Fritz Hollings

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield 1 minute to the distinguished Senator from Wisconsin and the remaining 2 minutes and 5 seconds to the Senator from Connecticut.

Mr. HOLLINGS. How much time do I have remaining, Mr. President?

Mr. HOLLINGS. The Senator is not leaving the party, is he? Is he going to join me?

Mr. HOLLINGS. Well, he said Republicans.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I am sure he did.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Right.

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. So the Senator from New Mexico, under the best of the best dismantlers of Government, President Ronald Reagan, made the motion that we terminate these programs. In other words, what he did was take the Reagan spending cuts. Everyone has said, ``Oh, if they only took the cuts.'' They have claimed that Congress went ahead with increases in defense and other programs, but never enacted the cuts like we were supposed to do. We tried with a sense-of-the-Senate. Do you know how many votes they got? Mr. President, 14 votes out of the 100. So we have a track record. We have tried it before, 10 years ago. We will try it again. But we have to face the facts as the facts face us. We could not get it done then and I am sincerely concerned that we will not get it done now. But that is no reason not to try. I am not trying to mislead the colleagues. I am willing to consider every spending cut offered by my colleagues. But my colleagues must realize that every dollar in savings we fail to achieve through spending reductions, we must make up through taxes. With a 5-percent VAT, we can get the job done. We had eight votes for this particular initiative in the Budget Committee. The distinguished Senator on the other side of the aisle from Minnesota, Senator Boschwitz, and the distinguished Senator from Missouri, Senator Danforth, joined with the Senator from South Carolina and we were conscientious about our charge. And none of us wanted to vote for taxes. If you want to run for reelection on this particular platform, do not come to South Carolina. I tried it, and barely survived. I was known as ``High Tax Hollings'' for putting out such proposals. Nowhere did the press say I was trying to cut interest taxes. Nowhere did the press say I was trying to cut spending. You cannot get that explanation on a 20-second sound bite. So they take advantage of the printed Record and they distort what you are trying to do. If we exclude the trust funds, cut spending by $406 billion, and enact a 5-percent VAT, we can finally eliminate the deficit by 1999. Even then, though, we will still have annual gross interest costs of $368 billion--that is more than a billion a day--on interest costs on the debt. So interest taxes are still on automatic pilot. It is not until the year 2002, when you have dropped from $368 billion to $354 billion, that you have finally have gross interest costs on a downward path. But it has to be done. I have one sheet of paper here that outlines the scope of the problem. Here it is. This does not include the billions necessary for middle-class tax cuts. Both sides have been misguided in pandering to the middle class. Brother, this is no time for middle-class tax cut revenues. The only way to stop spending on automatic pilot, the only way to stop raising interest taxes is to make the spending cuts you can and to raise taxes. I have outlined one way of doing it. I am going to introduce this amendment but I want to remind my colleagues what we have created is a matter of record. It is what the distinguished Presiding Officer has come into town to confront. We were here and we went through this charade. We dignified it with a commission. This Senator went through with it with President Richard Milhous Nixon. He said get rid of the Government and send it back in block grants. Then came President Reagan and he had appointed a Presidential Advisory Committee on Federalism and the Coordinating Task Force on Federalism. This Senator, at the appointment of the distinguished President, served with other Senators. I ask unanimous consent that we have printed in the Record this list of commission members.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Now, Mr. President, if you want your knees to buckle, read that. Dick Armey is right. If you want your knees to buckle, read that one, or listen to the discretionary cuts. I would not favor half of these. I probably would not favor 70 percent of these cuts. I have not gone down and said what I would cut. I am trying, as I would, when I was chairman of the Budget Committee, to pose to the colleagues here the art of the possible. Here is what is necessary. Here is what has to be done. And then, assuming it is done, the key point here is those are 1996 outlay amounts. That amounts in 1997 to only $58.407 billion in cuts. If you look at 1997, you have to have $74 billion in spending cuts, so you are still $16 billion shy next year when you work on the budget. The same will be true the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that. You see, this is what my colleagues have to understand. If they do not put the budget on a glidepath to zero now, you will always be playing catch-up. The next thing you know, you'll be moving the targets. Now, let us not talk fancifully. I will never forget, Mr. President, when the distinguished Senator from New Mexico--we all act like government started up when Gingrich came to town. We have been in government for quite a while, and several items in the contract, of course, we not only have favored, we cosponsored 10 years ago. The line-item veto. I used the line-item veto as a Governor 35 years ago. So it is not an invention in a contract. Last year, the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, Senator Bradley, and I tried again. We got 53 votes. The idea is separately enroll individual items so the President can veto legislation like we do at the State level. Many of these so-called new ideas have been tried before. Back in 1986, the distinguished chairman and ranking member of the Budget Committee got nettled in the debate because colleagues on both sides of the aisle were chastising him saying, ``Why don't you put in the cuts? Why don't you put in the cuts?'' So in a fit of, let us call it, sobriety, the Domenici-Chiles modified amendment was introduced expressing the sense of the Senate that some 44 programs be terminated. And I will ask that the list be included in the Record. You hear the same song in the Contract With America. We are going to do away with the ICC. We are going to do away with weatherization assistance. We are going to do away with the community services block grants and the travel and tourism administration. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that those programs be reprinted at this particular point in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the distinguished Chair. I thank the distinguished managers of the bill. Mr. President, I want to talk about the biggest unfunded mandate of all, which is not just interest costs on the Federal debt, but the entire Federal budget. We just heard--and I want to join the leadership of the distinguished Senator from North Dakota and the distinguished Senator from Nevada in their concern relative to interest costs. I will momentarily put into the Record a table that will show my colleagues exactly where we are. Prior to that, let me speak to some of the problems facing our Nation. We are really in crisis, Mr. President, with respect to our fiscal situation and also in crisis in our cultural situation. We all know the litany: There are some 40 million Americans in poverty. Some 10 million are homeless, sleeping in the streets; another 12 million children are hungry. The cities are a cesspool of crime and violence; the land is drug infested; the schools have turned into shooting galleries. Even more alarming, we now find that of those between the age of 17 and 24, 73 percent cannot find a job out of poverty. In sum, we are dividing into a two-tiered society, the haves and the have-nots. address is disappearing. Rather than offering up a State of the Union, rather than coming up with contracts premised on the dismantlement of Government, what we need is a plan to start the Government back up again, for it is only the Federal Government that can solve these problems. With all 50 States joining hands and pulling together, we can work our way out of this dilemma. Mr. President, our security is like resting upon a three-legged stool. We have the first leg, the values we have as a country, and those are very strong. We readily sacrificed lives to feed the hungry in Somalia; we sacrificed lives again trying to promote democracy in Haiti; and we are now willing to send earthquake relief aid to Japan. We, as an American country--not as a middle class or lower class or underclass or rich class--willingly sacrifice and give assistance where it is needed. Similarly, the second leg of our security rests on the leg of military power, and the strength of that is unquestioned. Finally, the third leg is that of our economic security, and that leg is fractured, in disrepair, and about to break because of the very litany that we have all enunciated on the floor. We act as if it is the best of times, and all we need to do is give to the various interest groups their wants. For those in California, we will now finally have a program on immigration after we just passed a multibillion-dollar bill on that subject. It makes a difference. But we have never even given the additional border patrols and everything else a chance to work, including the new offices that were set up. The thrust of such pollster-driven policies would be to say, ``We have not done anything,'' and ``Let us start doing something there,'' because California is important in the Presidential race. Of course meanwhile, both sides are trying their dead-level best to flatter the middle class with gifts such as tax cuts. Mr. President, we do not have anything to give. The tenor and tempo of the moment should rather be that of John F. Kennedy back some 30 years ago when he said, ``My program is not a set of promises of what I intend to give the American people, but rather a set of challenges of what I intend to ask of the American people.'' Rather than facing challenges and bringing reality, we are off on a toot, chasing around in a veritable contest, a foot race, if you please, trying to dismantle the Government and saying that the Government is the enemy. The truth of the matter is that the Government is a friend. We have valid programs working which need to be expanded upon--women, infants, and children feeding, 50 percent receive funding and 50 percent go wanting. But for every dollar I spend on women, infants, and children feeding, I save $3. For if I do not spend that money on nutritional supplements, I have, by account, an increase low birthweight infants. The average stay in an incubator for the low birthweight infants is 30 days, at $1,000 a day, or $30,000. Getting to the needs of the hour, we need to embellish the WIC Program and the Head Start Program. We can furnish the studies that show for every $1 that we invest in Head Start--not to the cities or to the States or to get it back to the people or to dismantle it and all the other gobbledygook they are giving us--Head Start saves $4.50 for every $1 we spend. We ought to extend that to the other 40 percent of Americans that are not participating. With respect to funding for the disadvantaged, half of those eligible are not receiving benefits, but for every $1 we spend there, $6.25 is saved. Biomedical research, which is a distressing thing to me, we have cut back under President Clinton's administration on top of the cuts that we have had under Reagan-Bush. But for every $1 we spend in biomedical research out at NIH, we save $13.50. Indeed, the Federal Government has a lot of good roles to perform. Welfare reform--you are getting another unfunded mandate, Mr. Governor, I can tell you now. Some will get welfare and some will not. Those recipients in the ``have-not'' States with the bigger burden will start moving to those ``have'' States. In fact, that is what brought about the Federal program. I can tell you, once they get to welfare reform and try to set up those jobs to make people work, no money is going to be saved. It is going to cost more. Welfare reform is going to cost more. Name the odds and I will take all bets. Similarly with health reform. Yes, we can slow down the growth of rising health costs, but the savings that we achieve through reductions in all of the entitlements will leave us far short of our goal. My point is while we may save some, we will not save enough. So, it is important that we come and start looking, if you please, at what we really need in this land of ours. And I will get into that on another occasion, because I want to address the problem of this unfunded mandate, the Federal budget. Mr. President, we need a Marshall plan for America. If we are going to have a capital gains tax cut, we need to have it for inner-city investment to industry, not just for the rich just to write off. In addition, we need to promote savings. We need targeted IRA's and incentives to promote investment in research and development investment here in the United States. With respect to technology, we need the advanced technology program, which is subject to peer review by the National Academy of Engineering and devoid of any political pork. Regrettably, you see some shouting in the contract that these are pork barrel programs. We have to get into competition with a competitive trade and industrial policy. We can go down the list of the needs, but we do not have any money. Looking at what is available, I find myself much like the famous character in ``Alice In Wonderland,'' where to stay where I am, I have to run as fast I can; to get ahead, I have to run even faster. Let me turn momentarily to the interest costs on the public debt. I can tell you, before Chairman Greenspan raised interest rates, the CBO estimated $311 billion for the 1995 gross interest costs on the public debt. Now, comes January, it has jumped some 28 billion bucks to $339 billion and is projected to rise to $408 billion by 2002. So what I have tried to do in this particular exercise is to bring into focus the magnitude of our current fiscal situation. I have been in a drill now all this month with my staff and the best of minds. I have summarized it on one sheet of paper. And I will ask my staff to distribute this sheet to our friends on the floor and any others who are interested. Yes, statistics are boring, but it is a reality. We start, Mr. President, with reality check No. 1, that it will require approximately $1.2 trillion in spending cuts to execute item No. 1 of the Contract With America; namely, to balance that budget. Now, balancing the budget is not a new thing. I have tried dutifully as a Member--and Senator Domenici and I are the only remaining Members since the initiation over 20 years now of the Budget Committee--and as a former chairman, I have conscientiously tried freezes. I have tried Gramm-Rudman-Hollings--which, incidentally, my colleagues, Mr. Gramm and Mr. Rudman, joined in abolishing in 1990 when we went from fixed to floating targets. We had the discipline. We needed to maintain that discipline, but in October of 1990, I guess it was--we will find out the exact date--at around 20 minutes to 1:00 in the morning, I will never forget making the point of order; the point of order was appealed and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, for all intents and purposes, was abolished. Do not say, ``It did not work.'' That is what I hear is said in these meetings and seminars, that Gramm-Rudman-Hollings did not work. The fact of the matter is that it was not the law that failed, but rather a bipartisan failure on the part of Congress to meet the targets. The problem continues to worsen--and I emphasize, Mr. President, ``worsen''--because if we had had the freezes that my distinguished friend on the other side of the aisle, the majority leader, Howard Baker of Tennessee, and I once offered, we would have a balanced budget this very minute. After failing with freezes, I then came with taxes. Now, I have been in public service 40 years and I am not some loon who is off trying to get a headline. I do not need it. Instead, I try to make headway. pollster politics in this land, every politician is told, whether Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, that Americans are all against taxes. Uniquely and ironically, we are in such a position that the only way we can stop increasing daily interest taxes by $1 billion is to raise taxes. Now think about that statement. I said to stop increasing daily interest taxes of $1 billion. Or save a few Sundays, we pushing gross interest up to $339 billion. That interest cost to me is the worst tax of all, because it cannot be avoided. That is the first thing that comes off the top. So, we have spending on automatic pilot and tax increases on automatic pilot. That is why I say our country is in crisis. The truth of the matter is that we have not paid for the Congress in years. We have not paid for the FBI in years. We have not paid for the DEA in years. We have not paid for the Departments of Commerce, the Interior, Agriculture, and other Departments in years. Why? Because if we look to see domestic discretionary--not defense--domestic discretionary spending right this minute is $253 billion. Defense spending is $270 billion; international affairs is $21 billion for a grand total in discretionary spending of $544 billion. Get that figure in your mind and turn to the size of the deficit. The true deficit figure for 1995 is $283 billion and not the $176 billion that the press continues to report. They do not want to speak the truth in budgeting. I offered the amendment along with my late friend, Senator Heinz, to prevent us from using the Social Security trust fund to mask the size of the deficit. They do not adhere to it. OMB and CBO give two figures, one using the trust funds, one not using them. As an aside, I might mention that Social Security is paying its way. It is not in the red. In fact, by the end of the century we will owe Social Security $1 trillion. One trillion dollars we have borrowed. We are using these little IOU slips in the trust fund drawer to mask the true size of the deficit. Now we will jump back to the $253 billion we spend on domestic discretionary programs. The courts, the Congress, the President, the FBI, the judges--all of these Departments of Government add up to $253 billion. Similarly, at the present time we have a deficit of $283 billion. Thus, we could eliminate all of Government and we would still be facing a deficit. When we come around with the Contract with America and say we will balance the budget with spending cuts, eliminate the Government, so to speak, we will still have a deficit. This is the unpardonable crisis we have worked our way into. I have continued to search for ideas. I appeared with the best of experts, Mr. Charles Walker, former Undersecretary of the Treasury, Dr. Cnossen of the Netherlands, who helped write the Japanese value-added tax, the United Kingdom's value- added tax. I have been to countries like Argentina that are operating on a balanced budget. I have been to Chile where they are operating on a balanced budget, and I am lecturing them? I am embarrassed. I have the biggest foreign debt. I have gross interest, the biggest domestic account that we can possibly think of, and we act like all we are here to do is make the headlines with contracts, identify with the family, identify with the middle class, identify with California on immigration, and get past, if you please, the election. I have tried to work on those entitlements. I wish Senators could have been at some of the meetings that I had with Claude Pepper. I learned that senior citizens were willing to sacrifice as long as everyone shared in shouldering the load. At a meeting with Claude and some senior citizens, I asked everyone to raise their hands if they were willing to just hold the line, freeze Social Security not cut it, but not get any increase so long as no one else got any increase. I would pick up half of Claude Pepper's audience. They would raise their hands and some would stand. After that, the distinguished Congressman from Florida and chairman of that particular committee quit inviting me to the meetings. I have stood the fire on COLA freezes. Someone on the other side might try and say, ``Oh, you did not vote that way in September 1985, when they wheeled in Pete Wilson for the Republican freeze of Social Security.'' That's true, I did not because it did not apply to every other particular program. In addition, I have tried to reduce other entitlements. Along with the Senator from Kansas, now majority leader, I attempted to reduce the waste and inefficiencies in the Food Stamp Program, but the promised savings never materialized. Instead, we saw more and more children qualify for the program. I can tell Members here and now what causes latchkey children. It is that the average family's income has steadily declined. So both parents have to get out and they both have to hustle. That is the case in my family and perhaps in your families and everybody's family. That is the fact of life. Some of them have to get out in order to support their children. The child is left at home. And there it is. If you think you are going to save on aid for dependent children, look at what the distinguished majority leader said in the morning paper that I read: Babies having babies we deplore, but we are not cutting the children off. I agree with him. It is a child problem, it is not a political problem with the next election to identify: ``I got hold of those riding around in Cadillacs and buying T-bone steaks with their food stamps''. I have heard that ad nauseam for years and have written a book on hunger. We will talk on that at length on a different occasion. My point in this whole particular amendment is that we are really in a crisis condition relative to spending on automatic pilot, and the need of the hour is not a delay for a constitutional amendment. The time for the discipline has passed, so to speak. What we need to do is do it. We all are like a bunch of players that have run up into the grandstand hollering, ``We want a touchdown; we want a touchdown; we want a touchdown.'' Darn it, get down on the field and score a touchdown. We are the players. I remember when Ronald Reagan came to town. He said he was going to balance the budget in 1 year. When he got here, after he had gotten elected on that pledge, he said, ``Oops, this thing is way worse. It's going to take me 2 years.'' We went back, thinking he was serious, in the Budget Committee and said, ``All right, we'll make it 3 years so it will be realistic and we can get it done.'' That was 1981, and by 1985, we had not done anything. In fact, we had this growth, growth, growth. We were supposed to grow out of our problems and give the people back their money so they can spend it better than Washington. We have been through that. But the fact of the matter is, by 1985 in Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, we had to make a 5-year plan. Now they are jumping it to 7 years. If you agree to that, I can tell you the next Congress is going to come for 10 years. Up, up, and away, just so long as you do not face the music. I am saying now is the hour to face that music. We cannot do all we want done. But we can make a good start of providing a Marshall plan to rebuild the economy of this land so that we can go back to providing jobs for Americans. The reality is that you cannot save enough on entitlements. What about defense? There are those who want to increase it inordinately. There are those who want to decrease it inordinately. I think the best judgment at this hour is to hold the line on defense and let the Defense Department really stabilize under the Bottom-Up Review. With respect to domestic discretionary spending reductions, they have to come from freezes and cuts. But once you go over the list, you find out that there are not enough savings to balance the budget. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent this cover sheet, with the list of the cuts, be printed in the Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS. I ask unanimous consent that we temporarily set aside the pending amendment so that I can introduce one.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Are we going to stay on that until 4 o'clock when we vote? Is that the ruling of the Chair? Mr. President, while I do have the floor, could I put up an amendment or how can that be arranged? Will there be no more amendments?

Mr. HOLLINGS. What is the present parliamentary situation? Is there an amendment to be voted on?

Mr. HOLLINGS. Also the yeas and nays. I am sure the distinguished Senator from Idaho, if it is agreed to--and I am perfectly willing to agree to it as he stated it--will also ask for the yeas and nays on the motion to table.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Will the distinguished Senator yield? Can we make it 40 minutes? Instead of 30 minutes to a side, 40 minutes to a side? Unanimous-Consent Request

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, they always say, ``He who seeks equity must do equity.'' If we are asking the other side to lay it out, then I think it is our duty over here to lay it out, too. That is what I have attempted to do. So, Mr. President, I see my distinguished colleague wants to come back and be recognized. So I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. HOLLINGS. We went into the Cabinet room and sat around the table. You could see the beginning of unfunded mandates for the cities, the counties, and the States. They said get rid of the Government, get rid of it, send it back to the cities, the counties, the States. But what they did was eliminate the money in October 1986. The first bill that the distinguished Senator from Tennessee, Senator Howard Baker, introduced was a revenue sharing bill. I had already introduced mine on February 1, 1967. We had both come from State governments and we were complaining then about unfunded mandates. So this has gone on from 1971 to 1995, some 24 years. I came to Washington and identified with the problem. We did get revenue sharing. But then, we unfunded the edicts of the Congress in October 1986, when we did away with revenue sharing. Coming right to the point, I want to refer to the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman. In the spring of 1992 he had an article that appeared in a magazine called the New Perspective entitled ``America Is Not Overspending.'' That ought to throw everybody into shock. The distinguished Congressman from Georgia along with our friend, Congressman Kasich are putting government on trial. But I do not mean to tuck tail and run, as Lyndon says. I mean to try the case. Where we can get a line-item veto, where we can get a balanced budget amendment, where we can get progress on reducing the deficit, they will have my vote. If we do not adulterate the legislation, like the unfunded mandates bill. I did not realize many of the changes made in S. 1 until the distinguished Senator from West Virginia came here and brought them to my attention. I publicly stated that I favored the legislation to address the problem of unfunded mandates. Such a bill was brought to the floor last year. Unfortunately, in their zeal to demonstrate how they can really run government up here, the Republicans have been overreaching. I want to help them. But I do not want to end up with a problem worse than the one we started with. If we do not move in at this particular hour in history, how will we ever get on top of this spending hemorrhage? Let me get back to David Stockman. I quote: The root problem goes back to the July 1981 frenzy of excessive and imprudent tax cutting that shattered the Nation's fiscal stability. A noisy faction Republicans have willfully denied this giant mistake of fiscal governance and their own culpability in it ever since. Instead, they have incessantly poisoned the political debate with the mindless stream of antitax venom while pretending that economic growth and spending cuts alone could cure the deficit. It ought to be obvious by now that we cannot grow our way out. Mr. President, very quietly, let me read that first sentence because it is almost heretic. ``The root problem goes back to the July 1981 frenzy of excessive and imprudent tax cutting that shattered the Nation's fiscal stability.'' That is exactly what we have going on now. History repeats itself. As Ronald Wilson Reagan says, ``Here we go again.'' As Governor of South Carolina, my first order of business was to raise some taxes, balance the budget, and get for the first time in our history a triple-A credit rating. Moody's has raised us back to us a triple-A credit rating. We had lost it for the past couple of years. Standard and Poor's still has yet to do so. But the need to get that triple-A credit rating reveals a funny juxtaposition of politicians running for office. I cannot run for Governor of South Carolina unless I promise to pay the bill; I cannot run for Senator of South Carolina unless I promise not to pay the bill. As a House Member of the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1950 I was trying to catch up with North Carolina. They had passed their sales tax for education in 1936. Following suit, I authored the sales tax. I heard arguments about its regressivity. But if we had not passed that 3-percent sales tax--which now is at 5 percent--we would never have had the schools. In addition to balancing the State budget, we would never have had the educational system to attract investment, to attract blue chip corporations, to attract Japanese and German industries. I was here in Washington the last time we had a balanced Federal budget. We called back over to Marvin Watson and said, ``Ask the President if we can cut another $5 billion.'' The entire budget-- Medicare, defense, domestic discretionary, everything else, interest on the national debt--was $178 billion. cut it another $5 billion.'' We cut it and gave President Richard Milhous Nixon a balanced budget. I am hearing all this stuff about a revolution 40 years in the making. They are getting away with a lot of flourish and rhetoric and headlines. But I have listened now since the beginning of the session, and somehow, some way we have to develop some bipartisanship. We are never going to do that unless we can get some truth in budgeting. If they do not want to raise taxes and want to balance the budget only through spending cuts, then they are whistling Dixie. You have to do both. You have to freeze everything to begin with, obey the caps, and then follow with additional spending cuts. And even with the spending cuts and the 5-percent VAT, you do not really get into the black until 1999. Mr. President it is a very, very difficult thing that the contract has taken up. That is why this Senator is not trying to out-headline the Republicans on the other side of the aisle. I prefer headway to headlines. I will continue to work with my friends on the other side of the aisle. I worked last year with Republicans on the telecommunications superhighway. We have had hearings galore on the subject and we had a bipartisan bill 18 to 2 out of the committee. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, with an overwhelming majority of Democrats, in a bipartisan information superhighway bill that had been worked out with various groups who all wanted these services to be extended to the poor and to the public education systems. That was ready to be passed. But the distinguished majority leader--and it is of record--the Senator from Kansas held it up. I do not say that lightly. I can show it to you in the Record. We were ready to go bipartisan then, and I am ready to go bipartisan now. Let us not come with just the headline and no headway. As Tennessee Ernie Ford sang, ``Sixteen tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt.'' Mr. President in closing I ask unanimous consent that a table entitled ``Senator Hollings on Truth in Budgeting'' which I have been referring to throughout my speech be printed in the Record at this point.

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, the wail and cry around Washington today is similar to what we heard 14 years ago when President Reagan came to town--get rid of the Government, downsize, the Government is the enemy. Today, like 14 years ago, the game to blame Government sounds good to many voters across the land. But look at the reality that has been inflicted on our country by 12 years of Republican rule--a deficit that is exploding and a debt that has more than quadrupled. The return of this feel-good kind of blaming in Washington is what Mario Cuomo related in his last official talk as Governor of New York. As he told reporters at the National Press Club on December 17, 1994, the game being played is ``deja voodoo'' and return to ``plastic populism.'' Government is not an evil that the Founding Fathers thrust upon the people. Government in its best form is a means to provide economic opportunity, create jobs, and rebuild our American standard of living. It is time for all of us to work together to rebuild America, instead of only harping, squawking, and howling at the Moon. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to read and study this talk by Governor Cuomo. He speaks commonsense truths that are rooted in reality. As he says, we need a cure for our problems not a simple reaffirmation of the disease. We have to fix what is broken, but not break what works. To that end, I ask unanimous consent that his talk be reported in its entirety in the Congressional Record.

Mr. HOLLINGS

Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the Senator.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Repealing the legislation, in essence, by--what does it say, mandating--``void the mandate?'' How do you void the mandate without legislation? So they have the executive agency legislating? Is that the case?

Mr. HOLLINGS. Then is it not the case that we are into the separation of powers? We have a case where we could not avoid the executive, and certainly the executive cannot legislate by mandating the end of a piece of legislation.

Mr. HOLLINGS. Page 12. OK.

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

Mr. HOLLINGS. I ask unanimous consent--and then you can go ahead and object because I am not trying to stop that. Sometime, somewhere I would like to get recognized so I can speak. We will go ahead with the quorum call.