Xavier Becerra

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 2 of rule IX, I hereby give notice of my intention to offer a resolution which raises a question of the privileges of the House. The form of the resolution is as follows: Whereas, Loretta Sanchez was issued a certificate of election as the duly elected Member of Congress from the 46th District of California by the Secretary of State of California and was seated by the U.S. House of Representatives on January 7, 1997; and Whereas A Notice of Contest of Election was filed with the Clerk of the House by Mr. Robert Dornan on December 26, 1996; and Whereas the Task Force on the Contested Election in the 46th District of California met on February 26, 1997 in Washington, D.C. on April 19, 1997 in Orange County, California and October 24, 1997 in Washington, D.C.; and Whereas the allegations made by Mr. Robert Dornan have been largely found to be without merit: charges of improper voting from a business, rather than a resident address; underage voting; double voting; and charges of unusually large number of individuals voting from the same address. It was found that voting from the same address included a Marines barracks and the domicile of nuns, that business addresses were legal residences for the individuals, including the zoo keeper of the Santa Ana zoo, that duplicate voting was by different individuals and those accused of underage voting were of age; and Whereas the Committee on House Oversight has issued unprecedented subpoenas to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to compare their records with Orange County voter registration records, the first time in any election in the history of the United States that the INS has been asked by Congress to verify the citizenship of voters; and Whereas the INS has complied with the Committee's request and, at the Committee's request, has been doing a manual check of its paper files and providing worksheets containing supplemental information on that manual check to the Committee on House Oversight for over five months; and Whereas the Committee on House Oversight, subpoenaed the records seized by the District Attorney of Orange County on February 13, 1997 and has received and reviewed all records pertaining to registration efforts of that group; and Whereas the Task Force on the Contested Election in the 46th District of California and the Committee have been reviewing these materials and has all the information it needs regarding who voted in the 46th District and all the information it needs to make judgments concerning those votes; and Whereas the Committee on House Oversight has after over nine months of review and investigation failed to present credible evidence to change the outcome of the election of Congresswoman Sanchez and is pursuing never ending and unsubstantiated areas of review; and Whereas, Contestant Robert Dornan has not shown or provided credible evidence that the outcome of the election is other than Congresswoman Sanchez's election to the Congress; and Whereas, the Committee on House Oversight should complete its review of this matter and bring this contest to an end: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That unless the Committee on House Oversight has sooner reported a recommendation for its final disposition, the contest in the 46th District of California is dismissed upon the expiration of October 31, 1997.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. There are a lot of folks in Orange County who are going to have a chance to watch this. I am glad. I hope this is well-reported, because it is time for the voters in Orange County to know what evidence there is that their Congresswoman, Loretta Sanchez, did not really win this election. Unfortunately, in the hour or so that I have been listening to this debate, I must tell the voters that I have yet to hear one shred of evidence that Loretta Sanchez did not win the votes of the majority of the people in Orange County. What I have heard is that we want to move this forward and apparently now the majority, which has for 11 months and after hundreds of thousands of dollars investigated this matter, now wants to move this over to the Secretary of State to do what we can do. Well, you have had 11 months, hundreds of thousands of dollars, you have put at stake the representation of the 46th Congressional District and Loretta Sanchez's ability to represent. You have put in an indicted stage the votes of thousands of voters in Orange County. You have run this game, you have taken the ball, and now you want to punt. You are saying, this political football has been too much, let us send it to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State cannot do anything more than you have already done. They can only look at the same names, same numbers, same addresses and tell us what you can tell us. It is our duty. Do not punt. Let us decide. If you have got proof, show it. If you do not, close down this investigation. There are people at stake, the first of whom is Loretta Sanchez, the second of whom are all the people in the 46th Congressional District who deserve representation. It has been 11 months. Let this woman go. Let her represent her district.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to read from a document entitled ``How To Use The Language of the 21st Century'' by a pollster often used by a number of Members, mostly Republican Members. It states as follows, regarding Hispanic Americans: ``Our majority is at stake. ``Republicans barely maintained their congressional majority in 1996, and a major reason their support dropped from 1994 was the utter collapse of the Hispanic vote. In all the large key States, California, Texas, Florida and New York, the Hispanic percentage of the total vote is significant and growing. ``We do not need a majority of Hispanics to win a majority of the vote. In areas of heavy Latino concentration, any Republican who wins more than a third of the Latino vote will be elected. It is that simple. But if we allow our percentage among Hispanics to fall below 25 percent, the Bob Dornan loss in California will be repeated again and again.'' We do not want to have a census that counts us all accurately because if we do there is a good chance that we will catch all those Hispanics that were not counted in the 1990 census. And if we look at the 1996 election, we will see that Hispanics are not voting Republican because of all the assaults on the Hispanic community by this Republican majority. Does it make any sense for the Republicans to want to count all Latinos in this country when they are not voting for Democrats? Is anyone surprised that we do not want to see an accurate count come out of the 2000 census and count the one community that was most undercounted in the 1990 census? It makes perfect political sense. Unfortunately, we should not be driven by politics in deciding what the Constitution has called one of the most important activities in this country, and that is counting every single American. Unfortunately, with this bill, we do not count every American. If we had the Mollohan-Shays amendment, we would. We should vote for that amendment because it is the right thing to do. It is not the political thing to do.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. I hope we are very careful how we use words on this House floor. When we talk about criminals, that means someone has in a court of law been convicted. The gentleman from California [Mr. Thomas] just referred to individuals who are under investigation. There are a lot of folks that sit on this House floor who are under investigation, but we do not call them criminals. Mr. Speaker, I would just urge that all of us during this debate be reasonable, and understand that when we refer to things, we use accurate words to describe what is going on. It is not accurate to say that there are criminals. There are people under investigation. In this country, you are innocent until proven guilty.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. Let me begin by first saying, as I think has been repeated often on my side, this resolution has no effect. The founders of this country, in drafting the Constitution, made it clear that we as politicians have no role of telling the Department of Justice how to prosecute. We cannot demand that they prosecute, and I thank the gentleman from Florida for making it clear, with the amendment that we have all accepted, that we cannot do anything with this resolution. It is just posturing. If we cannot do anything with this resolution, what are we really doing? I think there are probably three things that we can say are behind this particular resolution and its intent. Either it is an intent to bootstrap this electoral investigation that we know is going nowhere and perhaps to justify, and I want to say it now on the record, perhaps to justify in the future some action by this House to possibly vacate the seat of the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Sanchez] using this as an excuse for being able to do that. Second, as many are whispering, maybe, as some have said, maybe it is payback time for 1985, because Republicans feel that there was an election stolen in 1985. So if that was a wrong, maybe two wrongs will make a right. Or, third, perhaps it is just a downright honest attempt to intimidate voters, in this case Latino voters, who are now beginning to vote. Perhaps you do not like that they are beginning to vote. Regardless of what the intent is, there is a message that you are sending, whether you like it or not. It is to folks like my parents. My father was born in this country but speaks broken English and probably falls within the category of folks you want to go after. My mother was not born in this country, speaks better English than my father, and is a U.S. citizen of this country, and she probably is on that list of names that you are now disclosing, violating her privacy rights in the process of doing so. You are sending a message to these folks. You are telling them you do not want them to participate, you do not care about what they do, you do not value their worth as citizens. I will just say this: Remember this, because the message will be sent. I will say, as I conclude, I do not need to talk to my parents about this vote. They will be watching. And just like my parents will be watching, there will be a lot of other folks who, for the first time in 1996, had a chance to vote. Some of them voted for Loretta Sanchez. Some of them may have even voted for Bob Dornan. But they will remember what this House of Representatives is doing, because you certainly are not out to get a conviction, you are not out to get a criminal investigation, but you are certainly out to get the hides of people who have participated in this American process. That is wrong.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, for purposes of instructing Members who are here and those who are not, I would remind the chairman and those Members that there may be procedural votes called in between the substantive amendments that may be voted on as well. So I doubt very seriously that there will be an hour's worth of time that people would be able to be gone.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I offer a preferential motion.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. I will propound the question. I had to give some background so the gentleman would be able to answer the question. My question is this: If the Committee on Rules is thinking of taking up this House Resolution which would call upon the Department of Justice to initiate criminal proceedings on an organization that believes its constitutional rights may be violated if it were to have to respond to this subpoena, then I believe a number of us would have a great amount of concern allowing the House to take that course of action given a number of things that the House has done in regard to the Sanchez investigation.

Mr. BECERRA. If I may direct a question to the distinguished chairman from the Committee on Rules, the chairman may know or others may know, there is a grave amount of concern brewing on the part of a number of Members of Congress with regard to the course that this investigation, now 11 months old, has taken with regard to the investigation in the 46th Congressional District and the alleged improprieties in voting. This resolution and, as quickly as I was able to glance at it, House Resolution 244 evidently calls upon the Department of Justice to initiate criminal proceedings against an organization which it deems noncompliant to a subpoena that was issued against it or to it by this Committee on House Oversight in regards to the Sanchez case. My understanding is that this organization is appealing the issuance of that subpoena on constitutional grounds. My further understanding is that there is some grave concern as to the reach of some of these subpoenas. My further understanding is there is grave concern that this committee, the Committee on House Oversight, has sent out more than 500,000 names with additional private information gathered from the Department of Justice, INS, and is now requesting assistance from the Secretary of State of California for further investigation of some 500,000 names.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, if the gentlewoman will yield briefly under her reservation, I will note for purposes of this particular request for expedition of time and the conduct of this House's duties that if, in fact, the Committee on House Oversight intends to take this action, a number of us intend to do whatever we can in the minority party to exert whatever rights we have to ensure that there is some justice in this matter for the investigation in the Sanchez case. If we are hoping to have clean and smooth conduct of business, I think it is going to quickly wind down and not happen if we have this type of activity continue to occur.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, I happen to have been one of those ``nasty'' attorneys that on the other side we have heard mentioned so many times. When I had the privilege of graduating from Stanford Law School back in 1984, I took a job working for Legal Services in Worcester, MA, working for $18,000 a year, which is not even what I would have had to have paid for another year of Stanford Law School had I needed a fourth year. At the same time, most of my peers at Stanford Law School were being hired for something around $70,000 a year to start their legal career, and certainly that is not the pay that the partner or the mid-level attorney in those firms is making. And what certainly those individuals were charging was well beyond $100 an hour. Yet here I was, representing mostly people who were mentally ill. I had several clients; one, for example, was a minor who was locked up in a facility for adults. It was because Legal Services was there that we were able to remove that youth from that facility that was meant for adults who were mentally ill. I had the opportunity to help adults who were being overmedicated because the wards and the staff at the institution were tired of having to put up with mentally ill patients. So they would overmedicate them so they would be drugged out of their minds and would not budge from their beds. Had Legal Services not have been there, we would not have been there to help these patients avoid overmedication. I happened to work for Legal Services in Los Angeles when I was a law student where we were able to help people who were not being paid the minimum wage because unscrupulous employers were denying folks their pay. All of these things have happened. We have heard of a few instances where there may have been some abuse in legal services office, but I have not heard a single soul here say that when the Department of Defense paid $500 for a toilet seat, or when they paid some $200 for a screwdriver, or when the CIA spent 300 and some-odd million dollars for a secret building, or when the Department of Energy failed to safely oversee the storage of nuclear waste, that we should kill those programs. Certainly we know we need the Department of Defense, and we need to be protective of this Nation's security, but no one has said tube those particular agencies simply because there has been some abuse. When we think of the more than 1 million cases last year that were handled by a Legal Services attorney, for a pittance, it is well worth the while. When we think that these are people who would be unrepresented, those poor individuals who go to Legal Services--it is worth its weight in gold, because the folks that I worked with, the folks that I had the privilege to serve under working for $18,000 a year certainly did the job and did it well. I now look at my salary of $133,000, and I hear people arguing that we should do away with a program where attorneys are paid $18,000, $20,000, $30,000, and I think to myself, here we are making $133,000, and saying that we should do away with Legal Services; perhaps we should think about something else to do away with, and that should not be Legal Services.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I offer a privileged motion.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, now almost 1 year and a half a million dollars later neutral observers are saying what everyone in this House has been saying for the longest of times. The people of the 46th Congressional District in California voted Bob Dornan out of office, and they voted the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Sanchez] in. Yet the Republican leadership continues to waste taxpayer dollars funding Bob Dornan's election witch hunt against the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Sanchez] and his customary tirades. Now we hear that the Republican leadership has a scheme to reject the vote of the people of the 46th Congressional District and to take away the job that the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Sanchez] earned from the voters. The leadership on the Republican side will allege that there were too many questionable votes in the 984-vote victory of the gentlewoman from California. Who was the target of this so-called questionable voting campaign? Hispanics. Who was the target of the harassment in this investigation? Hispanic voters. It is the people of America who vote people into office; it is the people of America who vote people out. It is not witch hunts that are paid for and financed by taxpayers at the expense of those people who vote and do so. Bob Dornan does not have the right to do this at taxpayer expense.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, on September 16, 1997, I was unavoidably detained during two rollcall votes: No. 398, on agreeing to the Goodling amendment and No. 399, on agreeing to the Hoekstra amendment. Had I been present for the votes, I would have voted ``yes'' on No. 398 and ``no'' on No. 399.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time to me, and for her continued fight on behalf of people with HIV. Mr. Chairman, certainly needle exchange programs will not reduce the use of drugs. But all the evidence and all the research out there tells us that needle exchange programs do reduce the spread of HIV. The National Institutes of Health reports that needle exchange programs have brought down the spread of HIV by some 30 percent. When we consider that one needle costs a dime, and the estimate is that it costs some $120,000 to treat someone who gets HIV, we can understand why this is such a powerful program. When we put on top of that the fact that one-third of all the cases of HIV are now related to drug use, and the fact that most of the new HIV cases among women and children are related to drug use, my colleagues can see how powerful a weapon this is. Certainly, we just do not do a needle exchange program by itself. If we also want to address, and I hope we do, the issue of drug prevention, we have treatment programs, we have other avenues to try to make sure that we do reduce the use of drugs. But right now what we are talking about is trying to stop the spread of AIDS and HIV, and we should do whatever we can that has been proven to work to do so at a minimal cost. Mr. Chairman, we may not succeed just through needle exchange in reducing drug usage. That is not the effort behind needle exchange programs. But we have proven through needle exchange programs that we will reduce the spread of HIV. Why should we do this? Well, the U.S. Conference of Mayors tells us we should do this. Why? Because they have to deal with this most directly. We should follow the advice of those who have to deal with people who unfortunately have become infected by the HIV virus. Unfortunately, there are impediments. We should not be an impediment. Let us let those local programs work and help them coordinate nationwide and let us do the right thing in trying to stop the spread of HIV. I urge my colleagues to oppose the Hastert amendment.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, there is an old saying, those who do not study history are bound to repeat its mistakes. What has history taught us? We know that on May 20 of this year, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen, Ezequiel Hernandez, of Redford, TX, who was tending his goats was shot and killed by a Marine who was engaged in drug interdiction efforts along the borders. He was the first American to be killed on U.S. soil by American troops since the 1970 Kent State incident. We know we already have 7,000 Border Patrol agents patrolling the borders, and we are going to have an additional 1,000 Border Patrol agents for the next 4 years added to the force. We know that Border Patrol agents are trained to deal with situations and problems along our border. Military personnel are not. Ezequiel Hernandez, 3 months before he was shot, was tending his goats, as he always was. He shot again into the brush, because he thought there was something there trying to get to his goats. It happened to be Border Patrol agents. When he found out it was Border Patrol agents, he went and apologized to those agents. Had Border Patrol agents been patrolling the border on May 20 instead of military troops, Ezequiel would probably still be alive. His untimely death at the hands of U.S. Marines on our soil, American soil, is now part of our Nation's history. It is also a part of a Federal investigation into this incident. From his death we should learn that when our borders are patrolled by heavily camouflaged military troops, unbeknownst to Ezequiel Hernandez, unbeknownst to the citizens of Redford, unbeknownst even to the local law authorities in those areas along the border, because the military cannot tell anyone that they are there, what will happen is that unsuspecting American citizens can and will die. If we put 10,000 troops on our southern border, we will have learned nothing from history, and tragically, we will be bound to repeat its mistakes. This is not a proposal that is supported by the military. This is not a proposal supported by the residents in Texas along the border. It should not be a proposal supported by the Members of this House.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York, especially for all the work he has done on this particular balanced budget agreement. Mr. Speaker, if 535 Members of both the House and Senate got together to try to draft a bill, we would have 535 different versions of a balanced budget agreement. That is why in a democracy and in politics compromise is what must rule. If we do have that type of compromise, we have leadership and we will have progress. We have to accept some bad with the good. Democrats, I know for example, fought for about 5 million children to be included within the child tax credit because they happen to fall within families that earn between $18,000 and $30,000. Republicans were able to achieve victory for families earning $75,000 to about $160,000, and including them within the child tax credit as well. Democrats fought hard to get another $8 billion more for child health care, to try to help cover some 5 million of the 10 million uninsured children in this Nation. Republicans fought very hard and succeeded in getting the corporate tax rate dropped on capital gains tax rates. Democrats fought very hard to make sure that empowerment zones and brownfields were included in the legislation, which would allow for economically depressed areas, those areas that had contamination in the soil, to be reached by new entrepreneurs who are willing to take a little bit of a risk, and they will get some incentives and tax breaks if they establish a business in these areas. Republicans, on the other hand, fought very hard to get IRA's, individual retirement accounts, that will now go to those who can put up to about $2,000. If they happen to have incomes up to about $160,000, now they will not have to pay taxes on those particular IRAs. They benefit. Democrats made sure that the education package would give someone who is going to community college and pays $2,000 a year at least $1,200 of tax breaks. The Republicans wanted to give $750. We won on that. The Republicans were able to get more breaks for the 1\1/2\ percent of people who die and have to pay an estate tax. We all win and we all lose. Ultimately we try to compromise. I think we can all say that whether one lives on Main Street or Wall Street, we all won.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. BECERRA. By not providing for that tax credit for employers that try to provide education to some of their employees, what we are doing is saying if an employer has decided that it would be good for that employee to get further trained, that no longer can the employer say to that employee, you can now get that training and we will both receive the benefits of a tax credit by having had you better educated. Now the IRS will have to decide if there is any tax credit to be had by the employer or the employee.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Maryland, for yielding time to me.

Mr. BECERRA. I have taken a look at the tax bill as best I can find. The tax that is being imposed on students who earn, say, $10,000 or $12,000 is not going to help provide other opportunities for other people going to college, it is there to help pay for the cost of these tax breaks that mostly well-to-do Americans are going to be receiving. How does that strike the gentleman?