[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 98 (Tuesday, July 25, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7508-S7509]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BUSINESS OF THE SENATE
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I am compelled every once in a while to come
to the floor to let people know what is happening. I know there are
people watching the work of the Senate, and I know those people do not
have, for the most part, a program or a scorecard. It is pretty hard to
follow the rules of what is going on around here without that.
I make an attempt partly to explain to myself what is going on and
take the opportunity to share it with other people who might be
interested and might be listening.
Right now, we are in the closing days of a race for the U.S.
President. It does not really have a lot to do with this body; it has a
lot to do with our interaction with the administrative branch.
Sometimes it is easier for rhetoric to invade the Chambers and to
appear to be the most important thing we are doing.
What we ought to be doing is the appropriations bills for this
Nation. We handle in excess of $1.8 trillion. That is how much we spend
on behalf of the American public. We ought to be debating that. We are
not. We cannot get unanimous consent to proceed to a debate on an
appropriations bill. We cannot move forward to talk about the $1.8
trillion of appropriations for this country.
Instead, we have debate on things that we have debated, things that
have been decided, for the most part, and, on some occasions, with some
finality. Instead, we have people in this Chamber who would rather
rehash votes we have already taken and retake them again. I guess the
plot is to put fellow Members in a bad light in their constituency:
They have already voted on these issues once, let's get them to vote
again, and that will be progress for this country. You have to be
kidding me.
The appropriations for this country are the important things that
need to come before this body. They are the things about which we ought
to be talking right now, and we ought to be talking about them in some
detail. Pretty quickly we are going to run out of time. October 1 is
the start of the new fiscal year for this country, and that is when we
need to have the appropriations finished. That is when they start
spending next year's money. That is when we hope and pray they will be
spending it with the conciseness all of us envision.
When we are relegated to not being able to proceed on an
appropriations bill because we cannot reach unanimous consent, we
cannot debate in detail. Later, we are going to have to make massive
decisions on this money, and in fact it is my belief the minority would
prefer to have the President negotiating these things instead of the
way our forefathers envisioned it: that Congress would come up with the
mechanism and the plan and the votes to pass appropriations bills that
the executive branch would administer.
That is not how it is working. The longer we push this process, the
more it will be a nonvoted mediated expenditure without looking at the
details. The amendments are the way the details get into this
appropriations process, and it is not going to happen because we are
shoving everything back through this process. We are keeping the
appropriations of this Nation from being debated. We are not being
allowed to proceed to the debate on important appropriations bills.
Instead, we are hearing the rhetoric about how we should have minimum
wage, Patients' Bill of Rights, education, and the other important
things on which we have already worked, on which we have already voted
that are in conference committee. Those conference committees should be
finishing.
I will tell you what happened on the Patients' Bill of Rights. I am
on the conference committee for the Patients' Bill of Rights. It is one
of the toughest jobs I have had in my life. A number of us on the
committee have spent from about 1 to 6 hours a day working on it, and
it is largely nonscheduled time. When somebody discovers a place where
there might be a negotiation breakthrough, we get together and talk
about it. We work out words. We meet with the House folks, and we try
to come to a conclusion.
We did that for months and months. Yet we hear on the floor of the
delay in getting the Patients' Bill of Rights done. We were making
major breakthroughs on the Patients' Bill of Rights. The Democrats in
this Chamber bailed out of the process and said: Let's go back to the
original House version. Sure, we have spent 3 or 4 months making
important changes in this. I don't think they ever said that on the
floor. But we had made 3 or 4 months of important changes in major
areas. We had virtually wrapped up those areas as being much better
than either the House or the Senate bill. That is what a conference
committee is about. That is what a conference committee is supposed to
do. We were in the process of doing that.
The only thing I can conclude from the Democrats going back to the
original version of the Patients' Bill of Rights on the House side was
that they could see we were making progress that the country would
like, and they wanted to keep an issue instead. That is not how
Government is supposed to be done. That is not the way we are supposed
to do it.
We have debated these issues. We are working on these issues. But
there is a desire to keep things as an issue instead of a solution, and
I can't tell the Senate how much that dismays me.
There are a few other bills that could come up in this process, too.
We are working on the elementary and secondary education authorization.
It is done once every 5 years. The bill has come out of committee. It
has been to the floor. We have debated it a few times. The amendments
that are brought for that bill are not education amendments. It is all
of these other ones that the Democrats would like to vote on and vote
on and vote on again because that keeps them as an issue. What we need
to do is get some finality to the education issue. We need to have some
agreement between both sides that we will talk about education, that we
will make education decisions, that we will make education in this
country better for every student in elementary and secondary schools.
We have to do that. That is our obligation. That is our assignment.
That is what America is counting on.
We can't get that job done if we keep going back and making political
statements about issues on which we have already voted. If there is a
vote and you want to use it against somebody, you can put the spin on
it and use it against them. You don't have to have five votes on the
same issue to spin it that way. That isn't how elections ought to be
working in this country, but it does say something about how elections
do work in this country.
The voters are more discriminating than that. They are able to tell
the rhetoric from their desires. As I travel Wyoming--and I am back
there almost every weekend--our whole delegation usually goes out on
Friday because we don't have votes here, and we travel the State. In
Wyoming that means by car. I have traveled 300, 500 miles on a weekend.
The average town in Wyoming is about 250 people. The exciting thing
about visiting those towns is you get to talk to about 80 percent of
the people. You get a pretty good feel for what your constituents think
we ought to be doing. They do think we ought to be doing the
appropriations process in detail and getting it wrapped up.
They also think that some of the votes we have taken lately are very
important from a fairness standpoint. One of those issues is the death
tax. Practically everybody in Wyoming understands that death is a
terrible thing and when you accompany death with a tax bill, it is even
worse. That doesn't affect everybody in Wyoming. Those people
understand that the death tax does not affect everybody in Wyoming. But
they see a basic fairness issue where it does affect other people, and
it affects the businesses for which they work. If the small business
they work for has to sell off part of it for death taxes and can no
longer function and goes out of business, it is their job. They
understand that. It is the same with the farms and ranches in Wyoming
and the rest of the country. If you have to sell off a significant part
of your ranch or farm to pay the death tax, you may not have an
economic remainder left. When that happens, you don't have the same
culture in this country, and you do not have the same jobs. People lose
their jobs. So they see the basic fairness issue of making sure that
death is not a taxable event.
The bill that is out there for the President to make his decision on
[[Page S7509]]
doesn't say they avoid taxes forever. There is a capital gains tax in
it. When there is a sale of the business or a sale of the land, when
there is a taxable event, it gets taxed. That is how it ought to be. It
should not be triggered by death and be a second tax on the same
property.
I had a letter from a constituent who said, if we do the death taxes,
isn't that going to increase the gap between the wealthy and the poor?
That is a good question. The answer is, no. What we are working on is
middle America, the workers, particularly the workers who have been
building IRAs and 401(k)s and who have been participating in the growth
of the stock market, taking their wage and investing a little bit of
it. There are a lot of blue-collar workers across this country who are
now millionaires. They took some of their wages and saved it. They
aren't in some of the old exclusions we had on death taxes. They are
saying: Wait a minute. I worked my lifetime to save this money. I took
some risks to make this money. I didn't do it so I could have a great
retirement with a lot of vacation places. I did it so my kids would
have a better chance, so that my kids would have some advantages, so
that my kids would start at a little different level in their job than
I started in mine.
I want to make sure death taxes don't take it away. If we let middle
America, which by the Democratic definition is anybody who pays taxes--
no, that would be the rich. At any rate, if we let middle America keep
their money instead of paying it in death taxes and move up into a
little higher level, that is the way America has operated. That is why
virtually all the people in Wyoming tell me: Eliminate the death taxes.
We did that. It is going to be heading down to the President to see
if he agrees on it.
I hear a lot of the marriage penalty in Wyoming. Again, it is a
fairness issue. They want the marriage penalty eliminated. The bill we
sent down there was not the Senate bill. The Senate bill would have had
a lot more marriage penalty elimination. We went with the House version
for the most part. We increased it in the lower levels so the marriage
penalty among those paying taxes but making the lower amounts would
benefit from it and benefit the most. That is the way the bill is right
now that is being sent to the President.
Again, we had a debate; we took the vote. That issue was resolved.
We hear a lot on taxes about the rich versus the poor and what we
need to do with all the surplus. It is not surplus. It is excess taxes.
It is tax money that got paid that is in excess of what we had
anticipated and what we had planned to spend. There are a lot of
exciting things we can do with excess. Everybody wishes they had some.
The greatest thing would be to win a lottery. That is kind of an excess
sort of thing, unanticipated money that you got, with just a couple of
bucks for expenditure. If we just give these out on all the new ideas
for spending programs, that is what we will be doing--holding a
national lottery.
Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. ENZI. I think your side had time and I patiently listened while I
was in the chair. Your questions turn into statements. I would like to
finish making my statement, if I might.
What we are turning into is a country that recognizes that the
Federal Government can give us everything and we forget about where the
everything came from.
It is pretty exciting to get a windfall. I figured out--and this is
mostly from talking to my Wyoming constituents--that when a new program
around here is proposed, there are people across this country who
benefit from it. Maybe they get $1,000. In fact, that turns out to be
about the average a person in one of these programs gets--$1,000. Of
course, it employs some different people because they administer the
program, and they get more than $1,000 a year benefit out of it. They
become the main lobbyists for the new program, and they get very
excited about getting this new program in place and spending the money.
You know, if a person gets $1,000 or more, it is worth a letter or
two--more than that, maybe it is worth a trip to Washington.
So we hear a lot about the importance of the new programs and
everything. What we don't hear about is the taxpayers saying: Whoa,
that isn't a program I like or a program I want to fund; that isn't
where I want to put my money.
Do you know why we don't hear as much from those people? First of
all, they are busy earning the tax money that we spend; secondly, it is
only costing them about a quarter for a new program. How many letters
can you write for 25 cents? You can't. So what we wind up with is a
huge lobby for new programs.
The President, when he did his State of the Union speech, laid out
several billion dollars a minute in new programs--new programs--that he
would like to see done. In fact, there were about $750 billion worth of
expenditures listed there. Now, we have programs in this country that
we are not funding adequately at the present time, programs that we
have said are important, such as IDEA, that we bring up every once in a
while to get additional funding. We don't do it, but we keep looking at
new programs.
There are some things that need to be done in this country, and the
best way is to get on with the appropriations process, to work through
it in the kind of detail it deserves, and to quit throwing in
peripheral things just because they can be brought up, which come with
points of order and additional votes, each taking about an hour and
using up the time of the Senate. It is time we got on with the business
of appropriations and visited with constituents about the details of
how they think this country ought to run.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, what is the present order of business?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. We are in morning business until 12:30.
____________________