Jim Greenwood

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I rise to welcome and to introduce our guest chaplain for today, Reverend Henry Eisenhart. He is the National Chaplain of the American Legion, and I want to thank him for his thoughtful words this morning. Mr. Speaker, I would like to tell my colleagues a little bit about Reverend Eisenhart. He is a lifelong resident of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Muhlenberg College with a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1942, and he was inducted into the United States Army Corps, where he served with honor and with distinction. He was part of the landing at Oran, North Africa on January 27, 1943. He was attached to the 51st Troop Carrier Squadron and the 62nd Troop Carrier Group. He served valiantly in some of the most desperate and critical battles, campaigns, and air offenses of the war in Tunisia, Sicily, Naples- Foggia, Po Valley, the Northern Apennines, the Balkans, Rome-Arno, and southern France. Following his discharge in 1945, Reverend Eisenhart entered the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Mount Airy, Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor of divinity degree in May 1948 and he was ordained into the Gospel of Ministry of the United Lutheran Church of America. He continued his graduate studies to earn a master of sacred theology degree in May 1952. Four congregations have had the privilege of being ministered by Reverend Eisenhart prior to his retirement in 1982. In retirement, Reverend Eisenhart's desire to serve has not diminished. He is a 36-year member of the Wallace Willard Keller American Legion Post 232 and he has been Post Chaplain since 1963. Additionally, he has served as Pennsylvania State Chaplain of the American Legion from 1989 to 1997. He was named chairman of the Patriotic Religious Memorial Service for the 75th National Convention of the American Legion held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1993. And most recently, he was appointed National Chaplain of the American Legion for the Legion year 1997-1998. I am not surprised, Mr. Speaker, that he received the ``Good Thing You Do Award'' for outstanding and dedicated services rendered to the Pennsylvania American Legion. It is fitting this morning that we honor Reverend Eisenhart for his lifelong devotion to serving his country, his community, and for his untiring service to the Word of the Lord. It is, thus, with great pleasure that I welcome the Reverend Henry Eisenhart to the House today and offer him heartfelt thanks on our behalf for leading us in prayer this morning as our guest chaplain.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The subject of H.R. 3096 is the Federal Employees Compensation Act. The Federal Employees Compensation Act is a good statute, it is an important one, it makes sure that when Federal employees are injured in the line of work that their lost wages are made up by the Federal Government and that their medical bills are paid for. It is a program that has been in place for a long time and it is one that we need to have, of course. There are some problems with this program in my view. We are now spending $1.9 billion a year to pay for the costs of 270,000 Federal workers. There are some changes that I will propose at a future date. We had a hearing on those changes this morning. But today, for Corrections Day, we are considering H.R. 3096, which unlike some of the other more controversial changes that I will propose, is noncontroversial and enjoys bipartisan support. The loophole that we are trying to close with this Corrections Day Calendar has to do with the following: Under the current law, if an individual files a valid claim for an injury during the course of Federal employment and then subsequently files a false claim or false follow-up information and is convicted and may even go to jail, under that scenario that individual can still, believe it or not, receive every 4 weeks a Federal workers' compensation check from the very funds supported by the taxpayers that that individual has defrauded. We are going to simply change one word, change the word ``a'' to ``or'' so that we make sure that an individual will be ineligible to receive workers' compensation funds whether they had committed the initial fraud at the first claim or any subsequent fraud thereafter. It is a good bill, it is an important thing do to make the system have a bit more integrity. It has bipartisan support. It is supported by the Department of Labor and the Department of Labor's Office of Inspector General, and I would urge an aye vote. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) for his bipartisan support of this legislation. I want to thank the full committee chairman, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling), and the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection chairman, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), for their support of H.R. 3096 and for moving it so quickly through the committee. I would also like to again express my appreciation to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Clay), as well as the Members on both sides of the aisle and, as well, the Corrections Day committee for their support of H.R. 3096. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp).

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 3096.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that in the engrossment of the bill, H.R. 3096, the Clerk be authorized to make such technical and conforming changes that will be necessary to correct such things as spelling, punctuation, cross-referencing, and section numbering.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. I thank the chairman for yielding, Mr. Speaker, and I thank him also for the opportunity to chair this task force. When Chairman Bliley asked me to chair the task force on the FDA reform, I did not know a whole lot about the FDA, not more than most people did, but I learned an awful lot. One of the things that I learned is that we are approaching what I think will be a golden age of medicine. We are making such incredible breakthroughs right now in biotechnology and genetic engineering, in pharmacology, in the development of high-tech medical devices, that I believe that we are going to give the next generation in the next century, as well as many of us, opportunities to defeat diseases that have plagued mankind for a very long time, and be able to relieve people from their suffering from these diseases. But central to this promise is the role of the Food and Drug Administration. The Food and Drug Administration exists for the very critical job of making certain that all of these miracle cures, all of these devices and drugs, are both safe and effective. The problem we discovered is that the agency had become bureaucratic, and the law that governs it had become antiquated and was not keeping up with this modern age of miracle cures. We set about the role of seeing if we could make the FDA work more efficiently, bring these cures to those who are suffering more rapidly, while still maintaining the golden standard of safety and efficacy. I also learned of some very human situations. I learned that I had a constituent whose name is Shelbie Oppenheimer. She is a hero to me. She is a 30-year-old woman who at the age of 28 was running a day care center and discovered that she had ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a progressive, fatal neuromuscular disorder that attacks nerve cells and pathways in the brain and spinal cord. There is no cure for it, but there is a new medication that can delay the onset of the disease and slow its progress. My constituent, Shelbie Oppenheimer, and her husband, Jeff Oppenheimer, desperately want her to have access to this medication. Mr. Speaker, it is my hope that this legislation gives Shelbie Oppenheimer the extra time and the extra hope that this new medication will provide her. I would like, Mr. Speaker, to dedicate this bill to Shelbie Oppenheimer and to all of the other Shelbie Oppenheimers around the country who are waiting for the Congress to reengineer the FDA so that it can approve these new miracle cures for them more rapidly. I am also pleased that the legislation that I had introduced separately, the better pharmaceuticals for children bill, has been incorporated into this reform package, so we can bring the miracles of modern medicine not only to adults, but to the children who up until this time were not the subject of trials. I would like to thank all of my colleagues and the chairman, the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Burr], the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton], the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Klug], and the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. Whitfield], for their assistance, and certainly echo the comments of those who have praised our very, very able staff.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the Senate bill (S. 830) to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Public Health Service Act to improve the regulation of food, drugs, devices, and biological products, and for other purposes, with a House amendment thereto, insist on the House amendment, and request a conference with the Senate thereon.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to express my support for H.R. 901, the American Land Sovereignty Act. Unfortunately, on October 8, 1997, when the full House of Representatives voted on final passage of H.R. 901, I, in error, cast a ``nay'' vote on final passage. Mr. Speaker, I had intended to vote ``yea'' on final passage for H.R. 901. I had assumed that when I cast my ``nay'' vote, that I was voting against a Miller of California amendment that would have weakened the bill. Mr. Speaker, only when I returned to my office did I realize that I made this error. Mr. Chairman, I have always been a supporter of the American Land Sovereignty Act and voted in favor of similar legislation that the House acted on in the 104th Congress. Furthermore, in the 105th Congress I voted in favor of several amendments, that were offered by my colleague, Congressman Coburn, to various appropriations bills, that would prohibit any funds appropriated in those bills from being used to support the U.S. Man and the Biosphere Program or the World Heritage Program. Mr. Chairman, I regret that I made this error and wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate my support for this type of legislation.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 395, I was inadvertently detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time and for his leadership on this issue. When I was in school I learned that one of the worst ways to confound logic was to use generalizations. Whenever we generalize, we make a mistake, and there has been a lot of that in this debate. My good friend, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra], talked with great passion about his concern that this language, the Castle language, would undermine communications in the family; it would somehow spread itself into our families. And yet here we are on the other side of this argument saying that is not the case. There has to be some reason why honorable people seeking the truth find themselves with a different perspective, and I think it is this: Roughly half of the teenage girls in this country are not sexually active before the age of 18. So if we take that population for starters, we are not having any effect on them. They are not sexually active, they are not going into clinics, and so the families are untouched by this. Of those who are, most of them never find their way to a family planning clinic. They are sexually active, but they do not begin that process by going to a family planning clinic. That is not how this process works. Usually what happens is, after they have been sexually active for about a year, they get scared, they think they are pregnant or they think they might have a sexually transmitted disease, and then they go into the clinics to find out. And when they are there, they find a counselor who says, let us talk about this and let us get your parents involved. And 55 percent of the teenagers who do go to the clinics, this relatively shrinking population of American teenagers, do involve their parents. So what we are really talking about is a very small fraction of America's teenagers, and these are the kids who are sexually active, do go to a clinic, do not involve their parents because they cannot. We have to make that distinction. Yes, most American families will not be touched by this. They do not need my help, they do not need the Istook-Manzullo amendment, they do not need Congress involved in this issue at all. But if there is any doubt in anyone's mind that there are teenagers in this country who are prematurely sexually active and have not the parental and family and church resources to guide them, let us take a walk out of this building and in 3 minutes we will find scores and scores and scores of those teenagers for whom the family values we have been talking about are nonexistent. The church resources, the community resources are nonexistent, and yet we know they are sexually active because all of the indicators show the results of the pregnancies and the sexually transmitted diseases. So, for God's sake, for those kids, for those kids that are not like our kids, support the Castle amendment and give them a hand.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. I have to begin by saying that my heart is with, in many ways, the makers of this amendment. My heart is with the gentleman from Oklahoma [Mr. Istook] and the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Manzullo], because I understand what they want to do. They want to protect our children from the elements of our culture that would undermine the values that we try to teach them at home. They do not want a world in which our kids are sneaking behind our backs and getting information that rightly ought to come from us. As the gentlemen know, I have two daughters. They are 10 and 12. My wife and I are engaged in this struggle every single day. We are considered the fuddy-duds in our neighborhood, I think, because my daughters are always saying, how come everyone has their ears pierced already and we cannot? How come everybody can wear makeup to school and we cannot? How come you will not let MTV come into the house? I called the cable station and I do not let MTV come into the house. So that is pretty square, I guess. We work real hard in our family on communications with our kids because we know that if we can establish communications about these issues, I stayed up late the other night with my daughter, 12-year-old, on the question of makeup. And I said, it is bigger than makeup. I will tell you what I am afraid about. I am afraid that people on Madison Avenue and people in Hollywood, in order to sell a product, are trying to create an image. And kids your age feel that if they do not fit that image that is provocative, 12 or 13 or 14 years, that there is something wrong with you. I am afraid of these people stealing your childhood away from you. That is why we have these discussions. We communicate like that every day in our family. If we succeed at this level when we are talking about pierced ears and makeup, then I think we will succeed when the heavy issues come like sexuality, going out to parties, and dating, and all of those things that have me scared to death already. The parents in America that succeed at doing this, for them this language is moot. It does not matter. We do not need the government, for those of us, for parents who have succeeded, we do not need the government establishing communications. We do not have to mail a letter, nobody has to mail a letter to me saying your daughter is over here because I am going to know what my daughter is doing, if I succeed. But we also know that really good parents who try hard do not succeed at this. It is hard to talk about. It is hard for any kid. Think of it yourself. How many of us can honestly say that when we were 15, 16, and 17 we could sit down at the table and talk about sexuality over dinner? Let us not pretend, by the way, that that is what happened in this country for 200 years. Silence was the order. But some parents will not succeed. And for those parents who also, just like I do, hope that our kids are abstinent and do not get involved in sexuality before they are mature enough to do it, we hope that they will be abstinent until they are 18, at least until they are married, that this is not an issue. But what we know is that 56 percent of young ladies under the age of 18 are already sexually active. And it is higher with the males, 73 percent. So what are we going to do about that? We know that that is going on. There are a lot of variables that determine whether a teenager is sexually active. It has to do with how they communicate with their parents. It has to do with how they respond to peer pressure. It has to do with what kind of a situation they are in. But do you know what does not have any influence on whether a kid is sexually active? The availability of birth control. They do not refrain from being sexually active if they cannot get birth control, and they do not become sexually active because they can. That is not the way this works. That is not the way the birds and the bees work. Kids become sexually active or they do not become sexually active for a lot of reasons. And the kids who can talk to their parents are in great shape. But if we tell kids who cannot talk to their parents and who are sexually active that we are going to send a letter home to mom and dad or you cannot come into this clinic and get contraceptive services, I wish that would solve the problem. I wish those kids would say, OK, no more sex. We are finished, cannot get the pill. I wish that that would work, because that is what the framers of this amendment hope happens. But it will not happen. That is not what happens. They continue to be sexually active. We know the story. They become pregnant; they get sexually transmitted diseases. They have no one to talk to. They have abortions. That is the bottom line. That is what happens with this language. None of us wants that. There has been a lot of criticism of family planning clinics in this country, a lot of talk about what has happened with the teenage pregnancy rate. It has gone down 8 percent since 1991. These clinics are working. We should protect the work that they do with the Castle amendment.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Shays], my good friend.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from New Jersey began his remarks by indicating that he found it disingenuous that those of us who have drafted this amendment would advertise it as an amendment designed to prevent abortion. The gentleman's argument seems to rely on a myth. The gentleman's myth is that there are two kinds of Americans. There are Americans who are opposed to abortion and want fewer of them, and there are Americans who want more abortions, who favor abortions. That is the myth, that is the damning myth that makes this debate so difficult to overcome. The fact of the matter is that there is one kind of American on this issue, and those are all of us Americans who want fewer abortions in this country and around the world. This language is offered as a compromise. We acceded to the gentleman's view on China because we share his concern about coercive abortion in China. We have a difference of opinion, probably, about what the effect of the American presence might be on that coercive abortion, but we acceded to that. That is a huge compromise on our side. Then we said this. When all the myths are put aside and we look at the real world, here is what happens in the real world. In a place like Kazakhstan, in a place like Romania, in a place like Russia, where family planning is not available, women have repeated abortions. It is a horror. It is bad for their health. It is bad for their mental health. It is no way to prevent pregnancy. It is no way to plan the number of children in a family. The language of the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Smith], unamended by that of the gentleman from New York [Mr. Gilman], says when you have that situation, fold up our American tents and go home; turn your head away, put it in the sand, do not be there, do not be part of the solution. Just let those abortions, let those Russian women, Romanian women, have abortion after abortion after abortion, the thing they decry with such passion. What our amendment says is we are going to be there. We are going to be there for one reason and one reason alone. That reason is to convert these women into women who will use contraception as a method of family planning, and not abortion. So there are two options on this vote. Members can vote against the gentleman from New York [Mr. Gilman], and they turn away from the rest of the world and they say, have as many abortions as you want, because we will not be there to help you with family planning, and you will have no other choice. Or Members vote with the gentleman from New York [Mr. Gilman] and the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Pelosi] and myself, the gentlewoman from New York [Ms. Slaughter], the gentleman from California [Mr. Campbell], and you say, we are going to be there to help those little agencies in those backward countries to enter the modern age, and empower women to plan the size of their families using contraception. Mr. Chairman, if we vote down the Gilman amendment, here is what will happen. We throw the compromise away. This language will be unacceptable to the Senate, unacceptable to the administration. We will be back here voting this over and over and over again. It will be the last thing that keeps us here. It will keep us here in gridlock, and we will be voting it in February. If Members accept this compromise, we will put this issue behind us. We will save women's lives, and we will move ahead.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter].

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California, [Mr. Campbell]. (Mr. CAMPBELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Maryland [Mrs. Morella].

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, we have heard the rhetoric once again. Members of Congress sitting here, standing here in the Capitol of the United States talking about this issue. On the other side of this amendment, mostly men, but this is not the real world. What really happens in the real world, whether it is in Kazakhstan, whether it is in Bolivia, anywhere around the world, a real woman, somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's daughter, somebody's wife is pregnant and she has five children or six children, she may have lost one or two to hunger or disease already and she is pregnant again because she has no access to family planning and she is terrified and she is determined to get an abortion. She sees that as her only option, rather than starve the children that remain at home. She is going to get that abortion. She is going to get it in some dingy little concrete, damp, dank clinic somewhere out in the middle of nowhere if she is lucky, or she is going to get it in a back alley of some faraway place, terrified, unhygienic, threatening to her health. That is the world. That is happening as we speak all over the planet every day. There are two things we can do about that. We can turn away. That is what the Smith language does. ``Go away. Don't be there. Let that happen. As long as we're not part of it, nothing we can do about it. It's not our problem. It's not our mother. It's not our sister. It's not our daughter.'' Or we can be there. We can be there with a few scant American dollars to turn on a light bulb in that clinic, to set up a desk, to put some pamphlets on the table, to have a human being with care to say to that woman, ``You do not want to come back here again under these circumstances. We want to give you the birth control pill. We want to teach you how to use a condom. We want to empower you not to have to put yourself or be put in this position again.'' That is what the Gilman amendment does. Please support the compromise.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York [Mrs. Kelly].

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Chairman, on rollcall No. 359, I was inadvertently detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the players and coaches of the Warrington Athletic Association Girls Softball Team which came in second this year in the Little League Softball World Series. These 11 and 12 year olds and their coaches worked extremely hard and exhibited outstanding team work first as champions of the Pennsylvania District 30 competition, then to the Pennsylvania State Championship, to become U.S. Eastern Regional Little League Champions. As the East champs they played the West and Central champs and the team from Latin America. The final challenge was two games against the Southern U.S. champions. The Warrington team won the first of those games in a come-from-behind contest. It was only at the very end that they were defeated by the South in the second game, and emerged as second in the world of Little League Girls softball. Second in the world is an outstanding accomplishment and I am proud to bring this team to the attention of this House. I extend them warm congratulations and the best of luck as they continue to play together. Team members: Jamie Ahrens, Heather Bloemker, Katie Crawford, Kimberly Garrano, Ashley Kelly, Nicole McLearnon, Linda Secka, Kip Crawford, Maryann Scarpill, Christine Alff, Jaci Borsos, Noel Darreff, Lauren Homa, Allison Morris, Jess Rankin, Cindy Spiecker, coach, John Rankin, and manager, Joe Spiecker.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, the juvenile judges of the juvenile courts in this country face a wide variety of young people. Sometimes brought before them are teenagers who already, because of the brutality of their upbringing, the deprivation of their upbringing, are so violent and vicious and predatory that they may in fact not be able to be redeemed or rehabilitated; and for the benefit and safety of society, they indeed do need to be locked away, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Other kids come before the courts who, because of their immaturity, because of lack of proper parental guidance, have done some stupid things, got in trouble with the law, and these kids need to be treated firmly, but they need to be treated fairly and we need to see that they are steered away from a life of crime. Some of the group of kids come before the courts because they have committed status offenses, something that would not be a crime if they were adults, but they are chronic truants, they run away from home. And they do that for a lot of reasons, and the courts need to decide whether this is a child who is simply incorrigible and needs some firmness, or whether this is a kid who is running away from abuse at home and needs to be protected from his or her own parents. This act needs to thread that needle. This act needs to balance all those considerations, and we in the Congress have to give the State juvenile court judges the latitude they need. I think we have done this, and I would like to commend the gentleman from California [Mr. Riggs], the chairman of the subcommittee, for his excellent work, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott], the gentleman from California [Mr. Martinez], the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller], and all the others. In all of our deliberations, never once did I feel that any of the participants were grandstanding or trying to politicize the issue. These are all Members who care deeply about children, and this product shows that and I would commend it to my colleagues.

Mr. GREENWOOD

Mr. GREENWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bliley] for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, I rise with great enthusiasm to support this reconciliation package. This is why I came to Congress, to balance the budget. Today is a historic day for this Congress. But I want to specifically refer to the children's health care package. The previous speaker somehow argued that children will be left uncovered by this bill as we in the Committee on Commerce have crafted it. To the contrary, what we have done is created the flexibility that the States need to provide Medicaid coverage, to provide direct health insurance purchases, and to provide direct services. And for those who criticize the provision of direct services, we must remember that if we did not provide children with direct health care services, those children would get no health care whatsoever. We need to trust our Governors, we need to trust our State legislators and allow them to meet the health care needs of their children in the way that best suits their States' realities. I support this package enthusiastically and encourage my colleagues to do so, as well.