Jack Kingston

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. The third party of our military strategy, along with quality of life and readiness, is modernization, keeping up with the technology. If we just look at our own stereo systems and automobiles, we can see the technology changing tremendously from one year to the next. One can imagine what the technology is for a tank, for an airplane, for an aircraft carrier, for missiles and so forth. The things that we can do for safety, defense, for weapons, is tremendous. We are taking a huge risk if we do not. I was reading many years ago and so I cannot quote this exactly accurately but it was in Churchill's ``History of the English-Speaking People'' and he talked about the long bow, and in the long history of war with each other the French and the British, one king had the long bow, the arrow that would shoot the farthest distance. Unfortunately, I do not remember but I think it was the British, and the British were able to defeat the French for about 20 or 30 consistent years because they had this great weapon. As soon as the French invented it, then the pendulum swung the other direction. It is no different today. Ancient Rome, or whoever had the catapult first, they were at an advantage and today nothing has changed. We have to keep up weaponry, and that is one of the things that this budget is designed to do, not to spend more money on airplanes, tanks and ships but to spend it smarter so that we do not have waste but we are buying what is the most effective and what is the most useful.

Mr. KINGSTON. And if the gentleman will yield, a very key part right after readiness is the quality of life. For the first time, I think, in recent decades or in a decade military recruitment is down in all branches of military, and I think the only branch to make its quota this year was the Marines. We have had a 14 year decline in real dollar spending in defense. This year was the first year the defense spending was actually increased, and if you look at what is going on in the world, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Korea, it is a very dangerous place out there, and if something erupts in the Middle East, in Bosnia or Korea, we cannot fight a war on two fronts. And I do not think that America tries to be the policeman of the world, but if there is to be a policeman of the world, let it be America because we are the only country I think in the history of the world that has the ability to take over countries, but we never have. We have never started an aggressive war in this Nation.

Mr. KINGSTON. Relief for farmers now in the Southeast and the Midwest particularly. We have had a tremendous farm disaster. I represent Georgia, and I represent coastal and agrarian Georgia, and one of the things that is easy after a hurricane, to get relief because there is pictures of buildings that have blown over and boats in the middle of the street and so forth. Unfortunately the farm disaster, often you cannot see it unless you have a farmer out there in the field and you know what an undeveloped cotton boll looks like, or you know how big a soybean or a peanut should be at a certain time of year, and you know when it is not that big. And so in Georgia $700 million of agriculture disaster is a tremendous drain on the moms and dads who are in the farming business, the farm families, but also important to the local economies in the small town, the banks, the implement dealers, the county commissions, and the school boards and so forth. This has some major farm relief. It also has a little bit of tax relief for farms. Modernization, lower cost of government; we have taken a very serious, I think maybe final step to solve the Y2K problem, the Year 2000 computer glitch that we have heard so much about so that our Social Security checks will be able to get to America's seniors without interruption because of the technology. We also have, and you have pointed out earlier, we have secured a great deal of the Social Security surplus, and have we have resisted the temptation, unlike Congress for 40 straight years, we have resisted the temptation to spend the Social Security surplus, and I think it is very important that we protect that. You mentioned defense, national missile defense. This bill has, I believe, about $700 million dollars for national missile defense. It is so important in this dangerous world where you have Russian nuclear arms out on the marketplace because the Russian nuclear armament business has kind of fallen from within, and so what they are doing is they are pedaling the stuff out to the Third World countries and selling it to the Middle East. We are crazy not to have a strong missile defense system, and this budget takes a significant step to it. Let me yield to the gentleman.

Mr. KINGSTON. If the gentleman will not mind me adding a few extras to that?

Mr. KINGSTON. We thank the gentleman from Illinois for joining us and appreciate all the hard work you have done to bring common sense to government. The gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. KINGSTON. Well, we congratulate you on a successful negotiation. I yield back to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. KINGSTON. Does the gentleman care to give us an estimate when the final vote may be?

Mr. KINGSTON. Would the gentleman be considered treating himself to a hour's worth of sleeping tonight perhaps?

Mr. KINGSTON. As the gentleman knows, I control the time and I consider the gentleman's time from Illinois valuable, even though the distinguished majority leader from Texas has joined us. We are talking about this budget agreement that you guys have worked so hard on and I think done such a great job on. We are taking your bragging rights away, but it would be an honor for all of us to yield if you would like to say a few things.

Mr. KINGSTON. That is a very good point. I do think it is important that we recognize there is still going to be, I think, about a $71 billion projected surplus and the emerging nickname of this Congress, and you were part of the historic 104, the majority class, I think this freshman class is going to be called the Surplus Congress. We have a distinguished member from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) who has been sitting in the chair tonight. He wanted to make a few points on what you just mentioned.

Mr. KINGSTON. The gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) has joined us and he has been working hard, he is one of the number one budget crunchers on the floor, a staunch protective guy when it comes to spending tax dollars and the kind of leader we need.

Mr. KINGSTON. The gentleman has a major piece of legislation that he has introduced that is bipartisan in nature, for institutions of higher education that he may want to mention something about that, but I do want to emphasize this special education point that he has brought up. I think it is so important for us to help the families who have children with special needs and help the children with special needs and give them every single opportunity we can to help them progress and help them with whatever we can do. In some cases it makes a tremendous difference. For this Congress to abandon those children, it would be a travesty. But we have not done as Congresses have done in the past. We have said, ``No, we're going to meet this challenge, we're going to do it.'' You have been a leader of that. Our friend from New Hampshire (Mr. Bass) has certainly taken the forefront of it. You have mentioned the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling). We have done a lot about this. We talk about local control. I would like to tell the story of my old, or my former, not so old, she is 84 years young, Mrs. Musick back home in Athens, Georgia. She raised me, she was a very strict teacher, she raised me in the classroom, a very strict teacher. You could not talk, you had to cover your book, you could not pass notes, you had to do your homework and all kinds of things you need to be told to do when you are 15 and 16 years old. But she loved her classroom, her subjects. She liked to talk about Hemingway and Longfellow and Shakespeare. These people were her personal friends. They were her colleagues and her peer group. She read about it. There was no sentence she could not diagram. No sentence had a split infinitive or no participle dangled in her classroom. She was passionate about it. But the other thing was, she was the boss of her classroom. She did not have experts coming down from Harvard University to tell her how to teach the kids in Athens, Georgia. She did not have people up in Atlanta coming up with new charts and diagrams that had to be used. She did not have bureaucrats from Washington saying, ``This is the new way to introduce literature to kids.''

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, I think it is real important for us to just have a good balance between reducing spending and trying to fund necessary programs. This Congress has done a great job towards balancing and protecting and preserving Medicare, protecting and preserving social security, and reforming welfare, and providing, as the gentleman has stated, the first tax cut in 16 years. I still think the American people are overtaxed. We have to be very, very careful with how we spend the money that we get from the hardworking American people. On the same hand we are going to continue to push for these things, even if we do not get the full load this year. I think it is very important for us to stay at the table, get the job done, make sure that education is run as much as possible on the local level, not out of Washington bureaucracies, not out of State capital bureaucracies. We have stood strong for lowering the teacher-to-student ratio. We want more teachers in the classroom, but we do not want those teachers to work for Washington, we want the teachers to work for the local school board. We want the local school board to be able to make the decisions. It is similar to the COPS program, the community police officers on the street. In my area in Statesboro, Georgia, they have utilized COPS grants to put police substations in different housing developments, in high-risk crime areas. What has happened as a result of that is crime has gone down in this crime-infested area, and the little children are looking up to policemen. They are making friends with the policemen. Instead of running from policemen and seeing them as an enemy, they see them as a good citizen, and, if you will, a father figure, in many cases. It has been very positive. The reason why that COPS program I think has worked in Statesboro, Georgia, is because they do not rely on Washington to tell them how to spend the money or where to spend the money and when to spend the money. We want to do the same with education.

Mr. KINGSTON. Let me tell the gentleman, I will give three examples. A teacher in Saint Mary's, Georgia, told me that she had just returned from Athens, Georgia, where she went to a seminar where they taught teachers from all over the State how to behave around students. What they meant by that is one has to be careful to never be alone with a student because they might do something to the student. They should never go to a bathroom or a gym locker room alone with a student. These are prudent things, but then they went on to say one should not ever hug a student and one should avoid being with a student after class hours. Now think about that for those who may be a little slow on algebra, need to hear the grammar for a second time in order to get it. I had to often go back after class and talk to the teachers. They are telling these teachers not to do that. The worst part is she told me they were told not to hug the students, and she said I live in an area where we have a lot of young families, a lot of military families, dads are away, on ships in the Navy a long time. Some of these kids are actually from a broken home. They need a hug a lot more than they need an A. She went at taxpayers' expense to hear from the bureaucrats at the State Department of Education, who heard from the bureaucrats in the Washington Department of Education, do not hug your children down in Saint Marys, Georgia. I think this teacher was capable of making her own decisions. A teacher in Darien, Georgia, I asked her how much paperwork she has to do each day beyond grading papers in the normal paperwork that comes with being a teacher and she said she spends about 30 minutes a day; 30 minutes a day. That is 2 to 3 hours a week filling out forms of statistics, often which are meaningless to the bureaucrats in Atlanta, who send them to the bureaucrats in Washington. What we are trying to do, and I think this budget agreement is moving in that direction, is to give more power to the local teachers. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I would like to show him some of the education components that we have passed in this Congress this year, which we are trying to get, and I think we are going to be successful in getting a lot of these in the budget, the Higher Education Act, the A-Plus Savings Account Act. Now unfortunately that was vetoed. $500 million more for special education. The students in special education have particular needs that are not always met by the normal funding process.

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

Mr. KINGSTON. Which are very significant. That is not just measured in tax dollar savings, that is measured in people who are happy, who are independent, greater self-esteem, greater satisfaction, because they went out and found a job, and working they are working their way up the ladder. Finally, this Congress has cut taxes for the first time in 16 years, which we believe the American people are overburdened, and they need to hold as much as their own money that they earn as possible.

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I guess, in our time to close, let us just say, this Congress has worked and has balanced the budget. This Congress has worked to protect Social Security. We have worked to protect Medicare, not just for the next election, but for the next generation. We have reformed welfare. Thirty-seven percent of the people that were on it in 1994 have now gotten off of it.

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I want to mention, the gentleman talked about the amount of national debt. The debt service is actually about $2,000 per family. We pay I think it is the second largest expenditure in the budget is interest on the national debt, which runs to about $2,000 a family, which would be half a year's college tuition. It would be a down payment on a new car, or it could be a nice vacation. So the interest on the national debt is already something we are facing. Since the gentleman is from Colorado, and I have a mama and a sister and brother-in-law and nephew out in that great State. I also have to brag about one of my best friends two of my best friends, Ross and Paloma Fox, whose son Richard just got a full 4-year college to the University of Colorado. He is 6'10". He is going to be a Buffalo out there. I know that is not in your distict. But he is a great guy. I just want the gentleman to know, since he represents Colorado State, and I want him to know I have known Richard Fox, this 17-year- old boy, all my life. I know his brother David. They are both great kids. I know their families. But I just want the gentleman to know that, when Richard Fox and the Colorado Buffalos go up to Colorado State in Fort Collins, I am going to be cheering for him. I want the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) to know that I hope they win, and that Colorado State can go win the national championship because they are not going to be able to beat Richard Fox and team. I just have to have this personal brag, because he is a good Georgia boy.

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, the interesting part, the gentleman is talking about the farmer, is he is putting his savings back into production. That middle class taxpayer out there often, when they have little money left over at the end of the month, and they are planning on taking a nice vacation in the summer time or adding onto their house or buying a new car, inevitably the dryer breaks or the refrigerator breaks down, or the transmission falls apart. The money always seems to go back into the trappings of working and trying to be productive, sometimes the rat race. I mean, they have a hard time liberating themselves from it. I think that is why it is so important for to us remember that, when we are spending money, it is not our money. It is the American people's money. If we are walking down the street, and we find a wallet, the wallet has $100 in it. We do not go rush out and say, okay, here is what I am going to do with $100. We say, oh, man, a wallet. Somebody has lost $100 how do I get it back to them? Oh, let us see, here is their address now. I am going to return this money and the wallet, and they are going to be happy, and I am going to make share day. That is what we do. Here we have a surplus, people have overpaid, and we are saying, okay, how do we spend it. That is what I am very concerned about, that there are members of the administration who are taking this approach that, look, we have got this surplus, we are going out and obligate ourselves a new government and spending on new programs. What we are saying is, give part of it back, put the rest of it, 90 percent, and protect it for Social Security purposes because we have never protected money for Social Security.

Mr. KINGSTON. I believe that the American people are interested in less government overall. They had more control over their lives and more control on a local level. If a local city wants to do something, provide a service, and then they want it in Colorado but they might not want it in Georgia, people want that decision to be made in Colorado and in Georgia, not in Washington. Unfortunately, as the government grows, it is all up to some unnamed, faceless Washington bureaucracy to say this is what is good for the people of Georgia and Colorado and all of the States east and west of them. There are not that many States east of Georgia right now, but the way the government is expanding they might put a few people out there on pontoons or something. One has to be careful with this crowd. The reality is, though, the average hard working American, in my opinion, wakes up in the morning, scurries to get ready for work, both mom and dad, and get the children shoehorned into their clothes. In my house, and I know in the gentleman's house, we are full of children and the gentleman knows that their shoes disappear overnight. Even if they put them in a particular place, the shoes seem to walk under their own power, and somehow there is always a book, even though they have packed their backpack the night before there is a book that is missing, so somewhere in that dynamic the kids have to be dressed and organized and then fed, again, good nutritious breakfast so that they will be good learners. Then they have to be scooted off to school to the bus station or drop them off in the car pool and then run off to work. At work, we go back to a pile of paper or jobs that we could not complete the day before and we work real hard for that. Then we get an hour for lunch but we have to cut it off because we have some stuff to do. We are supposed to get off at 5:00, and it is kind of hard but the day care center closes at 6:00 so we have to push through, leaving some more stuff at work, to get the kids and then get home on time, maybe run by the grocery store to get something on the way. This is the modern nineties marriage. This is the modern nineties family experience. These folks do not sit around and watch us necessarily on C-SPAN, as brilliant as we are, and they are out saying, I am spent. By the time I get the family fed, get myself unwound, get the dishes done, get the yard work finished for the day and whatever daylight is left, finish with the kids' homework and get them in bed and bathed and all the good stuff, it is over with. People do not sit down and read the paper and think about national policy. What they do is say we voted. We expect the Members of Congress to do a good job. Republicans or Democrats, we expect them to put their party differences aside and do what is good for the country, and we want our government to work. By working, we want a budget that is balanced. This Congress has balanced that budget for the first time since 1969 because of reductions in wasteful spending, and slowing down the growth of government. They want a Medicare system that is going to be there for them and the future, not one that is going to be imperiled year after year and fixed for election year purposes only. They want one that is solid, which this Congress has solidified on a bipartisan basis. They want a Social Security that is reliable. We have put aside $1.4 trillion for Social Security. For the first time in 40 years, Social Security has been protected. They want to know it is there for them. They also do not want to pay 45 to 50 percent of their income in taxes. They feel their taxes are quite adequate, and we ought to do well with the money we are already taking out of their paycheck. That is why they are happy that this Congress has cut taxes for the first time in 16 years, and they want us to do it again because they are tired of busting their tails and having us share in it just because we have the power to do so.

Mr. KINGSTON. A number of parts of this are so important, teacher testing for teacher competency, Reading Excellency Act, high job skills training. One item I wanted to talk about, though, school nutrition, now I am on the Committee on Agriculture and my friend, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey) also was formerly on the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies. We work hard to protect school nutrition, to make sure that our children have a good balanced meal, and it is not just lunch. They often need to have a breakfast program, because the only warm meal that they get is at the school. So we want it to be a good meal. We want to make sure that the food is safe. We want to make sure that the food is nutritious and that it is quality. We do not want a situation where some broker is coming in there with some special deal to pawn off on American school children some third grade beef. So we have worked hard to make sure that our children are served consistently good quality meals. We think that is going to make also a better education product, but these are things that Republicans and Democrats can and do agree on, and we move in the right direction of it with this budget agreement because we believe there is so much that we do agree on, and unfortunately so on in the negotiating process we go at it like it is the World Series and there is only one team that can win. We have a vision that is different of government than the Democrats. Yet, when you put the two visions together, as we often will in a budget agreement, America wins; not Democrats, not Republicans, not the White House, not Congress but America. That is what these negotiations are all about. One of the things that I do want to talk to the gentleman about a little further is the level of reduction in government spending, how we are moving in a direction where we are bringing down the level of government spending and we think that it is very important to bring that level down consistently because the smaller the growth of government, the bigger the growth of the private sector, and that is where jobs are created. That is where the budget actually gets balanced and that is where more quality goods and services get to people.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, first of all, let me congratulate the President on his 100th fund-raiser. That is a quite a milestone for a guy who has only had time for two cabinet meetings this year. This year, most of the money is American money, a novel concept. I understand that Chinese money has kind of been discouraged. Big step for the DCCC and the Democrat party. I congratulate him on that. But it would be nice to think, why not try to get the cabinet meetings up to 5 this year. One hundred fund-raisers; five cabinet meetings. I do not know. He might want to talk about Bosnia, health care education, jobs, taxes, who knows. This week, Congress worked. We worked Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and of course Tuesday, and we will be working until we get the budget passed. Why? Because we have a great provision in there to put more dollars into the classroom for the school kids of America. Why? Because there is a farm disaster, $700 million in the State of Georgia alone. The President has vetoed the bill. No cabinet meeting on that, too. But, then again, who needs the cabinet member from the USDA. Then of course we have Social Security, a Republican plan to petition and wall off $1.4 trillion dollars so it cannot be used for general funds. All these are important, all these are working over the weekends. I hope the President will consider skipping one fund-raiser to help us out.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, there was this guy who was in hell and he was sentenced to go to hell and he was walking around down there and he was smiling. The devil says to him, what are you smiling about. He said, I am from South Georgia. It is 90 degrees. I do not feel so bad. I kind of feel like I am back home again. The devil got mad. The devil cranked up the thermostat to 100 degrees and checked on the guy after a little while, walked over, the guy was not even sweating. Devil said, now what is the problem, why are you so happy now? He says, well, again, I am from South Georgia and 100 degrees is like July. This does not bother me a bit. The devil got real mad, cranked up the thermostat to 110 degrees. And at this point the guy was smiling again. The devil runs over to him and says, I know, August, right. And guy says, you got it, devil, 110 degrees is not a problem. The devil got real mad and turned the thermostat down to 15 degrees. Everything got blue and frozen. Devil ran over there and he saw the South Georgia boy smiling one more time and he said, what is it now? And he says, devil, I am smiling because apparently the Democrats and the Republicans have finally found something that they agree on up there in Washington. And so the reality is, Mr. Speaker, we are often painted, Democrats and Republicans, as fighting things over. I will say this, that I believe philosophically so often that my side is right, as my good friends on the Democrat side believe their side is right. But what probably a less than complete world it would be if one side always won. I think that if the Chicago Bulls keep on winning the National Basketball Championships, people are going to get tired of watching basketball. I am real proud of the Atlanta Braves, as I know the folks in New York City are proud of the New York City Yankees. If every year it boils down to the Braves versus Yankees, this year it may be San Diego versus Cleveland, people would get tired of watching baseball all the time. The point is, Mr. Speaker, you cannot always have it the Republicans win; you cannot always have it that the Democrats win. We do need to cooperate. We do need to get some things accomplished, but at the same time, I do not think either side needs to apologize for what they believe in. I am very proud of what this Congress has accomplished under Republican leadership. We have the first balanced budget since 1969, 1969, when Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon and the Mod Squad was on TV. We have reformed, protected and saved Medicare which a mere 3 years ago was on the road to bankruptcy. Now Medicare, on a bipartisan basis, has been reformed. This Congress, under Republican leadership, has passed the first tax cuts in 16 years. We have passed IRS reform. This year we pushed for some more tax cuts. We have pushed for ending the marriage tax penalty. And my chart over here, Mr. Speaker, shows you some actual people, some real people who will directly benefit from marriage tax penalty relief. We have Kris Hanson in Nyssa, Oregon; William Johnson, Reno, Nevada; Larry Bergman in Tracy, California; Tom Smith from Columbus, Ohio, and the names go on and on and on, as millions of Americans would benefit from paying less taxes and avoiding paying higher taxes simply because they are married. How big is this tax cut? We keep hearing the tax cut is huge, but of our $9.6 trillion estimated expenditure over the next 5 years, the tax cut is a mere $80 billion. It is a slither of a slither, Mr. Speaker, as you can tell from this chart. It really has been exaggerated. So that people can see it, it is just a mere slice. If this was a pie, I can promise you, you are going to go away hungry. How much is the tax cut from the surplus? It is about 10 percent. What do we do with the other 90 percent of the surplus, Mr. Speaker? We for the first time in 40 years protect Social Security. We do not take the Social Security money out of the Social Security trust fund. We build a wall on it so that that money cannot be used for roads and bridges. The first time in 40 years, 90 percent of the Social Security surplus would be protected. What else has this Congress done? We have reformed welfare, welfare, Mr. Speaker, which was vetoed twice by the President and finally signed into law by the President. Today we have 37 percent less people on welfare rolls than we did 5 years ago. We need to continue to do that so that people become independent and that is a very important part of the American experience. Mr. Speaker, finally let me say on education, we have a whole gamut of issues on education designed to put dollars back in the classroom and control back in local educators' hands and away from the Washington bureaucracy. Mr. Speaker, is this Congress making progress? Yes, it is. Is it everything the Republicans wanted? No. Is it everything the Democrats wanted? No. But is America being served by the dynamic of the two-party system? I would say that it is, and we should continue working for these very important reforms.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, today's vote is not about impeachment. Today's vote is about the search for truth. This is a vote that our grandchildren will ask us about many years from now when our constituents have long forgotten us, many years from now when our terms of office have been behind us for many years. They will look up and say: ``Why did you vote the way you did?" Mr. Speaker, I think most Members are going to rise to this occasion and not vote by the polls, not vote by the parties and certainly not by the personalities, but vote for a higher reason: that question of does truth matter? What is right? What is wrong? Are we a Nation of laws? And do we want to affirm and uphold these laws? Do we see that as our constitutional oath of office? I believe that when the gavel is sounded, most of us, Democrats and Republicans, will affirm that we do uphold the values, that we will move towards the search for truth, not happily jumping into it, but soberly upholding our constitutional oaths of office.

Mr. KINGSTON

Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 4570. It represents a wide, bipartisan group of projects of local interest. And it is amazing to me how most of these are very specific to certain areas that the local folks have all supported, and yet when it comes to Washington, experts up here are saying that the locals really do not know what they are doing. We better kill this legislation. I think that this is a good bill. The part that I have the most interest is Cumberland Island in Georgia. The reason I support that is that we have historic properties on a historic island that was deemed a wilderness area. One of them is a 100-year-old mansion and the other part is a settlement that was founded by freed slaves. Mr. Chairman, we cannot name the number of villages founded by free slaves in the United States of America. There are not any. Yet here is one and it is right in the middle of a wilderness area and the Park Service, under their present plan, will let it fall to pieces because that is what a wilderness mandates. What our provision does is that it frees those properties, the 100-year-old mansion and the freed slaves area, also incidently called The Settlement, and allows them to be saved and protected for future generations because of their very historical significance.