[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 156 (Monday, November 8, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14232-S14234]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE SENATE

  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, let me first thank my friend from New 
Hampshire for coming down. We have morning business now for 2 hours, 
and we intend to talk about some of the issues before us during this 
first hour. I am going to at some point--and I hope the Senator will 
also--talk a little bit about some of the things we have accomplished 
this year. I understand the media is always interested in the conflicts 
and where we have controversy. And that is fine. But they do not always 
talk about the things we have accomplished, the things we have done 
with the budget, the fact we have spent less in growth this year than 
we have for a number of years, the fact that we are setting aside 
Social Security and have proposals out there to strengthen Social 
Security. We have done a lot for education; indeed, authorized more 
money to be spent than the administration asked for and allowed for it 
to be spent on the local level. These are things that are terribly 
important.
  Defense is probably the singular most important thing the Federal 
Government has to assume. The expenditures of defense have gone down 
ever since the gulf war. This year we have raised them because in order 
to fill out the mission the military has, there must be more resources 
to be able to encourage people to come into the military and to stay 
there.
  We have talked about tax relief, and, indeed, sent to the President a 
bill which would have given tax relief to all citizens of this country 
in various ways rather than spending it. Unfortunately, it was vetoed. 
We will be back with tax relief. When we have an excess amount of 
money, that is where it ought to go, back to the people who have paid 
it.
  In health care, we have done some things and intend to do more before 
the week is over; and bankruptcy.
  I wish to say I hope before we finish we can put some emphasis on the 
positive things that we have done for the good of this country.
  I yield to my good friend from New Hampshire, who has done a superb 
job on the appropriations bills, and continues to do so, whatever time 
he may consume.
  Mr. GREGG. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his courtesy in 
yielding me some time. I especially thank him for his commitment to 
making the American people aware through floor statements of how much 
we have accomplished and how many positive things have occurred in this 
Congress.
  As he mentioned, the most positive is that we have a balanced budget 
for the first time in generations; that for the first time in years, 20 
years or so, the Social Security trust fund money is going to be used 
for Social Security, which is one of the most important things we could 
do and thus preserve it for the benefit of senior citizens and the next 
generation of senior citizens. Something that is really an incredibly 
positive stride in the way we have dealt with ourselves in this Nation 
and has led in large part to the economic prosperity that we now 
experience is the fact that the Government has finally decided to live 
within its means. That is a result, in my opinion, of a Congress which 
has aggressively disciplined spending of the Federal Government.
  In fact, I recall when this Congress was first elected, a Republican 
Congress, the President had sent up his budget for the year, and it 
projected $200 billion deficits for as far as the eye could see. I 
think the year was 1996, and for the next 10 years it was $200 billion 
of deficits every year for as far as we could see.
  Well, we in the Republican Congress, the first Republican Congress in 
40 years, said that was not acceptable; we were going to have to live 
within our means. Others said it was not doable. We proved it was 
doable.
  That is a positive event. We now have multiple billions of dollars of 
surplus, a big enough surplus so we will have no impact on Social 
Security in this budgeting cycle.
  What I wanted to speak about, however, beyond the good news, is the 
issue that has caused us to sort of grind through the process of 
wrapping up the appropriations bills, specifically the demand by the 
President in a number of areas of appropriations accounts. The first 
one I wish to talk about is the demand by the President that we expand 
his classroom teacher proposal.
  Now, the Congress has fully funded to the tune of $1.2 billion. The 
amount of money that the President initially requested for class size 
in his original request was for $1.2 billion, the purpose of which was 
to add teachers to the classroom. Teachers to the classroom may be a 
good idea in the $1.2 billion that has been put on the table to 
accomplish that, but the difference between the two sides is not in the 
dollars; it is in the way those dollars should be spent.
  The President's proposal and the proposal coming from the other side 
of the aisle is that $1.2 billion shall be spent as the people in 
Washington tell the local people to spend it; it will be spent under a 
command-and-control process where the administration, the people of the 
Department of Education, the people of the national labor unions, and 
the legislators on the other side of the aisle tell the local school 
districts, tell the States, tell the local principals, tell the local 
school boards: You must use this money for the purposes of hiring 
teachers. You must use it for the purposes of hiring teachers. It is a 
command-and-control, top-down directive

[[Page S14233]]

from Washington telling local school districts how to operate their 
schools. We, on the other hand, on our side of the aisle, have proposed 
this $1.2 billion be used for schoolteachers, if that is what the local 
school district wants. But we have also said--and I will read the 
language to you--``If the local educational agency determines that it 
wishes to use the funds for purposes other than class size reduction as 
part of a local strategy for improving academic achievement, funds may 
be used for promotional development activities, teacher training, and 
any other local need that is designated to improve student 
performance.''

  What we are saying on our side of the aisle is that we do not think 
that a one-shoe-fits-all approach; we don't think that a command-and-
control, top-down approach is the right way to manage local education 
or to manage any education for that matter.
  What we believe very strongly is that we should put the dollars on 
the table. We should make those dollars available to the local schools. 
And we should say to the local schools: If you need more teachers, here 
are the dollars to hire those teachers. But if you have determined, 
under a procedure for obtaining higher academic achievement, you don't 
need more teachers but what you need are better teachers, and therefore 
you want to train your teachers, or what you need is to keep a teacher 
who is about to leave, and therefore you need to pay that teacher a 
little bit more money, or what you need is a class that has some sort 
of teacher's aide capability in it, such an individual, but also 
computer technologies, you should be able to do that.
  So we are saying in the context of improving the education, most 
importantly ``improving the students' performance,'' which is the exact 
words we use, you can use this money for other areas of teacher 
enhancement and of assisting teachers to be better teachers.
  Why are we saying that? Why aren't we saying what the White House and 
President Clinton say and what the Senators on the other side of the 
aisle say, which is you must do it our way; you must hire teachers, and 
that is what will make for better education? Why aren't we doing that? 
Because that doesn't work. That doesn't work.
  Study after study has concluded that it is not necessarily the class 
size ratio that is critical to education. It happens to be more than 
that. I think anybody who has ever been involved in any level of 
education knows this. It is intuitively obvious through inspection--
which was what one of my professors used to say in college, and we used 
to make fun of him for saying that--that there is a lot more to a 
classroom than the ratio of teacher to students.
  If you have a terrible teacher--I have said this on the floor 
before--who can't teach you a subject matter, if you put 10 kids with 
that teacher, or 20 kids with that teacher, they are still not going to 
learn. If you have an excellent teacher who knows how to handle the 
subject matter, the odds are that the size of the class, if it varies 
within five or so children, is not going to affect the quality of that 
education a whole lot. In fact, this is what studies have shown.
  In fact, Eric Hanushek at the University of Rochester, an economist, 
studied 300 other studies that have been done on this issue and 
concluded as follows: Looking at 300 different studies, class size 
reduction has not worked. Furthermore, the quality of the teacher is 
the most important factor in education, and it is much more important 
to the class than class size.

  A National Commission on Teaching and America's Future found the 
following: The thing that has the least impact on increasing student 
achievement, the least impact, is class size. The thing that has the 
greatest impact is teacher education and the capability of the teacher.
  In the State of Washington, which happens to be the home of the 
sponsor of this original proposal of the top-down control approach, 
Senator Murray's State, a Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee 
found: ``High quality teachers and family environment have a far 
greater effect on student performance than marginally reducing the 
class size.''
  It is not our job in Washington to tell the local school districts 
that they must hire a teacher so that they can get their class size to 
some arbitrary number. The President has picked 18 to 1. I note that by 
picking that number he has managed to qualify 42 of the States already 
because 42 States already have a class size ratio that is 18 to 1 or 
better.
  There are only nine States and the District of Columbia that do not 
have the ratio higher than 18 to 1. Arbitrarily, people on that side of 
the aisle are all knowledgeable and are saying to every school board in 
America, 18 to 1, and that is it. If you don't have 18 to 1, we are not 
going to give you the money. You have to hire new teachers, and that is 
it. That is what it is going to be.
  We are saying: Here is the money, American school system. You take 
that money and you choose whether you need it for a new teacher or 
whether you need it to make that teacher you already have a better 
teacher, and you tie it to standards. You tie it to professional 
development standards and you tie it to student performance standards.
  That is a much better way to do it than to try to manage every 
classroom in America from right here in Washington.
  As I said earlier, it is as if those on the other side of the aisle 
want to take the leader's desk and run a string out to every classroom 
in America, and that string tells that school what they are going to 
have to do. If they don't like what it is going to do, they are going 
to pull that string in running from that desk on the Democratic side of 
the aisle.
  I do not know how many classrooms there are in America. It would 
probably have to be what? I will take a guess. A million--a million 
strings running off that desk all over America, intertwined. It is 
going to get awfully messy and confusing--a big jumbled mess--and 
nothing is going to happen. We are not going to improve education at 
all.
  I think it is a much brighter idea, it is a much more appropriate 
idea, and it is a much fairer idea to say to the school systems that 
happen to know what they are doing because they are involved in it--at 
least every school district in America that I have ever dealt with is 
very concerned, first, about education: Here are the dollars. You use 
it to improve your teachers. You use it to improve your classrooms. You 
use it, most importantly, to improve student performance.
  This is what this debate on the budget has come down to. There really 
aren't too many other big issues out there today. This is what the 
whole budget debate has come down to--whether or not we are going to 
run the classrooms from Washington, whether or not we are going to 
demand that classrooms across America do exactly what we tell them to 
do by hiring a new teacher in order to get these funds, or whether we 
are going to allow the schools across America--the teachers, the 
principals, the parents, and the school boards--to decide how best to 
use that money in order to improve teaching in the classroom.

  The President has made his stand on this ground. To say the least, I 
think it is bad ground, a bad idea, and a bad stance.
  Ironically, at the same time the teacher and class size issue became 
a cause celebre for holding up the budget process, the other item 
holding up the budget process involves the President's demand for 
30,000 to 50,000 additional police officers. This is a little bit 
different. This was before the committee that I chair, the Commerce, 
State, Justice Committee.
  The President put forward a program about 3 years ago. He said we 
want 100,000 new officers. The Congress agreed with him: Let's try to 
put 100,000 new officers on the street in America. The Congress funded 
100,000 new officers. We put on the table and in the budget the money 
necessary to pay for 100,000 new officers. The program has run out. The 
authorization has ended.
  The President came forward and said, I want another 30,000 to 50,000 
officers on top of the initial 100,000 officers.
  First off, there was no program. The Congress didn't agree to that. 
We agreed to 100,000. We didn't agree to another 30,000 to 50,000. It 
was a political statement. He held a poll and had some focus group 
rushing into his office in the morning saying, ``Mr. President,

[[Page S14234]]

Mr. President, putting police officers on the street really pumps well. 
Let's do another 30,000 to 50,000.'' That is how they came to the 
conclusion. They did not have any hearings or even look at the program 
they have in place because if they had looked at the program they had 
in place, they would have realized that of the 100,000 officers we put 
the money on the table for--the Congress did our work to pay for them--
the administration has only been able to hire 60,000. They are still 
40,000 short of the initial 100,000. But they want to go out and hire 
another 30,000. They can't do it physically because they haven't been 
able to hire these offerers. It takes 12 months to do the program. They 
are not going to get the 100,000 in next year. So they can't possibly 
do another 30,000 to 50,000.
  Equally ironic, where did they find the money in their budget to fund 
the additional 30,000 to 50,000 officers? Remember, these are local 
police officers in towns that you and I live in across America. These 
aren't Federal police officers; these aren't FBI agents or even police 
officers in this Capitol. These are local police officers. Where did 
they find the money? They took the money out of the funds we were going 
to use to fund 1,000 extra Border Patrol agents.
  What is the responsibility of the Federal Government? What is our 
responsibility? It is to protect our borders. Those are Federal agents. 
Those aren't local agents. Instead of funding the 3,000 new agents who 
were supposed to be funded and on whom we agreed, for whom we had 
authorized and appropriated, we were going to appropriate the last 
1,000 this year. The administration said: No, we are not going to hire 
the extra 1,000 Border Patrol agents; we will take the money from that 
program and put it into hiring an additional 30,000 to 50,000 local 
police officers for a program that cannot even fulfill its first 
tranche of police officers, which was supposed to be 100,000.
  That is an interesting priority. Think about it. What this 
administration is saying is, we don't care about the borders as much as 
we care about putting out a political statement which happens to poll 
well, which we know has no substantive effect because we know we can't 
hire the officers. Maybe they didn't know it; they should have. All 
they had to do was ask the people at the Justice Department. Assume 
they knew it--putting out a political statement on which we know they 
cannot fulfill the specifics. They knew, going into this proposal, they 
could not hire an additional 30,000 to 50,000 officers because they had 
not even hired the first 100,000 officers. They were 40,000 short, and 
it takes 12 months to put the officers on the books and bring them on 
board.
  This instead of hiring the Border Patrol personnel to improve our 
southern borders from being the sieve they are where tens of thousands 
of illegal aliens come across on a weekly basis. I think it was in the 
Douglas area of Arizona they arrested nearly 40,000 people in a week. 
Unbelievable numbers of illegal aliens are coming across the border, 
placing huge demands on our society in the area of health care, in the 
area of law enforcement, in the area of schooling. These are huge cost 
demands on our society, policing those borders so legal immigrants can 
come across, legal workers can come across. Instead, illegal people are 
breaking the law to get into this country.
  Instead of doing that which happens to be a primary function of the 
Federal Government, they took the money and used it to set up this 
specious statement that they were going to add another 30,000 to 50,000 
police officers. Now they insist on it. The irony is, they insist on it 
as part of the budget process wrap-up. They are insisting on adding the 
extra police officers when they cannot even hire them. Why? PR. It is 
that simple. It polls well.
  The class size statement polls well. On the polling statement, the 
substance is so fundamentally flawed. They are taking control of local 
school districts and saying local school districts don't know whether 
they need a new teacher; we will tell them they need a new 
schoolteacher. Although they may know they don't need a new teacher, 
they need to train the teachers better. That philosophy is 
fundamentally flawed.
  The statement to reduce class size is great polling. We will 
administer cops on the street. Great polling. They are holding up the 
entire budget of the Government of the United States, which happens to 
include a lot of other important things.
  For example, in my bill, which involves the police officers, we have 
the funding for the FBI, the funding for the DEA, funding for the INS, 
funding for the FTC, which is very involved in trying to keep seniors 
from being fraudulently attacked on the Internet with scams. We have 
the funding for the FEC, obviously very involved in the different 
issues of how we manage this e-commerce marketplace in which we are 
functioning today. We have the funding for the State Department; We 
have funding for the whole Justice Department, funding for the whole 
judicial system. All of that is being held up because this 
administration wants to put out a political statement--not a 
substantive statement, because they can't do it, as I just pointed out. 
They cannot accomplish what they claim they will do. They know it. They 
want a political statement. Then they want to put forward a horrendous 
policy on class size because it polls well. They are holding up the 
budget to do that. It is another example of the superficiality of the 
way this administration approaches issues.

  Time and time again for 7 years, we have seen issues put forward not 
for the purposes of resolving a plan but for the purposes of scoring a 
political point by this White House. Now they are willing to put at 
risk the functioning of the entire law enforcement structure of the 
Federal Government for all intents and purposes over what is basically 
a political issue, a political statement. It has no substance at all. 
It has no purpose and can accomplish nothing because it can't be 
accomplished in this next year. Maybe 2 years from now, when they catch 
up to doing the full 40,000 officers they still have to do, they can 
come forward and reasonably say we need another 30,000 officers. That 
may be true.
  Once again, we see the shallowness of this administration is only 
exceeded by their brazenness. Unfortunately, a number of Federal 
agencies and the American people will suffer as a result of that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Hampshire.
  I have to imagine how different the needs of the school district in 
Wyoming are compared to Philadelphia. I certainly subscribe to the idea 
we ought to help with the resources, but let the local school districts 
decide for themselves what it is they need. The basic class size in 
Wyoming happens to be less than 18.
  I am very pleased to have on the floor of the Senate the Senator from 
Idaho, another western Senator, who is also chairman of our policy 
committee.
  I yield as much time as he desires.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Wyoming for 
allowing me time this morning.

                          ____________________