[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 87 (Friday, June 18, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H4663]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           CHARITABLE CHOICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, this really has been an exhausting week, and 
it will be interesting to see how people address this. Earlier one of 
our Members who said that we did not actually do anything this week, we 
did in fact pass a juvenile justice prevention bill, and I thought that 
that was our goal here which was to reduce juvenile crime and to reach 
those who have gotten in trouble and try to help them straighten out 
their lives.
  If one is obsessed only with guns, and particularly if one is 
obsessed only with their solution to the gun problem, perhaps we had a 
difficult week because their bill did not pass, but let us not confuse 
that with the fact that we did accomplish some advancement in an effort 
to try to reach youth.
  Furthermore, some of us were disappointed that we did not do more to 
address the question of violence in the media, and hopefully over the 
next few months we will be able to address that.
  One amendment that I had that passed, the charitable choice 
amendment, gets lost. Charitable choice and many other things like this 
are not as glamorous or as media driven, and the general public does 
not focus on them like the Ten Commandments or like the one video game 
called Postal, where actually someone goes crazy and it shows how many 
of the people are remaining to be killed and a person gets more points 
if they hit them in the chest or at a main artery as opposed to other 
places in their body. This type of disgusting type of thing will get a 
lot of media attention, but when we do charitable choice where we are 
allowing juvenile prevention funds to be used by religious-based 
organizations, where people are actually trying to help the kids who 
are being impacted by this, it does not get as much media coverage.
  We had hoped this afternoon to be able to move under unanimous 
consent a sense of the House of Representatives in regard to community 
renewal through community and faith-based organizations. Out of respect 
to the minority who did not have adequate time to look at this and has 
some objections, this will probably be addressed on Tuesday, but I 
wanted to speak a little bit about this resolution and the renewal 
alliance efforts of this past week.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts), the gentleman from Ohio 
(Mr. Kasich), the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Talent), the gentleman 
from Oklahoma (Mr. Watts), the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
English), the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp) and many others, as 
well as former Democratic colleagues Fred Flake of New York and Denny 
Davis of Chicago, have worked together in trying to put together both 
legislative packages, as well as in our renewal alliance efforts this 
past week, to have a number of meetings, to highlight local groups, to 
visit local charities and we were hoping that this resolution would 
have been a capping to that week.
  The resolution, which we hope to have come up on Tuesday, states that 
while steady economic growth and low inflation has yielded 
unprecedented prosperity, many American citizens have not in fact 
benefited from this prosperity and continue to be socioeconomically 
disadvantaged. Many of these live in inner cities and rural communities 
where they continue to be plagued by social breakdown, economic 
disadvantage and educational failure that fosters hopelessness and 
despair.
  Many of the groups that are by far the most effective are community 
and faith-based organizations. Many of us believe through the American 
Community Renewal Act and other pieces of legislation that we need to 
figure out how to get more dollars to the groups that are the most 
effective. We need to know how to capitalize on their vision of 
compassion, of volunteerism, of caring for the poor and the vulnerable; 
that when we see our national leaders, our current Republican leader 
candidate for president, Governor Bush has been a leader in the area of 
prisons where he has worked with Prison Fellowship. He has worked with 
a number of other local groups in Texas and has actually put this into 
practice.
  A little bit newer to this is Vice President Gore but he has been 
outspoken in the past few weeks on the importance of including 
charitable, particularly religious and community-based organizations, 
in this effort.
  In fact, on his election campaign home page he specifically says that 
he believes charitable choice should be promoted, and that was 
reflected in a vote this week on my amendment, where we not only had 
346 votes but we had, I believe it was 130 Democrats for it and only 79 
Democrats against it.
  We are in an unusual period right now in America, and that is both 
parties are coming to realize that the Federal Government, for that 
matter the State and local governments alone, cannot accomplish and 
solve all the problems related to poverty. Not that anybody can, but 
they need the help; in particular are seeking the help. Many of us in 
government now realize we have to work, we must work, with the churches 
and volunteers in our local community. We must give tax incentives.
  I have one tax bill, the charitable tax bill, that would increase the 
value of the charitable deduction to 120 percent; that would let 
nonitemizers take the charitable deduction; that would lift the caps on 
higher income and delay the effective date to April 15.
  We need to be looking at creative tax solutions, at creative 
solutions as we now have, in welfare reform where we have done 
charitable choice, in social services block grant where we did 
charitable choice last year, and now in juvenile justice where we have 
put charitable choice in.
  So whatever else we may or may not have accomplished, we did move 
some prevention programs. We have once again advanced the charitable 
choice and next hopefully we will have another resolution that will put 
the House on record in this exciting and really substantive, if not the 
most sexy concept, that we are proceeding with.

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