John Ashcroft

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I send two amendments to the desk and I ask unanimous consent they be considered as having been offered individually.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, today I would like to congratulate a Missourian who has dedicated his life to helping others. He has spent his entire career in the medical field, not as a doctor, but as someone just as dedicated and just as committed to service. Mr. Kruse is soon to accept the Hope Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Multiple Sclerosis Society. He has served as a hospital administrator, vice president, and president; but throughout, Mr. Kruse has never forgotten those who are less fortunate. Mr. Kruse was born on February 9, 1944, in the small midwestern town of Lake City, IA. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration and psychology from Augustana College in Sioux City, SD, and went on to earn his master's degree in hospital administration from the University of Minnesota. Mr. Kruse started his career first as an assistant administrator at the St. Barnabas Hospital in Minneapolis, MN, then became an associate administrator at the Metropolitan Medical Center in Minneapolis where he remained for 7 years serving as the vice president of community operations. In 1977, Mr. Kruse assumed the responsibilities as president and CEO of the Park Ridge Hospital and Nursing Home in Rochester, NY, and later president and CEO of Upstate Health System, Inc. in Rochester. In 1984, Mr. Kruse returned to his roots in the Midwest, serving as the president and CEO [[Page S 12831]] of Heartland Health System in St. Joseph, MO, for the past 10 years. While Mr. Kruse has continued to strive for success, he has never turned his back on others in his community. In New York, he was a member of the Greater Rochester Area Citizens League Board, the United Way, and the board of directors of the Rochester Area Career Educational Council. In Missouri, he has served as chairman of the St. Joseph Development Corp., as well as chairman of the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce, and is currently a fellow at the American College of Health Care Executives. These are just a few of the many contributions Mr. Kruse has made to fulfill his commitment and dedication to the communities in which he has lived. Mr. Kruse has been the recipient of numerous awards for his devotion to community service. In 1970, he was listed as one the outstanding young men in America. In 1976, Mr. Kruse was awarded a Distinguished Service Award and honored as one of 10 outstanding young Minnesotans. In 1992, Mr. Kruse received the Midland Empire Arthritis Center's William E. Hillyard Jr. Humanitarian Award. Throughout his career, Mr. Kruse has dedicated his life to helping and inspiring those around him. It is clear from his achievements that he is truly committed to making a difference in the lives of many. Mr. Kruse is a great humanitarian who has given his time graciously, caring for those who have been stricken by life threatening diseases. I am grateful for his service and commend him for his dedication to helping others, not just in Missouri, but across America.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will proceed to a period for routine morning business not to extend beyond 10:30 a.m., with Senators permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes, with the exception of Senator McCain, who is to be recognized for up to 30 minutes. At 10:30 a.m., the Senate will resume consideration of the welfare bill, and the time between 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. is equally divided between the two managers. At 3:30 p.m., Senator Daschle will be recognized for up to 15 minutes to be followed by 15 minutes under the control of Senator Dole. At 4 p.m., a rollcall vote will occur on the Daschle amendment to the welfare bill. Additional amendments are expected to be offered following the disposition of the Daschle amendment. Therefore, votes can be expected into the evening in order to make progress on the welfare bill. I call this to the attention of the Senate for purposes of restating this agreed-upon procedure.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, it is a pleasure to rise today and discuss an opportunity to provide relief from many of the threats to the safety, security, and well-being of those individuals who populate our urban centers. Our cities today, especially our inner cities, have become areas of hopelessness and decay and despair. Consider these facts: America's urban areas suffer a murder every 22 minutes, a robbery every 49 seconds, and an aggravated assault every 30 seconds. In a survey of first and second graders in Washington, DC, 31 percent reported having witnessed a shooting, 39 percent said they had seen dead bodies. In addition, 40 percent of low-income parents worried a lot about their children being shot, compared to 10 percent of all parents who worry about their children being shot; 1 out of every 24 black males in this Nation, 1 out of every 24 black males in America, will have his life ended by a homicide. A report in The New England Journal of Medicine stated that a young black man living in Harlem is less likely to live until the age of 40 than a young man in Bangladesh, perhaps the poorest country on Earth. These are tragedies too great to comprehend. The roots of these pathologies are varied. They are partly cultural, partly economic, and partly social. Many people are born, live, and die without ever knowing what it is like to have a job, to feed a family, and to fulfill their dreams. In a number of the high schools in central cities, for example, the dropout rate rises as high as 80 percent. In 1990, 81 percent of young high school dropouts living in distressed urban areas were unemployed. In that same year, more than 40 percent of all adult men in the distressed inner cities of America did not work, while a significant number worked only sporadically or part time. Today, half of all residents of distressed neighborhoods live below the federally defined poverty threshold--in 1993, $14,763 for a family of four. Why do we have these problems in our inner cities? Well, as I have indicated, there are a variety of reasons. But I submit that one of the significant reasons for all of these facts is what I would call a ``regulatory redlining'' of our urban centers--a series of pervasive regulations promulgated by a variety of agencies that have literally driven jobs from the center of America's urban environments. As a matter of fact, the older the site is, the longer there has been industry, the longer there has been manufacturing, and the longer there has been industrial activity, the less likely the site is to qualify with and escape from the kind of onerous regulations which drive away jobs in these settings. As well meaning as many regulations may have been, the reality is that they have destroyed opportunity in our inner cities. There is a great debate about regulation and the regulatory burden in America. But the people who live in our inner cities bear not only their portion of the $600 billion in regulatory costs that are built into our products, they also experience and sustain a cost of regulation which is substantially higher in many circumstances. It is a cost of lost opportunity. It is a cost of poor health. It is a cost of the lack of personal security and safety. It is truly a major challenge. I have spoken on the Senate floor of situations in both Kansas City and St. Louis MO where Federal regulations designed to protect health and safety actually hurt Missouri's cities by essentially prohibiting new jobs while simultaneously forcing existing jobs from the city. Every large city has countless numbers of similar stories. Regulations, in particular environmental regulations, have attached so much liability to older industrial sites [[Page S 12375]] that, in many instances, these properties now have a negative market value--you'd have to pay someone else to take them. As a result, industries are headed for suburban and rural lands unspoiled by older industrial development. Tired of wading through open-ended regulations and liability laws that hold anyone even remotely responsible for cleanup costs, industries are moving to greener pastures. Perhaps Kathy Milberg, executive director of the Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision Project, says it best: You've got industries building all these nice clean plants in our suburbs * * * while environmentalists are telling us we can't build--in the cities--because we don't have a pristine environment. We've got to stabilize this neighborhood economically as well as environmentally. * * * They talk about environmental justice, but where's the justice when the suburbs are getting all the new factories and new jobs while we're stuck with a bunch of fences covered with ``Do not trespass'' signs? The rules and regulations that she laments make sense in certain areas, but frankly, the statistics tell us that the inhabitants of our urban centers are at far greater risk of the kind of lead poisoning that comes from a .38 than they are from the environmental concerns that drive so many jobs from the inner cities. We have to find a way to bring jobs back into our cities. The risks associated with unemployment are enormous--far greater than the risks associated with a door that may be 36 instead of 38 inches wide, or that do not comply with a particular statute. The risk of being shot in a drive-by shooting is much more pressing and demanding and challenging than the risk of being contaminated by impure dirt beneath a parking lot. Under the guise of noise abatement, we have merely exchanged the sounds of productivity for the sounds of silent factories. The crack of cocaine has been the only sound of productivity in our cities' centers. The wail of a family in the wake of a siren, the echoing clang of a cell door--those are the principal sounds of our inner cities. We need a common sense approach to risk in our inner cities. We literally have a substantial group of people in this country at the core of our urban centers and in our cities, whose opportunities have been diminished, whose safety has been impaired, whose health has been undermined, whose security has been threatened, and whose longevity has been shortened because of well-meaning but misapplied regulations. Our challenge is to find a way to make our urban centers places where people can thrive again. That is why I am introducing The Urban Regulatory Relief Zone Act of 1995. The goal of the bill is this: to give the residents, government, and businesses of inner city areas the opportunity to restore their towns by reducing the often silly and senseless regulations that currently burden them. This bill will provide an opportunity for the mayor of a city, any city over 200,000, to appoint an Economic Development Commission which could assess rules and regulations which they believe impair the health, safety and well-being of their residents by keeping jobs out of the area; and to weigh whether or not waiving those regulations could give rise to an influx of opportunity which would provide an improvement in the health, an improvement in the security, an improvement in the education, and an improvement in the longevity of the individuals in that zone. These Economic Development Commissions will give all members of the community the opportunity to participate and work closely with one another to bring about real change and progress in the community. These Economic Development Commissions could then apply for modification or waiver of those rules. The Office of Management and Budget will process these requests and forward them to the appropriate Federal agencies. Ultimately we give the agencies the deference they deserve, and allow them to deny a waiver or modification request if the agency decides that the granting of the waiver would create a significant threat to human health and safety. I believe, however that the Economic Development Commissions will be able to readily identify those rules and regulations which prevent growth while achieving little or no benefit to the community. We have to give cities a chance to say to individuals: You can come in here, you don't have to be responsible for all the past sins of industry here; you don't have to make sure the dirt under your parking lot is so clean that it could be eaten by an individual for his or her entire 70 years of existence. We want to have jobs here because we know that an employed person is safer than an unemployed person; that an employed person is healthier than an unemployed person; that where there is economic vitality and industry, there is a far greater chance that the young people will persist in their education, avoiding the dropout situation; and will upgrade what happens in our very inner cities. The isolation of the distressed urban areas I have referred to conflicts with our national ideals. Equality of opportunity is a fundamental principle of American society and a right of all Americans. Extreme differences in the range of life chances between persons of one segment of American society and another, one racial or ethnic group and another, or one part of an urban area and another conflict harshly with this ethical standard. I believe the persistence of distressed urban areas is dangerous to America's future. Mr. President, I thank you for the opportunity. It is my sincere belief that the Urban Regulatory Relief Zone Act which I introduce today can restore a sense of hope and real benefits in terms of economic opportunity and improved health and safety to our inner cities. I hope that we will have the good judgment to share with the people of the United States the opportunity to make sound decisions about improving the standing of those who are at peril in our inner cities, the core of our largest urban centers. I hope that we will give them the opportunity to get relief when that relief will increase their likelihood for safety, for health, for security, for productivity and for longevity. I hope that we will give them the opportunity to get relief when that relief will increase their likelihood for safety, for health, for security, for productivity, and for longevity. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I call my colleagues' attention to an important addition to the debate concerning preferential policies in America. Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp recently published in the Washington Post an article that I believe goes to the heart of our troubles with affirmative action. Mr. Kemp first notes that affirmative action based on racial quotas and racial preferences is ``wrong in principle and ruinous in practice.'' He goes on to issue a call for policymakers to come forward with truly positive proposals--affirmative efforts--to replace it. Mr. Kemp has spent his public career valiantly fighting for an opportunity society. In this article, he continues that fight, arguing for school vouchers, tax and regulatory reforms, and other programs aimed at giving every American the chance to work for a decent education and a decent job in our free market economy. Mr. President, I commend Secretary Kemp's article to all our colleagues. In conjunction with Senator Lieberman, I will be presenting legislation in a few weeks aimed at furthering the cause of equal opportunity. By reducing taxes and regulations, particularly in distressed areas denoted enterprise zones, this bill will encourage economic opportunity. By providing for school choice in these same areas it will promote educational opportunities. In sum, it is an attempt to make the opportunity society a reality, particularly for America's inner cities and other distressed areas. I request that the following be entered into the Record: [From the Washington Post, Aug. 6, 1995] Affirmative Action: The ``Radical Republican'' Example (By Jack Kemp) The scene is Washington: a Republican President, new to the White House, defiantly throwing down the gauntlet to a Republican Congress, saying he will veto any bill that proposes to do more for ``black Americans'' than for ``whites.'' This is not some fast-forward vision of 1997 and the first days of a new Republican White House. It's a flashback to 1866. The agency to be vetoed was the Freedman's Bureau, established in President Lincoln's administration to ``affirmatively'' assist the recently emancipated African Americans. The president--Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor--worried that any ``affirmative action'' would hurt the white population by specifically helping ``Negroes.'' I offer this page from history not to prove once again that politically, there is not much new under the sun but to illustrate that the issues of race and equality are woven into the essence of our American experience. While our present-day passions on the subject of affirmative action open old wounds, they also summon us to moral leadership of Lincolnesque proportions. Thus far the summons goes unanswered by both liberals and conservatives alike. The [[Page S 12307]] unreconstructed liberal notion of endless racial reparations and race- based preferences is doubly guilty: wrong in principle and ruinous in practice. President Clinton's much-vaunted affirmative action review produced more of a bumper sticker than a policy; Clinton's focus-group-fashioned ``mend it, not end it'' slogan makes a far better rhyme than reason. The same, however, is true of the new affirmative action ``abolitionist'' position, which heralds equality but seldom addresses the way to truly give all people an equal footing. Critics are right in asserting that ``affirmative action'' quotas have contributed to the poisoning of race relations in this country. But critics must offer much more than just opposition and reproach. We know what they are against, but what are they for? ``A colorblind society,'' comes their response. Of course, the goal of equal opportunity is paramount and a worthy destiny to seek. But to say that we have arrived at that goal is simply not true. My friends on the right call for a colorblind society and then quote Martin Luther King's inspirational ``I have a dream'' speech, in which he imagined a nation in which every American would be judged not on the color of his or her skin but on the ``content of his character.'' All too often, though, they neglect to quote the end of his speech, where he describes the painful plight of minority America: ``The Negro,'' King said, ``lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.'' Much has changed in the 30 years since King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Minority enterprises have begun to gain a foothold, although there are far too few of them. But can anyone venture to the crumbling brick and mortar of Cabrini Green Public Housing, or the fear-ridden projects of Bed-Stuy or the streets lined with the unemployed in South Central LA or East St. Louis and believe that what he sees there today would pass as progress since Dr. King's day? This is not to negate the gains made by so many in the black and minority communities. But for large numbers the situation has not only not improved in 30 years, it has grown dramatically worse--with a welfare system that entraps rather than empowers, punishes work and marriage and prevents access to capital, credit and property. Reality requires that we admit two things--difficult admissions for both liberals and conservatives. First, that a race conscious policy of quotas and rigid preferences has helped make matters worse. Second, and more important, the Good Shepherd reminds all of us that our work is not done, and as we think about moving into the 21st century, we must not leave anyone behind. Sound policy begins with strong principles. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong--wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty. Counting by race in order to remedy past wrongs or rewarding special groups by taking from others perpetuates and even deepens the divisions between us. But race-based politics is even more wrong and must be repudiated by men and women of civility and compassion. Instead, like the ``radical Republicans'' of Lincoln's day, who overrode President Johnson's veto on the Freedman's Bureau, we would honor the past by creating a future more in keeping with our revolutionary founding ideals of equality. In this way, the eventual ending of affirmative action is only a beginning--the political predicate of a new promise of outreach in the name of greater opportunity for access to capital, credit, prosperity, jobs and educational choice for all. The time has definitely come for a new approach an ``affirmative action'' based not just on gender or race or ethnicity but ultimately based on need. ``Affirmative'' because government authority must be employed to remove the obstacles to upward mobility and human advancement. ``Action'' because democratic societies must act positively and create real equality of opportunity--without promising equality of reward. Affirmative opportunity in America begins with education, America's schools, particularly our urban public schools, are depriving minority and low-income children of the education that may be their passport out of poverty. Even the poorest parent must have the option more affluent families enjoy; the right to send their children to the school of their choice. Affirmative effort means ending the educational monopoly that makes poor public school students into pawns of the educational bureaucracy. And we should be paving the way to a voucher and magnet school system of public and private school choice. Opportunity means an entryway into the job market. That mean removing barriers for job creation and entrepreneurship and expanding access to capital and credit. According to the Wall Street Journal, from 1982 to 1987, the number of black- owned firms increased by nearly 38 percent, about triple the overall business growth rate during that period. Hispanic- owned businesses soared by 57 percent, and their sales nearly tripled. Even so, of the 14 million small businesses in existence across the United States today, fewer than 2 percent are black-owned. And of $27 to $28 trillion of capital in this country, less than one percent is in black ownership. Affirmative effort would take aim at expanding capital and credit as the lifeblood of business formation and job creation--including an aggressive effort to end the red- lining of our inner cities and a radical redesign of our tax code to remove barriers to broader ownership of capital, savings and credit. Opportunity means the ability to accumulate property. Affirmative effort would mean an end to every federal program that penalizes the poor for managing to save and accumulate their own assets. An AFDC mother's thrift and foresight in putting money away for a child's future should not be penalized by the government welfare system as fraud as is currently the case. Finally, real opportunity for racial and ethnic reconciliation requires an expanding economy--one that invites the effort and enterprise of all Americans, including minorities and women. A real pro-growth policy must include policies ranging from enterprise zones in our cities to a commitment to lowering barriers to global trade. It should also offer relief from red tape and regulation and freedom from punitive tax policies. Each is part of an affirmative action that can ``move America forward without leaving anyone behind.'' Now that we have opened a somewhat hysterical dialogue on affirmative action, we can never go back--only forward. Our challenge is to put aside the past--abandon the endless round of recrimination and a politics that feeds on division, exclusion, anger and envy. We must reaffirm, as Lincoln did at his moment of maximum crisis, a vision of the ``better angels of our nature,'' a big-hearted view of the nation we were always meant to become and must become if we are to enter the 21st century as the model of liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism the world needs to see.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate continue with debate only with the pending welfare bill until 7:30 this evening.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Consistent with our informal arrangement to go back and forth between the sides, I yield now to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate continue with debate only on the pending welfare bill until 6:30 this evening.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I want to take this opportunity to make some comments on the question of welfare reform. We have awaited this discussion for months, weeks. We are finally confronting the issue of welfare. And there is much agreement, and there is much disagreement. My colleague on the other side of the aisle just said that one of the reforms we have will put children in the street. Mr. President, the reason we are concerned about reform is that children's lives are being ruined. The real tragedy of welfare is not the tragedy to be found in numbers. It is not the tragedy to be found in how much this system costs. It is not a tragedy about the share of the Nation's output that welfare occupies or how much money the various competing welfare reform bills would save. This debate properly understood is not a debate about numbers. It is a debate about lives. It is a debate about the lives of individuals that have been trapped in a web of a ``Washington-knows- best,'' ``one-size-fits-all'' welfare system. The lives of people are welfare's casualties. Mr. President, in the first 8 months of this Congress we have accomplished an extraordinary amount of work. We passed a balanced budget resolution which signals to the public the right [[Page S 11778]] message about integrity and responsibility. We have advanced the telecommunications bill that brings our laws in line with the technologically advanced times, a bill that makes laws apply to Congress itself, and previously we have been enacting legislation to which we did not adhere, and many other achievements. As important as these achievements are, I believe they will be seriously compromised if we fail fundamentally to dismantle and replace the current Washington based ``one-size-fits-all" welfare system with direction from this capital to the State capitals, and foot dragging on the part of this city in terms of allowing innovation and creativity at the State level. Our efforts and our ability to replace welfare will be viewed by the American people and by history as a measure of our commitment to the American people--a bright line in our public life between cheap talk and real action. It is easy to call for a revolution, more difficult to achieve the purposes of a revolution. But that is the difference between administration and leadership. People want real leadership here. Across the world, our enemy for nearly 50 years no longer exists. It is not a result of someone conquering the Soviet Union from without, but it was a defeat from forces within. What communism did to the Soviet Union is not unlike what welfare threatens to do to America. It stifled her spirit, it lulled her into dependence, and it compromised her greatness. Our danger today is not to recognize the threat. Our danger is to believe that doing anything so long as we do something is sufficient. If that occurs, we will have failed, the welfare state will have survived, our pathologies will metastasize, and an America which now stands on the brink of chaos will tomorrow be thrown into the abyss of mayhem. Today, we have a welfare system that was designed with the best of intentions but, frankly, the poor have received the worst of all worlds--a world of despair, where a future is not seen, a world of no opportunity where advancement is not conceivable, a world of no family for support, to nurture or care. A couple years ago, it was my privilege to chair a task force on America's urban families. I was shocked, going into America's cities and meeting with children who did not know who their fathers were, but really appalled to know they lived in neighborhoods where no child knew his or her father and some of these children had no acquaintances who knew their fathers. It is a world with which many of us are unfamiliar but a world in which success is very difficult and a world from which escape is almost impossible. It is a world in which people are raised by welfare, fed through food stamps, but starved of nurture and deprived of hope. Results of this kind of system are frequently tragic. During the past week, I have come to this floor to talk about some of the stories, to talk about and highlight this human side of the welfare system. Some of the cases are of children who have been killed or neglected, some are testimonies of people trapped in the system, but each one of the stories was real. They have all been documented. They all appeared in the mainstream press. They are tragically true. They are all stories which we should remember as we debate the welfare reform issue. For 30 years and more, we have been told that all we need to do is spend more money and we would be able to solve the problems we face. We have been told that Government had all the answers, that Washington knew best how to help. Good intentions have carried us to a sorry state. Today, all the evidence points to the fallacy of that argument. Today, there are more people in poverty than ever before. There are more children being abused and killed. There is less hope, less opportunity. We must reverse the consequences of the actions we have taken. Today, again, I wish to make this point and by way of doing it I just relate another one of the case histories of a child who paid the full price of our welfare system. His name was Jason Allen, Jr. He was only 2 months old at the time of his death in September 1994, just last year. Born in Bakersfield, CA, to an unwed mother who had two other children besides Jason, her main source of income was $723 a month she received from the Federal Government through AFDC. Also, she had a drug problem, and the Federal funds helped her maintain that, too. Ms. Henderson was addicted to a methamphetamine drug known on the street as ``crank.'' In fact, by the time she became pregnant with Jason, it is suspected she was using a significant portion of her welfare check just to finance the drug addiction. Unfortunately for Jason, his mother used crank regularly throughout and after the duration of her pregnancy. As the New York Times reported in September of last year, 3 days after Jason was born, he had to be hospitalized for withdrawal from the methamphetamines his mother had taken. As Jason recovered, his mother continued to use crank--later claiming that the high she got from taking the drug helped her cope with the demands of motherhood. But when Jason was released from the hospital and his mother began to feed her son naturally, Jason took a turn for the worse. As the New York Times wrote last year, ``Ms. Henderson awoke [one day] to find her son lying still in his crib not breathing, his lips blue. Throughout the subsequent criminal prosecution of Ms. Henderson, prosecutors maintained that 2-month-old Jason died on his way to the hospital from his mother's drug-laced milk.'' Mr. President, there is no happy ending to this story. Ms. Henderson is currently serving a 6-year sentence on a felony conviction of child endangerment after the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 on the more serious charge of second-degree murder. The life of little Jason Allen, however, is tragically lost forever. In truth, he did not have a chance. His is the face against which our reform must be judged. The reform that we pass need not be perfect, but it must be substantially better than the system we have today, a system that finds us with individuals trapped on welfare and a system which projects the abuse from one generation to the next. The Senator from Pennsylvania spoke just a short time ago in this Chamber, and he talked about the intergenerational problems of welfare, and he cited a case that was recounted in the Boston Globe of a generation on welfare that began just a generation or two ago and the family now consumes almost $1 million annually. It is an intergenerational problem, a web of dependency that has entrapped almost all of those who are a part of the family. We must make sure that we change this record of failure. For 30 years and more, the Federal Government has determined it would tolerate a welfare system that allows this kind of dependency, that says you do not have to work to earn benefits, and it takes no action to discourage irresponsibility. We have, as a matter of fact, said if you are irresponsible, we will continue to write the check. As a matter of fact, we have said worse than that. We have said the more irresponsible you are, the bigger the check we will write. That has really found us in the validation of irresponsibility and impairing survival values which are essential to the well-being of Americans. So when this debate concludes on welfare, be it Wednesday or Thursday or Friday of this week, or whenever it concludes, what will be the earmarks of what we have done that can assure us we have been successful in pursuing genuine reform? Let me suggest to you a five- part test. First, I believe we must end welfare as an entitlement, the notion that people should receive Federal welfare benefits even if they do not work, even if they abuse their children, even if they are more and more irresponsible. It is a pernicious notion. It is a notion which reinforces the wrong values, that underscores the wrong commitments. Real reform would end welfare's entitlement status. It will free people from the shackles of governmental dependence, and it would allow them to embrace the responsibility and opportunity that are the hallmarks of America's survival values. It is essential that we reinforce a system of responsibility, and an entitlement does not have regard for responsibility. [[Page S 11779]] Second, we must radically limit Washington's intermeddling, micromanaging, counterproductive control of welfare. I spent 8 years in the Governor's office of the State of Missouri--the great privilege of my life--to shape the future, along with the citizens of the State of Missouri. A number of things we sought to do in welfare reform, ways in which we sought to change the system, an effort to upgrade what we were doing to make it more efficient, to make it more productive, to make it consistent with our values, having to come for each change hat in hand to Washington, DC, and being badgered, being argued out of one position or being slowed down in our progress, saying we will not tolerate real change; we will only allow you to do a pilot program. We will only allow it if it begins this way or that. It really curtailed our ability to serve the people that had elected us and to chart a new course that would break the web of welfare dependency instead of reinforcing it with unbreakable strands of reliance on the Federal Government. Even now I look this year to the department of social services in Jefferson City and they talked about Medicaid and how inefficient Medicaid is as a result of this intrusive control from Washington. The Medicaid director who works under my successor--and my successor is not a Republican, as am I--but the Medicaid director said that if the Federal control were out of the system so that they did not have to comply with this micromanaging, counterproductive demand for the way things are done, that for the same amount of money that they are caring for 600,000 people on Medicaid, they could care for 900,000 people on Medicaid. The productivity penalty, the service penalty of this invasive, micromanaging control system of Washington, the Washington-knows-best, the one-size-fits-all system, is cheating 300,000 Missourians out of medical care, according to the director of social services in the State of Missouri. It seems to me if we are really interested in helping people, the bureaucratic tax against the poor, of robbing them of that resource by having this control mechanism and by being unyielding and being stingy about what we want to do in terms of allowing for States to exercise responsibility and develop procedures whereby real efficiency could be managed--that is counterproductive. We do not want to do that. We should put it behind us. For 30 years our welfare system has been premised on the belief that Washington knows best. Well, there is a fallacy that is underlying the belief that anyone could know best. Because it suggests that there is a best solution for the entirety of America. Mr. President, I suggest to you that there is not any single best solution for America. I suggest to you that a variety of communities could come up with different solutions that might be best in the instance of their community and that we need to move forward in an evolution of thought on this matter. I think it was understandable that at one time it might have been thought by well-meaning individuals that Washington did know best, that we simply ought to figure out what was best, and then make the rest of a less-enlightened country comply with our demand. I think the effort to do that has met with substantial failure. So the next step in the evolution was to think that, well, maybe we should have had pilot projects that we could put around the country and we could learn what would be best. Then we would take the information from the pilot projects, having learned what was best for everyone, and we could impose it on them because they were less enlightened than we would be, having had the benefit of all those wonderful pilot projects and studies that were mandated every time a State wanted to have a waiver or do something creative. But the truth of the matter is that there is not a single strategy, a single pilot project that would work in Baton Rouge or Bangor. The truth of the matter is, there are various strategies that will work in various ways around the country. For us to presume even from our immense data base and from all the information and statistics that might be available in Washington, DC, that we could know best what would be appropriate for everyone, is an assumption that is false. It also ignores the fundamental component of our human existence; and that is, that we tend to believe whenever we are trying to work things best, we participate in the formulation of the strategy. Why do we not adopt a system which allows States to be invested in the formulation of strategy, allows them to participate in developing the ideas that they then put into practice, and we get the additional vitality and additional energy in the system that comes from people participating and shaping the strategy which they will employ to solve their own problems? Really that is what freedom is all about. One of the reasons freedoms flourish and societies of freedom flourish is they tap that special energy. We need to tap it in this system and the welfare debate. This afternoon, the Senator from Iowa stood on the floor here and did an interesting job of talking about how Iowa had a special program that encouraged even small businesses from individuals who were on welfare, and how the number of people on welfare that went into business had, I think, doubled in just the last couple years. I think that is a marvelous thing to think that we could have a system that would allow a State to do that. Iowa went through a pretty substantial process of asking the Federal Government for waivers. Why should we ask States to come here and beg for waivers? Let us provide a system where States have the authority to move right into these creative responses. But to say, if it worked in Iowa, it has to be done in Indiana or that it has to be done in Idaho or that we must mandate that system in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas, or Georgia, is to again make a bad decision. It is a decision of imposition. It is not a decision of innovation. We need to allow the States to be involved in rejecting this idea that one size fits all. It is like sending off to the catalog and saying, ``The average weight of a person in my family is 120 pounds. Send us five pairs of pajamas to fit a 120-pound person.'' Well, I tell you what, there is no 120-pound person in my family. All five of us would be ill-fitted with the pajamas. But the one-size-fits-all mentality makes you think you can take the one-size-fits-all type mentality and make it fit everywhere. We need to provide for tailoring. Let us let these States make investment in their future, and let us let them tap that creative energy that comes from participating in the design process of those investments. I think it is a real chance for us to succeed. Some on the other side of the aisle have complained, well, the States will not be asked to contribute as much as they previously contributed. The truth of the matter is, we should hope that the States are so successful they will not have to contribute all that they previously contributed. The idea, the mandate from the people of America, is not that we should maintain welfare or not that we should grow welfare. The idea is that we should employ innovative and creative strategies to reduce the caseload. The idea of copayments was brought up. As if there is some analogy between a block grant which is limited in terms of its expenditure and an insurance policy which allows people to consume health care regardless of the amount expended. Nothing can be further from the truth than to think that a limited block grant and an unlimited capless health care policy are the same things. As long as there is a limit in a block grant, States will have an incentive to work within that limit, copayments are unnecessary in that sort of setting. So I really believe that we must end entitlements. There are benefits to doing so. But, second, in addition to ending entitlements, we have got to free States to work effectively within their communities to develop these plans which will help us get the job done and get it done well. Bureaucracy has levied a sort of tax on the poor, taking up money and preventing it from reaching those in need. Every time there is a need for a report in Washington, someone has to generate it in the State. So the report reader has a drain on the system and the report generator has a drain on the system. Who should be the real judges of welfare and welfare reform? Who do we [[Page S 11780]] really want to satisfy? Is this a game in which we satisfy the U.S. Senate or the U.S. Congress? Is this some sort of exercise in which we should seek to satisfy the bureaucracy in Washington, DC? I do not think so. I think we really are trying to satisfy the people of America. I do not see any reason why we cannot trust them to make judgments about the success or failure of what is being done in their own jurisdictions where they are up close, where they see on a daily basis, where they walk past and work with individuals who are involved with the system. No one will know better than the group of individuals we call citizens. Incidentally, if we are looking for the boss in America, if we are looking for the final authority, let us go no further than to read the words, ``We the people.'' If we want to design a welfare system and we want to set up a jury to judge the welfare system as to whether it works or fails, let us not try to set up a jury so that somehow the system has to come to Washington to please the Congress or the system has to come to Washington to please the bureaucracy. Let us put a system in place that gives the people the opportunity to shape the future in which they live. That is the definition of freedom. And let us put them in as judges and arbiters of whether what they are doing is successful. The beauty of a free society is not just that you make decisions in the first instance; the beauty of it is if those decisions do not suit you or are not working effectively, you change the decision. Let us give the States the opportunity to make decisions which will result in the kinds of graphs that Senator Harkin brought in for his State and proudly presented. Let us give States that opportunity, and let us not make them come here to act as if what a State is supposed to live for is to get the approbation and ``attaboy'' and a pat on the head from the Congress or the bureaucracy. But let us be consistent with the real purpose of Government and allow these jurisdictions to do what is important and what can succeed in their jurisdiction, so that the people can assess whether or not this has been done well. And if it has been done effectively, they will stick with it; if not, they will reject it and build a different bridge. First, reject entitlements. We cannot go on with entitlements that do not have a relation to behavior and activity. Second, empower States through block grants. Third, we must encourage a national debate on an epidemic of illegitimacy in America. Illegitimacy has robbed so many in this culture of a future, and, indeed, unless it is reduced--not just contained, but reduced--it will rob this country of our future. Most of the problems surrounding welfare can be tied, in one form or another, I believe, to this epidemic. It is at the root of the family's breakdown in the inner city. It is tied to everything from educational noncompletion and failure to crime. It is the lifeline of dependency. Now, much progress has been made. I think our society and our country has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years in just learning that we can talk about it and that we can confront the issue and we can say about it what we believe to be the truth about it. There were people who did so long ago, some in this Chamber, and for whose voice I am grateful. But it is only in the last couple of years that our country has decided that it is fair to talk about this as a threat to our future, and talk about it we ought. Much progress has been made, but we must encourage further debate and discussion, and we must expect States and communities to take positions and to deploy strategies which they believe will help curtail this epidemic. I was encouraged to see that even here in Washington, DC, which is not thought to be necessarily mainstream, but the city council of Washington, DC, has voted to deny certain benefits to individuals who continue with illegitimacies while they are on welfare. There is a recognition at all points on the political spectrum about the threat that illegitimacy makes to the future of this country, and, frankly, the disastrous impact it has on individuals. The fourth test, I believe, is a test that should reflect our understanding that laws alone will probably not solve this problem. As much as it is gratifying, rewarding, makes one feel good to stand in the Chamber and debate policy and to think about shaping the tomorrows in which we live, I believe that we have come to an understanding from our experience that Government probably will not alone solve this problem. Government will not alone solve this problem at the State level. Government alone certainly has not solved this problem at the Federal level. We need to develop a strategy which will elevate substantially the participation in this challenge by nongovernmental institutions, by charitable organizations, by religious institutions. We not only need to have these institutions involved, but we need to have the average citizen become involved. I believe that there is a different character in governmental programs than there is in the programs of nongovernmental and charitable institutions. When volunteers get involved with individuals, they have a way of saying, ``I love you,'' by the fact that they are giving their lives to participate beneficially in the lives of others. That is not the message of government. It cannot be the message of government. It will never succeed as well, because it is not. It is time for us to emphasize the opportunity and to encourage the participation by the private sector, and I think we ought to do that by recognizing individuals not only who give money to charities but who also give their time and energy. We need, for the citizens of America, to come together, some on welfare, some not on welfare, but the interchange and interface between them can provide the connection which directs some over the bridge from dependence to independence. The people who are working jobs, we need to find ways for them to be in contact with people who need jobs, and that is part of the solution. Lastly, I think we must realize that it is unlikely that we will have unanimity when we decide on a form. We cannot try to be all things to all people. We have seen that when we do, we are detrimental to all. It is as unlikely to be all things to all people as it is to have one size that fits all. People are different, and there may be disagreements here, but these differences and genuine efforts--a resolution of these differences deserve our best efforts. We must work together in order to achieve a positive result. Well, today, we have a lot of work to do if we are going to get a bill that meets these tests, a bill that does more than just tinker at the margins and embrace the label of reform. We cannot allow just tinkering at the margins and labeling to satisfy us. We must call the Nation to greatness. We must signal that ideas and principles are more powerful than Washington's politics and pragmatism. We must refuse to compromise our struggle without ever trying to retake our city on the hill. We cannot settle for being rhetorically impressive while simultaneously being substantively lacking. Half measures which tinker with the margins are predestined to fail. And most importantly, let us never forget that they fail the very people that they need to help the most, and they are the people who find themselves in the system. They are the population which is more pervasively trapped now on welfare than there has been for quite some time. We can do better than we are doing. We can do better, and we must. And so we will work hard to achieve real reform that, in fact, eliminates entitlements and empowers the States with the opportunity for real creativity, that in fact makes it possible for reform which will shape the way in which we live, that will challenge the epidemic of illegitimacy and reduce this pathology which shakes at the very foundation the potential of the success of our Nation. With that in mind, I think we have an opportunity to be of great service. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor. Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN addressed the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, in 1938 American movies like ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' and ``The Wizard of Oz'' were still in production; U.S. involvement in World War II was 3 years away; the American labor force was almost entirely made up of industrial and agricultural workers; the right to collective bargaining was not yet 3 years old; less than 16 percent of married women were working outside their homes; and the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA] of 1938 was enacted. Now, nearly 60 years later, ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' and ``The Wizard of Oz'' are American movie classics; World War II secured America's ascendency to superpower status; service sector jobs dominate the economy; the right to collectively bargain is deeply embedded in our labor laws; more than 75 percent of women with school-age children work; and as absurd as it may seem, our rules governing the workplace and working hours still are largely governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Mr. President, America's working families and working conditions are undergoing major transformations today, yet the rules Americans must work under do not reflect changes in the structure and needs of society. Hopelessly outdated, our workplace laws reflect the needs of a bygone era that faced different challenges than we do today. It is incomprehensible that workplace law in this country is predominated by a workplace statute that was passed almost 60 years ago. The Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted at the request of President Roosevelt, who charged the 75th Congress with passing a law to help those ``who toil in factory and on farm to obtain a fair day's work.'' The law was enacted to protect unskilled, low-pay workers--those unable to protect themselves. In the context of today's two-parent and service-oriented workplace; however, the law has unintended and unexpected consequences. In today's fast-paced, information-based society, its rigid and inflexible provisions have paralyzed those it was meant to help. The FLSA now deprives employees of the right to order their daily lives on and off the job to meet the responsibilities of work and home. For example, under the FLSA a worker who wants to work 45 hours one week in exchange for working only 35 the following week so he or she can attend their child's baseball game, parent-teacher conference, or doctor's appointment, must first have an employer willing to pay him or her five hours of overtime pay for the 45 hour week. Since most employers cannot afford this additional expense, an employee is left with just two choices. He or she can forgo five hours of pay to be with their child, or miss the event their child needs them to attend. It is not an employer who places employees in this catch-22 regarding their families, it is the Federal Government. It is inside-the-beltway elitists who are depriving employees of the right to make decisions best suited for their circumstances. Ironically, even though the Fair Labor Standards Act ostensibly exempts salaried employees from the catch-22 faced by the Nation's hourly workers regarding flexibility in workday and workweek lengths, the truth is that they are not exempt as a practical matter. Under recent FSLA interpretations, whenever an employer allows a salaried worker to sway extra work for time off in increments which are less than a full day, the salaried worker is then converted to an hourly worker. This opens employers up to huge overtime pay liability if they let their salaried workers swap a few hours off for a few hours of additional work before or after the time off. Let me give an example, Mr. President. Pierce Processing was a professional engineering firm with 20 employees in Cincinnati, OH. William Pierce updated his personnel policies to provide his salaried employees with the maximum flexibility possible in their work schedules in order to meet the needs of their families and an attempt to increase their flexibility between work and family. Mr. Pierce had only one requirement, that the employees work 80 hours in a 2-week period. Even though the employees were salaried, Pierce agreed to pay them an additional straight time for hours worked over 80 or to subtract the time from an employees' pay if they did not work a full 80 hours. Through this arrangement, he hoped these employees could tailor their work schedules--and even income if necessary--to meet their family needs. This gave his salaried employees a great deal of control over their daily lives and schedules. The Department of Labor, however, learned of this progressive personnel policy, barged in and reclassified the professional employees as hourly workers. The Feds also required the company to pay the salaried employees 3 years of back overtime pay. To maintain any sort of flexibility for his workers, Pierce had to adopt a policy that required everyone to work a full day extra or take a full day off--to satisfy the Federal Government--so very little flexibility could be provided. Ultimately, however, Mr. Pierce was forced, due to the enormous litigation expenses, to declare bankruptcy and 20 people lost their jobs--all because he paid his employees well and provided them with the maximum flexibility he could in scheduling. Malcolm Pirnie, an engineering firm with offices throughout the United States and over 400 employees, suffered the same fate at the hands of the Department of Labor because the firm allowed salaried employees to take a partial day of unpaid leave to attend parent- teacher conferences, to visit the doctor, or to further their education. This action cost Malcolm Pirnie $875,000 in back pay for overtime and his employees lost their flexibility to schedule their work day to meet their individual needs. More recently, the Department of Labor has alleged that the Boeing Co. misclassified professional employees earning an average of $54,000 a year because, in addition to their salaries, they also were paid straight time plus $6.50 an hour for all hours worked over 40 per week. With the tools provided by our Government under the FLSA, there now is a plaintiff's attorney currently soliciting 20,000 employees to join a class action suit againt Boeing. I have the solicitation letter here, where the attorney informs potential litigants of their rights and specifies that he can help only if the employees salary averages at least $13 an hour for a 40-hour week. As a result, Boeing's workers now will be entitled to their salaries only no matter how many hours they work--extra hours will not be additionally compensated any longer. Mr. President, FSLA's straightjacket on work schedules is not limited to the private sector, it also affects State and local government workers. In Philadelphia, one FLSA court case will cost the city $60 million because the Federal Government says the city misclassified police officers as salaried workers. New York City's liability for the alleged misclassification will be $16 million and California anticipates over $565 million in liability due to five pending FLSA cases. In almost every case, some of the most highly paid workers in the labor force are collecting a windfall through this technical provision in the law, thus costing taxpayers millions of dollars-- simply because State and local governments tried to provide their employees with workplace flexibility to meet personal and family needs. Mr. President, I do not believe these are the kind of results Congress intended in passing the Fair Labor Standards Act. I know this is a result this Congress should no longer tolerate. Today, I am pleased to introduce the Work and Family Integration Act in an effort to make the Fair Labor Standards Act conform to the realities of the current workplace. This legislation will put work schedule decisionmaking back in the hands of employees. It is designed to recognize that Washington does not know best, and that the millions of workers' individual circumstances cannot even begin to be addressed by this 60-year-old law, inflexible law. Today, flexibility is important and Americans deserve the benefit of setting their own schedules--not to be forced into the straightjacket demanded by the Department of Labor. Flexible schedules were first introduced in Germany in 1967. Shortly [[Page S 11789]] thereafter, many American institutions began realizing the benefits of these schedules for their salaried workers--in both productivity in the workplace and quality of life at home. In 1978, Congress recognized the benefit of these work arrangements and passed the Federal Employees Flexible & Compressed Work Schedules Act. This act authorized a 3-year experimental period of alternative work schedules for Federal employees. The experiment was so successful, it was extended again in 1982 and made permanent in 1985. Sixty-six Senators as Members of either the House or the Senate, either voted in favor of these laws, or were Members in 1985 when the permanent authorization passed the House and the Senate by voice vote. Flexible work schedules give employees more control over their lives by allowing them to balance family and work obligations better. In addition, employees may attend to family needs without using limited sick leave allowances. Under compressed work schedules, day care expenses can be reduced by as much as 20 percent. Time lost to commuting would decline for employees able to travel during nonpeak hours. Employers also would win. By having such family-friendly work arrangements, they would enjoy increased employee productivity and loyalty. These benefits are essential for employers to compete in today's international, service-oriented economies. It is uncontested that flexible work schedules are advantageous to both employees and employers. Even President Clinton recognized the benefits of flexible work schedules when he extended the FEFCWS to executive branch employees. On July 11, 1994, he said ``[b]road use of flexible work arrangements to enable Federal employees to better balance their work and family responsibilities can increase employee effectiveness and job satisfaction, while decreasing turnover rates and absenteeism.'' However, private sector employers remain unable to offer this benefit to their hourly workers--even when both employers and employees agree--due to the Congress' failure to update Federal workplace laws. If such flexibility has been good for Federal Government employees over the last decade and a half, why are such benefits being denied private sector employees and the employees of State and local governments? Mr. President, the Work and Family Integration Act I am introducing is modeled after the Federal Employee Flexible and Compressed Work Schedules Act. It would allow private sector employees, specifically hourly employees, the same flexible work schedules that Federal workers have enjoyed for almost twenty years. I emphasize that this bill is meant to drag the Fair Labor Standards Act into the work and family realities of the 1990's--instead of the 1930's--by doing three things: First, the bill would alter the FLSA's rigid 40-hour maximum workweek provision. It would allow employees to work 160 hours in any combination, over a 4-week period before employers would have to pay overtime compensation. In addition, when time is more valuable than money, employees would be able to request--and employers could provide--compensatory time-and-a-half off in lieu of compensatory overtime pay. Such flexibility in scheduling would enable employees to meet better their family, community, and personal needs. Employees, not the FSLA, will have control over their work lives. As a safeguard against abuse, this legislation would require that any flexible work arrangement be agreed upon by both the employee and the employer and coercion into such an arrangement is prohibited. An employer who ahead of time schedules hours over 40 per week, without the prior request of the employee, would continue to be obligated to pay time-and-a-half. Employers also would be obligated to pay overtime compensation for all hours worked over 160 in a 4-week period. Finally, collective bargaining agreements would remain unaffected and would be free to set whatever hours are reached in such agreements. A second area in which my bill would update the FLSA is to correct the Department of Labor concerns the salaried employee overtime exemption interpretation. In 1938, when the FLSA was written, employees generally were not paid unless they worked. Paid sick time, vacation time, holiday or compensatory time off were virtually unknown. Employees were either paid on an hourly basis for hours they actually worked or were paid a weekly salary. Therefore, the definition of salary was simple and easily understood. Now that paid time-off policies have become so varied and sophisticated, the differences between salaried and hourly paid employees are often almost indistinguishable. Application of the FLSA's salaried exemption frequently is arbitrary, unpredictable, and contrary to good-faith efforts by employers to help--not abuse--employees. As a result, many employers who have provided progressive flexible schedules for their salaried employees--unintentionally turning these employees into hourly workers, according to the Department of Labor--have been held liable for massive amounts of overtime back pay. Once reclassified as an hourly employee rather a salaried one, not only is the employer liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars of allegedly unpaid overtime, but the employee also loses control over their daily and weekly work schedules--and thus their ability to meet their family responsibilities. By clarifying the FLSA's exemption for salaried employees, employers will then be free to offer flexible work schedules to employees without the fear of having to pay back overtime instead of having to consult an attorney for every personnel decision. Finally, the bill contains a provision allowing former employees a priority in rehiring if they quit in order to take care of family member. An individual would then be able to take time off from his or her place of employment for up to 5 years to raise a child or care for a parent, and upon return, could receive priority treatment in rehiring by the employer. The employer could not have such an employee's priority treatment used against it as evidence of, or an actual violation of, Federal equal protection laws. Mr. President, while the other institutions of society have updated the modes and means of their production and operation, the Nation's workplace laws have lagged far behind. Today, the most successful corporations in America reflect the new realities of American life-- they are decentralized, flexible, and nonhierachical. Meanwhile, our Federal workplace laws continue to function along the centralized, hierarchical, and one-size-fits-all principles that were the mandates of an age long past. For far too long Congress has largely ignored the changes in modern society's work and family realities. There is no need for the Federal Government to continue protecting employees from themselves in allegiance to an outdated law. In the November election, Americans spoke loud and clear. Unfortunately, the voters' roar was barely audible to those in Washington who are no longer attuned to reality of the American experience outside the beltway. On the other hand, for many of us, the frustrated cries of those outside of Washington still echo in our ears. The resounding mandate from the electorate is to drastically reduce Government spending, to shrink the size of the Federal Government, and to stop Government from interfering in making decisions for themselves, their property, and their lives. That means that the attitude of Washington-knows-best must come to an end. Unfortunately, this attitude has become so prevalent in the minds of this city's elite inside-the-beltway thinkers that they can no longer recognize it in themselves. Washington has become so obsessed with taking care of the American people that it is blind to the fact that such protection is often detrimental to the people's ability to order their activities and day-to-day lives as their desire. Amending the Fair Labor Standards Act is essential to allow all people--mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters--to work with their employers to arrange a schedule which suits their obligations in the home place as well as the workplace. This bill I am introducing would largely remove the Federal Government from the most important decisions Americans face each and every day, week, and month of the year. [[Page S 11790]] And that, Mr. President, is precisely what voters sent us here to do.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Thank you for this opportunity to address the Senate, as I have done on 3 or 4 previous evenings. I am here to talk again about a topic which will confront the Senate very dramatically later this week. It is the topic of welfare reform. It is time for the Senate to begin to focus not only on the cost of welfare reform in terms of dollars and cents, but the cost of the welfare tragedy in terms of the human cost--not numbers, but lives. In each of the previous evenings when I have had an opportunity to address the Senate on this topic, I have talked about specific individuals. Individuals who have a story; individuals who were tragic victims of our welfare system. The story I want to talk about tonight is the story of Jack Gordon Hill, Jr., of French Camp, CA. Mr. Hill's story is not a particularly uplifting story, for it is yet another story of human suffering at the hands of the welfare system. Mr. President, I believe that Mr. Hill's story is the personification of a system that has replaced responsibility with rights, and has replaced opportunity with entitlement. This picture beside me is one bright spot in Mr. Hill's welfare legacy. About a year ago, Mr. Hill credited the Federal Government's Supplemental Security Income Program with saving his life, and all the indications seemed to support his assertion. He was physically strong. He was mentally prepared, and ready once again to accept a place in America. Mr. President, Jack Gordon Hill, Jr, had a serious problem with drugs and alcohol his entire adult life. His cocaine and whiskey cost him everything he had. Years ago he lost his job, and shortly thereafter he lost his family. He and his wife divorced. He gave up an infant son for adoption. Most tragically, he abandoned his two small daughters in Baltimore, unable or unwilling to take care of them. In short, Mr. Hill was rushing ever faster toward rock bottom and almost hit, he claims, when he discovered SSI, which provides special payments for addicts. In his words, ``It is like I've been falling in a bottomless pit all my life, and all of a sudden there was this one thin branch sticking out. I grabbed it. Now I am climbing out.'' It turns out that the branch of SSI did not save him. It accelerated his fall. Mr. Hill's branch was a $458 a month governmental check, with which he was able to enter a drug and alcohol treatment center and get away from the street corner he had haunted. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun last July, he sat in his room, in the California rehab center, playing with his kitten, Serenity--its name represented a new-found state of peace in his life. This world of contrived contentment was built on a foundation of sand. Six months after that interview, the Baltimore Sun found Mr. Hill back on the same corner where he had begun, drunk and doped up. His Federal funds were now being used to support his renewed addiction to cocaine. His use of these funds is far from exceptional. The system under which he got them spends $1.4 billion per year of taxpayers' funds. Unlike Mr. Hill, however, most of the individuals who received these funds--hundreds of thousands, according to the Baltimore Sun--never enter treatment centers, or seriously try to beat their addictions. The $458 a month they receive only speeds their inevitable demise. One drug counselor at a health clinic for the homeless told the Sun that drug dealers flock around the recipients of these Government checks whenever the checks come in. Speaking of his patients who had died from drug overdoses, the drug counselor said, ``All the dealers came circling around the patient of the day like vultures. A week later he would crash from whatever dope he was doing and feel terrible. Those were the times he would go looking for help. The problem was that we could never find help for him when that check came in the mail on the first of the month, and the whole cycle started over again.'' This cycle of abuse, funded by the Federal Government, this welfare system which provides funding for the maintenance of these habits, is a tragedy which is costing us a tremendous toll in terms of human lives. When our welfare system clearly and openly supports a policy which runs contrary to every law and principle in our Government, we cannot be so blind as not to see the immediate and overwhelming need for an overhaul of the welfare system. I have come before this body repeatedly to relate the personal stories of real Americans, stories which demonstrate how bankrupt our current welfare system is, how it enslaves its beneficiaries, how it traps them and robs them of their independence, their hope, and their futures. It is hard enough to break out of the cycle of poverty and dependence which the welfare system creates economically, but when the welfare system buys drugs for addicts, it virtually guarantees they will not escape and they will never be anything but wards of the Federal Government. Mr. Hill did not only find himself abused, but he tried to do something. Mr. Hill did more than most of the SSI substance abuse recipients. He tried to get treatment. Yet, because Washington, DC, perceived the solution to his problems to be a wad full of Federal money--because the helping hand of Washington extends money to those who are in need and does not do much else--it destroyed his capacity. True charity cannot come from the Federal Government, it must come from concerned citizens who know the problems of their own communities, know the citizens in those communities, and truly want to solve the problems. And Federal money, money alone, cannot solve the problem. We need to involve the communities. We need to involve the States. We need to involve people--people who have the chance to introduce those on welfare to opportunities that lift them out of welfare. Federal money should be administered to the States directly, allowing them the freedom to direct funds where they are needed. Federal funds should not be administered from a distant Washington bureaucrat and directed in ways that are not meaningful on the local level. Welfare, as it is currently practiced, simply provides a means for Mr. Hill and others like him to continue their self-destructive behavior. This behavior costs not only Mr. Hill, it costs us--not only in terms of our resources but it costs us productivity and lives. It has cost his three children an association with a father. It has been a tragedy, not just in financial terms, but in personal terms. It provides a means for Mr. Hill and others like him to continue their destructive behavior. This is not a time for us to engage in half measures of welfare reform, and it is not a time for silence. Unfortunately, silence is exactly what we are getting from the Democrats who are making proposals which they call welfare reform. Every Republican plan that has been proposed eliminates the drug addiction and alcoholism disabilities from SSI. The Democrats are silent. President Clinton is silent on this issue. On issues as important as these, silence is death. We have been down the road of half measures before. It was called the 1988 Family Support Act. It made big promises. It was going to put people to work. We had hoped, with the so-called Welfare Reform Act of 1988, that the devotion of additional resources, that additional Washington management, that additional one-size-fits-all solutions from the Nation's Capital would somehow provide a solution to the problem. But if we take a good look at what has happened in terms of welfare spending, we did not solve the problem in 1988. The problem skyrocketed in 1988. Half measures, the rearrangement of the deck chairs on the welfare Titanic, will do no more than provide a basis for taking the line on this chart right off the page. We need to have real reform. We need to understand that welfare that is simply the Federal Government's handing individuals a wad of money, like the welfare reform proposal made available to Mr. Hill, is not welfare reform. That is welfare entrapment. We need to be involved in welfare replacement. We must do more, we must ask for more, we must involve more people in the program. We must ask that civic groups and nongovernmental organizations be allowed to work with States. We must send the resources to the States to give them flexibility. The idea that there is a single solution in Washington that will provide the opportunity for everyone everywhere is an idea that has been proven to be a failure. My family has an average size. If we were to try to buy pajamas based on the average size, one-size-fits-all would translate into one-size- fits-none. When the Government in Washington, DC, tries to have a one-size-fits- all solution, it frequently fits none. It is time for us to turn the opportunity over to the States, States that can involve institutions that care for people, States that have the courage to make basic reforms, States that will have the courage to say to those on drugs and alcohol, ``We will not continue to support your habit.'' The real costs of welfare are not just the costs that we face as a result of the budget crunch. They are the costs in terms of human tragedy, costs like those endured by the Hill family as a result of the fact that, as a Government, we have chosen to fund one's addiction rather than to provide the kind of care that would help an individual leave the welfare system and become a productive individual. This Saturday we will begin the welfare debate. We will have the opportunity to make a decision to pull together the information which will lead us to an inevitable conclusion that the one-size-fits-all Washington system has failed. We will have the opportunity to give the States, which have been begging for decades now, the flexibility to do what works, to give them the resources through block grants, to allow them to make the kinds of changes and to have the kinds of conditions and requirements that will lift people by enlisting nongovernmental organizations and others in their communities to help individuals on welfare become productive members of our cities and towns. It is with this in mind that we need to understand that welfare reform cannot be tinkering around the edges. It must be substantial. It must be real renovation and reformation, for without renovation and reformation in the system, we will not have a new opportunity for the citizens of the land. Indeed, that is what citizens who now are on welfare desperately need. I thank the Chair. Mr. FORD addressed the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that such time be provided for me to speak in regard to this matter, Senate bill 908.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Madam President, the Foreign Relations Revitalization Act of 1995 represents an important step in establishing a coordinated and coherent foreign policy and a refocusing of our national priorities in this time of limited resources. We need our foreign relations to be conducted at the highest level of integration and coordination, and the highest level of representation of the interests of this country and of the American people. And a top priority must be to ensure that our influence is used to benefit our interests and to ensure respect for American leadership. Senate bill 908, the Foreign Relations Revitalization Act of 1995, is a bill which will do that. I want to commend the Presiding Officer, and the chairman of the committee, Senator Helms, for his guidance and direction in crafting this important legislation that eliminates program duplication and establishes a sense of clarity in the conduct of foreign relations. This bill also streamlines the delivery of services by eliminating three agencies and consolidating their remaining functions within the Department of State. I believe this will strengthen the role of the Secretary of State and will enhance his ability to organize a foreign policy structure that will best serve our Nation. We will not be well served by a foreign policy that continues to flow from the mouths of many. This is a very important issue, and one that the full Foreign Relations Committee addressed on several occasions with witnesses appearing from the Agency for International Development [AID], U.S. Information Agency [USIA], and Arms Control Disarmament Agency [ACDA]. I found it interesting that some witnesses indicated that it was important that separate sub-interests of the United States be represented vocally and that there be a competition of sorts--a ``good-cop, bad-cop'' approach to foreign policy, whereby the folks who handed out the foreign aid for the United States would maintain good relations with a particular client nation, while the Department of State would essentially hold the line in protecting United States interests. I find that to be somewhat troublesome. I think we need to speak with a single voice. I do not think someone should be handing out foreign aid to a country at a time when that very country is clearly acting against our interests. If we continue with a foreign aid proposal, it should be with an understanding that the person asking for coordination and cooperation in one arena is the same person that will be delivering foreign aid and the kind of assistance that this country gives to other nations that are developing. The network of competing fiefdoms can only undercut the authority of the Secretary of State in conducting foreign policy. This bill will change that. It would be difficult to believe that those individuals who have tried to represent our interests with a singular, clear voice, would not favor this reorganization. Thus, it is no accident that virtually every previous Secretary of State who has had experience in this arena supports this bill. I believe that it is no accident that all the former Secretaries of State that came to speak with us supported this concept, and supported it very clearly, as did the current Secretary before his voice was muffled by the Vice President and others who suggested that perhaps he should not have that opinion. Sadly, rather than grab the opportunity to play a constructive role in helping to shape this proposal, the administration sought instead to adopt a fighting posture, a fixed-bayonet, take-no-prisoner strategy. I was particularly troubled by the secret minutes of an internal AID staff meeting that were provided to members of our committee. In that internal staff meeting, the staff was advised that ``Our strategy is delay, postpone, obfuscate, derail. If we derail [the bill], we can kill the merger.'' This has nothing to do with the merits of this particular proposal. It has to do with the preservation of the bureaucracy. The American people deserve better from public servants than to sit around the conference rooms of these agencies figuring out how to derail, obfuscate and delay the will of the American people. The American people not only deserve a sound foreign policy, they deserve to have individuals operating in our agencies so as to comply with the will of the Congress and the people, as expressed through the Congress. An entrenched group of Government bureaucrats has been diligent in their efforts to hold the line at any cost, by stonewalling and delaying the process. This represents precisely the attitude of Government that this last election was designed to change. People have signaled very clearly a distaste for this. They not only want our Government to reflect their wishes, they want the Government, when it reflects the America interests abroad, to do so coherently, concisely, and clearly. They think if we have a single voice in foreign policy representing the administration, be it Republican or Democrat, that single voice is most likely to get the job done, rather than if we have competing agencies, an agency handing out foreign aid resources, another agency asking for cooperation in some other area of the international arena. There is another point that ought to be made here, and that is while there has been wild speculation that this consolidation plan and the corresponding reductions in some foreign assistance accounts is undertaken, somehow our national prestige will be threatened. I think it is important to understand that national prestige is reinforced and enhanced when we operate with a clear, coherent, concise, understandable foreign policy. Speaking out of both sides of our mouths may be a habit that is understood politically in the United States. It is really not appreciated by the American people. It is certainly not appreciated in the international community, when various organizations from this country misrepresent our stated policy. On the related topic of our national prestige, it is my sense that our stock will rise on the exchange of the world's international community, when we let them know that we intend to seriously address our responsibilities. This reorganization plan correctly recognizes the fact that there is a direct correlation between our international prestige and our ability to express ourselves with clarity. Second, it recognizes a direct correlation between our international prestige and the fiscal health of this country. If we do not have the ability to put our financial house in order, we will not be respected by countries around the world. If we continue to race down the road to bankruptcy, our influence will not be substantial. This is the first authorization measure to come before the U.S. Senate that makes good on the promise we extended to the American people when we passed the budget resolution; that is, to have a balanced budget, to put our financial house in order. I submit to you that living within those rules and setting our priorities, financially as well as refining and clarifying our message in the international community--all of these things have no promise whatever other than to raise the prestige of the United States and to set an example in the world community that we should be responsible. Unfortunately, there are those in this country who think that there cannot be any cuts at all in the foreign relations area. And the lobbyists came around with their buttons saying ``Just 1 percent.'' They said that since our foreign aid budget represents only 1 percent of the total Federal budget, it cannot be touched. I just want to point out that the ``Just 1 percent'' is actually $14.3 billion. And I believe it can be touched. Should it be abolished? I am not in favor of abolishing foreign assistance. But I am in favor of sending a signal around the globe that when American citizens are tightening their belts, and exercising fiscal responsibility, there will be some ripple effects in terms of our aid. Not that we are going to shut anything down, not that we are going to change our policy dramatically, but we need to send a clear signal that the shared sacrifice here at home should be matched by a certain degree of sacrifice around the world. If we did not have the courage to ask them to participate in that respect, they would lose some of their admiration for the way we do business and they would lose some of their respect for us, and we would lose some of our ability to influence events around the world. This administration seems to be following the same path as the foreign aid lobbyists leveling charges that this commonsense reform bill represents a dangerous shift toward isolationism. It is not a shift toward isolationism but rather a shift toward the development of respectable foreign policy. We have dealt with foreign situations but we have not had foreign policy. Policy is something that is coherent, that sticks together, that you can forecast, that you can predict. It has a philosophy about it. We have too many lawyers in the process and too few philosophers. We solved this problem, and we solved that problem, and we solved this other problem. But we never do it in accordance with a philosophy. And the philosophy should be a philosophy which keeps us from having additional problems. I remember when the leaders of the so-called foreign policy establishment of this administration came to talk to the committee about the North Korean situation and the problems which we had negotiating with the North Koreans over nuclear issues. I asked the leadership of this administration's foreign policy what it was about the way we solved that problem that would suggest to the rest of the world that we should not do the same things that the North Koreans had done. They said, ``Well, nothing. We think this is a unique situation, and it will not never happen anyplace else.'' So we could afford to make this a very sweet deal for the people who went against the U.S. interest because it could never happen again. I submit to you that is not foreign policy. It may have temporarily solved that problem. But that is not policy. That is just pragmatism at the moment, and does not look down the road. We need a foreign policy, and we need a Secretary of State with the capacity to articulate that foreign policy with clarity, with singularity, and coherently around the world. The administration has pursued a ``Chicken Little'' approach to denouncing the reorganization plan by issuing a series of gloom and doom forecasts about how passage of this bill will result in damaged American prestige abroad and the possible emergence of more Rwanda-type situations. Well, it is just not so. The sky will not fall if the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is abolished. At the present time, the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA all have departments that are dedicated to pursuing arms-control-related functions. We have the ability to handle these issues in a coherent, rational, integrated, coordinated way if we make the changes that are in this important legislation which is before us. It is time that we prioritize. Some said we cannot afford to reduce our foreign aid at all in 1993. AID helped fund a visit to the United States by a group of Romanian architects so they could study U.S. architecture. Was this a priority for a country whose economic infrastructure was devastated by 40 years of Communist rule? I doubt it. Last week, the Washington Times reported that AID recently spent $175,000 to produce 3,000 of these gender analysis tool kits. I think the American people might wonder if the purchase of gender analysis tool kits is the right kind of priority setting. AID even floated a plan to help supply Moscow with street lamps. I know that crime has gotten to be a problem in Moscow. But it is a tough sell to say to the people of the United States of America, some of whom live in inner-city neighborhoods in the United States that make Moscow after dark look like a trip to Disney World, that we should spend millions of dollars putting street lights in Moscow, particularly at a time when Moscow was spending billions of dollars grinding up the people of Chechnya. I wonder. Again, it is a question of establishing priorities. In closing, and with great enthusiasm, I want to draw attention to the key features of this reform legislation. It says we do not have unlimited resources, we need to set priorities, and we need policy, and policy should not be articulated by contradictory messages issued by a variety of organizations. It says we must maximize our influence, and in order to maximize our influence, let us not speak with many voices in contradictory messages; let us speak with one voice so those who deliver the benefit can also be those who ask for the cooperation. It says that we in the United States of America will not sacrifice without expecting others to sacrifice along with us, because ultimately when we have the kind of fiscal integrity that we ought to have, the entire world will benefit. When our house is in order, we will be the leader that provides the kind of message and the kind of opportunity around the world which will lift the performance of many nations with us. We cannot spend as we have in the past in ways that are counterproductive. As the world desperately needs a leader--and there is only one--the United States must revamp its capacity to deliver that leadership with clarity and coherence, and the Foreign Relations Revitalization Act does that. I urge my colleagues to vote for this measure, because it is a major step forward in our world leadership responsibilities. Thank you, Madam President. Mr. HELMS addressed the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Madam President, I take this opportunity to raise important issues relating to a set of concerns which will be before the Senate next week, or perhaps even late this week. I am talking about our responsibility to reform a welfare system, a welfare system which has been a tragic failure. All too frequently, we speak of this tragic failure as if it is a tragic failure in terms of dollars and cents. The tragedy of this failure is compounded. It is not just dollars and cents, or not even most importantly dollars and cents. The tragedy of this failure is it is a failure in terms of human lives, the lives of children, the lives of families. It is a failure not only in terms of a single generation, but it is a failure that extends to lives that will exist in the future. I will talk a little bit about that story. I have been talking about different stories in the welfare system, and the tragedies, the human face of this tragedy, for the last several days. I might point out, you might think these are special cases I have somehow gained access to. The cases which I am addressing are cases which have appeared in the mainstream media. The first case was recorded in detail in the Chicago Tribune. Yesterday's case was reported in detail in the Boston Globe. These cases are cases which have been a part of the mainstream reporting. A case which I will talk about today is the story of Rosie Watson and her successful 18-year endeavor to get welfare benefits for all seven members of her family. This is a story that is a vivid illustration of how the system entices people to try to game the system, even to be industrious in working the system, instead of working in the productive arena of American culture. The Baltimore Sun reported in January that Rosie Watson, her common- law husband, and their seven children live in Lake Providence, LA, and they receive annually, $46,716 in tax-free income--$46,716 in tax-free income. That is principally from a Federal supplemental security income payment. Now, this woman, Ms. Watson, has an addiction to Federal welfare. That addiction began when she was 23 years of age. She started receiving Federal AFDC payment checks for herself and her two small children. According to the Baltimore Sun, as the number of children in the family expanded, Ms. Watson soon discovered her family's income could be significantly expanded by switching from ordinary welfare to SSI, the supplemental security income. That is the Federal Government's welfare program that distributes payments to a broad range of beneficiaries that include disabled adults that cannot work and the families of children with so-called mental and learning disabilities. Since 1974, Ms. Watson has submitted no fewer than 17 applications to Social Security law judges. She submitted these applications on behalf of herself and members of her family in an attempt to receive the maximum Federal welfare allotment possible. She claimed that she was too stressed out to work, and Ms. Watson was certified to receive Federal welfare benefits because of the disability, because she was too stressed out to work. Her common-law husband likewise was approved to receive welfare payments after he successfully argued that he was overweight and his overweight condition constituted a physical disability that made him too heavy to work. Moreover, since there is no limit to the number of times that anyone can ask for assistance, after even being turned down, Ms. Watson simply continued to file welfare petitions until she eventually secured payments of $458 each for all seven of her children. According to a feature in the Baltimore Sun, all of Ms. Watson's children were ultimately awarded full SSI benefits because they ``lagged behind in school and scored poorly on psychological tests, which, under Government rules, translates in a failure to demonstrate''--and this is the term of art we use in the law--``age- appropriate behavior.'' Madam President, it is no surprise that across the land citizens are irate and they derisively refer to these monthly SSI checks that go to these individuals who do not have age-appropriate behavior as ``crazy checks,'' because if the children will act out aggressively, irrationally, will perform poorly, they can qualify themselves for $458 a month. But that is not all. Ms. Watson soon discovered that persistence pays off. In the case of our Federal welfare system, it pays off big. In the case of the Watson family, $37,000 in tax-free, retroactive, lump-sum payments, because the lump sum was designed by our Federal system to say, ``We probably should have granted you these payments earlier. Here is a check or here are checks totaling $37,000 because you have finally convinced us that you are all incapable of functioning.'' Madam President, as I mentioned earlier, the issue here is not the amount of money the Federal bureaucracy is sending to this family every month. The real issue, the real issue is the toll this cycle of dependency collects in terms of human lives. In this case, the real issue concerns Ms. Watson's children and the devastating impact that this life style has on their lives. Next to me is a picture of her 16-year-old daughter, Oleaner. She is not encouraged to pursue any of the dreams normal to a 16-year-old child. She is not doing well in school, in sports, or any extra curricula activity. It seems that her main use to her mother is the check that she ensures will show up in the mailbox every month. At 13 years of age, she was officially classified as unfit to work or to study or to do anything but collect checks. Oleaner has become ensnared in a system which her mother manipulates for financial gain at the expense of her children's futures. She brings the family $458 per month and is paid $20 a month in allowance because of it. In order to qualify for these benefits, the children have forsaken their educations, their dreams, their futures, all sacrificed to the monthly check in the mailbox, which in a very strange way becomes their representation of what they are worth. They are worth something in terms of welfare. According to the principal of the children's former elementary school, the abuse of these ``crazy checks'' is very widespread. Mr. Willie Lee Bell receives a questionnaire from the Social Security Administration--he is the principal--every time a student applies for benefits. He estimates that half of the students have applied for the benefits. He believes that many of these students are encouraged or even coached by their parents in a manner that makes them eligible to receive the so-called ``crazy checks.'' The children, he says, do not want to fail. They are just doing what mama wants. Mrs. Watson's youngest son, George, was suspected of having been so coached. In 1991, the authorities alleged that he was not trying up to the best of his ability on the IQ tests. Ms. Watson denies the charge, saying she has never told any of her children to act crazy in order to get some money. The effect on school performance is clear. Children must be disruptive, they must be noisy, they must be slow. If not, their checks will cease. According to the Baltimore Sun, the message for this family and the message sent by this system is that it is not education that will provide advancement, it is not achievement, but it is disruption. Government assistance checks follow this kind of counterproductive behavior. The message to her son George from Mrs. Watson is clearly evident by a dispute last year in school. George's school books were taken from his locker. The principal told him he had to pay for them. Ms. Watson refused to pay. George then flunked all of his courses. George then would have to repeat the seventh grade, and Ms. Watson bragged about the additional year as a result and the ability to collect these kinds of payments. Madam President, we are now days away from the welfare debate. There is a near unanimous consensus from Republicans that the tragedy of cases like these demands immediate reform. SSI must be reformed. But from President Clinton and from those on the other side of the aisle, we hear: No proposal. There is silence. It is a silence which is deafening. The people of America have sent us to this Chamber to change the way business is done. Madam President, silence and apathy are the twin evils that have allowed this Washington-based, Washington-knows-all system to stifle the poor, that have ensnared the poor. The answer from the Democrats is more spending, more bureaucracy, more rhetoric, less reform, and on this point, silence. We cannot accept reforms that are little more than half measures designed to make the American people think they have done something about welfare. We have been down that road before. In 1988 we passed a so-called revolutionary welfare bill that did two things. First, it ensnared more people in the web of dependency. Second, it increased the costs of welfare. You can see this on the two charts that are here behind me, a major welfare reform in 1988 and see the spike in the costs. Here is a percentage chart showing the number of children, or the percentage of children in poverty in our country. Notice that the war on poverty began in the 1960's. We had a relatively low figure. But as we have waged our so-called war on poverty, we found out we were waging war on the future of our children, as larger and larger numbers of our children found their way into the despair of poverty, ensnared by a welfare system which captured them rather than liberated them. It is time for us to reform a system which has sought, perhaps, noble objectives. But it has elicited the worst of behavior. It is time, Madam President, for us to do real reform. No rearrangement of the deck chairs on the welfare Titanic will save us. We have to repudiate the current system. We have to institute reforms. We have to capitalize on the ingenuity and creativity and capacity of State and local governments, even governments like the District of Columbia which are addressing the central problems of the absence of family and the absence of work in the welfare system. They know that Government cannot solve this problem, cannot solve it alone, cannot solve it just with more money. The more money we have spent, the greater the problem has grown. The real cost in this entire operation is not just a cost in terms of financial resources. It has been a cost in lost lives. It has been from those who have sought to use their families, to abuse the system. It has been a cost of the future of children, and it will be the cost of the future of America if we do not correct this. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I intend to speak on the foreign relations proposal at a later time, but I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 10 minutes in regard to the welfare situation.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I appreciate this opportunity to speak this afternoon. The President of the United States is speaking about the welfare situation. He has promised to end welfare as we know it, and it is important, as we approach the debate on welfare in the U.S. Senate, that we thoroughly understand the condition in which we find ourselves as a result of 30 years during which Washington has dictated a radical theory of welfare on America's poor. The theory is that bureaucrats in Washington are best equipped to solve the welfare problem. Since the mid-sixties, we have spent nearly $5.4 trillion on welfare, and the theory that Washington knows best is as dead and as hopeless as many of the people it was intended to help. Most of America realizes this. Many Members of the Senate realize this. But, unfortunately, it does not appear that the President realizes this. Today in Vermont, veiled in glorious rhetoric, President Clinton announced his intention, again, to end welfare as we know it. But he revealed his intention to expand welfare beyond what we have ever known. Like so much with this administration's public policy, what sounds great frequently is different from what is reality. The old adage, ``signal right and turn left,'' has found new meaning in this administration. When you are riding down the highway and someone signals right and then turns left, it can be a very difficult and dangerous situation, and I am afraid that is what has happened here. The reality of the Clinton plan is that it will result in more misery, more hopelessness, and more despair in America's poor. It will provide a boost to Washington's welfare establishment. The bureaucracy will burgeon. We need another way of helping the poor. It is a way which recognizes that the States have an opportunity, and should have an opportunity, to tailor welfare solutions to meet the needs of their citizens. Last week, I spoke about Ariel Hill, a 5-month-old child, a victim of the welfare system. I am sure she would have said that we needed another approach to welfare. Today, I want to talk about another tragic story, another personal example of welfare's failure. In the picture next to me is Ernesto Ventura, a 4-year-old child who was brutally abused and neglected by his mother. Though the crime was committed only a year ago, its roots began about 30 years ago at the beginning of [[Page S 10938]] a cycle of dependency, a cycle of hopelessness and Government sanction, Government approval. The story begins in the fall of 1968 when Eulalia Rivera left Puerto Rico and came to the Columbia Housing Project in Dorchester, an inner- city Boston neighborhood. Within weeks after arriving in Massachusetts, Eulalia went on welfare to support herself and her family. Her first check, instead of providing a solid foundation on which to build, became a milestone in her life, marking the first leg of a journey which has not ended to this day. ``I remember the first check,'' Eulalia told a reporter for the Boston Globe. ``It was for $75 a month back then.'' The checks have never stopped and the hope has never grown. Eulalia never left the housing project where she first lived, and in this place she raised 17 children, 14 of whom were still living as adults. Her daughter, Clarabel, has abused her son. Of these 17 children, almost none graduated from high school, and they have produced 74 grandchildren, many of whom entered the welfare system themselves. As you can see on this chart, these are the children of Eulalia, and virtually all of them receive at least one form of welfare benefit: SSI, due to suffering from a nervous condition, also collects $120 a month in food stamps; another child receives: Medicaid, subsidized housing, AFDC, food stamps; this child receives Medicaid, subsidized housing. Here is Medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps, SSDI; food stamps, SSDI, AFDC. It just goes on in each of these cases. AFDC, SSI, Medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps; AFDC, SSDI; AFDC. This is the story of the intergenerational web, the lack of hope. Fifteen great-grandchildren now comprise the fourth generation of this welfare setting. The type of benefits received by the extended family are the alphabet soup of acronyms--all perfectly legal, and just as perfectly destructive to the human spirit. Many of Eulalia's descendents are considered disabled due to a medical condition diagnosed as anxiety attacks. SSI pays these individuals a monthly check in lieu of the jobs they are unable to perform. While interviewing Clarabel's family to find the motivation behind the tragedy of her son's abuse, a Boston Globe reporter found that the cycle continues, noting several school-aged children at home watching MTV at 1:30 in the afternoon. Theirs is a family that has given up hope of finding jobs or receiving an education, a family caught in a system which rewards illegitimacy and discourages work. Their lives revolve around a monthly check, a dangerous public housing project, and empty dreams. In the words of Robert Coard, director of the antipoverty agency Action for Boston Community Development: This family is a classic example of a poverty-stricken class. They are the ones who have given up. The tragedy of this story is perhaps most evident in Clarabel Rivera Ventura's life. At the time she abused Ernesto, she was 26 years old and pregnant, a mother of six, by five different fathers. Even her family is not sure about the identities of these men. ``Oh, wow,'' her brother Juan told the Globe, ``I have no idea.'' Eulalia gave the same answer. ``I don't even know who they are.'' A young woman caught up in the overwhelming system, Clarabel Ventura had no hope, no education, no prospects, and her will to improve her lot in life sapped by every check she received. Perhaps she looked to drugs as a way out. Neighbors said that Clarabel sold food stamps and even the family's washing machine to get money to purchase crack--shouting at and striking her children in frustration, neglecting the needs of the children in order to serve her own addiction. Reportedly, Clarabel would send her children out alone after midnight to beg for money, cigarettes, and food from other residents in their housing project. Finally, something snapped. In a rage, Clarabel plunged 4-year-old Ernesto's arm into boiling water, severely burning him. It was nearly 3 weeks before she sought medical treatment for the wounds. When paramedics finally arrived on the scene, they found Ernesto in a back room on a bare mattress, smeared with his own blood and excrement. His mother, he said, had abused him because she was mad. Government-sponsored poverty has a face, it has a soul, it has feelings and a body that can be hurt. Every day, children just like Ernesto suffer in an environment which Washington has created. They have no say. They cannot vote, they cannot read, they often are barely old enough to talk. But they pay the price of Washington's arrogant demand that the entire country run a welfare system in accordance with the bureaucrats' dictates. The fact that welfare needs a major overhaul is beyond debate. Washington's one-size-fits-all bureaucratic micromanaged welfare system has failed, and failed miserably. Unfortunately, President Clinton's solution is nothing more than 1988 revisited, rearranging the deck chairs on the Welfare Titanic, just as Washington has done in prior attempts at reformation. In 1988, Washington reformed welfare. The result has been an increase in spending for welfare programs of over 40 percent. We have more children in poverty today than when the war on poverty began. If there is anything we have learned, it is that no one solution from Washington has worked in the past or will work in the future. We have a mandate from the American people to tackle the welfare issue head on. If Congress is going to be serious, we need to do more than reform the welfare system. We need to replace it. First, because one-size-fits-none, we need to stop the system as we now know it. We need to transfer to the States, in a significant way, the opportunity to craft real solutions. Bringing the States, under the guise of waiver-granting, to Washington, DC to gain the stamp of approval from this failed system is the wrong way of doing business and must be curtailed. Second, Government and dollars alone will not solve the problem. We need to bring in nongovernmental, charitable organizations, and citizens to be a part of the solution. Finally, let me say that as we debate welfare reform in the days to come, and as we confront the issue in the U.S. Senate, we have to understand that this is not just a debate about numbers. This is a debate about families, about human beings, where despair has come and hope is gone. We need to involve ourselves as communities and citizens. We need to disengage from the idea that Washington knows all and knows best. We need to make available to the people of this country the opportunity to tailor solutions to this challenge in State and local arenas. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for the time.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. The question that this body will soon address in a formal sense is a question that has been titled welfare reform. In our debate, we will hear a lot about numbers. We will hear about how much the system costs, about the share of the Nation's output that it occupies. But this debate, properly understood, is not a debate about numbers. It is a [[Page S 10861]] debate about lives, the lives of people who are trapped in the web of the Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all welfare system, the lives of the people who are welfare's casualties. Today, we have a welfare system that was designed with the best of intentions but has given to the poor the worst of all possible worlds, a world of despair where no future is seen, a world of no opportunity where advancement is virtually inconceivable, a world of no family, no support, no nurturing or care from loved ones, a world in which people are raised by welfare and fed through food stamps but they are starved of nurture and they are deprived of hope. The results of this kind of system are very frequently tragic. It is my intention in the days and weeks to come to highlight this human side of the welfare system. I wish to share some situations that tell us the real tragedy of welfare. Some of the cases are of children who have been killed or neglected. Some are testimonies of people who are trapped in the system. But all of the stories are real, all have been documented in the mainstream press, and they are all stories which we should remember as we debate the statistics and the numerics of welfare, for we must remember the human costs of welfare. For 30 years and more, we have been told that all we need to do is spend more money. We have been told that we would be able to solve the problems we faced if we simply had enough resources. We have been told that Government, particularly Washington, has all the answers. We have been told that Washington knew best how to help. The facts are in. The evidence is conclusive, and it points to the fallacy of the argument, for today there are more people in poverty than ever before. There are more children being abused and killed. There is less hope and opportunity for those who are trapped. I wish to share with you some case stories that illustrate this and that should motivate us to change the way we address the problem of those who need hope and need opportunity and who need our assistance. I wish to share with you a rather shocking story today, an atrocious story of Ariel Hill. Hers is the body that lies in this casket that is being lowered into the ground in this picture on my left. It is a tragic picture. According to the reports in the Chicago Tribune, Ariel came into the world on Christmas Eve of 1992, 1-month premature. She was the second of twin children. Her parents were 22-year-olds who had dropped out of high school and did not have jobs. Her mother had her first child as a teenager. Her father grew up on welfare. Ariel had three other siblings in diapers at the time she was born. There were three other diapered children in the family. They lived in a squalid, roach-infested, one- bedroom apartment in public housing, isolated from friends and relatives. When police entered the home, dirty clothes and scraps of food were strewn about, giving the apartment the stench of decaying garbage. Both of the parents used drugs. The main source of income was the $900 per month in public aid checks and the food stamps they used to purchase their meals. When the investigators went into the apartment, they found the welfare dollars for each child listed on a scrap of paper. It is a tragedy when the human resource of this Nation, the future of America, is valued in terms of its capacity to claim welfare benefits. This was a family trapped in a system without hope, without future, without a way out. Ariel died on May 12, 1993, less than 6 months after she was born. Her body, weighing less than 7 pounds, had been malnourished and scalded under hot tap water. Ariel's parents were punishing her by refusing to feed her, starving her 5-month-old body. This program of punishment finally peaked on May 11; 30 hours later she was dead. According to court testimony, Ariel's mother was awakened by the daughter's crying that afternoon. Ariel needed to be changed. Her mother was so angry at being interrupted in the afternoon that she put the infant in the sink and began to burn her with hot water. Police sources later told the Tribune that Ariel's mother was so upset because she was having difficulty keeping up with her responsibilities as a mother. She had not had much sleep in the last few days, the officer said, with five kids and all. As Ariel was in the sink under the hot water, her twin brother, Adrian, began to cry in the other room, and Ariel's mother left to look after Adrian, leaving the infant in the hot water for approximately 5 minutes. The mother believed that Adrian was healthier because he was a better baby. By the time she returned, Ariel's skin had been badly burned and was beginning--well, her mother put hot butter on the wounds but did not seek medical attention because she did not want to deal with the division of family services. It was not until the next evening that Ariel's mother and father noticed that Ariel was no longer breathing, and they called 911. When Ariel was rushed to the Children's Memorial Hospital, she was pronounced dead on arrival. According to experts, her injuries were likely aggravated by her malnutrition, perhaps to the point where she was unable to cry. Ariel also was found to have bruises around her eyes and on her forehead. One of the examiners said there was nothing to her, absolutely nothing to her at all. According to the Tribune, at her funeral, Ariel's body was covered in a light pink dress and bonnet. Her casket was small enough to fit in the little red wagon that she was too young to play with. Mr. President, in the days and the weeks ahead, there will be those in the Senate who will take to the floor and argue that what we need is to reform the current system. I submit to you that unless we want tragedies like this, we need to replace the current system, not reform it. We rearranged the deck chairs on this welfare Titanic in 1988, and the skyrocketing record of welfare participation and tragedies, such as this one, indicate to us that reformation is not enough. This is no time for half measures. This is a time to focus on those in need and to realize that Washington never has had the answers and probably never will. What we need to do is to move people from hopeless governmental dependence to hopeful economic independence, from the grasp of a perverse system of Government programs to the embrace of the loving and caring communities and the limitless opportunities of America. Our welfare system has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. The prisoners in the war on poverty have been the poor themselves. We must revamp this system so thoroughly that reform cannot characterize the way we treat it. It has to be replaced. It has to be replaced with a system that will allow for the States to have full freedom to implement remedies that will reduce this problem, that will slow illegitimacy instead of grow illegitimacy. It has to be reformed in a way that will stop the incentive for additional births, illegitimate births, and the continuing payment of more and more for those who will bring individuals into the culture with less and less responsibility. Our effort to save ourselves from the human tragedy that the casket of Ariel in this picture represents has to be a good-faith effort that confesses that it is time to let the States and communities tailor programs to meet the real needs of America. As I indicated earlier, over the next week or so, I will be talking about the welfare system and the fact--undeniable fact--that it is so badly broken that it is tragically destroying the lives of citizens of this land. Welfare should be a hand up, it should be a way of moving from one standing to another. It should not be a way of ensuring that an individual trapped in a system stays there not just for his or her life, but condemns future generations to a similar existence of tragedy and pain. If America has a virtue, it is a virtue of opportunity, it is a virtue of hope. We must make sure that the welfare revisions, the replacement of this welfare system in which we will engage in the days ahead, always includes the components of opportunity and hope, those which have been so desperately missing, those which are all too frequently buried as the mistakes of welfare are dealt with under the current system. Mr. President, I thank you. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to speak in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I thank the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, the situation in Bosnia continues to worsen. Every day brings additional news of Bosnian-Serb troop movement, resulting in more chaos, devastation and reports of horrendous atrocities. As one so-called safe zone after another is overrun, and with refugees streaming out of them, it is obvious to most that the Bosnian policy constructed by the United Nations, NATO and the American administration has failed. If the consequences of the U.N. failure were not so grave, many of the scenes we all have witnessed would have to be considered almost farcical. United Nations armored personnel carriers being used to ferry bicyclists across streets in order to avoid a handful of snipers who operate with near impunity--shooting not only at the U.N. personnel-- but at women, children, elderly folks. It's an outrage. Then we witness the spectacle of United Nations equipment being taken by the Bosnian- Serbs as they overrun United Nations positions, and also by the Bosnian Moslems in desperate attempts to protect themselves against Serbian attacks. We have all witnessed these events, Mr. President--and those who continue to argue that negotiators require just a little more time need to face up to the reality of the situation. There is a deep-seated American belief that reasonable individuals--with time and effort--can solve even the most intractable of problems. Well, perhaps too many of our well intentioned negotiators labored for too long under the false impression that we were dealing with reasonable individuals in Pale and in Belgrade. The cycle of retaliatory violence confirms the fact that there is nothing remotely reasonable about the Bosnian-Serb leaders or their counterparts in Belgrade. Institutions that tried to prevent further escalation have failed to do so--plain and simple. This being the case, it is now time to pursue an alternate course of action that will not embroil United States ground forces in a conflict that the Bosnian Moslems can best settle on their own. The Serbs control 70 percent of Bosnian territory and will continue to advance unless the Bosnian Moslems affect a reversal of the balance of power through force of arms. While the unilateral lifting of the arms embargo may have some shortcomings of its own, and could be a costly endeavor, we should no longer actively prevent the Bosnian Moslems from defending themselves by trying to keep them unarmed. However, we should not assume that this decision will not have consequences. For example, depending on the sources of the weapons, we could be sowing seeds of future difficulties. If the Bosnian Government decides to access East European weapons inventories for instance, we do not know exactly how the Russians will react. Apart from sending weapons directly to the Serbs, the Russians might also decide to stem the flow of weapons to the Bosnians by applying certain forms of pressure on the East Europeans. Somehow, I have a difficult time imagining that Russia will just sit idly by as events unfold which are clearly detrimental to their Balkan allies. It is also not exactly clear what might happen in the event that the United States become a prime source of equipment, and gets involved in the training of Bosnian personnel. Mr. President, my decision to support this resolution is not without some concern about the unintended consequences of lifting the embargo. However, I do not see that we have much choice. For several years, the administration has been sending a stream of let's-wait-and-see signals regarding action on Bosnia. The President asked the majority leader to hold off on S. 21 until after the London conference. Well, the London conference is over and the situation continues to spin out of control. It should be abundantly clear to all that sooner or later, all of the safe-areas are threatened by the Bosnian-Serbs. We even have one of the top Bosnian-Serb commanders in a recent interview with a Belgrade newspaper stating his intention to take the remaining safe-areas within a few months. Coincidentally, this same Bosnian-Serb commander--who over- saw the trampling of Srebrenica--was indicted yesterday by a U.N. Criminal Tribunal for perpetrating war crimes. This time, the waiting is over, for if the embargo is not lifted soon, there may be no Bosnian Moslems left to arm. Ronald Reagan once said that ``America will support with moral and material assistance your right not just to fight and die for freedom, but to fight and win.'' By supporting this resolution today, the Senate will telegraph its support for those who seek to make it on their own. I urge my colleagues to support the Dole resolution.

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that I rise today to salute a good friend whose leadership in the field of law enforcement is exemplary. John T. Pierpont is currently serving his fourth term as Sheriff of Greene County, MO, which includes my hometown of Springfield, MO. John was first elected to serve Greene County in 1981 and is overseeing an office of 140 employees in seven different divisions, all dedicated to helping and protecting the people of Greene County and Southwest Missouri. Prior to serving Greene County, John was U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Missouri for 8 years. As U.S. Marshal for the Western District, John oversaw a jurisdiction of more than 66 counties. While successfully leading law enforcement efforts throughout southwest Missouri, John Pierpont also has been an active leader within the Missouri and national law enforcement communities. Sheriff Pierpont is a former President of the Missouri Sheriffs' Association, the Missouri Peace Officers' Association, and the Retired U.S. Marshals. John was first elected to a leadership position in the 26,000 member National Sheriffs' Association in 1989 as Sergeant-at-Arms and moved up from Seventh Vice President to the position of First Vice President which he held in 1994. I am pleased to salute John Pierpont for his June 14, 1995 election as the National President of the National Sheriffs' Association. Through his years of selfless service and dedication to his chosen profession of law enforcement, John Pierpont has displayed principled leadership and a devotion to the principles of justice, hard work, and family. His standard of leadership is an example to his colleagues in law enforcement and all other areas of public and private service.