[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[November 12, 1996]
[Pages 2108-2111]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Signing the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act of 
1996 and an Exchange With Reporters
November 12, 1996

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, 
and to the members of the administration and especially to the large 
delegation of Members of Congress who are here from both parties. I 
thank you all for coming and for creating this legislation which will 
protect and expand the treasure of our national parks.
    This legislation affirms our solemn commitment to say, from one end 
of our Nation to the other, we will be good stewards of the land that 
God has given us. This bill will create or improve almost 120 parks, 
trails, rivers, historical sites in 41 of our 50 States.
    It turns the Presidio, a former military post in San Francisco, into 
a sanctuary of nature and history by establishing a nonprofit trust to 
manage the Presidio's property. It gives us a blueprint for national 
parks that one day will be able to sustain themselves without Government 
funds. I thank Senators Boxer and Feinstein and Representative Pelosi 
for their work on this.
    The legislation preserves the Sterling Forest on the New York-New 
Jersey border. This new park, just 40 miles from New York City, will put 
nature within reach of millions of families of all backgrounds. It will 
safeguard a watershed that provides clean drinking water for the people 
of New Jersey. It will show that a forest that was left for dead a 
century ago can be brought back to life and protected today. I thank 
Senator Bradley and Senator-elect Torricelli and Representative Hinchey 
especially for their work on this.
    The legislation will establish the Tallgrass Prairie National 
Preserve in Kansas. Four hundred thousand square miles of this prairie 
covered our continent when Lewis and Clark made their great journey. 
Today, only a tiny fraction of it remains. This bill will help to 
restore 11,000 acres of this uniquely American landscape with its 9-
foot-tall grass and rich plant and animal life. I'm pleased to say that 
it will also give the State of Kansas its very first national park. I 
thank Senator Kassebaum especially for her work on this, as well as 
Secretary Glickman, who supported this project when he was a Member of 
Congress.
    The legislation does much more. It establishes the Selma to 
Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, the 54-mile stretch of 
road that Dr. Martin Luther King walked in 1965 to remind Americans of 
how far we had to travel to live up to our ideals of equality and 
justice for all. And I thank, especially, the man who walked a lot of 
those miles with Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, for his leadership in 
that regard.
    This bill also gives us the resources to upgrade housing for Park 
Service employees. Many of these dedicated public servants have been 
spending their winters living in 30-year-old trailers that were supposed 
to last only one summer. That's going to change. I must say that one of 
the more rewarding aspects of being President has been visiting our 
national parks and getting to know the people who get up every day and 
put on the National Park Service uniform. It is amazing, the level of 
talent, training, and commitment those people bring to this job and the 
sacrifices, financial and other, that they're willing to accept to do 
the work that they love. But they deserve a better deal. And for the 
service they do to us, I thank the Congress for providing decent housing 
to them.
    I'm also proud of what this bill does not do. It no longer contains 
provisions that would have taken land away from Virginia's Shenandoah 
and Richmond Battlefield parks. It does not open the Sequoia National 
Park in California or the Red Rock region of Utah to development that I 
believe would be destructive.

[[Page 2109]]

    I also want to say, finally, that I hope we can see more legislation 
like this in the next 4 years. This bill is a model of how we ought to 
work together. This bill had strong Republican support; it had strong 
Democratic support. We said we were going to put our national treasures 
beyond partisan politics and put the people of America, their future, 
and their environment above that. And I was very gratified by it, and I 
want to say again to the Members here and to those who are not here who 
played a leading role in this legislation, it is a model of how 
democracy ought to work.
    So now I want to sign the bill. I want to say that I ask Congress to 
continue to work with me in this same spirit, to protect the 
environment, to strengthen the community right-to-know protections, to 
toughen punishment for polluters, to clean up two-thirds of the existing 
toxic waste sites by the year 2000. We can meet these challenges if we 
work together in the future, as we did to pass this terrific piece of 
legislation.
    Thank you very much.

[At this point, the President signed the legislation.]

Second Term Transition

    Q. Mr. President, how close are you to naming a new Secretary of 
State, and will former Senator George Mitchell be the nominee?
    The President. I haven't made a decision. I'm working on it. I'm 
working on a lot of appointments now, and I will do it when I'm ready to 
do it. It's a very important decision.

Bipartisanship

    Q. Mr. President, what will you say to the congressional leaders, 
especially the Republicans, when you meet with them this afternoon to 
encourage this idea of bipartisanship?
    The President. Well, I think the first thing I'd like to do is to--
it'll be the first chance I have to thank them in a room together for 
what happened in the last 6 or 8 weeks of the last Congress, where you 
had Senator Kassebaum and Senator Kennedy's bill pass, a number of some 
other health reform legislation passed. We had the minimum wage, small-
business pension, adoption tax credit legislation passed, the welfare 
reform legislation. It was a remarkable period of incredibly productive 
legislation, and that shows what we can do when we work together. And I 
would just encourage us to do that, beginning with balancing the budget 
and the campaign finance reform. But there are lots of other things we 
have to do. So, basically, today I just want to reaffirm my commitment 
to try to re-create that spirit and keep it going.

Health Care Reform

    Q. Sir, Senator Lott, in particular, has said he would like what 
amounts to almost an admission from you and from the Democrats that 
using words like ``cut,'' ``slash,'' ``wreck'' referring to Medicare in 
the ads was, as they put it, demagoguery and unfair. They want you to 
set the record straight, so to speak. Will you cooperate?
    The President. Well, I didn't read what he said exactly in that way. 
I think the--what we objected to, I don't think that it was going to 
come back again anyway. The $270 billion option is not there and no 
longer needed, which is one of the problems with our budgeting process. 
You know, the inflation rate in health care has come down so much 
because of the increase in competition and efficiency that no one any 
longer believes that we need to do that again, I don't believe.
    So the question is whether we can basically take up where we left 
off, where the differences between us were smaller. And I think that's 
just the--we'll just have to talk about how to do that.
    Senator Lott, to be fair to him, has got to have time to meet with--
he's got some new Members. He's got to have time to meet with his caucus 
to develop a strategy. I think we'll be working together on this. I 
certainly hope we will.
    Q. Mr. President, do you have any views on----

Bipartisanship

    Q. Wasn't this remarkable period really driven by the fact that 
there was an election coming up and that Republicans didn't want to be 
perceived----
    The President. It does, and I'll compare it to mine. It may have 
been driven by that. But the point is, the people ratified what was 
done, you know. There is no way to read the election results as they 
came out as a repudiation of the last 2 months of the last Congress. It 
clearly has to be seen as a ratification of the last 2 months of the 
last Congress and what was done.

[[Page 2110]]

    And so it shouldn't take--you know, I'm not always as quick on the 
uptake as I ought to be, but it shouldn't take me another year and a 
half to figure that out. I have a fresh memory of what happened, and I 
think that's the way the Members will receive it as well.
    Q. Trent Lott says the first move is up to you on Medicare. Are you 
ready to make the first move?
    The President. Under the rules, I have to present a budget, and I'm 
certainly prepared to present a budget. But in the end, we will still 
have to reconcile. You know, we don't want to get into that--I don't 
agree with every characterization that was put on our economic program 
in 1993; I think that's why we're in the shape we're in today. We've got 
that interest rate down, went forward. But there's no point in us going 
back and litigating what we thought of each other's programs that we 
didn't agree with. We need to focus on how we can reach agreement now.
    We're in this boat together and we have to paddle it together. And 
that's what the American people want. We've got to remember that the 
American people are in the boat with us, and we're not nearly as 
important as they are and their future. And so it's time for us to each 
pick up our paddle and row. And I think that's what we'll wind up doing.

Balanced Budget Amendment

    Q. Mr. President, would you consider supporting a balanced budget 
amendment, given the change in the Republican Senate?
    The President. Do I expect the Congress to support it?
    Q. Well, no. Would you consider supporting it, given the change in 
the Senate now?
    The President. You know, my problems with it always were--you know, 
I lived under one as a Governor, and we produced 12 balanced budgets, 
and I'm trying to get back to a balanced budget system here.
    My problems with a constitutional amendment were always more a 
question of how to manage the larger economic problems of the country. 
The Nation's budget is different from a State, and I just want to make 
sure that if we have one, it needs to be clear in terms of how--and it 
needs to really give us the possibility of dealing with a recession. You 
don't want to wind up with a Congress someday in a recession raising 
taxes or throwing unemployed people off health care because they're 
trying to get to a balanced budget. Then you could actually wind up 
making the deficit worse.
    If it sets a framework and says that in the 21st century in the 
economy we're going to be living in, other things being equal, we ought 
always to be balancing our books, I agree with that. I just don't think 
you--we may tie our hands more than we will achieve. So what I'm going 
to focus my energies on is getting the balanced budget. I don't have a 
vote in the Congress. My voice counts, presumably, but I don't have a 
vote. But I do have the responsibility to help the American people get 
the balanced budget, and that's what I'm going to focus my energies on.
    Q. So you don't reject the amendment out of hand?
    The President. Well, what I--I don't believe we need it, and it 
can't be an excuse--for a long time I was afraid it would be an excuse 
to throw the burden on somebody else by the Congress, because by 
definition you have to have it down the road. It takes awhile to ratify. 
But my belief is that you--I don't believe that we need it, but if we 
have it, it ought to be able to be implemented in a way that actually 
works and gives the country what it needs to manage a recession because, 
you know, we won't always have--someday down the road we'll have another 
bad patch in the economy. I mean, we just know that's going to happen.
    You know, you don't have--no one has a total trouble-free life; no 
country has a trouble-free economy. Someday down the road--and we just 
don't want an amendment to wind up making our recession worse and 
causing us to do things that are counterproductive that you would never 
do in a recession. In a recession you would never raise taxes, and you 
wouldn't throw people who are unemployed through no fault of their own 
off of health care eligibility because you were trying to balance the 
budget.
    So that's the only thing I'm--if the escape hatch is good, then 
we'll manage it the best way we can. The American people--we're a very 
practical people. We'll find a way to deal with the amendment if the 
amendment--the thing I want us to do is, if you look at this global 
economy, look how much more economic activity was generated in America 
when we lowered the deficit and lowered interest rates, and it totally 
overwhelmed the contractionary effects of reducing the deficit by 
holding spending

[[Page 2111]]

down. And we would be better off in this kind of economy always 
targeting a balanced budget unless there is a substantial recession, in 
which case we don't want to raise taxes on people when they don't have 
as much money as they should anyway. That's what I'm worried about.
    So that's why I'm telling you I'm going to be working on putting a 
balanced budget in there. If we get it, if we can get the Congress to 
pass a plan that will achieve that, we'll have the desired economic 
effect, short term and long term, and then whatever happens with the 
amendment will happen.
    Q. Thank you, Mr. President.
    The President. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 10:18 a.m. in the Oval Office at the White 
House. H.R. 4236, approved November 12, was assigned Public Law No. 104-
333.