[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
[November 5, 1993]
[Pages 1904-1906]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Establishing the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement Reform 
and an Exchange With Reporters
November 5, 1993

    The President. First of all, I want to thank the leaders of Congress 
who are here and make a couple of comments, if I might. I am delighted 
that now both Houses have acted on the crime legislation. I congratulate 
the House and the Senate, and I look forward to working with them on 
getting the strongest possible crime bill out we can and hopefully 
meeting that goal that I have had for a long time now of putting another 
100,000 police officers on the street, which I am convinced will do more 
in less time to lower the crime rate than anything else. I also hope 
that we can now move forward to a debate in the Senate and the House on 
the Brady bill. I hope that it will pass before the Senate goes home and 
the House goes home.
    Finally, let me make one other preliminary comment. During all the 
debates on the budget, many of which were acrimonious and partisan, 
there was virtually 100 percent understanding on the part of every 
Member of Congress that, over the long run, our ability to bring our 
budget closer to balance and to free up money for needed investments 
required us to take a hard look at the entitlements part of our budget.
    The budget that we have just adopted has been very successful in 
many ways. It's helped to bring interest rates to historically low 
levels. We've got investment coming back into the country. We have more 
jobs coming back in. But we don't have the money to invest in new 
ventures that might be important to our national defense or to our 
economic growth and that's because we had to adopt steep defense cuts 
and a hard freeze on domestic spending for 5 years while the entitlement 
growth continued unchecked.
    As a result of that, today I am establishing by Executive order a 
bipartisan commission to look into the issue of entitlements of our 
Government, how it works and what's the impact on the budget long-term, 
as well as into the general tax structure of the Federal Government. I 
want to acknowledge and thank the

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leaders, Republican and Democrat, of the House and the Senate for 
agreeing to support this Commission and name members to it. Two-thirds 
of the members will be appointed by the congressional leadership on a 
strictly bipartisan basis. I will appoint a third.

    And then I want to give special attention to two Members of the 
Congress who have worked on this very hard. One is Senator Kerrey, who 
had the idea for this Commission, and I intend to name him the Chair. 
The other is Senator Danforth of Missouri, who is in his last term but 
has been interested in the entitlement issue for a very long time, and I 
have asked him to serve as the Vice Chair. We will be naming the rest of 
the Commission in the fairly near future. But I'm hopeful that this 
Commission, by next spring, will be able to do some work which will 
chart a future for the Congress and for the country, which will enable 
us to do the people's business up here and keep the country moving 
forward into the 21st century.

    So I thank all the leadership for their willingness to support this. 
And I'm going to sign the Executive order and then we'll answer a few 
questions and get on with our meeting, because there's a vote in the 
Senate.

[At this point, the President signed the Executive order.]

NAFTA Television Debate

    Q. Mr. President, why are you putting the Vice President up against 
the king of the one-liners? Aren't you sacrificing a political career 
here?

    The President. Let me say this, I certainly appreciate the way you 
characterized it. If we get an honest discussion of the issues, the Vice 
President will do just fine because he's an accomplished debater and, 
more importantly, because he's got the evidence on his side. I 
understand why Mr. Perot wanted to have a rally packed with people that 
he could get there who already had their minds made up against NAFTA. 
But I think the Vice President's issued the challenge to show up in 
Florida and have Larry King moderate the debate. And if we get a genuine 
discussion of the issues, I'm very confident that he'll do fine. It was 
his idea; I've got to compliment him. It wasn't mine. Wasn't it?

    The Vice President. Absolutely----

    Q. Why do you feel it's necessary to take on Ross Perot to do what 
many people would consider sinking to his level?

    The President. Why are you sinking to his level, Mr. Vice President? 
[Laughter] Why did you want to do that?

    The Vice President. I think the country does this from a discussion 
of the facts about NAFTA. What we're finding is that a whole lot of 
people in the Congress say, ``We agree with you on the facts, but we're 
getting a lot of political pressure on the other side. Is there any way 
that you can get the facts out to a wider audience?'' And I think the 
discussion of what NAFTA really does--it creates new jobs in America. 
The volume of our products being shipped to Mexico has been increasing 
twice as fast as the volume of their goods being shipped here. The more 
discussion of the facts, the better.

    Q. Are you going to do one debate or three, Mr. Vice President?

    The Vice President. Well, I've contacted Larry King and said that--
first of all, I issued this challenge; he accepted and proposed Florida. 
I said I'll be there on Sunday. I contacted Larry King. And we want a 
neutral format and a neutral place. I don't want to go to a rally filled 
with 20,000 people on one side of the issue. He was generous to say that 
he would buy the television time. Well, let's let Larry King provide the 
television time.

    Senator Mitchell. Why don't you pay for the television time?

    The Vice President. I considered that--[laughter]--I considered just 
picking up the tab.

    Q. Mr. President, aren't you the slightest bit concerned, not the 
least bit worried?

    The President. No. We're making progress on NAFTA. I feel good about 
it. And what we find is that if people--I went yesterday, when he was 
having a press conference saying I wouldn't answer questions from 
ordinary workers. I was with a thousand ordinary working people in 
Kentucky answering their questions. They were good questions, good, 
firm, hard questions. But I just believe that this is one of those 
issues where the truth will set you free. I think the more people know, 
the more they'll be for it.

    We have confidence. The Vice President, actually, when he went on 
David Letterman, I

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knew that he could stick up Ross Perot on one-liners, right? So, that's 
it.

    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:44 a.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White 
House. The Executive order is listed in Appendix D at the end of this 
volume.