Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. There are five of us, so our share of the national debt is $100,000, and next year it is going to be $103,000. It is going the wrong way.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If we really think about it, a debt of $20,000 per person, and I am a family of five, meaning that my share of the national debt is greater than my mortgage.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What the gentleman is pointing out is that with as much progress as we have made since 1995, there is still a lot of reason to be cautious. There is still a lot of work to do. There are people here in Washington who are saying, wow, look, $60 billion surplus going up to $110, let us go spend. Let us spend it on this program or let us spend it on that program. I think my colleague, perhaps in his next chart or one of the charts coming up, is going to talk about when the President came here for his State of the Union speech and spent most of the surplus that we really do not have. There is still a lot of work to do to get to a real surplus and to begin preparing for the deficits that we are going to be facing in 2013 in Social Security. So there is still a lot of reason to show restraint as it concerns spending here in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Right.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, in the last 2\1/2\ years, we have had the opportunity in the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to travel around the country having 17 hearings in 17 different states, trying to understand what is going on in education at the local and at the State level. It is because of that background that I rise in support of the amendment of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) that he is bringing forward. We have heard from the local level, from parents, from administrators, from government officials, that what they need is they need more flexibility to better serve their students. We also took a look at how Washington today is establishing priorities. We have 760 programs spread over 39 different agencies. What do we have in math and science? Is that a priority that we have clearly established? We have 63 different math and science programs, that is according to GAO, math and science programs. They are not all within the Department of Education. The National Science Foundation has multiple programs. NASA has three programs. EPA has three programs. The Department of Energy has three programs. I think we have come far enough in mandating to school boards and mandating to officials at the local level what they need to do in their classrooms. What this program does is it begins to step back and say that real accountability and real responsibility needs to be focused at the local level. We have a chart here that talks about what Washington says America's schools need, and over the last number of years, that is exactly what we have been doing here in Washington. We say, we have identified this need, we are going to have a program, and we are going to mandate that you do these types of things, whether it is teachers, and we hear a lot of talk about 100,000 teachers; whether it is math and science programs. Whatever the issue, in the last number of years, the response has been, Washington will develop a program, we will give you the answer, you will implement what we tell you to do, and then you will report back to us and tell us exactly what you have done. Mr. Chairman, what we lose in that whole dialogue is we lose the focus of the child and the education that they are getting. Point of Order

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the Chairman. When we are talking about this amendment, we are talking about whether philosophically we believe that Washington ought to be mandating to the local school level what needs to go on in the classroom and how those dollars are spent, or whether there will be a degree of flexibility at the local level to meet the needs of the children. Point of Order

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the Chairman. If this amendment and the other amendments do not deal about flexibility, do not deal about the degree of latitude that a local school district has, I am not sure what the debate is about. But what we have done in Washington is said, you will do these types of things and you will not have the flexibility to do the other types of things. We have 63 math and science programs today. We can, in this one instance, perhaps allow the local level a little bit more flexibility in how they are going to spend their dollars to meet the needs of their children. We have 63 math and science programs. Those go along with a whole range of other programs designed to meet the needs of the children. Let us move flexibility back into the local level, rather than sticking with mandates.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I believe that the gentleman has already interrupted me 2 times, and due to that lack of courtesy, no, I do not think that I will yield. I would like to continue, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, what we have found is that as we go to the local school districts, we find that they have lots of needs. Some have needs for professional development in the area of science and training; some have needs for special education dollars; some need computers. What we need to do is we need to follow the Ehlers amendment.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Absolutely.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we have the commitment then not only for how we spend the current dollars, the 1.6-1.7 trillion, but then we also have the commitment that our colleague was talking about, the promises that they inherently believe that we have made. I mean, every week they are paying 12-13 percent to Social Security and Medicare, expecting that somewhere along the line they are going to receive a benefit from that. But we know from all the surveys that most young people do not believe they will ever see a penny of it, and that means that we are not really keeping the faith with the people that are paying those taxes today because they do not believe that they will ever get it, that we will ever solve, if the gentleman will fetch that chart back up, as my colleague knows, they do not have a degree of confidence that we are going to take care of that blue part of the chart.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, I think what our colleague has pointed out is the awesome responsibility you have. As my colleagues know, at the Federal level, at the State level and at the local level we are going to working Americans and saying: The first 40 cents you own of every dollar is ours. So, Mr. Speaker, we have got an awesome responsibility as to how we spend that money, how we spend it today, and also the commitments and the promises that we make. So, as my colleagues know, we are in many ways making a lot of choices for those people on how their money is going to be spent because we have taken it from them, and we do not give them a choice as to whether they are going to use it for education, for homes, for an investment or for their retirement.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think the other thing that we have to take a look at is now is a wonderful window of opportunity. Much like we did a couple of years ago when we did the balanced budget agreement, we can and we found common ground, we did it with welfare and when we found the common ground, we were able to move forward and 3 years later we are finding out that those programs have been very successful. When we worked to cut spending, when we worked to do the budget agreement, we said we can get to a surplus by 2002. Under those rules, we were there in 1998. Now I think we can apply that same kind of creativity in a much different environment because we have made so much progress on spending, we can take that creativity and apply it to Social Security and I think the values and the principles that the gentleman was articulating are exactly what we want to do. We want to make sure that we don't impact seniors' benefits. We want to really restore the integrity of Social Security for 50 to 75 years. We want to make real progress on those issues. The other thing that we know that we can do is that we can make a lot of other progress. The interesting thing is we get to a surplus, is that we forget about the $1.6 trillion that we are currently spending and we naturally assume that all that money is being spent wisely. Today in the Education Committee we marked up what we call an ed flex bill which is going to allow the States a much greater degree of flexibility. Why? Because when they get involved in reporting back to Washington from a State or a local level every dollar that we collect in taxes for education, only 65 cents of it reaches a child. And that if we apply the same kind of creativity to that $1.6 trillion that we are spending today, we open up all kinds of opportunities to better educate our kids so that no child will be left behind, that we then would have room for Social Security, to save Social Security, and then if we really are serious about taking a look at that $1.6 trillion that we are spending today, we would also have room for tax cuts, by saying we can get the same impact for education. We took, and my colleagues are both familiar with this, on Education at the Crossroads, 39 different agencies administering something like 700 programs, losing 35 cents of every education dollar to bureaucracy, not to educating children. Just think about changing that process and focusing on the kids. We can get 35 percent more Federal money into the classroom just by taking a look at the process here and saying, it is not the process that is important, it is not the bureaucracy that is important, it is our kids that are important and we are going to get there. This is really a wonderful era right now that we ought to grasp and we ought to take a look at every issue. We ought to save Social Security, but we cannot forget about going back and taking a look at the $1.6, $1.7 trillion that we spend each and every year.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Show me the money, and out the door it goes. Again, we have kind of set the priorities in the wrong place, because we have said the first place the money goes is to us, this generation, this generation of citizens and this government in Washington. And, really, what we ought to be doing is we ought to be taking care of the sins of the Congresses in the 1980s who built up this $5.5 trillion debt. We ought to take care of those sins and start paying down the debt. I agree with the gentlemen. In my district people are saying, nobody is talking about paying down the debt. They say we are talking about reducing taxes, we are talking about more spending, but nobody is talking about paying down the debt. We ought to take care of the sins of the 1980s and start paying down the debt. And when we do that, that is good for seniors, because we strengthen Social Security; and that is good for our kids, because it takes this $5.5 trillion debt off their back.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, I just wanted to thank my colleagues, number one, for doing the special order and for, number two, inviting me to participate in this process. I am part of the Committee on the Budget, and as we enter the next couple of weeks the decisions that we make are going to be critical. Do we stay within the spending caps, the agreed-upon level that a couple of years ago we said we can live within this; that we can get done what we want to get done in Washington if we spend at this level? I know a couple of years ago some of us had a very difficult time voting for those spending caps because we thought it was too much money. We said we need to get to a surplus quicker and we ought to rein that spending in a little. But as part of a bipartisan compromise, the President coming to the table, our colleagues on the other side coming to the table, we said, all right, we will give, we will let us have a little more spending. And now we get to 1999, the economy has been good, Washington has been collecting more in taxes than what we expected we would, and the first inclination here in Washington is, times are good, let us spend it.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, I just want to make one point that I do every time. I have had a lot of meetings with seniors in my district because I wanted to start with seniors because I want to make it very clear to them that what we are talking about. We are not talking about, if you are getting a Social Security check today, we are not talking about changing their system. As my colleagues know, they are not going to next month or next year get a letter saying, you know, you have got this money and you have to figure out how to invest it in these kinds of things. No. If they are on Social Security and they are getting a check today, we are not messing with that. What we are doing is we are talking about how we are going to save Social Security for our kids and for our grandkids, and it will be a transition process. It is not going to affect you. It is probably not even going to affect people who are 60 years old today. It is going to affect the people who are younger than that who are going to have time to understand any changes, will be a dialogue with them. We will process through these types of changes, and we will not jeopardize their Social Security either. But for the people who are getting a check today, it is not going to change.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, I think, and also as we take a look at it, I do not think there are any proposals here that are saying take all of the Social Security money and do that with all of the Social Security funds. It is most of the proposals, if not all of them, are very modest proposals to take advantage of the exact benefit that the gentleman is talking about, and they all have structured in them protections for the individuals who will be on Social Security so that they will not get less money than what they get today but will have the opportunity to earn higher returns and have a higher payout when they get to be 65 or 67.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The opportunity is here today to do that.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague for yielding. As part of my work on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, I chair the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and in 1998 we went to the GAO and we asked them to take a look at paperwork as it affected America's businesses. They came back with a proposal, and they were going to take a look at companies in the State of California, to take a look at the Federal laws and the overlay of State laws that would affect a business within that company. They would take a look at the compliance requirements flowing from the Federal and State laws. They would take a look at the types of assistance that was available to different firms. And then they would take a look at the impact of workplace and tax laws, the impact that they would have on human resource operations. What did they find? Well, in the State of California they found that there were 26 key Federal statutes that would impact a small- or medium-sized business. Interestingly enough, they also found that there is no single public agency, State or Federal, that would coordinate or provide a single point of contact for these small businesses, no single place to go to to get an understanding of, as a small business person, what do I have to do and how do I comply with the law? What did these managers tell the GAO? Here are some of the things they said: Rules and regulations from the Federal Government are ambiguous under the law. They are constantly dealing with shifting sands. It means the regulations or the impact or how they are interpreted evolve over time. What H.R. 391 does is it starts to deal with these kinds of issues. It would put all of the rules or a comprehensive list of all the Federal paperwork requirements on the Internet, a single place to go to to get the information. It would offer small businesses compliance assistance. They go to a small business and say, we are going to help you comply with the regulations. Establish a paperwork czar. A single point of contact for small business so that there would be a place to go to to get an understanding. And finally the most important might be that we would get a process that would outline streamlined requirements for small business.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, too often, our staff employees get little or no recognition for the work they do to keep this body functioning. They are the unsung heroes of this institution. Today, I would like to say a few words of thanks to one of those heroes. A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Cynthia S. Harrington has worked for Members of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1973. Cindy began her tenure as Office Manager and Administrative Secretary to Congressman Ronald A. Sarasin of Connecticut, then moved to the office of Congressman Robert Davis of Michigan in 1979. She worked as Congressman Davis' Executive Assistant until 1993, when I had the fortune of hiring her as my Executive Assistant when I joined Congress. For the last six years, Cindy has been one of the constants in my office--booking my flights, scheduling my meetings in Washington, paying the bills and generally making sure I was where I needed to be at any given point in time. After 25 years of service to this institution and the American people, Cindy is leaving us and moving to the private sector. She will be working part-time for the CATO Travel Agency and will be spending more time being a mom to her 7-year-old daughter, Jessica, and spending more time at home with her husband, Lee, and Jessica. I expect she will continue to be active in her church and at her daughter's school as a classroom volunteer and on grounds projects, as well as with her daughter's Brownie troop selling cookies. So, in closing, I just want to say, ``Thank you, Cindy.'' Thank you for helping a newcomer in 1993 become an effective Congressman today. Thank you for helping me get home to my family every weekend. Thank you for making sure we all got paid. Thank you for serving the American people for a quarter-century. You will be missed.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today we are faced with strong evidence that the President lied after swearing an oath to tell the truth. We have only one legitimate remedy in front of us, impeachment. So with great remorse, I will vote in favor of impeachment. Some people have said that impeaching the President is an extremist or radical position. To those people I must ask, is holding the President accountable for his actions extremist? Is expecting the President to tell the truth radical? I submit to this House that the rational position and the moderate position is to hold the President of the United States as we would any other American accountable to the law. Impeaching the President is something none of us should take lightly. However, neither should we shirk our duty to uphold the laws of our country and hold the President accountable for violating those laws and abusing his powers.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding, and it is good to be here to pay tribute to my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Harris Fawell). It was in 1993 that I came to Washington for the first time, and I believe out of that class of 47 Republican freshmen I was the only one that said my first choice for committees is to serve with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling) and with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Fawell) on the Committee on Education and Labor. That was at a time when we were looking for people to serve on that committee. And I have never regretted that decision, because it has enabled me to work on a couple of issues that I have a passion for, education and labor, but it has also enabled me to work with, I think, some very good people here in the House of Representatives, the chairman being one and Mr. Fawell being the other. But since Mr. Fawell is the one who has decided that he is going to leave the rest of us here to fend for ourselves, I think now is the time to express my appreciation to the gentleman from Illinois for the work that he has done. I came here new to the legislative process, new to the process of understanding America's labor laws, understanding the spending habits of this Congress, and Mr. Fawell has taken the time to take many of us through that process, to outline for us what was good in Washington, areas that maybe we ought to take a closer look at, and also being very articulate in pointing out the things that were not right here in Washington. I want to give my colleagues a couple of areas where I think Harris really helped us as new Members. Harris has been here for 14 years. We thought in 1993, the class of 1993 and 1995, that we were the real people that broke the mold; that we were going to be the ones that were going to take us to a balanced budget, and I think, in many ways, we helped do that. But to be able to get to that point, a foundation had to be laid, and a foundation had to be laid by people in the 1980s and early 1990s that highlighted the information and put out in public view the information that said the American government is too big and it spends too much and here are some examples. Harris Fawell, through his efforts in Pork Busters, laid that foundation. The rest of us were able to build off that foundation. It was, what, just 6, 7 days ago that I think we reached the objective that Harris has been fighting for for 14 years, where we closed our books and we will have a surplus for the time since 1969. Harris Fawell has been instrumental in making that happen. Harris, you can leave with the knowledge that you have created a foundation; that we have a surplus that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 to $80 billion. And we now need to build off the work you have created to start paying down the debt, to start reforming Social Security to make sure we can save it, and to start to reducing taxes. But without the work that you did in the 1980s, we would not have been able to move and tackle these issues now in the 1990s. For the last 12 months I have had the opportunity to travel around the country and take a look at reforming American labor laws; what works and what does not work. At the same time, we could talk to Harris Fawell and get much of that information, because Harris understands the types of reforms that we need to make in America's labor law to make sure that we are the most competitive country on the planet today. He has been a champion. He has championed not only some of the reforms that we have seen, but some of the activities that were so important in the company that I worked in in the private sector. I think the best example of that is the TEAM Act. Harris has taken the lead in making sure that we pass legislation that really unleashes the potential of every American worker by allowing them to be more fully engaged in their workplace and working together, and taking 1930s and 1940s era labor laws and saying there is a new way to do it, there is a better way to do it, and this is one of the things that we need to do. So, Harris, you have been a champion on the TEAM Act and a number of other labor reform issues that I hope that the next Congress can move forward, and we can take the vision you have had and we can implement those types of ideas to ensure that we will be competitive into the next century. No discussion about Harris Fawell would be complete without talking about ERISA. This is the challenge that I believe the chairman feels, that I feel, that I know the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger) feels, and that is who is going to take us through the world of ERISA. We always knew that whenever there was a discussion on ERISA and what the implications of a legislative or a policy change would be, as our eyes might kind of glaze over and say we do not quite understand all of this, we always knew that there was a person that we could go to who knew the ins and outs of a very important and a very complicated piece of legislation, but who could give us a very clear, not necessarily always concise, but when we had a question, we knew we could go to Harris and we knew we could get the right answer. Now, the good thing here is I have had the opportunity to talk to Harris and ask him how we are going to get through this, and Harris has said he is going to be more than willing to come back and take us through that mine field and make sure that we continue doing the right thing, or at least we understand what we are doing. But, Harris, you have been a wonderful colleague. You have taken the time and energy necessary to take someone new through the process. You have taken your time and energy to teach us what you have known. And I hope that you have taught us well, I hope that I have learned well, so that I can take this with me into future Congresses and we can continue to carry forward much of the visions that you have had. Thank you very much for your 14 years, and congratulations on some great work here in the House of Representatives.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. He actually did not say that.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time, I believe the other thing that we learned and why you and I are so confident of this alternative vision, a vision that returns power back to the local level that focuses on parents, that focuses basically on academics, that focuses on getting dollars back into the classroom is the wonderful success stories that we saw wherever we went whether we were in L.A. and we saw Yvonne Chan in her charter school, whether we were in San Jose and saw the technology school, whether we were at the school that we saw in Colorado or the one in Nillageville, there are tremendous success stories and there are tremendous people involved in education at the local level who are doing phenomenal things with our kids each and every day, and what they are asking for is they are asking for a little bit more freedom from Washington so that they can do what they know they want to do for their kids versus what Washington is telling them they have to do, and they are saying: I will do what you tell me to do, but, boy, if I had the freedom, there are some other things that I really would like to do in my school, and when you take a look at the success stories and what the commitment of the teachers and the administrators and the parents at the local level, it is: let them go, give them the freedom, they are accountable. Teachers and administrators at the local level, they are not accountable to bureaucrats in Washington, they do not even know their name. They are accountable to the parents, and the kids and the school. Let us make that accountability, the one that we are really focusing on, and that is what this will start in enabling us to do.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming my time, we will be able to start moving towards the vision that many of their colleagues in 1979 had for the Department of Education. It is a vision Mr. Dodd had, it is a vision that Mr. Bayh had, it is the vision that Mr. Levin had. This is an opportunity to focus on kids, not on bureaucracy and to get dollars to our children and to their classroom. I thank the gentleman from Colorado for not only participating in this special order this evening but for the help that you have been in the last 18 months as we have gone around the country and as we have studied this issue, as we have had the 22 or 23 different hearings, and being there to go through a learning process with us to find out what is working and what is not working in education in America today. It has been a tremendous process. There has been tremendous learning, some great things and some frustrations, but we are making progress, and I think we can move this education bureaucracy in the right direction to really help kids. I thank the gentleman for being here tonight.