[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 20645-20647]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          BALANCING THE RECORD

  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I have heard a couple of speeches by our 
Democrat colleagues that are basically saying the entire fault of the 
economy is that of President Bush. I just have a little different view 
and wish to share the view somewhat to balance the record.
  It is kind of interesting; we are an equal branch of Government, the 
legislative branch. We are an equal branch to that of the executive. 
For one branch of Government to say, wait a minute, the economy is bad 
and it is all the President's fault, I find kind of interesting. We 
have equal powers under the Constitution. Our powers are a little 
different. Maybe sometimes the President gets all the credit when 
things are good and all the fault when things are bad, but that is not 
quite accurate. Congress shares its portion of responsibility, whether 
it be good or bad.
  We have done a couple things that are good and some things that are 
bad. Maybe I will point out some of those differences.
  I find it interesting where one branch of Government is faulting the 
other and assuming that is really the solution. That is not the case.
  When the recession started, I remember the stock market crashing or 
falling dramatically in March of 2000. I believe President Clinton was 
President at that time, and the market continued to fall. It rebounded 
a little bit in August of 2000, and then it fell a lot more and has 
been falling since. If you look at the precipitous rise in the stock 
market, it probably had risen too much too fast, and so it had some 
falling out to do. It has fallen; I hope it has not fallen too much. 
Maybe now it has bottomed out and started to increase.
  Actually, the last few days have been very promising. If somebody 
just got into the market last Monday or Tuesday, they have made a 
remarkable rate of return in the last few days alone. I hope maybe the 
market has bottomed out. To say that is all President Bush's fault is 
incorrect.
  The Washington Post on October 25 said:

       To blame the weak American economy on Mr. Bush is nonsense.

  That is a direct quote from the Washington Post, which is not exactly 
President Bush's biggest cheerleader. But they happen to be right.
  Let me say, instead of just trying to throw rocks at the Bush 
administration, we should be looking at Congress. What can we do. I 
don't know that we can just pass a few bills and make everything rosy 
in the economy. Nor does everything we do have a negative impact. But I 
do believe we can make a difference.
  Some of the things we pass can help, and some of the things we don't 
pass can either help or hurt. I will mention those.
  I remember a person all of us respect, Chairman Greenspan. His 
recommendation, his advice to Congress was to do two things: Show some 
fiscal discipline and also do things that would stimulate trade. And we 
did pass a bill, trade promotion authority, this year. Due to President 
Bush's leadership, we did get it through the House and the Senate. It 
wasn't easy. It wasn't even pretty in some respects. But it passed both 
Houses. It passed the House by one vote; it passed the Senate by more 
than that after extraneous measures were put on that were not in the 
committee. That was not a good way to legislate. There were three bills 
combined into one. But we eventually did pass trade promotion 
authority. That was good. That will help the economy.
  On the second recommendation, Chairman Greenspan said show fiscal 
discipline. I give the White House high marks in many regards. I give 
Congress a very low grade. If I was going to grade Congress on fiscal 
discipline, the grade would be an F. I am critical. I am on the Budget 
Committee. I used to be on the Appropriations Committee. But for the 
first time since 1974, we didn't pass a budget. And we have shown no 
discipline whatsoever. As a matter of fact, for the last two or three 
Congresses, we have shown very little discipline, whether or not we had 
a budget. Even when we had a budget in the last 2 or 3 years of the 
Clinton administration, we continually waived it.
  If you are going to waive it by declaring things an emergency, or 
waive it and say it doesn't count, we basically had no budget. So as a 
result, we had Federal spending climbing and climbing dramatically. 
Total outlays increased, in the year we just completed, 2002, the 
fiscal year, by $148 billion. That is the largest percentage growth in 
spending programs in 20 years.
  Defense grew by 13 percent. I agree with that. We underfunded defense 
for many years. Unemployment comp grew by a staggering 72 percent. 
Medicaid grew by 13.2 percent, the fastest since 1992. Total outlays 
grew by 7.9 percent in fiscal year 2002. But if you exclude the 
decrease for net interest, spending grew by 11 percent last year, about 
3 times the rate of inflation. And then I look at some of the other 
things Congress did that affect spending. Now, we can control that. We 
control how much money we spend. We had a farm bill that was billions 
of dollars over what was budgeted. The trade adjustment assistance bill 
had $11 billion of new entitlement spending. We had an emergency 
supplemental bill that was $4 billion over the President's request. I 
could go on and on.

[[Page 20646]]

  There was $6 billion in drought assistance that--when we passed the 
farm bill that was so expensive, the proponents said we won't need to 
do drought assistance every year. Then we came back and, sure enough, 
Congress passes billions of dollars more. So my complaint is against 
Congress because, for the first time, we didn't pass a budget. Then 
because we didn't pass a budget, we didn't pass appropriations bills.
  This is embarrassing. Here we are in the new fiscal year and we have 
not sent the President any appropriations bills. By the end of this 
week, I think we will have sent the President two appropriations 
bills--2 out of 13, all of which are supposed to be done by the end of 
September. And here we are in the middle of October. Congress, on 
appropriations bills, deserves an ``F'' this year because we have not 
done a budget, and Congress deserves an ``F'' because we have not done 
one of our constitutional responsibilities, which is to pass 
appropriations bills on time.
  So I look at the Members of Congress who keep throwing rocks at the 
President, saying the economy is in bad shape. Yet what are we doing? 
Have we done our job? No. What else could Congress have done? What 
could the Senate have done? The House passed an energy bill and we 
spent 7 or 8 weeks on it and it is still stuck in conference. If we 
would have passed an energy bill that had allowed exploration in ANWR--
the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge--as the House did, we could create 
hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is still stuck, so the Congress has 
not passed an energy bill.
  We have not passed a reinsurance bill. It passed the House and the 
Senate, but we have not worked out the differences in conference, 
mainly because the Trial Lawyers Association wants to have the extended 
ability to sue victims of terrorism. So there are billions of dollars 
in construction projects being held hostage because Congress hasn't 
been able to pass antiterrorism insurance.
  The House passed pension reform months ago. The Senate Finance 
Committee--of which I am a member--I believe, passed pension reform 
unanimously in committee. We have not passed it on the floor of the 
Senate. I urge the majority leader to call that bill up. If you want to 
talk about 401(k)s, and we want to protect them, and pension plans, and 
so on, let's pass the bipartisan bill that passed out of the Finance 
Committee to lend some protection there.
  We have not moved to make permanent the tax cuts passed last year. I 
keep hearing people being critical of the tax bill that passed. They 
want to say that tax bill caused all the deficits. That is totally 
false. The real cause, or culprit, wasn't the tax cut; it is the fact 
of the failing economy. The economy is staggering. Income receipts are 
down, and it is not so much because of the tax cuts but because of the 
economy. So we need to turn the economy around and allow people to keep 
more of their own money. Let's make the tax cuts permanent.
  Some people say, no, let's increase taxes. Let's change the law. I 
don't think that is the remedy being advocated by many, but I don't 
think that is a very good solution.
  Then I heard our colleagues say we didn't pass a prescription drug 
bill. That is not our fault. The majority leader and the chairman of 
the Finance Committee never even had a markup on prescription drugs in 
the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over that issue. They 
pulled the bill up on the floor and we debated it for weeks, but we 
didn't pass a comprehensive bill to add prescription drugs as a benefit 
for Medicare because we didn't let the Senate work its will. We didn't 
have it marked up in committee. We didn't allow Members to proceed as 
we should.
  I mention those few things. We are getting close to election time, so 
they want to start throwing rocks at the President and criticizing him 
for the economy, without saying, what have we done? What has the Senate 
done? I might say we should be thankful for some things that we didn't 
do and what some of our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle 
wanted to do, or have tried to do, which, if they were successful, 
would have made the economy a lot worse.
  I will mention one: ergonomics standards. There was a regulation 
promulgated by the Clinton administration in the last day or two of his 
term in office called ergonomics standards, which would have cost the 
economy billions and billions of dollars. I saw one estimate that was 
up to $100 billion. It was going to have the Federal Government set up 
a Federal workers compensation system--I started to say ``scheme''--
that would have cost billions of dollars to regulate movement in the 
workplace. It had such ridiculous rules, such as you could not move 
over 50 pounds 20 times a day and all kinds of little rules on how OSHA 
is going to regulate business. Congress wisely stopped that regulation. 
That was good. Some people still want to pass that. It would have cost 
billions and billions.
  Some people say let's pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, which would 
increase everybody's health care costs. Actually, the Senate passed 
that a year ago in June. It is interesting to note that the House 
already passed it a year ago, but we have not even gone to conference 
on that bill--maybe for a good reason. That bill would greatly expand 
not only the right to sue the HMOs but also employers for providing 
health care insurance for their employees. The employers could be sued, 
and the net result would be that a lot of employers would drop their 
health care. That would hurt the economy, not help it.
  Some people say let's increase the minimum wage. That is one of the 
proposals many Democrats are pushing now--increase that by $1.50 over 
the next 14 months. That is almost a 30-percent increase. Oh, that is 
great. What if the business could not pay $6.65? What if this is 
somebody trying to help at a convenience store, and all they can afford 
to pay is $5, maybe $6 an hour? We are just going to say that is too 
bad; we would rather have you unemployed than to have a job like that. 
If you cannot pay $6.65, you are out of work.
  CAFE standards: On the energy bill, many Democrat colleagues say 
let's increase the CAFE standards for automobiles. That is great. We 
are going to make everybody drive a Volkswagen-type automobile. That is 
not very safe; that is not what consumers want. It would certainly be 
detrimental, and it would cost thousands of jobs.
  I mention these to say that there are two sides to the story. We are 
a little less than 3 weeks from the election and a lot of colleagues 
are saying: We want to throw rocks at the President, blame the 
President for the deficit. So we want to stop making permanent the tax 
cuts the President already passed; and, incidentally, we want to spend 
a whole lot more money. So they are against the deficits when it comes 
to taxes, but in favor of them when it comes to spending money. Whether 
you are talking about Medicare adjustments, drought assistance, 
unemployment compensation--which, in a moment, we will probably be 
debating--we are going to have a major expansion of unemployment 
compensation, more than double the Federal program that we have today. 
Some will possibly propose that. It only cost $17 billion. What 
difference does it make? We don't have a budget anyway. In other words, 
they don't care about the deficit when it comes to spending--only when 
it comes to the tax side.
  I say these things because I think it is important to move together 
and improve the economy. I think we can do it if Congress works 
together. We can take a lot of the measures the House passed and we can 
help the economy. If we would pass an energy bill, a reinsurance bill, 
pension reform, and if we would be responsible and pass a budget, pass 
appropriations bills that meet the budget guidelines, I think we could 
help the economy. I don't think we help the economy by making a bunch 
of political speeches and blaming everything on President Bush.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized.

[[Page 20647]]



                          ____________________