Jack Kingston

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Well, the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Norwood] on the subject of Government regulations and Government knows best. I know that as a dentist he practices dentistry, and I asked my dentist the last time I was there how many rubber gloves his office used today. One hundred, and he said they never did a cost-benefit analysis on it.

Mr. KINGSTON. Well, it is amazing to me that people who say, ``I don't want to monkey with the Constitution''; the Constitution is so sacred that to them it seems to preempt the fact that the country is going bankrupt, and that does not make sense because that kind of thinking will not work. Now the balanced budget amendment, welfare reform, is part of the Contract With America. The other thing which I know both of my colleagues have been leaders on is deregulation of business because, if we really want to help the economically disadvantaged, we are going to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurs because the businessowners create the jobs, the small mom and pops, and I know my colleagues have been leaders in getting business deregulation, and we passed that bill last week. Can the gentleman tell us something?

Mr. KINGSTON. You cannot do that. That is why we always have to bail out Somalia, Rwanda, and all the other countries in the world, because they mismanaged their resources. America has managed it. We have some food. America has managed it, and we have some food. You are talking about cutting, you are talking about spending the cutting. One of the things that is amazing to me is, out of the thousands of programs, they are all efficient, they are all critical, and every one of those programs has a defender in the U.S. Congress, and, yes, it is bipartisan, it is Republicans and Democrats. But the thing that we have got to do is say no. Now today, as my colleagues all know, the U.S. Senate voted down the balanced budget amendment. I believe it is a very sad day for America, because of that, because if we cannot say yes to the balanced budget amendment, I can promise my colleagues they cannot say no to voluntary fiscal restraint.

Mr. KINGSTON. And he has said that, ``Give me the money. I will do a better job than those bureaucrats in Washington.''

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, today is the first day of March. Today is the first day of Lent. Today is the first day of the third month that we do not have a U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Is having a Secretary of Agriculture important? Apparently not to this administration. Or maybe it is agriculture issues that are not important to this administration. And what are agriculture issues? Food stamps, nutrition, School Lunch Programs, to name a few. Yes, that is right. For all the bureaucratic bellyaching over School Lunch Programs, neither the President nor the Senate Democrats have pushed for the confirmation of a new Secretary of Agriculture. Could there be a slight disconnect here, Mr. Speaker? And what else besides the School Lunch Program is in jeopardy or up for grabs? The 1995 farm bill, the Delaney clause, the Market Promotion Program, minor use pesticides. But forget these. How about every item on your table, everything you buy at the grocery store? Is it not important enough to the American consumers for the President and the U.S. Senate to confirm a new Secretary of Agriculture?

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, today as we face final congressional action on passing the balanced budget amendment, it is a moment of national truth. Will we squirm and wiggle and side-step our responsibility, will we cop out with politically palatable excuses or will we take the action because if we vote no today how much easier will it be to continue to vote for deficit spending? Since 1969 we have not had a balanced budget. And every Democrat and Republican who has voted for this deficit spending has had a good excuse to do so. But it is time to stop this. We need a balanced budget amendment. We can think of, and taxpayers above all can think of 4\1/2\ trillion reasons to vote for a balanced budget amendment. Ladies and gentlemen of America, watch today carefully. It is a critical day in the history of our Nation.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, the Democrats' scare tactics never cease to amaze me. First they told the senior citizens if we pass the balanced budget amendment, you will never get another Social Security check. Next they went after the politicians. If the President has a line-item veto, you will never get a pork-barrel, I mean an economic development project, in your district again. Now it is the school kids. If we consolidate 16 different food and nutrition programs, lay off hundreds of bureaucrats and make the system more efficient, kids will go hungry. Mr. Speaker, I ask you, how hungry will these kids be when our country is broke? This debate is not about feeding the kids, but eliminating fat cat bureaucrats who have been picking the best helpings off children's plates for too long. Feed the kids, not the bureaucracy.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. I want to also ask if your children are familiar with the are sour, and I would say there might be an instruction in that one, too. As you know, this is a body that has to have action in the House and action in the Senate and then action by the President, who today held a news conference denouncing much of the contract. And, you know, we are hoping, as you know, that the bipartisan spirit that passed the bill that put Congress under the same laws as the American people and that passed the balanced budget amendment and that passed the national security bill that the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Jones] talked about, and the unfunded mandates bill, we hope that that bipartisan spirit goes on in the next body, and then the President has the great unique opportunity to say, ``You know, some of this I can live with.'' And we hope that does happen.

Mr. KINGSTON. There is another important subject that is in the contract, and that is term limits. I know the State of Texas, the legislature only meets every other year, and that generally you are in the real world as a result of that. In the State of Georgia, we meet 40 days a year, but the representatives on the State level and the county commission and so forth are generally not full-time. They are involved in making an honest living in the real world, and one of the things that we need in Congress is more people like you who have been in the real world, more people who have a frame of reference of business, of education, of being a police officer, and so forth. We need to have that element to get away from the professional politicians. One of the things the Contract With America calls for is an involvement on term limits.

Mr. KINGSTON. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I think it is important to remember that this bill takes the power away from Washington bureaucrats, and it puts it back in the hands of the Houston police department and the folks in Atlanta and Savannah and Brunswick and Statesboro and Waycross that I represent, where I think decisions can be made more effectively as to what they need. Remember, midnight basketball is just one of many so-called preventative programs. Self-esteem programs were also in the bill that we passed in August of 1994. There is a lot more to the bill, but the idea is who is best to make the decision, the people who live and work on the streets where the crimes were committed, or people in the sheltered Washington, DC world. I know the gentleman will agree with us, that the decisions are better made locally.

Mr. KINGSTON. Let me ask the gentleman a question, first. Although I was born in Texas, I do not claim to know all the politics there for 1995. I would say to the gentleman, with the majority leader, Dick Armey, with the majority whip, Tom DeLay, and I understand there is a gentleman named Phil Gramm who may be the next President, I do not think we would pass a bill that is punitive to the State of Texas prison program. The Department of Justice, as you know, was against this crime bill. Janet Reno fought it every inch of the way. I suspect that information is not 100 percent accurate. I will follow up with you on it, if you want to look at that further. I do want to say, Mr. Speaker, in terms of the block grant program, remember, the 100,000 police officers, the Clinton bill only paid for 20,000 of them. The rest of that money, there was only $8 billion in that program, and it takes about $8 billion a year to fund it. The 100,000 police officers were not there. I trust my city police in the First District of Georgia, all over the State of Georgia, as I know you do in Texas, to make the right decisions. I'm not afraid of them taking that money and building midnight basketball domes. I just do not believe they will do it. They may say ``We do not need police officers, but we need a police car, we need some radio and we need some other drug interdiction equipment,'' but I think they are going to be able to make that decision better than Congressmen and women from New York City and from California and elsewhere.

Mr. KINGSTON. If the gentleman will yield further, he is right. We have protected the rights of the individual, which is extremely important, if not sacred, but at the same time, we cannot compromise the safety of the society. Yet, we have done that. Criminals on an average serve 35 percent of their time, which means our streets are full of people who have been arrested not once or twice but 7, 8, 9, 10 different times. The block grant concept says to States that ``If you have truth-in-sentencing, meaning if you sentence somebody for 10 years, he or she serves 10 years, we will give you block grants for new prison construction.'' We hear so often about overcrowding in prisons, and what this will do is make our streets safe by taking that element off the street, which is what the victim who was raped needs, what people in Arizona need, what people all over the country need.

Mr. KINGSTON. I think it is important also for us to keep in mind that we do not want to lose species when we talk about the Endangered Species Act. We do not want to lose wetlands when we talk about wetlands. What we do want to do is bring some sanity in. For example, I had a gentleman, a businessman in my district, send me a stack of papers about a half an inch thick. He said ``I have got to do this to get a permit to dig a hole because there is questions about the wetlands.'' The hole was 3 feet deep. He has to fill out what I can only say would be about a half an inch of paperwork, and it would probably take a half a day to do it, to dig a 3 foot hole. Not three foot long or wide, just 3 foot normal size hole. Cases like that we hear right and left. There is a road contractor in Georgia, and I know you know what a silt fence is, when you are building a new road that now they build these fences to help stop erosion, and that is the kind of wavy fence that you see on sticks. I have never seen one, frankly, do much good. But I asked the contractor, how much did that silt fence cost you on widening this road project? The total project for widening the road was $1 million. The silt fence was about $30,000. And I said now, realistically, the taxpayers are paying for it, so it is not any skin off his back, so-to-speak. He is going to get his profit out of the job. I said does that fence do any good? He said no. I said should you use a silt fence? He said in south Georgia, where everything is flat, generally you do not need a silt fence. If you need one, you do not need one the entire length ever the road. In north Georgia where it is hilly, you need it, and in south Georgia where it is hilly you need it. But he can't have that flexibility to decide. What he says is let me decide when to use a silt fence or not, and, if I am wrong, fine me. Eat up all my profit on the job. Take away my tractor. I promise you I am not going to let any dirt move from the site. What we are talking about is let's do not micromanage everything out of Washington. Let the Georgia DOT or the county commissions make these decisions along with the road contractor. You might not need it on every single project.

Mr. KINGSTON. Part of this getting folks to work, we have got to make sure that the jobs are out there. I think by giving middle class families this $500 per child tax break will help empower consumers and stimulate the economy through more consumer spending and create jobs. I think the other part of it is to get the Government off of the backs of business. Requirement of risk assessments: When EPA and OSHA and all the other thousands and thousands of government agencies and bureaucracies come and harass mom and pop businesses on Main Street, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, all over the country, let them make it harder to pass regulations on businesses, because if businesses do not have to pay so much time, effort and energy and money to Uncle Sam, they can expand. They can take that little lawn mower store and build a branch on the south side of town and create jobs that way. Remember, 70 percent of America is still working for small businesses.

Mr. KINGSTON. I think also, if you look and consider that the third largest spending item in our entire budget is the interest on the debt, which is about $20 billion each month, it is money we do not ever get back. We talk about investing in education. We talk about investing in our Nation's economically disadvantaged so they can join the mainstream. We cannot do that when we are spending $20 billion a month, and I can promise you that this year you will have requests from your congressional district, folks back home, worthy projects perhaps in Arizona, North Carolina. They will not come to $20 billion, and yet that is what is spent each month just on the interest, and that money is gone. We have got to do this. Now, one of the things we are trying to do in the contract is the welfare reform so that people who are able to work will be required to work. We are going to try to make it so dads do not have this alley cat mentality that they can go off and just get a woman, or a girl in many cases, pregnant and not have any more responsibility than an alley cat. We are trying to say, ``Look, you're on the hook, you have got to raise that child,'' because those children now are becoming welfare recipients themselves, in many cases drug addicts, in many cases high school dropouts and so forth, but they need to have dads back home, and our welfare reform plan works on restoring the family, and that is something so very important.

Mr. KINGSTON. And if the gentleman would yield, I think we have proven under Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, who frankly did not have many successes while he was President, but one of the things that he did was he gave a tax cut in the early 1960's. Reagan did one in the early 1980's. In both cases it brought about economic growth and economic prosperity because the American people know how to spend their money better than the United States Congress: more clothes, more hamburgers, more records, more cars, more houses are bought by them which creates jobs, and that has a multiplier effect for more revenues.

Mr. KINGSTON. Absolutely, and on top of the balanced budget amendment we have that very important line item veto which we, the majority party in the House, are willing to give to a Democrat President. We might be the ones who--that might be just like a boomerang to us. It is going to come back and cut projects in our own districts, but it is more important than any single congressional district. It will help attack that deficit, and I know that the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Jones] has worked hard on the balanced budget amendment and the line- item veto.

Mr. KINGSTON. I thank the gentleman. Absolutely, as we speak about senior citizens programs, balanced budget, programs for the disabled, we have to keep in mind, when we are going broke it does not matter. Remember when you were kids, if you found out your dad might have a charge at the local drugstore, you go down and you get you a soda pop, and you just sign his name. You did not have to pay the 35 cents for the Coca Cola, and you thought you were getting something. You were charging it to your dad. Well, little did we know that, when we were grown-ups, we would be charging things to our children, and you would not dream of going to a drugstore and charging a sandwich to your 8-year-old, but that is what we are doing. We are doing it in Congress, and, if we are going to be worrying about kids' nutrition programs, and senior citizens, and so forth, we are talking about compassion. We better talk about paying down this debt that we have, this $4.5 trillion debt that we have. That balanced budget amendment, it is critical because, if there is anything that our history has proven since 1969, Congress cannot say, ``No.'' We have got to have the constraint, the discipline, that a balanced budget amendment forces on us. I wish everyone would call their Senator tonight and say, ``Where are you standing, and why aren't you for it?'' As my colleagues know, a friend of mine, John Carswell, a farmer, told me something interesting last week, and he said a guy went down to farm and wanted to borrow another farmer's ax. He said, ``I'm not going to lend you your ax--my ax. You can't use my ax.'' And he said, ``Why not?'' He said, ``Because I'm making soup tonight.'' He said, ``Soup? What does that have to do with me borrowing your ax?'' He said, ``Nothing, but, if you don't want to do something, any excuse is a good one.'' That is what the U.S. Senate is doing to the balanced budget amendment. [Mr. Kingston] has a senior Senator whose vote is very, very important. I know you join me, as you said earlier, and, Mr. Speaker, as we know that we address the rest of the country, we welcome the phone calls, we welcome this new dialog, and I am certain, as the gentleman from Georgia will attest, that I am sure the folks in the other body would also be interested in hearing from the people as the other body approaches this very real vote on a balanced budget amendment. It is important for the people of this country, Mr. Speaker, to be heard. They were heard November 8, but what I think we are trying to say tonight is: Just as this continues through the Contract with America over the next 50 days, it is an ongoing process, and certainly the American people should not think it is a fait accompli, that we have already done it. It is continually evolving. The other body has a major role to play, and just as we welcome calls, I am sure the Members of the other body welcome them, too.

Mr. KINGSTON. One of the sad things about Washington is when you do not have the facts, you kind of rattle a little emotionally and say this and that. I will not accuse my friend from Wisconsin of that, but I would say there are Members in the Democrat Party who have school nutrition as their Social Security issue that, first, we scare the senior citizens, now we go after the hungry 6-year-old. The fact is there are 16 different school nutrition programs. We talk about these school lunch programs. There are 16 of them. What we are trying to do is eliminate them so that we can feed the children and let the bureaucrats go out and find other work, other things to do. Eleven different bureaucracies are trying to be consolidated, as I understand it, by the Opportunity Committee, and then four by the Agriculture Committee. All we want to do is say, ``Hey, there are too many people feeding at the trough before it gets to that little 6-year-old. Let us cut out some of those and maybe we can feed more 6-year-olds.'' I know the gentleman's wife's No. 1 goal is education, and I know she knows, as do the rest of us--and I come from a family of educators-- that you cannot teach hungry children. You have got to feed them and then you can teach them about math, English, prepositions, adjectives, and all that sort of stuff.

Mr. KINGSTON. Does the gentleman from Wisconsin see what he has done now? The gentleman from Arizona is an old sportscaster, and he is getting wound up. He knows politics is a contact sport, and that is good to have the contact, and I am glad the gentleman is here.

Mr. KINGSTON. I thank the gentleman. I think the important thing is I know that you have been with us on many of these votes, and we appreciate your joining us tonight. The thing to also remember, though, the balanced budget amendment does not even have to have President Clinton's signature. He is against it, which is fortunate. But what it does need to have--I am not sure what the count is right now, I think it is two Democratic Senators who have not voted. So I hope the people from Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina and anywhere else in between who are listening tonight, will pick up their phone and call their Democratic Senators and say, ``Pass that balanced budget amendment. Run your household in Washington or our country the way we have to have our households in America.'' I think it is a good point. The Democratic Party in the Senate is just bogging down the balanced budget. Let us get it passed. Let us get on to other things. Also, on things that we do not need Senate approval, for example, cutting committee staff by one-third, limiting the term of committee chairmen and eliminating some of the committees; we eliminated about 25 subcommittees. We have done that without having to have Senate approval for it. So there are many things that were in the contract that were done within our power that we could do within these walls, in this Chamber, without having the other body sign off on it and slow us down.

Mr. KINGSTON. The gentleman from Arizona controls the time. We do want to yield to the gentleman. We do want to make one point from the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Jones]. I represent the 24th Infantry. I had the great honor of doing that. We hope they can keep their name, the 24th Infantry Division, instead of being rolled into the Third. One of the things that the men and women in the ranks, the fighting men and women, the ones who delivered the victory in Desert Storm, are always concerned about is they do not want to go overseas and fight for a U.N. general. They are ready to fight. They are ready to do everything they can for the United States Government. They do not want a French military commander telling them to go up and take the hill. I do not think that is too much to ask. That is a very important point which is what we have done.

Mr. KINGSTON. I thank the gentleman very much for yielding. Let me tell you one of the things I have learned during my tenure in politics. I think it is important. This is not just patting each other on the back, but it is a different way of thinking, because I was in the State legislature and have lots of friends who are in elected office, and it is generally the accepted rule that you run for office, you pass out a brochure that says how tough you are going to be on crime, how strict you are going to be on welfare, how tight you are going to be about the people's money. As soon as you get elected, you put the brochure on the shelf and do not worry about it. You basically handle an agenda already in progress, many items set by special interest groups. So I think what is so different, you were talking about the Republican Congress during Truman's days and here we have a Speaker who has an agenda that was introduced on the steps of the Capitol to the American majority party and the freshman class, which you two are Members of, and he goes around with this thing and pulls it out of his pocket and punches holes in it. That is a revolutionary concept. When the Speaker of the House is saying to all of the Members, particularly the Members of the majority party, he means to stand by his promises, that is a very clear signal to the rank and file membership, completely different. I have not forgotten my brochure, the boss is the folks back home. Here is my brochure, I carry it with me. I am going to be accountable to these promises, passing or not passing them, I will be accountable, and he pulls it out on a regular basis to the American people.

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KINGSTON. My jogging buddy from the Northeast who has to come to Washington for warm weather these days, we will yield.