[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 23345-23346]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             A STARK CONTRAST BETWEEN RHETORIC AND REALITY

  (Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, the House has turned the 
Edmond Morris Ronald Reagan biography controversy on its head. Mr. 
Morris has been criticized for claiming to be present when he was not.

  The pattern here in the House is the opposite. Members are 
essentially claiming not to have been present

[[Page 23346]]

when they were. Indeed, they are trying to disclaim responsibility for 
things they themselves did.

  Most frequently that has happened with the 1997 Budget Act, which cut 
Medicare and imposed unrealistic caps, and which a lot of Members are 
now acting as if they stumbled across this somewhere in a room and have 
no idea how it got here.

  But now we have a new version of this, the Republican pledge that we 
will not spend any of the Social Security surplus, which they 
vigorously express while they are simultaneously bringing out 
appropriations bills which spend the Social Security surplus. That 
reached a new height the other day when we passed a resolution which 
was a memorandum from the House to the House pledging not to do what we 
were in fact in the process of doing.

  Claiming that we will never spend the Social Security surplus this 
year, while we are, according to the Congressional Budget Office in 
fact doing exactly that, is about the starkest contrast between 
rhetoric and reality in recent times.

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