Sam Brownback

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be agreed to.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, Senators Thompson and Glenn have an amendment at the desk, and I ask for its consideration.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consideration of Calendar No. 103, H.R. 680.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, as in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the injunction of secrecy be removed from the following treaties transmitted to the Senate on July 9, 1997 by the President of the United States: Extradition Treaty with France (Treaty Document No. 105-13); Extradition Treaty with Poland (Treaty Document No. 105-14). I further ask unanimous consent that the treaties be considered as having been read the first time; that they be referred, with accompanying papers, to the Committee on Foreign Relations and ordered to be printed; and that the President's message be printed in the Record.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, today there is some excellent news regarding the economy. The deficit, because of such a strong economy and taxes being paid, may be as low as $45 billion. I am hopeful that we can continue to keep that economy going strong by some of the tax cuts that are being proposed and are currently being negotiated. I think the real story here of what is taking place on balancing this budget is the fact that the economy is growing. Growth works, and it works well, and it is working well for us here. I think it would be a mistake if we did not step forward and do whatever we can to continue this economy and this economic expansion that has been one of the longest running expansions we have had in history to date. That is why some of the tax cuts, particularly the progrowth and profamily tax cuts, the capital gains tax cut and the $500 per child tax credit are very, very important for us to continue, not only to balance the budget and not only to do it before the year 2002, or do it by the year 2000, but to start to pay off the debt. I think it is important we do it. I also note that while the economy is doing well and we are getting the deficit under control--and those are important things--we certainly need some help in our culture overall. We continue to have terribly high rates of crime taking place in this society. We had in Washington, DC three people in a coffee shop murdered. We continue to have story after story, it seems like, on a daily basis of cultural problems that we are having just throughout society. Whether it is the number of children born out of wedlock, teenage suicide, cultural decline in total, violent crime rates or disintegration of the family, we really have to step it up in these areas.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be a period for the transaction of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I further ask unanimous consent that no other amendments be in order to the above-listed amendments.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, the Senate resume consideration of the Grams amendment No. 422; that there be 90 minutes remaining for debate to be equally divided between Senator Cochran and Senator Grams; and that following the conclusion or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to vote on, or in relation to, the Grams amendment, to be followed by a vote on, or in relation to, the Cochran amendment No. 420.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, one thing I want to draw people's attention to is that in the third week of October, there is going to be a ``Character Counts'' week taking place. That may be a while off and is not necessary for us to focus on now, but I think it is time that while we look at economic activity being strong and culturally we are having all these problems, let's focus on these things. The Senator from New Mexico, Senator Domenici, has been a major champion of character counts, and that is where people step up and say, ``We need to look at ourselves and our own character.'' Good character doesn't come about by accident, it is a practice of virtue. It is one thing that each and every one of us as Americans can step forward with. I would like to, as we close today, give one example of a person who stepped up on character, and it is a gentleman in Wichita, KS, in my home State, by the name of Leo Mendoza. Leo is a man who knows that character counts, because he hasn't always had it. Leo is a survivor of sexual abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and crime. For 17 years, he was in and out of jail, on and off drugs and in and out of marriages. But today, after years of soul-searching and counseling, he is, once again, a solid citizen. He is an elder at his church, and he and his wife are trying to adopt a child. What changed Leo? Was it Government rehabilitation programs? Was it a Government social program? Or was it actually something deeper, something that the Government could neither teach nor instill? Leo actually never relied on a Government assistance program, partly out of pride, partly out of independence. He never even sought help from others. It was his friends who sought him. In 1987, a friend of his introduced him to Alcoholics Anonymous and a local church. Slowly, he began to form the rudiments of character, promising himself that he would confront the daily struggles of life with the firmness that a life of true character is built not on one heroic act, but rather is the consequence of a thousand little struggles. Leo, together with his family, friends, and church, began to rehabilitate. He had the courage to say no, the patience to endure the temptations and the humility to ask God for help when weakness was about to overcome him. By struggling with his past, Leo learned virtue, and by learning virtue, he built character. Those struggles teach us about our own character and about what true character is made of. I give that little vignette as we close today because in attacking the cultural decline and difficulties in this society, this is not something you legislate with massive Government programs or is not something we can sit in a conference room to decide what we are going to do and impose that will upon the country. But rather it is the little individual struggles that each and every one of us has everyday. It is each and every struggle that 250 million-plus Americans deal with. That is how you make a great Nation, people struggling to build character, by building that virtue and struggling to build it one at a time.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I want to make a couple of notes about an upcoming event and something that took place today, and then I have business to conduct before the Senate.

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

Mr. BROWNBACK. I have no objection to doing that.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I would like to speak briefly in favor of the Dorgan- Lott second-degree amendment and associate myself with that amendment. I do think it is important before we go forward with additional BRAC's that we know and can certify the amount of money that has been saved by prior BRAC rounds. I do not think we have taken that into consideration. There is a lot that is also associated with closure costs. But more to the point on this particular issue, it seems to me that we have been through this BRAC process here now for several rounds, and some of that may have been very healthy to do, but that we ought to stop and appraise just what was good about that, and, more importantly, I think we need to go through a BRAC on domestic discretionary spending. Let us look at some of the programs that are discretionary programs, not entitlement programs but discretionary programs, say, within the Department of Commerce or, say, within the Department of Energy. Let us go through a BRAC there. Let us take a look at those and have a vote up or down. We ought to be focusing our effort there where we know we have some wasteful programs. We know there is money that is being wasted and spent not for a good reason or cause. We have gone through that on some of the military bases as far as looking at some bases that may not be necessary to have, but would it not be so much wiser now to focus on some of these discretionary programs? They are in the media virtually every day--the Advanced Technology Program being a corporate welfare program, for one instance. We have other programs that have been identified. We have a fleet of ships under the Commerce Department that we have been saying for a long time ought to be privatized rather than being run there. That is a wasteful spending program. I have a list of those that I think we ought to go through far before we start up some other BRAC round in the military when we do not even know what sort of cost or what sort of savings we have had associated within it. So, Mr. President, I just think we have a lot better things that we could be doing with our time and focus on rather than going back through a BRAC round. I do think it is constructive, through the Dorgan-Lott approach, to get a sense of where we are costwise, get a sense of what cost we have with closing a military base, get a strategy going here which guarantees that further base closures will not jeopardize national security. We need to look at all those things before we go forward with another BRAC round. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. THURMOND addressed the Chair.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I make a motion to waive the Budget Act with respect to my amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk in the second-degree.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, Senator Kohl and I have offered this amendment. It is a very, very simple amendment. It just says if we are going to break the spending caps on this bill, on this budget agreement that we've told the American people is going to balance the budget, if we're going to break the spending limits on it, we have to vote on it. And we have to vote and pass that by a 60-vote margin. That's it. The President has to say how he is going to get us to a balanced budget. If we're going to break that cap, he has to say how he is going to get us to a balanced budget; if we're going to break that spending cap, he has to say where we're going to make the spending cuts, and we have to vote if we are going to break it. I think this is the least we can do for the American people. It says, ``Folks, we meant it when we said we were going to balance the budget. We meant it when we said we're going to balance it by the year 2002.'' And if we are going to break it, we've got to break it by a 60-vote margin. I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Kohl.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I thank the Senator. I just needed that clarification. Mr. HARKIN addressed the Chair.

Mr. BROWNBACK. OK. So the point of order would lie.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Reserving the right to object, do I understand the chairman to say now that you are removing your waiver to the point of order that I have raised?

Mr. BROWNBACK. Will the Senator from Delaware explain the section?

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Thank you very much, Madam President. I first want to congratulate the Senator from Delaware for an excellent bill he has put forward on an important topic. We are finally talking about tax cuts, something we should have been talking about for a long period of time, but we haven't since 1981. This is a great day. I think it is a great opening that we are finally doing something about the tax burden on the American people, where they are paying over 40 percent of their income in taxes. I congratulate the chairman of the Finance Committee for raising this. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I would like to quickly respond, if I could, to just a couple of comments. I hope we will not stand here and say that the welfare program, the changes that we made in the last Congress have been a failure. They have been a great success. Look in my home State of Kansas where welfare rolls have gone down 30 percent. And, yes, we have had a strong economy, but in the past we have had a strong economy when the welfare rolls have gone up. You have to change the incentives in the program. That is what we did in the last Congress. It was a positive step to move forward. So I hope that we do not make something a failure when it has been a strong success and people are working now rather than receiving payments from the Government and they are having more self-confidence themselves. I think this is good for people, too, because with the past system the people on welfare, along with the people that paid for welfare, thought it was a horrible failure and a horrible system. We have changed the dynamics, and we have changed the incentives in this program to where the people are incentivized to work. And they feel good about it. They feel better about it. And this is a program that is going to work. I think there are a lot of things we could spend money on that might well be good, but we have tended to do a lot of that in the past, to the point we are over $5 trillion in the hole. So that we just cannot keep voting for everything to be able to do it or else we are not going to get in balance.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I would like to comment on the comments of the Senator from Michigan where he was addressing a foreign policy concern, and that is China. Yesterday, the House voted on most-favored-nation status and extended that status toward China even though we are having a great deal of difficulty in that country, and I do think we need to take additional steps in addressing this issue of China and our relationships back and forth. We have had problems with that nation expanding weapons of mass destruction, selling them to some of our enemies that we have around the world, particularly Iran. We have had problems with religious persecution, with forced abortion in that nation, and I think we need to step up and pass the issue of MFN. The Senator from Michigan has a start in his bill when he is talking about some different areas where we can put pressure on that nation in our relationship there to encourage more religious freedom taking place and to discourage things like weapons proliferation. Religious Persecution On Monday of this week, Senators Joe Lieberman and Robert Bennett, along with myself, hosted a forum on religious persecution around the world. We found this was not just a problem in China. It is in the Middle East. It is in Africa. And we are talking about an issue that goes beyond just certain levels of discrimination, all the way to the point of slavery, to murder that is taking place in those countries. A number of us came forward with solutions. Let's create a register of those people who are being persecuted around the world, and let's start to highlight it. Let's start a commission in areas of the Middle East, in Africa, focusing on this issue of the need for religious freedom. It is a founding principle of this country. People came here seeking freedom, seeking religious freedom. We are and we always will be best as a nation when we talk about principles. This is a guiding principle that we need to continue to move forward beyond this debate of MFN and focus nationally on this issue of what is taking place there. Create the register, create the commissions, focusing on this area. And I look forward to working with my colleagues, Senator Lieberman and many others. I hope it will begin in us talking about something that is so basic to America, religious freedom. We need to implement that and move those around the world. I yield the floor.