[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 25450-25451]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                  A CONTINUATION OF HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to continue this 
discussion as we can with the time allocated. Let me yield more time to 
my friend from Oklahoma.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, the fact is we passed a budget out of this 
House, and we passed the appropriation bills out of this House within 
$1 billion of that $601 billion. That is a fact. All 13 bills went out 
and went out on time.
  Now, the question is, the question the American public ought to be 
asking is, what happened after it left the House? And I hope some day 
they will know how this process works and put people up here who will 
not allow it to continue.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my colleague 
from Oklahoma. I thank my friend from Texas for his perspective. I 
think it is important to understand that there is far more that may 
unite us than divide us; and rather than pointing the finger of blame, 
I think it is important, after we await the verdict of the voters on 
the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November, if we should 
be fortunate enough to return to this institution, we certainly welcome 
our friend from Texas and other like-minded friends on that side of the 
aisle to join us in a governing coalition to work with the next 
President of the United States, who could very well be the Governor of 
my friend's home State, to work to unify and put people before politics 
and to deal with these real questions.
  I do appreciate the fact that he offers a voice of fiscal 
conservatism. We may not see eye to eye always on tax relief or a 
variety of other issues; but by the by, I think there is a great deal 
of agreement, and I do look forward to that opportunity.
  I yield to my friend from Georgia.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I also want to say to my friend from 
Texas, I do appreciate, number one, your yielding time for a real 
dialogue tonight; and, number two, your consistency on trying to hold 
down the budget numbers, because I think amongst those here tonight, we 
are all in agreement with you.
  Of the other issues that are on the table, though, one of the ones 
that concerns me and everybody else here, the gentleman from Michigan 
(Mr. Hoekstra), who is a chairman on the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce, is the President's scheme to federalize school construction. 
As you know, he wants to put in a big union pay-off and have Davis-
Bacon in there and that will drive school construction costs up 25 
percent on an average. We in rural south Georgia just cannot afford 
that. That is one reason why I think that we are here tonight, to put 
schools above politics.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my friend. I 
think this is important, because knowing my friend from Texas and his 
fiscal conservatism, it simply makes more sense to make the money work 
harder. You do not do that when you artificially inflate prices for the 
cost of construction, or, worse still, when you take the authority for 
school construction away from local school boards and transfer that 
authority here to Washington.
  In fact, I yield to my friend from Michigan, who has great oversight 
of this in his role in the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we found as we went and talked to 
local school districts, but also as we talked to the different State 
education boards, is that they typically get about 7 to 10 percent of 
their money from Washington, but they get 50 percent of their 
bureaucratic paperwork from Washington. So, for all of these 760 
programs that come out of 39 different agencies that are targeted at 
our local classrooms, with each one of those there come costs, burden, 
and red tape and strings attached, telling local officials, this is 
what you need to do in your schools.
  So what we wind up doing is focusing on process, rather than on what 
is good for our kids. The people who know our kids' names no longer 
have full control over what goes on in that classroom. It is time we 
put our kids before process, that we put learning before bureaucracy; 
and those are the kinds of issues

[[Page 25451]]

that we are wrestling with with the president at this time.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Following the tradition of our friend from Texas, I 
gladly yield him some time to visit on these issues.
  Mr. STENHOLM. I thank the gentleman for agreeing. Let me say I happen 
to agree with you on the Davis-Bacon provisions. I have agreed in the 
22 years I have now been fortunate to serve here.

                              {time}  2145

  I think it is a terrible mistake to include, especially the new 
provisions that will allow local board decisions to have Davis-Bacon 
applied. It has nothing to do with prevailing wage. I have always 
agreed that Federal contracts ought to receive the prevailing wage. But 
I have spent a good part of my career attempting to first repeal and 
then reform the Davis-Bacon act, to no avail. But I happen to agree 
with my colleagues on that.
  I do not agree on creating a new revenue-sharing program for schools. 
I think we ought to concentrate the money for school construction. So I 
disagree with my Republican colleagues on that, but here reasonable 
people ought to be able to work that out, have the legislative process 
be allowed to work.
  Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that. I think 
again it typifies much of what we have heard about, in the midst of 
this so-called political season where there are honest disagreements.

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