[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 147 (Thursday, October 15, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H11013-H11019]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE BUDGET AGREEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, it is very difficult to follow a 
discussion like that of one of our great colleagues, a beloved 
Californian, but I want to get to the subject of the budget.
  As the Speaker knows, we have been here in Washington camped out now 
for some 10 to 15 days trying to get a budget agreement with the White 
House and the Senate. I think it is very important for people to 
realize that, although we clash so often over partisan reasons, there 
is a lot more to the partisanship than just not agreeing.
  There are genuine philosophical differences between often liberals 
and conservatives. There are philosophical differences that have to do 
with the reasons we are elected.
  People are elected because they said I am a conservative, I am a 
liberal. When I go to Washington, I want to represent those liberal 
views or those conservative views. Guess what. We get 435 people 
elected to the House of Representatives on their own individual 
platforms, and of course we are going to have debates and of course we 
are going to have some disagreements.
  Often, that is going to be betrayed as partisanship, and sometimes 
there is a partisanship element to it. But there is a real profound 
ideological difference here. The Speaker has said that, look at it this 
way, Congress is the Civil War without bullets, or it is a substitute 
for civil war. It is a peaceful way to carry on our republic.
  I think that that is what has been going on the last 15 days. The 
budget debate did not start 15 days ago. It did not start in the 
summertime. It does not start with the first appropriations bill. It 
has started long before most of us were elected.
  We came here with ideas of what to cut and what to increase, what to 
spend money on and what not to. But we have been engaged in this 
process, most of us, since the time we were candidates.
  Then this year, as the appropriations bills went through, we debated 
various amendments and various spending levels. I am on the Committee 
on Appropriations. I can tell my colleagues there is hardly anything 
that is in an appropriations bill that has not had a hearing, that has 
not had a debate, that has not had a question that has not been 
scrutinized.

  Things in there have been well looked at and well debated. We are at 
this process where we finally have a massive budget agreement, and I 
think it is good. I am very excited about this budget agreement.
  There is a little bit of this and a little bit of that in there. 
There are some things that the Democrats can say they have won on, some 
things Republicans can say they have won on.
  But the ultimate winners are the American people. That is what is 
important for us to do at the end of the day, not say which party won, 
but say what the American people won.
  Here are some things in there that I believe Americans won. Drugs. We 
have strong anti-drug language in there. We have beefed up the position 
of the drug czar. We have given him more power to fight the drug thugs.
  It used to be that, when the drug lords were out in my area, as my 
colleague knows, I represent coastal Georgia, the Coast Guard does a 
lot of drug interdiction. They cannot keep up with the drug runners and 
their powerful boats. Those days are over with. Now the Federal 
agencies can go after them. There is nothing more frustrating than 
having drug dealers having higher technology than law enforcement. I am 
glad to say that is over with. Interdiction is very, very important.
  This is a product, Mr. Speaker, that has grown in South America and 
processed often in other South American countries and then sneaked in 
in the dark of the night into America and sold in the school yard near 
us.
  The employees of this company that sell this insidious product, if 
you will, the drug pushers, they cannot advertise. They cannot exchange 
business cards. They cannot even tell anyone they do. Yet, in every 
school district from Maine to Florida to California, they can get 
illegal drugs, and they did get to our 12 years olds, our 14 years 
olds, our 15 years olds. This Congress and this bill has taken a strong 
step to say, get the heck out of our school yards.
  In addition to cracking down on the drug dealer, we also have strong 
rehab. Because if somebody has gotten off track and they have become 
addicted to drugs, we want them to be able to turn to somebody or some 
agency or some institution when they are ready and say I want out. Can 
you help me? Can you throw me that lifeline?
  We are putting the needed resources into institutions, not all 
Federal, not all State, and certainly not all governmental, but we are 
doing it with nonprofit agencies as well to say that, if you want to 
get off drugs, we want to have the bridge there to get you off drugs. 
We hope you do not ever get on drugs, but if you are ready to come 
home, we want to be there to help you. That is in this bill, Mr. 
Speaker. I think it is a very significant step for the streets of 
America, for the safety of our kids.
  Another thing that is in this omnibus bill is education. We in the 
Republican Congress are committed to having world class education. I 
know the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) has children, because I 
get his Christmas cards.
  What we have in our family is we have got an 8-year-old, a 10-year-
old, and a 13-year-old, and a 15-year-old. My children and the 
gentleman's children are not going to be competing Georgians versus 
kids from Illinois versus kids from California. But they are going to 
be American kids competing against German kids and Japanese kids and 
British kids. They are going to be part of this big global economy that 
we have.
  In that spirit, we want to be sure that our American children can go 
head-to-head in science, head-to-head in math, trigonometry, and 
calculus, head-to-head in physics and chemistry, and head-to-head not 
just in English, but of all language skills.
  We want them to be able to compete in it. We think an important part 
of that is local control of schools, not Washington command control, 
but local controls.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth), 
one of the leaders in this budget fight, one of the toughest defenders 
of the hardworking dollars, tax paid dollars, paid by American middle 
class. He has joined us now, and it is an honor to yield to him.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from 
Georgia, for yielding to me.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening again to talk about America's 
priorities and the pursuit of common sense conservative goals, because 
as my colleague, the gentleman from Georgia points out, Mr. Speaker, it 
makes sense to get the resources to where they have the most impact. 
Education is far too important to leave up to Washington bureaucracies.
  So what we have done is to agree in historic fashion to provide 
resources but to make sure those resources are implemented at the local 
level. That is the key, because the first priority, of course, must be 
with parents and the teachers who are there in the classroom who know 
our children's names,

[[Page H11014]]

and the school board members whom we elect.
  Indeed, I would tip the hat, rhetorically speaking, to those 
colleagues from Pennsylvania, the gentleman form Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Pitts) and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling), chairman of 
the Committee on Education and the Workforce, who have worked so hard 
to say that the proper role is to make sure that resources are spent at 
home in local school districts and, indeed, that is commensurate with 
our overall philosophy of transferring money, power, and influence out 
of the hands of the Washington bureaucracies and back to the people at 
home who are on the frontlines addressing the problem.

                              {time}  2130

  That is the key. Just as the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts) 
in Dollars to the Classroom stipulated that 95 percent of every Federal 
dollar spent on education, or 95 cents of every Federal dollar spent on 
education should end up at home in the classroom and only 5 cents 
should go to the care and feeding of Washington bureaucrats is a 
common-sense approach.
  Further as our colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling) has pointed 
out, when it comes to special education, and the needs there, to make 
sure that this Congress lives up to the promise it made in 1975. I was 
in my senior year of high school, Mr. Speaker, a promise a liberal-
controlled Congress made to say to the States, ``Oh, we're going to 
help you fund special education'' but sadly that is one of those 
promises that never really was fulfilled. The challenge remains for us 
to really help children with special needs commensurate with what we 
have done across the spectrum in terms of education and taxation, in 
terms of tax-free education accounts for college students. We need to 
expand that, but we have gotten a good start. And today as we prepare 
this historic budget agreement, we continue to shape those priorities.
  I thank my colleague from Georgia. I look and I see that one of my 
other colleagues from Arizona has joined us on the floor, but I just 
want to thank my friend from Georgia for pointing these things out.
  Mr. KINGSTON. The gentleman has a major piece of legislation that he 
has introduced that is bipartisan in nature, for institutions of higher 
education that he may want to mention something about that, but I do 
want to emphasize this special education point that he has brought up. 
I think it is so important for us to help the families who have 
children with special needs and help the children with special needs 
and give them every single opportunity we can to help them progress and 
help them with whatever we can do. In some cases it makes a tremendous 
difference. For this Congress to abandon those children, it would be a 
travesty. But we have not done as Congresses have done in the past. We 
have said, ``No, we're going to meet this challenge, we're going to do 
it.'' You have been a leader of that. Our friend from New Hampshire 
(Mr. Bass) has certainly taken the forefront of it. You have mentioned 
the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling). We have done a lot 
about this.
  We talk about local control. I would like to tell the story of my 
old, or my former, not so old, she is 84 years young, Mrs. Musick back 
home in Athens, Georgia. She raised me, she was a very strict teacher, 
she raised me in the classroom, a very strict teacher. You could not 
talk, you had to cover your book, you could not pass notes, you had to 
do your homework and all kinds of things you need to be told to do when 
you are 15 and 16 years old. But she loved her classroom, her subjects. 
She liked to talk about Hemingway and Longfellow and Shakespeare. These 
people were her personal friends. They were her colleagues and her peer 
group. She read about it. There was no sentence she could not diagram. 
No sentence had a split infinitive or no participle dangled in her 
classroom. She was passionate about it. But the other thing was, she 
was the boss of her classroom. She did not have experts coming down 
from Harvard University to tell her how to teach the kids in Athens, 
Georgia. She did not have people up in Atlanta coming up with new 
charts and diagrams that had to be used. She did not have bureaucrats 
from Washington saying, ``This is the new way to introduce literature 
to kids.''
  Mr. HAYWORTH. If the gentleman would yield, I would hazard a guess 
that she did not spend an inordinate amount of her time filling out 
forms for Washington, D.C. explaining the effectiveness of her time-
honored methods of enforcing discipline in the classroom and holding 
her students to a higher standard and, indeed, that is what we have to 
recapture. It is not found in radical theory but it is found in a 
reduction of what some political scientists would call the bureaucratic 
inertia and what goes along with it, the requirements of all sorts of 
paperwork being filled out and all sorts of grant applications and all 
sorts of justifications for what really is vital, helping teachers 
teach and helping children learn. That is the basic, what is so vital 
in this human equation.
  Many more things are there to commend as we take a look at this 
budget agreement, including national defense, a priority promised in 
the preamble to our Constitution. As we take a look there and look at 
that time crisis that our military personnel are confronting, we have 
worked now to supplement our defense spending in this uncertain world. 
We have taken steps in that direction. But there are a variety of 
things to commend a reassessment of where we are headed in terms of our 
budget, to work for an honest compromise and again in this divided 
government, in our constitutional republic with a conservative Congress 
and a liberal President, there is the challenge of give and take and 
compromise. And so on a variety of fronts, whether education, or the 
national defense or working to make sure that there are extenders and 
modest tax relief in terms of an acceleration of the 100 percent 
deduction for health insurance for the self-employed. We have a variety 
of things on the table and in the agreement that commend it to the 
American populace, not the least of which being on another front the 
move to control pornography on the Internet. So many different topics, 
many different things to commend the bill.
  Mr. KINGSTON. The gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) has joined us 
and he has been working hard, he is one of the number one budget 
crunchers on the floor, a staunch protective guy when it comes to 
spending tax dollars and the kind of leader we need.
  Mr. SHADEGG. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I wanted to join you 
this evening and express my thoughts about this important piece of 
legislation and make it clear how strongly I believe that this is a 
good piece of legislation on balance and that it is something we need. 
Legislation is often difficult and the process by which we get to it is 
a struggle. It is always a compromise. I think when we address this 
issue, we are going to hear from some of our colleagues that they are 
disappointed in some of what is in this legislation and they are 
disappointed that the President won some battles. I think in assessing 
that, you need to understand that the President has the veto power and 
that he was willing this time around to use that power to shut the 
government down if necessary if we did not agree to some of his 
provisions. But I think it is extremely important to look at the good 
in this bill and to focus on that.
  Let me begin by discussing a disappointment, an aspect of this bill 
that disappoints me and I know disappoints my friend from Georgia (Mr. 
Kingston) and is something that we would liked to have seen. We all 
believe that the American people deserve tax relief. We feel strongly 
that it would have been important in this legislation to have given the 
American people some relief from the marriage penalty that is imposed 
on them. That was an issue that we surfaced some time ago. We passed 
out of this body a piece of legislation to give the American people tax 
relief. Now, why? Why tax relief now? I think it is important to 
understand that Americans are being taxed today at the highest level in 
American history. Federal taxes are at a near all-time high, they have 
only been higher than this at one point in our history and that was 
right at the end of World War II. But State and local taxes are much 
higher than they were then, so taxes are at an all-time high. Why then 
did we fight for tax relief? To give some relief to

[[Page H11015]]

the hardworking American people and let them keep their money. I am 
disappointed that is not in this bill, but it is important to 
understand why it is not in this bill. It is not, that is to say, tax 
relief for the American people is not in this legislation we will vote 
on tomorrow because the President opposed it. He made it clear, he told 
America he would veto any legislation we sent him giving the American 
people tax relief. I have got to tell you that is a huge disappointment 
to me and I think it reflects that there is a disconnect between this 
administration and what the American people desperately need.

  It is also important to understand the President's position on this 
issue. At the same time that we were fighting for tax relief, the 
President took the ground of saying no, you cannot give the American 
people tax relief because that would be spending a portion of the 
surplus. Now, I want you to understand, that is one position. It could 
be a principled position. If he had said under no circumstances can we 
raid the surplus for tax relief, that could have been a liberal, 
Democrat position which said keep the money in Washington, do not let 
the American people keep their own money. But it is important, I think, 
to discuss the fact that on this issue, the President is in fact not 
being square. As a matter of fact, I believe there is hypocrisy going 
on here. But at the same time he was saying no tax relief for the 
American people 2 weeks ago because that would raise the surplus, in 
this piece of legislation he is demanding that we spend that surplus, 
that very same surplus on bigger government.
  So before we focus on the good things in this bill, and there are 
many and I want to talk about them, it is important to understand that 
the President denied us the ability in this critical legislation to 
give the American people tax relief because he said we should save the 
surplus and instead in the negotiations over the last few weeks took 
that selfsame surplus that he has denied us the ability to give back to 
the American people in tax relief and said, ``I want to spend that 
surplus on bigger government.'' In fact, at the end of the day because 
of his veto power and because he was willing to threaten to shut down 
the government, there is no tax relief and sadly we were forced to 
agree to some additional spending in this bill which I know will 
disappoint some of my constituents.
  I know there are a number of points I want to talk about, good things 
in this bill, although I think several of my colleagues would like to 
talk on the point I have just raised.
  Mr. KINGSTON. That is a very good point. I do think it is important 
that we recognize there is still going to be, I think, about a $71 
billion projected surplus and the emerging nickname of this Congress, 
and you were part of the historic 104, the majority class, I think this 
freshman class is going to be called the Surplus Congress. We have a 
distinguished member from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) who has been sitting 
in the chair tonight. He wanted to make a few points on what you just 
mentioned.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. I thank my colleagues, and I think my colleague from 
Arizona brings up a good point that the public needs to remember, 
defining the surplus and then the difference between our goal of giving 
a small amount of money back to the taxpayers, and it was a small 
percentage, versus more government spending. That is what separates the 
two parties, a view of bigger government, more taxes, less freedom 
versus our basic ideology which is less government, individual 
responsibility, lower taxes.
  I want to highlight some things. We all bring our own special 
backgrounds, life experiences as Members of Congress. As we have had a 
lot of time, many of us who were not in the closed-door sessions and 
hashing out the final agreements to go through our in boxes, I came 
upon a document from a colleague in the other body that talked about 
military and military readiness. I just want to highlight a few items.
  Mr. ARMEY. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KINGSTON. As the gentleman knows, I control the time and I 
consider the gentleman's time from Illinois valuable, even though the 
distinguished majority leader from Texas has joined us. We are talking 
about this budget agreement that you guys have worked so hard on and I 
think done such a great job on. We are taking your bragging rights 
away, but it would be an honor for all of us to yield if you would like 
to say a few things.
  Mr. ARMEY. If the gentleman would yield, Mr. Speaker, I do have an 
announcement that I would like to make on behalf of the Speaker and the 
Majority Leader of the other body, an announcement for all the Members 
of both bodies if I may.
  On behalf of the Speaker and the Majority Leader, I would like to 
inform all Members that the omnibus budget bill that we have been 
negotiating, and incidentally I might say on behalf of the White House 
Chief of Staff as well as the Speaker and the Majority Leader, all 
Members of both bodies should be aware that the omnibus budget bill has 
been closed. While we still have some items under consideration by 
request of some Members, those items remain under consideration, but 
all Members of both bodies should be advised that no new items or 
requests will be considered from this point.
  Mr. Speaker, that is the announcement. But if I might just very 
quickly, I do want to then take a moment to thank all three of the 
gentlemen on the floor for the time that you are taking here. We 
negotiated for a very long and hard time on this bill.

                              {time}  2145

  It is a large bill. We have wrapped several of our regular 
appropriations bills together, and we have negotiated some very 
important legislation. In doing so, we have secured fundamentally the 
integrity of the surplus of this Congress on behalf of the American 
people against pressures to spend that surplus that came mostly from 
the White House. We have done something that I think has sorely been 
needed to do for some time that responds to one of the great urgencies 
felt by the American people in the defense of this Nation. We have done 
remarkable work in order to better secure our border against the inflow 
of drugs and to secure greater opportunities for a healthy, happy life 
for our children.
  There have been so many things we have accomplished in this bill. We 
have stopped some bad things. We have stopped the distribution of 
needles, and we put morality and ethical clauses into the practice of 
distributing birth control devices, and we have again given our respect 
to those people who by their own conscience or religious conviction 
feel they should not be compelled to participate. We have reformed the 
IMF, and hopefully we will be able to transform the manner in which it 
does business in the world economy in such a way that we can have the 
confidence that with the support of American tax dollars they will do 
things that will stabilize international currencies' circumstances 
rather than to be the destabilizing influence they have been.
  I know you three are discussing these matters, and I want to thank 
you all for letting me intrude myself on behalf of the Speaker and the 
Majority Leader and the Chief of Staff, but I did think it was 
important that all Members have this information so that they could 
relax.
  Again let me remind you, if you have your request in consideration at 
this time, that consideration will be duly given, but please do not 
contact either the majority leader or the Speaker for any new offers 
for consideration.
  Thank you.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Would the gentleman be considered treating himself to a 
hour's worth of sleeping tonight perhaps?
  Mr. ARMEY. Well, the gentleman is anxious to get back to my office 
and talk to my wife. I have not spoken to her yet today. I think it is 
half time, and Detroit and Green Bay are tied at 10 to 10, and of 
course with Barry Sanders on the field Detroit is always a sentimental 
favorite in favor of that great running back, but obviously you all do 
not want me to get you into the business of taking sides in a contest 
like that.
  So perhaps some rest and relaxation this evening, some satisfaction, 
I might say, of knowing that we have done good work on behalf of the 
American people to preserve the integrity of this surplus so that next 
year we can look at the manner in which it might be used to ensure 
greater retirement

[[Page H11016]]

security for all Americans and even get the American people that tax 
reduction they should have had.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Does the gentleman care to give us an estimate when the 
final vote may be?
  Mr. ARMEY. Well, I appreciate the gentleman asking. They are busy 
working hard on the enrolling. We will get a better measure of that 
this evening, and I am sure there will be announcements tomorrow.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Well, we congratulate you on a successful negotiation.
  I yield back to the gentleman from Illinois.
  Mr. ARMEY. I Thank the gentleman from Illinois.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. And I thank the gentleman from Georgia.
  I just want to cut to the chase because a lot of us have been here, 
and I know you all have some preparation to get covered. But my concern 
comes from my background as being a former Army officer and now a 
reservist and having friends and colleagues who are in the uniformed 
services of our country, and in this book that I have had a chance to 
start going through by a colleague from the other body he mentions 
this:
  Concerns include the corrosion and readiness that results from the 
high level of operational tempo, increasing depot level backlogs, 
underfunded quality of life for military personnel, underfunded 
manpower strength, manpower turbulence and insecurity, underfunded base 
maintenance and repair, underfunded equipment modernization, 
underfunded training and excessive reliance on simulation, underfunded 
major equipment life cycles, underfunded munition stocks, excessive 
reliance on emerging but unrealized technology, the funding of 
operations at the expense of readiness and the expenditure of savings 
before they are realized.
  That is from a colleague in the other body who is a well-respected 
military war hero about the readiness of our Nation our military 
forces.
  This budget agreement addresses a major concern that many of us who 
have served who have seen the hollowing out of our military forces and 
our military readiness, that we re-energize our military forces, we 
empower them, we support them with the needed funds to do the multitude 
of missions that we require them do, that they are putting their life 
on the line on a day-in-day-out basis, and I want to congratulate the 
leadership and the White House for making military readiness a critical 
issue in this budget negotiation.
  And with that, I look forward to the continued debate in the next day 
or so. I appreciate my colleague from Georgia scheduling this time and 
allowing me to join in, that we do have a lot of things to be proud of, 
and I will have a lot of things to be able to go back to my district 
and talk about the great accomplishments of the 105th Congress.
  Mr. KINGSTON. We thank the gentleman from Illinois for joining us and 
appreciate all the hard work you have done to bring common sense to 
government.
  The gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. SHADEGG. I thank the gentleman, and I started out by saying, 
talking a little bit about my disappointments and my disappointment 
that we do not have more tax relief in this legislation. There is some 
technical tax relief that is there. We would have liked much more. But 
then I turned to the fact that there are many positive things in this 
legislation, and I thought maybe what we should do is list off a series 
of them very quickly, and then after we list them off, let us walk back 
and go through them and talk about how important they are one at a time 
and perhaps build the case for why we think those positive things are 
so good and so good for the country.
  My quick list just runs down like this:
  You begin, and our colleague from Illinois just mentioned, number 
one, you begin with the fact that this legislation strengthens our 
national defense. It has dollars for readiness and dollars for 
ballistic missiles. So national defense is number one.
  No. 2, it enacts a ban on Internet pornography, and I will tell you I 
have very strong feelings about that issue, about the evils of 
pornography and about the fact that young children in America today can 
access pornography, indeed can be teased on the  Internet into looking 
at pornography. This will stop that conduct, make it criminal, put a 
block in place and do great steps in that direction. So that is another 
key feature.

  Another one to be added. There is tough anti-drug legislation in this 
particular bill. There are, I think, six different anti-drug 
initiatives in the legislation which will become law which our 
negotiators fought for. There is one of particular interest to me, and 
it has to do with providing a particular type of helicopter, Blackhawk 
helicopters, to our friends in Central America who desperately need 
those helicopters in the War Against Drugs, and we can talk in detail 
about that. But there is the anti-drug piece of this measure.
  And then another huge one is the education issue. You know, we have 
seen the President step forward and make his demands on education, and 
we have seen our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, our 
Democrat colleagues, say this is a wonderful bill for education and 
that Republicans caved to their demands. The reality is that is not 
true. It is in fact a wonderful bill for education but precisely 
because we battled against their initiative to nationalize education 
and take control away, and I want to talk about that issue.
  I particularly want to talk about the fact that one of our Democrat 
colleagues said last night on television that this bill makes parents, 
teachers, schoolchildren, students, school boards, everyone interested 
in the education of our children across the country the winners. I 
think he was right about that, but right for the reasons that we fought 
for, and I want to talk about the importance of the fact that when this 
bill came forward, when the President made his education demand, he 
would have taken control and authority away from parents, teachers, 
principals, students, local school boards and even State school 
officials, taken all that authority away. It was our battle to give 
rights back to those people that was extremely important in this 
legislation.
  There are many other good things, but I thought that would be a good 
list to just walk through.
  Mr. KINGSTON. If the gentleman will not mind me adding a few extras 
to that?
  Mr. SHADEGG. Let us do that. I will keep notes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Relief for farmers now in the Southeast and the Midwest 
particularly. We have had a tremendous farm disaster. I represent 
Georgia, and I represent coastal and agrarian Georgia, and one of the 
things that is easy after a hurricane, to get relief because there is 
pictures of buildings that have blown over and boats in the middle of 
the street and so forth. Unfortunately the farm disaster, often you 
cannot see it unless you have a farmer out there in the field and you 
know what an undeveloped cotton boll looks like, or you know how big a 
soybean or a peanut should be at a certain time of year, and you know 
when it is not that big. And so in Georgia $700 million of agriculture 
disaster is a tremendous drain on the moms and dads who are in the 
farming business, the farm families, but also important to the local 
economies in the small town, the banks, the implement dealers, the 
county commissions, and the school boards and so forth. This has some 
major farm relief. It also has a little bit of tax relief for farms.
  Modernization, lower cost of government; we have taken a very 
serious, I think maybe final step to solve the Y2K problem, the Year 
2000 computer glitch that we have heard so much about so that our 
Social Security checks will be able to get to America's seniors without 
interruption because of the technology.
  We also have, and you have pointed out earlier, we have secured a 
great deal of the Social Security surplus, and have we have resisted 
the temptation, unlike Congress for 40 straight years, we have resisted 
the temptation to spend the Social Security surplus, and I think it is 
very important that we protect that.
  You mentioned defense, national missile defense. This bill has, I 
believe, about $700 million dollars for national missile defense. It is 
so important in this dangerous world where you have Russian nuclear 
arms out on the marketplace because the Russian nuclear

[[Page H11017]]

armament business has kind of fallen from within, and so what they are 
doing is they are pedaling the stuff out to the Third World countries 
and selling it to the Middle East. We are crazy not to have a strong 
missile defense system, and this budget takes a significant step to it.
  Let me yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. SHADEGG. Yes, if the gentleman will yield, I just want to talk 
about those two issues.
  You just raised the issue of our national defense and also the issue 
of ballistic missile defense. I think it is very important for people 
out there across America looking at this piece of legislation to 
understand those two points. We all know that this is a dangerous 
world, and quite frankly, while we like to pretend it is not growing 
more dangerous, it is in fact growing much more dangerous. Our troops 
have had their ability to fight on our behalf weakened for far too 
long. I cannot tell you how many people in my district come up to me 
and say:
  Congressman, you have done too much. The Federal Government has gone 
too far in weakening our national defense. We need dollars for 
readiness. We must be prepared. Our troops cannot be out there with 
weapons that do not work. They cannot be placed in the handicapped 
situation. We cannot put them in harm's way with the equipment and the 
preparedness that you are giving to them right now. It is critically 
important.
  And I want the listeners to understand that of this in this bill 
there is $9 billion in emergency spending for defense and for 
intelligence needs.
  Now I was in the Middle East last November. We took a tour all 
through the Middle East. We looked at the issue of force protection. We 
looked at Khobar Towers. We saw the site where so many of our 
courageous young American men were killed. If we had had better 
intelligence gathering information, if we had known what was going on, 
those American boys might, and men and women, might be alive today.
  You just simply cannot make this point too strongly. We need these 
dollars for readiness, we need these dollars for intelligence 
gathering, and they are in this legislation.
  Mr. KINGSTON. And if the gentleman will yield, a very key part right 
after readiness is the quality of life. For the first time, I think, in 
recent decades or in a decade military recruitment is down in all 
branches of military, and I think the only branch to make its quota 
this year was the Marines. We have had a 14 year decline in real dollar 
spending in defense. This year was the first year the defense spending 
was actually increased, and if you look at what is going on in the 
world, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Korea, it is a very dangerous 
place out there, and if something erupts in the Middle East, in Bosnia 
or Korea, we cannot fight a war on two fronts.
  And I do not think that America tries to be the policeman of the 
world, but if there is to be a policeman of the world, let it be 
America because we are the only country I think in the history of the 
world that has the ability to take over countries, but we never have. 
We have never started an aggressive war in this Nation.
  Mr. SHADEGG. I could not agree more with the gentleman.
  On this same tour we were in Saudi Arabia. We visited our air base 
there where all of our pilots fly from to enforce the southern no-fly 
zones, Operation Southern Watch. We also then went up to Turkey, and we 
met with the pilots in Turkey who fly out of Turkey to enforce the 
northern no-fly zone. And the gentleman's point is absolutely correct. 
Those pilots are being asked to fly so many hours and so many missions 
and being sent back again and again and again that we are, as the 
gentleman knows, losing many of our best pilots because they are being 
simply pressed beyond the limits. They are not getting the training 
they want, but they are being asked to do missions that are beyond the 
call and with equipment that is not up to the task.
  We have to have a national defense that works. We have cut it too 
long. This bill has critically needed dollars.
  Now I know my fiscal conservative friends are going to say:
  But, Congressman, there is more spending in here.
  There comes a point when you have to stand and you have to say we 
support additional spending for worthy causes. Even when you do not 
like the way we have been forced into doing it, you do not like the 
fact the President would not give us offsets for all of that that we 
would like to have offset. The national defense spending in this bill 
is vitally important.
  The second one I want to talk about is what the gentleman just 
mentioned, and that is ballistic missile defense. I do not know how 
many of our colleagues understand. Sometimes I wonder that even they do 
not understand. But I am convinced the American people do not realize 
that if any missile were launched against America today, we could not 
knock it down.
  You know there is this great television commercial that was aired, 
prepared and I think aired on a few occasions, where the phone rings, 
and it is the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it is the 
President on the other end, and the President, the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff says:
  Mr. President, I have to advise you there is a missile that has been 
launched. Now we could expect that from almost any rogue nation, and it 
is heading towards the United States.

                              {time}  2200

  Then the President says, well, let us shoot it down, and this 
fictional character in this television ad says, Mr. President, we do 
not have the ability to shoot it down. It is simply inexcusable for us 
to allow the American people to remain in a vulnerable position where 
they could be subject to a missile defense, to a missile attack from 
some foreign rogue nation and we have no ability to knock it down.
  We can develop the technology. We can implement it. This bill puts a 
billion dollars toward that task and I think it is essential that we 
move forward on that. It is another piece of this legislation, 
admittedly not perfect. I admit this is not a perfect bill. This is not 
the bill that I would have written if I could write it all alone, but 
this does make major steps in the right direction.
  Two of them are adding dollars for our military readiness and adding 
dollars for ballistic missile defense.
  Mr. KINGSTON. The third party of our military strategy, along with 
quality of life and readiness, is modernization, keeping up with the 
technology. If we just look at our own stereo systems and automobiles, 
we can see the technology changing tremendously from one year to the 
next.
  One can imagine what the technology is for a tank, for an airplane, 
for an aircraft carrier, for missiles and so forth. The things that we 
can do for safety, defense, for weapons, is tremendous. We are taking a 
huge risk if we do not.
  I was reading many years ago and so I cannot quote this exactly 
accurately but it was in Churchill's ``History of the English-Speaking 
People'' and he talked about the long bow, and in the long history of 
war with each other the French and the British, one king had the long 
bow, the arrow that would shoot the farthest distance. Unfortunately, I 
do not remember but I think it was the British, and the British were 
able to defeat the French for about 20 or 30 consistent years because 
they had this great weapon. As soon as the French invented it, then the 
pendulum swung the other direction.
  It is no different today. Ancient Rome, or whoever had the catapult 
first, they were at an advantage and today nothing has changed. We have 
to keep up weaponry, and that is one of the things that this budget is 
designed to do, not to spend more money on airplanes, tanks and ships 
but to spend it smarter so that we do not have waste but we are buying 
what is the most effective and what is the most useful.
  Mr. SHADEGG. I could not agree with the gentleman more, and I think 
it is important for us to understand that the bill moves in the right 
direction on that issue. The other issue, of course, which is very 
important for people to understand, is to know exactly what is going on 
with education.
  We have heard the President; we have listened to the headlines. We 
know that he stepped forward and said, I demand. In fact, I think he 
said, I will not let this Congress go home until they fund my education 
initiative.
  In reality, we are not funding his education initiative but we are 
funding a vitally important education initiative that has a component 
that he is

[[Page H11018]]

for, and that component is funding more teachers for America. I think 
it is very important for people to understand this dynamic.
  As I mentioned, I watched one of our colleagues on the other side of 
the aisle last night come on television and say, this day, this bill, 
the American people, parents, teachers, students across America are 
winners.
  His answer was that they are winners because teachers got funded. 
Quite frankly, I think he was right, that they are winners, but he is 
right because our negotiators did not back off, and it is important to 
understand why. In America, we have always had one abiding principle on 
the issue of education, and that is that education was a matter of 
local control. The truth is, and I believe this to the depth of my 
soul, that the parents, the students, the teachers, the principal and 
the school board that runs my school know better how to educate the 
kids at my children's school, in Phoenix, Arizona, than a bunch of 
bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
  I think it is extremely important for every parent in America and for 
every teacher in America and for every school principal in America and 
for every school board member in America to understand that what this 
bill does on education is it strikes a compromise. The President wanted 
100,000 new teachers but he wanted to hire them from Washington, D.C., 
with all of the decisions being made by Federal Department of Education 
bureaucrats. That was the detail of his demand, and as they say the 
devil is in the details.
  Republicans said, Mr. President, we care about education. It is 
vitally important to us. There is no parent, Republican, Democrat, 
minority, otherwise, who does not care about his child's or her child's 
education, but, Mr. President, we believe in people. We believe that 
education is a matter where local control is vitally important.
  Why does that matter? Our colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. 
Hoekstra) recently did a year-long study on education, what works and 
what does not. In that study, they found one important factor: Schools 
where parents are involved are the best schools of all.
  The problem with the President's idea was he wants to run education 
from Washington, D.C. The sad thing about that is that it will send the 
message to parents, to students, to teachers, to principals, to school 
board members, indeed to superintendents of public instruction in the 
various states, that they do not really know the right way to do it. We 
in Washington know how to do it. Because we fought and we won the fight 
for local control, this legislation says, yes, we will have more 
teachers but, yes, they will be hired at the State and local level and 
the decisions as to which ones are hired to teach which subjects will 
be made by people closest to where those decisions will impact. That 
is, parents and teachers and school administration officials right 
there in the local school district, and I cannot emphasize how 
important that is.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Outside of my district but in the district of the 
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Chambliss), there is a little town called 
Gray, Georgia. Gray, incidentally is the home of Otis Redding. There 
was a teacher there who was one of these classic institution teachers 
that used to be filled in all of the school systems throughout the 
country. This teacher had about 30 years experience and she was the one 
that taught your big brother, maybe your big cousin and maybe in some 
cases your mom and dad, but she taught you and she taught you well. 
Everybody loved her.
  They had an expert from the Department of Education come in. The 
expert was about 24 years old and she told this teacher, this 30-year 
veteran teacher, she said, you need to start teaching kids on the left-
hand side of the chalk board because you write on the right-hand side 
of the chalk board and the kids' brains, the intuitive part of the 
cognitive dissidence of the brain, or some such garbage, it makes it 
easier for kids to learn if it is on one side of the chalk board 
because that is the learning side of their brain.

  Here is this teacher, who has an army of success stories, just a 
thick fan of followers, and so this young whippersnapper from the 
Department of Education came in here and wanted her to change the way 
she did business and the teacher was wise enough to say, well, thank 
you for your suggestions, and I will certainly put it under 
consideration. We will start doing that. Why do not you just get in 
your car, do not worry about this classroom. You have shown us how to 
do it now. You get on back to the Department of Education.
  Of course, the young consultant took off and the teacher continued in 
her archaic ways that had proven true for the previous 30 years. But 
that is the kind of absurdity that our teachers and our veteran classic 
teachers have to put up with.
  So having that local control is so important because do you know what 
I suspect, I suspect that there is a lot that my Georgia school kids 
have in common with your Arizona school kids, but I would also suspect 
that maybe your teacher out there in Arizona might know what she or he 
needs to do to teach them a little bit better than the folks in 
Washington do, and they might know the difference between the kids' 
needs in Georgia and the kids' needs in Arizona without this cookie 
cutter Washington command, one-size-fits-all approach to education.
  Mr. SHADEGG. I think the gentleman is completely right. It reminds me 
of a story. Both of my kids are in public school in Phoenix, Arizona. I 
have a 16-year-old daughter who goes to Thunderbird High School. I have 
a 12-year-old son who goes to Mountain Sky Middle School in Phoenix. I 
care about public education. Interestingly, both of my sisters are 
public school teachers, and until our second child was born my wife was 
a public schoolteacher. Last summer, one of my sisters called me up and 
said, John, would you come over to an in-service for all of these 
teachers and talk to us about what is going on in Washington, what is 
going on with the education issue.
  I went in kind of thinking that maybe I would have an adverse 
audience. I just walked through what we have to say, what Republicans 
have to say, about education, and this was a whole room of teachers. I 
am sure many of them were members of the NEA or the AEA, which is the 
Arizona version, and right down the line, when I talked to them about 
my concerns about education, but most importantly when I talked to them 
about this issue of local control, of letting parents and teachers at 
the school make decisions, they were adamantly in agreement with me. 
They do not want Washington bureaucrats telling them how to educate the 
kids in their classrooms. It just makes common sense.
  How many of us in our regular jobs would like it if some Washington, 
D.C. bureaucrat came in and told us how to do our job? And yet that is 
the divide on this issue.
  It makes me turn to one last part of this puzzle I want to talk 
about, and that is the issue of national testing. There was yet again 
this year a fight over national testing. The President wants one 
national test written in Washington, D.C. administered to every school 
child in fourth and eighth grade in America.
  When you survey parents about ways to improve education, they 
generally say they like all these ideas, computers in the classroom, 
they like it; better teacher training, they like it; teacher testing to 
see if teachers are up to the standards and teacher performance 
standards, they like it.
  When you ask them if they approve of national testing, parents across 
America say that is a great idea; national testing sounds like a good 
idea.
  The problem is that while it sounds good, in reality it is a terrible 
idea. The teachers that I talked to last summer, who were all public 
school teachers in Phoenix, Arizona, said to me, Congressman, you are 
absolutely right. We do not need to give our kids yet one more test. 
They are already tested and tested and tested and tested. But they went 
beyond that and made it clear to me what they think is wrong with Bill 
Clinton's idea of a national test, one national test, stuffed down the 
throats of every single school child in America.
  They said, John, if there is one test, just one test, we are going to 
have to teach to that test.
  Teachers are parents and human beings. They want their kids to do 
well. If they understand that there is one national test, written in 
Washington, D.C., deep in the bowels of the

[[Page H11019]]

Federal Department of Education, with some of the most radical ideas in 
education in it, like, for example, whole math or new math or new new 
math, where kids are not expected to do multiplication problems or 
addition or subtraction problems because they might fail those, that is 
really true. That is in the version of the national test that is 
already written, but if teachers understand that their students are 
going to be expected to take this one national test they have got to 
teach to that one national test.
  What does that mean? That means the curriculum, what kids get taught 
in your school, right down the street from where they will go tomorrow 
morning when the alarm clock goes off and you get them dressed and send 
them to school, what they will be taught in that classroom in your 
district, in your neighborhood, will not be decided by the principal at 
your school or by you and the school site council, it will not be 
decided by the local school board. It will not even be decided by the 
superintendent of public instruction or by the state legislature. It 
will be decided and dictated here in Washington, D.C.; once again, the 
Federal government telling people what is best for them, the Federal 
Government saying the only way to educate our kids is the way that we 
say to educate our kids in Washington, D.C., because they have got to 
pass this national test. It is a bad idea. It would hurt education.
  I grant that the proponents of this idea may believe it is a good 
idea but, in fact, it is a very dangerous idea that would nationalize 
student curriculum and this legislation blocks the idea of a one-size-
fits-all national test written here in Washington, D.C.

                              {time}  2215

  To our negotiators, I think that is a huge step forward for education 
in America and it will protect our kids and make sure that they do not 
get a curriculum crammed down their throats from Washington, D.C.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I wanted to 
say one other story about nationalizing education. I have in my area 
Saint Marys, Georgia, a small coastal community. And I was down there 
last year and a teacher told me she had just returned from Athens, 
Georgia, my hometown where the University of Georgia is, and there she 
went to a seminar on how to behave around kids.
  It was the bureaucrats telling the teachers in Saint Marys, Georgia, 
do not be alone with the kids. Do not go to the bathroom with the kids, 
because they might accuse you of improper advance and so forth. And I 
can understand that. But it kind of got worse. I think that the teacher 
could probably use her own common sense of when it is appropriate to be 
alone with the child. But one of the things they said was, if a kid 
stays after class for punishment or tutorial help, do not meet with the 
child alone.
  Imagine how awkward and difficult that would be. If a student needs a 
little help with math and can go in to see the teacher, they do not 
want to have to make a big production out of it. There should not have 
to be a witness to learn how to do a quadratic formula.
  But it went on from there. They said do not ever hug kids. In her 
particular case, she was teaching small children and she said some of 
them come from a broken family. They need a hug more than they need an 
A or a B, and it is very important for her to show some affection to 
the kids. But when we have big bureaucracies telling teachers how to do 
it.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I just want to make 
it clear, we talk here on the floor about nationalizing education. I am 
sure a lot of people are going, What does that mean?
  What it really means is the sad fact of moving all the decisions 
about education to Washington, D.C. If my colleagues think every 
decision that is made in Washington, D.C. is a wise and prudent 
decision and they would like to surrender control over education to 
Washington, D.C., then they like national testing, they like the 
President's agenda of hiring all of those teachers here in Washington.
  If they think sometimes they can make wiser decisions at home about 
their own life, including their children's education at their own 
school, then they have to oppose the President on that issue.
  I want to turn, in the time that is remaining, to talking about the 
drug war. I mentioned earlier that there are six pieces of legislation 
in this bill that I think dramatically advance our fight against drugs. 
I want to talk last about one that is personally important to me. Let 
me just first rattle them off or list them off.
  Number one, there is a ban on needle exchanges. There is a 
prohibition against the Federal Government taking American taxpayers' 
hard-earned money and giving free needles to drug addicts across 
America. I think that is a tremendous step forward. The idea of giving 
free needles to drug addicts is crazy.
  There is a prohibition against medical marijuana. I think that is 
another important step in the right direction.
  There is a provision called the Life Imprisonment for Speed 
Trafficking Act. Nobody in America cannot be concerned about this 
crime. I know in my own State of Arizona, and in my own community of 
Phoenix, there are many labs where this drug is created. It is doing 
immeasurable damage to our kids across America and we need tough 
penalties for it.
  There are also some programs that help kids in this area. There is 
the Drug Demand Reduction Act which block grants funds to the State for 
Drug-free Communities Act and other community-based programs. And there 
is also a Drug-Free Workplace Act to support small businesses that have 
drug-free workplaces. My brother is in the construction business and 
drugs are a serious safety threat on the job.
  But the most important bill I want to talk about has impact on me 
personally. It is called the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act. 
And there is a significant piece of this bill that I care about.
  Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to go to Central America 
and to visit Colombia. We flew into Bogota, Colombia, and while we were 
there we met with Jose Serrano, General Serrano, who is a legend in 
that country for his fight against drugs. He is the head of the 
Colombian National Police and a true hero in the fight against drugs.
  He took us on a tour of the hospital he built for his troops who were 
engaged in the fight against drugs there in Colombia. We have to 
understand that in Colombia, the drug war is literally a war with 
machine guns and rockets and anti-aircraft missiles and lives being 
lost every day. As we toured the hospital and witnessed and talked to 
his colleagues who had been shot and hurt, he made a plea to us. He 
said, Congressman, we desperately need Blackhawk helicopters. And in 
this bill, we give the Colombian National Police and General Serrano 
six Blackhawk helicopters to fight the drug war. It is a gigantic step 
forward.
  Mr. Speaker, some of us have been fighting to get those helicopters 
to Colombia for now over a year, almost going on 2 years, and this is 
just critically important.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona. And 
let me close with this, Mr. Speaker. This Congress has brought us the 
balanced budget, that has cut taxes for the first time in 16 years, 
that has on a bipartisan basis reformed Medicare, and on a bipartisan 
basis reformed welfare, with 40 percent of the people who were on it in 
1994 now being off of it.
  This year we have accomplished greater drug laws, greater education 
laws, greater opportunities for our school kids, protected Social 
Security, modernized our military and our government. Next year we are 
going to go on to reduce taxes further, increase the quality of 
education and health care protection. It is an exciting time to be an 
American.

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