Henry Hyde

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. I strongly support H.R. 2833, the Viet Nam Human Rights Act. I want to congratulate the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the vice chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, and other cosponsors of this comprehensive human rights legislation. Later this afternoon, the House will consider a resolution to approve the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement. We are all hopeful that free trade will improve the lives of the Vietnamese people and that it will eventually create irresistible domestic pressure for human rights and democracy in Vietnam. In the meantime, however, the Vietnamese Government remains one of the most repressive regimes on Earth. Religious persecution, especially of Buddhists and of Evangelical Protestants, has taken a turn for the worse during the last year. Since February, the government has engaged in a brutal crackdown against members of the Montagnard ethnic minority groups who participated in peaceful demonstrations seeking the return of their traditional lands. I think it is important, therefore, that in expanding trade relations we avoid sending a message of approval or complacency about Hanoi's human rights record. This bill makes clear that progress towards freedom and democracy will continue to be a central theme of U.S. foreign policy toward Vietnam. It uses forms of leverage other than trade sanctions to promote this objective, such as conditions on nonhumanitarian foreign assistance, guarantees that U.S. educational and cultural exchange programs will be open to people who share our values, and serious efforts to overcome the jamming of Radio Free Asia. I urge a unanimous vote in favor of this important human rights legislation.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 233) recognizing the important relationship between the United States and Mexico.

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

Mr. HYDE. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the resolution under consideration.

Mr. HYDE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, just over 1 year ago, on July 2, 2000, an extraordinary event took place. In a single day the people of Mexico peacefully ended 7 decades of one-party rule with their votes. Tomorrow, the man they elected as their president, Vicente Fox, will address a joint meeting of Congress as part of the first State visit hosted by George W. Bush. The inauguration of Vicente Fox as Mexico's president has ushered in a new chapter in our Nation's relationship with our neighbor to the south. President Bush and President Fox have seized the opportunity to forge a new partnership. Both leaders have acted to leave the past and build a road to the future based on real shared interests. The cornerstone of our relationship with Mexico is the North America Free Trade Agreement, initiated under the President's father's administration. Commerce between the United States and Mexico increased from $83 billion in 1994 to nearly $200 billion in 1999. Total trade among the three NAFTA members, including Canada, reached $557 billion in 1999. Mexico has surpassed Japan as the United States's second largest trading partner. Even so, there is a belief abroad in our land that NAFTA is the culprit for the present economic downturn. This is simply not true. The implementation of NAFTA, in fact, coincided with the longest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our Nation. The trafficking of elicit narcotics through Mexico has left a swath of corruption and misery in its path. Securing Mexico's full cooperation in addressing the drug threat has long bedeviled our relations. President Fox has, however, demonstrated great courage in facing this violent and corrosive threat to the security of both of our nations. Under his leadership, Mexico has finally begun to extradite Mexican drug kingpins to face justice in the United States for their crimes. Under President Fox's leadership, real law enforcement cooperation has begun at the working level where it counts, policeman to policeman. Migration is at the top of our bilateral agenda with Mexico. The U.S. Census of 2000 revealed that almost 12 percent of the U.S. population is of Hispanic origin. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans constitute about 65 percent of that total. President Bush believes it is very important that America be a Nation that welcomes immigrants. He recognizes the huge contributions to our economy that immigrant workers, including Mexicans, have made and the vital role America has in welcoming people who will fulfill that role in our economy. Accordingly, President Bush and President Fox have been working to establish a series of principles regarding migration issues that will be announced during President Fox's state visit. Madam Speaker, the resolution before the House today recognizes the extraordinarily important bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico, and welcomes the state visit by Mexico's democratically elected leader, President Vicente Fox. Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul), introduced a similar resolution earlier this year, and I am pleased he is among the Members from both parties, including the ranking member of our Committee on International Relations, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), who have cosponsored this resolution. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HYDE. Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Weldon-Stupak bill. Every Member of this House casts thousands of votes in the course of a congressional career. Some of those votes we remember with satisfaction; others we remember with less pleasure. That is the burden we take on ourselves when we take the oath of our office: the burden of decision. We should feel the gravity of that burden today. For no vote that any of us will ever cast is as fraught with consequence as our vote on whether or not to permit human cloning. Advances in the life sciences have brought us to a decisive fork in the road. Will our new genertic knowledge and the biotechnologies it helps create, promote healing and genuine human flourishing? Or will we use this new knowledge to remanufacture the human condition by manufacturing human beings? The first road leads us to a brighter future, in which lives are enhanced and possibilities are enlarged, for the betterment of individuals and humanity. The second road leads us into the brave new world so chillingly described by Aldous Huxley more than 60 years ago; a world of manufactured men and women, designed to someone else's specifications, for someone's else's benefit, in order to fulfill someone else's agenda. When manufacture replaces begetting as the means to create the human future, the dehumanization of the future is here. That is what is at stake in this vote. That is what we are being asked to decide today. Are we going to use the new knowledge given us by science for genuinely humane ends? Or are we going to slide slowly, inexorably into the brave new world? When we succeeded in splitting the atom, an entire new world of knowledge about the physical universe opened before us. At the same time, as we remember all too well from the cold war, our new knowledge of physics, and the weapons it made possible, handed us the key to our own destruction. It continues to take the most serious moral and political reflection to manage the knowledge that physics gave us six decades ago. Now we face a similar, perhaps even greater, challenge. The mapping of the human genome and other advances in the life sciences have given humanity a range and breadth of knowledge just as potent in its possibility as the knowledge acquired by the great physicists of the mid-twentieth century. Our new knowledge in the life sciences contains within itself the seeds of good--for it is knowledge that could be used to cure the sick and enhance the lives of us all. But, like the knowledge gained by the physicists, the new knowledge acquired by biology and genetics can also be used to do great evil: and that is what human cloning is. It is a great evil. For it turns the gift of life into a product--a commodity. We have just enough time, now, to create a set of legal boundaries to guide the deployment of the new genetic knowledge and the development of the new biotechnologies so that this good thing--enhanced understanding of the mysteries of life itself--serves good ends, not dehumanizing ends. We have just enough time to insure that we remain the masters of our technology, not its products. We should use that time well--which is to say, thoughtfully. The new knowledge from the life sciences demands of us a new moral seriousness and a new quality of public reflection. These are not issues to be resolved by politics- as-usual, any more than the issue of atomic energy could be resolved by politics-as-usual. These are issues that demand informed and courageous consciences. As free people, we have the responsibility to make decisions about the deployment of our new genetic knowledge with full awareness of the profound moral issues at stake. The questions before us in this bill, and in setting the legal framework for the future development of biotechnology, are not questions that can be well-answered by a simple calculus of utility: will it ``work?'' The questions raised by our new biological and genetic knowledge summon us to remember that most ancient of moral teachings, enshrined in every moral system known to humankind: never, ever use another human being as a mere means to some other end. That principle is the foundation of human freedom. When human life is special-ordered rather than conceived, ``human life'' will never be the same again. Begetting the human future, not manufacturing it, is the fork in the road before us. Indeed, to describe that fork in those terms is not quite right. For a manufactured human future is not a human, or humane, future. The world is watching us, today. How the United States applies the moral wisdom of the ages to the new questions of the revolution in biotechnology will set an example, for good or for ill, for the rest of humankind. If we make the decision we should today, in support of Congressman's Weldon's bill, the world will know that there is nothing inexorable about human cloning, and that it is possible for us to guide, rather than be driven by, the new genetics. The world will know that there is a better, more humane way to deploy the power that science has put into our hands. And the world will know that America still stands behind the pledge of our founding, a pledge to honor the integrity, the dignity, the sanctity, of every human life, as the foundation of our freedom.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following article for the Record. [From the Washington Post, July 27, 2001] (By Charles Krauthammer) A Nightmare of a Bill Hadn't we all agreed--we supporters of stem cell research-- that it was morally okay to destroy a tiny human embryo for its possibly curative stem cells because these embryos from fertility clinics were going to be discarded anyway? Hadn't we also agreed that human embryos should not be created solely for the purpose of being dismembered and then destroyed for the benefit of others? Indeed, when Sen. Bill Frist made that brilliant presentation on the floor of the Senate supporting stem cell research, he included among his conditions a total ban on creating human embryos just to be stem cell farms. Why, then, are so many stem cell supporters in Congress lining up behind a supposedly ``anti-cloning bill'' that would, in fact, legalize the creation of cloned human embryos solely for purposes of research and destruction? Sound surreal? It is. There are two bills in Congress regarding cloning. The Weldon bill bans the creation of cloned human embryos for any purpose, whether for growing them into cloned human children or for using them for research or for their parts and then destroying them. The competing Greenwood ``Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001'' prohibits only the creation of a cloned child. It protects and indeed codifies the creation of cloned human embryos for industrial and research purposes. Under Greenwood, points out the distinguished bioethicist Leon Kass, ``embryo production is explicitly licensed and treated like drug manufacture.'' It becomes an industry, complete with industrial secrecy protections. Greenwood, he says correctly, should really be called the ``Human Embryo Cloning Registration and Industry Facilitation and Protection Act of 2001.'' Greenwood is a nightmare and an abomination. First of all, once the industry of cloning human embryos has begun and thousands are being created, grown, bought and sold, who is going to prevent them from being implanted in a woman and developed into a cloned child? Even more perversely, when that inevitably occurs, what is the federal government going to do: Force that woman to abort the clone? Greenwood sanctions, licenses and protects the launching of the most ghoulish and dangerous enterprise in modern scientific history: the creation of nascent cloned human life for the sole purpose of its exploitation and destruction. What does one say to stem cell opponents? They warned about the slippery slope. They said: Once you start using discarded embryos, the next step is creating embryos for their parts. Frist and I and others have argued: No, we can draw the line. Why should anyone believe us? Even before the president has decided on federal support for stem cell research, we find stem cell supporters and their biotech industry allies trying to pass a bill that would cross that line--not in some slippery-slope future, but right now. Apologists for Greenwood will say: Science will march on anyway. Human cloning will be performed. Might as well give in and just regulate it, because a full ban will fail in any event. Wrong. Very wrong. Why? Simple: You're a brilliant young scientist graduating from medical school. You have a glowing future in biotechnology, where peer recognition, publications, honors, financial rewards, maybe even a Nobel Prize await you. Where are you going to spend your life? Working on an outlawed procedure? If cloning is outlawed, will you devote yourself to research that cannot see the light of day, that will leave you ostracized and working in shadow, that will render you liable to arrest, prosecution and disgrace? True, some will make that choice. Every generation has its Kevorkian. But they will be very small in number. And like Kevorkian, they will not be very bright. The movies have it wrong. The mad scientist is no genius. Dr. Frankensteins invariably produce lousy science. What is Kevorkian's great contribution to science? A suicide machine that your average Hitler Youth could have turned out as a summer camp project. Of course you cannot stop cloning completely. But make it illegal and you will have robbed it of its most important resource: great young minds. If we act now by passing Weldon, we can retard this monstrosity by decades. Enough time to regain our moral equilibrium--and the recognition that the human embryo, cloned or not, is not to be created for the sole purpose of being poked and prodded, strip-minded for parts and then destroyed. If Weldon is stopped, the game is up. If Congress cannot pass the Weldon ban on cloning, then stem cell research itself must not be supported either--because then all the vaunted promises about not permitting the creation of human embryos solely for their exploitation and destruction will have been shown in advance to be a fraud.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 2602 and include extraneous material.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2602, the extension of the Export Administration Act of 1979, a measure approved on a voice vote last week by the Committee on International Relations. Enactment of this measure is intended to reauthorize the existing Export Administration Act for a 3-month period, through November 20 of this year, permitting Congress to fashion a comprehensive rewrite of this 21-year-old statute. The Export Administration Act was extended for 1 year in the 106th Congress, through August 20 of this year; and it is now clear in the final week of our current session that a major EAA reform measure will not be enacted before that date. The prompt enactment of this stopgap authorization will, however, enable the Bureau of Export Administration of the Department of Commerce to continue to administer and enforce our export control system, and in particular, to protect licensing information. I would also point out to my colleagues that any lapse in the current EAA authorities would mean an automatic reduction in the level of fines for criminal and administrative sanctions against individuals and companies found to be in violation of our export control regulations. A comprehensive EAA reform measure, S. 149, the Export Administration Act of 2001, is expected to be placed on the Senate floor schedule later this week or shortly after we return from the August recess, and the Committee on International Relations will consider a very similar version of this bill on Wednesday, August 1. I would urge my colleagues to support this important stopgap authorization measure to maintain the integrity of our Nation's export control system. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2602) to extend the Export Administration Act until November 20, 2001.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for his tremendous contribution to this and other legislation before our committee. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate with great attention all afternoon, and--at the risk of oversimplifying, I would like to cut to the chase. What we are talking about is an army of people out there motivated by spiritual impulses who want to do good, who want to help solve poverty, disease, violence in the community, homelessness, hunger, and some of them are clergy, some of them are not. They are religiously motivated, and we have spent all afternoon finding ways to keep them out. We have enough help. We don't need them--there is too much God out there. We suffer from an excess of God, for some crazy reason. Discrimination--if the First Baptist Church wants to do something as the First Baptist Church, take care of some homeless people, that fact that they want to retain their identify and not become another local United Fund operation, there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with saying if you want to join us, you have to be Baptist. There is discrimination, and there is invidious discrimination. I do not think it is discrimination for Baptists to want to hire Baptists to do something as the Baptist Church. I think that is fine. That is not invidious discrimination. So far as I am concerned, we ought to figure out ways to facilitate the exploitation, the benign exploitation of these wonderful people who want to help us with our very human problems, instead of finding ways to say on because, for fear, God might sneak in under the door.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Surely. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield further, I admire what the gentleman from California is trying to do. I just do not think it is done properly in the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HYDE. Access to the courts is a legal element. Sometimes there is standing, sometimes there is not. I think that there is an issue here to be looked at. There is some law here, law of treaties, but I have no problem with the court adjudicating these, because I want the people who are going into court to be there under proper pleadings, not just inhibit the motion by the government. That does nothing. I do not want to invite fraud, which I think the gentleman's amendment does.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. Mr. Chairman, I just want to say to my dear friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), I am entirely sympathetic with what he is seeking to do. I just think it is inartfully done in the gentleman's amendment. He seeks to inhibit the government from filing any motion. There are lots of other pleadings and litigation besides a motion. There is an answer, there are interrogatories. There are all sorts of documents that could circumvent what the gentleman is attempting to do. It is too narrow. Secondly, fraud, it is an open door to fraud. If the gentleman stops the government from denying that some plaintiff was not a POW, is a phony, that can happen easily. All kinds of people claim war records. The gentleman opened the door for that. I think what the gentleman wants to do is meritorious, but it is going to require a lot more attention. I would prefer the gentleman to have a bill, and we have some hearings and have some scholarship look at this and do it right.

Mr. HYDE. May I be heard on the point of order?

Mr. HYDE. I wish to speak, if I may. I agree with everything my friend said, except he wants them to have a day in court, but he also does not want the Government to be permitted to participate. The gentleman's amendment says no motion denying this or that; an open door to fraud. But the gentleman cannot have a court hearing unless there are two parties.

Mr. HYDE. The Chair is right.

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal).

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston).

Mr. HYDE

Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to ascribe cowardice or lack of patriotism to people who disagree with me, although I listened to the last speaker ask, where are the patriots? I could direct him to some. Try Bob Stump who lied about his age so he could enlist in the Navy in World War II. There are plenty of patriots around. I have earned the right to stand here and debate this issue because I fought in combat in the South Pacific in World War II. I like to think I am almost as patriotic as the gentleman named Ackerman. I heard rights, rights, rights. Not one word about responsibility. Responsibility. But that is part of this debate. This is a good debate. We ought to once in a while look at our core principles and see if there is anything that distinguishes us from the rest of the world. We look around this Chamber and we see the splendid diversity of America. We see men and women whose great grandparents came from virtually every corner of the globe. What holds this democratic community together? A common commitment to certain moral norms. That is the foundation of our democratic experiment. Human beings do not live by abstract ideas alone. Those ideas are embodied in symbols. And what is a symbol? A symbol is more than a sign. A sign conveys information. A symbol is much more richly textured. A symbol is material reality that makes a spiritual reality present among us. An octagonal piece of red metal on a street corner is a sign. The flag is a symbol. Vandalizing a No Parking sign is a misdemeanor, but burning the flag is a hate crime, because burning the flag is an expression of contempt for the moral unity of the American people that the flag symbolically makes present to us every day. Why do we need this amendment now? Is there a rash of flag burning going on? Certainly not. But we live in a time of growing disunity. Our society is pulled apart by the powerful centrifugal force of racism, ethnicity, language, culture, gender, and religion. Diversity can be a source of strength, but disunity can be a source of peril. If you stop and think, the world is torn by religious and ethnic divisions that make war and killing and death and terror the norm in so many countries: Ireland, the Middle East, the Balkans, Rwanda. Look around the globe and see what hate can do to drive fellow human beings apart. This legislation makes a statement that needs to be made, that our flag is the transcendent symbol of all that America stands for and aspires to be and hence deserves special protection of the law. We Americans share a moral unity expressed so profoundly in our country's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence. ``We hold these truths to be self-evident,'' Jefferson wrote. The truth that all are equal before the law. We share that, across race, gender, religion. The truth that the right to life and liberty is inalienable and inviolable. The truth that government is intended to facilitate and not impede the people's pursuit of happiness. Adherence to these truths is the foundation of civil society, of democratic culture in America. And what is the symbol of our moral unity amidst our racial, ethnic, and religious diversity? Old Glory, the stars and stripes. In seeking to provide constitutional protection for the flag, we are seeking to protect the moral unity that makes American democracy possible. We have spent the better part of the last 30 years telling each other, shouting to each other, all the things that divide us. It is time to start talking about the things that unite us, that make us all, together, Americans. The flag is the embodiment of the unity of the American people, a unity built on those ``self-evident'' truths on which the American experiment rests, the truths which are our Nation's claim to be a just society. Let us take a step toward national reconciliation, and toward constitutional sanity, by adopting this amendment. The flag is our connection to the past and proclaims our hopes and aspirations for the future. Too many Americans have marched behind it, too many have come home in a box covered by the flag, too many parents and widows have clutched the flag to their hearts as the last remembrance of their beloved to treat that flag with anything less than reverence and respect. One hundred eighty-seven years ago during the British bombardment of Baltimore, Francis Scott Key looked toward Fort McHenry in the early dawn and asked his famous question. To his joy he saw our flag was still there. And how surprised he would be to learn our flag is even planted on the Moon. But, most especially, it is planted in the hearts of every loyal American. Four Supreme Court justices agreed with us. A ton of professors agree with us. This is not a settled issue. Five to four Supreme Court justices come down on the side of the flag.