate missile defense in this country, and 
since we knew we were going to spend more on domestic issues, we wanted 
to make sure that the preparedness and the readiness of our Armed 
Forces, that the development of our missile defense systems, were going 
to be funded as well as the social spending.
  I am very concerned in this country about the expansion of 
pornography along with the expansion of Internet. We all know that 
whenever we have an expansion of technology, whether it be television, 
or whether it be computers, that that opens up things to our children 
and our families that we hoped would be, they could be protected from. 
Yet these advantages of technology have been wonderful for our country, 
but we need to the best we can, limit the pornography and the 
perversion from getting into our homes and making sure that minors do 
not have access to that. That was one of the last points negotiated in 
this bill. It is something that Dr. James Dobson in Focus on the Family 
has battled for for a decade, working on the Pornography Commission. We 
finally have a victory in the area of Internet porn.
  We have a number of extensions on tax extenders for self-employed 
businesses and for farmers that were very critical to many small 
businesses in my district and throughout the country. We have a whole 
range of what would be termed more minor issues relating to gun 
registries, relating to language on certain bills where in fact 
conservatives won, and that is how this process works.
  One last comment:
  Anybody who says that they are going to put aside money for Social 
Security, this is one more proof the only thing that government can do 
is either spend it or giver it back to you. We have once again seen the 
fraud of using senior citizens as a shield to cover real motives. In 
fact, we are spending 19 to 20 billion extra dollars, much of that will 
be in the baseline and be spent for future years, too. We have 
basically spent a big chunk, if not the majority, of the so-called 
surplus, and it did not go to seniors. That started when the President 
came up here with the State of the Union address, said I want 
everything put to Social Security, and then detailed for 20 pages new 
programs to spend that. Today we are seeing that come through. I am 
disappointed in that, but in the end this is a bill worth moving.

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