[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18954-18960]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO THE HON. PATSY MINK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating my 
colleagues who provided the review of the irresponsibility of the 
Republican majority toward the economy and my previous speaker, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio, in terms of her spirit of indignation expressed 
about cavalier attitudes towards war.
  I think the subject that I want to talk about tonight, the lady that 
I want to talk about, the Congresswoman I want to talk about tonight, 
would very much approve of what our previous colleagues have done here 
already tonight. I want to talk about Congresswoman Patsy Mink, who 
recently passed away in Hawaii.
  Patsy Mink is known for many things, but I know her as a Patsy Mink 
who was filled with righteous indignation and anger against injustice, 
and my colleagues have presented tonight very intelligent 
presentations, well-documented presentations, but that will get all the 
time. I think I heard in their voices also some outrage. They were 
upset. They were angry about the irresponsibility of the Republican 
majority, and that we have all too little of here in this Congress, all 
too little righteous indignation and anger.
  We are going to miss Patsy Mink because she was a lady with great 
righteous indignation against injustice. She was angry at the kind of 
callous approach to human welfare that was exhibited too many times on 
the floor of this Congress.
  Yesterday we had a resolution on Patsy Mink, and many people spoke. I 
was not able to speak, but I did submit for the Record a tribute to 
Congresswoman Patsy Mink, and I would like to start with that tribute 
and make comments on it. The tribute, of course, is in its entirety in 
the Record, Tuesday, October 1.
  In Tuesday's Record this appears in its entirety, but I would like to 
repeat it and comment as I go, because I heard my colleagues yesterday 
talk about Patsy in many ways. Most of the references were personal. I 
would like to focus primarily tonight on Patsy Mink as a policy 
manager, Patsy Mink as a champion of the poor, Patsy Mink as a champion 
of women, Patsy Mink who could be very intense, although she always was 
polite and warm, and lots of people talked about that yesterday.

[[Page 18955]]

  Patsy Mink will be remembered with a broad array of accolades. She 
was a warm, compassionate colleague. She was civil and generous, even 
to the opponents who angered her the most. As a member of the Committee 
on Education and the Workforce, which when Patsy Mink first came to 
Congress was called the Committee on Education and Labor, as a member 
of that committee, in any long markup, and we could have some long 
markups, we always knew that Patsy would try out macadamia nuts to 
supply for all of us to refresh myself, and she would share my 
macadamia with everybody, those who were opponents as well as those who 
were allies.
  I remember her chiding me, joking with me when I talked about how 
much I loved macadamia nuts. I was a macadamia nut junkie, but I said 
to her, Do not bring any more because I am on a diet, and these things 
certainly do not help anybody's diet. The next time she came with 
macadamia nuts, they were chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, and they 
are even more delicious than regular macadamia nuts and greater 
calories. But that was the kind of person she was.
  She was quite warm, cared very much about everybody, but she could be 
angry. She could be a peace of chain lightning.
  For me, she will be remembered as my friend, mentor and my personal 
whip on the floor. Often at the door of a House Chamber, Patsy would 
meet me with instructions. ``We,'' she said, ``are voting no,'' or, 
``We are voting yes on this one.'' I did not consider that to be 
intimidation at all. I considered it always an honor to have been 
invited to function as an ideological twin to Patsy Mink. She was not 
telling me or instructing me. She was making assumptions about how we 
would be together in our analysis of the problem, our conclusions about 
what to do with respect to voting. That was a great honor, and I am 
going to miss that.
  In the Committee on Education and the Workforce, as well as on the 
House floor, I was always inspired by Patsy's convictions. She was 
always an independent spirit, and she pursued her causes with total 
dedication. She was not just another advocate for education or for 
women or for jobs for welfare mothers, not just another one. Patsy Mink 
was a special advocate.
  She was forever a fiery and intense advocate on these issues. She 
frequently exuded an old-fashioned righteous indignation that seems to 
have become extinct in the halls of Congress. For Patsy, there were the 
right policies and laws which she pushed with all the zeal she could 
muster, and there were the wrong-headed, hypocritical, selfish and evil 
policies which had to be confronted, and they had to be engaged to the 
bitter end.
  When colleagues spoke about partisan compromise negotiations, Patsy 
would quickly warn Democrats to beware of an ambush or a trap. I think 
Patsy in her encyclopedic approach to her mission, encyclopedic concern 
about anything that affected human beings, would have very much 
appreciated the presentation by my colleagues before the 1-hour 
presentation on the economy.
  On the Committee on Education and Labor where Patsy served and I have 
served for the 20 years that I have been here in Congress, we used to 
have hearings and testimony from economists, because this committee was 
charged and is still charged with overall responsibility with respect 
to the economy as it impacts on working families and working men and 
women, and as the human resources interact with the other factors in 
our economy. So we used to have many economists come, and our approach 
was certainly not a tunnel-vision approach.
  She would have been concerned and has been concerned all year long 
about the fact that the economy has been deteriorating, the fact that 
unemployment is increasing. The unemployment rate averaged 4.1 percent 
in the year 2000 and reached a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in October of 
2000; but today the unemployment rate has increased to 5.7 percent 
nationwide. We have presently 8.1 million unemployed Americans, an 
increase of 2.5 million compared to the year 2000. The number of 
Americans experiencing long-term unemployment over 27 weeks has almost 
doubled in the last year.
  Some of this my colleagues heard from my previous colleagues who 
spoke on the economy. I think this is summarized very well by my 
colleague the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman), the ranking 
member of the Committee on Government Reform. Job creation has 
reversed.
  In the year 2000, the year before President Bush took office, the 
economy created 1.7 million new jobs. This trend has been reversed, and 
the economy has lost almost 1.5 million jobs since President Bush took 
office in January 2001. Poverty is increasing. After decreasing for 8 
straight years, decreasing for 8 straight years and reaching its lowest 
level in 25 years, the poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent in 2000 
to 11.7 percent in 2001. In the first year of the Bush administration, 
1.3 million Americans slipped back into poverty, with a total of 32.9 
million Americans living in poverty in 2001.
  Incomes are falling. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are filing 
for bankruptcy. Mortgage foreclosures are at a record high. The Federal 
budget deficit is increasing. In 2000, the year before President Bush 
took office, the Federal budget, excluding Social Security, showed a 
surplus of $86.6 billion. The most recent figures from the 
Congressional Budget Office indicate that for 2002 the Federal budget 
excluding Social Security will show a deficit of $314 billion. This 
represents the largest budget decline in U.S. history, and it is the 
third largest on-budget deficit in history, exceeded in size only by 
the deficits of 1991 and 1992 under the first President Bush.

                              {time}  1930

  I think Patsy Mink would be, has shown all year long, that she is 
very concerned about all of these matters. Patsy Mink, in the 107th 
Congress, was one of the great spirits continually pushing to get more 
activists going in response to the decline of the economy.
  Patsy was a policymaker. Patsy should be remembered as a policymaker, 
as a fighter. Whatever else we remember about her as an individual, we 
should not trivialize her role in the dynamics here in the Congress 
with respect to making policy. Her profound wisdom on all matters 
related to education in particular and matters relating to human 
resources, whether it was job training or occupational health and 
safety, whatever matters relating to human resources, she had a 
profound wisdom about that because she had been here for quite a long 
time. Her long years of service on the Committee on Education and 
Labor, which later became the Committee on Education and the Workforce, 
afforded her that kind of wisdom.
  Too many of us in the Congress have forgotten the value of 
institutional memory. While the House is filled with Members who speak 
as experts on education, Patsy Mink was among the few who had hard-
earned credentials with respect to education. She was a part of the 
development and the nurturing of title I to the point where it has 
become the cornerstone of Federal education reform. She was here during 
the Great Society program creation. She served with Adam Clayton Powell 
and Lyndon Johnson in the years that they passed more social 
legislation than has ever been passed in Congress.
  Title IX was a landmark reform to end the gender gap in our 
educational institutions, in school athletics; but also many other 
aspects of higher education. Title IX belongs to Patsy. She conceived 
it decades ago, and she had to fight all the way to the President. Even 
recently, in this 107th Congress, there were skirmishes seeking to cut 
back on the funding for title IX. Title IX was passed in 1972, but 
right up until recently, the grumbling and the attempts to undercut 
have persisted.
  I will talk more in greater detail about some of the things that have 
happened along the way as Patsy was forced to fight to keep title IX. 
As I said, she had an encyclopedic approach. She was involved in many 
issues. There were certain issues she would focus on tenaciously. And 
because she focused on them, she was prepared to defend

[[Page 18956]]

them, and she very effectively saved many of these programs from the 
jaws of those who would roll back progress.
  Title IX, like many other Federal policies and programs, was 
considered to be impossible, something else we could not afford. We 
could not afford to have equality in our education activities for 
women. That would be a burden on our higher education institutions. 
That would be a burden on higher education athletics, college 
athletics, or school athletics. Always those who want to conscript and 
limit the opportunities for a class of people insist that it is not 
doable.
  Social Security originally was attacked. We know we did not get a 
single Republican vote when Social Security was implemented and passed. 
Social Security was attacked as something that would wreck the economy. 
The minimum wage was attacked. The minimum wage provision was attacked 
as another item that would wreck the economy. Always reasons are found 
to stop the spreading of the benefits of our great American democracy 
and our great economy to all.
  They particularly hold on with respect to matters relating to women. 
We are way, way behind, even in liberal America, liberal and 
progressive America. We are still way behind in recognizing full 
unfettered rights for all women. There is no more category of human 
being more oppressed in the world than women. If you want to look at 
numbers, the greatest number of people oppressed throughout the world 
are women. In all societies, just about, there is oppression. In 
societies that suffer from racial prejudice, an oppression because of 
race, or in others who suffer as a result of colonialism, and all those 
societies where everybody might suffer, the women still suffer most of 
all because of male dominance. Male chauvinism seems to hold on. It 
seems to be institutionalized in certain religions. And when we 
liberate women finally, we will have arrived as a civilization.
  But there is a great need to have the fullest possible liberation for 
women in America. We are more advanced in this respect than probably 
any society. The mountaintop is in view, and we should certainly go on 
to make certain that all of the pathways are cleared so that women and 
men are clearly equal in one society in the world, that is the American 
society, and that this will spread first in the Western world and on 
and on and break down any shibboleth that may remain in terms of 
religions that insist that women are inferior and women do not deserve 
complete equality with men.
  Patsy was an advocate for total equality for women, and that is quite 
appropriate. Her spirit will be missed. We should remember Patsy as an 
advocate for women. She was the coauthor of title IX of the Higher 
Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits sex discrimination in all 
education institutions receiving Federal funds. This law, which Patsy 
cited as one of her greatest accomplishments, has had a dramatic impact 
in opening up opportunities for girls and women in the professions and 
most visibly in athletics.
  In 1970, before the passage of title IX, only 8.4 percent of medical 
degrees were awarded to women. By 1980, this figure had increased to 
23.4 percent. By 1997, women were earning 41 percent of medical 
degrees. So in addition to athletics, in an area like medicine, Patsy's 
title IX opened the way for women.
  I think her colleague, Senator Akaka, in honoring Patsy, was able to 
bring some light on her personal travails as a woman. Patsy wanted to 
be a doctor. She applied for medical school after studying zoology and 
chemistry at the University of Hawaii. She applied in 1948 to a medical 
school there, but she was rejected, along with other bright young women 
who were aspiring to be doctors at a time when women made up only 2 to 
3 percent of the entering class. Patsy went on to apply to a law school 
instead. She gained admission to the University of Chicago.
  It was during her years at the University of Chicago that she met and 
married her husband. Patsy returned to Hawaii and gained admission to 
the Hawaii bar in 1953. But as a woman, even then, she had difficulty, 
because it was said that her husband was a native of Pennsylvania, and 
a woman had to gain her bar admission in the area where her husband 
lived. She challenged that piece of sexism and she won. She was 
admitted to the Hawaii bar, and she became the first Japanese American 
woman to become a member of the bar in Hawaii.
  In 1965, Patsy brought her views to the national stage when she 
became the first woman of color elected to the United States House of 
Representatives to represent Hawaii's Second Congressional District. 
1965. You can see that she was here during the time when Lyndon Johnson 
put forth his Great Society programs, and she was a colleague of Adam 
Clayton Powell as each one of those measures came through the Committee 
on Education and Labor on its way to the floor of the House to be 
passed successfully by a Democratically controlled Congress and Senate. 
So the institutional memory, the institutional achievements of Patsy 
Mink ought to be remembered as part of the record.
  She is a role model that the present Members of Congress should look 
up to. She is a role model that should be held up to future Members of 
Congress. We need role models that go beyond the fact that we are all 
very intelligent men and women who come to this Congress. You will not 
find a single person elected to Congress who is not intelligent. You do 
not get here unless you are very intelligent. Most of us have extensive 
formal education. Most of the Members of Congress are college 
graduates. Many are people who have gone beyond college and have 
professional degrees. So intelligence is not a problem here.
  If intelligence were the kind of cleansing overall virtue that I once 
believed it was when I was in high school and college, that intelligent 
people always do the right thing, intelligent people understand the 
world, they understand what is right, and they do what is right. 
Intelligence does not automatically lead to correct and appropriate, 
democratic, generous, progressive, and charitable behavior. So 
intelligence is not the problem here in this Congress. The quality that 
is missing here is indignation, righteous indignation, dedication to 
the proposition that all men and women are created equal. And if they 
are all created equal, they all have a right to share in the prosperity 
and the benefits of this great country.
  We have to make a way for them to do that, even if they are people 
who are very poor and at one time or another have to go on welfare. At 
one time or another they have to be the recipients of the safety net 
benefits of our Nation. We have safety net beneficiaries who are rich 
farmers, yet we never are critical of them. But we have safety net 
beneficiaries who are welfare mothers, mothers of children; and you do 
not become a woman on welfare unless you have children. It is Aid to 
Families With Dependent Children. So welfare women, who we refer to, 
are really mothers of children who are covered by the law Aid to 
Families with Dependent Children.
  In this Congress, Patsy declared war on the oppressors of welfare 
women. It was a lonely army that she led. A very tiny platoon, I would 
say, that she led as she made war on the oppressors of welfare women. 
No one was more incensed and outraged than the Member from Hawaii when 
the so-called welfare reform program of President Bush threatened 
greater burdens and smaller subsidies for welfare recipients. Patsy 
came to me often and said we must fight this, we must do something, we 
must not allow this to happen. We must point out the fact that welfare 
benefits have been greatly reduced in most of the States. We must point 
out the fact that in the model State of Wisconsin, the State where the 
Secretary of Health and Human Services, former Governor Thompson 
presided, they have reduced the welfare benefits for a family of three 
to less than $300 a month; and they are praising him for having made 
that reduction. That is wonderful; that a welfare family of three only 
gets less than $300 a month.
  That same Governor Thompson had transferred welfare money that would 
have gone to welfare beneficiaries to

[[Page 18957]]

other functions in State government. Maybe he had a few other cronies 
he wanted to employ, maybe he gave a few more State banquets, who knows 
where the money went; but the Federal money that was meant to go to 
welfare beneficiaries, the law allowed him, if he saved it by 
curtailing the benefits for welfare families, then he could use it in 
other ways. No one was more incensed and outraged by that kind of 
activity than Patsy Mink.
  Patsy said, we must do something. The Democrats are going to be 
rubber stamps to the Republican proposals. The Democrats are going to 
be rubber stamps to President Bush's proposals. Patsy Mink came 
forward, and we had made many proposals. We fought the greater burdens 
and smaller subsidies for welfare recipients. All of Patsy's proposals 
in the House were voted down. We did not pass anything at all. But I 
admire and will always praise Patsy Mink for leading the fight which 
stirred up the long-dormant conscience among Democrats.

                              {time}  1945

  Democrats did come to the floor with an alternative bill. We did 
produce a fight on the floor. We did have a debate on the floor. We 
offered an alternative. We set the stage for what happened after the 
bill left this House and went to the other body. We would like to 
believe that the fact that deliberations on this very important matter, 
welfare reform, continues and is stalled because we fought valiantly 
under the leadership of Patsy Mink, and that fight still goes on as a 
result of the record. We united behind Patsy. We were voted down, but 
we were together.
  As I said before, Patsy Mink is a role model for what needs to happen 
in this House. Some Members of Congress focus on housing issues. Some 
focus on transportation issues. Some focus on health issues. Whatever 
the issue, they need to bring to it the kind of indignation and 
determination that Patsy brought to the issues she cared about. She 
cared about education and welfare mothers. Nobody knew better than 
Patsy about the correlation between poverty and poor performance in 
education. She had many poor people in the rural parts of her district, 
and Patsy Mink understood the correlation.
  There is a correlation between poor performance, and the ability of 
students to take full advantage of the educational opportunities 
offered, and poverty. Poverty and education should not be discussed 
separately, they should be discussed together. What we do to welfare 
families hurts education. When a welfare family has their budget 
curtailed to the point where children go to school hungry, and the best 
meal they get is the school free lunch because supper is not going to 
be adequate, breakfast is not adequate, and at some schools we have 
begun to provide breakfast because of that, why not provide higher 
benefits and substitutes for the families so the children who are going 
to school get over that first hurdle and they come to school prepared 
to learn because they have a wholesome environment at home.
  We had on the floor today several resolutions which attempted to 
force the issue. Again, I think Patsy Mink would have been very pleased 
with what happened this afternoon in the regular session. We had four 
resolutions which showed some outrage, some indignation. We want to 
force the issue. We do not want to bide time here in this Congress the 
way that the Republican majority has decided we should. We do not want 
to just be here and not deal with the issues. I would hate to read 
history 50 years from now and hear how the historians analyzed what 
happened to the great America; that at its apex when it was most 
powerful, most prosperous, the leader of the entire world, the only 
remaining superpower sat around and, like Nero, fiddled while Rome was 
burning.
  There are so many issues related to the changing patterns of the 
weather, the climate, so many things that reach beyond our economy; 
and, of course, the ongoing fight against terrorism. That is no less an 
issue, but we have to chew gum and walk, sing, dance and do a lot of 
things at the same time, and we are letting most of our resources, the 
tremendous brain power of the Congress lies fallow, unutilized. There 
is tremendous brain power and energy. The Congress is not being 
utilized because, for political reasons, somebody has decided that it 
is best for us to tread water and do nothing.
  My colleagues in the Democrat Party, the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Holden), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Visclosky), and the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), 
they offered resolutions saying let us do something.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Holden) offered a resolution 
relating to family farmers and bankruptcy. Be it resolved that the 
House of Representatives should call up for consideration H.R. 5348, 
the Family Farmers and Family Fishermen Protection Act of 2002, which 
will once and for all give family farmers the permanent bankruptcy 
protections they have been waiting for for over 5 years.
  Mr. Speaker, why not? We are all here. Why do we not debate an act on 
this vital resolution? No, the Republican majority chose to vote it 
down. With a motion to table, all you need is a majority of the votes, 
and a motion to table takes effect.
  The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) wanted to deal with the fact that 
patent drugs, the drug companies are playing with patent law so they 
can hold on to patents longer and keep the cost of drugs higher and 
avoid the utilization of generic drugs. That was voted down, too.
  The Brown resolution attempted to call for some constructive action, 
but it was also voted down, but he did it, and Democrats rallied behind 
the gentleman overwhelmingly out of a sense of indignation. Those of us 
who are sick of being victimized by the majority, we are held 
paralyzed. We are here, but we can do nothing. At least we can vote for 
a resolution to call for action, and we did. But again, the majority 
had the most votes, and this resolution was voted down.
  The next resolution was by the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Visclosky). It was a simple resolution, after all of the whereases, 
resolved that it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the 
Congress should provide States with the resources they need to fully 
implement the No Child Left Behind Act as promised less than a year 
ago.
  Less than a year ago we passed the No Child Left Behind Act. It was a 
bipartisan vote on final passage. I voted for it. I voted for it 
because of the promises that were made with respect to funding. The 
President said he would double Title I over a 2-year period. The 
President said he would provide and support the funding for the 
implementation for No Child Left Behind, meaning the tests, the 
training and the administrative costs related to that. The President 
said that he would support an increase in the special education 
funding, but he has reneged on those promises.
  We would like to see the resources provided by passing the Health and 
Human Services and the Education and related agencies appropriations. 
The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Visclosky) offered that resolution.
  I would like to note that Patsy Mink said No Child Left Behind was a 
piece of legislation that was an ambush; it was a trap. She voted 
against it in committee, and she voted against it on the floor of the 
House. And now she has been proven to be correct.
  We made some stringent requirements there. We placed on the backs of 
school systems and teachers and students a lot of new regulations and 
threats, provisions for monitoring tests, and now we have reneged on 
paying the costs of all of that, leaving it to them. In Patsy's 
district, she complained several months ago that the provisions of the 
No Child Left Behind were beginning to upset parents because there are 
provisions that say if your individual school is failing in terms of 
the achievements of the students in reading and math, if it is failing, 
then you have a right to go to another school, transfer to another 
public school.

[[Page 18958]]

  Well, just about all of the schools in a certain area of her district 
are failing, and the parents are frustrated because they want to use 
that right, but in order to go to another school, they would have to 
have air transportation. The island is constructed such that the only 
way they can get to a school that is better than the schools in that 
locale would be to have planes to transport them. The cost of 
transportation is so prohibitive that the law has no meaning for them. 
She was angry because they were angry at her, but they have been 
stirred up by the promise that was offered by the No Child Left Behind 
legislation.
  I think that the next resolution that was offered by the gentleman 
from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), who is the ranking member of the Committee 
on Appropriations, was in the same vein, concerned about the fact that 
we have reneged on the promises of the legislation that we all voted 
for, most of us voted for, in a bipartisan compromise. Patsy did not 
vote for it. She said we would regret the compromise, and now we are 
living to regret it.
  The Obey resolution was, resolved that it is the sense of the House 
of Representatives that the Congress should complete action on the 
fiscal year 2003 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education and 
related agencies appropriation before recessing, and should fund the No 
Child Left Behind Act with levels commensurate with the levels promised 
by the act less than a year ago.
  Mr. Speaker, we are here. We should act now. Why have we defaulted on 
action to the point where there is a discussion of nothing significant 
is going to happen until after the election. Nothing significant is 
going to be done about any appropriations issues until after the 
election. That is a swindle. We owe it to the American people to take 
action on critical activities and demonstrate what we are made of. Let 
us have a record. Let us go forward and not play with the public 
opinion polls where we know that the great majority of the American 
people rank education as a major issue. Education is ranked as a major 
issue, and, therefore, we pay lip service to education, but we do not 
want to really doing anything.
  The indignation shown by these resolutions, the attempt to force some 
action or at least to dramatize it, the mobilization of one party to 
make certain that this issue was on the floor I think Patsy Mink would 
be quite proud of.
  Patsy was always concerned about the fact that education was so 
highly publicized by both parties. Patsy was concerned about the fact 
that there barriers put up about education costing too much, although 
in America we are only spending in terms of Federal funds, we only pick 
up 7 percent of the cost of education. There is a continued drumbeat 
that education costs too much. The Federal Government should not be 
more involved in education.

                              {time}  2000

  Our answer was, what activity is it that the American government is 
involved in that does not need education as more than a footnote? 
Education is a force in whatever activity we are engaged in and, 
therefore, what fools we are to continue to ignore education when we 
talk about critical issues. The Homeland Security Act, for example, the 
creation of a homeland security agency does not talk in any significant 
way about the role that education will play. The Education Department 
is barely mentioned. Yet the Homeland Security Act is a complex 
mechanism which will not work unless it has very educated people. It 
will not work unless it has cadres of people who are well trained in 
various ways. Homeland security will not work unless we train 
tremendous numbers of people in the cleanup of anthrax or the cleanup 
of biological warfare materials. We are preparing for that. We are 
discussing each day how we have enough vaccine to vaccinate our whole 
population in 10 days.
  There are a number of things happening, but we are not discussing who 
is going to do it. Where are the people who will give the vaccinations? 
We have a shortage of nurses. We have a shortage of basic technicians 
in our hospitals. We certainly cannot deal with complicated biological 
warfare as exhibited by the way we handled the anthrax emergency here 
in Washington.
  What happened in the anthrax emergency here in Washington? I will not 
go through the whole scenario, but Congress was threatened and the 
focus of attention of all the experts was on Congress. The post office, 
on the other hand, where the anthrax had to come through, was ignored. 
Even when they discovered that there was anthrax in the post office, 
all of the personnel were still focused here, all the expertise.
  So we had two people die here in Washington. They were postal 
employees, postmen, who died, because we did not have enough personnel 
to do the total job and the total job was not really of epic 
proportions. The anthrax attack, whoever did it, they still do not know 
who did it, of course, it was small in comparison to what terrorists 
could do. I fear anthrax more than I fear nuclear weapons. After 
watching what happened here in Washington, after having been locked out 
of my office for several weeks, even now we have to irradiate our mail, 
after watching it take 4 months to clean up the anthrax in one 
building, Senate building; and the experts, the hygienists who handle 
anthrax, whoever the experts were, were so limited, the technicians so 
limited till they only focused on the Senate building. There were not 
enough to go around. We could not deal with the post office. We still 
have not dealt with the cleanup of post offices the way we should.
  So we have a shortage of people who can deal with anthrax; and that 
is a clear and present threat, or something similar to anthrax. But in 
the Homeland Security Act, there is no provision for the training of 
more people in this area. There is no provision for dealing with the 
fact that we have a shortage of nurses. Who is going to do all these 
vaccinations in case we have an epidemic as a result of a biological 
attack? We have shortages of people who are going into police 
departments. We have shortages in fire departments in big cities like 
New York, for example. They are working madly to recruit people to 
replace the numerous firemen who lost their lives, but in general there 
has been an attrition over the years of applicants in terms of these 
agencies.
  Many of these positions do not require a Ph.D., graduate education; 
but they do require some education. Getting people to pass a basic test 
involving literacy and simple calculations, getting graduates of our 
schools who can pass those simple requirements has become a big 
problem. We need to invest whatever is necessary if we are serious 
about homeland security, or if we are serious about fighting terrorism.
  One of the factors that keeps coming up is the very embarrassing fact 
that we had a lot of data collected. Many of the facts that had been 
assembled by our reconnaissance agencies, by our satellites in the sky, 
picking up electronic communications, many of those items were there 
which told things that would have been very useful in counteracting 
what happened on September 11; but we did not have Arab translators. We 
did not have enough translators.
  I have said here on the floor many times, that is inexcusable, that 
there were not enough Arab translators to stay current with the great 
amount of data that was being collected from Arab sources. Arabs have 
been terrorists for quite a long time. Since Ronald Reagan's reign when 
they bombed the barracks in Beirut and killed 200 Marines, on and on, 
every major act of terrorism, sabotage, Arabs have done it. So surely 
Arabs should have been high on the radar screen and the number of 
people who interpret Arabic should have been great. But it is not 
there.
  I heard advertising on the radio and television in New York a couple 
of months after September 11 advertising for people who might want to 
be Arab interpreters. On and on it could go, including the fact that in 
the field in Afghanistan, where our troops have been victorious and 
conducted a high-tech

[[Page 18959]]

war in a very effective way, nevertheless, the casualties, if you look 
at the casualties that we have suffered, the majority of them have been 
from friendly fire as a result of human error. We have suffered 
casualties ourselves as a result of human error and friendly fire. We 
have had a couple of embarrassing incidents with respect to the 
Canadians and with respect to some tribal groups as a result of human 
error. So as war becomes more high tech, education becomes an even more 
important factor.
  There is a recognition in the military world of the value of 
education. I would like to juxtapose the fact that they place a great 
deal of value on education on specific things related to the military 
while at the same time ignoring the greater funnel, the mass education 
that has to funnel people into the military. For example, we have quite 
a number of military academies beyond West Point. Most people only 
think of West Point, the Navy at Annapolis, the Air Force Academy; but 
we also have an Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National War 
College, Army War College, Naval War College, Naval Post Graduate 
School, Air War College, Air Force Institute of Technology graduate 
school and long-term training arrangements and continued service 
arrangements which allow members of the military to go to graduate 
schools anywhere when needed.
  There is a great deal of understanding in the military of the value 
of education. Their personnel are constantly being put through a 
process of improving their education. The military is not afraid to 
spend money, also. It costs money to educate youngsters in this day and 
age.
  I hear complaints that education costs too much, that when I was a 
kid we were only paying teachers so much and school costs were at very 
low levels per child, but now teacher salaries are too high, and we 
want computers. That is the way of the modern world. When World War II 
started, we only had four or five vehicles in the Federal arsenal of 
transportation. Roosevelt had a car and four or five other Cabinet 
members. We were at that stage. Now we have a whole fleet of cars. We 
have a fleet of planes. The world has changed.
  If it has changed in every other respect, then surely it has changed 
in respect to education. But we do not recognize that when it comes to 
education. We do not look at the fact that our military academies are 
spending tremendous amounts of money. I have only got figures for way 
back in 1990. They do not let you have current figures. In 1990 we were 
spending tremendous amounts of money for the Army academy, which is 
West Point; Naval Academy, et cetera. But more important than what they 
were spending overall, which is hard to deal with, as of 1996, the 
budget office study showed again with 1990 figures, that the amount of 
money being spent per officer, that is where we can make some 
comparison.
  They say right now at Harvard and Yale, Ivy League schools may cost 
you between $40,000 and $50,000 per student per year now. In 1990, the 
cost per officer commissioned in the Army was $299,000. $299,000 per 
officer commissioned. In the Navy it was $197,000 per officer 
commissioned. In the Air Force, $279,000 per officer commissioned. We 
are willing to spend tremendous amounts of money when it involves 
personnel serving the military directly. If we are willing to spend 
$299,000 per officer commissioned, surely we can spend more than $8,000 
per child in the New York City school system and understand that modern 
costs are such that $8,000 per child is not going to get you very much 
in terms of what is needed in this day and age.
  I checked before Ron Dellums left as the head of the Armed Services 
Committee. I did get some figures which showed that the cost at that 
time, I think that was about 7 or 8 years ago, was down to $120,000 per 
cadet at West Point, if you left out the actual cost of the military 
training and just the academic training. The academic training at that 
time was $120,000 per student while Harvard and Yale at that time were 
estimated to be about $30,000 in the Ivy League. So either way you can 
see the difference. We are willing to spend tremendous amounts of money 
when we think it is important.
  Patsy Mink and I used to talk a great deal about the great hypocrisy 
of American policymakers. In private schools, the cost per child is far 
higher than $8,000 per child, as it is in the New York City schools. 
$8,000 per child is what the average is in New York City, because it 
has so many different schools. There is a low end in my district. There 
are some schools where they are spending only $4,000 per child; and 
there is a high end where they are spending $12,000 per child because 
the expenditure costs are driven by the personnel costs. The greatest 
cost of personnel, the more experienced teachers and administrators are 
in certain schools in certain districts that they consider highly 
desirable places to be. So their salaries raise the cost per child in 
those districts, while the poorest schools suffer from too many 
substitute teachers and uncertified teachers and you have a very low 
cost. But what I am saying is that as a Nation, we are investing very 
highly in a well-qualified, well-educated military. We are blind to the 
fact that all the other sectors must go along.
  A complex, modern nation, the leader of the free world, needs to have 
a comparable concern about education across the board. All of these 
Department of Defense graduate institutions, is there a single peace 
initiative we have which has Federal funding for graduate institutions? 
Is there a single graduate institution that we know of? There is a 
peace institute which you can hardly find in the budget, it is so 
small; and it is very cautious about what it does. But there is no 
place where we are training diplomats. There is no plan to make certain 
that the greatest Nation on Earth, the last superpower, has knowledge 
of all the other societies on Earth.
  We not only have a shortage in people who can translate Arabic but in 
Pakistan and some other countries, they speak Urdu. In Afghanistan they 
speak Pashto. We have more than 3,000 colleges and universities in this 
Nation. If you have a plan, if the Homeland Security Act cared about 
really dealing with terrorism across the world, you would have a plan 
which showed that somewhere in America there is a college or a 
university that has an institute or a center which is not only learning 
the language, teaching the language, but also teaching the culture of 
any group of people anywhere on the face of the Earth.
  Certainly any nation in the United Nations, we should have a program 
which has people who are studying it. We can afford to do that. By 
chance we have experts probably on everything, but single people who 
decide they want to go off and study and are ready when we need them 
for these kinds of assignments, that number is decreasing.

                              {time}  2015

  Why not have a plan which guarantees that we will always have enough 
people who speak Urdu to deal with increasing our friendship with 
Pakistan? Pakistan is a friendly Muslim Nation. Pakistan is our ally in 
the fight against terrorism. We need to know more about its culture and 
be able to deal with it. If we are going to have nation-building, that 
is a word that was trivial, used and ridiculed a few years ago, but now 
it is understood that we cannot fight terrorism without nation-
building. We do not invest a large amount of energy, time, lives, 
effort in a nation like Afghanistan and then walk off and leave it to 
crumble back into the kind of primitive savagery that existed under the 
Taliban. If we do not stay and we do not do nation-building, we will 
have to do it all over again in 10 or 20 years. So nation-building is 
part of a process that we should have in our overall plan to fight 
terrorism.
  Homeland security, military readiness, all that, we should look at 
education first and foremost. The funnel which feeds everything we do 
has to come up through our public school system. Fifty-three million 
children are out there in our public school system. They could supply 
every expert we need, every category of technician, but they are not 
doing it when they come

[[Page 18960]]

out of high school, and they can only barely read and write properly, 
when calculations are minimal.
  A large part of public school is inhabited by minorities, and one of 
the problems is, which Patsy and I talked about many times, as the 
minority population has increased in certain school systems, the big-
city school systems in America, the commitment of the locality and the 
commitment of the State government has gone down, and we cannot get 
away from an observation that racism is at work in decision-making.
  Doing less for the schools has happened as the population has 
changed, but let us take a look at what that means for America in one 
area. In our military those same minorities who are being neglected in 
our public schools make up a large part of our military relative to 
their percentage of population. African Americans are considered by the 
Census Bureau to be about 13 percent of the total population. In the 
Army African Americans total 25.5 percent of the Army population; 
480,435 people are African Americans. Hispanics are 9.3 percent. In the 
Navy African Americans, which are only 13 percent of the population, 
are 18.9 percent of the Navy. African Americans, who are only 13 
percent of the population, are 16 percent of the soldiers in the Air 
Force. In the Marines African Americans are 18.9 percent.
  These same African Americans who are in the inner-city schools 
predominantly, the supply that goes into our military, is jeopardized 
if you do not provide appropriate education now. What would it be like 
in a few years? What is it like now? Is the quality of the soldiers 
declining at a time when the high-tech complexity of the military is 
increasing?
  We should take a hard look at all the various activities of our 
society and how they complement each other.
  Patsy Mink, as I said before, had an encyclopedic mind when it came 
to looking at human resources and looking at the various missions of a 
civilized society like ours should have. Patsy Mink and I have talked 
about the fact that it is ridiculous to have a homeland security 
program which allocates no significant role to the Department of 
Education or to the universities and colleges in America. It is sort of 
doomed to failure.
  I would like to conclude by just refocusing on one particular project 
or program that is identified most immediately and specifically with 
Patsy Mink. That is Title IX. Many women who are doctors and lawyers, 
who had a basically equal treatment in the university system and 
graduate schools, have no idea what it was like before. I think one of 
the women on the Supreme Court told a long story about how she was 
denied access to decent jobs in the law firms when she first came out 
of college and later denied promotions, et cetera. So there are 
individual stories that can be told, but the figures were outrageous 
before Title IX.
  Title IX has made a big difference, but Title IX has been fought step 
by step all the way. It was signed into law in 1972, and Patsy had to 
go to war and fight the Tower amendment in 1974. She had to fight 
certain other Senate amendments that were attempted by Senator Helms 
and S. 2146 in 1976 and 1977. On and on it goes. There have been 
attempts to gut Title IX.
  So Title IX, the welfare rights, the welfare reform, all of it was 
part of why I say that Patsy Mink was a role model for decisionmakers 
of this Congress, and she is a role model for decisionmakers in the 
future. Compassion and riotous indignation are still vital 
qualifications for the leaders of a Nation. Patsy Mink was a great 
leader of this great Nation.

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