[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 156 (Monday, November 8, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H11693-H11697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               DO NOTHING CONGRESS: AN UNFINISHED AGENDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to spend some time this evening 
talking about the unfinished agenda for this Congress, because it is 
very likely that if not this week, then certainly very soon this 
Congress and this House of Representatives will be in recess. I am 
hoping that we will be able to complete the budget and the various 
appropriations bills that remain out there that have not been finalized 
here in the House of Representatives. But my point that I am trying to 
make tonight is this Republican leadership, because the Republicans are 
in the majority in the House of Representatives and they do lead the 
House of Representatives as well as the Senate, and essentially what we 
see is that the Republicans are determined to do nothing.
  Mr. Speaker, they have not been able to pass the appropriations 
bills. They have not been able to essentially pass a budget, even 
though the fiscal year began October 1. And, if anything, when we try 
to pass measures that are important to the American people such as 
Medicare prescription drug benefits or HMO reform Patients' Bill of 
Rights or campaign finance reform or gun safety laws that would make a 
difference for the American people and that the public is crying out 
for in most cases, what we see is that the Republicans get dragged 
along reluctantly to do perhaps something about these issues, but 
ultimately do not do anything about it or manage somehow to make it so 
that none of this legislation, none of this positive agenda pushed by 
the Democrats ever becomes law.
  Mr. Speaker, I just want to give some examples, if I can, about the 
problems that we are facing with this Republican leadership and with 
this unfinished agenda.
  What I find is that the Republican leadership basically seems to be 
dominated by the far right, the ultraconservatives within the 
Republican Party. They constantly talk about the need for tax cuts that 
primarily benefit the wealthy and the larger corporations. They 
constantly talk about the need to get rid of government, couched 
somehow in that there are too many government restrictions and so the 
best thing is to get rid of all the restrictions and ultimately get rid 
of the government.
  They get dragged into somehow passing sometimes, after a long period 
of effort on the part of the Democrats, into passing legislation like 
the Patients' Bill of Rights for HMO reform. But then they manage when 
it goes to conference between the House and the Senate to muck it up so 
nothing ever gets to the President's desk.
  Essentially what we have is a ``do nothing Congress.'' And it is also 
the ``wrong thing Congress'' because the Republicans have the wrong 
agenda. They do not want to adopt the Democrats' agenda and adopt 
legislation that helps the American people. They want to adopt the 
wrong agenda.
  Mr. Speaker, I suppose the biggest example of that wrong agenda is 
the tax cut. Over the summer the Republican leadership proposed and 
eventually passed narrowly a trillion dollar tax cut for special 
interests that benefited their wealthy corporate contributors, but not 
1 cent to extend the life of Social Security or to modernize Medicare 
with a prescription drug plan. Instead of allowing debate on a plan 
that would allow seniors to buy prescription drugs at an affordable 
cost, Republicans joined with the pharmaceutical industry to belittle 
the need for such a plan under Medicare in the first place.
  The Republicans fought tooth and nail to derail a bipartisan 
Patients' Bill of Rights that would have taken medical decision-making 
away from insurance company bureaucrats and returned it back to doctors 
and patients where it belongs.
  They have sat on, as I mentioned, common sense gun control to please 
the gun lobby. More than 6 months after the Columbine, Colorado 
incident, Republicans in Congress have still blocked any progress on 
keeping guns out of the hands of children and criminals by shutting the 
gun show loophole.
  Mr. Speaker, what we are seeing here is this Republican Congress is 
all about inaction, indifference and inertia. Democrats really have 
said over and over again we are not going to go home, we are not going 
into recess here until we get a budget agreement that addresses some of 
the outstanding priorities for American families. I know some of the 
previous speakers here on the other side of the aisle tonight have 
belittled the 100,000 teachers program and said it is not necessary, 
adding 100,000 teachers to bring down classroom size. Well, they may 
belittle it, but we are not going home until we pass it and we have the 
extra teachers to give to the communities to reduce class size.
  Some have even belittled the Cops on the Beat program saying it gives 
money to the towns to hire extra policemen, 50- to 100,000 extra 
policemen, but they only get it a few years and after that they do not 
have the money any more. Well, again the idea of adding police and 
giving some Federal dollars back to the municipalities so they can hire 
extra police or extra teachers, there is no reason why those programs 
cannot continue if the Republican leadership was willing to continue to 
fund them for the municipalities, help the towns reduce their property 
tax rate, provide more cops and more teachers.
  And of course we also have the other initiatives, the Democratic 
initiative to provide funding for school modernization, to provide more 
money for open space so that communities, counties, States can purchase 
more property for open space.
  Mr. Speaker, I am going to go into some of these issues tonight in 
the time that I have. I am not going to use all of the time, but I am 
going to go into some of the details about how the Republican agenda is 
this ultraconservative, right wing agenda, mainly tax cuts for the 
rich, and how they have not really dealt with the average problems or 
the concerns of the American people.
  Let me talk a little bit about this Republican tax cut, because what 
I find is that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they want 
to sort of forget that they put together this trillion dollar tax cut 
primarily for the wealthy. They talked about it a lot over the summer, 
but I guess they realized it did not work and the American public did 
not want it, so they do not talk about it much anymore.
  Just a little bit about it. It was primarily, overwhelmingly I should 
say, skewed towards the wealthy and corporations. It meant $46,000 
extra per year for the wealthiest taxpayers but only $160 per year for 
the average middle-class family. And there were $21 billion in special 
interest tax breaks for big business.
  The other thing, of course, is that what they do when they enact this 
trillion dollar tax cut, which the President wisely vetoed, is that 
that does not leave any money in the surplus that can be used to pay 
down the national debt. The President said that he wanted to use the 
surplus that was generated by the Balanced Budget Act to pay down the 
national debt, to shore up Social Security and Medicare.

[[Page H11694]]

  Well, so much of that surplus, the whole thing was basically taken up 
by the Republican tax cut for the wealthy that the effort to reduce the 
national debt, if that ever were passed and was not vetoed by the 
President, would simply go out the window. It also siphoned money from 
the President's Medicare and Social Security program.
  The President proposed in his State of the Union address that 
whatever surplus there was generated by the Balanced Budget Act over 
the next 5 or 10 years primarily would be used to shore up Social 
Security, because we know that in maybe 20 or 30 years there will not 
be enough money to pay for the people who are then seniors who reach 
the age of 65. He also wanted to use about 15 percent of that surplus 
for Medicare in part to provide a new prescription drug program.
  I will just mention this by way of background, because I know the 
Republicans do not like to remember that tax cut. But if that tax cut 
had ever passed and had gone primarily to the wealthy and the special 
interest corporations, we would not be able to pay down the national 
debt which we are doing to some extent now, we would not be able to 
provide money for the Social Security system in the future, and we 
would not be able to pay for a prescription drug plan.
  Now, I want to talk a little bit about two of the issues that I 
consider very important here, which are not part of the Republican 
leadership agenda, which are part of the Democratic agenda and which 
the Republicans continue to try to muck up so they do not become law. 
One is managed care reform and the other is the prescription drug 
benefit under Medicare for seniors.
  Interestingly enough, last week we saw an interesting development 
with regard to the managed care reform. I think my colleagues and most 
of the American people know that the Democrats along with some 
Republicans because there was definitely bipartisan support on this HMO 
reform, on a bipartisan basis, but not with the support of the 
Republican leadership but a minority of the Republicans, we put 
together a managed care reform bill, the Patients' Bill of Rights, that 
passed the House of Representatives overwhelmingly about a month ago.
  Well, the problem is once a bill passes here, we have to go to 
conference with the Senate and try to work out the differences between 
the two Houses. We call that a conference, the people who are appointed 
are called conferees. The Republican leadership never appointed any 
conferees for about a month because they did not want to move forward 
on the conference because they did not want a managed care reform bill 
to be passed by both Houses and go to the President for a signature.

  But, finally, because the Democrats kept pressuring about the 
appointment of the conferees, they finally did decide last week that 
they would appoint the conferees. But they managed, once again, to 
screw this thing up so that the conference either will never take place 
or will never be effective in putting together a bill that would go to 
the President and that would signal real managed care reform.
  If my colleagues do not want to take my word for it, let me point out 
that last Thursday's New York Times had a great article, a 
congressional memo sort of a feature column by David Rosenbaum, and I 
will quote a few salient passages. The title of the article is ``Not 
Quite Business as Usual in House on Managed Care.'' This is how he 
describes it in his article:
  And I quote: ``Here is how the textbooks say a bill becomes law: The 
Senate passes the bill. Then the House of Representatives passes its 
own version. Then a conference committee is formed where senior 
senators defend their bill and senior representatives defend their 
bill, with both sides striking compromises to resolve their 
differences.''
  That is what I was describing before about how we go about the 
conference.
  ``But in the real world,'' he goes on to say, ``in the real world of 
power politics, conventional procedures are sometimes flouted. That is 
what happened in the House today on legislation expanding the rights of 
patients in managed care plans. It threatens to undo the Chamber's 
action on the bill. Last month, by a lopsided vote of 275 to 151, the 
House passed a bill that would give patients a wide range of new rights 
in dealing with their health insurance companies. In July, the Senate 
had passed a bill covering barely a quarter as many patients and giving 
them a much more limited set of rights.''
  ``The House bill was strongly supported by President Clinton, and 
almost all Democrats and 68 Republicans voted for it. But Republican 
Leaders in the House opposed the measure, making its passage probably 
the most striking rebuff to the leadership since the party won control 
of the Congress in 1994.''
  So the House leadership did not like what we call the Norwood-Dingell 
bill, named for the two chief sponsors, one Republican, the gentleman 
from Georgia (Mr. Norwood), and one Democrat, the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Dingell). The House leadership did not like the bill. 
They stalled, they stalled. Finally the bill passes overwhelmingly. So 
what do they do?
  Going back to The New York Times. ``Today, these leaders,'' 
Republican Leaders, ``used their authority to make sure the Republican 
conferees named to negotiate with the Senate were on their side and not 
on the side that won the vote, a tactic that could effectively stifle 
any action regulating managed care plans in this Congress.'' They are 
going to kill the bill.
  ``The chief Republican sponsor of the measure, Representative Charlie 
Norwood of Georgia, was denied a seat on the conference committee. So 
was another leading Republican supporter, Representative Greg Ganske of 
Iowa. Of the 12 Republican conferees, 10 voted against the managed-care 
bill.''
  So what they did through a procedural gimmick is the Republican 
leadership made sure that if the conference is ever held, which it may 
not be, that whatever comes out will be controlled by the people who 
voted against the very bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House of 
Representatives.
  ``The rules of the House state:'' and I am going back to the New York 
Times article, that ``In appointing Members to conference committees, 
the Speaker shall appoint no less than a majority of Members who 
generally support the House position as determined by the Speaker. 
Technically, Mr. Hastert followed that rule. The managed-care 
regulations were attached to a separate bill, which Republicans call 
access legislation, that will increase coverage for the uninsured.''
  Now, what they are basically doing here is a gimmick. They put the 
managed care reform bill in another bill. They are saying that most 
Republicans voted for that, so that is okay. They do not have to have 
conferees that supported the managed care reform.
  Mr. Speaker, again, I only use this as an example. I could use 
campaign finance reform. I could use prescription drug benefits. I 
could use gun safety laws. The list goes on. Basically whatever 
positive agenda there is for the American people, the Republican 
leadership is determined that they are going to kill it.
  Now, let me just mention another issue that I consider very important 
and that I think we are starting to see more and more information that 
tells us about the problems that seniors have trying to purchase and 
have enough money or insurance to provide for prescription drugs.

                              {time}  2100

  Well, we are just seeing more and more information coming out every 
day about how difficult this problem is for seniors, because Medicare 
does not cover prescription drugs in most cases.
  Interestingly enough, a report came out last week by Families USA 
called ``Hard to Swallow Rising Drug Prices for American Seniors.'' I 
would just like to provide some of the information that was in the 
introduction or the summary of this report that came out last week 
because it shows dramatically how seniors increasingly cannot afford 
the cost of prescription drugs and are going without.
  We all know that prescription drugs are really the best preventative 
measure that one can take, particularly as a senior, to avoid 
hospitalization, to avoid having to go to a nursing home, to avoid 
being institutionalized. They are a preventative. If seniors cannot 
afford them, they are going to end up in a hospital, they are going to 
end up in a nursing home, they are not going to be able to take the 
preventative action that comes from having access to prescription 
drugs.

[[Page H11695]]

  Well, the Families USA report, if I can just quote, Mr. Speaker, some 
of the salient points. This is in the introduction, which I thought was 
particularly significant. It says that, ``For older Americans, the 
affordability of prescription drugs has long been a pressing concern. 
Outpatient prescription drug coverage is one of the last major benefits 
still excluded from Medicare, and the elderly are the last major 
insured consumer group without access to prescription drugs as a 
standard benefit. It is not included in Medicare.
  ``Although many Medicare beneficiaries have access to supplemental 
prescription drug coverage, too often that coverage is very expensive 
and very limited in scope. What is more, such coverage is on the 
decline. As a result, older Americans who are by far the greatest 
consumers of prescription drugs pay a larger share of drug costs out of 
their own pockets than do those who are under 65.
  ``Four years ago, Families USA found that the prices of prescription 
drugs commonly used by older Americans were rising faster than the rate 
of inflation. To determine if this trend of steadily increasing prices 
for prescription drugs has improved, remained the same, or worsened, 
Families USA gathered information on the prices of prescription drugs 
most heavily used by older Americans over the past 5 years.
  ``Our analysis shows that, in each of the past 5 years, the prices of 
the 50 prescription drugs most used by older Americans have increased 
considerably faster than inflation. While senior citizens generally 
live on fixed incomes that are adjusted to keep up with the rate of 
inflation, the cost of the prescription drugs they purchase most 
frequently has risen at approximately two times the rate of inflation 
over the past 5 years and more than four times the inflation over the 
last 2 years.''
  Now, just again to show my colleagues how bad the situation is 
becoming for seniors, just a little more information that comes from 
the discussion in this Families USA report, it says that ``because 
Medicare does not cover outpatient prescription drugs, many 
beneficiaries look elsewhere for drug coverage. About 28 percent of the 
Medicare beneficiaries receive some drug coverage through employer-
sponsored retiree plans, about 11 percent from Medicaid, about 8 
percent from individuals purchasing Medigap insurance, about 7 percent 
from Medicare HMOs, and about 3 percent from public sources such as the 
VA or State pharmaceutical programs for the low-income elderly,'' 
something that we have in New Jersey.
  But 35 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, 14 million people, have 
absolutely no coverage for prescription drugs. Interestingly enough, 
even for those 65 percent who do have access to some drug coverage, 
what the Families USA report shows is that much of that inadequate with 
high co-payments, low caps on overall drug coverage, and restrictions 
on the drugs that can be prescribed.
  For example, only three of the 10 standardized Medigap policies sold 
offer prescription drug coverage, two of these policies require a $250 
annual deductible, charge a 50 percent co-payment for each drug, and 
have a maximum annual benefit of $1,250. The third, which has a much 
higher premium, has the same high deductible and co-payment and has a 
$3,000 cap.
  So what we are finding is that the sources of prescription drug 
coverage for seniors are basically drying up. Next year the value of 
drug benefits and Medicare HMOs will decline. On average co-payments 
for brand-name drugs will increase by 21 percent, and co-payments for 
generic drugs will increase by 8 percent.
  I do not want to continue going through this, but I think this 
Families USA report shows dramatically how so many seniors do not have 
any access to prescription drug coverage and they are simply paying 
everything out-of-pocket, which they cannot afford; or for those 
who have some sort of coverage, the prices, the cost, the co-payments, 
the deductibles, and even the ability to obtain coverage at all, all 
those factors, everything is declining. We have to do something about 
it.

  Well, the President has proposed doing something about it, and the 
Democrats have proposed doing something about it. This is part of our 
positive agenda which we cannot get passed in the Republican Congress 
with this Republican leadership.
  The President a long time ago, much earlier this year, came up with 
the idea of a Medicare prescription drug benefit. He wanted to 
establish a new voluntary Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit 
that is as affordable and available to all beneficiaries.
  Now, I am not saying that the President's proposal is necessarily the 
one we should adopt, but the Republican leadership does not want to 
adopt anything. They say the problem does not exist or make some other 
excuse.
  But I will just give my colleagues a little information about the 
President's proposal because I think it is a good one. He says that 
there would be no deductible, and Medicare would pay for half of the 
beneficiary's drug cost from the first prescription filled each year up 
to $5,000 in spending.
  He would ensure beneficiaries a price discount similar to that 
offered by many employer-sponsored plans for each prescription 
purchased even after the $5,000 limit is reached.
  I want to stress how important that is to be able to do bulk 
purchases and keep the prices down, because price discrimination is a 
huge problem right now for seniors if they do not have access to some 
kind of plan where the purchases are made in bulk.
  The plan that the President proposed will cost about $24 per month 
beginning in 2002 and $44 per month when fully phased in by 2008. 
Beneficiaries with incomes below 135 percent of poverty would not pay 
premiums or cost sharing.
  I do not want to, again, go into all the details, but I just did want 
to say that, to date, once again, the Republican leadership has failed 
to show even the slightest understanding of the two broad underpinnings 
of this prescription drug issue; and that is the price discrimination 
that seniors face in purchasing prescription drugs and the need to 
establish a comprehensive Medicare drug benefit in order to help 
seniors combat this price discrimination.
  There have been some dramatic examples. The Government operations, 
the House Committee on Government Reform did a lot of analysis of price 
discrimination and basically showed that, if one goes to Mexico and 
Canada, generally the same exact drugs that were available in those 
countries are available for about half the cost of what they are sold 
for here in the United States.
  Again, I do not want to go into all the details on this, Mr. Speaker, 
but I just would point out that the problem with price discrimination 
exists because seniors without coverage have no negotiating power. They 
do not have the power to obtain pharmaceuticals at lower prices through 
bulk purchases like the drug industry's most favorite customers. We 
have to address that. This Republican leadership has failed to address 
it.
  I do not intend to use all the time allotted to me this evening, but 
I just wanted to spend a few more minutes talking about what is really 
happening here. Not only is this Republican leadership not addressing 
the real issues that need to be addressed like managed care reform, 
like Medicare prescription drugs; but they cannot even perform the 
basic functions of the House in terms of getting the budget passed. 
They continue to break their promises that they make in trying to 
accomplish that goal.
  We are now on the fourth CR, the fourth continuing resolution. As of 
October 1, the new fiscal year began. The new budget, the 13 
appropriations bills were supposed to be adopted by October 1. They 
were not. Every week or so, we pass a new continuing resolution to keep 
the Government going and not close down for another week or so. Now we 
are on our fourth that extends, I believe, to November 10, sometime 
this week, in time for Veterans' Day when we probably will recess.
  The fact that we are in such disarray, and we have not been able to 
adopt the budget is bad enough; but there are two things about what has 
been going on that I think need to be highlighted that maybe in some 
respects are even worse.
  The two promises that basically the Speaker made and the Republican 
leadership made earlier in this year about the budget, both of which 
have been

[[Page H11696]]

broken, one is that the appropriations bill would stay within the 
Balanced Budget Act and the caps that were set forth pursuant to the 
Balanced Budget Act so that we would not exceed the level of spending 
that was basically put forth and outlined over the next 5 or 10 years 
on an annual basis. There were caps on the level of spending that were 
put forth for each fiscal year.

  Well, the Republican appropriation bills have already busted the 
outlays caps for fiscal year 2000 by billions of dollars. I have 
actually an article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about this. I 
think I will just put it up here for a minute, Mr. Speaker.
  This is from Friday, October 29, Wall Street Journal. I think people 
generally understand that the Wall Street Journal tends to be 
Republican and tends to be conservative. This is an article there that 
says that, ``The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the GOP 
exceeds spending targets by over $31 billion. Congressional Budget 
Office estimates show that Republicans are more than $31 billion over 
their initial spending targets for this year, risking the Government 
having to borrow again from Social Security.
  ``Prior appropriations bills have exceeded Mr. Clinton's requests 
from funding everything from veterans' medical care and the Pentagon to 
the Environmental Protection Agency. Even with the 1 percent across-
the-board cut that the Republicans touted here a couple weeks ago, the 
Labor Education Health bill, which is expected to be passed by the 
Senate on Monday, includes major spending increases over the last year.
  ``The GOP continues to work to what amounts to two sets of book, this 
is the gimmicks, one based on the CBO and the other on spending 
estimates by the Office of Management Budget. When the OMB's numbers 
are favorable, House and Senate budget committees simply direct CBO to 
adjust the estimates accordingly.'' Well, it goes on.
  The point I am trying to make, Mr. Speaker, is that there is 
absolutely no question that based on the CBO estimates that the 
Republicans spending bills have busted the fiscal year 2000 outlays, 
the caps, by $30.7 billion. They use all kinds of gimmicks to try to 
justify that as emergencies or whatever.
  Now, the second promise that the Republicans made was that they were 
not going to dip into the Social Security Trust Fund. On October 28, 
the Congressional Budget Office certified that the GOP leadership had 
broken that program. They sent a letter to Congress certifying that, on 
the basis of CBO estimates of the 13 completed GOP appropriation bills, 
the GOP bills spend $17 billion of the Social Security surplus, even 
after their 1 percent across-the-board cut is taken into consideration.
  Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to go into this a little bit, and then I 
will complete my presentation this evening. There was an article, I 
guess it was in the New York Times last week, that talked about how 
these spending limits that were set forth with much fanfare as part of 
the Balanced Budget Act a couple years ago have just basically been 
ignored.
  Many of us at the time when the Balanced Budget Act was passed 
thought this was going to be really significant in terms of trying to 
keep the budget focused, not go into debt, create a surplus that could 
be used to shore up Social Security and Medicare, to pay for 
prescription drugs, whatever. But what we see is that the caps are 
effectively dead.
  If one looks at this article in the New York Times from last week, it 
says that ``In effect, Washington has now substituted a new standard of 
fiscal responsibility, the loser goal of not spending surplus Social 
Security money. Only through budget gamesmanship can either party claim 
to be meeting even that new standard this year.''
  Well, just to give my colleagues an idea of some of the thing that 
they have done to get away the caps, the article says that, ``Under the 
law, Congress and the administration must remain within the caps, or 
the White House must enact the across-the-board cuts to bring spending 
back into line.''
  Last year, the Republican leadership exploited a loophole intended to 
deal with wars or natural disasters. They designated $20 billion in 
outlays as emergency spending that is not technically subject to the 
limits. They did the same thing this year.
  Appropriations committees have almost arbitrarily placed $17.5 
billion in discretionary spending, including spare parts for the 
Pentagon, financing for the 2000 census under the emergency umbrella.
  They have also used a tactic that compares spending estimates, this 
is what was in the Wall Street Journal as well, where they look at the 
CBO numbers versus the OMB numbers, and they use whatever numbers they 
think are appropriate to try to say that they are not sending money. 
Whatever.
  The point I am trying to make, Mr. Speaker, is that we are here on 
this fourth continuing resolution. It is over a month since the budget 
was supposed to be fashioned. All we keep hearing from the other side 
is that, oh, we are going to stay here because we do not want to dip 
into Social Security. The reality is they have already dipped into 
Social Security about $17 billion.
  The last thing I wanted to mention tonight, and I go back to the 
Social Security issue again because I know some of my colleagues on the 
Democratic side have been attacked by Republican commercials, accusing 
them of dipping into Social Security when, in fact, it is the 
Republican leadership that has dipped into Social Security with their 
appropriations and their spending bills to the tune of $17 billion.

                              {time}  2115

  And there was a good article, again an editorial in The New York 
Times last week, that talked about the focus on this Social Security 
surplus and dipping into it. The New York Times pointed out, again, 
that the Republicans have already dipped into the Social Security 
surplus so that that whole issue is really moot. But what they say is 
the most important aspect and the best example of inaction here is how 
we are not dealing with the long-term solvency of Social Security.
  There again, I go back to what the President said in his State of the 
Union message earlier this year. He said, look, we can take the 
majority of the surplus that is being generated from the Balanced 
Budget Act over the next 10 years and we can use that to shore up 
Social Security so the trust fund remains viable, and 20 or 30 years 
from now, when all the baby boomers become senior citizens, or even 
sooner, there will be money there for Social Security; and we can use a 
significant portion of the surplus also for Medicare so we can have a 
prescription drug benefit.
  All I would like to conclude with tonight, Mr. Speaker, is to say, 
please, to my colleagues on the other side, to the Republican 
leadership that runs this House of Representatives, before we leave 
here, let us adopt a budget, but let us also make sure that we address 
some of these both short-term and long-term issues that need to be 
addressed. All the Democrats are saying is that we are crying out for 
bipartisan action on Social Security to make sure that we address the 
solvency long-term on Medicare, to make sure we provide a prescription 
drug benefit, address campaign finance reform, address the gun safety 
issue, address the concerns with regard to HMOs and pass the Patients' 
Bill of Rights.
  Let us get active on an agenda. Let us not just sit back and say that 
this House of Representatives and this Congress should run away from 
everything and the government should basically dismantle itself and not 
try to take some action in a positive way that would benefit the 
American people.
  I do not want to come here every day and see us fool around with 
appropriations bills and not pass a budget, and at the same time not 
address these major concerns that should be addressed, and that is what 
we are seeing here every day amongst the Republican leadership; 
inaction on the budget, gimmicks on the budget, no action on the major 
issues that are important to the American people.
  And worst of all, last week the Speaker again started to talk about a 
major tax cut, as if the only thing that this Republican leadership 
could do is to talk about another tax cut that is going to benefit 
primarily the wealthy and provide corporations with some tax breaks. It 
is almost as if the only thing that the Speaker and the Republican 
leadership can think about at any given time is coming up with more tax 
cuts.
  That is not what needs to be done. We need to address the issues that 
the

[[Page H11697]]

public is crying out for, and I hope that we do, otherwise we will be 
continuing to speak out on the Democratic side of the aisle every night 
to demand action on these important issues that the American people 
want to see attended to.

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