[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 5 (Tuesday, January 29, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H84-H85]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     OPEN SOCIETY WITH SECURITY ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 23, 2002, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, the House and the Senate are poised this 
evening to receive the State of the Union Message. Unavoidably and 
justifiably it will be about war. I certainly hope it will also be 
about the continuing faltering economy. But there is an issue that 
probably will not be on the Presidential and congressional agenda and 
needs to be. It is in our face. It is very visible, but it is beneath 
the radar.
  I will soon be introducing a bill called the Open Society With 
Security Act that would establish a 21-member commission. I will be 
inviting members in a Dear Colleague soon to co-sponsor the bill. The 
commission would simply look at how we can make the unprecedented 
accommodation between security against dangerous global terrorism on 
the one hand and the maintenance of an open and free society on the 
other. This is a truly difficult problem.
  We are doing it on an ad hoc basis because we have had to. It is too 
serious to be left to ad hoc nonplanning, however, and we clearly do 
not know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it because nobody has 
ever had to do it. The Presidential commission would provide a vehicle 
to put the best minds in this society to work on a problem that free 
societies have never had to confront before. We see some of the 
evidence before us every time we go outside this building, barricades 
and shut-downs; and, of course, there are on-again off-again alerts. 
There are all kinds of invasion of privacy that also are occurring.
  We need to systematically think through these difficult and troubling 
problems. They were first visible here. But now they are in every part 
of the country because the country has been attacked and the country 
has responded. The country deserves some guidance from a Presidential 
commission. The commission, of course, would have security experts and 
law enforcement experts and military experts. But this is about 
security and democracy and freedom. So we would also have on the 
commission architects and city planners and historians and sociologists 
and engineers and artists, etc. Put them all at the table. Let them 
thrash it out and advise us. Security is too important in an open, free 
society to be left to security people.

                              {time}  1245

  In the aftermath of September 11 and the anthrax scares, we can 
surely see that we are in danger of waking up one morning and finding 
that the society has closed in around us, and that we never even 
noticed until they closed us down.

[[Page H85]]

  Some of this is difficult, some of it just takes common sense, and we 
have already seen that when we raised our voices some of those common 
sense measures have been taken.
  I am grateful that the White House announced just last week that it 
was opening White House tours to children if they left their Social 
Security number. Soon I hope families who leave their Social Security 
numbers will follow. We have seen the reopening of tours here in the 
Capitol, simply by having people go in the trailer to be screened 
first. We saw the White House lighting of the Christmas tree open 
simply because they moved the glass that they put around the President 
at the inauguration to the Christmas tree site. It is not rocket 
science, but it does mean somebody does have to sit down and not have a 
knee-jerk reaction to security without considering all the options.
  In 1968, when our country faced an unprecedented racial crisis, the 
President had the good sense to say we do not already know it all, and 
so he called together the Kerner Commission. I believe that the problem 
posed to our free and open institutions is just as serious in 2002 as 
the racial crisis was in 1968. A presidential commission would bring to 
bear the Nation's best thinking on this unique issue and give it the 
thorough and rigorous investigation it deserves, with the result of 
advice we could take or not take. But at least we would have the 
satisfaction of knowing that there are people in our society who have 
thought about the most difficult problems in our society and given us 
some food for thought.

                          ____________________