Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I have introduced The Sexual Offender Tracking and Identification Act of 1996 with Senators Biden, Hutchison, and Faircloth. I would like, this morning, to talk a little bit about this bill, its origins and what it seeks to do. I begin by asking unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter of endorsement from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Mr. GRAMM. I thank the Senator. Let me say we are looking at exactly the problem of at what point should a juvenile go on this database. It is clear to me that, in the society in which we live today, by the time many of these hardened criminals, these sexual predators, are adults, they have already committed many crimes and have established a life style which they are unlikely to break. Senator Biden and I are working on these kinds of problems, and we will happily put the Senator on as a cosponsor. We would also be happy to try to incorporate into our bill any suggestions the Senator or his law enforcement officials might have. We have a blueprint of what we want to do, but we are very open to try to improve it, and I thank the Senator.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me begin with a tragic story, and then talk about a Texas law, what other States have done in the area of sexual predators, why what they are doing cannot work unless we do our part, and then outline what we are trying to do in this bill. Three years ago, a 7-year-old girl named Ashley Estell went to a park in Plano, TX, which is an upscale suburb of Dallas, one of the finest communities in America, and certainly we would assume one of the safest. She went to the park that day to watch her brother play soccer. Ashley's brother played in the second of three games to be played that day and while her parents stayed to watch the final game, Ashley went to play on a swing set. Although there were 2,000 people in the park that day, this little girl was, nevertheless, abducted, raped, and brutally murdered. The FBI stepped in to investigate the case, and asked parents who were there that day to turn in any video cassette recordings they might have taken of games on the playground. The FBI, using the 14 tapes that were turned in, was able to go back and identify a known sexual predator who had been there the day Ashley was abducted. They apprehended him, and after a change of venue to Midland, TX, he was convicted and sentenced to death. His record was a record that we read about every day in the newspaper--he had been previously convicted, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison, had gotten out in just 18 months, and then went to this park and abducted and murdered a little girl. What shocked Plano, the whole metroplex and, to some degree, the entire country, was not just this tragic crime, but the fact that the FBI, in looking at these 14 tapes, identified not one, but two sexual predators who were there in the park on that day. It turned out that the referee of all three soccer games played that day was a convicted sexual predator, who had fled from North Carolina to Texas to avoid being sent to prison for 10 years. One of the greatest tragedies was that the soccer league had no way of knowing who this person was and no way of checking his record. Further, there is no national database that can be used to check the records of anybody else who wants to be a scoutmaster for the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts, who wants to work for the Boys and Girls Club, or wants to be a Big Brother or Big Sister. And so, in light of this terrible tragedy, Florence Shapiro, an outstanding young State senator in my State of Texas, wrote a series of bills called Ashley's laws, named after this little girl. These bills sought, among other things, to set up a statewide tracking system for sex offenders, and required a minimum mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole for a second sexual offense or for aggravated sexual assault. Under the tracking system in Texas, before convicted sexual predators can be released from prison, they have to be photographed, fingerprinted, and have a file built on them. Then, when they leave prison, they have to register with law enforcement authorities in the town that they move into. The law enforcement authorities then notify the school system, print a notice in the newspaper, and make the data available to local civic organizations, local groups, and other groups where you have substantial concentrations of children. With this system, which is in place today, if somebody wants to be a scoutmaster in Plano, TX, the scouting council can go to the local police department and say, ``This person wants to be a scoutmaster. Can you look on your computer data base and see if there is a reason that we should be concerned about trusting young children to this person?'' This system has been set up in Texas, 46 other States have established similar programs, and I believe Texas' is a model system. The problem is, since each State has its own individual program, when someone commits a sex crime in Texas and moves to Arizona, there is no mechanism to pick them up in Arizona. The same, obviously, is true if somebody commits a sex crime in Chicago, goes to prison, gets out, and then moves to College Station, TX. There simply is no mechanism to pick them up once they cross State lines. Senator Biden, Senator Hutchison, Senator Faircloth, and I have offered a bill to change this by having the FBI set up, working with the States, a national data base on sexual predators. As the Presiding Officer knows, we are in the process of building a massive criminal data base which is expected to be on-line by the year 2000. This system will be the most comprehensive data base on criminals in the history of mankind. I was chairman of the Commerce, Justice, and State Department Appropriations Subcommittee last year when Florence Shapiro, our State senator, was writing her bill, and it struck me, in providing $88 million for this program, that this sexual predator effort is never going to work as long as sexual predators can move across State lines and escape the system. Needless to say, we are already beginning to get evidence which proves this. Even though most of these State laws are already in effect, it is becoming increasingly clear that exactly what you would expect happen has indeed happened; that is, sexual predators, in Texas and elsewhere, who are required to register when they move into a community are trying to escape this increased scrutiny. Although we do not have enough data yet to show this conclusively, I think it is increasingly clear that the interstate migration of convicted sexual predators has exploded as these convicts try to exploit the weakness of the current system. What we are trying to do in this bill is to have the FBI set up a national data base in conjunction with those States that have registration laws, and set up a data base for the three States that have not yet acted in this area, in order to develop a national system that all States can participate in as partners. Under this system, any time a sexual predator is released from prison, we will have a comprehensive file on them, and wherever they move we will ensure that the local law enforcement authorities are notified. We will leave it up to the State and local officials as to how they want to use this information. Some States, like Texas, have very aggressive programs which provide for school notification, public notification, and a program through which volunteer civic organizations can use the data base to determine whether someone should be put in a position of trust with regard to children. We do not get into telling the States how to use the data base, we simply assure that they have access to a nationwide sexual offender registry. Let me, in conclusion, provide an example of how this system might work once this bill is passed and the data base is operating. Let us say that in Tucson you had the principal of an elementary school call up the police chief and say, ``We have a strange guy hanging around our school, and maybe I am overreacting to this, but our janitor thinks he saw this guy looking into a bathroom window.'' What would happen with this system in place is that the police chief in Tucson could send a police officer out to the school, get a description of this individual, get any evidence there might be--a footprint, for example--and if they had a computer in the patrol car, they could actually put the data into the computer at that moment and ask the data base, ``Can you take this description and match it against any registered sexual predator within 25, 50, 100, or 1,000 miles of Tucson, AZ?'' The computer could then generate, for example, six people who meet this description, and produce color, digitized photographs of those individuals. These photos could then be immediately shown to the principal, to the kids, to the teachers, and to the janitor, and, hopefully, they could identify this person. In my State, it is a felony for a person who has previously been convicted as a sexual predator against children to be within a certain distance of the school whether they are still on parole or not, and so in Texas the police could go out and arrest this person and put them back in jail before they could hurt someone. It is important to note that sexual predators have a recidivism rate that is higher than any other known class of criminal activity. The probability that someone who is convicted of being a sexual predator, especially if it is a crime against a child, committing that crime again is estimated to be 10 times higher than the probability that an armed robber who is apprehended, convicted, and sent to prison will commit the act of armed robbery again. As a result, we have a special obligation to be vigilant in protecting society from sexual predators. Finally, I see this bill as being a first step toward using the power of the information age to deny criminals the one thing they need to prey on society, and that is a dark corner to hide in. I believe that with the explosion of the information age, if we are willing to commit the resources to hire and train law enforcement officials, to build prisons, and to elect and appoint judges that are serious about protecting society, we have the ability to protect our children from people for whom the preponderance of the evidence shows that they are guilty. I think the power of the information age in denying criminals-- in this case, sexual predators--a dark corner to hide in is going to give us the ability to have the safest society we have had in over half a century. I want to be certain that we take this opportunity to achieve these goals and I hope my colleagues will look at this bill and will join us in this effort. We hope to see this bill become law this spring and do not know of any organized effort against it. The ACLU opposed similar provisions in my State, arguing that we were violating the right to privacy of people who had previously been convicted as being sexual predators. My response to this charge, however, is that you do not have to be on this list. If you are concerned about your privacy, do not molest our children. If you do not commit a sexual crime, then you will not lose your privacy. But if you do commit this kind of terrible crime, part of our response will be to take extraordinary procedures to protect society. So I recommend this to my colleagues, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed as in morning business for up to 20 minutes.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, we have received last week the President's official budget for 1997 and for the next 6 years thereafter. I would like to take some time this afternoon not to do the standard presentation that we all make, where we take the President's budget and say what in it is phony, what is smoke and mirrors, and what in it has no hope of coming true? If people took the President's budget this year and did that, I think they could make a magnificent presentation because the President's budget is based on optimistic assumptions that things are going to get better without any change in policy to make them better. But that is not what I want to do this afternoon. What I want to do this afternoon is to talk about the President's budget proposal from a point of view that we don't use enough, and that is, if we assume that everything in the President's budget is valid, if every word in here is backed up by sound policy, if everything the President assumes will happen will happen, if we grant the President every benefit of the doubt, then let us look historically at the kind of America that this budget will produce. That is what I would like to do for a few moments here this morning. I would like to set it in historical perspective by using a series of charts. On this first chart I compare expenditures on national defense starting the day that World War II ended. So I look at the decade of the 1940's after World War II, the decade of the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, and then I look at the Clinton budget as projected for the next decade, in his own numbers. To simplify the comparison and avoid the impact of inflation or overall growth in the economy, I have decided to look at budget expenditures as a percentage of the total production of the American economy. So when I am going through these numbers, think of it as the Nation's overall income, the value of everything we produce and sell, and how much of that is going for these particular purposes. Looked at in this way, this chart shows that in the second half of the 1940's, from 1945 to 1950, 7.9 cents out of every dollar earned by every American was spent on national defense. As the cold war accelerated, that grew to 10.6 cents out of every dollar. It fell off some in the 1960's to 8.9 cents out of every dollar. In the 1970's and 1980's, it was 6 cents out of every dollar. If President Clinton's budget is adopted exactly as it is written, if every word in it turns out to be backed up by sound policy, and if everything it assumes will happen happens, under his policy we will, in the decade of the Clinton budget, be spending 3.4 percent of the Federal budget on national defense. There are several important points here. First of all, that is the lowest expenditure on national defense--3.4 cents out of every dollar earned by every American going to national defense--since the 1930's. Second, that is 43 percent less than we spent in the decade of the 1980's, and if every penny that has been cut out of defense had gone to deficit reduction, we would have a balanced Federal budget today. Let me state it in another way. The whole peace dividend for winning the cold war, which allowed us in real terms to spend about $150 billion less on defense every single year, every penny of the peace dividend has been seized and spent by Government. This is the first major victory in the history of America where the fruits of that victory--whether it was the Civil War, World War I or World War II-- this will be the first time in American history that when the conflict ended we did not give the money back to the people we took it from to fight the conflict. Every penny of the peace dividend will have gone to Government and will have been spent on nondefense programs. The second point I want to make is about social spending. Again, beginning the day World War II ended and for each of the decades, I have the percentage of all of the income in America that was spent by Government on nondefense programs, basically social programs with the overwhelming preponderance entitlement programs. Again, the level was 7.4 percent in the 1950's, it rose to 10.2 percent in the 1960's, rose to 14.6 cents out of every dollar earned by every American spent by Government on social programs in the 1970's. That rose to 17.1 percent in the 1980's and, under President Clinton's budget, if we met every savings proposal that he has, if all of his assumptions came true about saving money--and it would be the first budget in history where that ever happened--even under the best scenario, President Clinton has promised the largest expenditure on social programs in the history of the United States of America. By his own numbers he will spend 17.3 cents out of every dollar earned by every American in Washington DC, through the Federal Government, on social programs. So, when our President says the era of big Government is over, and when we are trying to assess what that really means, I do not know what he means when he says it but his budget spends 69 percent more on social programs, as a percentage of the income of all Americans, than we spent during the decade the great society programs began under Lyndon Johnson. Taxes: Beginning the day that World War II ended, the American people have borne the following tax burdens. From 1945 to 1950, on average, Americans paid 16.5 cents out of every dollar they earned in taxes to the Federal Government. That has steadily risen, and under President Clinton's budget, if fully implemented, we would have the highest Federal tax burden in the history of the United States of America. Under President Clinton's budget, if implemented, Americans would send 19.3 cents out of every dollar earned by every American, on average, to Washington to be spent by the Federal Government. Let me sum this up on these three charts. President Clinton's budget calls for the lowest level of expenditure on defense since World War II--since the 1930's, the highest level of expenditures on social programs in the history of the United States of America, almost 70 percent higher as a percentage of our national income than we had in the mid-1960's at the peak of the Great Society, and Clinton's own budget calls for the largest tax burden in American history. This is what the tax burden looks like if you plot it out, adding up State and local government. What you see by this chart is that, if implemented, President Clinton's budget would give us the largest tax burden ever borne by Americans at any time in the history of our country. The President talks about a tax cut in his budget, but what really happens in his budget is that the tax cut is sunsetted and ends while the tax increases continue. By the time you get to the year 2001, we have actually a tax increase in the Clinton budget. But now, to get down to why all this is relevant. What difference does it make that the Clinton budget has the highest social spending in American history? What difference does it make, other than to the taxpayer, that it has the highest tax burden in American history? What I have plotted here is economic growth. This represents the rate of growth in the production of income and opportunity and jobs in America. These numbers are very revealing. In the 1950's, the American economy grew at 4 percent a year on average. What that means is that in the aggregate, the average family in America was seeing its income grow by roughly 4 percent a year. In the decade of the 1960's, that grew to 4.4 percent, most of that growth in the first half of the 1960's. By the 1970's, it was down to 3.2 percent. In the 1980's, it was down to 2.8 percent, and in President Clinton's own optimistic assumptions, with his Government spending burden and his tax burden, his own budget concludes that, on average, for the next 10 years, we would have 2.3 percent economic growth, meaning that, whereas in the 1960's the average family could look forward to its income growing at 4.4 percent a year, under the President's program of taxing and spending, the average American family will be able to look forward to economic growth at roughly half the rate that we experienced in the 1960's. Why is that relevant? Let me give you a figure. If the American economy for the next 20 years grew at 4 percent a year, which is about the rate it grew in the fifties and sixties, rather than at the rate that it will grow under the Clinton budget by his own assumptions, that would mean that the average family of four in America 20 years from now, would have $40,157 more of income than they will have at President Clinton's growth rate. Why is this budget proposed by the President so destructive? It is so destructive because it is giving America a future that is shortchanging the people who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon in America. It is giving American families an economy that is growing at roughly half the rate it grew in the 1950's and the 1960's. What that means is that when families sit down around their kitchen table every night and they dream the American dream and they make hard choices to make it come true, only roughly half as many families are going to achieve the American dream under the Clinton budget as would have achieved the American dream if we could go back to the kind of economic growth that we had for the first 20 years after 1945. What really happened in the 1960's, and it happened roughly in 1965 when you look at the figures, is that America made a decision--a decision that was never debated and that there never was one single vote on it--but we made a decision that has profoundly affected our country. Prior to that point, for all of the 20th century, the American economy had grown at over 3 percent a year. From 1950 to 1965, the American economy had grown at over 4 percent a year. But beginning in the mid-1960's, we traded in an economy growing at 4 percent a year for a Government that has grown at 9 percent a year ever since. Since the mid-1960's, the American Government has grown twice as fast as the income of the average American family and, in recent years, three times as fast. The net result is we have had a decline in jobs, in growth, and opportunity. When you ask Americans, ``Are you confident your children are going to have a brighter future than you had?'' and when over 60 percent say no, they clearly perceive what is happening in America. I am opposed to the President's budget. I intend to work to defeat it. I intend to adopt an alternative, because I do not want the highest growth rates in American history for social programs. I do not want the highest tax burden in American history, and I do not want the lowest level of opportunity for working people in this country that we have ever had in the history of the United States of America. That is what this budget promises. Budgets represent a vision for the future. They define a relationship between the Government and the people. The relationship that is defined in the Clinton budget is a relationship of Government getting bigger, of Government spending getting larger, of taxes getting higher and of opportunity getting smaller. That is not the future that I want. Let me conclude by reminding my colleagues and anyone who might be listening that the President earlier this year vetoed a budget that balanced the Federal budget. The President vetoed a budget that, because it balanced the Federal budget, would have brought interest rates down by 2 percent, that would have saved the average family in my State in Texas $2,754 a year on their mortgage payments because of lower mortgage rates, and would have given an average family of four a tax cut of $1,000 a year which they could have invested in their own family, in their own future. If we had adopted that budget, we would not be looking at the lowest economic growth rate in American history. I think it is vitally important, Mr. President, that we reject the Clinton budget, not because it is phony, not because most of its figures are made up, not because the numbers do not add up--all that is true--but the reason we should reject that budget is because it does not paint a future that America wants. Americans do not want higher Government spending, higher taxes and less growth. They want less Government. They want more freedom. Our job is to see they get it. That is why I am opposed to the Clinton budget. That is why I am in favor of balancing the Federal budget by cutting spending. I thought it was important to come over today and talk about these numbers and give this speech because later this afternoon we are going to be voting on a spending bill that spends $4 billion more than we set out in our appropriations earlier this year. The President is saying that he is going to veto this bill because it does not spend $8 billion more than we set out in our appropriations earlier in the year. Somehow there is a disconnect between what we are saying in Washington and what we are doing. If we want the return of jobs, growth and opportunity--if we want to restore the kind of opportunity that was routinely available to America when the Presiding Officer of the Senate was growing up and when I was growing up--we are going to have to change the way we do business. We are going to have to spend less of the taxpayers' money in Washington, so that the taxpayer can keep it, so the taxpayer and the taxpayer's family can spend it, so that they can invest it in their future and, therefore, America's future. That is the difference between the Clinton vision and the vision of Republican Members of the House and the Senate. I yield the floor, and I thank my colleague. I want to apologize to him. During the speech of our colleague, Senator Gorton, I had walked into the anteroom, and he did not see me here on the floor. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Mr. SPECTER addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I believe this bill represents a significant break with the past. I think it does in a very real sense represent the changing of the guard. Might I say that I think it is long overdue. The last time we balanced the Federal budget was in 1969 when Richard Nixon was President, and it happened only because of a big tax increase that occurred in 1968--an income surtax. It lasted only for 1 year, and then it was gone. The last time we balanced the budget 2 years in a row where the budget was balanced by fiscal restraint by doing what every family and every business in America has to do every year was in the middle of the 1950's when Dwight David Eisenhower was President of the United States. In other words, we are here today changing the fundamental powers of the Presidency as they relate to the Congress and altering our system of the distribution of that power because for 40 years we have not been able or willing to say ``no.'' And because we have not said ``no,'' because we have said ``yes'' to virtually any organized special interest group with a letterhead, that has meant that families have had to say ``no'' on a constant basis. The problem is we have said ``yes'' to spending money when ``yes'' was the wrong answer, forcing families to say ``no'' to investing in their future and the future of this country, when ``no'' was the wrong answer. We are here today to try to change that. What does the line-item veto do, and what does it not do? The line- item veto allows the President to go inside an appropriations bill and to eliminate a program, a project, or an activity. He does not have the ability to change it. He can either say ``yes'' or ``no'' to the whole thing and strike it out, and then alter the budget total at the top of the page. This will allow the President to exercise leadership in controlling spending and to impose priorities. But, if the Congress does not agree and if there is strong disagreement, the President can be overridden. But what it does, no doubt about it--and the distinguished Senator from West Virginia is right--it changes the balance of power between the Congress and the President in one fundamental way: It gives the President enhanced power to say ``no'' to spending. It does not give him the ability to spend more money. It does not give him the ability to change priorities by partially altering spending figures. It enhances his ability to say ``no.'' It seems to me, Mr. President, after 40 years of living proof every day that our Government cannot say ``no'' when ``no'' is clearly the right answer, the time has come to change the system. This is a fundamental reform, there is no doubt about it. If you had a President who was honest-to-god willing to get out a pen and to veto, he could change America. And he could change it very, very quickly. Let us hope that the Lord will give us such a person. What is the problem with which we are trying to deal? The problem is not just this abstract idea of deficits. The problem is that in the mid-1960's, we fundamentally changed America without America ever knowing it, without an election ever being held on this subject, and maybe without Members of Congress knowing it. What happened is that prior to 1965, in this whole century, excluding the years of the Great Depression, our economy had performed very well. We had experienced an economic growth rate of almost 3.5 percent. From 1950 to 1965, our economy grew at over 4 percent a year. What that meant was new jobs, new growth, new opportunity. It created a situation through the whole of the 20th century, with the exception of 4 years during the Great Depression, where in almost every family in America parents did better than their parents, and they could be almost certain that their children were going to do better than they had done. Beginning in 1965, we traded that in for a Government growing at an average of 9 percent each and every year since. What has happened is this year the economy is growing at 1.7 percent. The average family's take-home, after-tax pay today is lower than it was in 1992. For the whole decade of the 1970's, the average working American family was worse off at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning because the economy did not perform, because we spent the seed corn of our economy here in Congress, and the President in signing appropriations bills had no ability to go inside those bills and strike items. So what we are doing today is trying to change a system that is broken. There are clearly people who love the old ways, who believe that Congress ought to have this ability to fill up bills with little add-ons that the President would like to veto but cannot veto without vetoing the whole bill. But I think after 40 years of failure, after 40 years of mortgaging the future of the country, after 40 years of lowering the potential living standard of our people, we have an opportunity if we would change the way Government does its business to guarantee that our grandchildren will be twice as well off as they will be if you continue business as usual. That is the ability to affect the lives of everybody in this country and everybody on this planet. It is the ability to give people the opportunity to escape poverty and fulfill their dreams. That cannot happen when Government is borrowing 50 cents out of every dollar. So we are here today to change it. This is going to be a fundamental, sweeping change in Government. My only disappointment is that it is not permanent. This is grandfathered, and what it will mean is that if we do have a President who actually uses it, my guess is we will not restore it to them once this expires. I had hoped this would be permanent law, but this is a very, very important bill. I commend everybody who has been involved in it. Let me conclude by just thanking some people individually. First of all, I thank Ted Stevens, who had very real hesitation about this bill. I thank Pete Domenici. Both of these men had real reservations when we started. This has meant a compromise for them, and I think, quite frankly, we have a better bill right now than we did when we started this process. I think they are largely responsible for it. But only because of their support will this bill become the law of the land. I thank Dan Coats and John McCain for their leadership. This has been a battle which has really raged for 8 years. Many people have despaired of it ever happening. But it did happen because we had people who cared strongly about it. I think it reveals the basic lesson of democracy, and that is intensity counts. If you have people who care very strongly about something and they do not give up, ultimately they succeed. I also thank the Presiding Officer, our distinguished assistant majority leader, for his good counsel in bringing people together and helping to push this matter to a final conclusion. It is interesting in that I think this is an old issue which has been debated a long time and as a result there is not the clamor which normally would surround a bill that is as important and momentous as this bill is, and that is a disappointment I am sure both to those of us who are for it and those who are against it in terms of its profound impact on America. There are very few things we have done in the last 4 or 5 Congresses that have a larger potential impact than the passage of this bill. I congratulate everybody who has been involved. I believe we are not only making history today, but we are making good history. That is something which does not happen very often. This is one more tool the President has, if the President wants to do something about the deficit. If we have a President who really wants to do it, all that President has to do is get one-third plus one in one House of Congress, sharpen up his pencil, and he is in business. I believe it is going to take strong leadership. I wish to conclude by remembering the words of Ronald Reagan when he asked for this power and said, ``Give me the line-item veto and let me take the heat.'' I was always disappointed we did not do that, but we are going to give whoever is President in January this power. We will see if they can take the heat. I thank the Chair and I yield the floor. Mr. BYRD addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I do not see anybody rising in opposition. If there is time, and if nobody wishes to speak in opposition to this amendment, I would like to speak in opposition.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, this bill started with a $4.8 billion contingency fund which represented our effort to buy the President into a budget agreement where, if he would agree to a budget--any budget, not just a balanced budget--we would give him $4.8 billion. But it seems since we started, we were overly eager to give the money away. We have already given the President about $3.3 billion by adding it right to spending, without even requiring a budget agreement. What I am saying here is, let us take this contingency appropriation out. If we have an agreement with the President, let us negotiate at that time. Let us not negotiate in advance. I thought we were trying to cut spending, not increase it. I do not understand how we balance the budget by giving the President $4.8 billion of additional spending. So I ask my colleagues to vote for this amendment.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I think we have reached the point of being ridiculous here. We have added $5.6 billion to Government spending right here in this bill. We are now so eager to spend money that we are no longer spending it this year, we are spending it next year. We cannot wait until next year to spend money on a program. We have to do it right now. What happened to the mandate of the 1994 elections? I am opposed to this amendment. I intend to vote against it, even if I am the only Member of the Senate that does. I am glad we have the yeas and nays. I hope it will be defeated.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be temporarily set aside so I might send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GRAMM. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I would like to go ahead and speak in opposition to the Cohen-Bumpers amendment, while we are here waiting for some resolution on other issues. Would that be in order?

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, what is the pending business?

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me remind my colleagues that the restrictions imposed in the Domenici amendment applied to all funds at the Legal Services Corporation, not just taxpayer funds. We have spent years debating this issue when the Legal Services Corporation has gotten involved in labor disputes, when the Legal Services Corporation has gotten involved in the politics of disputing election dates, when the Legal Services Corporation has become involved, basically, in political and partisan causes. It has often reminded me of an analogy you might have of the pastor of the First Baptist Church going to the Baptist student union and he discovers a brothel in one of the back rooms. The argument that would be made by the Senator from Arkansas is, ``Well, it just so happens that we didn't use the money from the Baptist Church for that room. Actually, only 80 percent of our budget comes from the Baptist Church, and that room was not part of the funds that came from the Baptist Church, and the electricity it used, and the natural gas for heating were not part of that budget.'' The point is, no pastor would ever buy into that logic. So when the Domenici amendment was offered, it recognized this problem and said, ``If you take taxpayer money, your job is to represent poor people, your job is not advocating political causes.'' That was the purpose of the Domenici amendment. If our colleague from Arkansas was willing to limit this to simply appearing before committees to ask for money, I might be willing to agree to that. But clearly he is not going to agree to that limitation. When you allow the Legal Services Corporation to be involved in all of these activities based on a written request, what you are doing is circumventing the limitations that we imposed in the Domenici amendment. So, we first get the money by saying we are going to restrict the activities, and then we come back in a second amendment and we take the restrictions off. It seems to me that those who voted for the Domenici amendment basically had put together a deal that they wanted the money, the money was supposed to go to help poor people get legal services, and they were willing as part of that to have strict limits on what the Legal Services Corporation could do with its money. It could not lobby, it could not be involved in political activities. There were a series of other restrictions that were included, including restrictions not just on the Federal money but all money commingled with it. We are now seeing an effort to undo that. I am opposed to it. I think this is bad policy. I do not know where the votes are, but if this amendment is voted on, and I intend to vote against it. Mr. THOMAS addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, this appropriations bill has an extraordinary provision in it. In fact, I am not aware that a similar provision has ever been in a bill that I have seen considered in the Congress. This is the contingency provision whereby we seek to bribe the President to enter into a budget by saying we will give him $4.8 billion to spend if he will enter into any budget that we will agree to. Mr. President, if such a proposal were made by a private party, they would be subject to being sent to the Federal penitentiary. I do not understand, if our objective is to lower spending and balance the budget, how bribing the President with additional funds will get us closer to home or closer to the achievement of that objective. I know there are many people in this body who are committed to the principle that somehow if we will just give the President enough money to spend, he will do what we want him to do. It seems to me that he will take the money and spend it, and we will end up not doing what we want to do. The problem is, what I want to do is not spend the money. We, in trying to bribe the President by giving him $4.8 billion, are, in essence, using as the bribe the money that I want the President to help us save. Now, we have adjusted this contingency fund because we decided on an amendment offered by Senator Specter to go ahead and give him $2.7 billion now. So the contingency fund is actually substantially lower than the $4.8 billion. The point remains: We need to be cutting spending, not increasing it. While I am very much in support of working out a budget agreement, I do not believe that we are going to succeed by giving the President more money in return for reaching a budget agreement, when we hope the budget agreement will spend less money. It seems to me a contradiction in terms, movement in the wrong direction, and wrongheadedness. Might I say, it shows how we have lost our way in this Congress. If anybody told me when the Contract With America was passed, when we sent it to the President, that we would be now, several months later, offering to give the President $4.8 billion of new discretionary spending authority if he would simply agree to any budget--there is no requirement in this bill this budget be balanced that he would agree to. If he will just agree to any budget with us, we will give him $4.8 billion. As I said, the number has been slightly adjusted because we decided not to wait until the agreement. There was such excitement about spending this money that we took $2.7 billion and decided to go ahead and spend it, not to even wait on the contingencies. I assume this amendment will not be adopted. But I want to give people an opportunity to vote to strike this contingency fund out. It seems to me that we ought to be cutting spending, not increasing it. And if we have trouble getting the President to agree to a budget, it seems that the solution is to make these temporary spending bills tighter and tighter and tighter, until the President will finally realize that it is in his interest, as well as the country's interest, to agree to a budget. So I urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GRAMM. I suggest the absence of a quorum. Mrs. BOXER addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. I object.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, we have had an amendment offered by Senator Cohen, on behalf of himself and Senator Bumpers. What their amendment does is it seeks to empower the Legal Services Corporation to engage in commenting on public rulemaking, testifying before legislative committees, briefing regulators and legislators on pending bills and legislation. Let me try to give our colleagues a little history of where we have come from, because I think this is typical of the problem we have in dealing with an agency like the Legal Services Corporation. When the Commerce, State, Justice bill was reported out of the Appropriations Committee, I am proud to say that we killed the Legal Services Corporation. In subcommittee, a level of funding for legitimate legal aid was entered into as a compromise, and the bill came to the floor. Then Senator Domenici, the Senator from New Mexico, offered an amendment to restore the Legal Services Corporation and provide more money for it, but as part of that amendment he restricted what the Legal Services Corporation could do. Those limitations were not as great as those that we had coming out of committee, but the point is, in that amendment he banned the Legal Services Corporation from lobbying and from engaging in the process of debating rulemaking. I remind my colleagues, the objective of the Legal Services Corporation is to provide legal services to poor people. As we all know, the Legal Services Corporation has become very heavily involved in public policymaking. The Legal Services Corporation files lawsuits against election dates, they file lawsuits involving numerous areas where people are trying to engage in their relationship with each other, and they have become very heavily involved in lobbying and in testifying before committees and doing other things that have nothing to do with their narrow mandate. Senator Domenici offered an amendment to raise their level of funding, which I opposed. I spoke against it. We had a long and spirited debate on it and I lost. Senator Domenici's provision prevailed. It provided more money, but with strict limits on what the Legal Services Corporation could do. The appropriations bill that is before us adds $22 million for the Legal Services Corporation above the level agreed to in conference. In addition, in the contingency section of the bill, the Legal Services Corporation would get another $9 million. Now we have an amendment by Senator Cohen and by Senator Bumpers that seeks to lift the restrictions on the Legal Services Corporation. Granted, there is a figleaf which seeks to differentiate between what Senator Domenici has done and what they are doing, and that figleaf is that it allows them to do these things if anyone asks them to do it in a written request. Mr. President, that is obviously going to happen. This amendment is going to eliminate the restrictions in the Domenici amendment, and my colleagues who offered this amendment both voted for the Domenici amendment. So, what we are saying here is we had a debate about killing the Legal Services Corporation. That was successful in committee. An amendment was offered on the floor that said, ``OK, we'll give them this money, but only under strict limitations to see that they do what their mandate is.'' That amendment was adopted. As far as I know, all the supporters of this amendment voted for it. Then we came in and added another $31 million to Legal Services Corporation in this bill, and now we are going back and lifting the restrictions so that the Legal Services Corporation will be able to spend the money on lobbying largely unencumbered and can, in fact, get back into exactly the kind of activities that the Domenici amendment at least claimed to prohibit. Could the Domenici amendment have been adopted had this provision been part of it? My guess is it could not. I do not know where the votes are on this. I am opposed to the Legal Services Corporation because I think it is a runaway Government program which spends entirely too much time and energy and money promoting political and social causes that are not part of its mandate. We live in a great free country. If someone wants to promote their views and philosophy and values, they have a right to do it, but they do not have a right to do it with the taxpayers' money. I thought we had restrictions that were reasonable under the Domenici amendment. We are now in the process of lifting those restrictions. I am strongly opposed to this amendment and hope to see it defeated. I yield the floor. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, this is a very simple amendment. This amendment tries to eliminate the need for an emergency designation in this bill. We are adding $1.2 billion to the Federal budget deficit by declaring an emergency, but by eliminating the need for an emergency designation and cutting other discretionary spending accounts across the board by .53 percent, we have an opportunity to fund these so- called emergencies but do it in a fiscally responsible manner where the deficit does not go up. Let me try to make my case. Let me make it as succinctly as I can, and then give others an opportunity to respond and oppose as well as to support. First of all, since 1990, we have passed $80 billion of emergency supplemental appropriation bills. In some cases, like the Persian Gulf, we have been able to come back and offset that with payments from foreign nations. But just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this loophole that we have created by declaring emergencies, in 1994 we declared an emergency for the California earthquake and the Midwest floods, and we spent $11 billion which was added directly to the deficit. In 1993 we declared an emergency for Midwest floods and added $3 billion to the deficit, with funding also for the drought in the Southeast. In 1993 again we added $1 billion to the deficit with an emergency for Somalia. In 1993 again we declared an emergency for economic stimulus as a supplemental appropriation and added $4 billion to the deficit to extend unemployment benefits. In 1992 we declared an emergency and spent $9.3 billion for two hurricanes, one on the mainland and one in Hawaii; and then for Typhoon Omar. In 1992 we declared a dire emergency to fund the costs incurred for the Chicago flood and for the riot in Los Angeles. I remember being in the conference and I moved to strike a provision where we were declaring an emergency to fund lawyers to defend the rioters. Fortunately, that provision died because people were shamed out of it. In 1992 we had another dire emergency. I could go on and on, but I think I made my point. My point is we have a lot of emergencies around here. I want to remind my colleagues that families have emergencies, but I want to go through what happens when a family has an emergency and what happens when the Government has the emergency and explain the difference. Families have emergencies. Let me just offer an example. Johnny falls down the steps and breaks his arm. He is taken to the hospital and it costs $700 to set Johnny's arm with the attendant medical expenditures. The family has had an emergency. If this family were the Federal Government, the Brown family would say, ``Well, look, we have already planned that we are going on vacation this summer. We have already planned that we are buying a new refrigerator. We have already set our monthly budget. This is an emergency, we cannot pay for it, so we are just going to add it on to our spending.'' That is what we are doing here. But that is not what the Brown family does. What the Brown family does is they go back and say, ``Well now, look, we have incurred an expense of $700 because Johnny broke his arm, so we are not going on vacation this year. We had planned it, we had written it in our budget, but now we cannot afford it because we had an emergency. Johnny broke his arm.'' In fact, the definition of an emergency in this case is something they have to spend money on and so they have to take it away from another purpose. They may decide they are not going to buy a new refrigerator. It seems to me that we can have a procedure that is exactly analogous to what families have to do, by saying we have an emergency, we are going to provide $1.2 billion for many worthy objectives, but to pay for it we are going to take all the other nondefense appropriated accounts and reduce them across the board --and let me remind my colleagues, we have in the supplemental a defense expenditure. We offset every penny of it. We only have emergencies in nondefense. We do not have an emergency in defense in this bill, though we have had them in the past. We generally do not have them. And we do not have one here. So, what I want to do is for nondefense accounts, in a simple across- the-board procedure, what we have done with specific accounts in defense. If someone wants to come up with a substitute that cuts specific programs as an alternative, I am willing to look at it. That, basically, is what my amendment does. Let me explain why it is so important. The American people got the idea that we were trying to do something about the deficit when we passed the Contract With America. The President has vetoed the Contract With America. We are now under a continuing resolution which is a temporary funding measure. We have a bill in front of us that already spends $2.3 billion more than that temporary funding measure spends on an annual basis. So, if we pass this bill, rather than simply rolling over that bill through the end of the year, we are going to spend $2.3 billion more than simply rolling over the continuing resolution would do, in any case. But let me remind my colleagues that yesterday all but some 16 Members of this body voted to increase spending by $2.6 billion. In fact, we had an interesting occurrence and that is our Democratic colleagues said, ``Let us increase spending by $3.1 billion.'' One of our Republican colleagues said, ``No, let us increase spending by $2.6 billion.'' Congress decided on the $2.6 billion and with great fanfare we had offsets. The problem is, these offsets have already been counted in the budget. We counted $1.3 billion in savings for the sale of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation. That is basically a corporation that enriches uranium. But the problem is we have already counted that $1.3 billion in deficit reduction in the budget that we adopted. But since that budget and the bill flowing from it has been vetoed by the President, we were able to do that yesterday. To pay for this new spending, $2.6 billion adopted yesterday, we sold off portions of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The problem is we had already decided to sell it as part of the budget. So what we really did yesterday is added roughly another $2.6 billion of spending. So we are already talking about spending almost $5 billion more in this bill than if we extend the current short-term continuing resolution. I think it is important that at some point we stand up and decide to stop spending money we don't have. It is one thing to write a budget setting out good intentions. But it is clear to a blind man that if you look at the pattern that we have followed with these emergency designations, it has turned into exactly what many of us feared it would when it was put into the 1990 budget summit agreement. It has turned into an agreement whereby the President and the Congress conspire to cheat on the budget; conspire to increase spending above the level we set out in the budget. In the process, we have these budgets that do not look so bad, but when we count how much money is actually spent we end up spending beyond the budget. What I am offering our colleagues is a great opportunity to save $1.2 billion. Somewhere in the sweet by-and-by there may be a budget that is adopted. The President may accept it. On the other hand, he may not accept it. So we may get through this whole year not having saved a penny anywhere. I can give you an opportunity tonight to save $1.2 billion. The only person I know who knows how much money that is is Ross Perot. We can save $1.2 billion by doing what the Brown family would have to do if they had an emergency, and that is cut programs we were going to spend money on to fund the emergency. And my proposal is a very simple one. We remove the need for an emergency designation so that it is not an emergency, and we have an across-the-board cut in all other nondefense discretionary accounts by 0.53 percent to pay for it. Let me remind my colleagues, we have spending in the supplemental for defense. We offset every penny of it with cuts. Why should we not do the same in nondefense? That is the purpose of the amendment. It is very simple and it boils down to one question: Do we want to spend money we don't have? Or do we want to move toward a balanced budget? I am giving you an opportunity tonight to save $1.2 billion. I hope we do not miss this opportunity and I yield the floor. Mr. SANTORUM addressed the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.