[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15962-15964]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         BUSINESS OF THE SENATE

  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I am compelled every once in a while to come 
to the floor to let people know what is happening. I know there are 
people watching the work of the Senate, and I know those people do not 
have, for the most part, a program or a scorecard. It is pretty hard to 
follow the rules of what is going on around here without that.
  I make an attempt partly to explain to myself what is going on and 
take the opportunity to share it with other people who might be 
interested and might be listening.
  Right now, we are in the closing days of a race for the U.S. 
President. It does not really have a lot to do with this body; it has a 
lot to do with our interaction with the administrative branch. 
Sometimes it is easier for rhetoric to invade the Chambers and to 
appear to be the most important thing we are doing.
  What we ought to be doing is the appropriations bills for this 
Nation. We handle in excess of $1.8 trillion. That is how much we spend 
on behalf of the American public. We ought to be debating that. We are 
not. We cannot get unanimous consent to proceed to a debate on an 
appropriations bill. We cannot move forward to talk about the $1.8 
trillion of appropriations for this country.
  Instead, we have debate on things that we have debated, things that 
have been decided, for the most part, and, on some occasions, with some 
finality. Instead, we have people in this Chamber who would rather 
rehash votes we have already taken and retake them again. I guess the 
plot is to put fellow Members in a bad light in their constituency: 
They have already voted on these issues once, let's get them to vote 
again, and that will be progress for this country. You have to be 
kidding me.
  The appropriations for this country are the important things that 
need to come before this body. They are the things about which we ought 
to be talking right now, and we ought to be talking about them in some 
detail. Pretty quickly we are going to run out of time. October 1 is 
the start of the new fiscal year for this country, and that is when we 
need to have the appropriations finished. That is when they start 
spending next year's money. That is when we hope and pray they will be 
spending it with the conciseness all of us envision.
  When we are relegated to not being able to proceed on an 
appropriations bill because we cannot reach unanimous consent, we 
cannot debate in detail. Later, we are going to have to make massive 
decisions on this money, and in fact it is my belief the minority would 
prefer to have the President negotiating these things instead of the 
way our forefathers envisioned it: that Congress would come up with the 
mechanism and the plan and the votes to pass appropriations bills that 
the executive branch would administer.
  That is not how it is working. The longer we push this process, the 
more it will be a nonvoted mediated expenditure without looking at the 
details. The amendments are the way the details get into this 
appropriations process, and it is not going to happen because we are 
shoving everything back through this process. We are keeping the 
appropriations of this Nation from being debated. We are not being 
allowed to proceed to the debate on important appropriations bills. 
Instead, we are hearing the rhetoric about how we should have minimum 
wage, Patients' Bill of Rights, education, and the other important 
things on which we have already worked, on which we have already voted 
that are in conference committee. Those conference committees should be 
finishing.
  I will tell you what happened on the Patients' Bill of Rights. I am 
on the conference committee for the Patients' Bill of Rights. It is one 
of the toughest jobs I have had in my life. A number of us on the 
committee have spent from about 1 to 6 hours a day working on it, and 
it is largely nonscheduled time. When somebody discovers a place where 
there might be a negotiation breakthrough, we get together and talk 
about it. We work out words. We meet with the House folks, and we try 
to come to a conclusion.
  We did that for months and months. Yet we hear on the floor of the 
delay in getting the Patients' Bill of Rights done. We were making 
major breakthroughs on the Patients' Bill of Rights. The Democrats in 
this Chamber bailed out of the process and said: Let's go back to the 
original House version. Sure, we have spent 3 or 4 months making 
important changes in this. I don't think they ever said that on the 
floor. But we had made 3 or 4 months of important changes in major 
areas. We had virtually wrapped up those areas as being much better 
than either the House or the Senate bill. That is what a conference 
committee is about. That is what a conference committee is supposed to 
do. We were in the process of doing that.
  The only thing I can conclude from the Democrats going back to the 
original version of the Patients' Bill of Rights on the House side was 
that they could see we were making progress that the country would 
like, and they wanted to keep an issue instead. That is not how 
Government is supposed to be done. That is not the way we are supposed 
to do it.
  We have debated these issues. We are working on these issues. But 
there is a

[[Page 15963]]

desire to keep things as an issue instead of a solution, and I can't 
tell the Senate how much that dismays me.
  There are a few other bills that could come up in this process, too. 
We are working on the elementary and secondary education authorization. 
It is done once every 5 years. The bill has come out of committee. It 
has been to the floor. We have debated it a few times. The amendments 
that are brought for that bill are not education amendments. It is all 
of these other ones that the Democrats would like to vote on and vote 
on and vote on again because that keeps them as an issue. What we need 
to do is get some finality to the education issue. We need to have some 
agreement between both sides that we will talk about education, that we 
will make education decisions, that we will make education in this 
country better for every student in elementary and secondary schools. 
We have to do that. That is our obligation. That is our assignment. 
That is what America is counting on.
  We can't get that job done if we keep going back and making political 
statements about issues on which we have already voted. If there is a 
vote and you want to use it against somebody, you can put the spin on 
it and use it against them. You don't have to have five votes on the 
same issue to spin it that way. That isn't how elections ought to be 
working in this country, but it does say something about how elections 
do work in this country.
  The voters are more discriminating than that. They are able to tell 
the rhetoric from their desires. As I travel Wyoming--and I am back 
there almost every weekend--our whole delegation usually goes out on 
Friday because we don't have votes here, and we travel the State. In 
Wyoming that means by car. I have traveled 300, 500 miles on a weekend. 
The average town in Wyoming is about 250 people. The exciting thing 
about visiting those towns is you get to talk to about 80 percent of 
the people. You get a pretty good feel for what your constituents think 
we ought to be doing. They do think we ought to be doing the 
appropriations process in detail and getting it wrapped up.
  They also think that some of the votes we have taken lately are very 
important from a fairness standpoint. One of those issues is the death 
tax. Practically everybody in Wyoming understands that death is a 
terrible thing and when you accompany death with a tax bill, it is even 
worse. That doesn't affect everybody in Wyoming. Those people 
understand that the death tax does not affect everybody in Wyoming. But 
they see a basic fairness issue where it does affect other people, and 
it affects the businesses for which they work. If the small business 
they work for has to sell off part of it for death taxes and can no 
longer function and goes out of business, it is their job. They 
understand that. It is the same with the farms and ranches in Wyoming 
and the rest of the country. If you have to sell off a significant part 
of your ranch or farm to pay the death tax, you may not have an 
economic remainder left. When that happens, you don't have the same 
culture in this country, and you do not have the same jobs. People lose 
their jobs. So they see the basic fairness issue of making sure that 
death is not a taxable event.
  The bill that is out there for the President to make his decision on 
doesn't say they avoid taxes forever. There is a capital gains tax in 
it. When there is a sale of the business or a sale of the land, when 
there is a taxable event, it gets taxed. That is how it ought to be. It 
should not be triggered by death and be a second tax on the same 
property.
  I had a letter from a constituent who said, if we do the death taxes, 
isn't that going to increase the gap between the wealthy and the poor? 
That is a good question. The answer is, no. What we are working on is 
middle America, the workers, particularly the workers who have been 
building IRAs and 401(k)s and who have been participating in the growth 
of the stock market, taking their wage and investing a little bit of 
it. There are a lot of blue-collar workers across this country who are 
now millionaires. They took some of their wages and saved it. They 
aren't in some of the old exclusions we had on death taxes. They are 
saying: Wait a minute. I worked my lifetime to save this money. I took 
some risks to make this money. I didn't do it so I could have a great 
retirement with a lot of vacation places. I did it so my kids would 
have a better chance, so that my kids would have some advantages, so 
that my kids would start at a little different level in their job than 
I started in mine.
  I want to make sure death taxes don't take it away. If we let middle 
America, which by the Democratic definition is anybody who pays taxes--
no, that would be the rich. At any rate, if we let middle America keep 
their money instead of paying it in death taxes and move up into a 
little higher level, that is the way America has operated. That is why 
virtually all the people in Wyoming tell me: Eliminate the death taxes.
  We did that. It is going to be heading down to the President to see 
if he agrees on it.
  I hear a lot of the marriage penalty in Wyoming. Again, it is a 
fairness issue. They want the marriage penalty eliminated. The bill we 
sent down there was not the Senate bill. The Senate bill would have had 
a lot more marriage penalty elimination. We went with the House version 
for the most part. We increased it in the lower levels so the marriage 
penalty among those paying taxes but making the lower amounts would 
benefit from it and benefit the most. That is the way the bill is right 
now that is being sent to the President.
  Again, we had a debate; we took the vote. That issue was resolved.
  We hear a lot on taxes about the rich versus the poor and what we 
need to do with all the surplus. It is not surplus. It is excess taxes. 
It is tax money that got paid that is in excess of what we had 
anticipated and what we had planned to spend. There are a lot of 
exciting things we can do with excess. Everybody wishes they had some. 
The greatest thing would be to win a lottery. That is kind of an excess 
sort of thing, unanticipated money that you got, with just a couple of 
bucks for expenditure. If we just give these out on all the new ideas 
for spending programs, that is what we will be doing--holding a 
national lottery.
  Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. ENZI. I think your side had time and I patiently listened while I 
was in the chair. Your questions turn into statements. I would like to 
finish making my statement, if I might.
  What we are turning into is a country that recognizes that the 
Federal Government can give us everything and we forget about where the 
everything came from.
  It is pretty exciting to get a windfall. I figured out--and this is 
mostly from talking to my Wyoming constituents--that when a new program 
around here is proposed, there are people across this country who 
benefit from it. Maybe they get $1,000. In fact, that turns out to be 
about the average a person in one of these programs gets--$1,000. Of 
course, it employs some different people because they administer the 
program, and they get more than $1,000 a year benefit out of it. They 
become the main lobbyists for the new program, and they get very 
excited about getting this new program in place and spending the money. 
You know, if a person gets $1,000 or more, it is worth a letter or 
two--more than that, maybe it is worth a trip to Washington.
  So we hear a lot about the importance of the new programs and 
everything. What we don't hear about is the taxpayers saying: Whoa, 
that isn't a program I like or a program I want to fund; that isn't 
where I want to put my money.
  Do you know why we don't hear as much from those people? First of 
all, they are busy earning the tax money that we spend; secondly, it is 
only costing them about a quarter for a new program. How many letters 
can you write for 25 cents? You can't. So what we wind up with is a 
huge lobby for new programs.
  The President, when he did his State of the Union speech, laid out 
several billion dollars a minute in new programs--new programs--that he 
would

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like to see done. In fact, there were about $750 billion worth of 
expenditures listed there. Now, we have programs in this country that 
we are not funding adequately at the present time, programs that we 
have said are important, such as IDEA, that we bring up every once in a 
while to get additional funding. We don't do it, but we keep looking at 
new programs.
  There are some things that need to be done in this country, and the 
best way is to get on with the appropriations process, to work through 
it in the kind of detail it deserves, and to quit throwing in 
peripheral things just because they can be brought up, which come with 
points of order and additional votes, each taking about an hour and 
using up the time of the Senate. It is time we got on with the business 
of appropriations and visited with constituents about the details of 
how they think this country ought to run.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, what is the present order of business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. We are in morning business until 12:30.

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