Lloyd Doggett

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Point of order, Mr. Speaker; point of order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. DOGGETT. Point of order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, under the rules of the House, if the gentleman or any of the other gentleman of the majority wish to object to this chart, instead of continuing to interrupt our speakers who use it, the proper approach under the rules is to state an objection. Then we can have a vote on it in the House, and I raise a point of order against these continued obstructions of the orderly debate and ask them to state their objection, if that is what they want, and get a ruling from the Chair.

Mr. DOGGETT. You have ruled it is out of order? Are you directing us to remove it from the floor?

Mr. DOGGETT. Then I ask for a vote on that. Mr. Speaker, I appeal the ruling of the Chair. I appeal the ruling of the Chair that the chart of the front page of the Daily News is out of order.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, Americans seek genuine reform of this Congress, not another sop or flop. They certainly seek more than the change of a number, which is little more than the substitute provides to change the level at which disclosure must occur. The problem with disclosure, among others, is that too often the beneficiaries of largess receive so many gifts they have trouble keeping track of all of them. I think of one leader in this body who disclosed his custom-made ostrich boots, but until he was asked by a reporter, he forget that he had a cruise to the Bahamas as well. Americans do not need to count the number of gifts that people receive and read about more gift through disclosure, about the level of benevolence of the lobby to the Congress. What they want to read is that this practice has stopped. I have the utmost respect for my colleague from Hawaii, and he is right that dealing with gifts is only part of the problem. We need to deal with campaign finance reform as well. My colleagues remember that it was in June that Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton shook hands on genuine reform, bipartisan reform, up in New Hampshire. It took from June until November for Speaker Gingrich to answer that handshake, and his proposal was the appointment of a new stall commission to stall any reform on campaign finance until next year. Do not let the need for one reform get in the way of another reform. Let us do what is right and pass some kind of genuine reform of the lobby and gift laws that the U.S. Senate did on an unanimous and bipartisan basis.

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, as a newcomer in this Congress, my concern with many of my Republican colleagues is not that they have tried to change the operation of this House too much, but that they have changed it too little. And with all due respect to my good friend from Florida, I have to say that the Republican leadership really has broken its promise to the American people in this regard. From day one, when the issue was the relationship between the lobby and the Members of this body, they refused to reform. We tried on January 4, we tried in May, we tried in June, we tried in September, we tried in October, again and again and again. We met a stone wall of resistance to doing anything to change those ties that bind Members of Congress to the lobby. This year, finally, under pressure from the U.S. Senate, where 98 Members of that Senate voted to reform gift ban, finally it became obvious that some reform was going to have to happen. And I salute those Members, largely new members of the Republican caucus, who have spoken out on this issue, because it is essential that it have bipartisan support. Yet as recently as this past Sunday on ``Meet the Press,'' Speaker Gingrich again spoke out against the version of this bill that passed the U.S. Senate. We have a rule today that has been structured to make it as tough as possible to pass a real meaningful rule. So today we have an opportunity to enact real reform, yet there is yet an amendment up here that would provide little more than the current system. It is essential that we not contract out the operation of this Congress to the lobby, that we rely on the Members of the Congress to do it, and not the gifts from the lobby.

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentlewoman from the other side of the aisle put it quite well with reference to this measure. We now have the opportunity to achieve on a true bipartisan basis, finally, real reform. We should not substitute for full reform something that appears to be full reform, done in the name of disclosure, which really does not change the existing law very much at all. What the American people want is not to hear more of the details of the kind of business as usual that they have rejected. They want to see it stopped once and for all. Many of these charitable events are done for a most charitable and worthy purpose. The only problem is that so often, it is the Member who gets most of the charity, and not the good cause that the charitable event is for. There is still no reason that Members of Congress cannot participate in such events, contribute to their community, but the direction and the purpose needs to be for the benefit of the charity, not for the benefit of the Member. We have the opportunity today to make real progress in this area. Let us do it by rejecting this substitute.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, Newt Gingrich and Medicare, the three words you need to understand this mess in Washington. He may really be a crybaby, but Newt Gingrich wants to demonstrate he is king of the mountain. And what better way to do that than to issue a royal decree cutting Medicare, even if it takes the taxpayers having to pay for 800,000 Federal employees to have a taxpayer paid vacation. And since the king expects lobbyists to come bearing tribute, it is only natural Speaker Gingrich would be doing everything he can today to kill our ban on gifts from lobbyists to Members of this Congress just as he killed real lobby regulation last session. And before this week's shutdown and Newt's paid vacation for 800,000 Federal employees, we already had shut down one institution of this body, shut down with lethargy, shut down with delay. point of order

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry. Is it proper to refer to the front page of a newspaper that calls him a crybaby? point of order

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, so that I may comply with the rules of the House, I understand then that I am not to refer to the Speaker as a crybaby. May I use the term ``Newt's tantrum''?

Mr. DOGGETT. But the Chair is not suggesting that this Daily News ``crybaby'' front page has to come down at this point?

Mr. DOGGETT. It is not on the House, Mr. Speaker. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, this measure has been called a sham, a shame, but in short, it is nothing but a Medicare cut under another name. Our Republican colleagues were so committed to cutting Medicare that the one thing they sent over to the President, along with their proposal, was an increase in Medicare premiums. They got caught. The American people have been saying no, and they have been saying no all week to that kind of Medicare cut. So what are they coming back with tonight? They come back with a new straitjacket to accomplish through the back door what they could not get done through the front door. There is one thing this great revolution that they have provided us has not changed. That is elementary school arithmetic. Adding still is the same old way as it was prior to the last election. If you give hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts to those at the top of the economic ladder, you give the Pentagon $8 billion more than it asked for, the only other place you can look is to take it out of the hide of the senior citizens of this country, out of the schoolchildren, and out of the environment. That is what they are going to do through this resolution. If you believe in protecting Medicare, you are going to vote against this.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Well, the Democrats are tax-and-spend and the Republicans can run Government on the cheap because they are not really for all these Government employees. How, Madam Speaker, do they propose to do it this week? Well, they are going to give 800,000 Federal employees a paid vacation. Yes, that is right. Today and until they resolve this crisis and get back to the reality of America, they are going to pay 800,000 Federal employees to do absolutely nothing. That is the kind of good business sense they have brought to this Government, when they could not pass the appropriations bills because of all their squabbles between the far right and the not-so-right in the Republican Party. Who is going to pay for this nonsense? The American taxpayer. They are not going to save one dime this [[Page H 12204]] week. They are going to be paying Federal employees to do absolutely nothing in order to accomplish their radical right agenda to cut Medicare and raise the premiums on every senior, on every person with disabilities come January 1. It is wrong to ask American taxpayers to pay our Federal employees to do absolutely nothing just to satisfy this agenda of power of Newt Gingrich.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Speaker, you know, to understand the crisis we are going through here in Washington today, you really only need to understand three words, Newt Gingrich and Medicare. You see, from the beginning it has been Newt's way or no way with reference to the way this Government would operate. Newt Gingrich made it very clear in the spring of this year, and he repeated it this summer, he repeated it again this summer, that he wanted this crisis. It was not something he was trying to avoid doing. He wanted to demonstrate to America and to the world that he was king of the mountain and that everybody had to salute him because he was the fount of all knowledge about the problems of the world. The key part of Newt's way or no way as far as this particular budget crisis is, of course, the one item that they chose to put on the continuing resolution that they sent over for the courageous veto President Clinton exercised, and that is Medicare. He wanted to send the seniors, he wanted to send the people with disabilities around this country a happy New Year's present in the form of a Medicare premium increase. It is the one irrelevant provision they chose to tack on a continuing resolution which, of course, would never have been necessary to send to the President at all if they had simply had the willingness to do their job and pass the appropriations bills rather then messing around with all of this agenda of the radical right which has tied them up. It has not been President Clinton that caused them to get only 2 of 13 appropriations bills to his desk by September 30. It has not been the Democratic minority in the House or the Senate. They could not agree amongst themselves as to how crazy they would be with reference to passing what the chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations called payback time to the radical right and holding up the business that should have been occurring in getting these appropriations bills there. No, cutting Medicare, raising the cost to the ordinary person relying on Medicare and Newt Gingrich explained the situation that we face today. I have been very interested this morning to listen to my Republican colleagues as they responded to this crisis because they have told the people of America two things: The first one is, ``You know, we Republicans are not really as mean as you Democrats say we have been. We are just a little bit mean. I mean, we do not want to totally foul all the water supply of America. We just want to let it be a little bit more dirty than it is today.'' On the environment, ``We just think the environment ought to be a little more dirty than it is today.'' ``And we do not believe you should cut off the opportunity of students to go to school, they can pay just at little bit more, just another thousand dollars. It is not as bad as what Newt Gingrich and his group proposed in the fall to hike the price by $5,000 to get a college education. We think raising it $1,000 on middle-class families who are struggling to get a young person through high school so they can go to college, we think just a little bit more pain is okay.'' And to our seniors, ``Just a little bit more pain is okay.'' Well, I think that America deserves better treatment than that. It is getting through Newt Gingrich, and we certainly do not need the kind of Medicare cuts he proposed.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, today America is presented with a manufactured crisis, and the inventor of this crisis, the person with all the rights to the patent to this crisis and all the silliness attendant to it, is one Speaker Newt Gingrich. Way back on April 3, he made very clear his determination to manufacture this crisis. He reiterated it on June 3, saying that he hardly worried whether the Government would show up. And then finally on September 22, he said to all that were listening then what was going to happen tonight, he said ``I do not care what the price is. I do not care if we have no Executive offices and no bonds for 30 days. Not this time.'' Well, the American people do care. They want their Government working together to take care of the problems that we have, and they do not want to have to pick up the tab for this unnecessary invention, for unless Speaker Gingrich plans to pay personally for the cost of this whole mishap with the proceeds of the next couple of books that he does with Rupert Murdoch, it is the American taxpayer who will have to pick up the price for this weird invention.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, we share your desire to show respect for our veterans. It is just that we do not find much respect in cutting Medicare for 8.8 million veterans in this country who are Medicare eligible, nor do we find it appropriate that when you do not include the cuts on waste and fraud in this resolution, you do not include the cuts in health care expenditures. The only cuts you provide is for the veterans and the other people in America who rely on Medicare by raising their premiums come January. That is not much respect. What this resolution does is to set up a procedure where by at 5 on Monday the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate still have not reached agreement. On the last day in which this continuing resolution is in effect, we will not know if they can agree among themselves on the future of this Government. And guess who is going to pick up the tab for it? It is going to come at a cost of millions of dollars a day just to shut down the Government. Unless Rupert is giving Newt Gingrich another book contract, the taxpayer is going to have to pick up that tab.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, here in Newtland a true Keystone Kops mentality has taken full control. The zealots have lost all reality. They tell America to pay any price, even default in order to accomplish their agenda. Yes, we have Chief Newt and a zillion little Keystone zealots chasing each other around the Capitol. The House Republicans cannot agree with the Senate Republicans. This morning the House Republicans cannot even agree with each other about what their agenda is or their schedule is, but they are willing to put the full faith and credit of the most important Nation in the entire world on the line and risk that despite our history of paying our debts. Let them listen to one of their own Republican colleagues, the gentleman from New York who said, and quote: I think the whole thing is nuts. Nobody knows the potential impact. If you play this hand and lose, you can really do a lot of damage. It is like threatening to explode a time bomb in your own backyard. That is the mentality that controls: Gingrichism, excellence in pursuit of error.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, certainly I am pleased that there is a new interest in honoring our veterans. If we really want to honor our veterans, do not force this country into default and lead to the cancellation and delay of services that our veterans need. If we really want to honor our veterans, do not raise their Medicare premiums. Do not cut the Medicare that over 8 million veterans in this country are eligible for. That is a way to honor our veterans. How is it that we got ourselves as Americans into this mess where we stand on the brink of default for the first time in the history of the United States? Well, it happened for a number of reasons. The first one was that our Republican colleagues wasted month after month trying to impose a contract on America that they told us was the greatest thing that had come along since sliced bread. Then in this morning's paper, we learn the truth, indeed the fiction behind that great contract on America. Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a Gingrich protege, never really measured the contract's popularity in the first place. Luntz announced that he tested only ad campaign slogans supporting the contract. The House Republicans' legislative agenda is not losing popularity. It is probably just shutting popularity it never had in the first place. The same story goes to quote the great pollster that backed up all this contract on America on which time was wasted instead of getting on with the real business of the American people as saying that the purpose of this polling had been to find the most persuasive wording of the contract's proposition for preelection ads in TV Guide. You see, when you run Government by bumper sticker instead of Government by involving the people, by good sense, by attending to the real needs of the American people, you end up on the brink that we face today of default. The second way they did it is through the appropriations process. Speaker after speaker has noted that they simply did not do their work. We were not supposed to be here in the middle of November dealing with appropriations bills. They were all due months ago. When we reached the deadline, 2 of 13 appropriations bills had been passed by the Republican majority and signed by the President of the United States. Why did they not get the work done? They had a little time after they wasted months with the contract on America. Well, we know why they were unable to complete their work, because the chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations himself declared in committee, and I quote, it is payback time. Yes, America, it is payback time, not to the ordinary people of America but those various extremist groups that dominate the Republican Party selection process. They deserve their due. Well, we ended up, therefore, honoring our veterans instead of by appropriating the moneys for our national security, that bill has not been forwarded to the President's desk. It has been tied up. Finally, by contracting to the lobby the job of governing America, the Gingrichites have pursued error with excellence.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, even at this moment when we stand on the brink of fiscal disaster, on the brink of closing down services upon which millions of Americans depend, our Republican friends cannot get themselves out of the clutches of special interest lobbies. On this issue of debt limit, they came to the floor yesterday afternoon and added something totally irrelevant, over 200 pages endorsed by a series of special interest lobbies, written in the dead of night, never presented for a hearing, never heard or discussed on this floor with what they call regulatory reform. What it means to those veterans that are watching is that we are going to engage in unilateral disarmament. Yes, the power to protect the people of the United States from unsafe products, to protect them from foul water and foul air, we are going to disarm unless the lobby approves. In fact, no new regulations can go into effect unless some peer review committee that includes lobbyists says it is OK. You let the tobacco companies decide how to regulate tobacco. That is the theory of this that we are debating right now. That is included here along with the debt limit though it has absolutely nothing to do with it. The last measure we considered included lobby control. What kind of lobby does it control? The Texas Council on Family Violence will be running a hotline to help battered women all over this country. Because they take Federal dollars to administer that hotline, they cannot come to Washington and speak out about the wrongs in this Republican budget. Do they control the polluters and the loophole lawyers? No. They want to muzzle the National Council on Senior Citizens because it had the courage to speak out against the cuts on Medicare that are in this budget. And the latest chapter, it is in today's Wall Street Journal with the title ``Gingrich Backer Had Unusual Access'' as a volunteer in the Speaker's office, that the Speaker contracted out his own office to a special interest lobbyist.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I must say that I disagree with the gentleman yielding to me and some of my other Democratic colleagues concerning the appropriateness of having habeas corpus and regulatory reform in this debt measure because I cannot think of two more fitting examples of what the Republican Party is doing than with these two measures. See, habeas corpus in Latin means, ``You have the body,'' and when the American people have the body of this Republican Party and what they are doing to America, they are going to see it for all that it is. They are going to know that they can take the stiffest old wire brush, and they cannot scrub the dirtiness and the ugliness of what they are doing to this country out with that wire brush. And what about regulatory reform? Mr. Speaker, what they believe in is regulatory short circuit. They have got it short-circuited to the point that we do not need a committee system in the Congress, we do not need to involve the America people in the decisions of the Congress. No, we can have regulatory and lawmaking reform; just get a cluster of the strongest, most powerful lobbyists in the country to get together in the closet with the Speaker. He will take a little time out of his campaign to be President of the United States, a campaign based on the theory that the American people want someone meaner than Phil Gramm as a candidate, and the Speaker will take a little time away from signing book autographs and running for President, and he will sit down, and he will resolve the lawmaking and the regulation of the United States in exactly the same way that he cut Medicare. Mr. Speaker, we have what is referred to as a Christmas party offering special deals to various lobby groups to get what they want. It is appropriate that the gentleman from Pennsylvania would begin the presentation on this amendment by citing letters from two lobby groups. Who else would this group that has contracted out the Contract on America, subcontracted it, if my colleagues will, to the lobby to write the bills, to use the committee computers, to turn to the lobbyists during the committee hearings to provide all the answers? Of course, they start with letters from lobbyists saying that this measure is OK. But what about the American people? Why do they not have a say in this process? Why shortcut it in this fashion when even the Members of this body do not get to see the bills that are passed? I am not just talking about the Democrats. We could not find 10 Republicans in this entire body that had the slightest idea what is in this amendment. It is not even the same amendment that was presented in the sneak attack last night. See, the problem is that our Republican colleagues are so used to having a party that is exclusive, that does not include people in the decision-making process that they decide to use a sneak attack instead of including the people in a process of decision making with committee hearings, with people coming in, hearing what good science is from the experts, instead of relying only on the lobbyists. Announcement by the Speaker pro tempore

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, we had a chance to look at the specifics of this regulatory reform measure earlier in the year, and one of the things we found is that it required, before any new rule to protect the public health, and welfare, and safety of the people of the United States could be adopted, it had to be peer reviewed, and we were not talking about a peer review of people of science. We were really talking about a peer review that could include lobbyists, the same kind of people that cluster up with the Speaker in the back room to write legislation like this, and they would not accept an amendment to delete the power of lobbyists to review these pieces of legislation and to roadblock them to gum up the process, and that same language, I am advised, is buried somewhere in these pages, is mixed in there at present, so that we will rely on the tobacco companies to decide the future of any regulation concerning tobacco in this country. We will rely on the polluters to decide on any regulation about water and air purity. Yes, this is in this particular amendment simply a question of whether we want to have unilateral disarmament of the ability to protect the health and welfare of the people of the United States to assure that we have water we can drink and air that we can breathe, whether we want to do that or whether we want to involve the people in a reasonable process that is not some back-room deal to provide in the dead of night one amendment and then come out here on the floor without any hearing, without any input, and do another. See, I think the problem is basically that some of our Republican colleagues confuse arrogance of power with leadership. They have not given us much of the latter. They have given us little else than arrogance and power.

Mr. DOGGETT

Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, our Republican friends began shouting ``Happy New Year'' a little early last night. ``Happy New Year'' to everybody in this country who relies on Medicare, because come January there will be a New Year's card from our Republican friends. It is called an increase in Medicare premiums that every person who relies on Medicare will have to pay. Mr. Speaker, if Americans are sitting out there saying, ``It does not make any difference to me. I am not on Medicare,'' they need to think again and look at the reports from this week. Economists in Washington and business representatives warn that millions of working people and their employers could end up paying more for health care and that many people who work for small businesses could lose their insurance altogether as a result of this harsh, backward Republican cut of Medicare. Indeed, one independent study reports that employers would require their employees to absorb much of the increased costs in the form of reduced wages, truncated or denied pay increases, or less generous health coverage. Half a million people will lose their insurance coverage altogether. That is the result of the Republican New Year's present to America: A cut in Medicare, a hike in premiums.