[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 18]
[House]
[Pages 25395-25396]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



   FORTY YEARS OF LIBERALISM LEAVES DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA IN SHAMBLES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MICA. Madam Speaker, the House today and this week and for the 
next number of days will be engaged in a very important debate. That 
debate is really a totally partisan debate. It is a debate about those 
who want liberal, big government programs and liberal programs for our 
government, and then on the other side, there are folks that think that 
we have too much power, too much spending, too many programs in 
Washington and that the policy of some 40 years did not, in many 
instances, work.
  This afternoon we had a debate about a policy relating to the 
District of Columbia. The President has vetoed the District of Columbia 
appropriations measure. Within that measure and that bill are 
provisions which would allow liberalization of drug policy for the 
District of Columbia. That is one of the things that is holding that 
measure up. Again, a contrast between a liberal policy, wanting to 
spend more money, and

[[Page 25396]]

also a liberal drug policy for the District of Columbia versus a 
conservative approach.
  Now, let me tell my colleagues, the other side of the aisle and the 
liberals tried for 40 years to deal with the District of Columbia, and 
under the Constitution of the United States, the Congress is charged 
with that responsibility, and we take that very seriously. Now, when I 
came to Congress, as I said earlier this afternoon, in 1993, the 
District of Columbia, after 40 years of liberal Democrat rule, was in 
shambles. The Nation's Capital was a disgrace. The murder rate exceeded 
anywhere in the Nation. The schools had the highest per capita and per 
student expenditures and costs and some of the lowest performances. The 
hospitals were a joke.
  In fact, there was an article in the Washington Post that I have 
cited a number of times that said you could dial 911 for an emergency 
for EMS and The Washington Post said you could dial for a pizza and get 
the pizza served quicker than you could get the EMS in the District. 
This is what they brought to the Nation's Capital, what should have 
been the gem of the Nation turned into despair. They had 60,000 
employees, almost one in 10 people in the District of Columbia were 
employed in this massive Federal bureaucracy created under again, 
liberal Democrat rule. The prisons, as I said, were in such bad shape 
that the new Republican majority has had to take over control of the 
prisons and basically disbanned Lorton. And again, deaths, and most of 
those deaths, drug-related in the District, were in the neighborhood of 
500. They were killing them in scores.
  Now, just in a few years, in less than five years, this new 
Republican majority has brought some of these programs under control. 
We have brought some meaningful reform. They had a job training program 
here I reported on in the District that spent millions and millions of 
dollars and not one person trained. We have gotten that program under 
control. The District was running a surplus, I believe it was two-
thirds of a billion dollars; if we check the exact statistics, we will 
find it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This 
Republican Congress, in less than five years, has brought that budget 
under control. We had to institute a control board and policies to do 
that.
  Now, we are engaged in the same debate about Social Security. Here 
are the folks that spent, for 40 years, Social Security, all the money 
in the trust fund, every penny in the trust fund, and on top of that 
added hundreds of billions of dollars of debt per year. They spent all 
of the money that should be in the trust fund. All that is in there now 
are certificates of indebtedness of the United States. And now they are 
telling us they want to fix it. They have the same liberal policies, 
liberal drug exchange policies.
  I have cited before that Baltimore in 1996 had 39,000 drug addicts, a 
dramatic increase since they started that program. That is what they 
want here. And the latest statistics are it is close to 60,000, or one 
in eight of the population in Baltimore under this liberal policy of 
needle exchanges is now a drug addict in Baltimore. A disgrace. But 
they want to take their model and impose it on the District of 
Columbia.
  I do not care if there are 1,000 vetoes by the President. This is our 
charge and this is our responsibility, and we should not let what 
happened in a liberal venue happen in our Nation's Capital.

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