[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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