Barney Frank

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. So, in other words, Washington knows best on that, and that is the one size fits all. That is a fair point that ought to be made explicit.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, the gentleman has illustrated it again. We get the same speech. I tried when the gentleman left the floor before, he talks about 40 years of control. It was the Reagan budget, known as the Gramm-Latta bill, which amended the Brooke amendment in the way the gentleman objected to. The gentleman said that the Brooke amendment, which was a Republican proposal to limit the amount of rents that could be charged, became a job killer because it also became a floor. That was done under Gramm-Latta, under Ronald Reagan. I have asked the gentleman to explain to me how that is the fault of the Democrats. Would he explain to me, I will be glad to yield to him, how was the fact that the Reagan budget of 1981 turned the Brooke amendment from a tenant protection to a job killer the fault of the Democrats? I would be glad to yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. No, excuse me. I know the gentleman was talking to somebody.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman please abide by the rules? The last 10 years cannot be relevant to my question about 1981. We are talking about 1981. In 1981, under the Reagan domination of this House, Gramm-Latta amended the Brooke amendment to make it what the gentleman objected to. How was that the fault of the Democrats, when it was Gramm-Latta that did it in 1981?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I would expect more in the gentleman's logic that we would propose that people could keep 30 percent of their pets; that would be more in line with the kind of thinking the gentleman has had.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Reclaiming my time, I am only talking about the Brooke amendment now. I would make a couple of points. The gentleman from New York's argument that during 1981, when Gramm-Latta passed with Ronald Reagan's first year of the presidency, it was a Democrat, the Democrats controlling the agenda, illustrates how at variance he is with the facts. Second, we were talking about Republican control of the Senate for all of those periods when we could not get legislation through that was not agreed to by both. We also had a Republican President whose signoff we had to have on the legislation. This is an example of the kind of distortion we are talking about, and again the notion, and, by the way, during this whole period when I got here in 1981, the Republicans controlled the Senate, the Republicans controlled the Senate and the Presidency from 1981 through 1986, but according to the gentleman from New York they have no responsibility. But I also want to talk about the substantive pattern here, and the substantive pattern here is for all the talk about empowerment, let us give the housing authorities more control over the lives of the tenants. When the gentleman from Louisiana wanted to expand tenant rights, no, no, that is no good. The gentlewoman from New York and her colleague, the other gentlewoman from new York, want to protect tenants' rights regarding pet ownership; no, no, no, we cannot interfere with the authorities. Indeed the gentleman from new York says we are going to empower the tenants by letting the housing authorities raise their rents without limit. That is the gentleman from New York's answer about empowerment because in fact what he said was, and this one I am still trying to understand and I will yield to him to explain this to me; the gentleman said that if we put a 30 percent cap on what tenants can be charged, that would be bad for the tenants who were working because then the authority would go up to the 30 percent, and the way to prevent the authority from going up to a 30 percent cap is to say with those very same tenants there is no cap at all.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I will yield to the gentleman in 10 seconds to explain to me how limiting the authorities to 30 percent of what they can charge working people, which is what my amendment would do, is a better protection for those working people in the housing authority than giving the housing authority the right to charge them unlimited rents because that is the only difference between us.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, sometimes I read an article so relevant to our work, and so thoughtful and informative, that I write a short gloss highlighting its main points and have it printed here so our colleagues can benefit from it. Occasionally, I come across an article so insightful and compelling that it would be presumptuous to summarize or paraphrase it. Nicholas Lemann's brilliant rebuttal of Senator Dole's attack on Government funded housing is such a piece. I ask that it be printed here so that Members can read it before our debate and votes on the Housing bill tomorrow. [The article follows:] The Public Housing That Succeeds (By Nicholas Lemann) Pelham, NY.--One of the endearing things about Senator Bob Dole is that he is so quintessentially the consensus-oriented legislator that his forays into the realm of wedge issues always have a tinny, false feeling, as if he isn't emotionally connected to the words coming out of his own mouth. His statement last week that American public housing ``is one of the last bastions of socialism in the world'' is a good example. It's hard to believe that Mr. Dole was candidly revealing his most deeply held views. Still, the idea that public housing has failed and should be abolished is something many Americans believe. High-rise public housing projects such as the notoriously dangerous and bleak Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago are the leading visual symbol of the idea that liberal Government programs, especially antipoverty programs, don't work and may actually cause poverty to increase. If public housing were in fact a bankrupt and doomed idea, it would be a very sad end to the oldest and most visible strategy in the struggle against poverty. Jacob Riis' ``How the Other Half Lives,'' published in 1890 and arguably the first American book to propose a plan for improving conditions in urban slums, ended with a call for the construction of ``model tenements.'' If Mr. Dole is right, the whole antipoverty cause would be powerfully undermined. The truth, however, is that housing for the poor stands out among antipoverty strategies as the area where the most progress has been made over the past generation and where there is the most cause for optimism. Senator Dole's comments were so completely wrong that they could help bring a halt to genuine progress rather than pull the plug on something unworkable. Before the World War II, public housing in America was considered a great success. It ``worked'' in the sense of being clean, safe and, for most residents, a huge improvement over the slums where they had been living. There were long waiting lists for apartments. One reason for the projects' good reputation was that their constituency was not the very poor but people with jobs one notch higher on the economic ladder. (Probably the most famous product of the public housing of that era is Elvis Presley.) Most projects wouldn't admit single parents, and many wouldn't admit welfare recipients. Virtually all maintained strict rules about keeping apartments and hallways neat and about who was allowed to be where when. Those who broke the rules or committed crimes were swiftly kicked out. Then in the late 1940's, the nation embarked on the course that led to the perception that public housing doesn't work: the construction of enormous high-rise projects. It wasn't just the architecture, or the mere presence of Government subsidies, that caused these places to go so horribly awry. There was also a big change in the tenant population, from carefully screened working people to the very poor. Because of changes in Federal rules, people who got jobs actually had to leave the building, and it became nearly impossible to kick out tenants who were criminals. Even so, it's not all public housing that doesn't work. It's just the large-scale, all- poor, severely isolated projects that invariably fail. Just a few blocks from the Robert Taylor Homes are pleasant high- rise projects for senior citizens. ``Imagine, the United States Government owns the housing where an entire class of citizens permanently lives,'' Mr. Dole said, as if this were fantastically improbable. Yet in most industrial countries a much larger portion of the population lives in Government housing. Three percent of Americans live in public housing, as opposed to more than a fifth of the population in Great Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands. What's unusual about American public housing is that it serves primarily the very poor. It is paradoxical that Mr. Dole chose to stage his attack on public housing at a realtors' convention, because the real estate industry, by and large, supported the construction of the worst projects. In the 1950's and 60's; African-American migrants from the South were streaming into the big cities, and part of reason for the building of the projects was to contain them within the existing ghettos so as to avoid residential integration. In any case, the mistake of the high-rise, all-poor projects was fairly quickly realized; in 1968, Congress banned the construction of any more them. These projects have no defenders except for unaccountably loyal groups of residents. To set high-rise projects up as being the fruits of a real political position, as some critics of public housing have, is to create a straw man. Under Secretary Henry Cisneros, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has begun demolishing about 30,000 of the worst high-rises. The agency is also trying to reinstate policies of giving preferences to people with jobs and swiftly kicking out criminals. In his speech to the realtors, Senator Dole called for replacing public housing with a voucher system. But we already have a voucher system, called Section 8, which is perpetually underfinanced (partly because the real estate industry is so effective in lobbying against its expansion) and thus has very long waiting lists. Mr. Dole has repeatedly voted against increasing financing for the program, and he failed to support Mr. Cisneros's proposal last year for a major new housing voucher program. There is an alternative to old-style public housing. In the decades since we stopped building new projects, hundreds of thousands of units for the poor have been created by local community development corporations, private groups that have sprung up around the country since the 70's. On the whole, this is housing that works. Those who haven't visited the South Bronx lately would be amazed to see how vastly areas thought of as desolate have been improved by the new and renovated housing that community groups have put up. These groups do exactly what Mr. Cisneros is trying to do in public housing: Screen tenants, create a mix of working and very poor people, oust criminals, maintain security forces big enough for residents to feel safe and keep the overall scale of developments manageably small. It's not an exotic, recondite, high-risk formula. Often people point to the success of the community development corporations as proving that the private sector can succeed where the Government has failed. The implication is that any involvement by the Government is fatally corrupting. But the community groups are heavily financed by the Government. More than three-quarters receive Federal dollars (Washington gives them more than $300 million each year) and more than half receive state money. The experiments in tenant management pushed strongly by Jack Kemp, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George Bush, were also federally financed. It should be kept in mind, too, that the disastrous large- scale urban public housing projects were constructed and operated not by Washington but by local housing authorities. In recent years, HUD has begun taking over the management of projects from the most incompetent of the local authorities. The view that Federal is always bad and state and local are always good just doesn't apply in public housing. The Federal Government pays for virtually all public housing and contracts with local organizations to run it. The key variables are whether the project's rules are sound and whether the local group in charge is competent. The conditions in the worst public housing projects are horrifyingly bad and constitute a real moral crisis. It is outrageous that week after week children continue to lose their lives to the violence of the projects and we don't do anything about it. It doesn't do public housing residents who live in fear and misery any good to be told that what they're going through is attributable to ``socialism'' and therefore can't be helped.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank my friend and I would say I admire him, but in the future I think when he is yielding to someone he better not ask their permission, because if they think they could deny it, they might.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the ranking member for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, I want to add my words in support of this bill. It is a lot easier, it turns out, for the Members on both sides of the House, Democratic and Republican and across the ideological spectrum, to abolish a program in principle than to abolish it in fact. We hear a great deal of talk about abolition but when we get to abolishing any specific program, it will have liberal and conservative defenders, it will have Democratic and Republican defenders. This is one where we also fortunately have a bipartisan coalition for the abolition. The time has come, clearly, to abolish it. If we cannot at this point dispense with the helium reserve, the purpose of which is no longer valid, then we cannot undo anything. Members who represent the area where it is involved, and they will be legitimately representing their interests, they will raise some objections. It is true that it would be a lot cleaner to do this if we never had a helium reserve in the first place. It is true that solutions to problems cannot be qualitatively more elegant than the problems themselves. When we have an entity, we have always some details to decide when we abolish it. Nonetheless, abolition is clearly the sensible way to go, and I think the gentleman from California [Mr. Cox], who has done so much work on this, has quite sensibly dealt with those problems. This is as reasonable an approach as we can get, with just one exception. I heard the gentleman from Hawaii absolutely correctly pointing out that there are some innocent victims in this, and those are the people who went to work for the Government in the helium reserve. I agree with him completely, that they should be held harmless as much as possible. The package of proposals he outlined, especially since as he pointed out they have no budgetary impact, are entirely reasonable. So I would join my friend from Hawaii in appealing to the Senate, when this bill goes to them, to add that kind of an amendment. In fact, as a cosponsor of the bill and as a supporter, I will join with him in urging them to act on that once we have done this. I say that is important not just in this instance, but it is important if we are to go ahead with the kind of changes we ought to make. We have to show that we can economize with some compassion, that we can economize taking a longer look, but that we are not going to make hardworking individuals who did not make the particular policy choices bear an undue share of the burden. To the extent that we can give them equity while we go forward, I think we ought to. So therefore, as I said, I join the gentleman's amendment, and with that I also strongly support this legislation. The gentleman from California [Mr. Cox], who began calling the attention of this body to this, has as I said done a very good job of saying, look, we have this outdated program, a program which it does not make sense for the Federal Government to be involved in. One test we always have here is, if we were in fact starting a government today, would somebody come forward and say, ``Hey, I know what we need, we need an army, a navy, an air force, a Justice Department, a Treasury Department, and the helium reserve.'' I do not think that a helium reserve would make anybody's list of the things a government ought to be doing right now. The question, then, is how do we phase it out sensibly? The gentleman from California's legislation does that. So I hope we pass this today, and I hope we can then persuade the Senate to take advantage of their greater rules flexibility, add the amendment the gentleman from Hawaii talked about, and send the whole thing to the President.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, this is a speech I was hoping I would not have to give. It is a speech I may have to repeat at greater length, and I hope I will not have to do that. In the City of New Bedford, which I represent, there is a plant, the J.C. Rhodes Co., which has been for a very long time a successful manufacturing plant, manufacturing metal fasteners, manufacturing some basic devices, and they have been profitable. We have heard a lot about American industry not being able to compete. Well, we have a plant here with an excellent dedicated work force. This plant has been around 100 years, and it is successful and profitable. Recently the plant was bought, not by another primary metal producer, but by a financial organization. This financial organization then decided that it would shut down this profitable plant because they could make more money by shutting the plant down and consolidating the production at a plant in a different part of the country. They did not argue that it was a problem of lack of profitability. They did not argue there was no way they could make a go of it in Massachusetts. They did not argue it was because our costs were too high. Mr. Speaker, it was simply that because of the financial manipulations involved they now found it more profitable to shut down the plant. No one is asking them to lose money. I have not gotten into detail about the names of individuals; I hope there will not be a need to do that, because I do not want to interfere with negotiations going on now. But it would be a failure on my part not to make clear to all concerned what the stakes are. The stakes are these. We have a profitable plant in a part of the country where industry has, for a variety of reasons, been diminishing. Heavy industry. This plant is still profitable. It was bought. We have responsible, successful business people, themselves in the manufacturing business, working with the city government and the city of New Bedford, working with the union, the United Electrical Union, working with others, and they are ready to buy the plant at a reasonable price and keep it going. We are being told that we cannot have that, by some, not because this plant is not profitable but because, to be honest, some extremely wealthy people can add incrementally to their great wealth by throwing these people out of work. That is why this is so important. The question that America has to confront right now is, are we at a point in our economic system, with the rules that have been set forth legally and in every other way, in which the jobs of the 100 people and of families dependent on them count for zero; in which the fact these people have been working very hard for many years profitably for their employer counts for zero; in which the great costs that would be imposed on the city of New Bedford and the surrounding area, the city of Fall River and surrounding areas where these people work, does that count for zero solely so that some people who are already quite wealthy can become a little bit wealthier? They can increase wealth that will make no difference in their lives except when they chortle over the balance sheets. I am not asking anyone to take a loss or to keep open a building or a plant that cannot make it. I am saying that, if we are going to be told that the rules are such that this financial conglomerate can come in and simply buy up a plant and shut it down and throw these people out of work and have no concern for the disastrous financial consequences, no concern for the tax losses, no concern for the unemployment compensation that will be paid out, for the mortgage loans that will be defaulted, the student loans that will not be paid back; if the system allows a small number of people to get a little wealthier by causing this degree of financial havoc when the plant can make it on their own and people are willing to buy it and keep it running at a price that would be a reasonable price, then the rules have to be changed. Mr. Speaker, I have met with the owners of the plant, along with business people from my district, along with the union and people from the mayor's office working with our Senators, Senators Kennedy and Kerry. We are trying to persuade the owners to be reasonable, not to take a loss, not to subsidize anybody, but to tell us that the lives of these working people do not count for zero, that a marginal increment in their great wealth is not going to be the only factor. If in the end their answer is that nothing else counts in the balance, that nothing but their ability to maximize their already high profits will count, that all of the serious real economic costs that will be imposed on working people and on the city and on the State of Massachusetts, that those will count for nothing, then they are helping to convince me we have to change the rules. I want the free market system to work. I do not want to interfere with it. But I cannot as a Representative sit idly by and allow the system to go forward if the consequence is that extraordinarily decent hard-working people are penalized and victimized solely for the financial gain of a small number of people with no real economic improvement for society. I hope I will not have to again be at this microphone on this subject.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I would say that the gentleman was the one who said this on the floor, and he said it in a context that said it was representative of more than just one person. The gentleman from Illinois, in explaining why an amendment passed to weaken this bill, suggested that this was a person who was representative of a broader spectrum. Here is what they did. Here is what remains. As a result of the changes that were made when the bill left committee and came here, if there is an attack of a terrorist nature involving a major explosion anywhere in the world, and the U.S. military has the expertise to help analyze the cause, not arrest anybody, not prosecute anybody, not pursue anybody, but if we need the expertise of the U.S. military in analyzing the cause of a terrorist explosion, that expertise can be tendered to any government in the world except one. What is the one government in the world that is considered ineligible to benefit from the law enforcement expertise of the U.S. military? The American Government. The American Government, as a result of the appeasement of the right wing of the Republican Party, they are in control, and the U.S. Attorney General cannot get that expertise. Similarly, the FBI and other Federal law enforcement agencies get no significant expanded powers for detection. We retard, here, the ability to use taggants. It is not as bad as it was, but it is still substantially weakened. As a result of the need to pacify the right wing of the Republican Party, this bill has been substantially weakened where it ought to be tougher, and law enforcement simply does not have the authority it ought to have to be able to protect us.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking minority member for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote against this bill. I voted for it in committee. I believe we ought to be strengthening our defenses against terrorism. But I do not believe we ought to be doing it in a fashion that misleads people. This bill, unfortunately, is excessively harsh where it ought not to be, and much too weak where we need toughness. Essentially what has survived in the assault of the Hamas wing of the Republican Party on this bill is virtually all of the added tools for law enforcement within the United States by which they could detect and prevent this kind of activity, those have gone out. We are very tough on foreigners. Once we catch you, we are going to be even tougher than we used to be. By the way, as to habeas corpus and the threat to our safety that is presented, remember, by definition, you are not eligible for habeas corpus unless you are locked up. We are not talking, when we talk about habeas corpus, about anybody walking around. We are talking about people who are locked up and who are a danger, presumably, to other prisoners, but certainly not to general society. But here is what was knocked out of this bill by the Hamas wing of the Republican Party, and their price apparently for letting the bill come back was to keep this out.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Yes, I do, Mr. Speaker. I would modify that to the wing that expressed they trusted Hamas more than the American Government.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California, and I want to join in congratulating his leadership, along with the gentleman from New York in the previous resolution on the Holocaust. In general, this is good legislation. As someone who represents a large number of Portuguese-Americans who are proud of the very strong, thriving relationship between our two democratic nations, I am pleased to see through the efforts of my colleagues the needs of the Portuguese Navy have been in part accommodated. But I am severely disappointed that this legislation continues a pattern of rewarding the Government of Indonesia, which continues to engage in some of the most oppressive and racist activities in the world in their maltreatment of the people of East Timor. Indonesia's record in East Timor is one of the great moral failings in the world, and unfortunately it is a further moral failing that the rest of the world stands back and allows the people of East Timor to be so oppressed. I understand that this is military and educational training. Theoretically just for civilians, in ways it is supposed to help. But you know when you are in East Timor being oppressed, when you are being killed or imprisoned by this brutal regime, the fact the people doing the killing and the Indonesians are a little better educated in civic values than they otherwise might have been is no consolation. I regret very much that this legislation continues that practice. Last year I offered an amendment to strike from the foreign operations appropriations bill all aid to Indonesia. The Committee on Rules did not allow it. I want to announce now that I and others intend to insist this time on our right to at least vote on that. It is bad enough that this Congress goes along with rewarding the brutal actions of the Government of Indonesia, but to deny us even a chance to vote for it implicates our own procedures in that unfortunate aspect, although obviously murder is a lot worse than our being able to vote. I am sorry it is not included here, and I pledge we will do everything we can to end the practice of rewarding the Indonesian Government until and unless it stops its brutalization of the people of East Timor.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the Chair. I would have been prepared to engage in a colloquy. The gentleman made insulting remarks, refused to yield. Now what he is trying to do is to prevent me from responding by deliberately flouting the rules of the House. It is not worth further discussion. What is worth further discussion is his blatant misrepresentation of the facts of the situation when he talked about Democratic tax increases. The tax increase of 1982 was a Reagan-Dole-O'Neill tax increase. So was the one of 1983. In fact, these tax increases came asked for, not just signed but asked for by Ronald Reagan. The notion that you are justified in making it harder to raise revenue because you want to reduce the debt is bizarre. As a matter of fact, when we were trying to save the Social Security system, we raised revenues in part for Social Security. I suppose you could have reduced expenditures to Social Security. I was not in favor of doing that. Maybe the gentleman is. But that is how you deal with it in this situation. Finally, the silliest thing I have heard today is to say that because the Founding Fathers required two-thirds in a couple of extraordinary circumstances, that must have meant that they wanted two-thirds in this one. Yes, it shows that they were perfectly capable of understanding when we required two-thirds, what extraordinary circumstances required two-thirds and when the general principle of majority rule ought to apply. They felt that for raising the revenues of the United States, majority rule ought to apply. That does not mean we cannot change it. We have a right to amend the Constitution. But to invoke the Founding Fathers so that you can say that they were mistaken seems very, very unfortunate. They decided we did not need two-thirds. The current Republican majority does not trust democracy, and therefore they want to make the amendment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I hope I have better luck getting a straight answer. When the gentleman said that it was the liberals who controlled Congress in 1982 that forced Ronald Reagan to have a tax increase, does he include in that the man who was then chairman of the Republican- controlled Senate Finance Committee, Robert Dole? The tax bill he is talking about in 1982 was passed by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate with Robert Dole as chairman of the Finance Committee. Was Robert Dole who passed that tax bill one of those liberals the gentleman is complaining about?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to follow the gentleman from New York, because he laid out what we are talking about: A political trick being played with the Constitution as a prop, and that ought to be beyond the pale. Mr. Speaker, what we have here is the most outrageous abuse of the procedures I have seen in 16 years. Here is what happened. This constitutional amendment was presented in a hearing to the Judiciary subcommittee on which I sit. At the hearing, the chairman of the full Committee on the Judiciary, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hyde], was unable to conceal his lack of belief in this amendment. He was quite critical of it. As the hearing proceeded, this was the original amendment which is still the one they plan to vote on in the Senate, it became clear under the amendment they originally presented, to go to a flat tax in the income tax, or to go to a sales tax, or to give the President the power to impose a countervailing tariff on a Nation discriminating against our project, all of those would have required two-thirds. There was some disagreement among the sponsors, but they agreed to that. So what happened then? Well, it was clear from listening to several of the Republicans on the subcommittee that they did not have the votes to get it out of subcommittee. So there was no markup on this in subcommittee, there was no markup in committee. Instead, a private conference was held with the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, who to his credit thought the original amendment was really stupid. And it was. Mr. Speaker, the hearing showed it to be stupid. It did all kinds of things, and I mean stupid in that it did all kinds of things the original sponsors did not mean it to do. So it has been totally changed. We now have an amendment before us which is wholly different than the one that was originally introduced. This amendment has had no hearings, because we had one hearing which showed a great flaw in the original amendment. They were so embarrassed and the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means said they cannot do this, so they came up with a whole new one. They did not learn from their mistakes. They learned if you are going to have a stupid amendment, do not have a hearing on it. Because this one did not have a hearing. They could not defend the original one in the hearing, so they bring this one forward, and it had no hearing, no markup, nothing. It came out of the private set of conversations. I talked to one of the sponsors of the bill today after it had been rewritten. He said I have not seen it yet. The chairman of the Committee on Rules quoted George Will. George Will wrote in his column supporting this amendment that the language of this version is problematic. George Will asks us to vote for a constitutional amendment that is problematic. Now, George Will, with whom I disagree, does not want to put problematic language into the Constitution. Obviously he thinks this is a good political gimmick and that is why he talks about it. Why else would he say pass something that is problematic? Here is one of the things problematic about it. It would require, according to the majority's own views, two-thirds to cut the capital gains tax. I heard a little colloquy before in which one of the sponsors of the amendment said, well, not necessarily. The Congressional Budget Office does not score it that way. Mr. Speaker, that was not an answer. Let me put this within the rules. That was not an answer consonant with the reality of the facts of the situation. The facts of the situation are that this amendment does not give CBO that authority. CBO is irrelevant. This amendment says by a method to be determined, we will require two-thirds if that method says that has got a reasonable chance of raising revenues more than de minimis. Never have we seen such imprecise language in the Constitution. I have more respect for my friends than to think they are serious about putting this kind of sloppiness into the Constitution. But it does show what a political game this is. But what they say is that, if it raises the revenues, well now, they believe every single sponsor of this believes that cutting the capital gains tax raises revenues. If you put up a board that reflected their views, that board would rule that it needed a two-thirds vote to reduce the capital gains tax. Now, I guess their view is this: They will be in control, a group that believes that reducing the capital gains tax will raise revenue will be in control, they will propose such a thing, and then they will set up a board which will rule contrary to their rule that it will cut the revenues. Obviously it will not happen. The reference to CBO was not a legitimate intellectual response, because CBO has no role under this amendment and the people who will be in control at the time that a tax bill is proposed will be the ones to deal with it. The fundamental problem we have is this: The right wing group that has taken over the Congress, because they are a majority of the minority, or a minority of the majority, but a very intense one, they have control; the ideological right wing group that has taken over has recognized that their viewpoint is not supported by the majority. The majority does not like their attacks on Medicare, their attacks on Medicaid, their attacks on the environment. It does not like those. The majority did not even like their tax cut. If you poll them, they said we are serious about balancing the budget, unlike some who want to use it as a game. What they are trying to do is change the rules, if they are successful, so the temporary majority they got in 1994 would continue to govern long after it has been repudiated at the polls. What this says is if the majority of the American people decide 10 years from now they would like to spend more money on the higher education, the environment, defense, or anything, tough. Because we, having gotten control now, will change the rulings. But even on those terms, they had a hard time coming up with an amendment. And this amendment, which has never had a hearing and never had a committee vote, which is problematic in its language, according to George Will, which would require you to get a two-thirds vote to cut the capital gains tax, is a disgrace.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, the concept is popular, but the problem Members cannot seem to get through their heads there is we do not deal just in concepts. We have to deal in reality. We are amending the Constitution of the United States. We are creating litigation, we are creating rights, we are dealing with the basic law. I did not imply that George Will was critical. I quoted George Will. He said the language was problematic. That is in response to the gentleman from Colorado, who says, and of all the silly arguments, I think this is the silliest we get today, oh, vote on the constitutional amendment; and you should vote yes, even if you disagree with it, because you leave it to the people. Of course, when we vote on the Equal Rights Amendment, that argument disappears. When we vote on a lot of others, that argument disappears. No, you are supposed to vote on it, whether you agree with it or not. Here is the problem: It will not get a fair hearing in the States because they cannot change it. The point I am making is on its own terms, it is stupid. It does not do what the gentleman wanted it to do. If we had a markup and a hearing we might be able to do that. The States cannot change it.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would say no, because we have not had the time to do that. We have not had a markup. You know, these rules that we have of hearings, and we have had no hearings on this language, of markups, these are not games. There is a reality to them. People that care about something come together and talk and bounce it off. I am not going to play the kind of game you play. No, there was not in the 2 weeks, all of which was recessed, during which we could see the new language, which replaced your original wholly inadequate language, your original language was repudiated on your side, so they had to come up with whole new language, it has similar kinds of problems, and you have studiously avoided subjecting any of this language to any of the legislative procedures that would test it. So, no, we are not going to be able to in this short period of time under this gun play that kind of game with the Constitution.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Regular order, Mr. Speaker. Please instruct the gentleman who refused to yield that he may not interrupt.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. No, I follow the gentleman's example, and I ask the Chair to please restrain the gentleman. The gentleman gets up, makes insulting remarks, refuses to yield and then tries to interrupt me when I am speaking. I am simply responding as he did under his rule. I would say this. First he talked about Democratic tax increases. The disrespect for facts is glaring.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, typical of the hit-and-run tactics of the gentleman, to make abusive remarks and then refuse to yield so I could respond.