Jim Clyburn

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I stand here today utterly and totally appalled by what I am reading in the bill H.R. 1214, the so-called ``Personal Responsibility Act.'' If this bill passes, and it just might--judging by the rapid-fire way this and other ill conceived ``Contract With America''-inspired legislation is making its way on and off the House floor--the GOP itself should be held ``personally responsible'' for creating a measure that could create the specter of millions of hungry American children. Let us take a close look at what will be cut and, if I may, let us use South Carolina as a case study on just how these cuts will affect some of the nation's neediest children. First, the bill proposes to cut almost $70 billion over 5 years in low-income assistance programs. As a part of these cuts, the bill will end the entitlement status of all federally funded child nutrition programs in lieu of State block grants, for the States to do what they will. On the surface, this may sound like big government savings. But a closer look at this bill reveals that these savings are being made at the expense of our children. On the chopping block are school breakfast and lunch programs, summer feeding programs, the special milk program and the commodities portion of school nutrition programs. In South Carolina alone, the absence of the school lunch program could mean that 400,000 children will be denied what may well be their only balanced meal of the day. Further, the bill repeals the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC. In South Carolina, the WIC caseload is close to 124,000. WIC has been proven to be highly successful in meeting nationally standardized nutritional needs of women and children. All totaled, South Carolina would receive $96 million less in Federal funding for the school lunch and WIC programs. Also on the cutting board are food stamps. This bill will cut spending by $20.3 billion in the Food Stamp Program over 5 years. This portion of the bill would impose a rigid cap on food stamp expenditures, with no adjustments for inflation. It would also require certain recipients to go to work without providing any funds to States for job creation. This portion of the bill would affect over 350,000 food stamp recipients in South Carolina and the State would receive $174 million less in Federal funding for food stamps over 5 years. Mr. Speaker, I have had a steady stream of visitors to my office in the past few weeks--bipartisan visitors--from the South Carolina PTA, the South Carolina Guidance Counselors, the South Carolina Food Service Association, the South Carolina Dietetics Association--people who are horrified at what this bill contains because they know first-hand what the true affects would be on children if this measure were to pass. What is the impetus behind the GOP trying to pass a measure that has raised the ire of such diverse groups as the National School Board Association, the United States Conference of Mayors, the American Heart Association and the National Education Association? Why are they so bent on passing a plan that would literally take food out of the months of the Nation's young? It is not secret that Republicans intend to use the revenues raised from cuts to welfare programs to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. Well, this ``steal from the poor to pay for the rich'' Robin Hood- reversal scheme has come under fire from all corners. And the fact of the manner is, even though the Republicans would like to pretend that welfare mothers and their children are the bane of the Federal budget, the realities do not bear them out. For even if the entire welfare program were totally cut today, it would make only a dent in deficit reduction. So, this mean-spirited attack on welfare, and in particular, this hatchet job being waged against child nutrition program, is totally unnecessary and will not make any significant cuts in the Federal budget. Mr. Speaker, when this 104th Congress began, much reference was made to the orphanage heralded in the movie ``Boys Town'' as a model for the Nation on how to deal with children born to poor mothers. Now, the Draconian measures proposed in this bill brings to mind another movie image, that of young poor and hungry ``Oliver Twist,'' his small child's hands cupped, standing before a scowling orphanage director, piteously pleading, ``More, sir?''

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to bring to the attention of my distinguished colleagues the fine record of one of the oldest civic/social organizations of African-American women in these United States--the Girl Friends, Inc. Founded in 1972, its primary focus was to promote friendship and to foster goodwill. Under the legal guidance of the Honorable Thurgood Marshall, the organization was incorporated in 1938. The Girl Friends, Inc. is a national organization comprised of 1,250 socially and professionally prominent women, including national political figures, Federal judges, medical doctors, college presidents, accountants, lawyers, and teachers. Presently, there are 40 chapters located in major American cities, representing leaders and spheres of influence with an ongoing commitment to contribute to civic activities that enhance the quality of community life. The organization has given major financial assistance to community organizations, including the United Negro College Fund, the NAACP legal defense fund, the children's defense fund, and the NAACP. Though its local chapters, it gives annually to local groups such as the heart fund, the sickle cell fund, the Cancer Research Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of America, and local theatre groups for children. I would like to congratulate the national president of the Girl Friends, Inc., Mrs. Virginia Scott Speller of Houston, TX, for giving leadership during these days of extending a helping hand to those in our communities who are in need, especially students who want to complete a college education and senior citizens who need care and attention. I also salute the more than 1,200 members who take time from their professional duties to give of themselves to help make our country a responsive and caring Nation. Mr. Speaker, I commend the national officers and all of the 40 chapters of the Girl Friends, Inc. for their 68 years of service to these United States.

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. Absolutely. I think that most of our friends who have been looking at the Congress operate thus far have been surprised to wake up in the morning and all of a sudden see headlines indicating that such and such is about to happen. We have always tended to take these kinds of decisions through a process of hearings; people would come before the committee to talk about the pros and the cons of all of these kinds of actions. But that is not what is happening here, not in this instance and in other instances as well. There are just two or three people, or whatever number, who have gotten together and decided what they need to do in order to make it work. As our friend from Missouri said earlier, if this were being done in order to do something about the deficit, I am convinced that the veterans in my congressional district and the veterans all across America would be lining up to do their fair share, because they too want to see us take this deficit down even further. But that is not what is being done here. We are going through a process of deciding how much money can be moved to put over in a big pot that the friends and supporters of our Republican colleagues can dip into in order to see a tax break for themselves. So that is what is happening here as a result of that. I hope that the American people will wake up and get in touch with their Congress people before we do our veterans what I consider to be irreparable harm.

Mr. CLYBURN. I agree with the gentlewoman, and I think it is time for me to yield back so she may close this special order. I thank the gentlewoman so much for allowing me to be a part of this special order.

Mr. CLYBURN. I think it is on Americans.

Mr. CLYBURN. That is exactly what we have got and I think it is being kind to call it that.

Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for allowing me to participate in this special order. I am pleased to serve with the gentlewoman on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, and I know of the gentlewoman's great commitment to the veterans of our Nation. And also to join with our friend from Missouri who too has displayed time and time again his concern for our veterans. Mr. Speaker, I join the gentlewoman from Florida in her opposition to our Republican colleagues' plans to rescind funding for veterans programs. Our Republican colleagues have already displayed their callousness by proposing legislation that would harm our Nation's youth. Now they are going after our Nation's veterans, the men and women who have committed their lives to the defense of our country. This so-called Contract With America has quickly revealed itself as a contract on Americans. The people who seem to be in the line of fire are the young and the helpless. Is this how we want to honor our veterans, by rescinding $206.1 million in fiscal year 1995 VA appropriations? Is this how we are going to care for our aging veterans, by rescinding money intended to fund 6 ambulatory health care projects totaling $156 million, and $50 million in medical equipment purchases? Mr. Speaker, these facilities are not Government frills. This medical equipment, these are not Government frills. They all represent an alternative to costly inpatient care by providing more accessible, cost-effective and efficient outpatient care. Mr. Speaker, when this rescission bill comes to the floor, I am going to join the gentleman from Missouri and the gentlewoman from Florida in opposing the bill and I will urge all my colleagues to vote against what has got to be one of the most ill-conceived pieces of legislation to be proposed by the Republican-controlled Congress thus far.

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. But to focus on those who are the weakest, those who do not have high powered lobbyists to argue their causes, to me is a bit much for us to be doing, and so I want to congratulate the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Fields] for bringing us here this evening to talk about this rescission package because in the next day or two, we are going to begin to focus. Now, I have had a lot of visitors in my office in the last few days. I would be there at 7:30, I will be having breakfast with people from the technical education people in my community, vocation educational people are all here, wanting us to really be sensible about some of these cuts. But I want to mention one last area because I think it is so important, and that is the area of literacy. The interesting thing, there are three significant literacy programs that these rescissions will just terminate; not cut back so that we will serve fewer people. They are terminated altogether. The workplace literacy partnerships, terminated. The literacy program for homeless adults, terminated. The literacy program for prisoners, terminated. Here we are building more prisons, and what we seem to be focused on is a warehousing of prisoners. It would seem to me that we ought to be looking at ways to rehabilitate people, and the best way I know to rehabilitate many of the people who find their ways into our prison systems is to teach them to read and write. We know that significant numbers of people who find themselves incarcerated need basic literacy training, and here we are terminating that program. So what we are going to do, we will take a person off the street, the person who does not know how to read or write, incarcerate that person for a number of years, or what have you, under these new no-parole programs we have got, and let them just sit there for five years or whatever number of years and then when the time is up, turn them back out on the street, not allow them an opportunity to learn to read or write, and many other programs that we have already begun to take away in other areas as well. And so I plead with the Members of this body, I plead with the influential people in the various communities across this country, to use their influence with the Members of this body, to ask them to begin to look seriously at the consequences of the actions that we take. What it is that we can expect we really expect to build a better America, to build better people, better communities by these kinds of actions? I don't think so. I do think that we ought to feed our children. I do think that we ought to take care of those people who find themselves in the twilight years of their lives, and I do think that we ought to do what is necessary to strengthen those who are the weakest links in our society and I believe that we as a Nation will be better off because of it.

Mr. CLYBURN. Thank you. I appreciate that. Mr. Speaker, since the beginning of the 104th Congress I have become increasingly alarmed at the rapid speed and harmful nature of much of the legislation that we are passing on this floor. But as the gentleman from Louisiana has just indicated, none has caused me more concern thus far than the proposal that would actually take the food out of the mouths of our Nation's youth. I am referring of course to the legislative proposals that are before us that would threaten the very survival of such programs as supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children, better known as WIC, and the school lunch program. Now, the gentleman has gone through most of these and so I will not be redundant and mention them, but there are a couple of other things in addition to the feeding programs that I am particularly concerned about. For instance, if you look at this rescission package, one of the things you will see in there will be rescissions that will take away 52,000 slots for dislocated workers. Now, I am particularly concerned about that because just outside of my district, within my State, and, of course, having a tremendous impact on my district, happens to be that area down in Charleston where we just closed five Naval installations and we have now begun to hand out pink slips to the people who have worked 20, 30 years in those installations, and we, in closing those installations, led people there to believe that we would be there for them to help assist them as they seek other employment, as they, in fact, become dislocated workers. But here we are now, after all that has been done, we are now saying to the people down there that we are going to pass legislation to rescind at least 52,000 of those slots. Now, I don't know how many of those will fall on people who live in my congressional district. Though the naval base is not in my district, many of the people who work there live in my district. All of them are in South Carolina. And I feel as much responsibility for them as I do the people who are in my district. But we are United States Congress-people. And there are many other sections in our country where dislocated workers are going to find their futures dimmed tremendously because of these rescissions. And so now we are going to see 52,000 fewer slots. I do not believe that that is a fair way to go about trying to find monies to balance the budget or to cut back on the so-called deficit. The interesting thing in all of this is that I began to analyze what it is that we plan to do with this money. I don't see that it is going in that direction at all. In fact, I have just read with some degree of interest what we are planning to do with the new food stamp proposals. We are now saying that we want to cut billions of dollars out of the food stamp program, not to correct and do away with fraud. We are now saying we want to balance the--or eliminate funds for the food stamp program so that we can have enough money to fund a tax cut for people who make more than $200,000 a year. That seems to be somehow the mind-set of many of the people in this body. And I think that that is a tremendous demonstration of the lack of compassion that I think all public servants ought to have for those people among us who are less fortunate. But let's look at a couple of other things as well. The Department of Labor has made a four-year commitment to funding 17 communities where we have these youth fair chance programs. According to the rescission package, approximately 2,000 at-risk youth per site will not be served if we go forward with these rescissions. But then we move from the youth, the most vulnerable among us, and go over and look at the next most vulnerable among us, the elderly, and we look at this rescission package and then we see 3,300 fewer elderly workers will be provided employment opportunities in this program year. Now, it is kind of interesting as we go through this rescission package, we look at educational programs, educational programs for the youth. We look at the Labor Department, their programs for people who are considered to be disadvantaged and people who are the elderly. Now, why is it necessary for us to only look in these directions in order to find funds to cut back on the level of expenditures? There are billions of dollars to be found in other areas. And many of them, if we were to bring them to this floor, I would not only vote for, but I would be a strong advocate helping to work the floor on behalf of their passage.

Mr. CLYBURN. If the gentleman would yield, I want to thank you very much for mentioning the veterans cuts, because on tomorrow evening, hopefully at an earlier hour than we are here at the moment, our colleague from Florida, Ms. Corrine Brown, has organized a special order in which we are going to go through all of these rescissions as it relates to veterans, the two of us that serve on the Veterans Affairs Committee, and we are very concerned about what these rescission also mean to the veterans of our country. I had a significant number of DAV members in my office today, Disabled American Veterans, talking about the impact that these rescissions will have on them and you are talking about a contract. This is breaking a contract. These people, we had a contract with them. They went off to defend the Nation. They are now back, many of them disabled, and we are now seeing that we are going to break faith with them, if these rescissions go through, as well as proposed cuts for future years. So tommorrow evening, we are going to spend an hour going through those rescissions, section by section, and inform the American people, especially those who served in the military, of the exact impact that this is going to have on them. So I thank the gentleman very much for bringing that up. That is why I did not get into that this evening, because I plan to participate tommorrow evening with the gentlewoman from Florida, Ms. Corrine Brown.

Mr. CLYBURN. Yes, I will be pleased to yield.

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman very much for her comments. I wanted to point out just one thing that she talked about. It is kind of interesting, but she mentioned that affirmative action, especially the goals and timetables part of it, got started under a Republican administration, under Richard Nixon. At the time, the very first group that he brought under the goals and timetables happened to be the construction group. The interesting thing is, Mr. Speaker, that at the time of affirmative action, the goals and timetables, the time was established, and 85 percent of all the supervisors in the construction trades had to be white males. If we look at this little chart here now, that figure still holds true today. After 20 years, 84.9 percent, 85 percent, are still white males. I thank the gentlewoman so much. I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi, Bennie Thompson, who I think wants to talk a little bit about what affirmative action means to the business community.

Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, tonight we are going to continue our discourse here on the subject of affirmative action. As you know, Mr. Speaker, that has become a subject that a lot of Americans are concerned about these days. So tonight, once again, I am pleased to join with three colleagues who will take a few moments to try and get the public and our fellow Members in this body to understand a little better what this whole issue of affirmative action is all about. Tonight, Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be joined by the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Bennie Thompson], my friend, the gentlewoman from Texas, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, and my friend, the gentleman from Alabama, Congressman Earl Hilliard. To begin with, Mr. Speaker, as I have noted before, for 18 years prior to my coming to the Congress, I served my State of South Carolina as State human affairs commissioner. In that job, it was my responsibility to look after the employment practices, the fair housing practices, all of these issues we had under one umbrella, and one of those things had to do with affirmative action. So every year, while I was there, we issued a report on the subject of affirmative action. I want to use a little from that report to hopefully shed some more light on this subject. Now, in South Carolina, I am very proud of the fact that affirmative action was the order of the day under four different Governors. I served four Governors, two Democrats, two Republicans. All four of those Governors supported this concept. I want to show you exactly why. Today on my way back to Washington I was reading through some news clippings, and one of the clippings I read was written by, I think, a Mr. William Rushing from one of the think tanks in the country. He asked the question, just what is affirmative action? I want to take a few moments and answer that question for him, because he attempted to answer it and got it wrong, like so many of our friends do. A lot of people get it wrong because they really do not understand it. Other people get it wrong because they intentionally try to misrepresent it and try to inflame people with such notions as quotas and preferences, those kinds of words that they know will inflame people. So let us look at this chart here. You will see, Mr. Speaker, exactly what affirmative action is. If this can be seen, affirmative action is a written document, outlining the steps an agency would undertake to reach fair representation of all race and sex groupings in its jurisdiction. In order to do a good affirmative action plan, you go through a lot of things, a policy statement. You look at the responsibilities for implementation. You look at disseminating the policy. But the most important thing about affirmative action is to utilize what we call availability, utilization force, looking at the job groups and looking at the availability of various people in that work force. Now, let us look at exactly what we try to do when we analyze a work force. First of all, the work force analysis that we do happened to deal with things like just who all worked in this particular environment, looking at exactly what the groupings are. Then when you look at the groupings of people who are working there, then you look at the job group analysis; that is, to look at all of the groupings of jobs by their categories, whether you are talking about professionals, executives and all of that sort of thing. And then we look at the availability. Now, that is something that is very important, because this is where people get it wrong. This has absolutely nothing to do with population. For instance, it may be that in a particular jurisdiction the population may be 30 percent black, but when you look at the kind of jobs involved in this work force and look for the number of people with the requisite skills for doing that job, what you may find is that the black people with the requisite skills may only constitute 20 percent. So then you will not be asking anybody to use 30 percent as a goal because of the population. You will then look at the goal being 20 percent, because that is what the availability is, that is what the number of people with the requisite skills may be. Once you find that, that is when you then get to the issue of goals and timetables. Now, I want to spend just a couple of minutes before yielding to Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas on this whole notion of goals, because that is where this term ``quota'' seems to creep in time and time again. I have heard people say, goals mean quotas and that is that. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I want, and hopefully you can see what we call a goals form, because this is very, very interesting, for those people who really want to know what this issue is. A goals form has to do with looking at the current work force, looking at what the current work force is in a particular agency or a particular State. And look at this goals form. Let us look first at this line that says that ``executives.'' When we look at the current work force and we see that here you have got 21 white male executives, one black male executive, over here the goal, that means you have a total of 23 with one white female. Now, what you have got here is a work force that shows that 91 percent of all the people who make up that work force happen to be white males. But the interesting thing is, when you go over and you look at the availability of people, you see that 8 percent of the people who are available in the work force happen to be black males. Almost 30 percent, 29.8 percent happen to be white females, and 9 percent happen to be black females. When you look at that, what you will see, if you have got 8 percent that is available and you only got one, which is 4 percent, that means that you are under utilizing those people by, of black males, by 3.7 percent. You are under utilizing white females by 25.5 percent, and black females by 9 percent. Now, what you do then is look at establishing annual goals based upon people's availability in the work force. And so you then look and say, well, if the availability is 8 percent, then that is how you set your goals, which is the floor. We are saying that at least 8 percent of the people in that work force ought to be black males. The interesting thing is, if the total is 23, 8 percent of 23 happens to be two. And so that is all you are talking about. If you have 23 people at that level and only 8 percent of the people at that level qualified to do the job happen to be black, then the goal would only be 8 percent of the total number of hirees. Now, that is what goals setting is all about. Finally, if you look at the second category here, you will find in ``professionals'' the numbers run a little bit different. But there is something here about the professional I want to show you, because it talks about how you really find out whether or not you need to set a goal. If you look at the professionals, you will see under professionals, there are 26 white males, only 3 black males, 7 white females, 3 black females for a total of 39. But now when you look at availability, you find that black males constitute 5 percent of availability. And you look here, you find out that that means simply that there is no under utilization, because they have 5 percent of availability, yet they end up in the work force at that job category 7 percent, so in actuality, they are 2.7 percent over represented. So do you need to do affirmative action there? The answer is no. That is why we see a big ``no'' sitting in this category of under utilization. So, Mr. Speaker, I thought I would point this out tonight before we get started in this discussion so that those people looking in tonight can actually see what a goal is and, hopefully, it will in some way put them in a better frame of mind to listen to exactly what we have to say here tonight, because I think that if we can get a good, solid discussion going on this subject, then we all can join with our President, as he reviews this issue. I think it needs to be reviewed, because people misunderstand it. There are a lot of people in this Congress, there are a lot of people in the White House who really need to understand what they are talking about when they talk about affirmative action, because most of them have talked about an issue based upon their own personal beliefs rather than studying this issue as many of us have as professionals for more than 18 years. So I am pleased now, to go further in this discussion, to yield to my good friend, the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson].

Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman very much. Mr. Speaker, let me close this hour by first of all thanking my friends for joining me this evening. Hopefully to our fellow Members in the House and to the public-at-large looking in tonight, we have shed some light on this subject. We hear a lot of talk today about the time for affirmative action has passed. Let me say in closing just a little something to you about time. My friends in this body who talk about the need to do away with affirmative action are always quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., in his ``I have a dream'' speech where he talked about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. But you know, Martin Luther King said something about time when he wrote that letter from the Birmingham City Jail in 1963, just a few months before he made the ``I have a dream'' speech. He said time is neutral; time is never right and it is never wrong, time is only what we make it. And he went on to tell us in that letter that we are going to be made to repent in this generation not just for the vitriolic words and deeds of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people. And then King said this, and I close. King said, ``I am beginning to believe that the people of ill will in our society make a much better use of time than the people of good will.'' And so I call for the people of good will in our society to start making a much better use of time and to remember that we, the people of good will, ought to make more use of our time, at least better use of our time than the people of ill will. With that I thank my colleagues and good night.

Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman so much. I yield to my good friend from Alabama [Mr. Hilliard].

Mr. CLYBURN. I go now to my good friend the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Thompson].

Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman so much. Let me point out it is kind of interesting you talked about the interruption, it is kind of interesting in the 1960's when we first started discussing what needed to be done in order to improve the status of black Americans, there was an interesting figure that I think we ought to all look at. When you compared black mayors' salaries to white mayors you would find in the 1960's, black mayors made 67 cents to every dollar that was made by white males. We put in the program of affirmative action in the 1960's and it is kind of interesting that by 1979 that figure had gone to 81 cents to every dollar. But along came the 1980's and we had an interruption in affirmative action where there was no longer any force, the Reagan administration attempted to undo it, calling in studies, studies which did not prove that affirmative action did what they said it was going to do, but during that period, by the time we got to 1990, that figure had dropped again back to 76 cents to every dollar. So, my point is in the 1960's when we started this, it was 67 cents, it got up to 81 cent in the 1970's and now we are retrogressing and so that is what has happened. Another little thing here is kind of interesting, the unemployment rate has started to do the same thing. The average unemployment in the 1950's was 4.5 percent, that creeped up. In the 1980's the average unemployment went up to 7.3 percent. In the 1990's we started down again. When this administration came into office it was 7.7 percent, it went as low as 5.6 percent, is now up around 5.7 percent, so we average so far 6.4 percent. So I say we are going in the right direction with our economy, and there is no reason for any white males or white females to be angry with black people because affirmative action did not do this. So, let me look. I think we have about 10 minutes remaining. Let me give each one of us 3 minutes here to kind of summarize, and I will go now to Congresswoman Johnson.

Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Thompson]. Let me look at this chart here to reinforce a point that you have just made. I think all of us will agree that there is in fact a phenomenon out here that can be called the angry white male. The question is, why are they angry? I say it is because of the same reason that black males are angry. We are angry because of what has happened to family income in recent years. If you look at this chart here, you will see that between 1950 and 1978, all the people in our society were growing together. I think it was President Kennedy who said that a rising tide lifts all boats. All the boats were going up together. In the first quintile here, you will see, in the bottom 20 percent, the growth in that timeframe, in that 28-year period, the growth of 138 percent. And in the top 20 percent, there was a 99 percent. Everybody went up, 98, 106 percent, 111 percent, 99 percent. But what has happened to the growth in family income since? What we see here between 1979 and 1993, that growth has been negative for the people. It has dropped by 58 percent for people in the low 20 percent, 7 percent in the next 20 percent and 3 percent in the middle here. Yet in the upper 20 percent, their growth has gone up by 18 percent. So, yes, people are angry because they are frustrated. They are working harder and they are making less money. So that is where the anger is. And those merchants of ill will are using this anger and this frustration trying to turn it into hate and, therefore, they are targeting the weakest elements of our society for these people to vent their anger on. So you are absolutely correct. I thought I would just use this chart to reinforce that, so nobody is denying that there is anger out there but that anger is not just among white people, it is among black people as well, because they, too, fall in these percentiles here. Let us now go to our good friend, the gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Hilliard], the lawyer in this group, who is going to talk a little bit about the public policy.

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. CLYBURN

Mr. CLYBURN. I think we ought to really look at that question. I want to just take a minute and say thanks to a great leader in this country, Art Fletcher, who as Assistant Secretary of Labor, I believe it was, under Richard Nixon, kind of pulled all of these affirmative action programs together. What we do today in the name of affirmative action was given to us by the Nixon administration. Art Fletcher was out on the front of this. My point being you cannot be more Republican than he was. So this was not a partisan issue. Affirmative action has always been a bipartisan issue, and I think we ought to keep this there. And those people trying to use this now as a so-called wedge issue, thinking that it will pay off for them at the polls at the next general election, I think that that is the worst possible thing that you can do to any country or any people in the country, because I can tell you this: We are bound to repeat some very bad sections of our history if we are not careful with those kinds of issues. We are coming upon the close of a century, and I know my history a little bit, and I know what happened to this country at the close of the last century when we saw court decisions. We went all the way from Dred Scott of 1854 to Plessy versus Ferguson of 1898, and we finally got to 1954, and I thought we were doing fine with these issues. But now, all of a sudden, we are trying to change the playing field. We are now trying to create a different atmosphere. We are now trying to use these wedge issues in order to inflame the electorate, hoping that they would not go out and vote for something, but go out and vote against something. That, to me, would be a horrible mistake for us to make.

Mr. CLYBURN. That is right.

Mr. CLYBURN. That is kind of interesting. For all those people that said we do not need affirmative action, when we had affirmative action programs, there was a question as to whether or not they were getting enough. Well, they were getting some. Now it looks as if after the Crowson decision that outlawed the plan, they have dropped down to less than 1 percent. Now, I predict that that is the future for all minorities and women trying to do business in our society if we in fact get rid of these programs as many of our friends want us to do. Now, the kind of interesting thing to me is why is it that the group of people who constitute 65 percent of the people eligible to do the work want to have 100 percent of all the work? That sounds to me like an illegal quota. 100 percent.

Mr. CLYBURN. If the gentleman will yield, on that same question, I have not seen the study, but we were informed today that Richmond, VA, you recall Richmond was the place of the Crowson versus Richmond decision, the decision that threw out a procurement program there that was called affirmative action, though there were many of us in the field that did not want to see that case go forward because we felt it was not a good enough case for us to test the issue. But I understand that today, the recent reviews indicate that the contracts that minorities are now getting from the city of Richmond have dropped to somewhere around 1 percent.

Mr. CLYBURN. And nobody has ever asked anybody to hire the person who made 78 or 79. We just said, when the person makes 80, don't ignore the person. Don't pass over the person. Don't throw that person's test scores in the garbage can waiting for somebody white to come along. Now people are saying, as my colleagues know, it is not just qualified; it has got to be most qualified. So that is saying, if you make 80 on the test, and that's what's required, and someone else comes along and makes 82 on the test, then you're duty bound to hire the person that makes 82. That is where the rub comes because that is not what qualifies a person for the job.

Mr. CLYBURN. We have heard that so often. First of all, there is absolutely nothing about affirmative action that requires hiring unqualified people. I say to my colleagues, in fact, if you're to do that, and with all these 25 years of affirmative action if you were hiring unqualified people, it would seem to me that the productivity of the country would have gone down, but that has not happened at all. In fact all the studies we've seen indicate that productivity is on the increase, that our workers are in fact the most productive, and we've had even studies that zero in on people who have been hired as a result of affirmative action, especially as relates to women, and what we found is that production on the part of women increased as a result. Mr. Speaker, that is the same thing we find all the time when people are made to feel as if they are worth something, that they can, in fact, get promoted without regard to race and sex, that they do, in fact, produce more and produce better. Now let me say one other thing about this issue of qualifications: If you establish a criteria for a job, if you said, ``In order to get this job you have to take a test, you have to score at least 80 on the test,'' and now if you score 80 on the test, it means that you're qualified.