[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1532-1538]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     TOPICS AFFECTING AMERICA TODAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, it is my intention to speak for the full 
60 minutes if my colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone)

[[Page 1533]]

does not arrive, but if he does, I would hope that could be brought to 
my attention so I could yield the second half of the hour to him.
  Madam Speaker, this is my first speech of the 106th Congress. I would 
like to welcome back my old colleagues and welcome our new colleagues. 
My new colleagues, I have not had a chance to introduce myself to all 
of them. Let me take this opportunity to do so. I am Brad Sherman. I 
hail from America's best-named city, Sherman Oaks, California.
  Periodically I seek an opportunity to give a rather long speech 
detailing a number of different topics. This saves the House from 
having to listen to a number of short speeches, each on a separate 
topic. Madam Speaker, I often give these speeches at the beginning or 
the end of a session. I have a number of topics I would like to address 
today. The first of these is the current unpleasantness occurring in 
the Senate, the problems involving Monica Lewinsky, the President, et 
cetera.
  First, I would like to point out that it is unprecedented in our 
lifetimes that an impeachment would be sent by this House over to the 
other body on a 99 percent partisan vote, with 99 percent of the one 
party voting against the impeachment resolution. I think it is a shame, 
a shame on this House, that we would send an impeachment resolution to 
the Senate under those circumstances.
  I came to the floor last month, actually in December, to voice my 
opinion that in not allowing Members to vote on censure and then 
sending over articles of impeachment on a partisan basis, that this 
House had gone astray. I said at that time that I would call this House 
a kangaroo court, but that would be an insult to marsupials everywhere.
  That shame has hung in this Chamber until yesterday, because I think 
we owe a debt of gratitude to prosecutor Ken Starr for doing something 
so outrageous that it has distracted America from the mistake we made 
here in December.
  Ken Starr knows, we all know, that the President is not going to be 
removed from office. Yet a leak emerges from Ken Starr's office that he 
thinks that he will criminally indict and perhaps prosecute a sitting 
president. This is not only a constitutional outrage, it represents 
perhaps the worst prosecutorial judgment ever displayed.
  Ken Starr has, in the words of George Stephanopolous, pursued the 
President with the hateful tenacity of Captain Ahab, and it is time for 
this misjudgment to stop. It is bizarre that Ken Starr, seeing that the 
President will not be removed from office, has begun to fantasize that 
he will barge into the Oval Office and place handcuffs on the President 
of the United States, perhaps during some meeting with a foreign head 
of State. We must take actions to show that this pipsqueak cannot barge 
into the oval office, and cannot seek to undermine the executive branch 
of government.
  I recognize, and we all recognize, that President Clinton remains 
subject to the rule of law. While he is president he can be impeached, 
and has been by this House, and could be removed by the Senate. As soon 
as he leaves the White House he is subject to all manner of criminal 
action, and of course, is subject to civil action as well.
  We need to look long-term at what this means for the presidency. I 
ask those on the Republican side of the aisle to remember that some day 
it may be one of theirs who is sitting as president. Imagine some 
future president, and imagine his enemies, or should I say, her 
enemies, begin immediately upon inauguration day to conspire, and they 
gather a few million dollars to carry it out.
  I used the word ``conspire.'' ``Conspiracy'' is not the right word, 
they simply gather together to begin a plan to undermine some new 
president. They gather a few million dollars together, and the first 
thing they do is announce that they will pay a $1 million book advance 
to any Secret Service agent willing to write a book titled 
``Embarrassing Things I Learned While Guarding the President.''
  Imagine that they place an ad in the Star tabloid, or should I call 
it the Ken Starr tabloid. The ad goes something like this: ``Have you 
been abducted by a UFO? Was the President working with the aliens? If 
so, contact us. We will give you $1 million, and we will help you sue 
the President for everything that went on on the spaceship. And by the 
way, if that UFO abduction happened, if the spacecraft happened to land 
in any one of these three or four counties where we have, in some 
obscure county somewhere in America, a friendly prosecutor, then we 
will also be able to urge that obscure prosecutor to bring criminal 
action against the President.''
  I am not sure that a lawsuit or criminal prosecution for 
participation in an UFO abduction against a president of the United 
States would last all that long. It might be thrown out of court. But I 
give this as an illustration of the road we are going down.
  That road is that the enemies of every president, those who are most 
blinded by their hatred of that president, will begin to try to destroy 
a president by finding out secrets and embarrassing tidbits from the 
Secret Service, by convincing people to begin civil suits that will 
distract the President and embarrass him or her, and by trying to 
convince local prosecutors around the country, even in the most obscure 
counties, to bring criminal actions against the President.
  For these reasons I think it is important that this House adopt, and 
I look forward to beginning to draft, a Presidential Protection Act. 
The basic tenets of this act would be three in number. The first is 
that those who work for the Secret Service would be required to keep 
what they learn confidential. Even if they want to write a book, they 
should not be allowed to do so, based on secrets they learned on the 
job.
  Second, of course, they should enjoy a privilege from being compelled 
to testify about those secrets. There might be a few exceptions, but 
imagine a situation where a Secret Service agent could testify about 
how long this meeting took place, or how many times the President 
contacted this or that adviser. Imagine the chilling effect it would 
have if a president felt he could not reach out or she could not reach 
out to advisers around the country because the names of those advisers 
or even the nature of what they discuss could be a matter of public 
discovery.
  Second, a Presidential Protection Act, or rather, a Presidency 
Protection Act, should provide that as to all criminal actions, or 
attempts at criminal prosecution, that we toll the statute of 
limitations. So if there is a 5-year statute of limitations on a 
particular crime, that any day that occurs while an individual is 
serving in the White House as president would not count toward that 5-
year period.
  Then we provide that there will be no criminal indictments or trials 
of anyone while they are president of the United States. We could 
provide that under certain circumstances testimony could be taken, in 
case some witness might die or become unavailable in the years that 
someone served in the White House. But clearly, no president of the 
United States should have to worry for a minute about the criminal law 
system being visited upon him or her by a politically-motivated 
prosecutor.
  Finally, we need to have a very similar proceedings dealing with 
civil suits, that the statute of limitations is tolled; that is to say, 
in nonlegal jargon, the suit is put in the freezer, and it can be tried 
after a presidency is completed.
  I know that the Supreme Court ruled, in the Jones vs. Clinton case, 
that you could sue a sitting president. The Supreme Court noted that 
the Congress could change that result. The Supreme Court argued that a 
civil suit against the President would not be an undue distraction. 
Clearly, later events have proven otherwise.
  I am, frankly, surprised, given the number and the power of certain 
individuals who hate this president, that there have not been a dozen 
or a hundred other civil lawsuits, trumped-up, real, or imagined, for 
this or that reason brought against the President. I make these 
comments not to invite such highly destructive behavior, but rather, to 
illustrate why the House and

[[Page 1534]]

the Senate must act to make it clear that any civil lawsuit against the 
President is put in the freezer, that the statute is tolled until the 
presidency is over.
  As I pointed out, such a statute would be just as protective of a 
Republican president as a Democratic president, and given the 
heightened level of partisanship that has occurred as a result of those 
who are scheming to try to destroy President Clinton, given the fact 
that that higher level of partisanship, unfortunately, is beginning to 
afflict both parties, I think it is critical that we act now to make 
sure that small groups of well-financed individuals cannot destroy a 
presidency.
  I will be circulating a letter to my colleagues urging that they sign 
onto a bill, but even before that, urging that they give me their 
comments or meet with me in the drafting of a bill so that I can have 
bipartisan input into how it is drafted.
  I am considering and would like my colleagues to comment on whether, 
on an emergency basis, we need to adopt a bill just dealing with 
criminal prosecutions, and making it very clear to Ken Starr that he is 
not empowered, and no prosecutor is empowered, to go barging into the 
Oval Office with a pair of handcuffs. The very possibility, the very 
argument that that could legally occur, undermines our system of 
government and makes us a laughingstock around the world.
  I would now like to shift to international relations. As many of my 
colleagues know, I served on the Committee on International Relations. 
I do want to comment about our friendship with Greece and the Republic 
of Cyprus. We all know that the very essence of democracy and so many 
of the values that are at the core of Americanism developed in Greece.

                              {time}  1700

  Greece and Cyprus want nothing more at this point than to defend 
themselves from the possibility of air attack and have sought air 
defense missiles. I regret very much that the administration pressured 
the government of Cyprus not to deploy air defense missiles that had 
been acquired.
  I agree with the administration. Cyprus should not have acquired 
missiles from Russia. Cyprus should have acquired missiles built in the 
24th Congressional District in California. When the United States is 
willing to sell Greece and Cyprus the air defense mechanisms that it 
needs, there will be no need for Greece and Cyprus to try to buy these 
from other places and potentially have Russian technicians on Greek or 
Cyprian soil.
  These are defensive weapons. They add to the stability of the Aegean. 
We ought to change our policy and make it very clear to Cyprus and 
Greece that we are willing to sell defensive weapons to those two 
countries on the one proviso that the manufacturers be located in the 
24th Congressional District.
  I had the honor to accompany the President of the United States on 
his trip to the Middle East in December. I want to applaud the 
President for making that visit. I also want to point out that the 
President was warmly welcomed by all the various legislators and 
officials of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian National 
Council.
  But after the President left, Yasser Arafat made statements in 
support of Iraq and calling for an Arab meeting to condemn American 
policy with regard to Iraq. Just a few days after the President 
departed and we all departed, he was once again talking about a 
unilateral declaration of statehood. There is nothing worse for the 
peace process than a unilateral declaration of statehood by the 
Palestinian Authority.
  Here, this year in Congress, we need to make it clear that 
immediately, without further action, upon any declaration of statehood 
made on a unilateral basis by the Palestinian Authority, all American 
aid to that Authority stops. And all American representatives at all 
international organizations, especially the World Bank and similar 
organizations must vote against any aid to the Palestinian Authority 
after such a destabilizing effort.
  I want to applaud the administration for remaining involved and 
dedicated to peace in the Middle East but point out that pressuring 
Israel is not the way to achieve that peace. Israel has been pro 
America whether we had a Republican administration or a Democratic 
administration, a Republican House or a Democratic House. We should 
remain dedicated allies of Israel whether the government in Jerusalem 
is Likud or Labour, the new party being organized and headed by Isaac 
Mordecai and others.
  In looking at the situation in the Middle East, we need to focus on 
both the short-term and long-term needs for security. All too much of 
the focus has quite naturally been on the short-term needs as if land 
for peace meant a peace consisting of nothing more than a month without 
a terrorist incident or a year without a bomb. Any such shallow 
definition of peace will not generate the kind of treaty that is 
eventually necessary for a final agreement with the Palestinians.
  Can we ask the Israelis to make the kinds of concessions, even in 
part, that the Palestinians are asking for if peace means only peace 
with the Palestinians? Instead, as part of any peace agreement, Yasser 
Arafat personally and the entire Palestinian Authority must be willing 
to become apostles for peace, must be willing to go to every Arab 
capital, every Islamic capital, and urge the recognition of Israel, 
trade relations with Israel, and most important of all, a general 
recognition that Israel is a permanent, inherent part of the Middle 
East.
  There are those in the Arab world who describe Israel as just the 
second of the crusader states, non-Islamic states created in the holy 
land that lasted less than two centuries. That cannot continue. We 
cannot have Arab children educated for war or taught that Israel is 
eventually to be driven in the ocean.
  For that reason, we need to change Arab education just as much as we 
need to make any changes in any of the borders between zone A, zone B 
and zone C of the West Bank; A, B, and C being different levels of 
Palestinian Authority and Israeli military control.
  Land for peace must involve sowing the seeds of peace, knowing that 
it will take a generation or two or three for them to bear fruit, but 
sowing the seeds of peace in an organized and systemic manner 
throughout the Middle East.
  This is critical to Israel's long-term security. Because any student 
of history will tell us, and any student of current military affairs 
will tell us that, if Israel ever faces the possibility of losing 
another war or some war in the future, it will not be to an Army based 
in Ramallah. If Israel must fear for its security in the sense of 
potentially losing a war, it must fear armies based in Baghdad, 
Teheran, Cairo or Damascus.
  Not only is this a reflection of current military realities or 
potential future military realities. And when I say current military 
realities, clearly Israel will not lose a war in the next decade or 
two. No combination of its enemies or potential enemies could beat it.
  But we must look, not one or two decades, but one or two centuries in 
the future and recognize that, at various times in the past, Egypt, 
Syria, Babylon now Iraq, and Persia now Iran, have all conquered the 
Holy Land. We must create a situation where it is as unthinkable in 
Cairo to erase Israel from the map as it would be unthinkable in Paris 
to think of erasing the Netherlands or Belgium from the map.
  I should also focus on the importance in the peace process to 
improving the Palestinian economy. A recent report by the Israeli 
government shows Israel's dedication on this subject. But the fact 
remains that there are close to 200,000 guest workers in Israel, 
workers occupying jobs that could be held by Palestinians without 
displacing a single Israeli.
  These guest workers hail from such countries as the Philippines and 
Thailand. Of course we in this body are interested in the future 
success of the Thai economy and the Philippine economy. Yet, when it 
comes to policy in

[[Page 1535]]

the Middle East, Israel's contribution to the economic recovery of 
Thailand is not as important for the Middle East as is economic 
development of the Palestinian Authority and of Palestinians in 
general.
  I had a chance to talk to Palestinian legislators. I feared that, as 
a matter of being politically correct or proud, that they would reject 
or pooh-pooh or minimize the concept of Palestinians working almost 
exclusively in nonprestigious jobs in the Israeli economy.
  What I found among Palestinian leaders to the very highest levels was 
practicality and an understanding of how important it is that 
especially young Palestinian men have a future for themselves and their 
families and not bitterness and the time on their hands to plot to join 
Hamas and other terrorist groups.
  With that in mind, I would suggest that, as part of an overall peace 
process and only in return for Palestinian concessions, that Israel 
endeavor to provide to the Palestinians rather than to guest workers 
those jobs within its economy for which Israelis will not be hired.
  This could be done through a flat prohibition on guest workers other 
than those arriving from the Palestinian Authority or some sort of tax 
on employers who employ guest workers from outside the Palestinian 
areas.
  But whatever steps are taken, the need for Palestinian jobs is as 
important as it may seem as just a practical aspect, not on the same 
level as issues of war and peace. Yet it is, I believe, critical toward 
forming the kind of peaceful relationship that will last into the 
future.
  A second part of this came up when I visited the industrial estate at 
Gaza. This is the proudest economic achievement of the Palestinian 
Authority and is a site where American aid has been successful in 
creating a desalinization plant to provide industrial quality water and 
some drinking quality water for industry at a site which, if everything 
works out well, should employ 20,000 Palestinians.
  There is, however, one thing that keeps this site from being as 
effective as it could be, attracting the kind of investment that it 
would want, and of course I hope this site goes further, but there 
should be a second avenue toward Palestinian employment in the 
industrial sectors; and that would be an industrial site on the Israeli 
side of the border designed to provide investors with Israeli levels of 
security, Israeli government, Israeli levels of assurance that there 
will never be an expropriation, Israeli levels of assurance that the 
currency will always be convertible, all of the reasons that investors 
prefer to invest in developed countries and at the same time be 
accessible by Palestinian workers who would come to work there without 
necessarily having access to the rest of Israel.
  Imagine the opportunity to invest in an area where you have a 
developed country's government, and of course corruption exists in all 
governments, but much less in developed countries than in most 
developing countries, Israeli level security, Israeli level absence of 
corruption and the risk of corruption or the belief that there might be 
corruption.
  Even if the Palestinian Authority is able to create a corruption-free 
government, it will always suffer from the general belief of investors 
that a Third World country is more difficult to do business in than a 
developed country.
  Imagine all of the benefits of investing in a developed country and 
at the same time having access to the American markets through the 
U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement and at the same time having access to 
Israeli technology and engineers and business acumen and at the same 
time having access to low cost industrial labor provided by the 
Palestinians.
  I should point out that we will see future developments; that the 
Palestinians may be eager to have industrial jobs today with Israel 
providing some of the more technological expertise. I am confident that 
if we are able to achieve peace in the Middle East, the Palestinians 
will develop their own industrial and engineering expertise. It is 
written nowhere in any sacred text that the Palestinians will always 
live in a Third World country or Third World economy.

                              {time}  1715

  We now want to shift our attention to our relationships with China. 
In focusing on China, we see three abominations. The first is Chinese 
policy toward proliferation. Wherever we see the risk of proliferation, 
whether it be in Iran or Pakistan or North Korea, there is evidence 
that China has provided either nuclear weapons or the technology to 
build them, or missiles or the technology to build missiles.
  Certainly, China cannot enjoy the friendly relations with the United 
States which it seeks if it is going to be the source of such dangerous 
proliferation.
  The second abomination is China's work on human rights, where human 
rights activists were arrested so very recently in another step 
backward for China.
  Finally, but I think most importantly, is China's adverse impact on 
human rights in the United States through its decision to avoid 
importing from America. China sends us $66 billion of exports. One 
cannot go into any store and not find goods made in China. Yet, China 
accepts only $11 billion of American exports. $66 billion to $11 
billion is arguably the most lopsided trading relationship in the 
history of mankind and womankind; 66-to-11.
  Sometimes that means U.S. workers lose their jobs because Chinese 
imports come in and take those jobs away. Sometimes, though, the goods 
being imported from China could not be profitably manufactured here in 
the United States, but I would argue that if we bought our tennis shoes 
from India, if we bought our garments from Bangladesh, that if 100 toy 
companies could be formed in the Caribbean, that these Caribbean 
countries, that Bangladesh, that India, would be recycling those 
dollars into the United States; that they would be buying billions of 
dollars of our goods if we would be buying additional billions of 
dollars of their goods; not even necessarily on a barter or quid pro 
quo basis, but any economic development in a free country means that 
the citizens and businesses are free to buy American.
  The trade deficit we have with China is not the product of free 
economic decisions. It is not necessarily the product of any law that 
the Chinese Government has published. It is a result of oral 
instructions, unprovable, to major Chinese enterprises to buy American 
last.
  Those who would say the solution is to admit China into the World 
Trade Organization must ask themselves: What Chinese enterprise would 
buy American goods if a local communist party commissar said orally in 
a telephone conversation, we know we have changed the law, we know that 
it is legal to buy these American goods without tariffs, we had to 
change the law, but Mr. Chinese businessman, the commissar could easily 
say, if you decide to buy American goods you will be sent to the 
reeducation camp.
  What could we do? Bring a charge before the WTO? This would be a 
situation, and it happens now and would happen in the future until the 
Chinese government agrees that a country that they sell $66 billion of 
goods to must be a country they are willing to buy $66 billion of goods 
from.
  The problem we have in this House is what lever do we use to try to 
force a strong bargaining position? I would point out that we are in an 
amazingly strong bargaining position. If we could just go without 
tennis shoes for a month, if we could just satisfy our need for toys 
elsewhere for a month, the Chinese economy would be brought to its 
knees and we would have the kind of negotiations that we need.
  Instead, we cannot even threaten China with the possibility that we 
would play fairly and expose them to anything like the trade barriers 
that our products are subject to.
  The administration, unfortunately, will not bargain hard, and the 
only device available to us here is to deny Most Favored Nation status 
to China and that is too Draconian a penalty. What we need to do is 
make it clear that if we deny Most Favored Nation status to China, that 
at least the first year or two or three of that denial that

[[Page 1536]]

we will not adopt all and to the full extent the taxes and tariffs on 
Chinese goods that such an action would call for. Clearly we do not 
need to treat Chinese goods the way we treat goods from Cuba or North 
Korea or Libya or other countries that do not enjoy Most Favored Nation 
status. We will never have the votes on this floor to impose that level 
of tariff on Chinese goods.
  So what we must do, and I had an opportunity to talk to our 
colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) about this, and it 
will be an unusual combination if I and the gentleman from New Jersey 
(Mr. Smith) ever do anything together, is provide by statute, and even 
if it is vetoed its meaning would be clear, that if and when we deny 
Most Favored Nation status to China that we would expose its goods to 
only 20 percent of the tariffs otherwise applicable by that decision.
  So, for example, if China can import into the United States a pair of 
tennis shoes with only a one dollar tariff, given the fact that China 
enjoys MFN status and in the absence of MFN status the tax would be 
$11, which would cripple China's ability to send those tennis shoes to 
the United States, that we would provide that in the first year of MFN 
denial, the tariff would be only the tariff applicable to MFN countries 
plus ten percent of the additional tariff imposed on nonMFN countries.
  In this example, we would add one dollar of tariff to the dollar we 
place now on Chinese tennis shoes and then a year later we would add 
another dollar, and after that perhaps another dollar so that the 
immediate effect on U.S. Chinese trade is substantial but not so 
enormous that members of this Congress are unwilling to vote for it.
  I look forward to working with as many of my colleagues as are 
interested to craft some mechanism to deprive China of some of the 
benefits that it enjoys under MFN.
  The gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) had an interesting bill to 
at least deny MFN to those products made in enterprises owned by the 
People's Liberation Army and while that is, I think, a good thing for 
us to do I would point out that we cannot count on China to properly 
identify for us which enterprises are so owned and which enterprise 
manufactured which goods.
  I would now turn our attention to the budget and comment on the 
current debate as to who deserves credit for our booming economy today. 
Is it the Federal Reserve Board and its chairman Alan Greenspan, or the 
political system, chiefly President Clinton?
  I would argue that it is the latter. Mr. Greenspan has done an 
outstanding job and shown tremendous capacity, but what he has done is 
pretty much the same as his predecessors would have done, the same as 
most, I would say all, mainstream economists would have called upon him 
to do.
  There is no particular genius in knowing that interest rates can be 
low and inflation rates will be kept low if we run a declining Federal 
deficit or, better yet, a surplus at the Federal level. For many years, 
those of us concerned with the U.S. economy, for many years mainstream 
economists have said, that it would not take a genius to give us low 
interest rates and low inflation rates if we had fiscally responsible 
management of the Federal Government, and then they would go on to say 
but, of course, that is politically impossible.
  Under President Clinton's leadership, we have done the impossible. We 
have shown that democracy can be fiscally responsible. Keep in mind the 
new Euro that was adopted in Europe, in order to join this new 
currency, the rule was that European countries, and they all had a very 
hard time meeting this standard, would have to have a national deficit 
of only 3 percent of their gross national product. Not a single 
European country even thought of running a surplus in its national 
government.
  For any democracy to not cut taxes, all the way to running a huge 
deficit, to not increase spending at least until the outer limits of a 
possible deficit are reached, for any democracy to say no to those who 
want to spend money and no or not very much to those who want to cut 
taxes, requires a level of political genius seen in only one place in 
the world in recent decades, and that is here in Washington.
  Now I would point out that at the beginning of 1998, our Republican 
colleagues suggested an $800 billion, let me stress this, an $800 
billion tax cut over, I believe, a 5-year period; a tax cut of almost a 
trillion dollars. Had we adopted that provision we might have been 
popular for a day or a week or a month, but in fact we would have 
crippled this outstanding economic recovery.
  Now, I am for tax cuts. When we were able to say no to a trillion 
dollars worth of tax cuts and instead what was before this House was 
$80 billion, less than one-tenth of what had been proposed before, I 
voted for it, and I hope that we have some genuine tax cuts that we can 
actually afford. Keep in mind, a decision to vote for $80 billion in 
tax cuts instead of $800 billion in tax cuts is $720 billion of saying 
no to our own constituents, and that is something we need to have the 
courage to do.
  I hope in a minute to talk about the nature of the kind of tax cut 
that we would adopt, but I want to point out that there has been 
agreement that we should save 62 percent of the upcoming surplus for 
Social Security. Reaching agreement on that is not enough. We need our 
colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle to agree that we reserve 
15 percent of the surplus for Medicare because it does our seniors 
little good to tell them that Social Security is safe until the year 
2055 and, of course, we should reach a way to say 2075, but even saying 
that Social Security is safe until 2055 rings hollow unless we can make 
sure that Medicare is there, too.
  Another element of the budget that I think is very important, and for 
which I praise the President, is dealing with the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund. We have a number of special funds that are part of 
the Federal Government. We have a transportation fund. It is funded 
with tax dollars paid by motorists when they buy gasoline. We assured 
those taxpayers we would spend the money for road improvements and 
repair and for many years, until last year, we cheated them out of that 
promise by spending less out of the transportation fund and using that 
to hide the deficit we were running in the general fund.

                              {time}  1730

  We finally are treating the transportation fund as a separate, 
sacrosanct fund. We have a Social Security fund. It is funded by 
employer and employee contributions that are to be used exclusively for 
Social Security. That fund needs to be sacrosanct and used for those 
purposes.
  And least known of the three special funds I will mention is the Land 
and Water Conservation Fund. It is funded out of Federal royalties from 
offshore oil drilling and takes in roughly $900 million a year. For 
many years we spent only a tiny fraction of the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund on its intended purpose. Keep in mind when that fund 
was created in 1965 it was a grand compromise and an outstanding deal. 
It said that if our environment is going to be impaired by offshore oil 
drilling as it is in various places, and should not be but it is, then 
the funds that result from that should be used to preserve our 
environment in other places and should be set aside to buy land to 
conserve our heritage.
  Well, when I first got to Congress, only 14 percent of the funds 
being taken in by the Land and Water Conservation Fund were used to buy 
our precious lands to protect them from development and to give 
something to our children. I am very proud of the fact that in 1998 
this House spent virtually all of the Land and Water Conservation Fund 
to acquire critically needed lands.
  And now as we look to the first budget of the new millennium, we must 
keep faith with the law that established the Land and Water 
Conservation Fund, and we should applaud the President for presenting 
us with a budget that provides for enormous surpluses, that safeguards 
Social Security

[[Page 1537]]

and Medicare and at the same time allows us to spend nearly a billion 
dollars in preserving our land for posterity.
  I especially want to complement the President for including within 
that $5 million to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains by buying 
critically necessary tracts within those mountains. For my colleagues' 
edification, I will point out that one out of every 17 Americans, not 
one out of every 17 southern Californians, not one out of 17 
Californians, one-seventeenth of all Americans live within an hour's 
drive of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
  There is no better investment in not just recreational opportunities 
but the chance to get out into nature and unwind for one-seventeenth of 
the country than to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains. We need to do 
that one parcel at a time, one fiscal year at a time, until the land 
acquisition plan is fully implemented. To do less would be to turn to 
southern Californians and say, if you want to unwind, fine, drive to 
Yellowstone, and after a thousand miles of hectic travel you can unwind 
in America's most premier national park. We need to have national parks 
close to where people live. We have one in the Santa Monica Mountains.
  While I am focusing on local issues, I should also point out the most 
important transportation need of the southern California area, and that 
is dealing with the intersection of the San Diego Freeway and the 
Ventura Freeway, the 405 and the 101. I want to applaud our State 
government for beginning a $10 to $15 million plan to provide some 
immediate quick fixes and one additional lane in order to deal with the 
huge snarl of traffic at that interchange. But these quick fixes and 
moderate amounts of expenditures will not be enough to solve the 
problem. I want to thank Secretary Rodney Slater for providing for a 
half-million-dollar study of what can be done to deal with this 
intersection and the transition roads that have to accommodate almost 
half a million cars every day.
  Madam Speaker, I would like to use the last 10 minutes of my 
presentation, and I thank the House for giving me this much time, to 
focus on one particular type of tax cut that I hope will have 
bipartisan support, and that is the need to reform our estate tax laws 
to dramatically reduce the amount of estate planning, the length of 
documents and the literal legal torture that we put our elderly and our 
near-elderly through as a result of an estate planning process that 
yields virtually no revenue from the middle-class and upper middle-
class individuals who need to go through the process.
  Let me describe that process briefly. We have an estate tax that 
reaps, I believe, $17 billion in revenue for this country. It is 
designed to get revenue from the wealthy as great wealth passes from 
one generation to another. We designed the law so that a married couple 
could leave $1.2 million to their children with no tax at all. That is 
the tax policy that we have established, $1.2 million tax-free.
  But we adopted that tax policy in a bizarre way. And when I say, by 
the way, $1.2 million, that number is going to be ratcheted up over the 
next decade to a total of $2 million, depending upon, of course, when 
people die and that estate tax becomes applicable. In my presentation 
here I will use the old figures, the $600,000 figures and the $1.2 
million figures.
  That is to say, how is it that current law provides for that $1.2 
million exemption? It provides a $600,000 exclusion to each of the two 
spouses. So what do they have to do to take advantage of this $1.2 
million exemption? They have to write a long, complicated estate 
planning document and bypass trust so that when the first spouse dies, 
that first spouse does not just leave all the family assets to the 
surviving spouse. Oh, no. That would trigger an estate tax of major 
proportion when the second spouse dies. Instead, the first spouse to 
die must leave $600,000 in a trust for the benefit of the surviving 
spouse. The effect is virtually the same, but the legal complexities 
are enormous.
  First, just drawing the instrument is a $1,000 to $3,000 legal fee 
tax imposed on any couple that believes that when the second of them to 
dies it is possible that their assets will exceed $600,000. And given 
the possibility that homes in southern California would go up in value 
with the same rapidity next decade as they did last decade, every 
middle-class married couple sees that as at least a possibility.
  Keep in mind, those who fail to go through this excruciating estate 
planning process, and I will describe why I think it is excruciating 
because I have lived it, are told, well, if the second spouse dies, 
there will be a quarter of a million dollars of extra Federal tax that 
you could have avoided, a quarter-million-dollar penalty on the family 
for failing to go through this complicated estate planning process.
  But the estate planning process is not over. It seems to be over but 
it is not over when the trust is documented and the couple leaves the 
lawyer's office with a 50-page document. Because there will come a time 
when the first spouse dies, and at that point complicated legal steps 
need to be taken so that assets are put into the trust and other assets 
are assigned to the widow or widower, and then every year thereafter 
that trust has got to fill out a separate income tax return. Assets 
have to be kept separate.
  Imagine trying to explain for the 20th time to a 95-year-old widow or 
widower how some assets they have control over and are in trust, which 
they are only allowed to touch under certain circumstances but get the 
income under other circumstances, and other assets are in a different 
trust. Why do we afflict America's elderly, especially our widows and 
widowers, with the need to be in these bypass trusts?
  Now, I am not talking here, by the way, of the living trusts that are 
established to avoid probate in many of our States. Those are genuinely 
simple. But built within so many of them are these bypass trusts, 
created not to avoid probate but created to deal with very complicated 
tax laws.
  What we should do instead is provide that when the first spouse dies, 
they can leave all the assets, or some portion of them, to the 
surviving spouse, and any unused portion of the unified credit, the in 
effect $600,000 exemption, goes to the surviving spouse. In the 
simplest plan this would mean when the first spouse died, all of the 
assets could go to the widow or widower. When the widow or widower 
passes on later, $1.2 million would be exempt from tax and the rest 
would be subject to tax.
  This is the same tax effect that most couples will be faced with. I 
just think they should be able to reach it without living with these 
trusts throughout the widowhood or widowerhood of the surviving spouse.
  Now, the Joint Tax Committee has informed me that they believe that 
this kind of change would deprive the Federal Government of a billion 
dollars a year in revenue. For those who want to see a significant 
estate tax reduction, that is a strong reason to join me in this 
proposed estate tax change.
  But I would argue that that billion-dollar reduction in revenue is 
almost entirely illusory, because the bill as I would propose it would 
provide tax benefits no greater than any married couple could get 
simply by visiting a lawyer and paying a $1,500 legal fee. The vast 
majority of couples with assets of over $600,000 will do just that, and 
as a result they will obtain through complication the tax savings that 
I would like to provide through simplicity.
  I look forward to working with the staff of the Joint Tax Committee 
to get a more reasonable revenue estimate of this estate tax 
simplification, and I look forward to working with as many of my 
colleagues who are interested in crafting legislation to try to 
simplify the life of every middle-class and upper middle-class widow 
and widower in this country.
  I want to thank the Chair for extending so much time. I want to thank 
my colleagues for their patience in allowing me to get so many matters 
off my chest.

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