[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 106 (Monday, July 26, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9171-S9174]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               RESTORATION OF THE ENFORCEMENT OF RULE XVI

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will now 
proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 160, which the clerk will 
report.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A resolution (S. Res. 160) to restore enforcement of rule 
     XVI.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Time on the resolution shall be limited to 6 
hours.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I have been designated by the Democratic 
leader to control the time on this resolution that is now before the 
Senate.
  I feel a certain affinity toward rule XVI because it was my point of 
order that was appealed and overruled. In short, what this meant is 
that we were here on an appropriations bill. It had been standard 
procedure in the Senate for decades and decades and decades that when 
an appropriations bill came before this body, we did not offer 
legislative matters on that appropriations bill; it should be for the 
13 subcommittees to deal with the money of this country and not append 
extraneous materials, extraneous legislative matters to an 
appropriations bill.
  However, that is what happened on such a matter, a supplemental 
appropriations bill. The junior Senator from Texas offered an amendment 
dealing with the Endangered Species Act. I raised a point of order. The 
Chair

[[Page S9172]]

upheld my point of order and that was appealed, a vote taken in the 
Senate which overruled that decision, and it changed the precedence of 
this body.
  It has caused legislating on appropriations bills as standard 
operating procedure in this body since then. For more than 4 years, 
that is what has taken place.
  There is going to be a vote taken later on rule XVI. The minority is 
going to vote against it. We recognize that we will be overruled by 
virtue of the fact that we are in the minority. We are protesting 
basically because of what has gone on in the Senate these past several 
years. The fact is that we are not able to offer amendments to bills 
coming through this body. In short, the Senate has been treated similar 
to the House of Representatives. For those of us who served in the 
House, there is not much difference anymore between the House and the 
Senate. When a bill comes to this Chamber, there is, in effect, an 
order placed on that bill just as in the House saying how many 
amendments you can offer, how long you can debate each amendment, and 
in effect how the bill is going to be treated.
  That is very much unlike the Senate. In decades past, when a bill 
came before this body, debate took place on amendments that were 
offered relative to that piece of legislation. That is not the way it 
is now.
  The reason that is important is that we Democrats believe we need--
the country needs--to debate campaign finance reform. In the State of 
Nevada, a small State populationwise, my opponent and I spent over $20 
million last year in the election. It is hard to believe. The State of 
Nevada had less than 2 million people in it. But my opponent, 
Congressman Ensign from the State of Nevada, and I spent over $20 
million.
  How could that be done? It was done because in the so-called hard 
money counts in our campaign we spent about $4.5 million each, and in 
State party money we spent over $6 million each. That does not take 
into consideration the independent expenditures that took place for me 
and against me. That is not the way campaigns should be, I don't 
believe. In the small State of Nevada, I repeat, over $20 million, 
probably closer to $25 million, $26 million was spent when you add in 
the independent expenditures about which I have talked.

  That is an issue we should debate in this body. Maybe I am wrong. 
Maybe the American public, the people from individual States, want all 
that money spent. I doubt it. I think we should have a debate as to 
whether soft money, that is, corporate money, should be used for State 
parties and spend all this money on negative ads. I don't think so.
  There should be a time, I believe, that we are able to debate 
education. The State of Nevada leads the Nation in high school 
dropouts. We are not proud of that, but that is a fact. I think we 
should be able to debate issues relating to that issue.
  Senator Bingaman and I have legislation that would create within the 
Department of Education a dropout czar so that we could debate whether 
or not we should have in the Department of Education a person whose 
sole job it would be to work on curbing dropouts. Three thousand 
children drop out of high school every day in the United States. Over 
500,000 kids drop out of high school every year in America. That is not 
the way it should be. Education is an issue we have not debated nearly 
enough in this body.
  There are other issues we need to talk about: child care, minimum 
wage, the environment. There are so many issues we have not had the 
ability to talk about. That is what this debate is about.
  I see my friend from the State of New York is here. I am managing 
this bill. I do not want to take a lot of time because I am sure there 
will be time later today to speak about issues. But the point is, rule 
XVI is being debated today as a result of a ruling of the Chair that 
was appealed. It was my point of order to the Chair that brought about 
this situation in which we now find ourselves. The point we in the 
minority want to make is that we should have full debate on issues, all 
issues. There should not be any arms or legs tied. We should be able to 
speak as we want on issues. We have not been able to do that.
  I ask my friend from New York, how much time does the Senator wish?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Might I have, say, 15 minutes?
  Mr. REID. The Senator from New York is happily yielded 15 minutes.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York is recognized.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is a special pleasure to rise on this 
important subject on this fateful day in the aftermath of the Senator 
from Nevada, whose vigilance, if I may say, as minority whip, led him 
to see a clear violation of rule XVI, the rule against legislation on 
appropriations bills, and so he made the point of order. In a casual 
way, having to do with the seeming inconsequence of the measure that 
had been proposed, the Senate overruled that point of order, and a 
century and more of fixed senatorial practice crashed and burned and 
has been burning all around us ever since.

  There is a larger context, I suggest, in which to consider this 
matter. I am now in my last term in the Senate. I have been here almost 
a quarter of a century. I am frequently asked what has changed in the 
Senate in my time here. Without hesitation, the one thing I say is the 
procedures by which we work.
  When I arrived, there was a recognizable symmetry and balance to the 
distribution of responsibilities, duties, and powers in the body. We 
had evolved over the 19th century a two-layer pattern of committees--
committees being very special and distinct to our Government.
  We are one of the few governments in the world that has them. The 
House of Commons has none. Recently they have been appointing 
committees of inquiry but no legislative committees of any kind. All 
authority rests with the Prime Minister. On those used-to-be celebrated 
occasions when the Chancellor of Exchequer at No. 11 Downing Street 
would come out, and he would hold up a briefcase called the budget, 
that, sir, was, in fact, the budget. There was not going to be a chance 
of change in the government's proposal. It has been that way for more 
than two centuries.
  It is not the government that the founders put in place. They put in 
place a government of checks and balances of the assumption of opposed 
interests, of the resolution by debate, and by the recognition that 
there were, in fact, opposed interests. We were not all happily subject 
to the Queen, under her rule--or his if it were a King--and a harmony 
in the realm. Our founders thought no such thing. They did not depend 
on virtue. They depended on self-interest and being equally opposed in 
a mode of negotiation to resolve matters.
  We had a series of authorizing committees, and they had jurisdiction 
over principal areas of government service. There were four--well, the 
principal committees were Foreign Relations, Finance, Armed Services, 
and then Interior, Commerce, Labor and Public Welfare, as it then was, 
Environment and Public Works, having previously been just Public Works.
  Their jurisdictions changed. New issues came along. Public Works 
became Environment. Public Works, under the tutelage of Senator Muskie 
of Maine, brought the issue of the environment to our body. They would 
make laws which more often than not required expenditure. That 
expenditure would be provided by the Appropriations Committee in terms 
of the laws that had been passed by the authorizing committees. There 
was a parallel.
  The Finance Committee, in the earliest years, from 1816 I believe, 
was principally concerned with raising the revenue of the Federal 
Government. In the early years, up until the beginning of this century, 
those were tariffs. That is why the tariff legislation, the ``tariff of 
abominations,'' things similar to that are so prominent in American 
19th century history.
  We moved to the income tax as our principal source of revenue. 
Tariffs are still not insignificant. In the Finance Committee, of which 
I am a member--for a period I was the chairman; now ranking member--we 
looked after the revenues of the Federal Government. Then Social 
Security came along; it was a tax. Whether it ought to have been a tax, 
sir, is an issue you could debate.

[[Page S9173]]

  But 54, 55 years ago, at a garden party here in Washington, Frances 
Perkins, the Secretary of Labor who was responsible for developing a 
Social Security plan--a Justice of the Supreme Court kindly asked her 
about her work, and she said she had this great plan, but she was very 
concerned because the great Justices always said it was 
unconstitutional, whatever the New Deal was then going through that 
period. The Justice asked her to tell him more. She did, and he leaned 
down and whispered: The taxing power, my dear; all you need is the 
taxing power.

  So in that famous photograph of President Roosevelt signing the 
Social Security Act, the person to his right is the chairman of the 
Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, a 
gentleman from North Carolina named Robert Doughton--little noted in 
history but enormous in his impact.
  So the Finance Committee has taken over these other areas as well. 
Still our basic task is to raise revenue that the Appropriations 
Committee will spend in accordance with the laws passed by the 
authorizing committees. A workable system--rational, understandable, 
comprehensible and functioning.
  Then in 1974 came the Budget Act and the creation of the 
Congressional Budget Office, the creation of the budget resolution. In 
part, this was a reaction to events in the Nixon administration--
political and contemporary. But just as important, if I may be allowed 
a certain excursion into political science, if that is the term, it is 
a pattern that one observes in governments the world over, and you can 
see in ours. It was with the proposition, sir, that organizations in 
conflict become like one another.
  A German sociologist at the end of the 19th century noted that even 
Persians finally determined it was better to have Greeks fight Greeks. 
And you can trace these patterns of imitation and competition through 
our own government.
  Item. In 1904, or thereabouts, Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing 
for the White House. He now had an office, the President had an office 
with a desk, and he could ask reporters in to tell them about things. 
Suddenly an office that had not been that eminent, certainly not 
compared to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, took on a 
quality previously unnoticed.
  Right away the House built the Cannon Office Building named for their 
Speaker, Joe Cannon. We built what is now the Russell Building. 
Franklin Roosevelt built the East Wing of the White House. They built 
Longworth; we built Dirksen. In the meantime, the Supreme Court, which 
had worked happily down the hall for a century and a half--or, well, 
from the time we moved in to the new quarters in 1859, I believe--they 
came up from the basement and lived happily down there, and they said: 
Why don't we have a building? And they produced a building which 
eventually was across the park here. This pattern goes on and on.
  Presidents travel abroad now. We travel abroad. There are more judges 
in the executive branch than there are in the judicial branch, and the 
like.
  In 1921, Warren Harding created the Bureau of the Budget. Suddenly 
there was a consolidation of Presidential authority. Departments used 
to send their budgets to the Congress on their own. The President would 
know about them, of course, but there was no unified Presidential 
executive budget. That made for a real shift of authority toward the 
President.
  It took almost half a century, but then we got our Bureau of the 
Budget in the Congressional Budget Office, and we started having our 
budget. This suddenly intrudes on the authority of the authorizing 
committees. Each year they would be given a notice of how much money 
they could spend, which was to be tolerable, of course, but it was 
somebody else telling them what previously they decided on their own. 
In this context, there was a centralization of authority in the Senate 
which did not serve it well.

  Then came the decision to overturn rule XVI. Our government became 
incomprehensible. I cannot think of the number of hours I have stood on 
this floor, sometimes there at the desk for the chairman of the Finance 
Committee or ranking member, sometimes back here, looking at the final 
product of some massive, mysterious, impenetrable conference that went 
on somewhere in this building, downtown, elsewhere, that would bring to 
our desks at the end of the Congress 1,500-page bills that did 
everything, combined the appropriations with the legislation, with 
this, with that, with nobody knowing its contents. Not one Member of 
this body could attest to having read the bill, probably no one person. 
Obviously, some persons had read some parts, but that is not a 
democratic procedure. That is not a wise procedure.
  It came about through a combination of the Budget Committee and this 
breaking away of a long, established unrestraint on ourselves that 
there are 13 appropriation bills, each must pass, and, therefore, if 
somehow you could get a measure on an appropriations bill, it would 
become law, even if it might not make it through the authorizing 
committees.
  Well, yes, but what law? Whose law? Who knew? Those committees 
haven't been up there, the Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services 
Committee, for two centuries without acquiring some experience in their 
matters; and here, sir, we are heading for the same thing because the 
rule was overturned. Appropriations bills don't get passed any longer. 
Now it is we have 2 weeks left in July and August, really, because of 
the recess.
  Mr. President, if my time has expired, may I ask for 5 additional 
minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
  Mr. REID. I yield the Senator another 5 minutes.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. We are heading for this situation. There is even talk 
that the tax bills, which we will bring to the floor tomorrow or 
Wednesday, need not be resolved in this period of time. They can lay 
over until September. Well, that means they will lay over until the 
last day of the Congress, the last moment of the session. In the 
meantime, we can expect over half the appropriation bills to have 
passed.
  I wonder if I might address a question to my friend from Nevada, if I 
might interrupt. How many appropriation bills have passed this year? 
Would he happen to know? No reason to know.
  Mr. REID. I say to my friend from New York, surprisingly, in spite of 
the legislating on appropriation bills, we have passed, I think, seven 
appropriation bills at this stage, give or take a bill or two. But, for 
example, we were able, on Thursday, to pass Commerce-State-Justice, 
which had hundreds of amendments filed. It was only through the 
cooperation of the membership.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. We begin to come to our senses; that has brought us to 
this point. We passed seven. I don't think we will pass 13. I think our 
tax legislation has every prospect of being an abomination. The Senate 
cannot pass legislation which it has never read and does not 
understand. That is what has been the consequence of this new 
situation.
  In addition to which, the distinguished minority leader is proposing 
an amendment to the fine initiative of the majority leader that says: 
No more writing legislation in conference committees. That is against 
all of our rules, too, but has crept into our practices. Again, the 
authorizing committees are gradually being marginalized and have no 
role. Power is centralized.
  Mr. REID. Will the Senator from New York yield for a question?

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I surely will.
  Mr. REID. The Senator has graphically illustrated what happened under 
our present situation. Last fall, being more specific, that huge 
document we were asked to vote upon, we all came from our individual 
States, because we had been out of session, while a few people 
negotiated this bill for all of us.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Right.
  Mr. REID. It was well over 1,000 pages, and it was something that you 
or I didn't read or anyone else read, isn't that true?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I stood here and said: I haven't read it. I know no one 
who has read it.
  Mr. REID. I say to my friend from New York, the same thing is 
happening now. The mere fact that the Senate has passed an 
appropriations bill doesn't mean it is going to become law because we 
have to go to conference with the House. If we are fortunate enough to 
come up with a bill, it goes down to the President. He has said he is 
going to veto most of these appropriations bills. So that means we will 
be right back

[[Page S9174]]

where we started last year, isn't that the case? We will have a bill 
written in conference that you or I, or even the members of the 
appropriations subcommittees, have never seen; is that fair?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. That is exactly so, sir. I can say to you, for example, 
that Senator Roth, our distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee, 
and I have jointly been sending letters regularly to the Appropriations 
Committee saying: You have Social Security Act or tax matters in this 
appropriations measure you are dealing with; surely, you don't want to 
do that. We don't get answers somehow.
  Mr. REID. But under our present rules, I say to my friend, that is 
not only the rule, it is being done.
  The minority leader has offered an amendment to this change we are 
discussing today regarding rule XXVIII, so that when you go to 
conference, the conferees could only work on the bills they have, the 
one from the House and the one from the Senate, and have to work on 
matters that are before them. They can't go outside that scope and 
start talking about wild horses in Nevada or they can't start talking 
about the wheat crop in North Dakota, if it is not in the conference 
report.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. If it is not in the conference report.
  I will close, sir, by simply saying this is a subject that is said to 
be arcane, to be incomprehensible, to be something on the margin. The 
Constitution of the United States is a bit arcane. It was not something 
immediately obvious to everyone, what its principles were. But they 
were powerful, and they have persisted. So, indeed, have the rules of 
the Senate, developed in the early 19th century, and then later, 
starting in 1868, with regard to germaneness and the like. Language 
very similar to our Rule XVI dates to 1884. We have here the question 
of whether we are going to be able to govern ourselves in the future. 
If we should fail in that regard, what else, sir, will there be said of 
us when the history of the decline of the American Congress is written?
  I thank the Chair for its courtesy in allowing me to extend my time. 
I thank my friend, the minority whip, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I think the statement made by the Senator 
from New York and the wisdom that he imparted to us is something we 
should all listen to.
  Some have said: Well, we have to treat the Senate like the House of 
Representatives. We really can't debate measures.
  I say to my friend from New York, and anyone else within the sound of 
my voice, we used to debate matters and let the cards fall where they 
did. A good example of that was the Budget Deficit Reduction Act of 
1993. As Senators will recall, we had all kinds of statements of doom 
regarding that. The chairman of the House Budget Committee said: This 
plan will not work. If it does work, then I will have to become a 
Democrat.
  Well, it has worked. We have now a budget surplus. But my friend from 
the House has not become a Democrat.
  My friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said: It will 
flatten the economy. That has not been the case.
  My friend, the senior Senator from Texas, said: I want to predict 
here tonight that if we adopt this bill, the American economy is going 
to get weaker, not stronger. The deficit 4 years from today will be 
higher than it is today, not lower. When all is said and done, people 
will pay more taxes. The economy will create fewer jobs. The government 
will spend more money, and the American people will be worse off.
  Every statement made by my friend from Texas was absolutely wrong. 
The fact is that we had that bill. We had a debate. Without a single 
vote from my friends on the other side of the aisle, we passed that 
bill, with the Vice President breaking the tie. The deficit did not 
rise. In fact, it went away.
  The economy got stronger, not weaker. More jobs were created; in 
fact, almost 20 million new jobs have been created since that 
legislation was passed.
  The point I am trying to make is that we can debate issues, debate 
them in their entirety. We should do more of that. That is what this is 
all about.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will my friend yield for a comment?
  Mr. REID. I am happy to yield.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I was chairman of the Finance Committee in 1993 when 
that deficit reduction act passed. It was a risk. We risked that what 
we understood of markets and of the economy was right. We could have 
been wrong. But it was not a casual affair. Day after day and evening 
after evening in the Finance Committee we debated it. We voted on it. 
It came to the floor, admittedly under a time limit from the Budget 
Act, but it was adequate to the purpose.
  We legislated, and it was done in the open. The consequences are here 
to see. The $500 billion deficit reduction package contained in the 
1993 reconciliation bill has been re-estimated by the Office of 
Management and Budget as having saved a total of $1.2 trillion. We had 
a $290 billion deficit that year. The 10-year projection was $3 
trillion, and more, of cumulative deficits. Now we are dealing with a 
$3 trillion surplus. But that is because the process worked--and in the 
open. The oldest principle of our Government is openness and 
responsibility. We have been abandoning both, and the consequences 
show.
  Mr. REID. I say also to my friend, he will remember when we had the 
debate about uninsured people who had no health care--who needed health 
care but had no insurance. That was a debate that came early in the 
Clinton administration, and we had a full and complete debate on that 
issue. It was debated at great length.
  At that time, we had 38 million people with no health insurance. Now 
we have 43 million people with no health insurance. But the fact is, 
when you are in the majority, you have to take chances, as did the 
former chairman of the Finance Committee, the senior Senator from New 
York. You have to take chances. Health care was a good debate for the 
country. Does the Senator agree?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. I much agree.
  Mr. REID. So I hope this debate will allow the majority to give us 
more opportunities to debate issues. It doesn't hurt to talk at length 
about issues. It is good for the country to talk about issues. It is 
good for the body politic. But we should legislate the way the Founding 
Fathers determined we should, and not have 1,500 bills that are 
prepared by 8 or 9 people when we have 535 Members of Congress. We have 
less than two handfuls of people that came up with that bill, and that 
is wrong. I think we need to change rule XVI, of course. We are going 
to protest and probably vote against that. But we also need to change 
rule XXVIII while we are doing it. If we do that, we will have a much 
more open and better legislative body. Does the Senator agree?
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Well said, sir.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. COCHRAN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
  Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may speak 
as in morning business and that the time I consume be counted against 
the time on the resolution.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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