[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 70 (Tuesday, May 24, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H3887-H3890]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
APPROVAL RATE OF CONGRESS AT LOWEST POINT IN 10 YEARS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Westmoreland). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr.
Pallone) is recognized for half the remaining time until midnight as
the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, as we prepare to return to our districts
for the Memorial Day work period, I think it is important for us to
take a look at where we are today and how exactly we got here in the
Congress. I think, for the most part, and certainly a lot of recent
polls indicate it, the American people are fed up with the Congress,
that the approval rate of Congress is at its lowest point in 10 years,
and it leads me to wonder how did we get to this place? I think we have
to take a look back at the first 5 months of the 109th Congress this
year to get some answers.
Earlier this year, the Republican leadership went ahead and changed
the way the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct does its
business. In the past, whenever ethics changes were being considered,
they were addressed in a bipartisan fashion with both Democrats and
Republicans at the table, and that is the only way ethics reform can
honestly be addressed. But the Republican leadership ignored that
protocol and strong-armed enough of their Members to pass new and
weakened ethics rules, without any support from our Democratic
colleagues.
Mr. Speaker, I think the American people understood that these new
ethics rules were basically a blatant attempt by the majority to
protect one of their Republican leaders. These new rules allowed either
party, Democrat or Republican, to protect its own Members. Under the
new Republican rules, if a majority of the committee could not
determine whether or not an investigation should proceed after 45-days
of receiving a complaint, that complaint would simply be dropped. Since
the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is made up of five
members from each party, either side could prevent an ethics
investigation from moving forward against one of its Members.
That is not the way the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is
supposed to work. Under the old bipartisan rules, which have now been
restored, an investigative committee was created after a 45-day
deadline if a majority of the committee could not determine how to
proceed.
The weakened ethics rules by House Republicans did not fool anybody,
certainly not the editorial writers around the country, both liberal
and conservative. They followed the House proceedings closely and they
were essentially fed up with the new Republican rules.
I will just give you some examples. The conservative Chicago Tribune
said, ``How do House Republicans respond to ethical lapses? By trying
to bury them.''
The Hartford Current wrote, ``The committee has been careening
towards ethical oblivion in recent years as the majority Republicans
have relaxed the standards, eased up on investigations and created trap
doors through which alleged transgressors could escape.''
Finally I cite the Sarasota Herald Tribune, which wrote, ``If the
GOP's leaders in Congress continue to change the rules to protect one
of their own, they will have ceded the ethical high ground they pledged
to take in 1994.''
Again, this is what I call the Republican abuse of power, and it is a
major reason why people have lost faith in Congress and why Congress is
at a 10-year low in terms of people's support or feelings about the
institution.
But the Republican leadership did not just stop at weakening the
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct rules. No, the leadership
also purged three Republican members of the Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct earlier this year, three members who ruled against a
Republican leader the previous year.
After losing his chairmanship on the Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct, the Republican gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Hefley)
told the Washington Post that there is ``a bad perception out there
that there was a purge in the Ethics Committee and that people were put
in that would protect our side of the aisle better than I did.''
He continues, ``Nobody should be there to protect anybody. They
should be there to protect the integrity of the institution.''
Mr. Speaker, it took congressional Republicans nearly 4 months to
finally listen to their former ethics chairman and the media. But,
fortunately, in the end they did restore the old bipartisan ethics
rules. The gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Hefley) was clearly right, the
integrity of the House is much more important than any one Member, and
I think it is time the Republican leadership learn that lesson, not
only on that Committee on Standards of Official Conduct issue but in
general.
The abuses of power by the Republican majority really make you wonder
why they are necessary now. It seems clear to me that the Republican
leadership went to all this trouble to protect
[[Page H3888]]
one of its leaders. The Wall Street Journal charged ``there is an odor,
an unsavory whiff at the highest reaches of the House of
Representatives.'' Every single day it seems the Members of this body
and the American people are subjected to another revelation of
questionable actions by one of our colleagues. It is a constant drip
that is getting close to a large puddle.
Fortunately, as I said, the American people were not fooled by this
abuse of power by the Republican majority with the ethics process. They
saw the new rules for what they were, nothing more than an attempt to
protect a powerful Republican leader, and finally, after media and
public outcry became too much for the Republican majority to endure,
Republicans agreed to reinstitute the old bipartisan ethics rules.
However, it is important to remember that had the public been
indifferent and had the Democrats on the Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct gone ahead and allowed the committee to organize under
the weakened rules, today this House would be structured under ethics
rules that would allow either side, Democrat or Republican, to shield
its Members from scrutiny.
Mr. Speaker, the Republican ethics reversal was good for this
institution and good for the American people.
Now, there are still a lot of questions remaining about what the
Republican majority is doing with the Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct. Despite the majority's change of heart on weakening
the ethics rules, there are still several areas where the Republican
leadership is continuing to delay any action by the Committee on
Standards of Official Conduct.
The new chairman of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct
has said that he wants to appoint his chief of staff from his personal
office to be the new staff director of the Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct. This action would defy House rules, which state that
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct staffers are to be
nonpartisan.
It is inconceivable that the rules would allow the chairman to
unilaterally appoint a chief counsel without immediately running afoul
of the rules. Trying to do so would be a clear violation of the rules,
as well as an affront to the committee's tradition.
The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is supposed to be a
place where Members can get straight, unbiased, trustworthy ethics
guidance. How can Members who might have disagreements with the House
leadership feel comfortable going to the committee for advice if they
fear committee staff members are incapable of performing their official
duties in a nonpartisan fashion?
My point is that the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct
should be a politics-free zone. One way to ensure politics stops at the
committee doors is to hire staff whose first loyalty is to the ethics
rules of the House and second loyalty is in equal measure to the
chairman, ranking member and remaining members of the committee. If
committee staff are perceived as being loyal to or owing their position
to only one member of the committee, their ability to render advice and
investigate sensitive ethics issues will be called into question.
I would say once again, Mr. Speaker, the American public see the
games the Republican leadership is playing with the Committee on
Standards of Official Conduct and they simply do not like it. They
would rather see this committee go back to work in a bipartisan
fashion, and now, so the Congress can address their concerns.
Now I want to go from the one issue of abuse of power here in the
House related to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to the
other outrageous abuse of power in the other body, in the Senate, and
this relates, of course, to the Senate filibuster.
Senate Republicans have spent much of the last 4 months fixating on
seven extreme judges President Bush once again sent up for confirmation
after they had already been rejected during his first term. Rather than
dealing with rising gas prices and an economy that continues to falter
and other issues that people really care about, Senate Republicans
attempted to have a power grab, unlike any other in the history of the
U.S. Senate.
Fortunately, Mr. Speaker, the Republican quest for absolute power in
Washington was temporarily halted last night by 14 Senators. And this
was a truly bipartisan group. Seven Democrats and seven Republicans
came together to save the Senate from moving forward with an extreme
power grab that would have undermined the very checks and balances that
have existed in our Nation for over 200 years.
Senator Frist and the Senate Republican leadership were prepared to
wage an unprecedented political power grab on the filibuster. They
wanted to change the Senate rules in the middle of the game and wanted
to attack our historic system of checks and balances with the
filibuster so that they could ram through a small number of judicial
nominees who otherwise could not achieve a consensus.
In reality, the power grab by the Senate Republican leadership in
trying to eliminate the filibuster did not really have much to do
probably with the current judicial nominees, but instead it was an
attempt by the White House and conservative interest groups to clear
the way for a Supreme Court nominee eventually who would only need 51
votes rather than 60.
Conservative interest groups and a large majority of Senate
Republicans are not happy with the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme
Court. They do not want to see another David Souder or Anthony Kennedy
nominated to the Supreme Court, even though they both were confirmed
with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. They would prefer to see
President Bush nominate a Supreme Court Justice like Clarence Thomas,
who, because of extreme views, could not garner strong bipartisan
support. In Justice Thomas's case, he only received 52 votes, and he
has proven to be an extremist.
If the Senate had proceeded with this power grab and gotten rid of
the filibuster, President Bush would have been able to appoint right-
wing judges to the Supreme Court.
{time} 2245
The President has already said he most admires Justices Scalia and
Thomas and I think it would be frightening to think of another Justice
with that same mold.
Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day a group of 14 bipartisan senators
kept the Senate Republican leadership from moving forward with this
extreme power grab. The bipartisan compromise that was reached last
night shows that President Bush is not going to be able to ignore the
moderate views of these senators when he appoints future justices to
the Supreme Court, and I think that is certainly good news for our
country.
I think certainly what was happening here, Mr. Speaker, was that the
White House was manufacturing a crisis with these judicial nominees.
The American people know that there was absolutely no reason for the
Senate to take the measure of eliminating the minority's right for
input on judicial nominees. The White House has essentially
manufactured this judicial crisis because if you look at the record,
over the past 4 years, the Senate has confirmed 208 of Mr. Bush's
judicial nominations and turned back only 10. That is a 95 percent
confirmation rate, higher than any other President in modern times,
including presidents Reagan, the first President Bush, and President
Clinton. In fact, it is thanks to these confirmations that President
Bush now presides over the lowest court vacancy rate in 15 years.
Despite what Senate Republicans are saying today, judicial nominees
have not always received an up-or-down vote on the Senate Floor. In
fact, back in 2000, it was Senate Republicans that attempted to
filibuster two of President Clinton's appointments to the Ninth Circuit
Court. Senator Frist, the architect, of course, of eliminating the
filibuster now, voted to continue a filibuster of a Clinton nominee,
Richard Paez.
There are also other ways the senators can prevent a nominee from
receiving an up-or-down vote on the Floor, and this has happened many
times in the past, which shows why it is not the case that there has to
be an up-or-down vote. Judicial nominees have often been stalled in the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary. More than one-third of President
Clinton's appeals court nominees never received
[[Page H3889]]
an up-or-down vote on the Floor of the Senate because Senator Hatch,
then the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, refused to bring
the nominees' names up for a vote in the committee.
And, I think it is extremely disingenuous of Senator Frist to say
that all nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote when he himself
helped Senate Republicans block President Clinton's nominees in the
late 1990s. We did not hear him talking about an up-or-down vote then
when President Clinton was nominating judges.
I just want to say, once again, Mr. Speaker, I think that the
bipartisan agreement reached last night was extremely valuable. It will
keep two of the President's nominees from moving forward who really do
not deserve to be appointed, and I would hope that the President would
learn from last night's action that, unlike the House, the Senate is
not a chamber that will be a rubber stamp for his extreme views. Let us
hope that President Bush was listening and will resist nominating
extreme right-wing judges to our courts in the future.
But all of this, not only the action in the House on the ethics
rules, but also the action in the Senate on the filibuster, I think
they are examples really of how the Republican majority has abused its
power. And the consequence of that is that the public is increasingly
disappointed and feels that the Congress does not do its job, that it
is essentially a do-nothing Congress. And as we approach the Memorial
Day recess, I think I need to stress that, that I believe the reason
why the polling and the media shows that people no longer have faith in
Congress or that the support of Congress as an institution has dropped
significantly is because of the Republican leadership's fixation on
these issues that consolidate their power, that seek to consolidate
their power without focusing on the real issues that affect the
American people.
A USA Today CNN poll that was released today, Mr. Speaker, showed
that the American people are fed up with Republican control of Congress
and are ready for a democratic Congress. And who can blame them? If
they had been watching the abuses of power that had been taking place
in both the House and the Senate in the last four months, they would
have to be disgusted. Beyond that disgust, I think it is clear that
they just want Congress to address the issues of importance in their
lives, and we are going to be going into a Memorial Day recess without
most of those issues being addressed. It really has been, for the last
five months, a do-nothing Congress.
For five months now, congressional Republicans have done nothing to
reverse their abysmal economic record. The fact is that middle class
families are being squeezed at the gas pump, at the pharmacy with high
drug prices, and in the grocery store. There are growing signs of a
faltering economy, with President Bush still having the worst jobs
record in history.
Instead of addressing the serious kitchen table issues of American
families, education, health care, you name it, Republicans are focusing
on legislation that is written for the special interests and will
actually harm middle class families.
Instead of increasing the minimum wage and expanding prosperity,
Republicans are focused on undercutting bipartisan ethics rules.
Instead of creating good jobs with good paychecks by completing the
much-delayed highway bill, for example, Republicans choose to focus
instead on undercutting the checks and balances on judicial nominations
by focusing on the filibuster.
Instead of enacting an energy bill that improves our communities and
brings down gas prices and tries to create more energy independence,
the Republicans have channeled their energy into replacing Social
Security with a risky privatization scheme that clearly most Americans
do not support, and the President probably is going to have to
eventually abandon.
And, instead of passing a budget that reflects the values of
America's families, Republicans brought the entire Federal Government
to intervene in the personal tragedy of just one family, and I am, of
course, talking about the Terry Schiavo case. I think it is no wonder
that the American people are not pleased with Congress, and I think it
is time congressional Republicans take a hard look at these polls. I do
not say, Mr. Speaker, that we should always be looking at polls, but in
this case, the polls reflect what people are thinking.
I go back, and I will, of course, go back to my district during the
Memorial Day recess, and I know I am going to hear from people who are
saying, why are you not talking about health care, why are you not
talking about education? What are you doing about the trade deficit?
What are you doing about the budget deficit? What is the reason why a
crisis for everything from housing to groceries to gas continue to go
up, and we in Congress do not address the issues.
I am simply saying that the Republican leadership should listen to
their constituents. The polls reflect, I think, what our constituents
are telling us. I think the American people really want these abuses of
power to stop. They do not want to hear us talking about the filibuster
and about the ethics process; not that those are not important, they
are, in terms of the procedures and how we proceed. But, in each of
these cases, the Republicans wanted to change the procedure here so
that they could get their own way, and instead of concentrating on
those procedural issues and trying to change the rules, they should get
down and look at issues like the rising cost of college, the rising
cost of health care, the rising price of gas at a time when most
people's wages are shrinking.
It is simply time, I think, for us to get down to the people's
business. I hope that when we come back after the Memorial Day recess,
that we can see the end of these Republican abuses of power, we can see
the end of their trying to change the rules and, rather, focusing in a
bipartisan way on trying to address some of the Americans concerns of
the American people.
Steps Toward Peace in Israel
I just wanted to switch to a different issue, if I could, Mr.
Speaker, for a few minutes, because I know that this Thursday is an
historic day when the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is
going to be visiting Washington to talk to President Bush. I wanted to
discuss briefly the recent developments in the Middle East peace
process and how that relates to this historic visit to Washington by
the Palestinian leader.
This is the first time a Palestinian leader has visited the United
States since peace talks in 2000 collapsed into bloodshed. This is a
critical opportunity for Abbas to prove to Israel and the world that
their commitment to peace goes beyond rhetoric and that the Palestinian
leadership is taking concrete steps towards peace.
Just as this is an important opportunity for Abbas to show that he is
committed to peace, Abbas's visit to Washington is an equally important
opportunity for the United States to further encourage reforms in the
Palestinian Authority. As one of my constituents said to me this
afternoon, and this is one of the reasons that I am here this evening,
the United States must be willing to hold Abbas's feet to the fire.
That being said, in order for negotiations to move forward, Abbas
must rise to the occasion. He must take steps to dismantle Hamas and
the Palestinian terrorist network. Security is of the utmost concern
for Israel and Hamas is a direct threat to the safety of the Israeli
people.
Mr. Speaker, Israel has taken remarkable risks over the last few
months to advance the peace process.
By the end of this summer, Israel has agreed to withdrawal its
military and civilian presence from the Gaza Strip and four settlements
in the West Bank, and this decision was made at great political,
financial, and emotional risk for the Israeli people.
In his speech today in Washington at the annual meeting of the
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon said that he is willing to work with Abbas to
ensure a secure transition in Gaza. Cooperation on this level is an
unprecedented step. It is critical that the Palestinians work to ensure
a safe transition, that any looting or violence is prevented. Israel
has taken the dramatic step of withdrawal; Abbas must then ensure that
Gaza does not become a haven for terrorists.
[[Page H3890]]
This morning, Sharon also announced that as a sign of good faith, he
plans to release 400 Palestinian prisoners. This is in addition to the
500 prisoners freed in February as part of an agreement between the two
sides.
I would urge President Bush to be firm in his meeting with Abbas on
Thursday that any support of terrorism will not be tolerated, that
these next couple months will be critical if the peace process is to
continue, the disengagement, and the upcoming Palestinian elections
must go smoothly.
Mr. Speaker, I would like all of my colleagues to be cautiously
optimistic about the situation in Israel. These initial steps are
heartening, but the words must be met with action.
I had the opportunity almost two years ago to go to Israel at the
time when there was a cease-fire and there was relative peace. At that
time Mahmoud Abbas was the Prime Minister, and I realized very quickly
that he was not in a position of authority and that it was not likely
that the peace process was going to continue or that the cease-fire was
going to continue. Very quickly, after myself and the rest of the
congressional delegation left, the violence began again, Abbas ceased
to be the Prime Minister, and we went through essentially another year,
over a year of violence, if not longer than a year.
I hope that this time is different. I hope that because of the
overtures and the steps that Ariel Sharon has taken, that we can see
now a situation where Abbas is ready to negotiate and to end the
violence. But I do think it is incumbent upon President Bush to make
that point, that we are not going to see peace, we are not going to see
any new negotiations, we are not going to see any roadmap unless Abbas
and the Palestinian Authority immediately take steps to ensure that
there is peace and that violence does not continue.
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