Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, if I may, I thank the Senator from Arizona for his kind words.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to bring to the attention of the Senate the current celebration which is ongoing in my home State of Utah. With the beginning of this new year, Utah begins its centennial celebration having been admitted to the Union of States in 1896. This 100-year mark is very significant considering the long struggle for the citizens of the Utah Territory to gain statehood in the late 19th century. The people of the Utah Territory tried unsuccessfully for admission to the Union six times--1849, 1856, 1862, 1872, 1882, and 1887--before being admitted in 1896. Today, Utah is one of the fastest growing States in the country. Business is thriving as more and more companies establish roots in the State. The banking and financial industry have a long history of success in Utah. Manufacturing industry continues to grow and succeed. Utah's software industry is growing so rapidly that it has now surpassed that of Silicon Valley. Utah provides many opportunities for the families that reside in the State. With six 4-year, degree-granting universities and colleges, including four State institutions and two private institutions, Utah provides its citizens with many opportunities to enhance their education and circumstances. Today, Utah is ranked among the stop States in the Nation for the quality of its graduates. Again, Mr. President, it brings me great pleasure to join with the people of my State in celebrating during this centennial year. I would like to pay tribute to the many people who have worked so hard to put together the events that are taking place this week and throughout the remainder of this year. In particular I would like to single out Mr. Steve Studdert for the fine job he has done as chairman of the Utah Centennial Commission. Additionally, thanks goes to Gov. Mike Leavitt and his many predecessors who have worked so hard over the past 100 years to make Utah what it is today. Of course we cannot forget our pioneer founders who saw the vision of what the desert could yield and put forth the hard work to cultivate and culture the Rocky Mountain valleys we now call home. For Utahns who find themselves transplanted to Washington, DC, I would like to announce that a celebration will be held here on the 27th of January, commemorating Utah's centennial. My staff and I can be contacted for further details.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask that with regard to the nomination of Joseph H. Neely, the following letter be inserted in the Record at the appropriate place. The letter follows: State of Utah, Department of Financial Institutions, Salt Lake City, UT, October 15, 1995. Re: Joe Neely's nomination to FDIC board Hon. Robert Bennett, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC. Dear Senator Bennett: This letter is to inform you of my strong support of President Clinton's nominee, Joseph H. Neely, to the vacant fifth seat on the FDIC board. I have personally known Joe many years in his current role as Mississippi Bank Commissioner. I have always found him to be very articulate and informed on all issues concerning financial institutions. I have appreciated his ability to listen and then respond to the issue or question. I believe he would add considerably to the breadth and depth of FDIC board deliberations. Joe would bring a state banking commissioner's view to the FDIC board. I believe this state perspective on banking issues is needed to counter the inordinate number of U.S. Treasury Department personnel having a seat on the FDIC board. I urge your continued support of his nomination as it goes to full Senate hearing. Thank you for your favorable consideration of this matter. Sincerely, G. Edward Leary, Commissioner. (At the request of Mr. Breaux, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent that the veto message be considered as having been read and it be printed in the Record and spread in full upon the Journal.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I understand the veto message with respect to the securities litigation bill has arrived from the House.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we had a long, I think, careful and reasoned debate on this issue. It passed the Senate by a very substantial margin, indeed by a margin, which, if it had been the final vote, would have been sufficient to override a Presidential veto. I am not sure what purpose will be served by our spending a great deal of time repeating the arguments that were made, but I am sure we will. The procedure and tradition in the Senate being what it is, we will go over this one more time. I believe the President has made a mistake in vetoing this bill. I believe the House of Representatives has made the right decision in overriding the veto. I know the bill has been characterized as an issue between investors and corporations. The President, in his veto message, indicated that he was going to strike a blow for the investors. Mr. President, I need to point out once more, perhaps, that the owners of corporations are the investors, and anything which damages the economic health of the corporation damages the investors who place their money in that corporation. Anything that prohibits the corporations' ability to earn a return on investment damages the investors who are seeking that return on investment. I find it difficult to understand, therefore, those who say that we are going to help investors by supporting activities which damage the profitability of the corporation in which the investors have placed their money. The key provisions of this bill are proinvestor provisions. I think the most significant provision of this bill is the one that allows the investors to determine who will prosecute the lawsuit when a class action suit is brought. Let me illustrate the importance of that, Mr. President, with an example that is admittedly overdrawn, but we need to overdraw these issues because some people do not seem to understand them when they are not overdrawn. Let us assume that the ABC Corp. has 100 shares outstanding; let us assume that one investor has purchased one of those shares, and another investor has purchased the other 99. When a class action suit is brought, it is brought on behalf of all members of the class. In the circumstance I have just described, there are two members of the class--the class being the investors: One who has one share, the other who has 99 shares. If a class action suit is brought by the investor who has one share and the effect of that class action suit is to damage the ability of that corporation to perform, who is most damaged by the suit? It is the shareholder who owns the other 99 shares. Yet the way the thing is structured now, the shareholder who owns one share can bring a class action suit on behalf of the entire class, and if he gets to the courtroom first, he is determined to be the lead plaintiff in this suit. Now, the investor who owns the 99 shares sits down with him and says, ``Sam, this is stupid. This is going to damage the corporation. This is going to damage all of us.'' Sam smiles sweetly at Joe and says, ``Joe, what is it worth to you to get me to drop my suit?'' Joe says, ``Well, Sam, you know you will lose if we get in court.'' And Sam says ``Joe, that's not the point. What's it worth to you?'' Sam says, ``It will cost the corporation a million dollars to defend against your suit.'' Joe says, ``Fine, offer me half a million and I go away.'' It is blackmail, Mr. President, pure and simple. So Joe finally says, ``OK, Sam, here is your $500,000. Drop your suit.'' Sam takes his $500,000 and he goes away until the next time. I have told this story before. I have to repeat it again because I think it is an important part of the point I am trying to make. We are often told here, ``No, the only reason lawsuits are settled out of court is when the management has something to hide.'' Well, the story I am about to tell you is a real story. It really happened. It happened to my father. He served here in the Senate for some 24 years. When he retired from the Senate he was not ready to retire from life so he got himself another life and another series of activities. One of them was serving on boards of directors. He was on a number of boards. Some were charitable, some were nonprofit, some were very much profit. On one of the boards he served, he would go to the board meetings and take his duty seriously--as my father always did--and then one day he received a stack of papers in the mail notifying him that he was being sued. The suit was made out to Wallace F. Bennett, et al., and the suit was claiming all kinds of things. My father looked through this. He was quite disturbed. It became clear to him that the ``et al.'' in this case were the other directors of the corporation. He called the legal division of the corporation whose board he was serving on and said, ``What is this all about?" The lawyer said to him ``Oh, don't worry about that, Mr. Bennett. The reason you are named is because the directors are listed alphabetically and ``B'' comes before the letters of any of the other directors so they are suing you and all of the directors, but it is just a coincidence that your name comes first, that you are named in the suit. The entire board is being sued.'' Dad said, ``That is a little bit of comfort, but what are we being sued for? What did we do wrong?'' Well, the lawyer says ``You raised your salary.'' Dad said, ``Pardon me?'' And he said, ``Well, remember, the way this thing is structured, the compensation of the directors are tied to the profitability of the organization. So when the organization makes more money the directors' compensation goes up.'' Dad says, ``That is logical. That is proper. What is the basis of the suit?'' ``There is a lawyer in New York who watches this, and whenever the compensation of the directors goes up for whatever reason, he automatically files a lawsuit against us claiming that the directors are looting the proceeds and assets of the corporation for their own profit.'' Dad said, ``Well, that lawsuit is absolutely absurd. It is sound business practice to tie the directors' compensation to the profitability of the company. That means the directors will take the actions that will make the company more profitable.'' ``Don't worry about it, Senator, this lawyer knows he will never win his suit. He knows we will never spend the money to take him to court. It would cost us about $500,000 to prosecute this suit and take him to court and win and it is cheaper for us to send him a $100,000 check to settle this.'' So every time this happens, that is, there is a change in the compensation of the directors, he files the suit, we send him a $100,000 check, he goes away and the problem is solved. That is exactly what happened. They sent the lawyer a $100,000 check, he dropped his suit, and everybody went forward. My father was outraged. But they told him, ``Senator, you can be as outraged as you want to be, but our alternative is to prosecute this lawsuit, take him to court, beat him in court, see a $500,000 legal bill run up in the process. The logical thing for us to do for the shareholders, the investors, if you will, is to pay him his $100,000, and hope he will go away.'' Now, my father was pleased when another member joined the board whose last name began with an ``A'' because then the papers were always filed on the new director rather than my father, but again and again they sent the $100,000 bribe money off to the lawyer in New York who had himself a really wonderful legal practice. All he had to do was file these papers and collect his check. There was no merit whatever in his claim and he knew it and everybody else knew it. There is an end to this story that I kind of like. The lawyer decided to expand his practice and he started suing other companies besides the one of which my father served as a director. One of the companies he decided to sue was owned by Merrill Lynch, and the Merrill Lynch lawyers looked at this and decided the time has come to put an end to it and we have deep enough pockets that we can take this man to court and ruin him in his legal costs, trying to defend himself. So the system that had worked for the lawyer in the one circumstance then turned against him. Merrill Lynch said, ``Whatever it takes in legal costs, it takes, but we are going to put a stop to this, force this man to go to court and force him to defend his position.'' And they ultimately did put a stop to it because when he was faced with actually proving his position in a court of law and running up the costs connected with that kind of litigation, the lawyer was finally forced to back down. I tell this story because I want to lay to rest, once and for all, the canard that is raised on the other side of this issue by those who say that by passing this legislation we are damaging investors for the benefit of big corporations. The investors in the company where my father served as a director were benefited by the actions of Merrill Lynch and their legal department when they finally stepped in. They would be benefited by the passage of this legislation, and Merrill Lynch investors would be benefited by the fact that Merrill Lynch would no longer have to spend that kind of money to clean up that sort of an outrage. If you want to vote on behalf of the investors, you vote for the override of the President's veto of this bill. I was sorry to hear that the President had vetoed. We were told informally on the floor when the bill was passed that the President would probably sign it. We were told that the President and the people advising him understood that this was proinvestor legislation and the President, obviously, wants to position himself as being proinvestor. I was also told by those who watch these kinds of things that the President would probably sign it because this legislation is very, very important in Silicon Valley. The companies that have been the target of these frivolous lawsuits are primarily located in the high-technology industry, and Silicon Valley in California is considered the seed bed of high technology in this country. I might, in a parochial way, Mr. President, note that there are more software companies in Utah Valley than there are in Silicon Valley, but that is a parochial comment made by the Senator from Utah. Why would it be important for the President to sign a bill that would benefit Silicon Valley? One need only look at the political map and the number of electoral votes that are contained in California to realize that anything that improves the California economy would be of political benefit to a politician who could take credit for improving the California economy. The California delegation as a whole has been most vigorous in their support of this bill. The senior Senator from California [Mrs. Feinstein] has been a supporter of this bill. But the President decided, apparently, that whatever political benefit would accrue to him by doing something that would be good for Silicon Valley might be offset by his ability to pose as the defender of the small investor. There have been many editorials written by people who perhaps do not understand this bill, to say, no, this really does support the small investor, and the President decided to go with that rhetoric rather than with what I consider to be the true substantive benefit of this bill. So we are back again. We have gone through this argument in committee. The bill was reported out of committee by a strong bipartisan margin. We are back into it here on the floor. As indicated, the bill was passed by the Senate by a strong bipartisan margin. It has gone through the House. The override vote was 319 to 100, more than 3 to 1. It needed only be 2 to 1, but it was more than 3 to 1. So that makes it very clear there is a strong bipartisan message here. I am interested that the authorship of this bill began on the Democratic side of the aisle with Senator Dodd, joined on the Republican side of the aisle by Senator Domenici. It was known as the Dodd-Domenici bill in the previous Congress. Now, given the results of the election, it is called the Domenici-Dodd bill. But it demonstrates the bipartisan nature, rising above partisan bickering, that has marked this entire effort. The effort has taken years, and in the years since Senator Dodd began his crusade to get this problem fixed, there have been millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, investor dollars wasted in dealing with these frivolous lawsuits. If this veto is upheld, there will be millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars wasted in the future. This legislation will ultimately pass. It will ultimately pass because it is the right thing to do and more and more people recognize that it is the right thing to do. The only question is whether it should pass in this Congress and become law in this year. I believe the time has gone long enough for us to debate this and repeat the arguments back and forth. The time has come for us to pass this bill. So I hope the Senate will respond, as the House has done, with a strong bipartisan majority to override the President's veto. I expressed my concern that I think the President was misguided by his advisers on this one, both those who advised him on the substance and those who may have advised him on the politics. I hope we will help correct this Presidential mistake by what we do here on the floor. Mr. President, I could go on and repeat all of the arguments that have been made in committee and on the floor on this issue, but I see the senior Senator from Maryland, who was the ranking member of the Banking Committee and who is opposed to this bill, and undoubtedly in support of the President's veto. He is on the floor, and I will be happy to yield to him for whatever opening statement he might have. Then we can go forward from there. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator for his courtesy. I had not intended to go on this long. But it is this experience that has said to me: we ought to try this. We ought to turn this over to the States and see what happens. When people say to me, ``But you're playing with children's lives here''--and the Senator from Illinois was tremendously moving in her comments in that regard, and that is one of the reasons I take the floor, because I want to make it clear I am aware of the fact that we are playing with children's lives here, and I do not take that responsibility lightly--but I look at the results of the present system and I say, ``What are we risking if we try something else?'' I look at the disasters that have occurred under the present system and ultimately decide we are not risking that much. Mr. President, I am not announcing for reelection at this point, but I expect to be in the Senate longer than my present term. I assure the Senator from New York and anyone else, if we find out, as a result of the passing of this kind of torch from the Federal level to the State level, that we do, indeed, get a race to the bottom, we do, indeed, see greater disasters than what we have right now, I will be one of the first Senators to come here and say, ``Let us not let the future roll continue'' for however many years it has been since President Kennedy signed that bill that I think had a major, significant impact on the rise of homelessness. I will be one of the first Senators to be here and say, ``OK, we tried it, it is clearly not working, the race to the bottom is happening, let's stop it, let's stop it now.'' But I am not content to let the present circumstances go on without this kind of experimentation, because the human tragedy that the present circumstances created is so significant that we must do what we can. I thank the Senator for his courtesy. That is my response to listening to the comments that were made. I appreciate the Senators letting me get it out while it is still fresh in my mind. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I appreciate the willingness of the manager to yield me some time. I had the privilege of being in the chair and thereby being able to give my full attention to the statement of the Senator from New York, and following that the Senator from Illinois, two Senators for whom I have enormous respect and personal affection. I am moved by the clear and unalloyed concern they have for the children in poverty in our country and for the failure of our present system to solve that problem. I can think of no two Senators who have better motives and more genuine urges to solve this problem than these two. I am a supporter of the conference report. And I want to respond to the comments that were made so that my support for the conference report will not be misunderstood. I think the Senator from New York put it in the best context when he described the signing ceremony that took place in the Kennedy administration against a backdrop of great optimism and unfortunately complete ignorance as to what the future would actually be like. I think the Senator's point is well taken. We are embarking once again on a leap of faith with considerable ignorance as to what the future would be like. I would be reluctant to take that leap of faith if I thought the present was working. But the present is not working. And I am willing to take a leap into the future in the hope that it will be better than the present and frankly a fear that things could not be much worse than we have in the present, that we are not risking that much by dismantling some of the present circumstance. Let me share with you an experience from my home State of Utah that gives me more hope for the future than perhaps my friends have. In the State of Utah we set up--I say we, I had nothing to do with it--the Governor and the office of social services set up a program which required a whole series of waivers from Federal regulations in order to implement. These waivers took a great deal of time and effort to put in place. Finally the Feds said, ``Well, we will grant you the waivers''--my memory tells me that it took 44 such waivers--``We will grant you the waivers from the Federal regulations because we think the program you will put in place will in fact improve the lot of the poor, who come under your program. However, we tell you that based on our analysis, the program will cost 20 percent more than is being expended right now. And we do not think you can afford it, but we will give you the opportunity to spend that extra money.'' We wanted to have--in response to the kinds of concerns the Senator from New York raised about ``understanding''--a proper kind of control of this circumstance, so even though some centers were set up for the pilot program, in the one center where the most people would come for the pilot program, they established a truly random control group; that is, one would come in and be put in the present Federal programs, the next person through the door would be put in the State pilot program, the next person through the door in the Federal program, the next person in the State pilot program, and so on, so that you had exactly the same kind of people, from exactly the same neighborhood, serviced by exactly the same social workers to see what happened. Under the program devised by the State, which was completely flexible, the question asked was, ``What do you need? Tell us your circumstance. And what do you need?'' ``Oh, all right, if this is what you need, I have control over all of the Federal programs, all of the money, and I can give you so much for food stamps, I can give you so much for this, I can give you so much for that. By the way, before you receive this, we have to have an understanding that this is temporary and you are looking for work.'' Under those that came in under the Federal program, the question was not ``What do you need?'' the question was, ``For what are you eligible?'' The whole focus was on eligibility. ``You may need this program, but you don't happen to be eligible, and, therefore, I'm not empowered to give it to you. So I will give you only what you're eligible for.'' And by the way, no one really brings up the issue of work. Very interesting results. First the financial results. The program managed by the State was not 20 percent more expensive, it was 5 percent cheaper. We saved money. That was not the purpose of the program. The purpose of the program was to do something better for the people who were poor, but the byproduct of doing it the way we did it is that we saved money. People who came in who had never had an experience with the welfare system before, when asked ``Are you willing to go to work?'' responded instantly, ``Of course. That's what I want. I am only here because I can't get work.'' ``We'll help you find a job. That is part of the reason we're here for. We'll help you find employment.'' People who came in who had experience with the Federal welfare program before said, ``Wait a minute. Nobody ever asked me about work before. And I don't want to talk to you about that. I'm here to get that to which I am entitled. And I'm going to fight you if you say I have to do anything other than show up.'' Admittedly, those are people who had previous experience with the Federal welfare program. The people who had not had the previous experience did not have that attitude. But among the new folk who were coming in for the first time--automatic--``We want to do something to get a job.'' These are the statistics, as I remember them. The folks under the State pilot program, 95 percent of them are ultimately employed. Admittedly, they may not be employed in the kinds of jobs you and I would like, Mr. President. There are many of them employed in what are sometimes derisively called leaf raking jobs, but there are things for them to do somewhere, someplace that the office involved with their lives helps them find. And 95 percent of them have some kind of income as a result of their work. Mr. President, I cite this example as justification for my support of this conference report. The State devised this program, and it is better than the Federal program. The State devised this program, and it is cheaper than the Federal program. Then the final blow here, that says to me we must do what we can to get this out of the hands of the Federal control. Donna Shalala came to Utah and saw this program, and she was entranced. She said, ``This is what we should be doing nationwide.'' That was 3 years ago, Mr. President, and nothing has happened at the Federal level. The Federal bureaucracy is so cumbersome and so difficult that even the Secretary, with all of her good will and desire to solve these problems--and I grant her all of that--has been unable to move the bureaucracy under her control in the direction that she herself said it ought to go. Governors move more rapidly than that. Federal bureaucrats, if I may use an old cliche, and I know that it is not entirely fair, but it makes the point. When I entered the Federal bureaucracy, I was told, we think in 40-year periods because that's how long it takes us to get our pension. Governors get reelected in 4-year periods, so perhaps they think 10 times as rapidly. But the Governor who put in place the program I have just described already knew at the time he was doing that that he was going to face the electorate 4 years later and he had to have a success and he had to have it quickly. The bureaucrats who are in the Civil Service who think in 40-year periods think perhaps some day we might.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Mr. BENNETT addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Pennsylvania. If we were not in the veto circumstance we are in, we might well be able to work out some of the issues that he raises. My only comment with respect to some of the comments he made is to remind Senators that this bill deals with forward-looking statements, not with fraud that is committed in terms of reporting inaccurate stock prices, earnings, asset value, et cetera. I hope Members of the Senate and any who are listening will understand the point we have made over and over again, that had this bill been in place at the time of Charles Keating's defalcations this bill would not have prevented a class action suit against Charles Keating. Had this bill been in place at the time of the class action suit brought in Orange County, this bill would not have prevented those class action suits. There is a clear difference between fraud when one is making a false statement about the performance in the past and forward-looking statements where one is making predictions about the future. That is one of the cruxes here of this argument that has been lost. People have stood in the Chamber again and again and said to those of us who are in support of this legislation, how can you support fraud on the part of corporate executives? The answer is, we do not support fraud on the part of corporate executives. We have never supported fraud on the part of corporate executives. If I may be somewhat predictive in my forward statements, Mr. President, I see charts that are being set up in the Chamber that we have seen before which make this point, that investors are being defrauded and therefore how can you support legislation that would support this kind of defrauding. The fact is, stating it once again for the record, we are not talking about the Charles Keatings of this world. We are not talking about that for which Michael Milken was sent to jail, acts where information is hidden from investors or information is distorted to defraud and mislead investors. We are talking about the circumstance where an executive is asked a question about the future and gives his best answer, and then after the fact, if the future does not come to pass the way that executive had speculated, he gets sued. If I may, Mr. President, I would like to put that in the context of the present budget debate because that is so much on everybody's mind. We are seeing estimates of the future that are coming out of the Office of Management and Budget. We are seeing estimates of the future that are coming out from the Congressional Budget Office. We are seeing estimates of the future that are coming out of the Mainstream Bipartisan Coalition, with whom I met yesterday, about what the economy is going to do and what the budget is going to do. Without the protection contained in this bill, if the Members of the Senate and the House, if, indeed, the President himself, were corporate executives making these estimates about the future, we would all be subject to class action lawsuits if it turned out we were wrong. I guarantee you, Mr. President, we are all wrong. The only thing I know about the Congressional Budget Office projections for the future and the Office of Management and Budget projections for the future and the President's projections for the future and my projections for the future is that we will all be wrong. The future is not knowable with any degree of certainty. If it were, we would all be rich because we would all bet on the right side of every football game. We would all make the right choices for every stock that was purchased. We would all be rich because we could all predict the future with certainty. None of us can, and yet that is the standard to which too many executives have been held in this arena: You said you were going to have product x ready for us by September and you missed it by 30 days. We are going to sue you for misleading us. What protection does the executive have in that circumstance when they say, Mr. Executive, when do you expect to have product x ready for market? He says, I will not tell you because if I say September and it turns out to be October, you are going to sue me. And if I say September and it turns out to be August, you are going to sue me. So I will not tell you. Well, how can I make an intelligent guess as to whether or not I should invest in your company if you will not even tell me what you expect to happen? Tough luck. That is what we have now, Mr. President. In the name of protecting the investor, we are depriving the investor of the very best guesses so labeled, estimates so labeled, conjectures so labeled, of the people who know the most about the company. We are asking the investor to fly even more blind than they would be if they had those guesses. So let us understand as we debate this that we are talking about protecting people from lawsuits based on their inability to guess the future, not about protecting people from liars, cheats, and thieves. The liars, cheats, and thieves will still be subjected to class action lawsuits and the class action lawsuits will still end up recovering millions of dollars for investors. But if this legislation passes, honest executives who want to share their best guesses of the future with investors will be able to do so with the knowledge that if they happen to be wrong and product x comes out in October rather than September, they will not have to spend millions of the investors' money to pay off some professional plaintiff that has brought a suit against them on the technicality that exists in the present circumstance. Mr. President, I see that my colleagues are now prepared. I am happy to yield the floor to those who have a differing point of view. Mrs. BOXER addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Precisely, and I have no problem with that. I do have a personal problem, whether it is legal or not, with the extent to which this President seems to use this White House staff. I am entitled to that concern.

Mr. BENNETT. I have Lloyd Cutler's statement to that effect, if the Senator would like to hear it.

Mr. BENNETT. Under the same procedure, Mr. President, that it is understood I would not lose my right to the floor, I will be happy to engage in whatever colloquy and debate my friend from Connecticut may desire.

Mr. BENNETT. The Senator has raised a possibility which may indeed turn out to be the outcome. The matter becomes a matter of judgment as to which scenario you believe is the one that will play out, the one I have posited or the one that the Senator from Maryland has posited. And we will all have to vote and see which of those two scenarios is the one that comes about. Mr. President, I had not planned to go on this long. I will be happy to yield again to my colleague from Connecticut, but I would like to wrap up.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I had not planned to go on this long.

Mr. BENNETT. So I would not presume to try to give instructions to my colleagues in the House. But I think it is appropriate that we have these kinds of conversations. I think the Senator from Connecticut raises a very logical course of action that we should consider. But I am not prepared to remove the pressure that the existence of this vote creates toward getting a solution because, as I said to the senior Senator from Maryland, in my opinion, the movement to which he refers would not have taken place if the committee had not taken the tough stance that it has taken. The movement that we have seen in the White House position in just the last 24 hours, I believe, is attributable to the pending vote that we are going to take. If we take the vote and the White House and the House can come to some kind of a conclusion, then the subpoena called for in this vote is rendered mute and the matter is taken care of. But I would rather not remove the pressure that this vote represents until after the agreement is reached because I believe that the pressure of this vote has had a salutary effect in moving us toward that.

Mr. BENNETT. I say to my colleague that I would be happy to sit down with him if it were just the two of us and see if we could arrive at an agreement on that point. I have learned long since, even though I am a relatively new Member here, not to try to guess what the House will do under any circumstance.

Mr. BENNETT. The Senator is correct to raise that quote in this context. It simply demonstrates that there are now some circumstances that the President was unable to imagine that long time ago because he has now asserted the privilege and we confront it.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, going back to the editorial in the New York Times of yesterday, after they made the statement that I have quoted about the legally dubious claims, they conclude that editorial with this comment cutting straight to the issue that we are talking about today on the floor: It should still be possible to make arrangements before tomorrow when the Senate is due to take up the matter. If not, the Senate has no choice but to vote to go to court to enforce the committee's subpoena. Now, I have gone to the trouble of quoting all of these editorials leading up to this to indicate that this is not a sudden decision on the part of the editorial writers of the New York Times or I would assume the Washington Post, whose stream of editorials has gone the same way. As I say, I have not quoted from all of the papers that have been considered to be Republican friendly. I have quoted from papers that would normally be expected to take the President's side on this issue, and I find it somewhat interesting that the leader of those papers concludes its editorial by saying that the Senate has no choice but to vote to go to court and enforce the committee's subpoena. I see my friend from Connecticut rising.

Mr. BENNETT. Two months, if we are lucky.

Mr. BENNETT. I have not done that kind of research. I will go back and take a look at the past media circumstance. It is my impression that no one has called for breaching the attorney-client privilege for the President or anybody else; that the concern here has to do with whether or not that privilege extends to Government lawyers. I do not know of anybody in the media who would say that if the meeting was confined entirely to the President and the lawyers who had been hired by him and are being paid by him to represent him in his personal matters, the notes should be turned over. I have not had anybody say that to me. The issue is whether or not the presence of Government lawyers at the meeting so changed the nature of the meeting as to make it appropriate for the committee to ask for those notes. So I understand the point that my friend from Connecticut is making, and I am sure that he is correct in terms of the institutional bias of the press. I would stop short of saying that it applies to violating all kinds of privilege. I think it applies to the narrow issue here as to what happens by virtue of the Government lawyers having been present.

Mr. BENNETT. Having started, I want to finish the point, and I think it important all Members of the Senate find out about this because it goes to the heart of why we are having this conversation at all. Here are the notes that Ms. Thomases took of her telephone conversation with Web Hubbell: ``Massey has relationship with Latham and Hillary Clinton had relationship with McDougal. Rick''--that is to say Massey--``will say he had relationship with Latham and had a lot to do with getting the client in.'' These are the notes of the damage control person. ``This is what we're going to say about how Madison Guaranty came to the Rose law firm: Rick will say he had relationship with Latham and had a lot to do with getting the client in. She did all the billing. Hillary Clinton had number of conferences with Latham, Massey, and McDougal on both transactions. She reviewed some documents. She had one telephone conversation in 4-85 beginning of the deal with Bev.'' Bev is the appropriate Arkansas State regulator handling these matters. ``Neither deal went through. Broker dealer was opposed by staff but approved by Bev under certain conditions which they never met.'' Now here is a crucial sentence for me: ``But for Massey, it would not have been there. Rose firm prohibited from filing examiner's report.'' And at the bottom: ``Hillary Clinton was billing partner and attended conferences. He''--I am assuming ``he'' is Massey--``he had a major role blank hours versus Hillary Clinton's blank hours.'' We are trying to fill in the blank, and the only document we have with which to fill in the blank goes contrary to these notes. That is, Mrs. Clinton's hours are greater than Mr. Massey's hours rather than less. But the interesting thing for me is the statement flat out: ``Rick will say he had relationship with Latham and had a lot to do with getting the client in.'' Later on: ``But for Massey, it would not have been there.'' The December 18 New York Times has the following comment: In her 1992 notes, Ms. Thomases records how top campaign officials discussed how to answer questions about Madison and the Rose firm. Her notes show that Mr. Hubbell told her that an associate in the firm, Richard Massey, ``will say he had a lot to do with getting client in.'' Mrs. Clinton has also said, in sworn testimony to regulators, that Mr. Massey brought in Madison as a client. But Mr. Massey, now a partner in the Rose firm, has told Federal investigators that he does not know how the firm came to represent Madison. Well, Mr. President, I think the Senator from Connecticut makes an appropriate point, and we should not rehash everything that happened in the hearings. I will now step down. But I go through all of this to demonstrate my conviction that pressure from the committee has been essential to the forthcoming of documents. Whether the pressure has been continued badgering by the majority staff or whether it has been formal subpoenas or threats of subpoenas, it has taken pressure every step of the way for us to get documents. And in every case, when we have come close to getting a resolution to an issue, we were told, ``Well, that document does not exist,'' or ``I do not remember.'' And we find the same circumstance here. After we discussed the conflicting evidence, Web Hubbell told me, ``The only way you are going to find out what really happened, Senator, is to get the original billing sheets.'' We now find that the original billing sheets do not exist. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT. I do not wish to be flippant about these matters because they are important matters, but I find myself saying the lapse of memory seems to fit a pattern that we have seen from other people in the White House.

Mr. BENNETT. I understand. I agree he is a leading expert. And it is a very strong letter. I also note, however, as you have, that the matter has not been adjudicated in a court, and I think that may well argue strongly for us to proceed and allow the court to so adjudicate, because if we solve these matters by getting legal opinions on opposite sides and then reading the opinions to each other, we do not need courts. The courts exist to take the legal opinions on one side and the other and listen to them and make a decision. Many of those decisions, as the Senator well knows, are decided on a five-to-four vote, with strong letters from real experts ending up on the side of the four, sometimes, when it goes to the Supreme Court, and the strong letters from real experts ending up, sometimes, on the side of the five. I have heard from distinguished commentators, lawyers of sufficient reputation to require us to pay attention to their views, that the President, in this case, has little or no grounds to stand on. The lawyer you have just quoted obviously disagrees with those opinions. I think that is why we have courts. It may be that this matter is important enough to be resolved once and for all, and the way to get it resolved is to proceed with the subpoena and let the court hear the matter.

Mr. BENNETT. Sure.