John Kerry

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I have asked a question of the Senator. But I do have the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from North Carolina. Let me say to my friend from North Carolina that I think it is unfortunate that within a mere matter of hours on a bill we proceed to a cloture vote and behave as if somehow there is a major effort to delay a bill. I think there are 139 amendments on this bill-- 139 amendments; 94 of them--it is now 144 amendments--94 of them are from the Republican side of the aisle. Most of them are from my colleague from North Carolina. So to suggest that a bill that was laid down yesterday--was laid down Friday afternoon, to be technically correct--but first debated yesterday for a few hours, beginning at 2 o'clock in the afternoon is now suddenly, on Tuesday morning, the subject of some kind of delay confuses me and, in fact, I think sort of does an injustice to the legislative process. This is a very important bill. It represents a major overhaul of the means by which the United States of America delivers all of its foreign policy effort in the world. It has the most significant reorganization in it in modern history. It has some $3 billion-plus of cuts. It is a very significant altering of the mechanism of foreign policy. There are many people in the U.S. Senate, Mr. President, who feel that it runs roughshod over the constitutional prerogatives of the President of the United States. Let me give you an example. I think every word of the amendment that the Senator just put in, with the exception of maybe five, I would support. I think it is a very strong statement of what the Secretary of State ought to do. It is a very strong statement, an exhortation to reorganization, we should do that. But it has a specificity as to a particular department or a particular movement that we have suggested in keeping with constitutional prerogatives of the President ought to be decided by the President. All we are suggesting is give the President a mandate from the Congress to make the cuts, but allow the President to determine exactly how they are going to be made. I can remember my friends on the other side of the aisle over the years that President Reagan and President Bush were in office consistently coming to the floor and saying, ``Get the cotton-picking micromanaging hands out of the administrative process. Congress shouldn't micromanage. Congress shouldn't decide every single movement of personnel. There ought to be some administrative capacity here.'' Here we are suddenly, because President Clinton is in office, and we are going totally role reversal back on all of those restraints on microman- agement, and we are telling them, ``You have to specifically get rid of this department, you have to put it here; you have to get rid of this department, you have to put it here; you have to get rid of this department, you have to put it here.'' Now, all we have suggested is this would not be a problem if we came to the floor and adopted a compromise that was proposed by the administration and Democrats, which would have suggested, look, give the President a mandate for consolidation, but allow the President to decide what he wants to consolidate and where, how it best will function. Here there is a mandate that you put certain departments within the Department of State when all of the former Secretaries of State have said, while they may be in favor of the concept, they have no confidence that the current State Department has the capacity to effect it. We have not addressed that here. There is nothing that deals with the capacity of Foreign Service officers to pick up these particular missions. There is nothing that deals with the capacity of these missions to be effected within the context of the State Department. So while, on the one hand, you are making this enormous shift, there is no commensurate administrative capacity or enablement to be able to actually implement the shift. So I just say to my friend, this is an effort to legislate, not an effort to delay. Legislating is what we ought to do. We are supposed to come to the floor of the Senate and make some wise decisions about how to best demand change or mandate it and how best to make these savings. I wonder if my friend from North Carolina would be willing to mandate the savings but take out the specificity and simply say we are going to try to find X amount of savings within this Department in order to try to reduce the budget, but leave up to the President the capacity to be able to choose where that might occur. May I ask my friend from North Carolina--turning to his sense-of-the- Senate request on page 3, reading at line 15, paragraph 1, the Senator says, ``It is the sense of the Congress that the President should consolidate within the Department of State or eliminate * * *.'' --I wonder if the Senator intends that it be an option of one or the other, just to clarify.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, we have looked at this amendment. We will be happy to accept it.

Mr. KERRY. Thank you Mr. President. Mr. President, I would like to thank the Senator from Connecticut for a very thoughtful statement not just about USIA, but most importantly about the overall changes that are taking place in the world and the implications for the United States and for our foreign policy. I think he has demonstrated the vision that is essential to any kind of decisionmaking with respect to the shuffling of the parts of our foreign public diplomacy effort. So I thank him for having shared those thoughts with us and I think provided a very important and credible statement with respect to this issue. Mr. President, I would like to express further, following up on some of the things that the Senator from Connecticut has said, I think it is really important for us to understand, the United Nations particularly--and for a lot of appropriate reasons, I might add--the administration of the United Nations has been just sort of a morass without any seeming sense of concern or culpability, although I think in the last year perhaps the message may be beginning to get through. But clearly, the ineffectiveness of the United Nations with respect to certain concerns, notwithstanding great successes, has clouded the image of that institution in its 50th anniversary so that for a lot of Americans, it is a very quick take. They think of foreign policy and they tend to think not of a global climate change treaty, not of the Montreal protocol which will reduce CFC's in the air and help to preserve the ozone layer, they do not think about the treaty to preserve Antarctica or the treaties with respect to arms control through the years that made an enormous difference in helping to win the cold war; they tend to think of the big symbols, and generally speaking, the symbols of either confusion or sometimes failure. The result is, if you want to get a good applause line when you go home and give a speech, you can very quickly pick up a line that talks about how you should not be giving aid to other countries, that the aid ought to be coming back, you know, to whatever city in one State. If you say that when you are in a particular place, people are quick to respond and say, ``Boy, that is right. We ought to be get that money, not these other folks.'' And in some cases, unfortunately, it is true. AID and others have had some programs sometimes that lack accountability. But name for me the corporation in America that has not sometimes had an advertising campaign that has been overboard or an excess of expense accounts or an excess in departments. Most of the great buy-outs of the 1980's were predicated on a lot of those far too expansive corporate budgets where value was not limited and people saw that they had an opportunity to come in, pare down, create a far more productive entity, raise the share value, and sell it for a killing. Indeed, that happened over and over again. This is no different. There is no bureaucracy on the face of this planet that does not have organizational problems. The question is, what are we trying to do here, and what are the interests of the United States? Foreign policy is not some foreign engagement exclusively. Foreign policy is the art of achieving our interests abroad. It is really an extension of the interests in every community here in our country. It is not really a foreign affair. It is a domestic interest that is represented through whatever happens abroad. So when we engage in Latin America in an antidrug program, we are representing the interests of people in Kansas City, in San Francisco, in Boston, in New York, in Los Angeles, and all across this country. And to whatever degree we can get the cooperation of Colombians or the cooperation of Ecuadorians or Panamanians or the Caribbean countries in helping us to prevent the flow of cocaine or helping to prevent the flow of laundered money, we are representing our interests. That helps us here at home. It keeps perhaps 1 kid, 20 kids, hopefully 1,000 or a million kids out of trouble. It seems to me that in the same way, Mr. President, in dozens of other ways, our interests are represented through the diplomatic efforts of our State Department in ways that a lot of Americans just take for granted on a daily basis. Take, for instance, the interests of New England in fishing. We have two of the most important fishing ports in all of the country in Gloucester and New Bedford, MA. Until recently, our fishermen were able to go up and drag off the coast of Canada for scallops. Now, because of an international treaty, we are not allowed to do that anymore, and we have huge tensions with Canada over the questions of fishing. We have huge tensions over the fish that are caught there, that are sold in the United States at a lesser price, that take away from our fishermen and their livelihood. So these are the relationships. This is not a foreign interest. This is not an expenditure of money somehow that goes to someone else's benefit abroad. It goes to our benefit, Mr. President. Hopefully, if well represented and well negotiated, it goes to our benefit. There are dozens of other ways in which examples abound about how our interests are or are not represented. We have millions of Americans traveling abroad every year, millions probably even as I speak right now. They expect to be able to walk into an embassy or a consulate office and get answers. They expect to be able to get a visa. They expect to have their interests represented. If they get in an accident abroad, if they have a sickness abroad, if something happens where they are falsely arrested or some other event takes place, we need to be able to represent the interests of those citizens abroad. Increasingly, Mr. President, in every single sector that is important to the interests of Americans, we have been cutting over the last few years. We made an enormous cut in the foreign affairs budget just 2 years ago. We made a cut 2 years before that. It has become sort of the whipping boy, if you will, of the budgetary process because there is no easy, quick constituency in the United States that leaps up and says, ``Oh, yes, I identify with that money.'' Already out of a $1.5 trillion budget, we spend less than 1 percent of the total budget on all of our foreign affairs interests, including foreign aid, and most of the foreign aid of this country, as we know, goes to two countries: Egypt and Israel. So, if you take the almost $12 billion, I think it is, that goes to Egypt and Israel, we are leaving ourselves something like $8 billion for everything else that we wind up doing around the world in respect to all of our treaties, all of our negotiations, all of our representing of our citizens, all of our efforts to try to deal with international crime, with international customs problems, with all of the other interests that we have across this planet. I inform my colleagues that overseas workload has increased dramatically. My colleague from Connecticut was talking a few minutes ago about what has happened with respect to the sort of closing in of the world. The fact is that because the world is now smaller, because there are more airlines flying more places, because communications are easier, because there is a much broader middle class, not just in America, but in many other countries, people are traveling more. And because of that travel, there is far more of a relationship between nations than there was previously, much more commerce, much more just to keep track of. The workload for our embassies in just issuing passports, the workload in this country in issuing passports, is a 60 percent increase in the last few years. The overseas consular operations have exploded-- visas, increased services to Americans, refugee admissions. We have opened 30 new posts in the last 3 years because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Europe. And yet, notwithstanding all of that increase, there has been no financial increase whatsoever. All of these new posts, all of this new work has been taken up by virtue of consolidation, cuts, deferred maintenance, reductions. Mr. President, I respectfully suggest that a hard analysis of what has been happening to the budget with respect to the State Department and the capacity of our Foreign Service entities to do their jobs over the last years has been such a significant reduction that we are getting to the point where we are losing our capacity to represent our own interests. This is not smart anymore. This is the old story of cutting off your nose to spite your face. This is shooting yourself in the foot. It is reducing our own influence. I suggest that we ought to think hard about where we are going. The State Department's budget has been frozen in recent years. In fact, the fiscal year 1996 request is underfunded by over $200 million, or by 10 percent when inflation and the exchange rate losses are factored in. That is an important thing to recognize, Mr. President. We operate our foreign offices, obviously, in a lot of places where the currency is fluctuating. So we send people there with an expectation that we are going to spend x amount of dollars. But because the dollar may go down, you wind up having a huge increase in expenses and it costs you a lot more to do the same business. Have we increased the amount of money to represent that kind of increase in costs? No. We have taken it out of the building fund, we have taken it out of maintenance, we have cut other sectors, and we are beginning to get to the point where we are reducing our own capacity. The State Department has already reduced its work force by 1,300 positions, and it has cut administrative expenses by almost $100 million. We have reduced the size of the senior Foreign Service already by 10 percent, and we have cut diplomatic security programs by 15 percent. This is what has already happened. Now we approach this bill, and I want to share with my colleagues why I think there is such a problem in this bill. Despite the fact that this bill meets the administration's 1996 appropriations accounts for the State Department and the USIA, the aggregate funding in this bill for 1996 is $450 million below the 1995 enacted level, and it is $330 million below the President's 1996 request. The total funding in the bill decreases sharply over the next 3 fiscal years. The authorized funding under this bill for fiscal year 1999 is over $1.3 billion below the 1995 enacted level. I will add, Mr. President, that those cuts, that $1.3 billion by 1999, does not reflect the steep reductions in foreign aid funding levels for fiscal years 1996 and 1997 that are in the foreign aid bill. So when you add those cuts to the foreign aid bill, you wind up with the most significant reduction; in fact, you go below the function 150 budget resolution figures for the next 2 years. I do not think we ought to go below the budget resolution figures in the 150 account for those next 2 years, given the reductions that have taken place in the last years. Mr. President, 10 years ago, in the height of the cold war, when you had a bipolar world with this intense focus on basically the Soviet bloc and China and whatever satellite countries of theirs were creating havoc in other parts of the world, our total international affairs budget was 2.44 percent of the total budget of our country--2.44. Today, it comprises only 1.3 percent. And in the last decade, the appropriations for function 150 have declined by $15.6 billion in fiscal year 1996 dollars. They have gone from $36.8 billion in 1985 down to $21.2 billion in 1995, all of that cut, notwithstanding what the Senator from Connecticut and I have just said with respect to an increase in responsibility, an increase in the number of relationships and an increase in the numbers of issues that we now face. I might add, Mr. President, now that you have a world where you do not just deal with the Soviet Union and the whole focus is not on arms control and the arms race, you actually have unleashed a whole set of additional forces that make diplomacy far more complicated. In many ways, when you had the Soviet Union and the United States and people were dividing up along those lines, you had a much easier dynamic to work with than the current international economic competitive structure, with all of the attendant environmental, crime, refugee, ethnic conflict and other issues that have been liberated. I respectfully suggest that the world we face today requires a knowledge of what is happening in countries, an understanding of that ethnic force, an understanding of who is who within the criminal constellation, an understanding of the dynamics of how we can assist other countries to move toward sustainable development--a host of issues that are far more difficult to leverage and that require personal relationships in the leveraging. Yet, here we are withdrawing ourselves from the very capacity to create those kinds of personal relationships. Under the budget resolution, discretionary funding for the international affairs budget is reduced by $2.1 billion in fiscal year 1996 alone. And by fiscal year 2002, the Budget Committee's target date for the balanced budget, the mark for the function 150 discretionary funding is $14.7 billion. Mr. President, we are going to go from $36.8 billion in 1985 to $14.6 billion in the year 2002, and we are somehow going to pretend that we are going to represent the domestic interests of the United States abroad with that budget while simultaneously meeting the needs of a country that prides itself in being the leader of the free world. I do not think it makes sense. I think it is ill considered. I think it is shortsighted. I think it is contrary to our national interests, and it may not be hyperbole to suggest that it is even dangerous for the interests of this country. I recognize that economies have to be achieved in all respects, with respect to the Federal budget, including international affairs. But the dollar alone cannot be the sole measurement with respect to what we are doing. We do not just have a fiscal deficit, Mr. President, we have a leadership deficit, we have an involvement deficit, we have a presence deficit. If you travel to Asia today, you will find greater presence of French and Germans and Japanese than you will Americans. I am consistently asked by foreign businessmen when the United States of America is going to get its act together and have the kind of presence necessary to signal our determination to be a real player beyond what our weaponry gives us. It seems to me that those are the kinds of things we ought to be thinking about as we arrive at a budget, not just an arbitrary 602(b) figure that is thrown out by a couple of people sitting around saying, ``We will give this much to this committee and that much to that committee,'' without a real measurement of what the real impact is in the overall interest of our country. In addition to the problematic budget areas, Mr. President, this bill also contains several provisions that are designed to undermine and place restrictions on the United States' participation in the United Nations system. For example, the bill mandates that the United States withdraw from several international organizations, including the International Labor Organization, and it eliminates funding for U.S.- assessed contributions to these organizations. In addition, the bill places conditions on the full payment of the U.S.-assessed contributions to the United Nations and to peacekeeping operations that serve to weaken our leverage at the United Nations at the very moment when our leadership is needed. It is very difficult to go to Mr. Akashi and Boutros Boutros-Ghali and suggest to them that the role of the United Nations ought to be different, and they ought to heed our advice at the same time we are pulling back from an obligation, as well as from other involvement and efforts of the United Nations. If ever we wanted to invite others to begin to spur whatever leadership we might be offering, it seems to me that that is one of the ways to do it. So, Mr. President, I would hope that in the course of the deliberation on this bill we can try to rectify, to whatever degree possible, some of these things, so that we get back to the spirit of bipartisanship that governed the movement of this bill in the last 11 years that I have been here. There was an unfortunate vote along party lines sending this bill to the floor. It is my hope that we can use this time now in the legislative process to harmonize and bring together a bipartisan effort when I think the Congress is most well-served and certainly when the interests of the country are served. Everybody knows that this country has been strongest when its foreign policy is bipartisan. The great standard was written by Arthur Vandenberg. In recent days, we have had joint efforts--whether it was Senators Lugar and Nunn, who joined together with respect to Russia, or whether it was Senator McCain and others here, who joined together with respect to Southeast Asia--and we have been able to show that bipartisanship makes a difference and it makes this country strong. I hope we can find that in further efforts with respect to this legislation.

Mr. KERRY. I yield the floor.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will do that in a moment in order to try to see if we can make an agreement on this. The Senator from Connecticut was here a moment ago. I know he wanted to address this particular amendment. So I am hopeful to give him that opportunity. I simply say to my friend again--and we can discuss this privately while in a quorum call--it is something we have had some discussion on in the past. I personally am not averse to some kind of consolidation, and I have said that to the Senator. I personally think that there are ways to more effectively deliver the interests of the United States through our foreign policy establishment. I do not think that this particular recommendation ought to be treated lightly, and I have never suggested that. What I do think is that we should try to construct a mechanism which affords the administration the maximum amount of flexibility in keeping with the notion that it is really their responsibility to decide which ``t'' to cross and which ``i'' to dot. I think, as the Senator from Connecticut will demonstrate, there are very strong feelings here about one particular shift versus another. So I ask my friend if, rather than putting in a quorum call, he and I could spend a minute visiting while the Senator from Connecticut addresses the amendment.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I would just like to say to the majority leader and to the distinguished chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, I respect and appreciate the decision of the majority leader with respect to the bill that was just on the floor, but I want the distinguished chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to know that the quote he read has already been disavowed. It is not the policy of the Democratic side, and that is not what we are trying to do with respect to this bill. I would be happy to engage with the Senator further as we have previous to this to try to see if we can arrive at some kind of understanding. It is an important piece of legislation. We are not trying to avoid it altogether. But I think it was premature in its current state, and we would be happy to work with the Senator from North Carolina in an effort to see if we can come up with a reasonable bipartisan approach.

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. I do not use any more time.

Mr. KERRY. My answer is the judgment has already significantly been made by the private sector and by the National Academy of Sciences that it is not worth pursuing.

Mr. KERRY. I am not suggesting you have a meltdown structure, but you could nevertheless have a release of radiation, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's advisory committee has suggested that they are not willing to accept these approaches. Moreover, in order for this technology to be competitive, you would have to complete the R&D phase, which would cost another $700 million, and then in order to make the technology commercial, you are going to have to build a full-scale demonstration plant. You are going to have to operate that successfully for another $1 billion. Now, various reports of the National Academy of Sciences, the most recent of which was released this month, have unfailingly rejected this reactor technology for either mission, for the mission of providing energy or for the mission of getting rid of nuclear plutonium. So, Mr. President, if you look at what the Electric Power Research Institute, which is a research arm of the electric utility industry, said, they reported in 1991 that the HTGR was just not cost competitive. Now, if the private sector refuses to finance the R&D on a gas-cooled reactor, why should the taxpayers? It just does not make sense. I mean, this is one of those projects which we have got to have the courage to say it does not make sense economically, the science is not good. There are other alternative means of dealing with what is being proposed. This is the same argument as the ALMR. It took us 2 years to cut the ALMR. We cut it. But it was being proposed as a way of getting rid of nuclear unspent fuel. I think that truly, Mr. President, this particular expenditure of $900 million since 1970, chasing some kind of legitimate mission using taxpayers' money on an ongoing process, in a year when we are cutting education, we are cutting Medicare, we are cutting all of the other programs that are of such importance, and here we are once again trying to protect one of the great chases. Truly this is the kind of program that makes the wool and mohair subsidy look like support for the 101st Airborne or for cancer research. It simply does not stand up to scrutiny under the National Academy Of Sciences itself, under the private sector's own judgments. And therefore, the U.S. Senate ought to step up to bat and terminate it. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. KERRY. I yield but not on my time. If I can use the time of the Senator.

Mr. KERRY. Not on my time.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I rise in support of the amendment of the Senator from Arkansas, and I must say to my friends I do so on a personal level with some reticence because I worked so closely with both the proponents of this. Nevertheless, I feel very strongly that this is one of the moments where Congress really needs to just make the cut. The House has voted by 306 to 121 to cut the funding for this. We have been toying around with this technology since 1970. We have spent now some $900 million to date for the technology. But no commercial buyer is prepared to step up for this technology. Gas-cooled reactors employ what is known as a passive cooling system, and these do not allow for the use of conventional containment structures to prevent the release of radiation in case of accidents. That lack of containment could be a serious problem and would represent a major safety tradeoff.

Mr. KERRY

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

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk to the amendment of Senator Kennedy.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, it is my understanding we are going to try to work out the differences that still exist on section 619, and at some later date we may pull it up. We are in agreement with respect to the rest of the amendment.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that section 619 be stricken from the amendment.

Mr. KERRY. Does the Senator from North Carolina want me to stop----

Mr. KERRY. I would say to the Senator, Mr. President, there is nobody here who does not feel strongly about what they have done to Harry Wu. This is not a debate about whether Harry Wu should be left to be a prisoner or not. This is a question of what is the most efficient----

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senator from Louisiana for their comments. Let me clarify to colleagues that this amendment does not, per se, prohibit the delegation from going. What it does is penalize, to the tune of $3.5 million, the account from which that conference participation would be paid, or other conferences would be paid, if, in fact, the President goes ahead and sends them. So, in effect, it is a vote by the Senate as to whether or not we believe we ought to or ought not. There is punishment in it for the President choosing to exercise his constitutional prerogatives with respect to this. It does not, per se, prevent the President from doing so. That does not mean that we should not, nevertheless, oppose this amendment by virtue of the fact that there are stronger ways to send this message. I think it is very, very important to understand that opposition to this particular chosen method does not signal any kind of latitude with respect to Harry Wu. It does not signal anything other than our disapproval for that situation. In fact, there may, as the Senator from Louisiana has suggested, be far more effective ways to not only work his release but to deal with a host of other issues which we share with China. In the last few months, we have been going down a road that is defined largely by our mutual misinterpretation of each other to a certain degree. If there is any lesson that we should have learned in the last 20 years, I think it is that we are not going to unilaterally, through some very public confrontational method, alter an immediate event in China. It does not work that way. It has not worked that way along the course. It is usually when we work a fairly fine-tuned, and over the course of a longer period of time, strategy that is very much interfaced with personal relationships and personal respect that we begin to make the most progress. Every time we step out of that, we seem to take steps backward. I think there are many ways to affect Harry Wu's status. We ought to pursue every single one of them. To suggest that when they have already separated the nongovernmental organizations from the main U.N. conference in Beijing, and they have done that specifically to deny the capacity of the nongovernmental organizations to follow the events closely or have a major impact on them, it is clear they are already in a damage control mode. They are trying to manage this conference in a way that minimizes particularly the capacity of American participation to have an impact. I respectfully suggest that to have American participation leveraging Harry Wu's status, as well as the other issues, poses a far greater challenge to their ability to manage the news and the output and events than our nonparticipation. If the conference is going to take place anyway and we are simply going to say we are not going to do this out of protest, we not only minimize our voice but we also set into place a series of events that the Senator from Louisiana has talked to, which will have a whole bunch of collateral downsides. I do not think it is smart foreign policy. I do not think it accomplishes the goal we are setting out to accomplish. [[Page S 10946]] Mr. President, I ask my friend from North Carolina if we could temporarily set aside the pending amendment for further business?

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I ask my friend to withhold.

Mr. KERRY. We will be glad to. The majority leader is about to leave, I suppose, but let me say that I think there is not any issue in the U.S. Senate about how we feel about Harry Wu's detainment. I think there are probably 5 or 6, or, I do not know, maybe 100 different ideas here about how we might properly signal our disaffection, anger, frustration over it. I am genuinely not convinced that the way to do it is deny us participation in a conference that highlights human rights. It seems to me, when you measure the U.S. record against every other country in the world, we are the leader on human rights. It has been the United States, among all of the industrial countries, that has tried to assert human rights as a part of our foreign policy and also as a part of our efforts to do business in other parts of the world. I think it is fair to say that many of our allies--many of our closest allies, our best friends in the international arena--have been very slow to come to the level of international concern for human rights that we have tried to exhibit in public policy. For the United States to take an action that willfully deprives us of our own voice in the international arena, seems to me to be a very shortsighted, shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, try-to-conduct-diplomacy- with-one-foot-nailed- to-the-floor approach. It just does not make sense. In many ways, I suspect that China is apprehensive about the holding of this conference in Beijing. This cannot, in the midst of their transition, be a very stable time for them to have thousands of women from around the world descending on their capital, with all of the media from the world attendant, all listening to comparative analyses of the rights that are afforded to citizens in each of those present countries. If we just step up and take ourselves out of the picture, what we are doing is denying ourselves our own role of leadership. We are denying ourselves a voice at the conference. I suspect we are playing right into the hands of those who would love to have a low-key, noncontroversial, nonconfrontational, nonsubstantive conference. If you want to have that, then let us come to the floor of the Senate and deny American women, who have been preparing for this for years--literally--the right to go to Beijing and hold up the record of the Chinese on human rights for all the world to see. It just does not make sense. I would be in favor of coming to the floor and finding a means, as President Clinton has exhibited a willingness to do, to try to do something that puts teeth in the policy, and that literally matters more. To pick the women's conference and suggest that somehow that matters in a major way to the Chinese leadership is to misread China and, I think, to misread opportunity. President Clinton, I read today, has already said he is not willing to sit down and meet with the President of China unless Harry Wu is free. There are many other ways for us to come to the floor and leverage Harry Wu's freedom, and we ought to. We ought to do that. But it seems to me this is one of the weakest and most tangential of the ways of doing it. For those who want to read mischief into this amendment, it is not hard to do that. There are a lot of people who have never approved of U.S. participation in the women's conference. There are people who tried to stop participation at the Nairobi conference, if I recall correctly. There are people who have objected to the notion that we would get together and talk about family planning and other such issues important to women or women's rights. So I rather suspect there is more to this amendment than Harry Wu's freedom. If Harry Wu's freedom is really what this amendment is about, then we can find a much more forceful and intelligent way of putting that issue before the U.S. Senate. But to deny ourselves, as I say, our own participation as a leader in human rights and an opportunity to go to Beijing and hold up for all the world to see the degree to which China is lacking with respect to that, I think is just a very weak and negligible, unimportant way to approach this particular issue. I hope colleagues will recognize that there are [[Page S 10941]] other amendments which will afford them the opportunity to vote on some legitimate and important way of signaling our displeasure with the detention of Harry Wu. I do not think this is the method. I hope there will be more said on that as we go down the road. I reserve further time to speak on that as we progress. I see other colleagues are here on the floor, so I will yield the floor for now.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, let me begin by saying to the distinguished majority leader that I hope it might be possible to set this aside temporarily, simply because we have a couple of Senators who have amendments, or at least desire consideration, with respect to Harry Wu. It may not bear directly on this, but it think it would bear on the debate.

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, clearly we are not going to be prevented from what we think is right. The question is whether we can find a strong and forcible best means of sending this message. I simply ask the Senator whether or not that or a number of other methods I might add might not strike more at something meaningful to China than taking away the single, strongest human rights voice in the world from a conference that they are trying to frustrate anyway? This plays right into their hands. The reason it has been moved, the reason that there are so many difficulties with accreditation is that the leadership fears this conference. And here we are coming along and adding to that. I ask the Senator why we strike in a way that somehow nails our own foot to the floor rather than theirs?

Mr. KERRY

Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I move to table the motion. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 2031 (Purpose: To amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act to authorize reduced levels of appropriations for foreign assistance programs for fiscal years 1996 and 1997)