[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 5 (Monday, January 31, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S125-S127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         THE LEGISLATIVE AGENDA

  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I will take a little time to talk a bit 
about our agenda and the things I think most of us hope we will 
accomplish during this coming legislature.
  There are some who believe we won't accomplish much. It seems to me 
that is not a good prognosis. The fact is, we should put some 
priorities on the many issues that are there and, indeed, make a 
special effort to accomplish a good deal. I think we can. Many of the 
issues have been talked about a great deal already. We know what the 
backgrounds are.
  I think now our commitment is to decide what the priorities are for 
this country, what the priorities are for this Congress, and to set out 
to accomplish them.
  We heard the President last Thursday make a very long speech, 
including a very long list of ideas and things he is suggesting we 
consider. I don't believe he is suggesting certainly that they all be 
done. He knows very well that will not be the case. I think it is up to 
us, particularly the majority party, to establish an agenda of those 
things we believe are most important.
  I read in the paper that some Democrats in the House are saying we 
aren't going to accomplish anything unless we set the agenda, and we 
will talk our way through that. I am very disappointed in that kind of 
an idea. Of course, it is possible to continue to raise all these 
issues that one knows are not going anywhere. I suspect that is not a 
new idea even in this body. But we need to have a set of priorities.
  The President had 100-plus ideas that, I suppose, were set forth to 
lay out a political agenda, maybe largely for this election. That is 
fine. It is not a brand new idea. I am surprised the agenda pointed in 
a different direction than that with which the President has sought to 
characterize himself over the last several years. He talked about the 
leadership council and starting towards the center, saying, I think 
some time ago, that the era of big government is over. One would not 
have suspected that, as they listened last Thursday night to his view, 
that the era of big government is over.
  It was a very liberal agenda laid out, I am sure, for conduct of this 
session of Congress. I suggest that is not the direction we ought to 
take. Expenditures of some $400 billion in additional programs, $400 
billion in spending, some $4 billion a minute during that process, with 
very little detail, of course, as to how it is done but, rather, here 
are the things we ought to do, sort of in a broad sense.
  We need to ensure that the description of what we are going to do 
does not interfere with us doing something. We have an agenda. Much of 
it I am

[[Page S126]]

hopeful the President will agree with and the Members on the other side 
of the aisle will agree with. Certainly I am not excited about the idea 
the minority party will set the agenda, just simply by the discussions 
that go on endlessly. When it comes to spending, of course, there are 
many of us in this body who were sent here by our constituents to see 
if we can't limit the growth of Government, and we have succeeded some 
in the last couple years. Even though it was a large one, the growth in 
last year's budget was something around 3 percent, which was about the 
inflation rate, which is considerably less than it has been over the 
last 10 years, where the rate has gone up much higher than that.
  Did we hold down spending enough? No, I don't believe so. To do that, 
we have to have a little different system this year. Hopefully, we will 
do that. I think we are already beginning to deal with the budget, with 
the appropriations, so that we don't end up at the end of the session 
with a huge bill that many people are not even familiar with all the 
content. So we need to do that.

  I am one who believes we ought to be setting about to hold down the 
size of the Federal Government rather than to expand it. I am one who 
believes there is a limit to the kinds of things the Federal Government 
is designed to do. I think that is very clear in the Constitution. We 
have exceeded that in many ways, but it is not too late to take a look 
at what we are doing and say, is that the appropriate thing for the 
Federal Government to do? Are these the things the Federal Government 
can do better than any other government? I don't think so. When we talk 
about States and the differences we have among States, certainly, I 
come from a State that is the eighth largest State in the Union, one of 
the smallest in population. Our needs and methods of delivery of health 
care, the management of public lands, all those things are quite 
different in Wyoming than they are in Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, and 
properly so, which seems to me to be a good indication that we should 
not be continuing to have the one-size-fits-all kind of Federal 
pronouncements from the Congress and from the bureaucracy in 
Washington.
  One of the things I hope we do over time is change our system to 
biennial budgeting, where we have a budget that lasts for 2 years. It 
seems to me it is very appropriate to do that. Most States do it that 
way. For one thing, the agencies then have a longer time to know what 
their spending restrictions are for a period of 2 years. Maybe more 
importantly, however, we have an opportunity to exercise the oversight 
which is the responsibility of Congress, which we don't do very well. 
Unfortunately, we spend so much of our time on appropriations and other 
things that the idea of ensuring that the laws which are passed are 
carried out consistent with the intent of the law is something we don't 
spend enough time doing.
  I want to come back to the floor next week and talk a little bit 
about that provision in, I think, a 1996 law which provides that 
regulations that are put together by the bureaucracies must come to the 
House and the Senate to be reviewed. Seldom does that ever happen. I 
think only one or two times has there been some kind of a motion to 
change those, and none have succeeded because the system is not 
workable. A great idea, and we have that in most legislatures where 
there is oversight of the legislature by the regulations that come out 
to augment the laws that have been passed. We don't do that here. So we 
ought to hold down spending. We ought to have smaller Government. We 
ought to seek to review the kinds of things the Federal Government has 
involved itself in and ensure that there are reasonable things that are 
best done here. That doesn't mean there isn't a role for government. Of 
course there is. But often that role can be best implemented at the 
State and local level.

  We need to talk about reducing the Federal debt in a real way. We 
have been doing some work on that for the first time in 40 years, I 
think. We have not spent Social Security. We balanced the budget for 
the first time in 25 years. We are using Social Security money to pay 
down the publicly held debt, which is a good idea. It reduces the cost 
of that debt. It takes the Social Security money out of the opportunity 
to be spent. That is good. Nevertheless, the key there is that it is 
reducing publicly held debt. We are replacing one debt with another 
kind of debt. When these young people are eligible for benefits from 
Social Security, those dollars that have been put into a trust fund to 
replace debt will have to be recovered from the taxpayers at that time. 
So we need to do something more than that.
  In my opinion, we ought to set about to figure out some kind of a 
process over a period of time that we commit ourselves to a payment 
each year to pay off the debt out of operating funds, that we do it 
much like a mortgage on your home. We can decide that we will pay off 
$15 billion, or whatever it is, each year, and do that over a period of 
time. That would be real debt reduction. That would be reduction that 
would help to keep the so-called surplus from being spent to increase 
the size of Government. So we can do that and reduce our debt in a real 
way.
  We also, hopefully, will pursue--when we have a surplus--what are 
considered to be the real needs of the Federal Government, and after we 
secure Social Security and pay down some of the debt, that money will 
then be returned to the taxpayers so it can be used to buoy the 
economy. Otherwise, frankly, the money left floating around is going to 
be spent. If you don't like the concept of increasingly large 
Government, when there is money beyond what there is a target for, then 
it ought to be sent back to the people who paid it in in the beginning.
  What are the priorities? They are pretty clear. They have been the 
same for several years and will continue to be. I think that is where 
we ought to focus. Certainly, most people would consider education to 
be the issue we are most concerned with--having an opportunity for all 
young people to have an education. Obviously, money is not the total 
answer. There has to be accountability, training, and there have to be 
things that happen within the school system in addition to money. You 
can't do it without money, however; it is essential.
  Health care is one issue, obviously, about which everybody is 
concerned. We are trying to do some things about that. We need to 
continue to do that. I am proud of the health care system we have in 
this country, certainly in terms of quality. On the other hand, we have 
to start to be a little careful about what that quality costs--
affordability. But we can do some things about the health care.
  Social Security. There is no question but that we have to change 
Social Security if we are to have it for these young people who start 
to pay in the very moment they get a job, and most of whom now don't 
expect to have benefits in 30, 40, 50 years. We need to change it so 
that the benefits will be there. There are several alternatives that 
can be used to change that. Certainly there needs to be a continued 
reduction in taxes.

  In education, I am proud of what we have done so far. This GOP 
Congress provided more funding in the last year than the President 
requested. We did get into a hassle, of course, about how the money is 
spent. You may recall the President insisted it be spent on 100,000 
teachers. I can tell you, there are schools where I live where 
additional teachers are not the issue; there are other things that need 
to be done. So we need to give the flexibility to the State and local 
school boards as to how they spend the money to strengthen education. 
We will insist on that being part of the system we produce this year. 
The elementary and secondary education bill this year, I hope, will be 
passed for safe schools and keeping the parents involved, and 
particularly making sure that all children have a chance for quality 
education.
  I am interested, of course, in access to education in rural 
communities. I am also particularly, for a number of reasons, and 
personally interested in special education for special kids. My wife 
has been a special education teacher for 25 years, and I am very proud 
of that. Education will be one issue we will continue to press on.
  Health care, of course, we will continue to have on our agenda, and 
it will be one of the most important things we pass. We passed a number 
of things last year. In my State, for example, in small towns, we have 
hospitals that won't be able to have a full series of services and up 
until now could not be certified and did not receive dollars

[[Page S127]]

from HCFA. We changed that so they can be something much like a clinic 
and have emergency care, so patients can be transferred on--sort of a 
wheel-and-hub concept. We did that last year.
  Certainly, we need to increase the funding for Medicare and hospitals 
and all kinds of service providers.
  A Patients' Bill of Rights, we will be working to try to do something 
on that. The controversy basically is how you have appeals. There have 
been changes, apparently, on the part of the health care providers, 
managed care providers, to provide more medical decisionmaking in the 
process, which is exactly what we need, rather than legal or nonmedical 
accounting kinds of decisions. So we need to pass that this year. I 
feel confident we will. It will be a priority.
  I also believe we will make some real progress--and it is time to 
make progress--with regard to pharmaceuticals. We can do that. 
Actually, health care is something of which we should be quite proud. 
We have the greatest health care in the world. We also have great 
problems with the rising costs of health care. There are problems with 
HMOs and access to some breakthrough drugs. We have too many uninsured. 
Despite that, we have great health care, and I think it is largely 
because we continue to keep it in the private sector.
  We need to ensure that our seniors can continue to have Medicare and 
that it covers their needs. We probably need to look at another change, 
some structural changes, so that there are choices there, where a 
Medicare recipient can stay where they are if they like or, indeed, set 
up a little like the Federal health program, where you have some 
choices. If you would like to add dollars to it, you can go to a 
different coverage than the basic one you had. I think we can do that.
  I mentioned the bill of rights. It looks as if we will be able to 
resolve that this time, the emphasis being on decisions being made by 
medical providers as opposed to the economic people in the managed care 
system. We will be doing more research, of course, on insured, which 
continues to be a problem we will be able to persist with, I believe; 
and I don't think we will solve that by just putting a ton of money out 
there without making some changes.
  I mentioned education, of course, and we will continue to work at 
that. I think our focus will continue to be funding with local 
decisions being made.
  Social Security. I think there are resolutions on Social Security. 
Whether we will get to it this year, I don't know. I hope so. I think 
we should. Almost everyone agrees that if we continue to do what we 
have been doing, we won't be able to pay the benefits at the end of 
this period. Much of it is simply the change in the structure of our 
society. I think when we started Social Security back in the thirties, 
there were 25 or 30 people working for every beneficiary. Now there are 
three. We are readily on the way to having two.
  So a change would be substantially in the nature of how we pay for 
Social Security.
  One of the opportunities of change, of course, would be to decrease 
benefits. Not many people are for that. Some would say we could 
increase taxes. The Social Security tax is the largest tax that most 
people pay these days.
  The third one is to increase the return we have on the money in the 
trust fund. It seems to me to be a very logical opportunity for us to 
take a portion of the money people pay in--I think the caveat is that 
probably for most people over 50 or 55 it would not change; they would 
continue to go on as they are, but for younger people who are starting 
to pay in, part of their Social Security payment would be put into an 
individual account that is owned by that person. It would be invested 
in their behalf by contractors and it would be invested in equities. It 
could be in equities. It could be in bonds. It could be a combination 
of that, such as the plan for Federal employees. You could raise 
substantially the return on that money. Over a period of a person's 
lifetime of paying in, it would make a great deal of difference and 
probably ensure that those benefits would be there at the end of a 
period of time.
  Significant change? Sure. Difficult to make? Of course. But it can be 
made. When you get to the options, then at least in my judgment that 
could become the option.
  Those are some of the things I think are most important to us. We 
find ourselves now faced with a great opportunity to put together a 
priority agenda for this year. The majority party will be doing that 
and has done that. It will include education. It will include health 
care. It will include Social Security. It will include paying down the 
debt. It will include some kind of tax relief on an equitable basis.
  It seems to me that those are the things we ought to put in as 
priorities. It is great to list the whole thing. It is great to go into 
great debates and filibusters almost by offering everything on the 
floor that you know is not going to happen, but I am hopeful we do not 
find ourselves in the position of raising issues more for the political 
benefit they might have in the election year as opposed to finding 
resolutions to those issues. It seems to me that is the challenge that 
lies before us.
  I am very pleased to be joined during this hour by one of the leaders 
of our party, the chairman of our Policy Committee, the Senator from 
Idaho.
  I yield to the Senator from Idaho.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho is recognized.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, let me thank the Senator from Wyoming for 
yielding.
  Let me also join him in his analysis, and certainly the hope that he 
speaks to as it relates to an agenda that the Congress might direct 
itself toward this year, away from, of course, the pitfalls of the kind 
of political rhetoric that I think we oftentimes find ourselves in 
especially in Presidential election years. We are now well into this 
Presidential year.

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