Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, in a moment I want to make a few remarks about the defense bill. Before the Senator from Oklahoma, my good friend, Senator Nickles, leaves the floor, I would like to pose these questions. First, why is it that we have to shut the Government down in order to continue negotiating? Second, who do you think benefits from that?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I think the Senator from Oklahoma and I, if we sat down and talked about this for a couple of weeks, we might work something out even though we have very serious disagreements. I know the Senator was euphoric, and I was depressed, in November 1994 when the American people took away the long, long, 40-year Democratic majority in the House and, I guess, about a 10-year majority in the Senate. They were voting for a whole host of reasons. Some of them were mad about gays in the military. Some of them were mad because we had not passed a constitutional amendment on prayer in school. Maybe some of them wanted a flag desecration amendment to the Constitution, or term limits. Maybe some of them missed a Social Security check that month. I do not know. I do not think there was one single thing, one single thread that ran through the election of 1994 that caused people to vote the way they did. But I will tell you one thing. They did not vote for chaos, and that is all they have had.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, if I may say so, I have only been here 21 years; not as long as the Senator from North Carolina who I see here on the floor, but pretty near. I have never--I have never--witnessed anything like this and hope to goodness I never witness it again, where, instead of passing a continuing resolution to allow people to operate at even a severely constrained level, even much less than they got last year, we shut down the Government instead. Actually, if I were the President I would be a little ambivalent about this, because, if we continue operating on a continuing resolution, we might get a balanced budget faster because a lot of these people are operating on a severely constrained budget. But my point is this. We have never--we have never--taken the option of shutting down the Government simply because we disagree with the President. It seems to me we might wind up having to have a constitutional amendment one of these days to say that is absolutely prohibited. Congress would be solemnly bound to pass a continuing resolution or something. I must tell you, I am at an absolute, abject, total loss as to how anybody can possibly believe that the country's business is being well served by shutting the Government down. I do not care how much you disagree with the President.

Mr. BUMPERS. But, Mr. President, would the Senator not agree that, under the Constitution, if the President does not like a bill he not only has the right, but the solemn duty, to veto it? And Congress has the right and the solemn duty to try to override it. Yet, while we have operated that way for 206 years, all of a sudden we have a new deal, that if you do not have the votes to override a veto, you shut the Government down, and, in addition to that, send 250,000 people home this morning, saying do not come to work but we will pay you for it anyway. Who benefits from that?

Mr. BUMPERS

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for 15 minutes as if in morning business.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. For the benefit of the majority, who apparently crafted this report, I would like to say there is something here that is ``passing strange,'' as we say in Arkansas. The report says, ``Therefore, the Senate conferees believe that the increased authorization of $493 million provided for the B-2 bomber program may be expended only for procurement of B-2 components, upgrades, and modifications that are of value for the existing fleet of B-2 bombers.'' At another place, it says, ``The conferees agree to authorize the budget request for research and development and to increase the authorization for procurement.'' So, I do not know whether the Pentagon has the authority to start buying 20 additional bombers or not. The thing that is strange to me about this is it says, ``Therefore, the Senate conferees believe.'' It does not say the House conferees believe. I was curious as to how this could be written with the Senate conferees believing one thing and the House conferees believing something else. Both sides usually have to concur, do they not? On another matter. Let me say to the distinguished ranking member also, he touched on the plan to sell the Naval Petroleum Reserve at Elk Hills, which really hit a nerve with me. I think it is the height of folly financially and economically to be selling off such assets and take credit for it under the Budget Reconciliation Act. Until this year it was specifically prohibited to count the sale of assets in budget deficit reduction. In other words, CBO was not to score asset sales. I thought that was a good rule. I have tried to reinstate it a couple of times and came within a couple of votes of getting it done. I think it was Mr. Bowsher who used to be at CBO who said that selling assets to reduce the deficit reminded him of the lawyer that came home from work one day and told his wife he had a great day, and she said, ``What happened?'' He said, ``I sold my desk.'' That is what we do when we sell off assets. One other question, because the Senator from Georgia was very active in crafting the so-called ABM language when that bill was in this Chamber. My staff has indicated to me that this bill would torpedo the ABM Treaty. Could the Senator from Georgia comment on that?

Mr. BUMPERS. I was aware of that, and I said earlier in the Chamber the President has a right to be wrong just like everybody else.

Mr. BUMPERS. I am sorry; will the Senator repeat the question?

Mr. BUMPERS. I think the Senator describes the situation perfectly. I might say, Mr. President, this is not particularly apropos of the story he just told, but it is one that might introduce a little levity here on a Friday afternoon. Chet Lock, who used to be Lum, in Luck and Abner, became a very good friend of mine when I ran for Governor the first time, and he told me a great story about a fellow who owned a horse and another fellow who came by one afternoon. The visitor said, ``What would you all take for that horse?'' He owner said, ``I'd take a hundred dollars.'' And the visitor said, ``I think I'll buy him.'' So he paid a hundred dollars and took his horse home. And the original owner could not sleep that night. He got to thinking: If that horse is worth a hundred dollars to him, certainly it would be worth more than that to me. So he called the guy the next morning and said, ``Listen, that horse is pretty dear to me. I raised him from a foal and I really hate to part with him. I will give you $200 to buy him back.'' The other said, ``Well, come and get him.'' So he went over and gave the guy $200. And the other fellow got to thinking that night: He knows something I don't know or he wouldn't have given me a hundred dollars' profit on that horse. The next day he called him back and said, ``I will give you $400 for to buy that horse back.'' This kept going on until they got the horse up to about $3,000, and one morning one of them called the other and said, ``I've called to make you an offer on the horse. Can I come and get him? I will pay you $200 more than you paid me.'' The other man said, ``I can't do that. I sold the horse.'' He said, ``You sold the horse?'' The other said, ``Yes, sold him to somebody else.'' And the first man said, ``Why would you do that? We were both making a good living off of him.'' I yield the floor. Mr. WARNER addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator will yield for a couple of questions. I do not want to take the time of the Senator from South Carolina, but the committee report on the B-2 bomber is mildly confusing. I just wonder if the distinguished ranking member could enlighten us as to what discretion the Pentagon has on how it spends the additional $493 million that is authorized for B-2's?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. BUMPERS. There are a lot of parts of this bill that I would like to address. I agree with the Senator from New Jersey that the bill is certainly better than it was in its original version. Thanks to the House of Representatives, who refused to accept it and voted overwhelmingly to recommit it to the conference, it has been improved. To tell you the truth, Mr. President, I am so sick of making this speech I am about to make, I cannot tell you how tiresome it is, and yet until the Members of this body change their attitude about mining on public lands, until the President and the press finally penetrate the minds of the American people as to this, the greatest of all scams in the history of the Nation, I will come here every year, time after time, to make my argument again. My mother used to have an expression, ``Everybody's business is nobody's business.'' And I cannot think of a better application of that saying than what we allow the biggest corporations in the world to pull off on us. It is just that it does not affect very many people. There are about 10 to 12 States out West where the Federal Government has extensive landholdings and where people file mineral claims to mine gold, silver, platinum, palladium, whatever, off the Federal lands, and it is very important to the mining companies and it is important to those few States where it takes place. But because the other roughly 40 States do not have a dog in the fight, they feel free, Senators of those States feel free to vote however they chose in the certain knowledge that their constituents will never hold them accountable. But let me recount the history of the issue of which I speak. In 1872, Ulysses Grant signed his name to the bill called the mining law of 1872. And the idea was we would permit people to go west and file claims on 20-acre parcels on the Federal lands there that the U.S. Government owned. Anybody could do it. And anybody can still do it. Just go out there and put four stakes down on a 20-acre tract, not just one, do a dozen if you want, two dozen, whatever you want. Just file claims on it. That started in 1872 as an incentive to get people to move west. When I first became involved in this issue there were about 1,200,000 claims that had been filed. And they were required to either pay $100 a year to maintain the claim or to certify that they had done $100 worth of work on their claim. Well, everybody simply sent in a certification that said, ``I did $100 worth of work.'' Meanwhile, they had no intention of mining it. Finally, in 1993, I was able to get a bill passed through here to require them to put up $100--not a certificate that they had done $100 worth of work, but pay $100 cash. The number of claims dropped from 1.2 million to the present, roughly, 330,000. So we have these 330,000 claims out there. If you own one of those claims, what do you do next? If you are really serious about mining something, then you start digging around to see if that land has anything on it. Most of the time, Mr. President, the people who own these claims never lay a glove on them. Some mining company comes in and says, ``We will pay you so much to let us work this claim, and if we find anything there, we will give you a 5- or 10-percent override on everything we find.'' And, ordinarily, the person who owns the claim says, ``That is fine with me, you are a big mining company. If anybody can make this work, you can.'' The claimant gets a nice little override for having simply put down four stakes on a claim. But once the mining company finds something, gold, silver, whatever, they go to the Bureau of Land Management and they file an application for a deed. Now, this is really the most egregious part of this whole law. You think about somebody going out and putting down stakes on Federal land that belongs to the taxpayers of this country, finding gold on it, and going to the BLM over at the Department of Interior and saying, ``I want a deed to this land.'' Do you know what else? The Secretary of the Interior--if he can validate the claim that there is mineable hardrock minerals, has to give them a deed. It is not an option with him; he has to give them a deed. What do they pay for it? Either $2.50 an acre or $5.00 an acre--for billions of dollars' worth of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. That is right, Mr. President. I am not making this up. I have made this speech every year for 7 years. The Secretary of the Interior has to deed billions of dollars' worth of minerals that belongs to the taxpayers of this country to some huge mining company for $2.50 an acre. Now, the mining industry which promotes this scam recently felt some heat as the press has caught on to the issue. I can see the representatives from the mining industry all sitting around the table saying, ``What are we going to do? We cannot take this adverse publicity forever.'' And somebody says, ``I have a grand scheme. We will say that we will give the Government not $2.50 an acre, but we will pay them fair market value less the value of the minerals under the surface. That way, we can go home and tell the Chamber of Commerce if they raise the issue with us, if there is a townhall meeting and there are some of those people there who have been paying attention and want to know why we are giving billions of dollars away to the biggest corporations in the world, we will say that we will make them pay fair market value. That is where you cut it off. You do not say fair market value for the surface, which is $100 an acre. Just tell them it is fair market value.'' That is what the reconciliation bill says. If the bill were to become law, the mining companies would have to pay fair market value, which CBO says is $100 an acre, underneath which is billions of dollars' worth of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, for which they pay nothing. Mr. President, there are not two Senators in this body that know this. It costs the Government $250 an acre just to process patent applications. Think about that. Here they are going to pay fair market value of $100 an acre. They are going to pay $100 an acre for something that just the processing of the claim costs the taxpayers $250. So we lose $150 per acre right on the front end. Mr. President, see this chart right here. ``Value for the interest in the land owned by the taxpayers exclusive of and without regard to the mineral deposits''--$2.50 an acre is the current price. The new price will go to $100 an acre. In exchange for that, the biggest corporations in the world, many of which are foreign-owned, take billions of dollars' worth of taxpayers' gold and silver off the land and go home with it. When I first got into this, the price of gold was $330 an ounce; platinum was selling for less than $400 an ounce. The argument was made that ``If we have to pay a 3-percent royalty, we might be able to live with that, but some of our mines might have to shut down and all these people will be thrown out of work.'' Today, the price of gold is $390 an ounce, and platinum is $410 an ounce. And what do you think the same argument is? ``We will have to shut down and put all these poor people out of work.'' You know why I know personally? I am not a miner. Do you know why I know that is the most specious argument of all? Because they pay an average of a 5- percent-net smelter return royalty to people who own private lands and pay substantial royalties to States if they mine on State lands. It is only when they mine on Federal lands they are going to go broke. On December 1, 2 weeks ago, Secretary Babbitt at the Department of the Interior gave ASARCO a deed for 349 acres in the Coronado National Forest in Arizona near Tucson. What do you think the taxpayers of this country got? First of all, that 349 acres has underneath it 2.9 billion dollars' worth of copper and silver. What do the taxpayers get? A whopping $1,745. Do you know something else? The Washington Post and the New York Times did not have one word about it. Not one line. I guarantee not one person in this body saw a news story anywhere that 2 weeks ago the taxpayers got shafted for $3 billion. Three months before that, the Secretary of the Interior gave the Faxe Kalk Mine, a Danish corporation, a deed to 110 acres of public land in Idaho. What was under the 110 acres? Mr. President, $1 billion worth of travertine. What did the taxpayers get for their $1 billion? Mr. President, $275. On May 16, 1994, the Secretary of the Interior gave Barrick Resources, a subsidiary of a Canadian corporation, a deed for 1,700 acres of land. What did it have under it? Mr. President, $11 billion worth of gold. What did the taxpayers get for their $11 billion?-- $9,000. I give the press credit; they did cover that one. Stillwater Mining Co. in Montana, 2 days after I almost got a moratorium put on the patenting process, filed a claim with the BLM for deeds to 2,036 acres. They filed for their patent in 1990. They got their first half certificate and the Secretary of the Interior will eventually be forced to give the Stillwater Mining Co. a deed for that 2,036 acres. What is under that? Mr. President, $44 billion worth of platinum and palladium--not my figures, their figures. Look at their prospectus. They are the ones who say there is 225 ounces of platinum and palladium on the land. We made the calculation. If that is correct, it is $44 billion worth of platinum and palladium. What did Uncle Sucker get?--$10,000. We talk about balancing the budget; how are we going to finance Medicaid, education, the environment, and all the rest of it while we are giving away billions and billions of dollars' worth of resources that belong to the people of this country? There is not a Senator in this body that has not gone home when he faced reelection and said, ``If you elect me, I will balance the budget. I will treat your money as though it were mine. I will be tightfisted.'' You may be tightfisted with some poor, pregnant, teenage girl, or you may elect to make Medicaid a block grant program so some children get health care and others do not. But if things continue the way they are, you can rest assured those same people who are so concerned about that will continue to vote for this just as they have in the past. It is absolutely sickening. There is no other way to describe it. This bill, thanks to the House of Representatives, contains a patent moratorium. Let me tell you about that. There are presently 608 patent applications pending over at the BLM. Of the 608, 373 of the applications already have their first half certificate so they can go ahead and get their deeds for $2.50 or $5 an acre. The rest of them, 235, are frozen, subject to future legislation. But do you know what was in the reconciliation bill? A royalty. My staff came in and said, ``Senator So and So has put a royalty in the reconciliation bill--5 percent.'' Really? We started looking at it, and it is 5 percent of nothing after taking into account the deductions. When you look at the reconciliation bill and you see that whooping big 5 percent royalty, and you say 5 percent of what? and you start seeing what you will deduct before you levy a royalty, there is nothing left to levy a royalty on. What is worse, what is even more cynical, is every one of the 608 applications for patents would be exempt from the royalty forever. That is billions of dollars' worth of minerals. Who else is exempt? The 330,000 claims that are in existence. So you cannot tax the lands for which patents have been applied and you cannot tax any future claims on any applications for patent on the 330,000 claims that are still existing. What do you wind up with? Less than $1 million per year. People say, ``I wonder why President Clinton vetoed that reconciliation bill.'' That was only one reason. Mr. President, I am still grateful to the House even though we had to grandfather the 373 patent applications and will likely never get a dime out of it. It is a step in the right direction. So, Mr. President, let me cover one other point. I have never understood why hard rock minerals get this exemption. We do not give it to anybody else. When I first became involved in this issue, I could not believe it was as egregious as it turned out to be. It turned out to be much worse than I thought at first. At the time, people believed that somehow or other if you rubbed a quartz crystal a certain way it would cure your warts and whatever else ails you. I did not know about it. But everybody else in America seemed to know that these quartz crystals, people were being told, had healing powers. Do you know where the biggest quartz crystal deposit in the United States is? It is in the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas. People were down there with picks and shovels tearing the forest up. I went to Senator McClure, who was at that time vitally interested in the subject. I said, ``Do you mind if I pass a bill eliminating quartz crystals from the 1872 mining law?'' He said, ``No, I don't care.'' So I did, and in about a week's time. That is the fastest I have ever gotten anything done here since I have been here. Every year we get a few thousand dollars in Arkansas as a royalty. I forget how much we charge on this. But we get a royalty on all of the quartz crystals taken off, and it goes to the Federal Treasury. I take full credit for that. If I could have gotten this whole thing taken care of by then we would not have nearly as much trouble today balancing the budget as we have. Why do we charge coal miners 12\1/2\ percent for all the coal they mine off Federal lands? And if you go underground to mine coal on Federal lands, you have to pay an 8 percent royalty. If you take natural gas off Federal lands, you pay a 12\1/2\ percent royalty. And if you take oil off Federal lands, you pay a 12\1/2\ percent royalty. But, if you take gold, silver, or platinum, or any other hardrock mineral, you pay nothing. If I were the oil industry, I would be up in arms about this because when they go out and drill an oil well they do not know whether they are going to hit anything or not. Mr. President, I come to the end of this little speech saying I am going to vote against the bill even though I must confess the distinguished chairman of the committee, who I know had a very difficult time, did a tremendous job. I tried to pass an amendment in the conference 2 days ago to put a 1.5 percent royalty on mining on Federal lands and to give half of the money to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Many of the western Senators, who have a lot of Indians in their States, have convinced me that the Indians are really getting savaged under this balanced budget thing. Even the President has allowed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is getting shortchanged. I thought a 1.5 percent royalty on this with half of it going to the Bureau of Indian Affairs might attract some people who have shed tears on this floor about the plight of the poor native Americans--not one Republican vote; 8 to 6 on a straight party-line vote. What else is in this bill? I wanted to give the BLM 10 years to process the 373 patent applications that were grandfathered by bill. However, the Republicans--particularly the western Senators--were not having any of that. Let me tell you something, Mr. President. If we have 373 claims that the first half certificate has been issued on, and this bill says that the BLM will process those claims within 5 years, do you know what that means? That means that about 75 claims a year will have to be processed. Do you know what else it means, Mr. President? That is an abject utter impossibility. Do you know the highest number of applications that have ever been processed in the history of the world in the BLM? Thirty-eight. Do you know who the Secretary of Interior was? James Watt. The man the environmentalists loved to hate more than anybody else. Do you know what the average has been over the past 10 years? Mr. President, 25.7 claims a year. So why do we have a provision in here saying you have to do 75 a year? It is utterly impossible. Why do we do that? I will tell you why they want to do it. Because, if there is ever a change in the makeup of this body, this nonsense is coming to a halt, and they want to get their deed before that happens. That is exactly why they want it all done in 5 years. I offered an amendment to say why do not we at least make these mining companies, who are worth billions, pay the charges the Government incurs to process their application, which is $250 an acre? If you are going to give them a deed for $5 an acre, surely they would be charitable enough to pay $250 to the taxpayers that they are putting out--8 to 6 vote; the same thing. Mr. President, I do not know how it will all turn out. But I can tell you one thing. The Bureau of Land Management will not, and cannot, process 75 claims a year when the 10-year average has been 25.7 claims. Mr. President, there has been an awful lot written and said about lobby reform. The ethics manual of the U.S. Senate just gets thicker and thicker. The first thing you know you will not be able to drive home. You will have to take a bus at the rate we deal with that around here. I do not have any quarrel with that. I do not care what the ethics requirements of this body are as long as I know what they are. That is all most Senators ask for. I do not care whether the value of the gift can be zero, $20, or $100 as long as I know and understand the rules that we are supposed to live by. But having said that, that is not the problem. The problem is the money that flows into campaigns. You tell me I cannot allow a lobbyist to buy my lunch but he can hand me a $5,000 check at lunch? What kind of palpable nonsense is that? I am telling you, campaign financing is what drives this body. That is one of the reasons we have not been able to deal with the reform of the 1872 mining law. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, am I recognized for 10 minutes under the order?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I will not vote for the bill before us principally because it has the space station in it, $2.114 billion, while we cut EPA by about $1.5 billion and veterans medical services by somewhere between $300 and $600 million. The space station, which is now calculated by the General Accounting Office to cost $94 billion, still does not have one single redeeming value. Of the $94 billion it is going to cost, $90 billion of that is going to come from the United States. You hear the argument made this is now an international undertaking. That is some undertaking when we are putting up $90 billion of the $94 billion it is going to cost. Now, for the past several days, we have been reading that even though NASA is giving the Russians $200 million a year to participate in this program--so much for international participation because they are participating and we are giving them the money to participate--they are saying they cannot afford to fulfil their part of the program because we are not giving them enough. So now they are proposing that we allow them to use a part of their existing Mir space station, hang it onto our space station and let that count as a contributory share. Mr. President, I am not going to take up much time on that. I intend to vote against the bill. I am just saying what I have been saying on this floor for about 6 years now. The space station is going to be one disaster after another. This year it is the Russians. Next year, it will be something else. My staff brought me a little squib on some company that said they had been able to use protein crystals that had been grown on one of the shuttles to develop a flu vaccine, which they hope to finish and perfect by the year 2000. I read the story closely since NASA keeps saying that we will cure all kinds of diseases if only we spend $94 billion on the space station. Well, what the president of the company said was that it was nice to have the space shuttle to develop these crystals, but they could do it on the ground, and they were going to do it anyway. The space shuttle happened to be handy so they used it at taxpayer expense. None of the pharmaceutical companies in this country is willing to pay for any share of the shuttle or the space station as of this date. Yet, you keep hearing that the space station is going to cure warts, cancer, emphysema, and everything else. So I am going to vote ``no'' on that. As far as cuts to the environment, I think this body makes a very bad mistake. We act as if all environmental regulation is somehow bad. Nobody defends environmental regulations that are out of order and excessive. But many environmental regulations are absolutely necessary. This morning, I picked up the paper and saw that the Washington, DC, sewage system is going kerplunk. It is dilapidated, worn out, and no one has the money to repair it. You are reading more and more stories about that all the time. Bear in mind, colleagues, that the environment determines our very existence, and to build a space station that is going to cost $94 billion while we have sewage running up and down the streets of this country is an absolute outrage. So I repeat that I won't vote for this bill because the priorities it represents are all skewed-up.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, the Senate has just acquitted itself very well by approving a list of ambassadors, particularly that of our former colleague, Jim Sasser. Jim Sasser came to the U.S. Senate in 1978. He acquitted himself immediately with his colleagues in a most admirable manner. We all knew shortly that Jim Sasser had a very keen mind and quick wit. He ingratiated himself very well with his colleagues and almost instantly became one of the most popular Senators; by the time he left here, in my opinion, he was the very best Senator in the U.S. Senate. His tenure as chairman of the Budget Committee was exemplary. Hour after hour after hour he sat there in the manager's chair, dealing with the most complex and difficult legislation of the year, and that was the budget. It is a real travesty that the confirmation of a man of his talents has been held up for so very long, at a time when American-Chinese relations need a good, strong Ambassador more than ever. I promise my colleagues--and of course most of you know this--that Jim Sasser will represent this country with great distinction. He will do it with dignity and with integrity. The Chinese will find very quickly what all of us found very quickly, that he is a quick learner. His integrity is absolutely unimpeachable. This is a great day for him and his family. His lovely wife Mary and their beautiful daughter Elizabeth will be accompanying him to China. They have waited a long time. They have been hanging by their thumbs, wondering whether they would be able to go to Beijing, for almost a year now. So this is a great day for the Sasser family. It is a great day for the Chinese. Above all, it is a great day for America, that we can appoint somebody of his talent and his skills. Finally, I want to personally, and I know I speak for almost all of my colleagues, wish him Godspeed and much luck. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I join my colleagues to express my support for the efforts of the task forces on gender bias in the Federal courts. Six of the seven States in the eighth circuit have conducted gender and/or racial bias studies. When bias was documented, these State task forces recommended improvements designed to assure the fair administration of justice for men and women in the courts. In 1994, Chief Judge Richard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit appointed a 30-member gender fairness task force on gender bias. The group includes 12 Federal judges from each of the 7 States in the circuit as well as court administrators, attorneys, and law professors. These distinguished task force members are committed to a careful, responsible survey of the court to determine whether gender bias exists there. Congress has unequivocally authorized this work and I strongly believe that the Federal judiciary should continue this effort. Community Relations Service

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, first let me commend my distinguished colleague from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, for objecting to the motion to proceed to the constitutional amendment on flag desecration until roughly 18 ambassadors' nominations which are being held up are released. We all, around here, do what we feel we have to do to make a point. But we have extremely important ambassadorial posts going unfilled because of a dispute over a totally different item. I suppose it is that old saw ``the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets greased,'' is true, and I am not criticizing the Senator from North Carolina personally. He has a right to do whatever he wants to do. All I am saying is I do not believe the country's interests are being well served when someone like our distinguished former colleague, Senator Sasser, is prohibited from taking his post in China where we so desperately need representation, at this time especially. So, I hope the Senator from New Mexico will stand fast on it. I will do my best to help him with it. That is one logjam that needs to be broken. Mr. President, what I came to the floor to speak about is the proposed constitutional amendment dealing with flag desecration. I have voted on that a number of times since I have been in the Senate, have steadfastly opposed it every time it has been offered, and I will oppose it again today. When I think of the real problems of this Nation right now, and find this body dealing with this particular issue at this time, I am appalled. Motorola wants to build a big new facility and hire lots of people. They have elected to stay in this country and not go to Malaysia, and the only criterion they ask is that the applicants have a seventh grade knowledge of math, a fifth grade knowledge of English, and 50 percent of the applicants cannot meet that standard. The President of IBM says they spend $3 billion a year on remedial education. And you only need to look at the annual survey of high school seniors' heroes in this country to understand what they are learning about history, particularly the history of this country. So what are we doing? We are doing two things. No. 1, we are cutting education dramatically. Somewhere between 500,000 and a million youngsters will not get a college education under the budget reconciliation bill as it now stands. Those programs are going to be savaged. I saw a bumper strip yesterday. I told my wife about it last night. She said she had seen it years ago. It said, I will be glad when the schools of this country and our children get the money they need, and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. I have said many times, as I did during the debate on the space station, if you take the money you are putting in the space station and put it in education, I promise you the dividends will be 10 times greater. You take the $7 billion in the defense bill in excess of what the Pentagon asked for and put it in education, and I promise you your chances for peace are exponentially better. So here we are, as the Atlanta Constitution said, with a resolution searching for a problem. We are not here to deal with the real or even an imagined problem. Everybody here in this body knows that this is pure, sheer politics, with four flag burnings last year, and none this year. And we are going to tinker with the first amendment, with our cherished Bill of Rights, a document which we in good common sense have not seen fit to change one letter in 206 years? Where does this stuff come from? Why do people forever want to tinker with the most sacred document we know next to the Holy Bible? The people of the country show a great deal more common sense and respect for the Constitution than the Members of Congress do. In 206 years we have amended the Constitution only 27 times, 25 times when we consider the passage and repeal of Prohibition. Would you like to take a guess, Mr. President, at how many resolutions have been introduced in the Congress to amend the Constitution? More than 10,000. You think of it. So, thank God for the American people in their infinite wisdom. Otherwise, we would have 10,000 changes in the Constitution of the United States. Happily, most people who offer resolutions here to amend the Constitution will issue a press release, beat themselves on the chest about how patriotic they are and how representative they are of the people back home, and that is the last you ever hear of it. At the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, the most neglected duty that a legislator is to be an educator. If you are not capable of going before a town [[Page S 18061]] hall meeting and saying, yes, I voted against that bill and here is why, if you cannot stand for reelection and let the people decide if you really represent their views and the best interests of the Nation, if you are not willing to let them ask, ``Does the fact that he voted against the flag amendment mean he is not patriotic?,'' then you shouldn't be here. Does that apply to our distinguished colleague from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, who lost a leg in Vietnam, who has said the revulsion we feel for somebody who would desecrate our flag is all we need to protect the flag? As long as 99.9 percent of the people of this country are repulsed and find flag desecration repugnant, why do you want to change the first amendment? Let me repeat, Mr. President. The Bill of Rights is the most important part of the Constitution of the United States and the first amendment is first for a reason. That is what gives us our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of press. And, Lord knows, I have trouble with that sometimes, but I wouldn't change it. I will tell you what the problem is. The problem is going home and facing our constituents. Who wants to go home and say, ``Yes, I voted against the defense budget?,'' knowing his next opponent will have a 30-second spot saying he is soft on defense, or he is not patriotic? It takes a little courage around here. Courage is in very short supply. I know of one Senator, I will not name him, who is laying his political future on the line because he comes from a very conservative State, who has taken a stand against this amendment. Is that sort of courage not, after all, what the American people want? When somebody comes up to me on the streets of the towns and cities of my State and says, ``Why don't you guys screw up your nerve and do something courageous for a change?'', do you know how that translates? I will tell you exactly. What they are saying is, ``Why are you afraid to do something that is unpopular?'' It does not take courage to always do the popular thing. I do not denigrate the people of this country. But I know precisely how to vote, if I do not want to catch any flak when I go home. I would vote for that thing in a New York minute. But I just happen to believe in the Constitution. I consider it the document that is the glue that holds the fabric of this Nation together. And every time somebody says, well, I do not think you ought to spit on the flag, or burn the flag, or something else, I'm not ready to say, ``Let us amend the Constitution.'' I have said hundreds of times on the floor of this body in my 21 years here that when you start tinkering with the Constitution, I belong to the Wait Just a Minute Club. Down in Arkansas in 1919 the legislature passed a law saying you cannot do this and that and the other to the flag. Essentially, you cannot show disrespect for the flag. In 1941, 6 months before Pearl Harbor, old Joe Johnson, who lived out in Saint Joe up in the Ozark Mountains, ran afoul of that law. I guess Saint Joe has maybe 300 people. The county seat was Marshall, AR. The woman who dispensed commodities to poor people at the courthouse had heard that there were a bunch of those Jehovah's Witnesses out at Saint Joe. Not only did they not believe like most good Christians, the Bible and their religious training was more important to them than the flag of the United States. Joe had a wife and eight children. And he goes into Marshall as he does on the first day of each month to get his commodities to feed his children. Now, you have to understand Saint Joe in that era of 1941, you have to understand the unspeakable poverty the people of the mountains lived in. So Mrs. Who Shall Remain Nameless, even though it was 1941--I am sure she is long since departed--says to Joe Johnson, ``We hear you have been drawing commodities for kids you ain't got.'' Joe says, ``That's not true. I've got eight children. You're welcome to come out and see.'' She accepts that, and she says, ``We also understand that you belong to a sect called Jehovah's Witnesses.'' He said, ``That's correct.'' ``And we understand that you Jehovah's Witnesses don't respect our flag. And if you are going to draw commodities, I want you to stand up there and salute that flag.'' Joe says, ``I ain't going to do it. The Bible tells me that I don't salute any earthly thing except the Bible. That's my religious teaching.'' There were quite a few people in that office, and Joe went ahead to make a speech. And during the course of his speech somebody testified at his trial that he had touched the flag. That was enough to find him guilty of disrespecting Old Glory. So they fined Joe $50 and gave him 24 hours in jail. Then Joe took it to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and while it was on appeal, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So Joe's conviction was upheld on a vote of 6 to 1. I remember well the Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court--his son was a very dear friend of mine--dissented. He dissented, saying you cannot have a law like this. You cannot say that Joe has to choose a flag over his religion. He cited Oliver Wendell Holmes that the country must fight every effort to check the expression of loathsome opinions, unless they so threaten the country they had to be stopped to save it. ``The fact remains,'' Justice Smith wrote, ``that we're engaged in a war not only of men, machines and materials but in a contest wherein liberty may be lost if we succumb to the ideologies of those who enforce obedience through fear and who would write loyalty with a bayonet. If ignorance were a legal crime, this judgment would be just,'' he said. ``The suspicions and hatreds of Salem have ceased. Neighbor no longer inveighs against neighbor through the fear of the evil eye.'' And the writer of this column says, ``The reasons for the misguided fears of 1942 are gone, but ignorance and intolerance are still with us.'' I do not know what happened to me last night. I woke up at 2 o'clock, and I could not go back to sleep. I could see it was a futile thing to try, so I went downstairs where there were three small books I had checked out of the Library of Congress on the Salem witchcraft trials and on witchcraft in general. I read until 4:30, and I am tired right now because I did not get enough sleep last night. I started reading through the charges that used to be leveled long before Salem, back in the Middle Ages, and one thing I had not really thought about is that witchcraft trials were sexist. It was always the woman who was the witch. And a woman who lived to be 60 are 70 years old, might develop a haggard look. As we crossword puzzle junkies would say, she was a ``crone,'' and so the first thing you know, anybody who developed that sort of look was called a witch, riding a broom across the skies, if a child had a seizure in the community, she was very likely to be the first one accused of being a witch. In this little community of Salem Village in Massachusetts, in a 2-month period, 134 people are accused of being witches. One of the books I was looking at last night had transcripts of the trial, believe it or not. Thirty-two were convicted, 19 either burned at the stake or hung. On what grounds? The testimony of 10-, 12-, 13- year-old children. We have not had witchcraft trials in this country since. This comes close. I revere the flag. When I first came to the Senate, I went up in the Northeastern part of the country to one of the most prestigious universities in the country, and the rostrum was full. I guess they wanted to see what a new moderate Senator from the South looked like. The emcee got up and said, ``Let's all stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance.'' I would say that at least half of those kids refused to stand. I was pretty shocked, Mr. President. But I got to reflecting on how I first went off to college and how anxious I was to prove my independence. My father and mother could not tell me what to do any more. If I did not want to get up and say the Pledge of Allegiance, that was my privilege. I was insulted by it, and I did not like it. But I did not see anybody there I wanted to send to prison. Is that a legal crime? Why, of course, it is not. But I can tell you, I was offended by that, as I would be if somebody had walked out in front and spit on the flag. Is this desecration anyway? Desecration comes from the Latin root, I guess, which means sacred. [[Page S 18062]] So what is sacred? To some people the Bible is the only thing that is sacred. It was the only thing that was sacred to Joe Johnson. So people will come in here who do not any more believe in this amendment than a goon. And I hate to say this. There are a lot of Senators who will take you aside and deplore this amendment, and they will vote ``aye'' because they do not want to have to go home and talk to their constituents. That is the risk you take. When I voted for the Panama Canal treaties, I was getting 3,000 calls a day against my position, and it has cost me dearly ever since. I do not mind telling you, if I had had a tough opponent in 1980, I would have probably been defeated. It was a very volatile issue. My pollster said in 1992 I still lost 3 percent of the vote because I voted for the Panama Canal treaties. It would have been so nice to have said no to that treaty. I am not saying that history has vindicated that vote, but I will say this: I think Panama would be in absolute chaos right now if we had not done it. But there was also something called the Golden Rule involved in my vote on that. So around here we vote for the flag amendment, we vote for an amendment to require prayer in school. I have noticed the Republicans, who thought term limits was the greatest thing since night baseball, they do not much like it anymore. I knew if they ever got control, term limits would die a fast death. The line-item veto: I have never been for it; I will never be for it. We finally got it this year. What happens? Bill Clinton is in the White House, so we cannot even get the conferees appointed. Boy, if there ever was a time I might support the line-item veto, it would be right now. But I am not going to support it. I never have and I never will, because it is a bad idea. The Republicans do not like it either when Bill Clinton is in the White House. Everybody runs on family values. Who wants to face a 30-second spot saying, ``He says he's for family values, but look how he voted on prayer in school, look how he voted on this, look how he voted on that.'' Everybody around here jumps under their desk every time one of these controversial issues comes up. Who wants to say, ``I'm not for that new star wars program''? And people come by and say, ``He doesn't even want to defend the people of this country against a missile attack.'' Oh, would that that were all there is to the issue. Mr. President, if this amendment were adopted and we chose for the first time in 206 years to, in my opinion, sully the Constitution of the United States and the most sacred part of the Bill of Rights, it would not increase my patriotism any. I would not get goose bumps any more than I did at the Kennedy Center Sunday night. This magnificent orchestra played ``The Star Spangled Banner.'' I cannot stand the way I hear it sung most of the time. I am an old band man and marine, and I love the way the Marine Band plays ``The Star Spangled Banner.'' I wish everybody would play it that way and sing it that way. At the Kennedy Center, this orchestra played ``The Star Spangled Banner,'' and one of the honorees was Marilyn Horne. There were a lot of other opera singers there, and they sang ``The Star Spangled Banner,'' and it just took the roof off. I promise you, all the people there had goose bumps. It was exhilarating and thrilling and exciting. So if you had this flag amendment, do you think people there would have gotten any more goose bumps? You know what we do when we adopt this? We take a freedom away from people and create a class of political prisoners. We will imprison people. You know what the amendment says. The amendment says the States and Congress may prohibit desecration of the flag. They will determine what desecration is. One State will charge you with a $15 misdemeanor fine; another State will give you the death penalty; another State pins a medal on you for it. What kind of nonsense are we into here? Every State would decide for itself a constitutional issue: what constitutes desecration of the flag? Coming back from Arkansas last weekend, I counted three people, two men and a woman, whose shirts were made out of the American flag. What are you going to do with them, Mr. President? Are you going to haul them off like Joe Johnson, put them in jail? Well, maybe one State says you put them in jail, another State says you cannot do that. You go into a bar and you get a drink and there is a swizzle stick to mix your drink with a flag on the end of it. What are you going to do with that bartender, the owner of that bar? On the Fourth of July, the entire front page of the paper is the American flag, every one of them going into the trash before sundown. What are you going to do about that, Mr. President? How about the used-car lot that has an American flag sticking up on every antenna? Do you ever suspect for a moment, Mr. President, that these car lots with these massive displays of flags are designed to convince you that the owner of that place is a patriot? Some people would see it as the opposite: commercialization of the flag. While we are covering desecration, why do we not also cover commercialization of the flag or using the flag for commercial purposes? And then, what is physical desecration? Does that mean you have to spit on it, tear it, burn it? What is physical desecration? I tell you what it is, Mr. President. It is whatever each one of the 50 States say it is. You will have 50 different definitions of what used to be a precious, protected freedom of political speech in the Constitution of the United States, and then Congress will also weigh in so you will have 51. We already have protection of the flag. The Supreme Court has already said fighting words, acts calculated to create a violence can be considered to be illegal. Mr. President, let me ask you, what kind of company are we going to be in? I have two grandchildren. And like we did with our own children, Betty and I put them on our laps, and we go through Highlights looking for hidden pictures, all those other little games. One of the Highlights games is always, ``What is out of place in this picture?'' It will have 8 or 10 things. One obviously does not fit, it is out of place, out of character. Here is a chart. And taken from Highlights magazine is ``One of these things is not like the others.'' Look at it. I ask you, which one is not like the others? Here you have Germany which in 1932 passed a law saying: Whoever publicly profanes the Reich or one of the states incorporated into it, its constitution, colors or flag or the German Armed Forces, or maliciously and with premeditation exposes them to contempt, shall be punished by imprisonment. Nazi Germany. You cannot say anything about it, you cannot talk about it, you cannot desecrate the flag, the constitution or much of anything else. The Soviet Union, 2 years in the gulag. The Soviet Union, 2 years in the gulag for desecration of the flag. China, 3 years. Iraq, 7 years. And not to be outdone, Iran, 10 years. South Africa, 5 years and a fine during apartheid. Cuba, old Fidel is not as tough as these other guys; only 3 months and a fine in Cuba. Syria, 6 years. There they all are. And in the center is Old Glory. Is this the crowd we want to join? We are going to wind up giving up a lot more freedom than we are going to get. Mr. President, I have been amazed at where a lot of conservative writers are on this issue. Charles Krauthammer--I do not read him. I do not care for his articles, and I never read him. He thinks this is pap nonsense. George Will, Cal Thomas, and other conservatives. Senator Mitch McConnell, from Kentucky, had a column in yesterday's Post, and I thought it was absolutely superb. He quoted a veteran, a man named Jim Warner, an American patriot who fought in Vietnam and survived more than 5 years of torture and brutality as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Here is what he said: We don't need to amend the Constitution in order to punish those who burn our flag. They burn the flag because they hate America, and they're afraid of freedom. What better way to hurt them than with the subversive idea of freedom. Spread freedom. When a flag in Dallas was burned to protest the nomination of Ronald Reagan, he told us how to spread the idea of freedom when he said: We should turn America into a city shining on the hill, a light to all nations. Don't be [[Page S 18063]] afraid of freedom, it is the best weapon we have. You do not hear me quote Ronald Reagan very often, but that was beautiful. And finally, to quote our old friend Will Rogers, and I will close with this: When Congress gets the Constitution all fixed up, they're going to start on the Ten Commandments, just as soon as they can find somebody in Washington that's read them. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I rise today to pay tribute to one of America's greatest heroes, and certainly one of Arkansas' greatest, if not the greatest, hero in the history of our State. He is Maurice ``Footsie'' Britt, born in the small town of Carlisle, AR, and raised in the small town of Lonoke, AR. He was a football star at the University of Arkansas and Honorable Mention, All American. I first met Footsie in the barbershop of my hometown of Charleston, population 1,200. He had his campaign literature under his right arm-- or his right stub. He did not have a right arm. He was running for Lieutenant Governor on the Republican ticket with Winthrop Rockefeller. He had all his literature under his stub and would use his left hand to pull it out and hand it to you. As I got out of the barber's chair and paid the barber 50 cents for the haircut, this was 1966, Footsie Britt walked in. He had been a real hero to me, and I was honored to meet him. Winthrop Rockefeller became the first Republican Governor since Reconstruction in my State. In my opinion, he would have never been elected if he had not had Footsie Britt as his running mate. But to go back, he was the first American to ever receive the three highest awards the American military can grant for valor and bravery in one war. He held the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Silver Star. I do not know whether anybody has ever equaled that since then or not. What happened to the right arm? It lay on the battlefield near Anzio, Italy, where he had been a lieutenant in World War II. As I walked around the battlefield at Anzio last year, as the President and numerous Members of Congress went to Normandy and Anzio, I thought ``Where did Footsie lose his arm?'' Madam President, he not only received the three highest honors that our military can bestow, he received the highest honor that Britain bestows on any non-Englishman, the Military Cross, and the highest award that can be bestowed by Italy on any non-Italian, the Cross of Valor. He was in charge of a platoon and leading a group of men near the beach at Anzio. He saw that some of his men were getting out in front of the others. He knew that the Germans were ahead of them and on either side of them. And as he had feared, the others got so far ahead of the rest of the group that the Germans had them surrounded. They knew it, and they surrendered. The Germans took the American soldiers as shields, as hostages, and began to march them toward the other Americans that Footsie commanded. The Americans held their fire, obviously. And just as they got close enough, Footsie shouted, ``Now hear this order by me. Hit the mud!'' And every one of the American hostages immediately fell down and lay in a prone position. The Germans, not speaking English and being dumbfounded by the order, were confused just long enough for Footsie and his men to mow all the Germans down, saving all the hostages. If Footsie Britt had an enemy in this country, I am not aware of it. He was a beloved public servant, not a strident partisan, just an all- around good guy. He saw his duty and did it. He was later appointed head of the Arkansas Small Business Administration where he served for 14 years. His wife, Pat, preceded him in death several years ago. Two weeks ago I went to the John L. McClellan Veterans Hospital in Little Rock, as I do every Veterans Day. The first room I went to was Footsie Britt's. He had lost a piece of a foot as [[Page S 17546]] well as his arm at Anzio, and being an acute diabetic, 48 hours before had had one of his feet amputated. I walked into the room, and I could hardly believe that Footsie had had that foot operated on and removed just 2 days before. He said, ``Senator, I just want you to know I think Betty Bumpers was the most gracious First Lady the State ever had. She was always unfailingly polite and friendly to me. And I hope you will tell her that.'' Shortly thereafter, they had to amputate more of the leg, and his heart just gave out. To youngsters I speak to in high schools and colleges, I always remind them of how lucky they are to live in this country, how many sacrifices so many brave men and women have made to provide them with the freedom, the rights they enjoy, all the protections of our sacred Constitution. They do not understand what I am saying. They cannot possibly understand what I am saying. But I say it again today, Madam President. They, you, I, and every American have lost one of our greatest heroes with the death of Maurice ``Footsie'' Britt, a true immortal.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, it is not unusual when I go home and visit with some of my wealthy friends--and I do have some wealthy friends--they say, ``The only objection I have to you Democrats is you are constantly engaging in class warfare. You are always talking about the wealthy.'' I repudiate that idea, but I would like for my colleagues to look at this chart for just a minute. This is a quote from David Gergen--one of Ronald Reagan's right-hand men when he was President--from an op-ed piece that he wrote in this week's U.S. News and World Report. Without straining your eyes, I will tell you what he said about this bill we are debating tonight. Eighty percent of the tax breaks in this bill go to the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans. Eighty percent of the spending cut burden goes to the poorest 20 percent. Now, you talk about class warfare. There is class warfare. It violates every principle I ever learned as a Methodist Sunday school boy. It violates every principle I have ever held dear, and the very reason I came to the U.S. Senate. Madam President, let me say something about the wealthy people of this country. They do not like this. Seventy percent of the people of this country say they do not want a tax cut until the budget is balanced. Why are we going against what 70 percent of the people say? Last fall, when people were voting, Madam President, most did not have a clue what was in the Contract With America. And I can assure you they were not voting for this. They were not voting to penalize the poorest 20 percent of the people in America. They were not in favor of depriving a million children in this country of an education. They were not voting to put another million people in poverty, which this bill does. They were not voting to cut school lunches, which is the only decent meal an awful lot of children in this country get. They were not voting to savage Medicare and make the elderly people of this country pay it. They were not voting to savage Medicaid. In my State, Medicaid will be cut 33 percent, Madam President. We will not have a Medicaid program. The people of America were not voting to slash the Earned Income Tax Credit for people who are trying to work and stay off welfare. What are we doing? We are cutting that $32 billion. So I remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, when the American family gathers around the dinner table in the evening, what do they talk about? What do they say they love? Not the Mercedes in the driveway. Not that posh office downtown or that magnificent farm out back. They love their children. That is who they want us to protect. What are we doing? We are savaging the children of this country. For what? So that the biggest corporations in America get a break. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator very much, and I thank the Senator from Delaware for allowing me to speak.

Mr. BUMPERS. Does the Senator from Rhode Island feel that this sufficiently protects existing law?

Mr. BUMPERS. This morning, I heard the Senator from Rhode Island talking about the provision in the bill that changes the law that prohibits States from putting new billboards on scenic highways. I was adamantly opposed to the section of the bill that would turn this authority back to the States. We have a magnificent highway in my State. When complete, it is going to be one of the most beautiful--if not the most beautiful--scenic highways in America. I am not sure what the distinguished floor manager said this morning on that provision about the Secretary's right to override the States on this. Could the Senator clarify that for me?