Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, there is a flood of money corroding the foundation of our democracy. Now, the Republicans would have us believe that it is only the foundations on this side of the aisle or downtown at the White House that are endangered by this flood of money, but that is not quite true, because we remember Simon Fireman. Simon Fireman was the vice-chair of Bob Dole's fund-raising. He pled guilty to 64 counts of money laundering, paid $6 million in fines and 6 months in jail. This is a bipartisan problem. Both sides suffer from this problem, and it does not serve either side to stonewall reform. There are many of us on this side of the aisle calling sincerely for just a debate, an open rule. Let us see what happens. Let us vote on campaign finance reform before we go home. Even on the Senate side now they have relented, and they say they are going to take up campaign finance reform. Let us take it up here in the House of Representatives, or do many Members think, as the Speaker does, that there is not enough money spent on campaigns yet corroding our democracy.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I know many people wonder what takes precedence here in Washington, DC. It is kind of puzzling when you watch the House in session. Is it the 13 unfinished appropriations bills, the bills that will fund every part of the Government for the next fiscal year, which are due on the first of October? Not a one has been passed? Can we avoid another Government shutdown? Is that a crisis we should be working on day and night? No, that is not it. How about repeal of the special $50 billion tax break snuck into the tax bill for the tobacco industry? Does that take precedence? No. There is one simple thing. The House is adjourning at 4 p.m. today, a day on which we usually work late into the night, with all its business pending, for the thing that always drives this body and is driving the majority party. Campaign finance reform will not be heard, but they will be raising money in New York. They are going to New York. They have got corporate jets coming to pick them up. They are going to New York to raise money. We are adjourning early today and the people's business will not be done so they can go to a $10,000 a plate fund raiser.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, we are having a little bit of an interesting dialog here on a topic that is important to many of the American people, which is the way we finance our campaigns here to get elected to the U.S. Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency. I think there is room for bipartisan agreement, which is that the current system stinks. It stinks. The influence of special interest money here in Washington, DC, is evident day in, day out. Go back and page through the tax bill and wonder where some of those special provisions, the 73 special individual provisions in the tax bill which did not grant much tax relief to middle-American families, came from; very, very, very well-financed organizations that give tremendous amounts of money to people running for Federal office. Mr. Speaker, the Republicans have a problem now. Now their own base, their own constituents, according to a recent poll in the Weekly Standard, a Republican conservative magazine, support by a large margin an overhaul of the way we finance campaigns in this country. So I can understand why the gentleman is defensive the other side of the aisle, why the gentleman wants to obfuscate the issue before us. I am willing to admit there is a bipartisan problem. There is a problem both with the Democrats and with the Republicans here. I would like to remind the gentleman that it is Bob Dole's vice finance chairman who went to jail for 6 months, Simon Fireman, who pled guilty to 74 counts of money laundering. Yes, we have some laws, and occasionally someone gets convicted, but the laws are full of loopholes. There are a lot of other people doing things that average Americans think they should go to jail for that are actually legal under these current loophole-ridden numbers. I am a sponsor of a couple of campaign finance reform bills. I am not going to argue the merits of those bills today, but what I would like to do is see that we here in the U.S. Congress are given a couple of days or a week before we rush home to debate this vitally important issue. What is wrong with debate? What is wrong with airing these issues? What is wrong with bringing a few bills to the floor in an open amendment process? We have been working on the Health and Human Services bill for 7 days now, interminably, with an open rule. Let us bring campaign finance reform to the floor with an open rule. The chairman of the Committee on Rules promised us we would do almost everything in this Congress under an open rule. Let us bring something that is so vitally important, that goes so much to the heart of our democracy, here to this floor. Let us have a promise that we will have that debate. Let us have a campaign finance reform week before we leave. In light of that, we are asking our colleagues to vote no on the previous question to demonstrate their support for bringing this issue up before Congress rushes back for the cover of their home districts.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, remember the handshake, the handshake between Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton, June 11, 1995? The agreement that would go forward with campaign finance reform in this country at least? Eight hundred and twenty-two days ago, $2.5 billion ago, untold scandals ago, they shook hands. Now what does the Speaker say? The Speaker says there is not enough money in the system; we should undo the few remaining reforms and protections we have. The Republicans want to focus only on the Democrats' problems. The Democrats have problems. I admit it. The system is corrupt and corrupting for both sides of the aisle. That is true. But remember Simon Fireman, the vice chairman of Mr. Dole's Committee on Finance, was convicted of money laundering. He received a $6 million fine, pled guilty to 74 counts of laundering illegal contributions for the Republican Presidential candidate, and was sentenced to 6 months in jail. This is a problem on both sides of the aisle. We need campaign finance reform action now.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I recommend that all my colleagues read the article reprinted below from the Washington Times by Charles McMillion for an objective assessment of the true impacts of NAFTA on the U.S. economy. [From the Washington Times, Sept, 1, 1997] U.S. Should Slow Down and Think Before Racing Ahead on Fast Track (By Charles W. McMillion) There are few things more important to our local and national economy today than global investment and trade. With our terrific new technologies and more than 1 billion (one in three) of the world's workers unemployed, what policies work best in driving growth and prosperity? Unfortunately, this is not the high-minded debate we will hear this week as Congress begins discussions on renewing ``fast-track'' negotiating authority for President Clinton to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement south of Mexico. Instead, brace yourself for an awesome display of big-money arrogance and raw public relations power by the few dozen largest corporations and financial institutions that dominate discourse on these vital concerns. Speaking for these powerful special interests--and key campaign contributors--President Clinton declared again last week: ``Already, over the last four years more than 25 percent of our economic growth has come from overseas trade.'' This statement may be true for the small group of private interests. But it is pure nonsense for the U.S. economy. The United States must borrow from abroad or sell assets worth $3 billion each week to pay for our trade losses. Workers and firms throughout the country have taken cuts in pay and profits to avoid becoming a trade statistic. Yet global trade is one of the four defining elements of our nation's gross domestic product. The others are consumer spending, private investment and government spending. U.S. economic losses from trade, large when Mr. Clinton came into office, have grown each year, setting world records. Trade has sharply reduced the U.S. economy. It is one of the reasons that growth has been slower and the U.S. dollar far weaker in the current recovery than in any other similar period on record. Beyond the simple arithmetic, U.S. trade losses are now compounded by the composition of trade. Unlike a generation ago, when oil and basic commodities accounted for most U.S. trade losses, today's losses are dominated by autos and high- tech electronics. Global commerce, dominated by a few transnational companies, is now largely a tool that undermines domestic producers and living standards. While the Dow Jones industrial average has soared more than 150 percent the past five years, average salaries, health care and retirement benefits have declined. But despite these facts, a ``globaloney'' PR campaign will promote the benefits of expanding NAFTA. NAFTA, ratified four years ago, was sold by the business and political elite as a precedent-setting investment and trade pact among the sleeping giant of Mexico, with its population of 93 million, the United States (population 260 million) and Canada (population 29 million). But the administration and big-business lobby have recently been forced to wildly spin NAFTA's effects. Several no-longer (if ever) independent ``think tanks'' funded by transnationals, their foundations and the government, from Brookings to Heritage, have put out reports using remarkably similar and inappropriate assumptions to reach the conclusion that NAFTA has had a slight but positive effect on both the United States and Mexico. Yet under NAFTA Mexico has suffered its worst depression since the 1930s, with incomes still 15 percent to 20 percent below 1993 levels. Gone is any reference to Mexico's population, three times the size of Canada's, or to its young and well-educated labor force, which is growing by more than 1 million per year. Now Mexico is presented as an almost insignificant little place with an economy only one-twenty-eighth the size of the U.S. economy. This to pretend that Mexico can have very little effect on U.S. workers or firms.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. Mr. Chairman, this is the only, only Federal money that goes directly to support State, local, and private coordinated efforts to prevent the growing epidemic of child abuse in this country. We had 1.4 million reported cases of child abuse in 1986, up to 3 million in 1996. In my hometown of Springfield a precious little girl 3 years old, Tessa Lynn, needed some help, and that help never came. One day the police came in response to some calls by neighbors, and they checked her, and they were told she was asleep. Well, now, she is asleep forever. She was horribly abused and murdered. We need more community-based programs to prevent child abuse, and this is the only one that receives any Federal funding. Mr. Chairman, I would urge my colleagues to support it. It is not a new program. It is an authorized program. It is not an unfunded mandate. And it is a program which involves States, communities, and private organizations in a coordinated effort to save the lives of precious youth in this country. Mr. Chairman, I insert the following for the Record: State of Oregon, John A. Kitzhaber, Governor, July 29, 1997. Hon. Peter DeFazio, House of Representatives, 2134 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC. Dear Congressman DeFazio: Congressman Peter DeFazio is proposing an amendment to restore funding for local child abuse prevention grants to the states. The budget for the Federal Community-Based Family Resource Support Grant (CBFRS) was eliminated in the House version of the Health and Human Services budget. The Senate version continues the grant at last year's funding level. Congressman DeFazio's amendment will restore the CBFRS budget and increase it by one million dollars. The offset comes from the office of the director of the National Institute of Health and by reducing funding for new buildings to last year's levels. I strongly urge your support of the DeFazio amendment. The CBFRS resources will play a very important role in preventing child abuse and neglect in Oregon. One of the most profound gaps in our service system is that of families who are at high-risk of and have an unfounded or undocumented case of child abuse or neglect. This gap lies along the continuum of services between the ``wellness'' (or primary prevention) role of the Commission on Children and Families and the role of the Department of Human Resources in protecting children through its Services to Children and Families division (SCF). Oregon will use the CBFRS resources to address this gap by establishing ``community safety nets'' at the community and the state levels. These safety nets will be strong community and interagency partnerships designed to respond to the needs of those children and families who fall through the cracks. At my direction work has already begun to lay the foundation for the safety net project. The restoration of the CBFRS grant will help get Oregon on the road to addressing one of the most serious gaps in our service system for children and families. I urge your support of the DeFazio amendment. If you need further information, please contact Pam Curtis in my office at 378-6895. Sincerely, John A. Kitzhaber, M.D.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Fox] for his support and his work on this amendment. This will save some children from the horrible fate that Tessa Lynn suffered in my own hometown.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from California to perhaps expand on this and elucidate to the many Members out there who are now listening with rapt attention what is at hand.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, this gentleman from Oregon is a bit confused by the debate between the gentleman from Arizona and the gentleman from California.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Are you confused? Mr. Speaker, I think a lot of people listening to this debate over the last 2 days are. They should be. In fact this legislation is designed to confuse the process, rushing this through before Congress's month-long vacation, is designed to obscure the truth. The truth is yesterday Congress adopted very substantial cuts in Medicare, cuts in reimbursements, cuts that will drive up premiums for seniors, cuts that will deprive seniors of home health oxygen benefits, and today they are using the proceeds of those cuts to fund huge tax breaks, $275 billion in tax breaks over the next 10 years, tax breaks that will double the deficit by the year 1999. Yes, that is right. The balanced budget agreement before us today will double the deficit over the next 2 years, and that is from the Republican-controlled Congressional Budget Office. It will probably more than double the deficit over the next 2 years. A strange path to fiscal responsibility. What underlays this whole thing? Tax cuts slanted toward the very wealthy, repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax; an embarrassing time in the mid-1980's when Ronald Reagan supported imposing a corporate alternative minimum tax, as the largest corporations of this country were getting refunds for taxes they did not pay. We are going back to that. We will all pay taxes so corporations can get refunds for taxes they do not pay. Capital gains. Look at the distribution right here. The largest amount of money, 44 percent of the benefits, go to the top 5 percent, those earning over $112,000. If you are in over $112,000, cheer, right now, OK. If are in the bottom 60 percent, families making less than $36,000 a year, that is most of my constituents, those are the people who most need tax relief, look at what that large number of people, 60 percent of the population are going to rake in: 7 percent of the benefits. What a great day for middle income America. Forty-four percent for those privileged few at the top and 7 percent for the rest. Mr. Speaker, this point cannot be made too many times in this debate. This is being rushed through unnecessarily so people will not understand the facts. They will say that 75 percent of the benefits are going to people who earn under $75,000 a year. That is simply not true. We are engaged here in the big lie. The big lie is that this is going to balance the budget. It will not. We have statistics now that show it will double the deficit in the next 2 years. What they are saying is magically in 2001 Congress will come here and decide to cut $61 billion out of discretionary programs. That means cut the entire Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Energy, Department of Housing, Social Security Administration, and the Justice Department.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. Mr. Speaker, here we are today on the last day of this session of the Congress before the big recess engaged in the big lie, the big lie. This is a balanced budget agreement. Well, after we voted yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office came up with an analysis, and the analysis is, guess what? Deficits have gone down for the last 5 years, but next year for the first time in 5 years they will go up and we will double the deficit by 1999. The American people know we cannot give away huge tax breaks, increase spending, and balance the budget. Congress did this once before in the early 1980's, and guess what. Three years later they came back and they had to repeal substantial portions of what they did. This bill today will reduce revenues to the Federal Government by $275 billion over 10 years, and it is going to balance the budget. This is great. We are going to have zero tax on capital gains, the Republicans tell us now by next year, and that will balance the budget. We will not tax capital gains, but all those little people who work for wages will pay taxes, and that is how we will balance the budget. What an absurd and very, very cynical assertion on their side of the aisle. Listen to a few things in here: Simplify foreign tax credit limitation for dividends from 1,050 companies to provide look-throughs starting in 2003. Now all the middle-class Americans out there looking for that foreign deduction for the look-through starting in 2003, that is a billion dollar gift. Well, I am sure that a lot of my constituents, average working Americans, are looking forward to that. Then we have the capital gains provisions, $21 billion, and now they say they want to repeal the tax. Had a young woman in my office yesterday. She wants to become a neurosurgeon. We talked a little bit. She said, ``What does this mean?'' I said, ``It means if you become a neurosurgeon, you earn $250,000 a year, you'll pay 40 percent of your income in taxes. But the rich kid who went to college with you who has not worked a day in his or her life who then just invests for a living will pay taxes at half that rate. She was outraged. She said, ``How can that be fair?'' Well, they are saying it is not fair, the rich kid who inherits the money tax free should pay zero income tax his or her entire life; that is the Republican position. That is absurd. Then we have the alternative minimum tax. It was so embarrassing in the 1980's when the largest, most profitable corporations in America not only did not pay taxes, they got tax refunds paid for by the rest of us for taxes they did not pay, that Ronald Reagan supported putting in place an alternative minimum tax for corporations. They are repealing that here today. That will cost $20 billion, a nice gift to the large corporations. Oh, that is for middle-income America. That is for middle-income America. Sure it is, Mr. Speaker. Then we have the subtotal here for gift and generation-skipping tax provisions, which they call estate tax relief, $35 billion. So the sum total here today is $275 billion in tax rates; crumbs for the middle class, and just wonderful bounty for the wealthiest in America.

Mr. DeFAZIO. But in a way to enrich contractors, not to enrich those people at the bottom.

Mr. DeFAZIO. The gentleman is correct.

Mr. DeFAZIO. We cannot cut a penny out of the Pentagon and we are going to build 20 B-2 bombers.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, let us make no mistake on what we are about here today; the cuts we are about to adopt today, with precious little debate, are to finance the tax cuts of tomorrow. There is a direct and irrefutable relationship. So the cuts in Medicare, the cuts in veterans' benefits, the cuts in Social Security Administration costs, are to finance tax cuts tomorrow. Tomorrow perhaps we will get the debate on the merits of the tax cut. The point is, earlier the esteemed chairman of the Committee on Rules responded to my earlier statement saying, well, so the gentleman has not had time to read the bill. So there is only one copy. Now it is on the Internet. That is great. But he said earlier, he said, he should just rely on the judgment of some of his colleagues. Can he not follow them? First off, I doubt that they have had an opportunity to read the entire bill. And secondly, no, I did not check my brain at the door when I got elected to Congress. I do not hand my voting card to anybody else. And to say that, well, the Democrats were abusive so we should not give them adequate time to read and review the bill, so we are going to do the same thing, I voted against those reconciliation bills when we had a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, and they kept shoving them through here and we did not have to read them. I even signed a pledge never to vote for another one unless we were given a minimum of 24 hours to read it. No one has been given 24 hours to read however many thousand pages there are, and I do not know, because there is no index and it is not numbered. But it is probably a couple of thousand pages. Makes amazing changes. I would ask the gentleman if he is particularly familiar with the cuts in veterans. We have an aging veterans population, and by the year 2002 we are going to see a reduction of $4.1 billion in veterans benefits in the year 2002 to achieve this theoretically balanced budget or, if one wanted to be more cynical, to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, a 19-percent cut. How is it we are going to reduce veterans benefits with a dramatically aging veterans population, not just the World War II people and the Korean war vets, my own generation, the Vietnam generation, is beginning to develop aging problems. We cannot do it. It will not work. We are not going to debate those veterans provisions here on the floor. We are not going to debate the merits of them. We are not going to be given time to even examine them. It took me a while to find them in this pile. Let us talk about the Social Security administrative costs. Social Security is underfunded for administration, and it is paid for out of the trust fund. It is paid for out of the trust fund, yet we are going to cut Social Security administrative costs by 25 percent. So the next time that your mom or dad or your grandparents or the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] in a few years tries to find out what has happened to their Social Security check, they are going to be put on indefinite hold. Right now it takes 3 months on the average to process a claim. Under this legislation, it is going to take 6 months or 9 months, and with an aging population, who knows how bad it will get? These are not the places to cut the budget. They are not fair cuts. In fact, I do not believe these cuts will ever be made. In fact, under this bill the deficit gets larger next year for the first time in 5 years. Is that not ironic? We are going to balance the Federal budget, but the deficit has been going down since 1992. Under this for the first time since 1992, the deficit goes on.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me. This is not just an esoteric procedural debate. I was insulted when the gentleman on the other said, ``Well, so what if we're bringing up this bill delivered, one copy, to the Democratic side at 3:30 in the morning. They wouldn't have read it any way.'' Well, I was here a few years ago, and I read the catastrophic care bill before it came to the floor of the House. I was one of the few Democrats to vote against it, and a whole heck of a lot of people had to change their votes a year later because they cast their vote for a bad bill. This bill is a bad bill. I will not yield to the gentleman. This bill is a bad bill. But we are not going to be allowed time to read it. If we split this up among the 200 or so Democrats here, we would have a hard time getting through it in the time allotted. We are going to vote on this bill within the next three hours. Do my colleagues know why? Because it is going to make prime time news. That is why we are going to vote on it. This is an Alice in Wonderland budget process. We are going to get to the balanced budget by first increasing the deficit with retroactive tax cuts. It is slanted very much toward the wealthy people and the largest corporations in America. Then maybe later, we have heard this before, these cuts will go in place. Do my colleagues know what the cuts are? A one-third cut in Social Security Administration. If someone has to wait 3 months now to get their claim processed, under this bill they will be waiting 6 months, 9 months or a year to get their claim processed. A 20 percent cut in veterans and cuts in other vital programs. This is not a good path to the balanced budget. In fact, it is no path whatsoever. This is stranger and stranger. We have stepped through the looking glass, it is getting more and more bizarre. This is no kind of a legislative process. No one on the floor can come to the floor today and say they have read this bill, they understand it and they are voting for it in good faith. That would be a lie.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to be absolutely certain that we get the funding into this program, it did not get lost in conference. I appreciate the support of the gentleman from Florida and the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Madam Speaker, we have got the great bipartisan budget deal, a balanced budget with generous tax cuts. If it seems too good to be true, do you know what? It is. This is not a new day in Washington, DC. This is business as usual. Cutting up a fat hog, made wildly optimistic assumptions about the economy and revenues, cut social programs a little. Do not take a penny out of the Pentagon and give a host of generous tax cuts slanted toward the most wealthy in America and the largest corporations. A deal written behind closed doors announced last night; no written copies available to Members of Congress, nothing available for review, but it will be voted on tomorrow night, just to be certain that no one knows the details before the details leak out and it begins to stink like the Potomac in August.