Barney Frank

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, the argument we hear against auctioning off the spectrum to the broadcasters, as we have just heard from my friend from Louisiana, after all, they operate with public interest obligations. I have been here with him 15 years, and that is the nicest I have ever heard him talk about public interest obligations. The broadcasters successfully work to reduce those public interest obligations to mean virtually nothing. The only time they raise them is when they can use them as an excuse to get the superhighway, as the gentleman from North Carolina said, for free. I do not think that my friend from Louisiana believes that that public interest standard will ever be amounting to much. It is simply a flag they wave so they can get this for free.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. The one thing that surprises me is that the Republican Party has apparently, with regard to this question of how to use the new spectrum, so little confidence in the free market. We hear about the free market from time to time, but because a very valuable industry, the broadcasting industry, wants to get the first use of it for nothing, and that is what we are talking about, this valuable part of the spectrum, yes, the broadcasting industry will be allowed, for free, to do the experimentation, and then maybe at the end they will give back the other part of it. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from North Carolina was right. Whatever happened to the free market? Is not the best way to decide how to use this new spectrum that will become available, whether it is for digital TV or for some other purpose, to let us auction it off? Mr. Speaker, earlier it was said all elements of industry liked this bill. I have no particular beef with the industry, but I would suggest that when all elements of industry like the bill, probably the taxpayers and the consumers have reasons to worry.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I urge defeat of the rule. One, the need to dispense with the normal procedures is another example of rewarding one's own incompetence. The bill should have come out in time. The notion that we are ready to leave cuts no ice, because there is no reason why the bill could not have been out before. But I also have serious substantive problems with the bill. Indeed, I have always believed that self-denial was an important thing for leaders to show. But I think my Republican friends have gotten confused. Instead of self-denial, they have used this bill for self- repudiation. First we have the Speaker of the House who talked very loudly about how he was opposed to censorship. He was going to keep our electronic communications free of censorship. Despite that, we now have a bill which is heavily weighted with censorship. We have a bill which will interfere with free expression through the Internet and elsewhere. But there is another example of self-repudiation that troubles me deeply, and that is the decision by the majority leader of the Senate to abandon his very brief crusade on behalf of the taxpayers. I was very pleased when Senator Dole spoke out against a giveaway of access to the spectrum on the part of the Government to broadcasters, and I was briefly with the Senator. But I made the mistake of, I do not know, going to lunch. When I came back from lunch, I was alone on the battlefield, at least as far as the Senator is concerned. This is a Congress that has been making severe cuts in programs that deal with the economic needs of some of the poorest people in this society, and we have been told that we must rely more on free enterprise, less on Government entities and Government regulation, and people must be on their own. But It now turns out they forgot to say, those who said that, that they are for free enterprise for the poor and free enterprise for the workers. But when it comes to wealthy interests in this society, free enterprise is apparently a very scary thing. Because the broadcasters, among the wealthiest people in society with the largest concentrations of wealth, are to get for free access to the spectrum. I know there is going to be language and people have written letters which in effect say we are passing a bill that says one thing, but please let us pretend that what we say, we did not really say. I believe that the Senate majority leader was right to criticize the giveaway of access to the spectrum, and I think it is wrong to drop that out. I should note parenthetically we are apparently about to do the same thing with agriculture. Free enterprise for the poor, no subsidies there, no regulation when we are talking about the environment. But when we are talking about growing peanuts or sugar, oh, well, wait a minute, free enterprise was not meant for that. I hope this rule is defeated and taxpayers interests are vindicated in the protection of the spectrum.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, first I want to thank the gentleman from New York for pointing out that Ronald Reagan signed every appropriation bill, so the next time you hear people say this terrible deficit happened purely because of the Democrats, quote the gentleman from New York. Remind people that the gentleman from New York said that Ronald Reagan and George Bush signed every appropriations bill. No penny was spent during the Reagan and Bush administrations that they did not sign. As my friend, the gentleman from Maryland, points out, in some cases they wanted more spending. So every dollar in the deficit that we have was with the joint participation of Reagan, Bush, and the Congress. I appreciate the acknowledgment. Second, he said we needed this rule to keep the Government open. In the first place, a two-thirds vote would allow us to pass the CR today. If you were not trying to be excessively controversial, you would not need this rule. It is a two-thirds vote. So it is not that we need this rule to pass it today, we need it to do it without a two-thirds vote. Even more important is this point: Why are we at the point where we need to bring up a complicated policy-oriented continuing resolution and pass it the same day? It is because the other side has been too incompetent. They have been too incompetent to do it better than this. No; it is not good management to bring it up and vote on it the same day. They have created the crisis by shutting down the Government, by their own internal ideological turmoil, and now they come to us and say ``We are going to solve the crisis.'' They lurch from one self-created crisis to another, and then, like the arsonist who sets the fire, take credit for putting it out. It is a shambles of how to run the place. Mr. Speaker, I will say, I admire one thing about the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. McInnis. At no point has he defended this rule. He has talked about balancing the budget, he has talked about everything else, but in the last couple of conversations he has not defended the rule, because what we have is one more self-created crisis that the Republicans have tried to solve.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I was surprised to hear the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] say that there will be no more deficit spending with the Republicans in control. I had understood the Republican budget to accept the reality of the fact that there will be deficit spending for the next 6 years. The 7-year budget means that the deficit ends in the seventh year, but for the first 6 years of the Republican budget there is a deficit. So, to say that there will be no more deficit spending is to assume that we will go into a coma for 6 years and then come out in the seventh. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from New York did have a tougher budget. It is true. It was a very tough budget. That is why I believe a majority of the Republicans voted against it. But the key here is procedural and not substantive. I gather this is the first time the House has been asked, not at the end of the session when we are trying to clean things up, but at the very outset of a session to change the rules substantially to diminish the chance to discuss publicly major legislation. Mr. Speaker, this is doing away with the two-thirds vote. For a group that came in boasting about how open and democratic they were going to be, this is an extraordinary diminution of our ability as a legislative body to discuss things. And the reason for it is simple. I want to be very clear. I am not impugning the motives of my colleagues in this regard. I would not do it even if the rules allowed me, in this one case at least. I do not think they came intending to diminish openness and fairness. I do not think it was part of their explicit program to do so. But they have a problem. The problem is their own incompetence. They have been unable to do the business of the public sufficiently well to stick to openness. And authoritarianism is the result of incompetence. We will not have a chance fully to debate these issues because they are so disorganized, so unable to cope with their own internal divisions, apparently surprised, one of the things I have heard is Members on the other side have said, it is not our fault, there is something called the U.S. Senate, they have said. In the U.S. Senate they have something called the filibuster, and that has interfered with us. Some of us, a year or two ago, were urging that in our rules of reform we deal with Senate filibuster. We said we did not like it. Universally the Republicans said, no, you cannot do that. That is a bad idea. So they were the great defenders of the Senate filibuster when we last talked about rules reform. When some of us talked about trying to curtail the filibuster through the mechanism of rules reform, the joint rules, Republicans said that was a terrible idea. Now they are apparently shocked to find on it that this filibuster causes some problems. But the Republicans control the Senate and the Republicans control the House. And under Republican control, we have compiled the worst record in simply doing our job that I can remember. The appropriations bills were not passed. They were passed in November and December. They were all supposed to be passed by October 1. So how do they deal with this problem? They come in today with a resolution that substantially diminishes the ability of the American public to look at these things and hear them debated because they abolish the rule that says you cannot do them all in the same day. Part of the problem may be this and we have seen this from the Republican side. The Republican leadership comes up with a proposal and the Republican membership immediately attacks it. It may be that what we are being given here is an effort not to throttle the Democrats, not to keep the press out, but it may be that the Republican leadership has finally figured out that they cannot give their own membership time to read these things. Maybe they figure that Republican freshmen, being new to this place, will not be able to figure it out in a day. It will take them 2 days and they will have had it passed already. Because what they are saying is they should be able to bring up major legislation involving their failure to do appropriations bills and pass it the same day, not have that 1-day waiting period when it goes in the press, when it can be talked about on television, when the public has a chance to react. That is what we are talking about. What we are talking about now is the ability of, apparently, the Republican leadership to bring up legislation dealing with the appropriations and get it passed the same day, lest it be talked about. I have to say, since we are the minority, unanimously we do not have the votes to stop them from doing what they are doing. What they are afraid of are their own Members. What they are afraid of is the kind of, oh, we cannot do this. The problem is that there is a gap; there is a gap between the views of many of the Republican Members and reality. And their fear is that the Republican leadership, now that they have learned that shutting down the Government is disruptive and unpopular and in fact fiscally quite irresponsible, since it adds to Government costs, the Republican leadership does not want again to have a Government shutdown. But they have a problem, because they have difficulty in getting the votes on their own side and with their own colleagues to pass legislation that keeps the Government working. One way they have decided that they can minimize that difficulty is to reduce the possibility for public input, to reduce the chance for discussion, to speed this up. And that is why we have an extraordinary motion today from the advocates of procedural fairness and openness, substantially to diminish the time which the U.S. House of Representatives will have to discuss the expenditure of billions of dollars. I regret very much that they have not been competent enough and sufficiently organized within themselves to deal with the difficult task of governing. But I do not think that democracy ought to be the victim of that incompetence.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I hope we will vote this bill down. We are going to balance the budget. We are going to severely limit Federal spending. If you spend military dollars at the rate that this bill calls for, you inevitably will diminish substantially our ability to clean up the environment, to provide medical care for people who need it, to help provide public safety in our cities, to help deal with education for middle-income and working class students. There simply is not enough money to do both what this bill would do and that. Fortunately, the gentleman from California who heads the minority on this committee has articulately and eloquently over the years, and again today, pointed that out; and that leaves me free to focus on one of the most obnoxious aspects of this bill. I admire the fact that the President singled it out when he originally vetoed it. I am very disappointed that it survives. That is the legislation that says, if you are a young man or woman who volunteered to serve your country and you contract a terrible illness, the illness of being HIV-positive, your country will reward your volunteering and your good service by kicking you out. Any service you have accumulated will count for nothing if you are not eligible for a pension. Fortunately, the Senate intervened a little bit to temper the gratuitous cruelty of the House bill to say that you should at least get some medical benefits. But cruel it remains. What it says is, if you are someone who volunteered to serve your country, volunteered to join the armed services, but you become seriously ill with HIV, we will treat you as callously and as coldly as it is possible for a society to treat you. Out you will go. Out you will go. People who said, well, that about their ability to do things. The military now has the power to say, you have reached the point of disability, you must leave. This means that well before that point people who are HIV-positive will be subjected to this incredible, callous cruelty, and it means that there will be no chance that the military now has to reassign people, to make use of their talents while they are still in a healthy phase. The military has a knack for this. It is an example of bigotry that dishonors this House.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, on Martin Luther King Day I was very pleased to be able to attend a breakfast organized by the Black Professional Association of New Bedford, MA. The event was attended by hundreds of people, and was an impressive tribute to Dr. King. The main speaker at the breakfast was, very appropriately, Leon Dash, now an award winning reporter for the Washington Post, and a native of New Bedford Mr. Dash's speech was an extraordinarily thoughtful and informative discussion of the problems of teenage pregnancy. It reflected the painstaking and creative investigative work he has done on this subject, and indeed Mr. Dash's work represents one of the major contributions that anyone has made to our understanding of this important problem. The quality of the speech Mr. Dash gave is an indication of the high quality of the work he has done as a journalist and sociologist over the past several decades. After graduating from Howard University in 1968, he worked as a reporter at the Washington Post, and then joined the Peace Corps serving as a volunteer teaching in a rural high school in Kenya from 1969 to 1970. In 1971 he returned to the Post, serving from 1979 to 1984 as West Africa's bureau chief. At that point he joined the newspaper's investigative desk where he continues to work and where he does enormously important journalism. His book on teenage pregnancy, ``When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis in Teenage Childbearing'' was published in 1989, and he has also coauthored ``The Shame of the Prisons'' which was published in 1972. Last year, along with Washington Post photographer Lucian Perkins, Mr. Dash won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. He also in that year won first prize for print journalism from the Robert F. Kennedy Book and Journalism awards. And in 1990 his book received a PEN/Martha Albrand special citation for nonfiction work. He has also won the Washington Independent Writers President's Award for excellence in urban affairs reporting, first prize--Public Service from the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, the international reporting awards of Africare and the Capitol Press Club, and the George Polk Award of the Overseas Press Club. Mr. Dash has won a number of other awards as well, and they reflect the extremely high quality of his work, and his dedication to helping provide our society with the information we need if we are to deal seriously with the problems that confront us. Racism is the unhappiest legacy of our Nation's history. We have struggled hard with this terrible legacy over the past decades, and we have made significant progress in lessening its terrible affects. But much remains to be done, and our ability to continue this work in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, is enormously enhanced by the kind of serious, thoughtful and intellectually honest work that Leon Dash does. There is no greater service that someone can perform than to give to a democracy the information it needs if it is to deal honestly with its gravest problems. Leon Dash does this with excellence and commitment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I understand that the Republicans are frustrated. Watching the ``Gong Show'' they have been putting on today underlines that. But scapegoating when frustrated is not appropriate behavior. Mr. Speaker, this attack that is now coming on Secretary of the Treasury Rubin, and the preposterous suggestion that he might be impeached, has served no purpose except to cause serious problems in the bond market, because some of those people think that people on the other side might actually be serious, not having had firsthand exposure to them. Robert Rubin is guilty of doing his job superbly. He had a hearing before the House Committee on Banking. When the Republicans talked to him and asked him questions, they were not able to come forward with a single suggestion of anything that he had done inappropriately. I asked Republicans and their only objection was that we did not have their version of a balanced budget. Mr. Speaker, threatening to impeach an outstanding public official because they disagree with his having freed a hostage they have taken is one of the tactics that the Republicans ought to eschew. Why do they not go back to their fifth, sixth, and seventh CR instead?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, we do have a dispute, not about whether to balance the budget but how and by what specifics. But what the Republican Party has decided to do is to punish the American people because they do not like the way the President wants to balance the budget. The problem is that the American people in fact do not like what they are doing. So we get one more ludicrous version of an effort to get themselves out of the hole they dug. Basically this is a resolution that says stop me before I shut the Government down again. Except, Mr. Speaker, they do it incompetently. We had expected, many of us, a certain degree of fanaticism from the new Republican majority. I had not expected to see a somewhat new phenomenon, incompetent fanaticism, dysfunctional extremism. They want to do drastic things, but they do not know how to make it work, and the proof of that is that what they have come forward with is so repugnant that their own majority would not support it except under coercion. And let us be very clear. They have brought forward a parliamentary procedure that will prevent any reasonable amendment. Therefore the key vote on this will be the motion of the previous question. Some of the Republicans over there who are unhappy at laboring under the yoke of this ideological incompetence will tell their constituents that they wish they did not have to support this, that they would like to have voted to open the Government. Understand, however, that when they vote for the previous question on this rule, they will be acting in total variance with that statement. Any Member who says that he or she wanted to open the Government, but voted for this previous question, has in fact misrepresented what the situation is. It was made clear by the chairman of the Committee on Rules, Mr. Speaker, the only opportunity people will have to fully open the Government, let the Government function, will be to vote for amendments, which means defeating the previous question, and those Republicans who are telling their constituents one thing and vote another way will be held accountable in November.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, we are being given an extraordinary constitutional argument, namely that when the President of the United States exercises his constitutional right to veto, he is then to be held responsible for a shutdown of the Government. That is of course nonsense but it is confirmation of what we have here: people who want to make very drastic changes in public policy, who lack the two-thirds that the Constitution says you need to override a veto, who in the absence of the two-thirds want to hold the Government hostage. But even on its own terms the arguments fail, because the problem is that the appropriations bills, this one included, were not passed by this congressional majority until months after they were supposed to. We are in a crisis in part because of the absolute incompetence of the majority, which kept them from passing the great majority of appropriations bills for months, did not get any passed on time, or maybe one. That is why we are in this crisis. The Constitution allows the President to veto a bill, and then we have time for him to have the veto override considered, and then negotiations. When you wait 2\1/2\ months after the deadline and pass the bill, you have lost your right to complain about a veto.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, the Republicans have a problem. We are not simply talking about balancing the budget, but how to do it. They want to do it in a very extreme, radical way that does not appeal to most Americans. They want to cut Medicaid drastically, do away with a Federal guarantee for people who are sick and in need; they want to substantially reduce what Medicare would otherwise produce. They do that to increase military spending, to reduce taxes. They are in this dilemma. Here is the problem: they send the President their bills; they cannot pass the regular legislation, so they load up the appropriations bills. They do that 2 or 3 months late. The President then, as he is constitutionally entitled to do, vetoes them. What do they do? They take the Government hostage. They started out being for a line-item veto for the President, but then they realized Bill Clinton was president. Now they are not only not for a line-item veto, they are unconstitutionally trying to write the regular veto out of the Constitution. Because what they say is, if you do not accept our extreme procedures about Medicaid, about school lunches, about environmental protection, we will shut the government down. The problem, of course, is that they know that that is unpopular, and there is one thing we should be very clear about. One reason they are taking this elongated recess, they are afraid to let their own members vote. The chairman of the Committee on Rules, he announced last week he was very powerful. He said, people ought to be horse whipped if they disagreed with him on the ethics bill. Now what he is saying is that he will see that the Republicans cannot vote, because if we vote on a clean resolution to keep the Government open it might win. So they do not like the Constitution, they do not like democracy, they are not only taking the Government hostage, they are doing it somewhat incompetently. I wish this was not a game, but watching them, it appears that to them it is my. I am reminded of what Jim Breslin said in the title of his book, ``Chronicling the First Year of the Mets,'' and this is their first year of running the House: Can't anybody here play this game? Can't anybody here run this House? Can't anybody here keep this Government functioning?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I said of Medicaid.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Well, first, the gentleman was not listening, because that was addressed to me. I said cutting Medicaid and I said reducing Medicare from what it would otherwise produce. I agree it is more, but it would be a lot less than it would have been if you did not change the law.

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

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I said Medicaid. You will reduce it beyond what it would otherwise be.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, therefore, under the rules, I claim the 20 minutes to be allotted to a Member in opposition when both the other Members are in favor.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself my remaining time. My friend from Washington said they found some extra spending in the NRO and they dealt with it. They did. They spent it somewhere else in that same budget. That is a good example. The intelligence community hid a billion dollars from them. A billion dollars was being spent by the intelligence community and they did not know about it. And then they found out about it after the fact. Well, first, how many Federal agencies have the capacity to hide a billion dollars from the appropriators and the authorizers? The intelligence people did. and what was the penalty, Mr. Speaker? Well, the penalty was they could not spend it the way they wanted to. But that billion dollars did not go into deficit reduction or into other purposes, it went back into this cold system because they just think they need this money. I believe, in the first place, that when we talk about a 39-percent reduction, let us understand that that is differential accounting. Because when the Republicans talk about cuts or increases in future programs, they do not use real dollars. They do not take inflation into account. They use nominal dollars. It is only the national security budget that gets the inflation factor put in. But even if it is 39 percent, and let us just use that real dollar term elsewhere, and then some of the increases they talk about will become decreases in real dollars, but I believe the threat to the United States has dropped by more than 39 percent. In 1985, a fully armed Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, and that is gone, and Iran and Iraq and those other countries do not add up to 60 percent of the threat we had. Yet there has been a drop. It is also the case that 1985 was a great base year because that was after Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger and a very quiescent Congress gave the Pentagon literally more money than even they knew what to do with. 1985, of course, was the most inflated possible base year. I want to close by talking again about that billion dollars they hid from the Congress at the NRO. We have people today cold, endangering their health, because this Congress has refused to appropriate adequate funds for low-income home energy assistance. Let us be very clear. We have cut this back. There are elderly people and families in a panic because in this cold they could not heat their homes because we cut back the money. The billion dollars that they hid from us that we rewarded them by letting it be spent elsewhere is more than we are going to give people to heat their homes. Crumbs, small change in this budget are essential elsewhere, and this is an example of the worst kind of priority setting.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], because he will need that for his introductions.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the gentleman for that. I hope he has not endangered his standing as a member of the national security community prepared to help protect our secrets. But this is an example of the silliness. There are further examples of how this is not the best way to deal with it. We are talking here about one of the most fundamental issues facing this country. We are about to adopt a budget which will severely limit spending over the next 7 years. We are going limit overall discretionary spending. The amount we spend on national security, on intelligence and its various forms, on the military, and this is all intricately connected, will be a severe check on what we can spend elsewhere. The more we spend in this budget the less environmental protection we will have, the less we will have for education. It all becomes zero sum. In the past we would say to ourselves, well, when it comes to the national security, we will err on the side of safety because, after all, the very security of the Nation is at stake. We also have not been operating for many years in a limited zero-sum situation. We had a deficit, a continuing deficit. It was harder to argue then that an extra billion or two or three in this budget would come out of efforts at local enforcement where we supply money for communities to hire police officers, loans for people to go to college who could not otherwise afford to go, environmental protection. We use to be able to be more casual about this. But today every dollar that we appropriate for this and other national security measures reduces our capacity as a society to deal with other important public problems. Now, for many years we argued that we, if we were going to err, we should err on the side of spending money on national security because the very survival of the Nation was at stake. And it was. Beginning in the late 1930's, with the rise of Hitler and his allies and then after this Nation played a major role in defeating Hitler, beginning in 1945, with Stalin and his, not allies but vassals, we faced for 50 years outside powers that did not share our belief in freedom, that were regressive in their desire to diminish freedom elsewhere and which possessed the physical capacity to damage the United States. Fortunately, for a combination of reasons, by the early 1990's, that situation had changed, and one thing that this budget reflects is the view, and Members have said it time and again here, the world is no less dangerous today than it was 10 years ago from the standpoint of the United States. I cannot think of a single proposition less intellectually valid, less in consonance with the real facts in the world and more damaging to the social fabric of this country. In fact, there has been a qualitative increase in our security in the world. Yes; there are in the world today very unpleasant people running countries. You look at Iran, you look at Iraq, you look at North Korea and in a rational world the people running those countries would not even be allowed to drive cars. Sadly, they are in charge of countries. They make miserable the lives of millions, and if they could they would do great damage. But, collectively, they simply do not rise to the level of a threat of the United States. We fought a few years ago against Iraq. We were told, and some of us took that apparently more seriously than it turned out we had to, that there would be a terrible problem because Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world. We went to war against the fourth largest army in the world, and that war was over, fortunately, very quickly in a very, very one-sided win for the United States. Then we were told, even after Iraq, there are other countries that are a threat. There is Iran. Well, Iran is run by people who are appalling in their lack of respect for the rights of others. They are clearly people who, if they could, would substantially diminish freedom. But they have not got the capacity to threaten us physically. Iran lost a war to Iraq, which suggests to me that our fear of their overall power has been exaggerated. Again, we are talking now not about whether the United States ought to be strong, not whether the United States ought to be by far the strongest nation in the world with the best intelligence in the world, the best weapons in the world; the question is, now the Soviet Union has collapsed, that Russia is now a small part of what the old Soviet empire was, now that Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have moved away, now the Soviet Union itself has been broken into smaller parts, the nature of the threat has substantially diminished. Yes, there are still problems in Russia, but the capacity, and people in the military have always said, you do not look at the intention of the enemy, you look at the capacity, that capacity is rapidly diminishing. The Russians are now trying to sell their last remaining aircraft carrier to India, because they cannot afford to keep it up. Their fleet is in disuse and they are trying to sell that off. There has been denuclearization in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. The question is not whether America should be strong. The question is, and this is, as I said, the central proposition, those who are looking to prop up excessive defense spending, which comes inevitably at the cost of environmental protection and education and health care and other important needs, local law enforcement, local transportation, their argument is the world is no safer. They are wrong. There is a qualitative difference between the Soviet Union of 10 years ago, leading the Warsaw Pact, with its capacity to inflict absolutely terrible physical damage on this country, and, on the other hand, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Immoral societies, societies that oppose freedom, but which simply do not have the power. Members have said, you know, the military budget has dropped since 1990. Yes, it has. But the point is that it has not dropped nearly enough, given the drop in the threat. If, in fact, we were lucky enough to see cancer as an illness diminish in its scope the way the Soviet Union has diminished, I would predict you would see a greater drop in the National Cancer Institute. We do not spend a lot of money today combating polio. It is a terrible thing, but fortunately, we have diminished it. The problem is that military spending survives far after the threat has diminished, and the proof of that is that people who defend this level of spending, this relatively minor cut, talk about, and I really feel at a disadvantage, because, unlike the gentleman from Washington, the majority has insisted on keeping the number secret, so they are going to tell you they cut it, but they cannot tell you how much they cut it. But that is because they do not want to tell you how much they cut it, which is, of course, silly. But it also helps them keep it at a much higher number than it should be. We have got an overly inflated national security expenditure. The world is very different. As a matter of fact, what we are suffering from is a severe case of cultural lag. For about 50 years, from 1940 to 1990, it is true, this Nation faced, first from the Nazis and then from the Communists, physical threats to our very existence. Today the major international problem for Americans is not that we face a physical threat to our existence; it is that we face a threat to our ability to maintain the standard of life to which we have become accustomed in a world in which you can make anything anywhere with great technological change. That is the challenge. That is the challenge that is destabilizing France. That is the challenge that is causing grave problems in America, as company profits go up and workers are treated worse. The problem we have is that we are using tens of billions of dollars of our resources to act as if we were still under major physical threat from the Soviet Union or some comparable force, and depriving ourselves of the ability to deal with the current threat. It is a severe case of cultural lag. So, I hope we will reject this particular budget, because it is a reflection of the mistaken policy that says the world is just about as dangerous as it used to be. Let me say this. They said, you know, the world is just as dangerous because we have Iran, Iraq, North Korea. None of those countries, as I recall, sprang into existence for the first time in 1992. Eight or nine years ago we had the fully nuclear- armed Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and Iran and Iraq and North Korea. Now we have these smaller nations and we continue to pump it up. As far as the intelligence agencies are concerned, what are they doing? Well, they are into, we have talked about mission creep, they are into mission search. Mission creep is when you gradually begin to do more. Mission search is when you do not have enough things to do and you look for new things to do to justify your budget. So now we are being told we need them to do economic intelligence. Where are the free enterprisers? You want to have the Federal Government now serving as the economic research bureau of corporate America? These are people who are charged with protecting our national security. The notion that we will now transfer over and pay them billions of dollars to do economic analysis is hardly consistent with free enterprise, and also not a very good use of our money, since they are not going to be the ones you would reply on. Paying our highly trained intelligence force to be market researchers does not make a great deal of sense, but that is the direction they are moving in. I stress again that we do this at very specific cost to everything else. Every billion dollars we spend unnecessarily in this area means you cannot spend money on student loans, for working class young people to go to college; cleaning up Superfund sites, providing adequate transportation; providing health care. My Republican colleagues have said with regard to some of the cuts that are being made, we do not like to make them, but we have to, because we have the goal of balancing the budget. You make it much harder with this kind of legislation. To the extent you continue to pump unnecessary funds into the national security apparatus and do not recognize the extent to which there has been a diminution in the threat of a qualitative sort, you cause your own problems when you reduce spending in many other places. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the gentleman. As you know our former colleague, Mr. Glickman, now Secretary of Agriculture, I understand he is interested in trying to hide the number of agricultural subsidies. That is, I think, one that angers many more Americans, what we are going to pay the farmers to do whatever they want anyway. That is probably one they ought to hide and not this one. I acknowledge what the gentleman from Washington said. But the majority has enforced this rule. So the American people can know, I think I can say without fear of indictment, that we will be spending many billions of dollars in this bill. I think national security will survive by mentioning the figure, many billions. The American people will not know how many billions and how many less billions than we used to before.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I agree

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

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am afraid I have to differ with my colleague who just spoke when he said this should be a model for how to deal with important legislation. I do not think there is a less becoming example of how this Congress deals with fundamental issues than the way we have historically dealt with intelligence. First, let us underscore one point: One of the most important facts about this debate will go unuttered: How much are we authorizing? Because we have enforced upon ourselves an extraordinary stupid rule by which we cannot publicly say what the overall amount of the intelligence budget is, apparently because we think the enemy may know. Now, of course, virtually any enemy interested in being an enemy knows. What we do here is to keep this from the average American. There will be figures presented in the newspaper. They will probably be accurate. We will look the other way. It seems to me we bring a lot of disrespect when we wink at that. Actually, I was surprised when my friend from Washington said we were reducing the authorization this year. From what to what? We cannot tell you. How much? We cannot tell you. The American people cannot be trusted with anything as potentially dangerous as a number, but we can tell then we are reducing it. I am actually encouraged the Committee on Intelligence is telling us if we announced we were reducing it, we would be encouraging the enemy. I am pleasantly surprised. I do not think anything negative will happen. We are gong to see now. We have announced we are reducing it. I do not think the enemies are going to come forward.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I would inquire as to whether the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Dicks], the ranking Democrat, is in favor of this conference report and would yield to the gentleman for the purpose of answering that question.