[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 144 (Friday, November 3, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H11833-H11834]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  AN APT DESCRIPTION OF THE END OF THIS SESSION OF THE 106TH CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, T.S. Eliot said: That is the way the 
world goes, not with a bang but a whimper. It seems like an apt 
description of the end of this session.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an article from Slate, which is 
a magazine, an online magazine, entitled ``Ralph the Leninist.''
  The article referred to is as follows:

                  [From Slate magazine, Oct. 31, 2000]

                              [Ballot box]

                           Ralph the Leninist

                          (By Jacob Weisberg)

       Over the past 10 days, liberals have been voicing shock and 
     dismay at the imminent prospect of their old hero, Ralph 
     Nader, intentionally throwing the election to George W. Bush. 
     A first, eloquent protest came 10 days ago from a group of a 
     dozen former ``Nader's Raiders,'' who asserted that their 
     former mentor had broken a promise not to campaign in states 
     where he could hurt Gore and begged him to reconsider doing 
     so. Others, including Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, have 
     expressed a similar sense of disappointment and betrayal.
       Nader's response to all this heartfelt hand-wringing has 
     been to scoff and sneer. On Good Morning America, he referred 
     contemptuously to his old disciples as ``frightened 
     liberals.'' The Green Party nominee is spending the final 
     week of the campaign stumping in Michigan, Minnesota, 
     Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington--the very states where a 
     strong showing stands to hurt Gore the most. Nader has said 
     he wants to maximize his vote in every state in hopes of 
     attaining the 5 percent of the vote that will qualify the 
     Green Party for $12 million in federal matching funds in 
     2004. Speaking to foreign journalists in Washington 
     yesterday, he explicitly rejected Internet vote-swapping 
     schemes that could help him reach this qualifying threshold 
     without the side effect of electing Bush president. In 
     various other TV appearances, Nader has stated bluntly that 
     he couldn't care less who wins.
       This depraved indifference to Republican rule has made 
     Nader's old liberal friends even more furious. A bunch of 
     intellectuals organized by Sean Wilentz and Todd Gitlin are 
     circulating a much nastier open letter, denouncing Nader's 
     ``wrecking-ball campaign--one that betrays the very liberal 
     and progressive values it claims to uphold.'' But really, the 
     question shouldn't be the one liberals seem to be asking 
     about why Nader is doing what he's doing. The question should 
     be why anyone is surprised. For some time now, Nader has made 
     it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to 
     pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is 
     the Leninist one of ``heightening the contradictions.'' It's 
     not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being 
     personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's 
     actively trying to elect Bush because he things that social 
     conditions in America need to get worse before they can get 
     better.
       Nader often makes this ``the worse, the better'' point on 
     the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He 
     says that Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt was useful 
     because he was a ``provocateur'' for change, noting that Watt 
     spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More 
     recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. 
     Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave 
     at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., last week: ``After 
     lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton 
     administration, Nader said, `If it were a choice between a 
     provocateur and an anesthetizer, I'd rather have a 
     provocateur. It would mobilize us.' ''
       Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has 
     said similar things before. ``When [the Democrats] lose, they 
     say it's because they are not appealing to the Republican 
     voters,'' Nader told an audience in Madison, Wis., a few 
     months ago, according to a story in The Nation. ``We want 
     them to say they lost because a progressive movement took 
     away votes.'' That might make it sound like Nader's goal is 
     to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic Party to the 
     left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the 
     socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his 
     real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic 
     Party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked ``about 
     leading the Greens into a `death struggle' with the 
     Democratic Party to determine which will be the majority 
     party.'' Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes 
     in the future to run Green Party candidates around the 
     country, including against such progressive Democrats as Sen. 
     Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Sen. Russell Feingold of 
     Wisconsin, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California. ``I hate to 
     use military analogies,'' Nader said, ``but this is war on 
     the two parties.''
       Hitler analogies always lead to trouble, but the one here 
     is irresistible since Nader is actually making the argument 
     of the German Communist Party circa 1932, which helped bring 
     the Nazis to power. I'm not comparing the Republicans to 
     fascists or the Greens to Stalinists for that matter. But 
     Nader and his supporters are emulating a disturbing, familiar 
     pattern of sectarian idiocy. You hear these echoes whenever 
     Nader criticizes Bush halfheartedly, then becomes 
     enthusiastic and animated blasting the Green version of the 
     ``social fascists''--Bill Clinton, Gore, and moderate 
     environmentalists. It's clear that the people he really 
     despises are those who half agree with him. To Nader, it is 
     liberal meliorists, not right-wing conservatives, who are the 
     true enemies of his effort to build a ``genuine'' progressive 
     movement. He does have a preference between Republicans and 
     Democrats, and it's for the party that he things will inflict 
     maximum damage on the environment, civil rights, labor 
     rights, and so on. By assisting his class enemy, Nader thinks 
     he can pull the wool from the eyes of a sheeplike public.

[[Page H11834]]

       If Nader's goal were actually progressive reform--a ban on 
     soft money, a higher minimum wage, health-care coverage for 
     some of the uninsured, a global warming treaty--it would be 
     possible to say that his strategy was breathtakingly stupid. 
     But Nader's goal is not progressive reform; it's a 
     transformation in human consciousness. His Green Party will 
     not flourish under Democratic presidents who lull the country 
     into a sense of complacency by making things moderately 
     better. If it is to thrive, it needs villainous, right-wing 
     Republicans who will make things worse. Like Pat Buchanan, 
     Nader understands that his movement thrives on misery. But 
     the comparison is actually unfair to Buchanan (words I never 
     thought I'd write) because Buchanan doesn't work to create 
     more misery for the sake of making his movement grow the way 
     Nader does. From a strictly self-interested point of view, 
     Nader's stance is the more rational one.
       So Gore supporters might as well quit warning the Green 
     candidate that he's going to put George W. Bush in the White 
     House. Ralph Nader is a very intelligent man who knows 
     exactly what he's doing. And they only seem to be encouraging 
     him.

  Mr. Speaker, this article lays out, I think, the basic premise by 
which this Congress failed to deal with the Patients' Bill of Rights, 
education, prescription medicines for senior citizens.
  In talking about the Ralph Nader campaign, it said that Mr. Nader has 
made it perfectly clear what his strategy was. It is the strategy of 
Lenin; that is, to ``heighten the contradictions.'' That is in quotes.
  Now, the whole idea of bringing down the political process to make 
things better out of the ashes is one that has been very actively 
pushed by Mr. Nader in his campaign. He said it very directly in many 
places. He said, ``We are hoping that we will destroy the Democratic 
Party, and that from that will rise a new party on the left.''
  This House and its failure to deal with these major issues today and 
in this session are a direct result of a strategy very similar 
announced by Speaker Gingrich. His idea, when he was in the minority, 
was to destroy the House; to do everything possible to discredit the 
government, to discredit the House of Representatives, to bring it into 
ill repute with everybody in the public.
  Now we come to this session. He started it 6 years ago. He tried it 
for 2 years. He lost seats in the next election. He tried it again. He 
lost seats in the next election. And the third time they tried it, they 
lost seats in the next election.
  Now, what we have got here is a situation where the Congress simply 
did not function. All that lovey-dovey kissy-face that was going on a 
few minutes ago is basically to obscure the fact that, although the 
Republican leadership said, ``We will pass the budget and all its parts 
by a timely date the first of October,'' but in fact, we stand here 
today, 1 month after the new fiscal year is in, and we have not passed 
three major bills. The Senate and House Republicans could not get their 
act together and get it down to the President.
  They say, well, the President was not going to sign it. They never 
could get an agreement among themselves to send the bill down to the 
President and veto it if he chose. They sent some down, which he 
vetoed. But if they cannot decide among themselves, maybe they should 
go down and sit down with the President and negotiate and get the 
people's business done.
  They could not do it. They could not bring themselves to. Having 
created these contradictions and all the fighting in here, they could 
not then sit down with the President and negotiate how to deal with tax 
relief for the middle class, how to deal with educational financing for 
schools. They could not deal with the Patients' Bill of Rights. They 
could not deal with prescription drugs for senior citizens.
  I do not know how any State is going to plan their budget when they 
have no budget from the United States government. They are just sort of 
sitting out there waiting.
  There are hospitals. The BBA give-backs, that is, the restoration of 
the unfortunate cuts that were made in Medicare, which have put 
hospitals all over this country in serious problems, have not been 
done.
  We are going into an election with a hospital in every one of the 435 
districts represented in this House where they do not know how much 
money they are going to have, or if they are going to have any money to 
make up for the deficits they are running now.
  This comes from this idea that somehow they can radically rip this 
government up and start over new. It is a fallacious idea that Mr. 
Nader is using, and it was a fallacious idea that Mr. Gingrich used in 
this House.
  We must come back here and work together in the future, or this 
country will suffer immensely.

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