Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair. I thank the Senator. I will not give all the arguments for the space station. I have given them in times past and Congresses past in debate with my friend from Arkansas. He says it is his nature to bring it up. It is my nature to be for it. I will, however, return to a previous quote that I have used in past debates that I think summarizes why it is we go ahead with it. Samuel Eliot Morison, the great historian, wrote this about this country. He said: America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else. When discovered, it was not wanted and most of the exploration for the next 50 years was done in the name of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of it. History is like that, very chancy. Mr. President, that is why we are going into space. No, we do not know with exactness what we are going to find. We cannot predict it any more than the people who discovered this continent from the European side could predict what would happen, and indeed what we find there may not be wanted just as this country was not wanted for a long period of time. But I will share with the Senate this experience. Every year, I sponsor in the State of Utah an activity called Space Talk, where we get together and talk about space and what can be done in space and what the prospects of space are. Last year, as part of Space Talk, NASA agreed to allow the shuttle on its way from Cape Canaveral to Edwards Air Force Base to stop in Salt Lake City to refuel and stay overnight. As it turned out, the 747 carrying the shuttle banked in over the Salt Lake Valley just about at the end of the day, just about at sunset it came over. There were approximately 100,000 people who stopped in their cars on the freeway, who came out of their houses and stood in their front yards and who waved and acknowledged that as it made a pass down the valley, then turned, came back in low over the valley and finally landing at the Salt Lake airport. I still have people who will come up to me on the street corner literally with tears in their eyes and say, ``Senator, that was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. How proud I am to be an American,'' demonstrating their support for the space program. America has not lost the sense of exploration that it had all the way back to Columbus' time, and we should not lose it again. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Thank you, Mr. President. I do not want to repeat some of the arguments that have been made, but I want to talk about one aspect of the numbers that have been discussed today so glowingly described by the President. They look upon the last quarter and say, ``Isn't this magnificent? We are growing at over 4 percent a year.'' And I agree that a quarter in that atmosphere is a wonderful thing. What were they saying just two quarters ago when they were growing at 0.3 percent a year? One quarter does not control what happens in a year. It can be a seasonable circumstance. It can respond to any one of the series of one-time events. You need to look at things over time. I would like to look at one number over time that we have been hearing about in the Clinton administration crowing about the tremendous economic performance, and that is taxes. We all know that President Clinton made raising taxes the centerpiece of his economic program. He promised when he ran in 1992 that he would cut taxes. But he said when he got into office: I have suddenly discovered that things are far worse than I ever recognized, much worse than I realized. I not only cannot deliver on my promise to cut tax rates, I must give you increased tax rates, or the economy is going to be destroyed. So we had increased tax rates in the United States. He is now saying: Well, you see, because I had the wisdom and the courage to raise tax rates, we are getting all this tremendous revenue, and now I am responsible for the fact the deficit is coming down. I point out a few things. If we go back to the last year in which the Reagan tax structure was in place, which was 1989, taxes from individuals were producing revenue to the Government at the rate of 8.6 percent of our gross domestic product. Then President Bush broke his tax pledge, and we had the tax increase in rates from President Bush. Then Mr. Clinton broke his tax pledge, and we had the increase in rates. What happened to revenue? Revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product went down, Mr. President--not up, down--from 8.6, where it had been in 1989, down to 8 percent. It started to come back up in 1995. It was 8.4--still not as good as we had during the Reagan years, but coming back a little. How is it possible, people say to me, that when you raise rates you see revenue go down? Stop and think about what happens in the real world all the time. I use the example of Ford Motor. They introduced what they thought was a marvelous new car, the Ford Taurus. They thought there would be so much demand for it they could raise rates. They call them ``prices,'' but since we are talking about Government we will use ``rates.'' They will raise the rates on the new car. It hit the marketplace. The marketplace reacted by not buying Tauruses. What did Ford do? They lowered the rates and increased their sales and thereby increased the revenue that they were getting from the sale of the introduction of that new model. Around here we do not understand that principle. But every businessman in the United States understands it and uses it every day. You raise your prices, you lower your prices, depending on what the market tells you. Here we just feed the numbers into the computer, and whatever the computer tells us, we say that is automatically the way it is going to be. So President Bush, and then President Clinton, raised tax rates only to see revenue as a percentage of the economy go down, and even now in this wonderful report the President gives us, the tax revenue has not yet gotten back to the level that it was prior to the time when they told us that increased taxes were good for us. Mr. President, I do not believe that increased tax rates are good for us. I think what we should focus on in the Government is tax revenue, how much money we get in from the economy in order to pay our bills and deal with the deficit. I recommend we go back to the revenue levels that we were getting in the days of the Ronald Reagan circumstance when we were getting 8.6 percent of the gross domestic product coming from individual taxpayers, rather than the anemic 8 percent we hit in the Clinton administration. Referring to the charts quoted by my friend from Florida, Senator Mack, the increase has been the lowest of any expansion we have had. Just think, Mr. President, what we would have in terms of revenue for the Government and relief from the budget deficit if we had had a historic rate of growth in this expansion and 8.6 percent of that coming in in the form of revenue. We would be better off than the Clintons are claiming we are today. Do not get carried away with a single order or with rhetoric in an election year. Keep our understanding on the historic pattern that tells us the best way to see growth in our economy is when we have tax rates that allow Americans to earn more and then to keep more so they can do more in their own lives, instead of having Government make all of the decisions. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. In order to adequately fund this program, $9,000,000 under Engineering and Geosciences in Basic Energy Sciences, and $5,000,000 in computational technology research in other energy research programs must be committed to the Department's Advanced Computational Technology Initiative.

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator for his courtesy in this regard. advanced reservoir management program

Mr. BENNETT. I thank my friend from New Mexico, the distinguished chairman of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee for his leadership on this bill. I particularly wish to thank the Senator for his personal commitment to the Bureau of Reclamation's title XVI water recycling program. As the Senator knows, I am a strong advocate of this program. In arid Western States like Utah, water reuse is the next logical step, both economically and environmentally toward guaranteeing more dependable water supplies for our cities and towns. As the Senator knows, I have sponsored legislation to expand the existing title XVI program which I am hopeful will be enacted this year. This legislation includes projects in my own State of Utah as well as projects in New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, and California. In anticipation of the enactment of that legislation, I have asked the distinguished chairman to seek the inclusion of certain language in the conference report accompanying this bill at the proper time. This language that would instruct the Bureau of Reclamation to make available to other water recycling projects authorized under title XVI any funds appropriated by this bill of title XVI projects that the Bureau may be unable to obligate for whatever reasons when it is possible. Would the distinguished chairman agree to seek the inclusion of this language in the conference report?

Mr. BENNETT. This program is a collaborative effort that will produce significant energy security benefits. For example, the program is advancing technology to reduce the costs of acquiring seismic data and enhance 3D simulation using advanced visualization and virtual reality in reservoir engineering. These advances will bring down development costs in marginal areas thereby increasing net production and reducing the surface impacts of oil drilling. The application of advanced technologies will enhance oil recovery from current producing areas in Prudhoe Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian Basin.

Mr. BENNETT

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, you and some others in this body have heard me say that the one experience that took me out of the private sector and brought me back into public life was my term as chairman of the Strategic Planning Commission for the Utah State Board of Education. I was happily serving as the chief executive of a very successful, functioning corporation when I was asked to take that assignment in public service. It brought me face to face with the current crisis in education. I have been interested in that issue ever since. I was interested in this morning's Wall Street Journal where the following appeared. I would like to call it to the attention of the entire Senate and, hopefully, through the Congressional Record and C-SPAN, as wide an audience as possible. In this morning's Wall Street Journal there is the following article that I find incredible: New York City's Cardinal John J. O'Connor has repeatedly made the city an extraordinary offer: Send me the lowest performing 5% of children presently in the public schools, and I will put them in Catholic schools--where they will succeed. The city's response: Silence. In a more rational world, city officials would have jumped at the cardinal's invitation. It would have been a huge financial plus for the city. The annual per-pupil cost of Catholic elementary schools is $2,500 per year, about a third of what taxpayers now spend for the city's public schools. Mr. President, I have had this debate with leaders of the Teachers' Association in Utah. Members of the National Education Association do not come to see me because they apparently know that I have already come to the conclusion that something must be done to break the monopoly that current teachers' unions have on the way education is conducted in this country. The author of this article goes on to tell us his own experience with his own children. He tells us how he takes his children past the Catholic schools every morning, to enroll them in what are considered the best public schools in New York City. One day he decided he would go in and see what was going on in the Catholic schools, to compare it to what was happening in the public schools. He says, ``* * * I was impressed. I sat in, for example, as fourth-grade teacher Susan Viti conducted a review lesson on the geography of the Western United States.'' He goes on to describe the things that were done, and then he says: I found myself wishing that my own son's fourth-grade teachers at nearby Public School 87, reputedly one of the best public schools in the city, were anywhere near as productive and as focused on basic schools as Miss Viti. Both my boys' teachers have wasted an enormous amount of time with empty verbiage about the evils of racism and sexism. By contrast, in Miss Viti's class and all other Catholic school classes I attended, it was taken for granted that a real education is the best antidote to prejudice. Miss Viti earns $21,000 a year, $8,000 less than a first- year public-school teacher. ``I've taught in an all-white affluent suburban school, where I made over $40,000. This time I wanted to do something good for society, and I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do it. I am trying to instill in my students that whatever their life situation is now, they can succeed if they work hard and study.'' Mr. President, monopoly is a terrible thing, whether it is in an economy or in an intellectual circumstance. Establishing a monopoly that prevents people from looking for other ideas or other ways of doing something is the best way to guarantee stagnation. What we have in public education now is a monopoly, firmly enforced by the teachers' unions and geared to prevent any kind of intellectual competition. We have seen it on the floor of this Chamber. Again and again last year, we tried to pass an appropriations bill for the District of Columbia. Certainly, there is no place in the world that needs appropriations more than the District of Columbia. Mired down in financial disaster and management chaos the District needed that money as quickly as it could come. Yet because we put into that bill the opportunity for experimentation on just that situation described in this morning's story in the Journal, there were people on this floor who filibustered against that appropriations bill, willing to hold up needed financial support for the District, all in the name of preserving an educational monopoly for the teachers' unions. Now, I have very good friends in the Utah Teachers Association who come to me and say, ``It is unconstitutional for you to spend public money on a private institution, particularly a private institution that has connection to a religion.'' Mr. President, we crossed that line, successfully, 50 years ago. All of us are familiar with the GI bills, considered by many to be the most successful Government program ever, the most successful expenditure of Government money to help people's lives that has ever taken place in the history of the United States. I have heard the GI bill being described thusly here on the floor by some of my colleagues. What do we do in the GI bill? We say to individuals, ``Here is the money that we promised you to help you with your education. Now you make the decision as to where that money will be spent.'' Is it unconstitutional to someone under the GI bill to take that money and go to the University of Notre Dame just because the University of Notre Dame is affiliated with the Catholic Church? Is it unconstitutional for you to take that money to go to Georgetown University here in the District just because Georgetown University is run by the Jesuits? Of course, not. We have long since come to the conclusion that the money follows the student, not that it goes to support the institution. Would it be unconstitutional for the city of New York to take Cardinal O'Connor up on his offer and say we will give you the 5- percent lowest students, we will give you the 5-percent worst problems we have, allow the money to follow the students, and let you take care of it for us? No, the constitutional precedent has been firmly established. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of saving money? They are afraid of doing better by the children? No, they are afraid of the political retaliation of the teachers' union. The article goes on to describe that retaliation in some detail. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the entire article be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, there is no issue that we face in this body more serious than the challenge of educating our young people. That is not a cliche. That is a statement of our primary survival challenge of the future. Talk to CEO's, talk to personnel directors around the country, and they tell you more and more the primary challenge we have long term in this country is maintaining a work force that can survive international competition. Talk to many of these CEO's and they tell you that more and more of their budget is going to pay for remedial learning skills for their new hires. They are hiring people who cannot read the instructions that they are given to carry out their work. They are hiring people who cannot figure enough to even make change in a retail situation. Recognizing that the schools will not teach these people to read and figure, they are beginning to allocate more and more of their corporate dollars to give this kind of education themselves. It is potentially, as I say, Mr. President, the single most important issue we face. I think with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this has become the long- term survival issue for the United States. Yet we allow ourselves to insist that the status quo, producing these kinds of results, is what must be maintained at all costs. We allow ourselves to say we will not even experiment with a voucher system that might challenge the present monopoly. We will not even allow an educational system that is willing to try and experiment with 5 percent of the kids who are doing the worst in our Nation's largest city, to see what might happen with that experiment. What are the teachers' unions afraid of, when challenged with the opportunity to have an experiment of this kind? They are afraid of people like Miss Viti, described in the article, demonstrating to all of the world the bankruptcy of the present circumstance. Education is the only place I know, Mr. President, where professionals--and I consider teachers to be professionals--are willing to accept less money in order to avoid working for public payroll. In every other circumstance, the professionals earn more money when they get out of the public payroll. Lawyers in private practice earn more than lawyers who work for municipalities and State governments and the Federal Government. Doctors in private practice earn more than doctors who work for the Public Health Service. But in education, teachers earn less who work in private schools than those who work for the public. Why do they do it? Because as Miss Viti says, ``I wanted to do something good for society. I am lucky to be able to afford to do it.'' Mr. President, I will return to this from time to time. I am not on the appropriate committee for a variety of reasons which we understand around here. The committee assignments come by virtue of the State that you represent and the interests that you have in seeing that State is properly represented. But I could not pass the opportunity to call to the attention of the Senate this incredible statement in this morning's paper, whereby the Nation's teachers' union, working through its affiliates in New York State, have denied the lowest 5 percent of the city of New York the opportunity to try something new, and have thus condemned those 5 percent to a continued future of bleakness and lack of opportunity. A final demonstration of this, Mr. President, again, from the information contained in the article comparing what happens in New York City schools--the public schools that are spending three times as much as the Catholic schools--in terms of the results. Here is the conclusion that comes from the New York State Department of Education. This is not a conclusion that comes from the managers of the private schools, the Catholic schools. This is the conclusion that comes from the New York State officials themselves: Catholic schools with 81 percent to 100 percent minority composition outscored New York City public schools with the same percentage of minority enrollment in grade 3 reading . . . In grade 3 reading, they were 17 percent better; in grade 3 mathematics, 10 percent better; in grade 5 writing, 6 percent better; in grade 6 reading, 10 percent better; in grade 6 mathematics, 18 percent better. A Rand Corp. study compared the performance of children from New York City's public schools and Catholic high schools and came up with these statistics. Again, this is not from the Catholic school system itself; this is from an outside observer known for its excellence and its objectivity, the Rand Corp.: Only 25 percent of the public school students graduated at all . . . Let me repeat that statistic, Mr. President. It is staggering. Only 25 percent of the public school students graduated at all, and only 16 percent took the Scholastic Aptitude Test. By shameful contrast, the small ``elite'' of public school students who graduated and took the SAT averaged only 642 for those in neighborhood schools and 715 for those in magnet schools. Here is the shameful contrast: 25 percent of the public school students graduated, and 16 percent took the SAT; and 95 percent of the Catholic school children graduated, and 75 percent took the SAT's. The Catholic school students scored an average of 815 on the SAT, compared to 642 of the public schools. Once again, Mr. President, let me stress that these are in schools where the minority makeup is identical to the minority makeup in the public schools. If there is ever a statistical case to be made for the fact that we need to experiment with this kind of education and break the monopoly that the teachers' union has established and is maintaining on public education, this is it. I thank the Chair for his indulgence. As I said, I will return to this subject from time to time because I consider it the Nation's No. 1 survival issue in the long term. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From the Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1996] Why the Catholic School Model Is Taboo (By Sol Stern) New York City's Cardinal John J. O'Connor has repeatedly made the city an extraordinary offer: Send me the lowest- performing 5% of children presently in the public schools, and I will put them in Catholic Schools--where they will succeed. The city's response: silence. In a more rational world, city officials would have jumped at the cardinal's invitation. It would have jumped at the cardinal's invitation. It would have been a huge financial plus for the city. The annual per-pupil cost of Catholic elementary schools is $2,500 per year, about a third of what taxpayers now spend for the city's public schools. no idle boast More important, thousands more disadvantaged children would finish school and become productive citizens. For Cardinal O'Connor's claim that Catholic schools would do a better job than public schools is no idle boast. In 1990 the RAND Corporation compared the performance of children from New York City's public and Catholic high schools. Only 25% of the public-school students graduated at all, and only 16% took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, vs. 95% and 75% of Catholic- school students, respectively, Catholic-school students scored an average of 815 on the SAT. By shameful contrast, the small ``elite'' of public-school students who graduated and took the SAT averaged only 642 for those in neighborhood schools and 715 for those in magnet schools. In 1993 the New York State Department of Education compared city schools with the highest levels of minority enrollment. Conclusion: ``Catholic schools with 81% to 100% minority composition outscored New York City public schools with the same percentage of minority enrollment in Grade 3 reading (+17%), Grade 3 mathematics (+10%), Grade 5 writing (+6%), Grade 6 reading (+10%) and Grade 6 mathematics (+11%).'' Yet most of the elite, in New York and elsewhere, is resolutely uninterested in the Catholic schools' success. In part this reflects the enormous power of teachers' unions, fierce opponents of anything that threatens their monopoly on education. In part it reflects a secular discomfort with religious institutions. I myself have felt this discomfort over the years, walking past Catholic schools like St. Gregory the Great, near my Manhattan home. Every morning, as I took my sons to public school, I couldn't help noticing the well-behaved black and Hispanic children in their neat uniforms entering the drab parish building. But my curiosity never led me past the imposing crucifix looking down from the roof, which evoked childhood images of Catholic anti-Semitism and clerical obscurantism. Finally, earlier this year, I ventured in, and I was impressed. I sat in, for example, as fourth-grade teacher Susan Viti conducted a review lesson on the geography of the Western United States. All the children were completely engaged and had obviously done their homework. They were able to answer each of her questions about the principal cities and capitals of the Western states--some of which I couldn't name--and the topography and natural resources of the region. ``Which minerals would be found in the Rocky Mountains?'' Miss Viti asked. Eager hands shot up. Miss Viti used the lesson to expand the students' vocabulary: when the children wrote things down, she insisted on proper grammar and spelling. I found myself wishing that my own son's fourth-grade teachers at nearby Public School 87, reputedly one of the best public schools in the city, were anywhere near as productive and as focused on basic skills as Miss Viti. Both my boys' teachers have wasted an enormous amount of time with empty verbiage about the evils of racism and sexism. By contrast, in Miss Viti's class and in all the other Catholic school classes I visited, it was taken for granted that a real education is the best antidote to prejudice. Miss Viti earns $21,000 a year, $8,000 less than a first- year public-school teacher. ``I've taught in an all-white, affluent suburban school, where I made over $40,000,'' she says. ``This time I wanted to do something good for society, and I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do it. I am trying to instill in my students that whatever their life situation is now, they can succeed if they work hard and study.'' You might expect liberals, self-styled champions of disadvantaged children, to applaud the commitment and sacrifice of educators like Susan Viti. You might even expect them to look for ways of getting government money to these underfunded schools. Instead, they've done their best to make sure the wall of separation between church and state remains impenetrable. Liberal child-advocacy groups tout an endless array of ``prevention'' programs that are supposed to stave off delinquency, dropping out of school and teen pregnancy-- yet they consistently ignore Catholic schools, which nearly always succeed in preventing these pathologies. Read the chapter on education in Hillary Clinton's ``It Takes a Village.'' Mrs. Clinton advocates an alphabet soup of education programs for poor kids, but says not a word about Catholic schools. Similarly, in his books on education and inner-city ghettos, Jonathan Kozol offers vivid tours of decrepit public schools in places like the South Bronx, but he never stops at the many Catholic schools that are succeeding a few blocks away. Why are Catholic schools taboo among those who talk loudest about compassion for the downtrodden? It's hard to escape the conclusion that one of the most powerful reasons is liberals' alliance with the teachers' unions, which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of liberal candidates around the country. Two weeks ago I attended the National Education Association convention in Washington, a week-long pep rally for Bill Clinton punctuated by ritual denunciations of privatization. Before the teachers' unions rise to political power, it was not unusual to see urban Democrats like former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo support government aid to Catholic schools. Mr. Cuomo's flip-flop on this issue is especially revealing. In 1974, when he first ran for public office, Mr. Cuomo wrote a letter to potential supporters: ``I've spent more than 15 years . . . arguing for aid to private schools,'' he wrote. ``If you believe aid is a good thing, then you are the good people. If you believe it, then it's your moral obligation, as it is my own, to do something about it. . . . Let's try tax-credit plans and anything else that offers any help.'' Mr. Cuomo soon learned his lesson. In his published diaries he wrote: ``Teachers are perhaps the most effective of all the state's unions. If they go all-out, it will mean telephones and vigorous statewide support. It will also mean some money.'' In his 1982 campaign for governor, Mr. Cuomo gave a speech trumpeting the primacy of public education and the rights of teachers. He won the union's enthusiastic endorsement against Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Over the next 12 years, in private meetings with Catholic leaders, Gov. Cuomo would declare that he still supported tax relief for parochial school parents. Then he would take a completely different position in public. For example, in 1984 he acknowledged that giving tax credits for parochial-school tuition was ``clearly constitutional'' under a recent Supreme Court decision--but he refused to support such a plan. Politically controlled schools are unlikely to improve much without strong pressure from outside. Thus, the case for government aid to Catholic schools is now more compelling than ever, if only to provide the competitive pressure to force state schools to change. And the conventional wisdom that government is constitutionally prohibited from aiding Catholic schools has been undermined by several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. sucker's trap Since the powerful teachers' unions vehemently oppose any form of government aid to Catholic schools, reformers are often skittish about advocating vouchers or tuition tax credits, fearing that will end the public-school reform conversation before it begins. But to abandon aid to Catholic schools in the name of public-school reform is a sucker's trap. We have ended up with no aid to Catholic schools and no real public-school reform either. Catholic schools are a valuable public resource not just because they profoundly benefit the children who enroll in them. They also challenge the public-school monopoly, constantly reminding us that the neediest kids are educable and that spending extravagant sums of money isn't the answer. No one who cares about reviving our failing public schools can afford to ignore this inspiring laboratory of reform.

Mr. BENNETT. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, although I am a new Senator, in my first term, I have had association with the Senate going back some 30 years. I started as an intern between school years some 30-odd years ago. I have served on the Senate staff, been associated with the Senate for a number of years. I want to draw on that experience to give a little historical perspective to what I think is going on in the Senate here. I remember in the days that I have referred to that filibusters used to be very rare. When a filibuster occurred, it was a real filibuster. I remember the time when the Senators were told, ``Get out the cots. You're going to be here around the clock. We're going to have quorum calls at 3 o'clock in the morning and do everything we can to break the filibuster.'' It was reserved, if you will, for those issues about which certain Senators felt most powerfully. The filibuster was not an ordinary tool that was used whenever a bill came up that a Senator objected to. You contrast that to today's strategy when the filibuster is used almost routinely, when cloture votes are the most common votes that we cast, and you realize something rather fundamental has happened in the Senate. I think what has happened is that people have discovered that through the use of the filibuster, in the present circumstance, they can change the political dynamic. It is no longer necessary to have a majority in order to work your will in the Senate. Through the use of the filibuster, all you need is 40 votes and you can control the Senate and you can force your opposition to cast votes that they might not want to cast so that you can then go home and campaign against them. The Senate has ceased to be a legislative arena and has turned into a campaign arena that seems to be ongoing and continuous. I will obviously confess to having participated in filibusters in the last Congress. There were two issues that were very important, in my view, that we engaged in filibusters on. No. 1 was the stimulus package offered by the President of the United States. A group of us felt that was a serious mistake. We took the floor. We held the floor. We ultimately forced the President to back down on that issue. Looking back on it, we were right. The stimulus package that he was calling for was clearly nothing more than pork. I do not apologize for having tied up the Senate to prevent the $19 billion worth of pork that the President proposed. Other filibusters--I will not take the time to describe them--but the one common thread was I participated in filibusters against bills I was opposed to. We have seen that going on here now. The two Senators from Nevada are involved in a filibuster against a bill that they are opposed to. What is different in this Congress is that we are seeing filibusters against bills that people are for. Yes, they are doing their best to delay consideration of bills they intend to vote for. I have had to ask myself, what is the motivation behind a filibuster against a bill you are for? I have come to this conclusion, Mr. President--I may be wrong; and I will be happy to have someone demonstrate that I am wrong--but until that demonstration is convincing, I have come to the conclusion that the reason filibusters are currently being mounted against bills that the participants in the filibuster are, in fact, for is that they wish to embarrass the current leadership of the Senate for political purposes in November. I could understand that when the majority leader was the Republican nominee. I did not approve of it, but I could at least understand it, people saying, ``OK, we will filibuster this bill. We will make it look as if Bob Dole is impotent as a leader so that we can then attack him as being an ineffective leader as the nominee.'' Senator Dole recognized that that was going on, so he did the thing that surprised all of us, and I think perhaps probably disappointed the opposition a little, he said, ``OK. I will resign as the majority leader. I will even resign from the Senate.'' He made an interesting comment to us when he announced to Members of his own party that he was resigning. He said, ``The people of Kansas deserve a full-time Senator, and I can't do that being the nominee. The Republicans deserve a full-time leader, and I can't do that being the nominee. And the people who nominated me deserve a full-time nominee, and I can't do that and stay in the Senate.'' So out of a great sense of duty and responsibility, Senator Dole resigned his position in the Senate, obviously stepping down as majority leader. I thought that would solve it. I thought once Senator Dole was gone as a target, that the filibusters slowing down the work of the Senate would stop and we could then get ahead with the work of the Senate. It turns out I was wrong. I have come to the conclusion that there is a deliberate strategy to try to make the leadership of the Senate look bad in an effort to then go to the people in the election and say, ``Change leadership. We will be able to get things through.'' I hope I am wrong, but I have come to the conclusion that that is the strategy and that that is why people are filibustering bills that they favor. So, Mr. President, I hope we will step back and look at this in a historic context and say, is this the right thing to do in the Senate? Is it the right thing to get us in the habit and the pattern of deciding everything that comes before us in a purely political context, both sides perhaps equally guilty if we get into that circumstance? Or should we all say, let us step back, let us recognize that the Presidential campaign is going to be between Bob Dole, no longer a Senator, and Bill Clinton, who is not a Member of this body, and let them fight their issues out? Let us take our constitutional responsibilities seriously and get on with the business of the Senate. Let us stop dilatory tactics that are geared not to change the content of legislation but to simply slow down the process and tarnish the image of the leadership. Let us take our lumps. If we lose, we lose. If we feel passionately about an issue, use the filibuster about the issue we feel passionately about; but if there is an issue that can be decided and will be decided by a majority vote, go ahead and decide it by a majority vote and not try to tarnish the effectiveness of the leaders we have chosen. I voted for Senator Lott as the leader because I feel he is committed to moving the business of the Senate forward in a proper, professional way, regardless of his ideological position. I think we should give him the chance to do that. I think we owe him the courtesy of doing that. I think the same would be true if Senator Daschle were the majority leader. I would not engage in a filibuster myself on any bill I intended to vote for. I think it should be reserved for those bills that we opposed.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, one of the things that continues to amaze me in my service in the Senate is how we, in this body, spend all of our time projecting and conjecturing about the future and not much time looking at the past in an attempt to find out if there is a model that can give us a more sure understanding of the future than the projections of professional pundits and economists. In this debate on minimum wage, we do have a clear model from the past which illustrates what happens when the minimum wage is raised. I want to spend some time this morning talking about this model. By coincidence, the best summary of this model appeared in this morning's New York Times. Under the headline, ``Thesis, Rise in Wages Will Hurt Teenage Group,'' we have the following: At one time, Sidewinder Pumps Inc., in Lafayette, La., would hire a dozen or more young people to work each summer at minimum-wage jobs like weeding or expanding the parking lot--tasks that were not really essential to the company but that let it give teenagers a taste of what paid work is like. When the Federal minimum wage went up in the early 1990s, the company cut back to three or four summer workers. And this year the prospect of another increase led the company to end this quarter-century tradition. The last time Congress raised the minimum wage this company cut back the number of minimum wage earners. Now, some are proposing to raise further the minimum wage and this company is now eliminating more jobs. This situation is not theory, but actual experience, actual practice. The article goes on to give us some statistics: In March 1990, just before the Federal Government raised the minimum to $3.80 from $3.35, 47.1 percent of teen-agers had jobs, but that promptly began a slide that carried it down to less than 43 percent a year later, when the $4.25 wage kicked in. The figure then tumbled to 39.8 percent by June 1992 before slowly recovering to 43.2 percent now. ``The timing of the drop in teen-age employment is absolutely coincident with the increase in the minimum, whereas for other groups the recession's bite was delayed,'' declared Finis Welch, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and a prominent student of the subject. In other words, the last time the minimum wage was raised, the group that was hurt the most, in terms of unemployment, statistically and historically, was teenagers. The article states: Black teenagers, often most in need of basic job skills, fared even worse. At the beginning of 1990, 28.8 percent of this group held jobs. But lack of hiring and dismissals drove this down to 22.5 percent by January 1991 and to a low of 20.4 percent in August 1991. Not until April 1996 did it recover to 28 percent. In other words, they started out at 28 percent. The minimum wage was raised, and black teenagers saw employment go all the way down to 20 percent. It has taken 6 years to get back to 28 percent. And now some want to again raise the minimum wage so that black teenagers can see their employment go back down, the way it did the last time the minimum wage was raised. The article continues: ``Teenagers shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden'' even after allowing for their ranks contracting from demographic trends, said Erich Heinemann, an economist at Brimberg & Co., a Wall Street firm. ``To a very significant degree,'' he added, ``the 1990-1991 recession was a teenage recession.'' The article summarizes: [Some have] found the 1990-91 experience persuasive. ``The last increase turned out to be a cruel joke for low- skilled teenage workers,'' he declared. ``To the extent that the minimum is raised high enough to positively affect wage levels,'' he contended, ``it will negatively affect the demand for labor.'' Like many in this body, I worked as a teenager. I started out when the minimum wage was 40 cents. You do not earn a lot of money at 40 cents an hour. Frankly, the money was not the most important reason for me to work. It seemed important at the time, in fact, it seemed like a tremendous boon to me because I was earning more money than I received in allowance from my parents. But looking back on it, the most important thing I gained from working at age 14, was the experience of going to work: Showing up on time, staying the full work period whether I was bored or not, punching out at the proper time, dressing in proper attire--the kinds of experiences which I find far more valuable than the money. We are denying these experiences to more and more teenagers when we raise the minimum wage. Fortunately, the amendment by the Senator from Missouri will allow many teenagers to continue to have the work experience that this Senator had when he was a teenager. For me, the lessons learned from the last increase in the minimum wage are persuasive. We should learn from the past. We should learn from what happened last time and be very, very careful about raising it this time. At the risk of sounding more demagogic than I would like, I say to teenagers who lose their jobs, to black teenagers who see a repetition of what happened in 1990-91 when they appealed, ``Where did the jobs go,'' the answer might be, ``Talk to the senior Senator from Massachusetts. In the name of trying to help you, he has fashioned a program that has destroyed your jobs.'' I know the Senator from Massachusetts does not have that motive. I know he is acting out of the best of intentions. But I say that past experience in raising the minimum wage indicates that history will repeat itself and we will again see jobs lost. I plead with the senior Senator from Massachusetts in the name of the teenagers whose jobs will be destroyed, to examine past history and do his best to see to it that we do not repeat the mistakes made 6 years ago. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the managers of the bill. Normally, I would not intrude upon the legislative session for a matter that belongs in morning business. But this morning's newspaper carries a story that has some urgency connected with it, and I think some connection with the bill we are discussing. We are talking about America's defenses, and in the course of the debate, we talked about the situation in Russia and the election in Russia. In this morning's Washington Post there is a headline ``New Yeltsin Aide Rails at Foreign Religions.'' Then the subheadline, which is what has caused me to come to the floor in protest, says ``Lebed Calls Mormonism `Mold and Scum.' '' In the story coming from Moscow, the date line of June 27, Alexander Lebed, the tough-talking retired general who has become President Boris Yeltsin's unofficial running mate, railed against Western cultural influences in Russia today and vowed to rid the country of foreign religious and cults-- including Mormonism, which he called ``mold and scum.'' Speaking to an assembly of patriotic organizations, he declared that Russia has three ``established, traditional religions''--Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Buddhism-- pointedly excluding the faith of the country's 650,000 Jews, who have endured fierce antisemitism here for centuries. He then lumped Mormons with Aum Supreme Truth--the Japanese cult implicated in last year's poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system--saying they pose a ``direct threat to Russia's security'' because they are bent on ``perverting, corrupting and ultimately breaking up out state.'' Mr. President, there are several reactions to this outburst on the part of Mr. Lebed, all of them disturbing. First, we should note that he is reciting and repeating the general political posture taken by the Communist candidate in the race for the Presidency. This man, who is now viewed as the strongest man behind President Yeltsin and possibly President Yeltsin's replacement in that part of the Russian politics, has reached out to take the most virulent antireligious positions of their Communist opponent, Mr. Zyuganov, and has adopted them into his political platform. One would assume, therefore, that we might dismiss this phrase as simply a political ploy on Mr. Lebed's part in an effort to steal a political position from the opponents. It is far more serious than that. Mr. Lebed has the reputation of being the kind of man who does in fact speak at the drop of a hat and sometimes without thinking but who, once having made a statement of this kind, would use his official position to follow it up with a serious religious repression of any who do not fall into the three religions he has declared to be acceptable-- Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. I would think that Catholics, Protestants, Western Christians of any kind, and certainly Jews, would be chilled by this kind of statement coming from the man who is so close to President Yeltsin. It is very interesting to me as a side comment that he has chosen to speak of the Buddhists as one of the three acceptable religions in Russia when, in fact, there is not a significant presence of Buddhism in Russia. If you are going to choose religions on the basis of their representation there, there are far more Jews in Russia than there are Buddhists, and yet he has chosen to include the Buddhists and very pointedly exclude the Jews. This is an outrageous statement from a nation that has been the source of some of the most virulent anti- Semitism the world has ever seen, and it clearly needs to be challenged. The other point that needs to be made here with respect to what is being said in this Presidential campaign in Russia has to do not with religion but with democracy. We are being told continually that the Russians have finally crossed over the hump, and they have gone from the totalitarianism of the Communist years now into the open sunshine of free debate and free dissension. We know from history that the first casualty of tolerance for a regime moving in the direction of totalitarianism is always religious tolerance, and then immediately following after that comes an attempt to destroy any political dissension. We are seeing a signal here from the man closest to President Yeltsin that the Yeltsin regime, if they listen to this man, will move in the direction of destroying dissent and differing opinions throughout all of Russian society. They will start with religion, but surely they will then move to repress all other dissenting opinions and we will see Russia move back into the shadows of totalitarianism under which the Russian people have, unfortunately, lived for centuries, if not millennia. Indeed, if you go past the Communist period into the years of the czarist rule, we found that the czars and the then State church worked hand in hand to see that there was no dissension of any kind in either religious or political debate in czarist Russia. These are the specters that are being raised by this kind of statement from this man in a Presidential election. Mr. President, I am working on the language of a letter that will be sent to Secretary Christopher, a letter that will be sent to Brian Atwood, the Director of AID, and that probably will be sent also to Boris Yeltsin himself. Senator Hatch is working with me. We will coordinate the language of this letter. Senator Reid has joined and indicated his outrage at these statements, as have Senators Lieberman and Specter. The Presiding Officer will recognize that three of us in this group are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons to which Mr. Lebed pointedly refers, and the other two are Jews: Mr. Lieberman, who practices an orthodox fashion of his religion as faithfully as anyone ever has, and Mr. Specter, whose father was born in Russia and forced out of Russia because of the anti-Semitism in that country. And Senator Specter continues to practice his Jewish religion. Senator Specter and I have been to Russia together, and we have visited with high officials in the Russian Government and Russian regime. At the time, we were both welcomed, and we both felt we were contributing to a greater degree of understanding of the two nations. Now, with this kind of statement, I would realize that if I went back to Russia, I would be labeled ``mold and scum'' because of my religious position, and Senator Specter would have every reason to raise the question of what would happen to him in a modern Russia if this kind of thing is allowed to go unchallenged. One final comment. For many, many years, the Mormons were excluded from Russia and had no contact there. It was during the time when Mikhail Gorbachev was the head of the Soviet Union that the Government reached out and recognized Mormonism as a religion and invited Mormons to come to Russia. From that time until this, the Mormons have been in Russia and have had a very welcomed response on the part of the Russian people. There are now over 5,000 native Russians who have joined with the Mormon Church in Russia who have reason to feel very, very much threatened by this kind of formal statement. So, Mr. President, as I said, Senators Hatch, Lieberman, Reid, and Specter will be joining with me in putting forth an official protest in this matter, but I wanted to bring it to the attention of the Senate in this Chamber this afternoon. Mr. NUNN addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia and the Senator from North Dakota for their expressions of support. I am very grateful for that, as I am sure are all other individuals who have been outraged by the statements attributed to General Lebed. I might say to the Senator from North Dakota, I am sure he hit the ball pretty well, which is why they had him on the team, in addition to his good personality and friendship. These teams are open to everybody, but they are open more to people who can play well and not people like myself who get in the way. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. Mr. CONRAD addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I rise to support the amendment that modifies section 366 dealing with DOD assistance to civilian sporting events. I thank Senator McCain for his willingness to work with both Senator Hatch and me in crafting language that clarifies the manner in which the Department of Defense can provide security to civilian sporting events in the future. I found that we all had an interest in safety and ensuring that government resources are spent wisely. Because Salt Lake City, UT, has been chosen to host the 2002 winter Olympic games, I have more than a passing interest in ensuring that everyone attending the Olympics can do so feeling confident of their safety. I believe visitors can have that confidence in Atlanta, and I want that to be the case in Salt Lake City. Federal expertise and assistance is invaluable to ensuring public safety in such circumstances. The Department of Defense also has unique capabilities that have proven very useful in supporting an event of this size. Senator McCain is known for his vigilance in ensuring tax dollars are spent wisely, especially in the Department of Defense. As the chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee, and as one whose family has a long history of military service to this country, I understand his concern. I share his belief that DOD resources must be used very carefully, whether it is for a new weapon system or providing Olympic security. This amendment will continue to permit the Department of Defense to assist government entities responsible for safety and security with essential security needs. This assistance is absolutely necessary to adequately address the threats to any large international sporting event in today's environment. In addition, it will make DOD's nonsecurity capabilities available, as they have been in the past, if the DOD costs of providing that assistance is reimbursed. This would permit the current practice of making available surplus or unused equipment that is sitting in a warehouse on loan. The Department of Defense will also be required to report to Congress, outlining the assistance that has been provided. It is my hope that this amendment strikes an appropriate balance between accountability and flexibility when Federal assistance is needed. Again, I thank Senator McCain for his willingness to work with us. I would also like to thank my colleague Senator Hatch for his work on this amendment. He is very aware of the terrorist threat, and is committed to providing a secure environment for our citizens, athletes, and international guests. We are on the eve of another Olympics coming to the United States. I reiterate my support for Atlanta. I know this has been a long road and I wish to thank my colleagues from Georgia, Senator Nunn and Senator Coverdell. They have provided a valuable perspective and given me a glimpse of the magnitude of this event, and the efforts that have been made to bring the Olympics to the United States. As the world gathers to watch the best of the best compete in the spirit of good will, I extend my best wishes to Atlanta. May the games enjoy every success. It is an honor to have the games here.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, today in Utah, memorial services will be held in Salt Lake City for Terrel Howard Bell, who passed away on Saturday. Since I cannot be there, I would like to make a few remarks to honor him. While he is best known inside the beltway as the Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, his time in Washington comprised only a small period of a lifetime of dedication to education. The words, ``A Nation at Risk'' mark the legacy of T.H. Bell. Commissions come and commissions go in Washington. Most have long been forgotten. However, I believe most of us would recognize the blunt assessment of American education contained in the report by The National Commission on Excellence in Education, the creation of then Secretary T. H. Bell: Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . . .[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . .. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. This warning got the attention of America and started the wheels of reform moving. The life of T.H. Bell was marked by an interest and passion for education. He believed that anybody who got a good education could accomplish whatever they wanted. This belief drove him to spend his life working to ensuring a good education was provided in public schools first in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and then the entire United States. His belief in opportunity was not a mere philosophy based on a good idea he had read about, but was based on his own life experiences. He was born in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho in 1921. His father died in a mining accident when he was 8, and his mother, left penniless during the Depression, supported the family and they never did have much. Attending college, while his dream, was not a foregone conclusion given the financial challenges he experienced growing up. In his own words, he shared his uncertainty about succeeding in college: When my senior year in high school came along, my mother had succeeded in her long campaign to get me to make the impossible happen. I was going to leave Lava Hot Springs for college. Since we had no money at all, I was compelled to attend Albion State Normal School, a teachers training institution, but my love of my hometown school made it easy for me to accept that necessity. If I could make it, I was going to be a teacher. So I hoped as I labored, full of doubts and fearful of the possibility of failure. . .. Each term I attended seemed likely to be my last. My borrowed textbooks, threadbare clothing, skimpy meals, and constant apprehensiveness that I was not college material caused me--indeed drove me--to study with a dogged passion and urgency. He attended Albion State Normal School, beginning in 1940. After serving in the Marines during World War II, he became a high school science teacher. At age 25, he became superintendent of schools in Rockland, ID. He also held that position in Afton, WY, and Ogden, UT. He then served as Utah's state schools chief from 1963 to 1970, and then moved on to Washington, DC, to work in education under President's Nixon and Ford as Deputy Commissioner and then Commissioner of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He took office as President Ronald Reagan's Education Secretary in 1981, where the landmark report, ``A Nation at Risk'' was issued. His strong belief in State and local control of schools was often misunderstood, given his view that the Federal Government should provide some leadership role in education reform. After leaving his post as education chief in 1985, he established a nonprofit consultant group focusing promoting academic excellence at middle schools, and co-authored ``How to Shape Up Our Nation's Schools.'' T.H. Bell died in his sleep on Saturday. He was 74. T.H. Bell worked to ensure the opportunity for a quality education was open to all, and with it, the hope of a better life, just as it had been opened to him. I would like to conclude my remarks, using his own words: My life would have been a great void had it not been for that public school in Lava Hot Springs staffed by caring teachers who treasured their jobs. From them I learned that I could learn. I learned as well that the joy of understanding surpasses all else. . . To look into a test tube, to marvel for the first time at a chemical reaction swirling around before your eyes in an Erlenmeyer flask in a public school chemistry laboratory, is to describe the experience that is at the heart of the Nation's commitment to the doctrine of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We cannot promise happiness. But we must promise the pursuit. . .. I was not only promised the pursuit, I was enabled to fulfill it. In this, he spoke of pursuing an education. But I believe this is a fitting description of his life. He had the opportunity to pursue a life in educational service. He pursued it, and fulfilled it.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I spoke at some length yesterday in a philosophical fashion, going back to the Founding Fathers and the Federalist Papers, hoping to turn the debate into that kind of an analysis of our basic freedoms and our political approach. Today I want to get very down and dirty, as they say; very practical. It has been my observation throughout this entire controversy, and it goes back to the last Congress as well as this one, that the efforts at campaign finance reform really constitute an incumbent protection activity. The Senator from Arizona, my friend, Senator McCain, said that if the challengers were voting here they would all vote for this bill because he showed the chart that showed most of the PAC money went to incumbents. I have been a challenger. The memory is still fresh in my mind, even though I am now an incumbent. And I can assure all who do not know anything about the political process, that an incumbent comes into a race with incredible advantages. Let me give an example. I did not run against an incumbent Senator but I ran against an incumbent Congressman. These are the advantages he brought to the race. He had a staff, paid for by the taxpayers, that was available to research every issue, provide him with a paper on every issue, and in the course of press releases give him the press support that he required. He held a press conference late in the campaign in which he attacked me for a wide variety of things. The press person who scheduled that press conference, who wrote the press release, and who handled all press inquiries relating to it was paid by the taxpayer because he was on the Congressman's staff. I had to have people there to protect my interests. They were all paid for out of campaign funds because I had no congressional staff. I am not saying that he broke the law. I am not saying that he did anything improper. I am just outlining this is the way it is. He had name recognition going back to 8 years of service in the House of Representatives. I thought I had some name recognition because my father had served in the Senate. I figured everybody would remember the name ``Bennett'' favorably in connection with the Senate. Boy, did I find out differently. In the first poll that was taken, I was at 3 percent, with a 4-percent margin of error. I could have been minus 1. How do I counteract that 8 years of name recognition that he has built up? I had to raise the money. How did I pay for the people who were there to counteract the people that he had on his congressionally supported staff? I had to raise the money. Is it a fair fight when you say the incumbent is at level x and the challenger must also be at level x, when the incumbent has all of these advantages that are worth money that the challenger has to raise money in order to produce? When you say, let us get a fair fight and let us do it by saying that the challenger is unable to raise money to take care of the things that the incumbent does not have to raise money for, you are automatically creating a circumstance in favor of the incumbent. Some political observers have said to me, ``Why are you opposed to this now that you are an incumbent? We can understand that you were opposed to campaign reform while you were a challenger because as a challenger you were at a disadvantage in the face of campaign reform. But now that you are an incumbent, and particularly now that your party has a majority of the incumbents, why isn't your party in favor of an incumbent protection act that will put all of these disadvantages on the backs of the challenger?'' Well, I go back to my statement yesterday. I have philosophical challenges with these attempts to do that which I consider would produce damage to our basic philosophical underpinnings in this country. I did not quote the Federalist Papers just to prove that I had read them. I went through that process to demonstrate that I have a philosophical objection to what it is we are trying to do here, even though, should this bill pass, I would be benefited as an incumbent. I am convinced, if this bill were to pass, that I would be benefited as an incumbent, that I would be in a circumstance where it would be impossible for anybody to challenge me. But I am willing to run the risk of having them challenge me because that is the American pattern and that is what is in the Constitution that all of us have sworn to uphold and defend here in this body. So, Mr. President, I am not going to vote for cloture. I am not going to vote to support a bill that is an incumbent protection act. I am going to say we will all stand exposed to the challenge of challengers who have the energy and the message necessary to raise the money to challenge us and not hide behind limits that say that we can use the advantages of our offices and our challengers cannot. I believe it is as simple as that. I believe that honest fairness says we will oppose this bill, and, therefore, we oppose cloture on the bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Kentucky be allowed to enter the colloquy.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, the subject of today's debate is ostensibly campaign finance reform. It is currently fashionable to say that all of our ills as a nation are caused by incompetent officeholders--or worse, politicians who have been bought by special interests through the process of campaign contributions. So we are gathering to debate a bill that is supposed to fix that. Who can possibly be in favor of a system like that? To some, this should be an easy vote. Destroy the status quo. Anything would be better. So I am in favor of destroying the status quo, Mr. President, but I reject the idea that anything will be better, and particularly the bill that is before us. I believe there is at stake here an issue that is far more fundamental than campaign finance reform. Perhaps without realizing it, we are dealing with the most crucial political questions that any society can confront, issues that were confronted and resolved by those that we now refer to as the Founding Fathers. Accordingly, Mr. President, I wish to deviate from the direct bill in front of us long enough to move this debate into a context that goes back to the Founding Fathers. I begin with the writings of James Madison, commonly called ``the father of the Constitution.'' His work, along with that of his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, is now on display in the National Archives, America's most hallowed document, our political scriptures, if you will: the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. However, today I am not going to be quoting either from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, both of which were products of Madison's genius, but rather from what has come to be known as the Federalist Papers, a series of political tracts written during the time that the Nation was debating the ratification of the Constitution. At that time, there were many people who were afraid of the impact the Constitution would have on their existing Government, and to allay those fears, James Madison, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, set forth the clear statement of the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of American Government. It has added relevance to the debate on campaign finance reform because in the 10th of this series of publications, that which has come to be known as the 10th Federalist, Madison addressed the fundamental question of what to do about what we now call special interests. The 18th century word for ``special interest'' was ``faction,'' so I will use the terms ``faction'' and ``special interest'' interchangeably. Quoting now from the 10th Federalist, I give you Madison's definition of what a faction is. Faction: . . . a number of citizens . . . who are united and actuated by . . . common impulse of passion or . . . interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens. I can think of no better description of a special interest than that one. Madison then tells us, ``There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: * * * removing its causes'' or ``removing its effects.'' He then tells us, ``There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: * * * by destroying * * * liberty'' or ``by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions and the same interests.'' Appropriately, Madison then describes the first remedy, that is, the destruction of liberty, as ``* * * worse than the disease.'' I think all Americans would agree with this. Controlling the mischiefs that come from special interests by destroying the basic liberty that guarantees each American his or her own right of opinion would destroy the very basis of the Nation in which we live. Now, referring to the second way of dealing with factions, that is, ``* * * giving to every citizen the same opinions * * * passions * * * and interests,'' Madison says, ``The second * * * is as impractical as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible * * * different opinions will be formed.'' He summarizes, ``The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.'' Again, Mr. President, no contemporary writer could place the situation more precisely than Madison has. Special interests arise among us because we are free, and, as long as we are free we will disagree to one extent or another. Madison continues. He says, ``The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed * * * and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.'' He then tells us, ``* * * relief is supplied by the republican principle.'' Now, by using the word ``republican,'' Madison is clearly not referring to the modern Republican Party. He is differentiating between a democracy and a republic as a governmental form. He says, ``The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are, first, the delegation of the government in the latter, to a small group of citizens elected by the rest. Secondly, the greater number of citizens * * * over which the latter may be extended.'' Referring to the greater number of citizens that are governed by a republic, he tells us why this will defeat the pressures of special interests. Quoting, ``The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration throughout the other States.'' I will say more about this in a moment, but for now it is his point of the difference between the democracy and a republic which I wish to stress. In a pure democracy, every decision is made by the vote of every citizen; in a republic, as Madison says, ``The delegation (goes) to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.'' It is this republican form of government that the Constitution gives us and under which we have lived for well over two centuries. Now, since the representatives in our Republic are freely elected, as contrasted to those who were chosen by the Communists to serve in the Republics of the old Soviet Union of Republics, modern commentators use the term ``democracy'' to describe us, and if we interpret the word ``democracy'' to mean a system where everybody gets to vote, I have no objection to that term. However, as a description of governmental structure, applying the term ``democracy'' to the United States is a misstatement. What does all this have to do with campaign finance reform? In my view, it has a great deal to do with it. Campaign finance reform is about the power of special interest groups--factions--and how to control that power, the very subject of the 10th Federalist paper. Let us take modern tools of communication and insert them into the model that Madison gave us. For instance, is it now possible for a modern special interest or faction to create a conflagration simultaneously in several States? Given the wide reach of television, national publications, the Internet, the answer is clearly yes. A special interest group, be it a labor union, an environmentalist group, a business alliance or a religious association, now possesses the means, if it can raise the money, to reach every citizen in the country virtually simultaneously without regard to any political boundaries or geographical boundaries that might exist. Examples of this are all around us. First, various religious organizations calling themselves the Christian Coalition have banded together, and by using the outlets of communication available to them in both churches and the media, in 1994 put out a common message to all of those who are adherents to those particular denominations. They greatly influenced the outcome of the election that year, and they have promised to repeat the process in 1996. Second, the National Rifle Association sent broad mailings and purchased advertising time on the electronic media to make sure that everyone who agreed with their views with respect to gun legislation would be stimulated to go to the polls and support candidates of the same mind. Third, the AFL-CIO has publicly announced that by increasing the compulsory dues levied on their members, they are going to raise at least $35 million, which will be spent in an effort to guarantee that candidates who support their political agenda will be elected to the House of Representatives in 1996. And finally, on an issue perhaps closer to home for me as a Senator from Utah, recently groups of environmental supporters concerned about a bill relating to land use in Utah, which was introduced by members of the Utah delegation, purchased full-page ads in the major newspapers in major cities all across the country urging an outpouring of communication to Congress seeking defeat of this particular legislation. They were successful in creating a filibuster in the Senate that saw the bill go down. Madison's statement that ``the influence of factious leaders may kindle the flame within their particular States but will be unable to spread a general conflagration throughout the other States'' is clearly no longer true. That means we must return to the other ``great point of difference between a democracy and a republic'' of which Madison speaks, namely, ``the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.'' It is through this device primarily that we must now find hope for protection against the tyranny of a pure democracy where a faction able to temporarily gain a majority position can then ride roughshod over the interests and opinions of all the other citizens in society. I realize that when he talks about the republican principle, Madison is talking about officials after they take office, but the same principle applies to campaigns. We do not vote in campaigns as a pure democracy, deciding every issue. Instead, we choose among Madison's phrase a ``small number of citizens'' who have offered themselves to serve in public office. Through a process of conventions or primaries or both we winnow this number down to the final choice. It is done through a democratic process, but it is an example of the republican representative principle nonetheless. The rhetoric we are hearing about campaign reform flies in the face of this preference for a republican principle. The more we limit the amount of money that is available to candidates--those who will be representative once they are in office--the more we weaken the republican principle and strengthen the hand of special interests. This is particularly ironic in view of the calls for this kind of reform in the name of weakening the power of special interests. Envision the following: Assume a congressional district with candidate A and candidate B, under strict spending limitations. This means that each has a limit on the amount he or she can tell the voters about his or her position on particular issues. The special interests, on the other hand--the labor unions, the environmentalists, the Christian Coalition or the NRA--have no such limits, which means that the voters can and presumably will be bombarded with information coming exclusively from those groups and aimed at influencing their vote. Exercising their first amendment right of free speech, the special interests will never have limitations placed upon them, nor should they. The first amendment is too precious. But in the name of campaign finance reform, we will create a situation where the voters will receive proportionately less and less information from the candidates and more and more information from the special interests, so the voters will ultimately make their choices on the basis of which special interest message is the most persuasive. The candidate's intellect, training, character, and talent will all become secondary if not, in the end, lost altogether in the elective process. The Republican principle of representative government will be weakened and washed away. Officeholders will become more and more insignificant. We have a clear example of how this can happen in the current workings of the electoral college. That is an institution that is so arcane that very few of our citizens even know that it exists. But the Founding Fathers intended to have the electoral college work this way: Voters in the individual States would pick outstanding citizens in their States to represent them in the process of choosing a President. If the electors were unable to produce a majority for any one individual, the choice would then move to the House of Representatives. It was anticipated in the time of the ratification of the Constitution that the election of a President by Members of the House of Representatives would be a frequent occurrence if not, indeed, the norm. Today, even the names of the electors let alone their opinions or qualifications, are virtually unknown to the voters, most of whom think they are casting a vote directly for one Presidential candidate or the other. The power of the Presidential candidate to reach over the heads of the electors and appeal directly to the voters is so strong that the electoral college has become virtually a dead letter. Indeed, there are now laws on the books in a number of States that prohibit the electors from exercising their own judgment as the Founding Fathers had intended that they would. I am not here to call for reform of the electoral college. But I give this as an example of what can happen when the qualifications of the individuals become overwhelmed with advertising dollars that go to the point on which the individual is supposed to vote. If, in the name of campaign reform, we set up a circumstance that limits the ability of a candidate to raise and spend his or her own money, therefore limiting that candidate's ability to put forth his or her own positions, we weaken the ability of the candidate to stand up to a special interest. When we say to a candidate, ``If you disagree with the position taken by the AFL-CIO, or the Sierra Club, or the Christian Coalition, or the trial lawyers, or the NRA, or whatever, you have only a limited number of dollars available to make your case; while they, on the other hand, can say whatever they want, without limitation, about you and your position.'' That is not a fair fight. That puts the candidate who would be the constitutional representative at a serious disadvantage as opposed to the special interest. That is not the position that Madison laid out for the American people as he described the Constitution, and it is not the kind of fundamental change in our political life that we should be pursuing here. I can hear the question now. ``All right, Senator Bennett, thanks for the civics lesson, the political science lecture. If you do not like this bill, what proposals do you have to try to clean up the influence of special interest money in America?'' I have a proposal. It is not in the form of legislation, but can be reduced to legislation as soon as I feel I have stirred up enough support for it. I believe in the power of full disclosure. I would support measures that would eliminate all limitations on candidates to raise and spend money, as long as those candidates were open and candid in disclosing to the voters where that money came from. I would extend those disclosure requirements to the special interests. At least with the AFL-CIO, we know where the money comes from. It comes from their increasing the levy on their members. That very fact has produced an issue in itself, as people have complained that their money is going to support candidates that they themselves do not support. That kind of debate is healthy. The more people know where the money comes from, the better off we are going to be in our political discourse. We do not know where all of the money that supports Common Cause comes from. They are immune from the kind of disclosure that candidates have to meet. We do not know the exact nature of the contributions that keep open the doors of the Christian Coalition. They, too, are immune from the kind of disclosure requirements that candidates have to meet. We do not know the extent to which people on the payrolls of these organizations show up in campaigns to perform services on behalf of the campaign, either for or against the candidate involved. I do not condemn any of these activities. They are free, proper expressions of one's rights under the Constitution. But I say the way to limit the power of special interests in our political process is to open the door of disclosure upon those special interests, to maintain and increase, if necessary, the full disclosure requirements on candidates, but leave the candidates free to raise and spend whatever money they need to defend themselves against the money that is raised and spent against them, directly, by the special interests. If we are to preserve the principles laid down by Madison and his contemporaries, we have the right to know more about the inner workings of factions than we do now. As long as modern communications have made them major players in the political game, they should be treated as such and brought under the appropriate kinds of sunshine requirements that we have decided as a Nation that we want our candidates to live under. They should not be given a free ride while the candidates, who need to protect themselves against the pressures from these special interests, are held back with artificial and, in my view, tremendously unwise limitations. For these reasons, then, I would support an elimination of all limitations on candidates' fundraising and candidates' spending, with full and solid disclosure requirements, making sure that voters knew where that money came from, and then applying the same principle, no limitation on spending but full disclosure on those special interests that seek now to gain unfair advantage by virtue of the passage of this legislation. I am sure in the course of this debate I will have plenty of opportunity to expound further on this theme, so I will leave it at that and yield the floor. Mr. McCAIN addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I will not speak at length, having introduced the debate. I want to provide a counterpoint to the arguments that we have had now with two speakers in favor of the bill. I would like to make several comments, one with respect to the chart offered by my friend from Arizona. I was in this town when Richard Nixon was President of the United States and the loud outcry went up that money was destroying politics; that we had to reform politics; that we had to find a way to take the corrosive support of money away from politics in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The solution that was crafted and debated on this floor and ultimately passed was the creation of the political action committees [PAC's]. PAC's were touted as the ultimate purifying process. What could be better than a PAC? I remember the debate very well. It went this way. Instead of one individual being able to give Richard Nixon $250,000--or, as Clement Stone did at the time, $2.5 million--now you have a circumstance where ordinary citizens can get together and pool their money in a political action committee, and for efficiency purposes, the managers of that committee will issue individual single checks of no more than $5,000. What could be better in cleaning up politics than the creation of the political action committees? Indeed, Mr. President, I once worked for the man who probably created the first political action committee. His name was Howard Hughes. At the Hughes organizations in California, where people were constantly coming to Mr. Hughes for political contributions, he said, ``Let's get all of the employees together, let them contribute $5, $10, whatever is their choice, into a single fund, and then let them determine how that money will be spent.'' The original Hughes political action committee had every politician in California coming before it to speak to the employees because the candidate who did a great job in front of that PAC meeting would walk away with a check for $50,000, $60,000, or $100,000, depending upon how the employees voted that their PAC money was to be spent. I believe that was the model for the creation of the political action committee. Now we see charts being given to us telling us of the corrosive damaging influence of PAC's. It all comes down to a statement that was made in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the 4th of April. I quote: The bigger point here is that money and politics is like water running downhill. Dam up one avenue, and it will pool and meander until it finds another way to break through. Trying to regulate it is a fool's errand, as even some good government reformers are beginning to understand. If I could go back to the theme of my opening statement, we are not talking about, in the words of the Senator from Wisconsin, reducing the flow of political action money. We are talking about redirecting the flow of political action money with the kind of legislation that is being offered here. Back to the Wall Street Journal, another editorial. This one that appeared on the 2d of February 1996, which gives an example of the kind of thing I was talking about in my opening statement. What the reformers will not advertise is that there is nothing much they can do about the special interests who decide to spend money on their own, as they did to great effect in Oregon. The AFL-CIO says it devoted 35 full-time professionals and sent out 350,000 pieces of partisan mail for the cause. The Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters spent $200,000 on 30,000 postcards, 100,000 telephone calls, and very tough TV and radio spots accusing Republican Gordon Smith of voting against ground-water protection, clean air, pesticide limits, and recycling. The editorial goes on: The toughest was a Teamster radio spot run on seven stations in five cities that in effect accused Mr. Smith of being an accomplice to murder because a 14-year-old boy died in an accident at one of his companies. Quoting the spot: Gordon Smith owns companies where workers get hurt and killed. He has repeatedly violated the law. Those are the facts. The Journal goes on: In fact, the young worker had died after a fall in a grain elevator while being supervised by his father, who still works for Mr. Smith and does not blame him. An analysis of the ad in the liberal Oregonian newspaper essentially concluded that the whole thing was false. The ad was the work of consultant Henry Sheinkopf, who is part of Bill Clinton's reelection team this year and likes to say he believes in the politics of terror. The editorial goes on: Even Mr. Wyden felt compelled to criticize the rhetoric of the ad, but since it was not run by his campaign he couldn't be blamed for it even as it cut up his opponent. That is the beauty of these independent expenditures. They work for a candidate without showing his fingerprints. Mr. Wyden took the high road earlier this month and announced that both candidates should stop negative campaigning, while his allies kept dumping garbage on Mr. Smith through the mail and on the airwaves. Mr. President, that is the point I made in my opening remark, and that is the point I will keep coming back to again and again until we recognize that special interest money is more damaging in the hands of special interests going directly to the voter than it is in the hands of a candidate who must be accountable to the voter. We will be missing the point in this whole debate. Setting limitations? Oh, we are told they are not mandatory, that they are only driven by a voluntary incentive system. Ask Bob Dole about the voluntary incentive system he is laboring under. He cannot spend any more money now under this voluntary incentive system, and President Clinton has $27 million to spend because Bob Dole had to run against Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan to win his nomination, and Bill Clinton did not have to run against anybody. So Bill Clinton has his $27 million raised for the primary that he can spend in any way he wants, and Bob Dole is forbidden by law. But, no, that is not mandatory. That is a voluntary incentive system.

Mr. BENNETT. I agree completely that the Senator from Arizona is correct, that this bill does not include public financing. But may I get clarification? The voluntary incentive system does, in fact, if entered into by a candidate for local office, produce a limitation.

Mr. BENNETT. Yes.

Mr. BENNETT

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