[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 542-543]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              CIVIL RIGHTS

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I first want to offer a few comments 
about the very important birthday of the greatest civil rights leader 
of our time, Dr. Martin Luther King, and give some thoughts about the 
issue of civil rights and our commitment to equal opportunities for all 
Americans.
  Obviously, we need to continue to fight to protect the rights of all 
Americans by supporting and ensuring full implementation of the 
antidiscrimination laws. But we also need to ensure that programs 
designed to create equal opportunity for all groups and for all 
individuals in our society in critical areas such as education and 
health care are fully implemented.
  I believe an important test of our commitment to equality is an 
examination of the broader policy choices we make and the priorities we 
set as we allocate Federal dollars.
  We have heard a great deal from the administration, and continue to, 
about their championing of minorities and the disadvantaged. But, 
unfortunately, there seems to me to be a pattern of shortchanging the 
programs and the policy initiatives that are most meaningful to those 
very groups, at least those groups as I visit with them in my home 
State.
  In the context of education--which the Presiding Officer is extremely 
well versed in--the administration's position has embraced the 
Children's Defense Fund slogan, which is: We Should Leave No Child 
Behind.
  Last Congress, on a bipartisan basis, we enacted the No Child Left 
Behind Act which, for the first time, demands that our educational 
system demonstrate progress for all children by closing existing 
achievement gaps. I believe the accountability provisions in that law 
can have a revolutionary

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impact on our educational system and can bring us a great distance 
toward ensuring equal educational opportunities for all children.
  But we need to back up these mandates and these requirements by 
working in partnership with State and local governments to provide the 
resources the schools and the teachers need to help all of our children 
to succeed. And I do not believe we have seen a real commitment to do 
that from this administration.
  The pending fiscal year 2003 budget, which we are getting ready to 
debate, even as soon as this afternoon, underfunds the No Child Left 
Behind Act by $7 billion. The President included a small increase from 
the title I program--the program targeted to districts and schools with 
large numbers of disadvantaged students--but even with this increase, 
the program remains underfunded by $5 billion. The proposed funding 
level will not be sufficient to keep pace with the growth in child 
poverty. It will mean over 6 million poor children will be left behind.
  In addition, the President's budget zero funds programs that are 
targeted at assisting minority groups. One of those is the dropout 
prevention program which we wrote into that law.
  The dropout rate for Hispanic students in this country is almost 
three times that for non-Hispanic white students. Most recent data--
1999 through 2000--shows a dropout rate among white non-Hispanic 
students of 10 percent; among Hispanic students, just over 27 percent. 
These children are being left behind. Yet despite bipartisan agreement 
during the negotiations on the No Child Left Behind Act to include this 
program, to include this initiative at the Federal level, to assist 
with dropout prevention efforts in our high schools and in our middle 
schools, the administration has proposed zero funding for the program. 
They propose zero funding in the 2003 fiscal year budget, which we are 
going to be debating later today or tomorrow; and I fear they may 
propose zero funding for the dropout prevention program in the new 
budget we see at the beginning of February.
  The refusal to fund this program is an even greater problem in light 
of the new focus on student performance and assessment. The increased 
focus on assessments has led many to fear dropout rates will increase 
as States strive to meet their academic performance goals. There is a 
danger that kids who are not doing well on tests will be the ones most 
likely to drop out. We tried to address the issue by including a 
provision in the new law that requires schools to show that increased 
test scores do not come at the expense of increased dropout rates. But 
the administration's recent regulations interpreting the new law gut 
this protection by allowing schools to claim progress even if dropout 
rates for some groups increase.
  If we truly intend to leave no child behind--and I do believe there 
was good faith in the effort to put this bill together--educational 
funding, particularly funding for programs such as this I have just 
discussed that are targeted toward the most disadvantaged children--and 
this includes a disproportionately large number of minorities--these 
programs need to be our top priority, not our lowest priority.
  We also see misconceived priorities in the area of health care. The 
Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences said in a 
report they issued.
  [A] large body of published research reveals that racial and ethnic 
minorities experience a lower quality of health services, and are less 
likely to receive even routine medical procedures than are white 
Americans.
  One of the number of recommendations the report made--and has been 
ignored, thus far, by the administration--is the recommendation to 
ensure public health care payors--that means Medicaid and the 
Children's Health Insurance Program, specifically--that the health 
beneficiaries of those programs are brought to the same level in their 
benefits as those who get their benefits through the private sector.
  In the area of providing coverage to low-income pregnant women, the 
administration first supported and then turned its back on a bipartisan 
approach to cover low-income pregnant women with access to the full 
array of prenatal, delivery, and postpartum care that is typical in the 
private sector. This bipartisan effort--Senator Bond was very involved 
in this, as were other Senators on both the Republican side and 
Democratic side--the bipartisan effort would improve the outcomes of 
deliveries for both pregnant women and their children, particularly 
among racial and ethnic minorities who are disproportionately enrolled 
in these public sector programs.
  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, 
African American women have mortality rates over four times higher than 
that of non-Hispanic whites. American Indian/Alaska Natives, Asian/
Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic women have mortality rates 67 percent, 
55 percent, and 41 percent, respectively, that are higher than non-
Hispanic whites.
  To address this problem, we have pushed to provide States the option 
to provide comprehensive coverage to pregnant women, including 
lifesaving postpartum care through the CHIP program. The Bush 
administration has decided to reject that approach and, instead, 
proposed a regulation that does not provide comprehensive coverage such 
as postpartum care to pregnant women. The administration has chosen, 
instead, to pursue an ideological agenda with respect to women's health 
and abortion rather than to address this most basic health issue for 
women and infants.
  There are other areas that show a lack of commitment to equal 
opportunity for Americans. For example, the administration alleges it 
wants to eliminate poverty through progressive welfare-to-work 
policies. I heard the President yesterday indicating his desire that 
people work 40 hours a week. I favor requiring people to work whatever 
is reasonable, but we have seen great resistance from the 
administration in our efforts to increase child care funding, which is 
essential for the mothers we are now requiring to go to work. We need 
to see that that issue is adequately addressed. And the administration 
needs to support our efforts to increase child care funding as part of 
any reauthorization of the welfare legislation.
  There has been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the 
unfairness and inequities in the tax proposal of the administration and 
how that is clearly skewed to help the wealthy and not to help the 
average American of whatever racial or ethnic background.
  In the area of pension reform, again, minorities are less likely to 
work for an employer that offers a retirement plan. We need to do 
something significant to try to expand pension coverage in this 
country. That is a great failing. Well over half of the private sector 
employees in my State do not have pension coverage, and that is an 
issue that needs addressing as much as anything else in the pension 
area.
  To summarize my views, we need to provide equal access to high 
quality education, equal access to adequate health care, and to child 
care. We need to support equitable tax policies. That is what is 
essential if we are going to support equity and equality and really 
follow through on the rhetoric which we hear related to the birthday of 
Martin Luther King.

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