Sam Farr

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Did you know, following up on that, that the defense authorization bill prohibits private-funded abortions for our service men and women, and I say men because they are overseas with their families, from being performed in overseas military hospitals? Private services. So that means if you are in the military or you are a military dependent and you want to use your own money and you choose your own military hospitals, which we have there for our military active duty personnel, that you are denied. You have got to go out into the foreign market. At what risk do you go at that foreign market? We are subjecting people who are giving their lives to military service from just the basic benefits that their own relatives receive working for private corporations in America. We have gone--this antiwoman attitude in this Congress is, I think, beginning to show itself so strongly in how we are trying to set up women as a second-class citizenship in America.

Mr. FARR. I absolutely agree. I hope what we do need guidance for is America, wake up. Women in this country, wake up, come to Washington. We need to hear your voices. We need to hear your concerns. We need to change attitudes here in Washington that are taking away the rights you have as citizens of this country by denying you services which all other people in our society are entitled to.

Mr. FARR. Absolutely not. I think you see it very clearly. I can see clearly now, and what I can see clearly now is that the new majority here wants to make women second-class citizens. I am appalled by that, my daughter is appalled by that, my wife is appalled by that, my father is appalled by it. I think all of our family is looking at this and saying what is going on in Washington, DC?

Mr. FARR. I as a father, you as a mother, can understand what we try to do as parents is ensure or give hope to our kids that there will be a better, sounder, safer, saner world which they can grow up in. I only have one child. It is a daughter. I guess that makes me a feminist because I really want to see the world in which women have equal opportunity. I am very proud to tell her that just this week I met with the highest-ranking woman in the Navy, and she is coming out to be the commandant or provost of the naval postgraduate school and, I think, someday will be chief of naval operations, and I hope so. She is a very talented woman, and to be able to show symbols of where women in society have become equal to men so that she, as she grows up, and with her colleagues, that women can see that they can do everything that any male can do. We have certainly seen that in winning Olympic Gold Medals, and we will see that in Atlanta when the Olympics come, and certainly in every profession, Sally Ride being the first woman into space and so on. But I come here as a new Member of Congress, a relatively new Member, and I am just shocked because California is a pretty big State, and serving in the State legislature, I thought I had seen conservative politicians. But I have to tell you I never heard on the floor of the State legislature in California the kind of rhetoric I heard here this week. That led me to be so shocked that I wanted to come and join with you and share with you my concerns as a father and as a representative of one congressional district in the United States that I think that the Congress, under the new leadership, is doing a great disservice to women. It is setting up and saying, if you are a woman and you want to go into Federal employment, do not go there. We pointed out in our dialog today, if you go into the private sector, you can receive benefits that you will not be able to receive in the public sector, not even an equal playing field for health care delivery services that we know we have a lot of teenage pregnancies, we know we have HIV issues to deal with. You deal best with that with education. That is what the title X moneys are all about. Then they have taken away those things. We have told people if you are going to go overseas, you cannot even use your private money in an American-sponsored military hospital to get these services. What kind of message are we trying to send as a country as to how we respect women if we are going to discount, disregard, and really put them in jeopardy?

Mr. FARR. I think that the issue here, or the symbol, is that this has been a week in which the Gingrich-led Congress, the conservative aspects of it, have taken away rights that protect women, taken away the rights to buy health care policies that provide services for medical abortions. They have zeroed out family planning money. They have affected the defense authorization bill that prohibits private funded abortions from being performed in overseas military hospitals. They have cut back, major cutbacks in the international planning funds, and then to cap that off by going off to an all-male retreat, I think, is really symbolic of this sort of take away from women or discounting women or trying to put women as secondary citizens. It is symbolic of what is going on, and I think the women of this country ought to wake up and become involved.

Mr. FARR. Will the gentlewoman yield for a moment? Let me just add on that. You realize that I am from California, and the Bohemian Club Grove is in Marin County, CA, and it has been there for over about 100 years, I think, of people. It is sort of the corporate heads of America go there, and the irony is that their own corporations, 70 percent of all the private health care plans in America, provide services which Congress denied to Federal employees. So there is a--I mean, this--if you are going to make government more like the private sector, you certainly do not want to begin by denying health care, medical services to women that the private sector, major corporations in America and those CEO's that are running around, as you say, in the Bohemian Club Grove are providing to their own employees.

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, joining in with the gentleman from Texas and the gentlewoman from Colorado, this is a 25-year-old-program that the Federal Government has been involved in. Not only does it provide funding for organizations, private and nonprofit, like Planned Parenthood, but it also provides grants to public entities and agencies. Those agencies have served an estimated 4.3 million people in 1995 through a network of 4,200 clinics provide key reproductive services. The gentlewoman has talked about those services, services that are screening for sexually transmitted diseases, for Pap tests, for pelvic exams, and other important tests. What essentially they are doing is cutting off health care, health care to women and to young ladies and to girls. I rise in consternation with what has happened this week, because I am a father of a young teenager. Telling her over the phone this week about this, she was absolutely shocked. She said, ``Daddy, does that mean because you buy Blue Cross health insurance from the Federal Government, that if I get raped, that your health care policy cannot take care of the medical exam that I would have to have and the services that I might need?'' And I said, ``Yes, isn't that disgusting?'' She said, ``I can't believe it. You mean that is what you have done in Congress this week?''

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I would say to the Members, ``Wake up. Look what is going on around here.'' We passed GATT last year. We passed NAFTA. We told the world we want to be competitive and now my colleagues want to cut the underpinnings that allow us to be competitive? All you urban legislators that get up and talk about cutting this program turn around and say it is all right to use taxpayers moneys to promote New York, promote Massachusetts, and promote Atlantic City. ``Bring the tourists here. We will use the taxpayers' money to do that promotion.'' But when it gets to agriculture, ``No, we don't want to use any of that money. We don't want to promote.'' You walk into a restaurant and you talk abut the fact that there are all these big wine companies. There are also Chilean wines, European wines. Do my colleagues know that the Europeans spend more money promoting European wine than is in this entire program? I represent small farmers who try to sell their strawberries. We grow more strawberries than California and the United States can consume. We have to sell them some place else. We have to have some help doing that. They have to put their own money into it. They have to be in small business and can only be in the program for 5 years. This is a program that works. If we are going to be competitive in the world, we have to sell our product abroad. Do not undercut the small farmers in the United States. Vote no against this amendment and all the other ones that attack this program.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I rise on this issue as a father, and I want to point out that there has been a lot of emotional debate here. Let us stick to the facts. The facts are stated on page 63 of the bill, line 22. They say, no funds appropriated by this act shall be available to pay with any health care plan, any health care plan. Now, in the Federal Government we go to the private sector and we ask the private sector to offer health care plans to our employees. Mr. Chairman, in the State of California that you and I represent, companies like Aetna, Cigna, Foundation Health Care, HealthNet, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Met Life, Kaiser, and Maxicare, on and on, all offer health care plans not only to Federal employees, but to the 6,000 governments that exist in California, all those local governments, school governments, fire departments, water districts, all of those people that have public employees who are also paid by the taxes that pay the Federal Government. So this issue before us is not the emotional one that you have been hearing debated. It is a contract issue, and it is a discriminatory issue. It essentially says, and this gets back to my point as a father, I buy a plan for my family. My daughter, 16, 17 years old, just became 17 years old, if she visits me here in Washington, gets raped in Washington, what this plan says is the health care plan I buy cannot cover the medical emergency procedures she would need to terminate a pregnancy caused by rape. That is absurd. That is discriminatory. It does not just discriminate against women, it discriminates against fathers. It discriminates against people who give their life to come work for the Federal Government. And if this were really what you wanted to do, then you would prohibit States, you would prohibit local governments, you would prohibit everybody in the public sector from having such plans. Mr. Chairman, I urge the support of the Hoyer amendment and reject the bill.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise to discuss in support of this appropriation. I represent the State of California. You are always hearing about California being a state of 32 million people. But what you may not know is the largest industry in California is agriculture. Per year, $18 billion in farm sales generates over $70 billion in economic activity annually and employs over 2 million people on the farm and related jobs. Nearly 1 out of every 6 California jobs depends on agriculture. The fastest-growing sector of this economy is the agricultural export market, which now derives nearly $13 billion in economic activity and supports over 137,000 jobs in California. Despite the Uruguay round agreement on GATT, California's agricultural exports are up against the heavily subsidized foreign competition that still dominates the global marketplace. The European Union, for example, outspent the United States in export subsidies by more than 6 to 1 and will be able to maintain this historical advantage under GATT. Chile just announced a $25 million export promotion, and Norway has initiated a $20 million program to promote just salmon exports. This is the real world of global competition. With the help of the market promotion program, we run a trade surplus of $14 billion per year with Japan, our biggest agricultural export market, and it grew by $500 million just in last year alone. The market promotion program helps California agriculture develop, expand, and maintain foreign markets. Eliminating the market promotion program would amount to unilateral disarmament. The USDA estimates that for every dollar in the market promotion program, the funds generate an average of $16 in agricultural exports. I support the market promotion program in this bill and would urge my colleagues to reject any amendments to delete or diminish it.

Mr. FARR of California

Mr. FARR of California. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in support of the Hoyer amendment and in support of the basic right of women to choose, regardless of whether they work in the private sector or they serve in the Federal Government as public servants. We all are well aware of the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe versus Wade that a woman's right to a safe and legal abortion is constitutionally guaranteed. This is the law of the land. The provision of the bill that my colleagues and I seek to strike would single out Federal employees and prohibit them from choosing a health care policy which provides a full range of reproductive health services including abortion. What you may not realize is that currently two-thirds of private fee- for-service plans and 70 percent of health maintenance organizations provide abortion coverage. As most insurance plans today provide coverage for reproductive health care including abortion, to deny Federal health benefit participants this health service is harmful to women's health. Mr. Chairman, this is not a pro-choice or pro-life issue, it is an issue of discrimination. This provision blatantly discriminates against women who work for the Federal Government, singling them out and denying them the same access to safe reproductive health care that non- Federal workers in State, local, and the private sector would receive. This is an issue of basic fairness and equity, Mr. Chairman. Fairness to our Nation's public servants who wake up every day and work to serve their country. These women deserve the same quality of care that non- Federal employees have access to every day. These women pay into their health insurance plans, such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield or Atena just like women in the private sector. The difference would be that these women, unlike women in the private sector, would not receive coverage for abortion. Excluding abortion procedures is taking away part of the medical coverage that thousands of Americans currently have. Are we going to treat these hard-working women as second-class citizens because they are employed by the Federal Government? I hope not. I urge my colleagues to join me in standing up today in support of women's rights--in support of women's health--let's strike this blatantly discriminatory and harmful provision in the bill.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I have a question for the chairman of the Subcommittee on Interior, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula]. I understand that the committee's allocation made it impossible to provide full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund acquisition request received by the committee. I also understand the committee has recommended $14.6 million for the Forest Service budget to be allocated by the Forest Service for emergency and hardship acquisitions. As you know, the Los Padres National Forest has worked extensively with private land owners and others to protect the land along the world-renowned Big Sur coast through Federal acquisitions from willing sellers. This has been an ongoing effort and has saved thousands of acres of the Big Sur landscape from development. Mr. Chairman, would the committee's instructions to the Forest Service regarding its emergency and hardship use of the Land and Water Conservation Fund appropriations in FY 1995 allow the continuation of the Big Sur project? 2200

Mr. FARR. I thank the gentleman. I understand that continuing for emergency and hardship use that these lands may qualify. amendment offered by Mr. Fox of Pennsylvania

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this amendment. Invest in creativity, do not cut it. Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts is an investment in our culture, our civilization, our future, which must be protected. The background material that my office has received against the NEA is tantamount to propaganda and is untrue and offensive and adds nothing to honest debate. The truth is, the NEA enables struggling performers to bring their art to the masses. In my district in Monterey, CA, the Endowment has awarded eight grants totaling $160,000. It is not much, but with those funds, the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art and the Monterey Jazz Festival were able to survive Prop 13 and an economy in flux. And despite those financially troublesome times, the people of the Monterey Bay area knew affordable arts were always available to them. It was the NEA that guaranteed that access. The oddity, Mr. Chairman is that of $160,000, hundreds and hundreds of people got a chance to experience music, or theater or art, while at the same time, the Republicans are proposing tax breaks for more than that. There's something wrong with that equation, Mr. Chairman. The majority is right when they say we have to set spending priorities. But I want to know why they define priority as meaning only those options that destroy middle class access to government programs. Defense contractors haven't lost access. Stockbrokers and bankers haven't lost access. Let's set priorities but let's set them in favor of the people. The budget bulldozer weaves out of control when it turns over the poor, runs over children, runs over the elderly, and now is set to run over artists, musicians, and actors. The arts are something to be cultivated and encouraged in our youth. A ``yes'' vote on the Stearns amendment sends a message that there is something wrong with art, that persons with artistic abilities should hide their talents and be ashamed of their creativity. Censorship and irresponsible deficit reduction are ugly things that do not have a place in this chamber or our country. I urge you all to vote ``no'' on this amendment!

Mr. FARR. In response to the question, then, Mr. Chairman, it may be eligible for those funds?

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, Members on both sides of the aisle have been known on occasion for playing fast and loose with the facts and obscuring the truth with statistics. Tonight I'd life to submit for your consideration a different perspective. This one comes from someone in the field--a nose-to-the-grindstone Federal employee who works as a tax collector for the IRS. In correspondence I received from him, he tells me of the folly of Republican proposals ensconced in the budget resolution to cut funding for, and then privatize certain tax collection activities. His argument is clear: only the force of the Federal Government can compel tax evaders to comply and only well-trained, dedicated IRS agents have the wherewithal to produce the kind of results that Congress seeks in bringing scofflaws to justice. You may be tempted to put my comments down as partisan posturing but I submit here a copy of my constituent's letter for the Record and ask you to take it from one who knows. July 7, 1995. Hon. Sam Farr, Congress of the United States, Salinas, CA. Dear Congressman Farr, I just heard some of the provisions of the House Budget Resolution passed last week in the name of deficit reduction, and I am appalled at the contents. It is clear that some members of Congress have taken leave of their senses, and I hope that you can assist me in changing their minds. As a federal employee, I strongly resent the fact the House chose to ``balance the budget'' on our backs by increasing the contributions we will have to make to our retirement system, weakening our health insurance system, changing how pensions are to be calculated, etc. As far as I'm concerned, it was an act of cowardice, because law enforcement and general government operations only constitute about 2% of federal outlays. What about taking a look at the other 98%?! However, Congress has never been known for its ability to make the tough choices, so we expected that. We've had to make sacrifices for so many years . . . I guess we can make a few more. Much worse than that, however, are the seeds of `FISCAL INSANITY' contained in the Treasury Appropriations portion of the Resolution. Not only does it contain provisions for testing the contracting-out of tax collection activities (a supremely stupid exercise in futility), it cuts the Internal Revenue Service's budget for the Compliance Initiative by $130 million, Returns Processing by $130 million, and enforcement by $268 million!! If the Republican majority in the House thinks this is the way to achieve deficit reduction. I know what they've been smoking--and they did inhale!! Let me explain, I am a GS-12 Revenue Officer with the IRS here in Salinas. Even if some of your Congressional counterparts don't understand it, we at IRS do understand money. After all revenue is our middle name!! First, we are sworn, commissioned officers with broad powers of collection granted to us by statute. Giving equal powers to a private firm operating under contract would require the modification or deletion of literally hundreds (if not thousands) of existing laws! We have a rate of assaults and threats against us that is twice that of the next highest agency, The Drug Enforcement Administration. How is a private company going to find people that will take that kind of abuse, collect taxes as efficiently and effectively as we do and make a profit??!! Whoever proposed that idea has an intelligence level sufficient to qualify him as plant life. Second, actual numbers are quite telling. The house has proposed a cut in the enforcement portion of IRS budget of $268 million. Well, enforcement is Collection, basically. So how much does Collection collect? Here are some real numbers. My Collection group consists of a Group Manager, a secretary, a Revenue Representative (for simpler, smaller cases) and thirteen Revenue Officers (five of whom are trainees). During the first nine months (which included the highly disruptive move of our entire office to a new location), our group has collected over $9.8 million in back taxes. At an average of $1.1 million per month that would be $13 million for a year. The total of salaries for our sixteen people is $582,953 a year. That means $22.30 in delinquent taxes collected for each dollar of our salaries. That is a ``Return on Investment'' (ROI) of 2200%!! Where else can you find an ROI like that? Real Estate? The Stock Market? Collectibles? None of them come close--and we do it year after year. So in order to reduce the deficit, the house intends to cut the Enforcement portion of IRS' budget by $268 million. Well, $268 million X $22.30 equals almost $6 billion that [[Page E 1441]] won't get collected. what a novel idea--you reduce the deficit by adding to the deficit!!! The number of returns to be processed increases each year, so we'll decrease the budget for doing that. Compliance has been steadily eroding for years so why not cut monies there and make it even easier for the cheats, the scofflaws and the underground economy to flaunt their noncompliance in the face of the taxpaying public. All of this OZ-type logic is giving me a headache. I guess I'd better hold onto Toto a little more tightly. It doesn't look like we're in Kansas anymore. I hope that you share my concerns for the severely adverse impact that this portion of the House Budget Resolution will have not only on the administration and enforcement of America's tax laws but on the budget itself? Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is counterproductive. I've been a registered Republican all my life, but now I'm ashamed to admit it. How the House leadership could even permit (much less promote?) such a gross act of fiscal irresponsibility is beyond my comprehension. They need to rise above whatever petty personal grievances they may have with the Service and think about their country. Taxes are the lifeblood of Government, and if the taxes due cannot be collected because of budgetary insufficiencies, we will only sink deeper into the morass of mounting deficits in which we find ourselves already. In the end it will be the body politic that will suffer, and the damage will last for years. I hope you will exercise your good offices as Congressman for our District by meeting with the Treasury Appropriations Committee conferees next week and convincing them how short- sighted and ill-conceived this piece of budgetary lunacy really is. Don't hesitate to give them copies of this letter if you think it will help. Any assistance you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely yours, James R. Norman, Revenue Officer.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, help. I've fallen and can't get up! This is the cry of a program--the Medicare program--in deep distress. This is the cry of America's elderly as they tremble at the prospect of losing access to doctors, hospitals and medicines as the Medicare program is held hostage to the Republican steamroller of deficit reduction. By the year 2002, the average senior citizen will pay $1,200 a year more in Medicare premiums. This is the cry of health care providers across the country as they struggle to meet the needs of their patients in the face of ever- restrictive government reimbursement policies. Under the proposed $270 billion cut to Medicare, hospitals will crumple--one hospital in my district will have to reduce its health care services by $5.6 million. That's just one hospital. Multiply that by the number of hospitals in your district. And what for? So rich people can wallow poolside in their second and third homes. What do we get? Tax breaks for the rich. Tough breaks for the little guy.

Mr. FARR

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

Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out that this amendment is a compromise amendment. I cannot imagine why anybody would vote against it. It is not what a lot of people have indicated, an open door to volunteers being able to be utilized. What the bill says, and I think that the author of the bill recognized it as a Republican amendment, but the bad side is also a Republican bill. That is that the bill says that none of the funds provided for resources research may be used to administer a volunteer program; and what the language says, ``unless that volunteer is properly trained and the information is carefully verified.'' So this is a half a loaf, it is a good amendment. I urge everybody on both sides of the aisle to support it.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with my colleagues who will be on the floor a little bit later tonight to discuss the value and the importance of the Peace Corps and how the corps is affected by this year's budget. As with most other Federal programs, the Peace Corps is facing cuts. The current budget for the Peace Corps is $231 million. Let me repeat that. The current budget for the Peace Corps is $231 million. That is a very little amount of money in light of what we have been discussing here today in relevance to the history that the Peace Corps has played for this country. But today the House only appropriated $224 million, a cut of $7 million from the current budget. This cut is going to have a profound effect on the Peace Corps operations. It will cut at least 500 volunteers who could be serving, who would be sent overseas next year. There are approximately 6,500 currently serving this country in countries all over the world. Given the enormous contributions just a few of the volunteers can provide, this means major loss of aid for thousands of needy people. I am a former Peace Corps volunteer, now serving in Congress. There are six of us in this House, and we are very proud of that service. We remember the vital programs that served the countries that we were invited by those countries to serve in, Programs will be ended entirely in many countries, several countries, in addition to the programs in Nigeria and the Cook Islands, which are already scheduled to be closed. What my colleagues and I are here to discuss today is the valuable and effective Peace Corps experience, that experience that is shown everywhere around the world, and how we will need to guarantee a stable budget for the Peace Corps in the future, not to go on a roller coaster road that this Congress is starting on. Let me give you just a few examples of what makes the Peace Corps so unique and effective. Then I will yield time to my colleagues who have also served in the Peace Corps. In Lesotho, wells and rain catchment systems built by volunteers provide drinking water for 32,000 people. In Benin, volunteers trained 400 people from 1,700 villages in parasite eradication, and worm cases in those areas fell by some 64 percent. In Ghana, volunteers created locally staffed vaccination clinics in 20 villages, which today serve nearly 50,000 people. Now, I would like to remind the viewers and my other colleagues who will be here in a minute, and particularly Mr. Shays, who served in the Peace Corps in Fiji and has been a strong supporter of the Peace Corps, and Mr. Ward, who served in Gambia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Cuts in the Peace Corps are going to hurt States with large populations, and I represent one of those, California, with 32 million people. Our State has more volunteers serving than any other State in the Union, 827 this year alone. A recent study by the University of Maryland found that 85 percent of the public support maintaining or increasing Peace Corps's budget. The Peace Corps consumes only $1.50 of every $10,000 spent by the Federal Government. These dollars are well and cost-effectively spent. In Kazakhstan, volunteers are teaching English to 3,000 primary, secondary, and university students; in Armenia the first independent radio station in the country was established with help from the volunteers; in Cameroon, volunteers helped to develop a textbook for teaching AIDS prevention. The result is there are 5,000 students learning how to prevent AIDS. In Ghana, over 1 million seedlings are planted each year to help volunteers helping in the prevention of erosion. Mr. Speaker, let me conclude by just saying that the Peace Corps has had over 30 years of bipartisan support. It has earned this support because everyone knows that the Peace Corps works. Just ask the villager who learned how to irrigate his farm, or the hundreds of people who did not die from parasites because their doctors were taught how to prevent them, or the thousands of students around the world that now speak English because of the Peace Corps teaching them English. We need to continue this valuable and cost-effective program. Let us not let our budget cutting frenzy cut merely for the sake of cutting. The Peace Corps is probably one of America's proudest symbols of how we, living in this affluent country, can reach out and help countries around the world. I cannot think of a more cost-effective program in the Federal Government. I would urge my colleagues to reconsider the cuts that were made.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Mr. Speaker, we wanted to show tonight that there is a bipartisan support for the Peace Corps, that this is not an issue that has ever been just a one party effort. I would just caution my colleagues in the House that as the world grows smaller and as we need to have more effort to sort of hypereducate the world population, there is not a more cost effective way of doing that than allowing young Americans and old alike, because there is no limit on serving in the Peace Corps, to be able to volunteer. They get paid, we got paid a small amount when we were in the Peace Corps, a stipend.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I was commenting that one of the unique feelings we all had was that each of us had the ability to live in a minority in another land and learn another language and learn another culture, and essentially be able to really understand what it is like to be outside of our own culture and our own values, because I think in order to educate people and bring them into changing behavior patterns that may have been in existence for hundreds of years, behavior patterns that might not have been good health, sanitary conditions, or nutritional habits, that you really have to be a part of them in order to bring that about. That learning that other culture, that other language, and the language I learned in Spanish, they say with every language comes a second soul.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, as we approach the 4th of July celebrating our citizenship and the good fortune to live in a country where people can elect a government that derives its strength from the faith of the government, Let us take this moment during the 4th of July recess to reflect on a lot of people who will be citizens of the United States. Mr. Speaker, I am talking about the many of us who recognize that there are decent, productive, legal immigrants trying to become good and productive American citizens. Sometimes there is one thing in the way, a backlogged naturalization process. As a Member of this Congress, I have worked with the administration towards eliminating the long backlogs and improving the naturalization process for many hard-working immigrants who wait as long as a year and a half to get naturalized after they have qualified to be naturalized. Recently I supported the INS request to pout more funds into improving our naturalization system. This successful effort allows the INS to spend $76.6 million to make progress, processing ``adjustment of status applications'' and ``naturalization applications'' much easier. These critical funds will allow the INS to hire more than 1,000 much- needed additional staff and utilize newly improved technology to more efficiently process the surging backlogs. It will help also in the INS efforts to improve customer service. It is very important to point out that the money for naturalization is not taxpayer money. It is from the immigrants themselves and from the application fees that they pay into the system. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to see that this unprecedented commitment by the INS to improve the naturalization process and eliminate many of the backlogs will allow many people to become citizens this next year. I ask my colleagues to join me in making the 4th of July a day in which our communities do their own swearing-in ceremonies, to welcome our newest citizens on board. I will be performing such ceremonies in Watsonville, CA, on July 7. I hope a year from now that the President will offer the lawn of the White House for the national 4th of July swearing-in ceremony and that every Member of this Congress will sponsor residents in their district of participate in such a swearing-in ceremony.

Mr. FARR

Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, what is wrong with this picture: The Republicans want to protect interest income of the wealthy. The Democrats want to protect interest payments on students loans. The Republicans want to provide tax cuts for millionaires. The Democrats want to provide tax cuts for middle-income families. The Republicans want to use spending reductions to pay for tax cuts. The Democrats want to use spending reductions to pay for deficit reductions. What is wrong with this picture, Mr. Speaker, is that under the Republican budget, all the money coming out of the system is going into the pockets of the rich and powerful, and all the money coming out of the system is coming out of the pockets of the middle class. I sincerely hope we in Congress can find the right glidepath to a balanced budget but if it means the rich get richer while the middle class pays for it, count me out.