Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is our view that the roughly $900 billion in projected surpluses for the coming decade can prudently be allocated in thirds: the first to be reserved for Medicare. We are going to have to get to Medicare. If we do not do it in this session, we may do it in the next or the next Congress, but that time is coming. It will require money. It will require general revenues, there is no mistaking that any longer. We think that keeping a third of a billion dollars for that purpose is prudent. In the meantime, it will retire some debt and there will be some interest savings and we will have that money generally understood to be available. We think another third has to be used to restore what we have come to call discretionary spending. I wish I knew for sure from where that word came. I think Senator Roth would not have produced so devious a term. Is the Marine Corps discretionary? Is the Coast Guard? Do we regard the Bureau of the Census as something we can do without? We did for a while, letting the States do it, but since 1860 we have had one. This is our general Government, and it is not discretionary, save on the margins. Most of these functions have been with us a long time, and we need them. The present arrangement is for drastic reductions in real dollars for these programs over the next decade. It cannot go on. We have just seen the painful scene of the House of Representatives providing an emergency appropriations for the year 2000 census, as if the census came up like a hurricane or a flood. We have had one every 10 years since 1790. It is not an emergency. It is just that it cannot be met under these caps. So we think a third should be preserved for that purpose. Finally, a third for tax relief, targeted to generally accepted principles that are widely based. We would have $189 billion in broad- based tax relief. That would, most importantly, increase the standard deduction by 60 percent. This would remove more than 3 million taxpayers from the tax rolls and would provide an estimated 9 million more to simply take the standard deduction. It is good tax policy. We believe it certainly is simplification. We would like to have $27 billion for health care initiatives, including a $1,000 long-term care credit and a 50-percent deduction for long-term health insurance to make health insurance affordable. We look forward to $17 billion in education initiatives. That would include a large bond program for public school modernization and permanently extending employer-provided tuition assistance for higher education. If the Senate would indulge me, this latter provision is so important. I have now 23 years in the Finance Committee, and it seems every other year we recommend extending it instead of making it permanent. But if ever there was a palpable, demonstrably useful program, it is when employers send employees to receive education at various levels, commonly graduate levels, because they want to acquire new skills for which they will be put to work at higher wages, and for which they will pay more taxes, and that virtuous cycle I was talking about this morning will continue. It is unreal we continue to keep it on a short lifespan. But this gives it a much longer period. Finally, $31 billion in technological and economic development incentives, including an extension of the research credit. These seem, to us, to be widely based. They are equitable, and I hope they will amend themselves to the Senate. I see my friend from North Dakota is on the floor, is ready, and I yield him 15 minutes. Mr. CONRAD addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to my colleague from Nevada who is on the Finance Committee.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Another 5 minutes for my friend from Nevada.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Of course.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. First, I congratulate our revered chairman, Senator Roth, for the manner in which he has presented the Taxpayer Refund Act of 1999, for the manner in which he brought our committee together in consultation and deliberation, and who, indeed, produced a measure which was bipartisan. It has many elements which would commend our support across the aisle--certainly mine. But it is not to that issue that I will speak today, but to the question of the doctrine. I would like to put this debate in a doctrinal perspective, which is to say, the development in the 1960s which holds that the only way to restrain the growth of Government is to deliberately create a protracted fiscal crisis. This begins, of course, with a view of Government that is so very different from what traditional conservatism would hold. It is a new and radical idea. I will discuss how it emerged. But first I will cite an article from this morning's New York Times op-ed page by Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of our preeminent historians and an avowed conservative. She writes so much of what goes on. She says: In their eagerness to do away with the nanny state, some conservatives risk belittling, even delegitimizing, the state itself. A delicate balancing act is required: to dismantle or diminish the welfare state while retaining a healthy respect for the state itself. For good government is the precondition of civil society, providing a safe space within which individuals, families, communities, churches and voluntary associations can effectively function. But, as I say, the debate on this tax bill is not just a debate about tax policy; for it is far less a debate on taxes than a debate on economic and budget policy and the large understanding of the role of Government in our society, the role of Government in an advanced market economy. At the outset of this debate, we should be mindful of some painful mistakes we have made in the not too distant past and which we evidently mean to repeat. In August of 1993, just 6 years ago, we began to correct a colossal budget mistake. The President signed into law a deficit reduction act without precedent in size that dramatically changed the budget outlook--turning deficits of $290 billion a year, as far as the eye could see--to anticipate my friend David Stockman--into the surpluses we now project of $200 billion and more--surpluses on budget--leaving aside the Social Security revenue stream. At the time of its passage, it was estimated that the 1993 legislation, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, would reduce the deficit by $505 billion over the 5 years, 1994 through 1998. The Office of Management and Budget, in its fiscal year 2000 edition of ``Analytical Perspectives,'' estimated that the total deficit reduction has been more than twice this. I quote: ``The total deficit reduction has been more than twice this--$1.2 trillion.'' That suggests the extraordinary quality of that moment when we stood on this floor and waited for the final vote that would allow the Vice President to cast the determining vote, 51-50. The act was passed without one Member of the Republican Party of either House of the Congress. In 1997, we had a more bipartisan effort in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Again, we see larger revenue benefits than were originally anticipated. As for the fiscal year that ends this September, the OMB projects a budget surplus of $99 billion and the Congressional Budget Office projects a surplus of $120 billion. With the end of the fiscal year just 2 months away, we can expect, with great confidence, a budget surplus for the second consecutive year. What explains this huge gap, this pleasant surprise between budget expectations and outcomes in recent years? As is often the case in economic analysis, there are interrelated factors which cannot always easily be disentangled but which provide clues. To begin with, we appear to be in what has been described by our now- Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers, at his confirmation hearing as a ``virtuous cycle.'' I put a question to him, and he responded: Senator, I think it very important that, as you suggest, we do reduce the national debt by the full amount of the Social Security surpluses, which would continue this virtuous cycle by reducing interest rates, which makes possible more growth, which makes more tax collections, which makes larger surpluses, which makes lower debt, which reduces interest rates, which starts the cycle going again. That is an enormously important process. The Honorable Robert Rubin, who was Mr. Summers' distinguished predecessor, often spoke of a term which is not in ordinary usage, but it is a term known by Secretaries of State and by persons who deal in securities, in markets. Mr. Rubin would use the term the ``risk premium on interest rates.'' That is to say, the extra charge if a person is lending money, if they are not certain of the fiscal stability of the Federal Government, in this case, and, thence, of the economy at large. It was, first of all, this risk premium that we broke in 1993, the fear that down the line, if these deficits of $290 billion in the previous year went on and on--the debt had quadrupled over the previous twelve years--that the day would come, again, to use an economist's term, when we would ``monetize'' the debt through inflation. We would get rid of it by wiping out the value of the dollar. That is that premium, that risk premium on interest rates. We began to see this effect. I was here on the Senate floor on February 10, 1995. I remarked: . . . the economy performed better than expected, in part, because Congress adopted a credible deficit reduction plan. In part, also, because, as Secretary of the Treasury Rubin remarked to the Finance Committee this Wednesday [that is, Wednesday, February 8, 1995], the deficit reduction program squeezed the risk premium on interest rates out of real long- term interest rates. If financial markets do not believe the deficit is under control, they will levy a risk premium on capital lending. In 1993 and 1994, we clearly persuaded the markets that we were finally serious. From a slightly different perspective, the Congressional Budget Office also took note of the importance of reducing interest costs. For most of the post-World War II period, interest costs have been the second or third largest item in the budget, behind Social Security and national defense. In commenting on this, the CBO said, of the effects of that 1993 legislation: Remarkably, the biggest single change lies in . . . interest--now projected at 3.3 percent of GDP in 2003 compared with 4.5 in the earlier report, a testimonial to the efforts to rein-in the debt's growth [which had taken place]. For the record, CBO, in its latest budget update issued earlier this month, now projects interest costs at just 1.7 percent of GDP in the year 2003, a reduction by half from its September 1993 projection when we had just passed that legislation of that year. Outlays for net interest peaked at $251 billion 2 fiscal years ago. They are now projected to decrease to $222 billion, and if we can just keep from squandering the surplus, we will repay the debt incurred in those years and that interest cost will again go down, almost to disappear. Now, I do not mean to suggest that the budget outlook is solely due to changes in budget policies. Factors other than deficit reduction are at work, making for a strong, sustained economic expansion. The economy brings higher receipts and lower outlays for unemployment and other such programs that automatically expand in a recession. Last week, in testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, Alan Greenspan, our world-renowned Chairman of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve, provided some insights into what is sustaining this period of remarkable growth. Observing the absence of production bottlenecks, shortages, and price pressures that inevitably occur in an expanding economy, he noted a number of the possible explanations for the good fortunes involved; notably, just-in- time inventories and such like; but they have come about fortuitously at a time when the deficit was under control, deficits were declining, and the prospects were much better all around. The question is, Can we not keep this? Can we not sustain the extraordinary economic expansion on which we have embarked? Unemployment is now at 4.3 percent. May I say, as someone who in the Kennedy administration was Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning, we would have said, sir, that a 4.3-percent unemployment rate was unsustainable. It would lead to an outbreak of inflation. Yet here we have it, 4.3 percent, real economic growth at 4 percent. We are in the ninth year of an expansion, and we have no inflation. This is something that is going to require that the economic textbooks be rewritten. But we have done it, and a lot of it comes about from what we did on the Senate floor in August of 1993 and which our great hope on this side of the aisle is that we not undo in this short time that has passed. Alan Greenspan, in that testimony, was very clear. He said tax cuts are to be reserved for recessions. That will be the most effective means we can have to regenerate the economy and keep the long-term growth path moving high. The New York Times editorialized this past Sunday, on the Oracle of the Fed: Mr. Greenspan is treated reverently on Capitol Hill, but it appears that the Republicans do not want to heed his advice to run a surplus and pay down the national debt, while saving a tax cut for when it is needed. How come this sudden resurgence just now, when it would seem so clear that a quite opposite policy has had such very desirable effects? Well, sir, I go back, as I said I would earlier, to matters of political doctrine. We don't talk much of doctrine on the Senate floor, but there are times for it. In 1995, for example, we debated a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget. I presented a series of papers in which I tried to describe the idea of ``starving the beast,'' as the term was; that is to say, depriving the Federal Government of the revenues needed, putting it simply, to govern. The argument is quite simple. It goes back to the 1970s when a number of theorists on the conservative wing of the Republican Party determined that it was not going to be possible for the Federal Government ever to be controlled in its size as long as it had the revenues to sustain, or even to increase, that size. And so it came about that a policy doctrine developed which argued that deficits, if sizable enough, had acquired a new utility--deficits that had presumably been the horror of conservative financial thought now became something attractive because they could be used to reduce the size of Government itself. E.J. Dionne, Jr., in an op-ed article in yesterday's Washington Post, clearly recognizes this idea is still afoot. He writes: The long-term goal, about which Republican leaders are candid, is to put Government in a fiscal straitjacket for years to come. In fairness, I think this is more to be encountered on the House side than in this body, but it still would be the cumulative effect, in fact, of the tax cuts that have been proposed in both bodies. I can remember the onset of this. In the late 1970s, it was clear. One could write about it, and one did. Then came the administration of President Reagan in which, in effect, the policies were carried out--or they began to be carried out. In a television address, 16 days before his inauguration, President Reagan said: There will always be those who tell us that taxes could not be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice or breath, or we can cut their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance. There you have President Reagan in his most agreeable and heart- warming quality. He thought this could be done because he thought there would, in fact, be reductions in Government. There were none. Moreover, very shortly, his economic advisers realized the economic analysis they had used to project revenue increases from tax reductions weren't going to work, and they faced a prospect of deficits of, as David Stockman once said, ``$200 billion as far as the eye can see.'' Haynes Johnson, in his superb book, ``Sleepwalking Through History: America Through the Reagan Years,'' writes: The Reagan team [not the President] saw the implicit failure of supply side theory as an opportunity, not a problem. Now, this we have to absorb. They saw the failure of supply side theory--which said that the more you cut taxes, the higher the revenues will be--as an opportunity, not a problem. The secret solution was to let the Federal budget deficits rise, thus leaving Congress no alternative but to cut domestic programs. But in the end, they were not cut. Some grew. There was a view, and certainly a respectable one, that defense had to be increased. We now, incidentally, suggest there be a 20-percent reduction in defense spending over the next 10 years. The Reagan administration increased defense spending, and they had a perfectly good argument for doing that-- but not simultaneously with huge tax cuts. There, very shortly thereafter, had to be tax increases. But the course was set for the 1980s and the deficit doubled, from under a trillion dollars to about $3.7 trillion now in publicly held debt. So I rise again to say, as I have done before, that what we did in 1981 with that tax cut--for which I voted because the Office of Management and Budget, seeing our huge inflation continuing, projected surpluses in the future--was so ruinously wrong. We now have a debt that will level off at about $6 trillion, while the debt held by the public will fall by $2 trillion, or more, depending on the size of this tax cut. The other important reason, which I will close on, is that the 1997 balanced budget amendment left us with what the Washington Post this morning calls an ``accounting illusion,'' that we can reduce the spending on domestic programs by 20 percent in real terms over the next 10 years. The illusion is coming apart already. Just the other day, the House of Representatives determined that the money to pay for the decennial census in the year 2000 required an emergency appropriation outside of those limits. We have had that census for many years. That census is provided in the Constitution. It has taken place every decade since 1790. All of a sudden, we have made it into an emergency. In this morning's Washington Post, our former majority leader, our beloved colleague, Robert C. Byrd, has an article called ``Time for Truth In Spending.'' He said: What we need to jettison is the political rhetoric. What we need to impose is truth in spending. And he set down a few principles. He said: First, watch our investments carefully and manage them prudently. We should continue our best efforts to manage the economy and watch out for inflation. Second, do not spend our money before we make it. Before the surplus is spent, whether on tax cuts or continuing important priority programs, wait for the money to be in the bank. We are proposing to spend a surplus, sir, that does not exist. Third, pay our debts. The United States should take advantage of this opportunity to retire the national debt. Fourth, cover the necessities. Congress should not shortchange the Nation's core programs, such as education, health care, veterans, and the like. Fifth, put aside what we need for a rainy day. Congress should take steps to reserve the Social Security and Medicare surpluses exclusively for future costs of those programs. Sixth, don't go on a spending spree. Resist the temptation to create costly new government programs. Finally, take prosperity in measured doses. Congress should reduce taxes without pulling the rug out from under projected surpluses. I can think of no wiser counsel. In that regard, and with great respect for the chairman of the committee, I would suggest that the budget reconciliation process was devised to expedite consideration of deficit reduction measures. The bill before us uses those same expedited procedures to secure enactment of a deficit-increasing measure. Section 313(b)(E) of the Byrd rule provides that any provision in any reconciliation bill which would decrease revenues used beyond the budget window--in this case beyond the year 2009--may be automatically stricken from the bill upon a point of order being raised. Section 1502 of the bill before us provides for permanent continuation of tax cuts in the years beyond 2009, causing revenue losses of hundreds of billions of dollars. Accordingly, sir, at the appropriate time, I intend to raise the Byrd rule point of order against section 1502 of the bill. I thank the Chair for his cordial consideration of my remarks. I see my friend, the chairman of the Budget Committee, is on the floor. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on January 3, 1999, Jerry Quarry, a perennial heavyweight boxing champion contender in the 1960's and 1970's, died of pneumonia brought on by an advanced state of dementia pugilistica. He was 53. The Professional Boxing Safety Act of 1996 was an excellent step toward making professional boxing safer for its participants. Nevertheless, it contains several gaps. The amendment I proposed here today is aimed at protecting professional fighters by requiring more rigorous prefight physical examinations and by requiring a brain catscan before a boxer can renew his or her professional license.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Might I have, say, 15 minutes?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will my friend yield for a comment?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I was chairman of the Finance Committee in 1993 when that deficit reduction act passed. It was a risk. We risked that what we understood of markets and of the economy was right. We could have been wrong. But it was not a casual affair. Day after day and evening after evening in the Finance Committee we debated it. We voted on it. It came to the floor, admittedly under a time limit from the Budget Act, but it was adequate to the purpose. We legislated, and it was done in the open. The consequences are here to see. The $500 billion deficit reduction package contained in the 1993 reconciliation bill has been re-estimated by the Office of Management and Budget as having saved a total of $1.2 trillion. We had a $290 billion deficit that year. The 10-year projection was $3 trillion, and more, of cumulative deficits. Now we are dealing with a $3 trillion surplus. But that is because the process worked--and in the open. The oldest principle of our Government is openness and responsibility. We have been abandoning both, and the consequences show.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Well said, sir.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. If it is not in the conference report. I will close, sir, by simply saying this is a subject that is said to be arcane, to be incomprehensible, to be something on the margin. The Constitution of the United States is a bit arcane. It was not something immediately obvious to everyone, what its principles were. But they were powerful, and they have persisted. So, indeed, have the rules of the Senate, developed in the early 19th century, and then later, starting in 1868, with regard to germaneness and the like. Language very similar to our Rule XVI dates to 1884. We have here the question of whether we are going to be able to govern ourselves in the future. If we should fail in that regard, what else, sir, will there be said of us when the history of the decline of the American Congress is written? I thank the Chair for its courtesy in allowing me to extend my time. I thank my friend, the minority whip, and I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I much agree.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Right.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I stood here and said: I haven't read it. I know no one who has read it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I surely will.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. That is exactly so, sir. I can say to you, for example, that Senator Roth, our distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee, and I have jointly been sending letters regularly to the Appropriations Committee saying: You have Social Security Act or tax matters in this appropriations measure you are dealing with; surely, you don't want to do that. We don't get answers somehow.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is a special pleasure to rise on this important subject on this fateful day in the aftermath of the Senator from Nevada, whose vigilance, if I may say, as minority whip, led him to see a clear violation of rule XVI, the rule against legislation on appropriations bills, and so he made the point of order. In a casual way, having to do with the seeming inconsequence of the measure that had been proposed, the Senate overruled that point of order, and a century and more of fixed senatorial practice crashed and burned and has been burning all around us ever since. There is a larger context, I suggest, in which to consider this matter. I am now in my last term in the Senate. I have been here almost a quarter of a century. I am frequently asked what has changed in the Senate in my time here. Without hesitation, the one thing I say is the procedures by which we work. When I arrived, there was a recognizable symmetry and balance to the distribution of responsibilities, duties, and powers in the body. We had evolved over the 19th century a two-layer pattern of committees-- committees being very special and distinct to our Government. We are one of the few governments in the world that has them. The House of Commons has none. Recently they have been appointing committees of inquiry but no legislative committees of any kind. All authority rests with the Prime Minister. On those used-to-be celebrated occasions when the Chancellor of Exchequer at No. 11 Downing Street would come out, and he would hold up a briefcase called the budget, that, sir, was, in fact, the budget. There was not going to be a chance of change in the government's proposal. It has been that way for more than two centuries. It is not the government that the founders put in place. They put in place a government of checks and balances of the assumption of opposed interests, of the resolution by debate, and by the recognition that there were, in fact, opposed interests. We were not all happily subject to the Queen, under her rule--or his if it were a King--and a harmony in the realm. Our founders thought no such thing. They did not depend on virtue. They depended on self-interest and being equally opposed in a mode of negotiation to resolve matters. We had a series of authorizing committees, and they had jurisdiction over principal areas of government service. There were four--well, the principal committees were Foreign Relations, Finance, Armed Services, and then Interior, Commerce, Labor and Public Welfare, as it then was, Environment and Public Works, having previously been just Public Works. Their jurisdictions changed. New issues came along. Public Works became Environment. Public Works, under the tutelage of Senator Muskie of Maine, brought the issue of the environment to our body. They would make laws which more often than not required expenditure. That expenditure would be provided by the Appropriations Committee in terms of the laws that had been passed by the authorizing committees. There was a parallel. The Finance Committee, in the earliest years, from 1816 I believe, was principally concerned with raising the revenue of the Federal Government. In the early years, up until the beginning of this century, those were tariffs. That is why the tariff legislation, the ``tariff of abominations,'' things similar to that are so prominent in American 19th century history. We moved to the income tax as our principal source of revenue. Tariffs are still not insignificant. In the Finance Committee, of which I am a member--for a period I was the chairman; now ranking member--we looked after the revenues of the Federal Government. Then Social Security came along; it was a tax. Whether it ought to have been a tax, sir, is an issue you could debate. But 54, 55 years ago, at a garden party here in Washington, Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor who was responsible for developing a Social Security plan--a Justice of the Supreme Court kindly asked her about her work, and she said she had this great plan, but she was very concerned because the great Justices always said it was unconstitutional, whatever the New Deal was then going through that period. The Justice asked her to tell him more. She did, and he leaned down and whispered: The taxing power, my dear; all you need is the taxing power. So in that famous photograph of President Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, the person to his right is the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, a gentleman from North Carolina named Robert Doughton--little noted in history but enormous in his impact. So the Finance Committee has taken over these other areas as well. Still our basic task is to raise revenue that the Appropriations Committee will spend in accordance with the laws passed by the authorizing committees. A workable system--rational, understandable, comprehensible and functioning. Then in 1974 came the Budget Act and the creation of the Congressional Budget Office, the creation of the budget resolution. In part, this was a reaction to events in the Nixon administration-- political and contemporary. But just as important, if I may be allowed a certain excursion into political science, if that is the term, it is a pattern that one observes in governments the world over, and you can see in ours. It was with the proposition, sir, that organizations in conflict become like one another. A German sociologist at the end of the 19th century noted that even Persians finally determined it was better to have Greeks fight Greeks. And you can trace these patterns of imitation and competition through our own government. Item. In 1904, or thereabouts, Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing for the White House. He now had an office, the President had an office with a desk, and he could ask reporters in to tell them about things. Suddenly an office that had not been that eminent, certainly not compared to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, took on a quality previously unnoticed. Right away the House built the Cannon Office Building named for their Speaker, Joe Cannon. We built what is now the Russell Building. Franklin Roosevelt built the East Wing of the White House. They built Longworth; we built Dirksen. In the meantime, the Supreme Court, which had worked happily down the hall for a century and a half--or, well, from the time we moved in to the new quarters in 1859, I believe--they came up from the basement and lived happily down there, and they said: Why don't we have a building? And they produced a building which eventually was across the park here. This pattern goes on and on. Presidents travel abroad now. We travel abroad. There are more judges in the executive branch than there are in the judicial branch, and the like. In 1921, Warren Harding created the Bureau of the Budget. Suddenly there was a consolidation of Presidential authority. Departments used to send their budgets to the Congress on their own. The President would know about them, of course, but there was no unified Presidential executive budget. That made for a real shift of authority toward the President. It took almost half a century, but then we got our Bureau of the Budget in the Congressional Budget Office, and we started having our budget. This suddenly intrudes on the authority of the authorizing committees. Each year they would be given a notice of how much money they could spend, which was to be tolerable, of course, but it was somebody else telling them what previously they decided on their own. In this context, there was a centralization of authority in the Senate which did not serve it well. Then came the decision to overturn rule XVI. Our government became incomprehensible. I cannot think of the number of hours I have stood on this floor, sometimes there at the desk for the chairman of the Finance Committee or ranking member, sometimes back here, looking at the final product of some massive, mysterious, impenetrable conference that went on somewhere in this building, downtown, elsewhere, that would bring to our desks at the end of the Congress 1,500-page bills that did everything, combined the appropriations with the legislation, with this, with that, with nobody knowing its contents. Not one Member of this body could attest to having read the bill, probably no one person. Obviously, some persons had read some parts, but that is not a democratic procedure. That is not a wise procedure. It came about through a combination of the Budget Committee and this breaking away of a long, established unrestraint on ourselves that there are 13 appropriation bills, each must pass, and, therefore, if somehow you could get a measure on an appropriations bill, it would become law, even if it might not make it through the authorizing committees. Well, yes, but what law? Whose law? Who knew? Those committees haven't been up there, the Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, for two centuries without acquiring some experience in their matters; and here, sir, we are heading for the same thing because the rule was overturned. Appropriations bills don't get passed any longer. Now it is we have 2 weeks left in July and August, really, because of the recess. Mr. President, if my time has expired, may I ask for 5 additional minutes.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I thank the Senator.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. We are heading for this situation. There is even talk that the tax bills, which we will bring to the floor tomorrow or Wednesday, need not be resolved in this period of time. They can lay over until September. Well, that means they will lay over until the last day of the Congress, the last moment of the session. In the meantime, we can expect over half the appropriation bills to have passed. I wonder if I might address a question to my friend from Nevada, if I might interrupt. How many appropriation bills have passed this year? Would he happen to know? No reason to know.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. We begin to come to our senses; that has brought us to this point. We passed seven. I don't think we will pass 13. I think our tax legislation has every prospect of being an abomination. The Senate cannot pass legislation which it has never read and does not understand. That is what has been the consequence of this new situation. In addition to which, the distinguished minority leader is proposing an amendment to the fine initiative of the majority leader that says: No more writing legislation in conference committees. That is against all of our rules, too, but has crept into our practices. Again, the authorizing committees are gradually being marginalized and have no role. Power is centralized.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that I rise today to introduce the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act. This bill protects the rights of researchers in their work. This is an issue that Professor Robert O'Neil of the University of Virginia Law School has done much to advance, and I am extremely grateful for all his assistance. Two points, followed by a coda, if I may. The first point is that the Thomas Jefferson Act gets to the heart of the first amendment and the principles that our nation was founded on. This Act would protect researchers from the compelled disclosure of their research, studies, data, surveys, etc. Too often researchers are forced to turn over this information in open courts. This interrupts their research and makes it nearly impossible for them to finish and publish their research. If researchers are unable to publish their findings, then the flow and dissemination of information are choked off. This runs counter to the essence of the first amendment. We need a uniform standard that protects the work of researchers. Some courts have ruled in favor of researchers while others have ruled against them. We need consistency in this field, where researchers feel comfortable to produce their research and do not have to fear that it will be taken from them. This bill will provide that consistency and comfort. To the second point. We have reached a time in our society where we have to decide between what should be shared and what should be protected. In this case, it is very important to society as a whole to protect a researcher's notes and data before they are ready to be released. It is from these data and research that ideas and thoughts are formed, ideas that will eventually help man and society progress. If a researcher's data are released prematurely, then their ideas may never bear fruit. In the long run, protecting a researcher's data will only lead to more information and ideas in the future. This is what the first amendment is all about. No one describes the utility of free speech and the dissemination of original ideas better than John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, he argues that neither government nor a public acting informally may legitimately use coercion to stifle free expression, and the reason he gives is a utilitarian, or at least a consequentialist one. If the opinion is right, the human race is deprived of it; if wrong, they are deprived of the opportunity to reinforce--through surviving a challenge--their understanding of what is right. The quashing of opinion is therefore, a much more far-reaching evil than the mere loss of something valuable to the individual, for it deprived society at large of something of benefit. This is exactly what happens when researchers are forced to turn over their work prematurely and prevented from developing and sharing their thoughts. The Thomas Jefferson Bill would help rectify just this situation. I conclude by saying that I could think of no better namesake for this bill than Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. A philosophical statesman rather than a political philosopher, he contributed to democracy and liberalism a faith rather than a body of doctrine. By his works alone he must be adjudged one the greatest of all Americans, while the influence of this energizing faith cannot be measured. One of Jefferson's greatest contributions to our nation was his protection and advocacy of free speech. From the Declaration of Independence to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to the founding of the University of Virginia, he was a passionate proponent of education, human liberty, and free thought. He wrote: ``If nature has made any one thing exclusive property, it is the idea, which an individual may exclusively possess . . .; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone . . .'' Jefferson, always a step or several steps ahead of his age, understood the importance of the freedom of speech in the development of an individual and a nation. It is only appropriate that the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act be introduced in the month of July, when our nation declared its independence, and be named after Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest political thinkers and one of our greatest advocates of the free mind. I ask unanimous consent that the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that I rise today to introduce the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act. This bill protects the rights of researchers in their work. This is an issue that Professor Robert O'Neil of the University of Virginia Law School has done much to advance, and I am extremely grateful for all his assistance. Two points, followed by a coda, if I may. The first point is that the Thomas Jefferson Act gets to the heart of the first amendment and the principles that our nation was founded on. This Act would protect researchers from the compelled disclosure of their research, studies, data, surveys, etc. Too often researchers are forced to turn over this information in open courts. This interrupts their research and makes it nearly impossible for them to finish and publish their research. If researchers are unable to publish their findings, then the flow and dissemination of information are choked off. This runs counter to the essence of the first amendment. We need a uniform standard that protects the work of researchers. Some courts have ruled in favor of researchers while others have ruled against them. We need consistency in this field, where researchers feel comfortable to produce their research and do not have to fear that it will be taken from them. This bill will provide that consistency and comfort. To the second point. We have reached a time in our society where we have to decide between what should be shared and what should be protected. In this case, it is very important to society as a whole to protect a researcher's notes and data before they are ready to be released. It is from these data and research that ideas and thoughts are formed, ideas that will eventually help man and society progress. If a researcher's data are released prematurely, then their ideas may never bear fruit. In the long run, protecting a researcher's data will only lead to more information and ideas in the future. This is what the first amendment is all about. No one describes the utility of free speech and the dissemination of original ideas better than John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, he argues that neither government nor a public acting informally may legitimately use coercion to stifle free expression, and the reason he gives is a utilitarian, or at least a consequentialist one. If the opinion is right, the human race is deprived of it; if wrong, they are deprived of the opportunity to reinforce--through surviving a challenge--their understanding of what is right. The quashing of opinion is therefore, a much more far-reaching evil than the mere loss of something valuable to the individual, for it deprived society at large of something of benefit. This is exactly what happens when researchers are forced to turn over their work prematurely and prevented from developing and sharing their thoughts. The Thomas Jefferson Bill would help rectify just this situation. I conclude by saying that I could think of no better namesake for this bill than Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. A philosophical statesman rather than a political philosopher, he contributed to democracy and liberalism a faith rather than a body of doctrine. By his works alone he must be adjudged one the greatest of all Americans, while the influence of this energizing faith cannot be measured. One of Jefferson's greatest contributions to our nation was his protection and advocacy of free speech. From the Declaration of Independence to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to the founding of the University of Virginia, he was a passionate proponent of education, human liberty, and free thought. He wrote: ``If nature has made any one thing exclusive property, it is the idea, which an individual may exclusively possess . . .; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone . . .'' Jefferson, always a step or several steps ahead of his age, understood the importance of the freedom of speech in the development of an individual and a nation. It is only appropriate that the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act be introduced in the month of July, when our nation declared its independence, and be named after Thomas Jefferson, one of our greatest political thinkers and one of our greatest advocates of the free mind. I ask unanimous consent that the Thomas Jefferson Researcher's Privilege Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, of the half-dozen great journalists who wrote of the Kennedy era, as we think of that Presidency, none was closer to those involved, where they had come from, who they were, who they wished to be than Martin F. Nolan of the Boston Globe. He has done so once again, in a moving reflection of the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and her sister, entitled ``Life Goes on, but it'll Never be the Same.'' I ask unanimous consent that his reflections be printed in the Congressional Record

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, it happens I was in the White House, in what was then Ralph Dungan's southwest office just down the hall from the Oval Office--where they were cleaning the carpet, the President's furniture having been moved to the outside corridor with his rocking chair atop the clutter--when word came from Dallas that the President was dead. A few moments later Hubert H. Humphrey burst in, embraced Dungan and let out: ``My God, what have they done to us.'' By ``they'' of course he meant the political right wing in Texas. Later we learned that the Dallas police had arrested a man associated with Fair Play for Cuba. What indeed had been done to us, what were we doing to ourselves? That evening a group of us who lived on Macomb Street, out Connecticut Avenue, drifted over to Mary McGrory's. We sat about, saying little. At length Mary, with the feeling only she can put into words, announced: ``We'll never laugh again.'' ``Heavens, Mary,'' I replied, ``we'll laugh again. It's just that we will never be young again.'' In this morning's Washington Post, her column ``A Death in the Family'' describes in poignant detail the history from then to now, now being of course the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., so much on our minds in those slow-paced days of mourning so many years ago, now himself gone, along with his wife Carolyn and his sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. I ask unanimous consent that her reflections be reprinted in the Record in full following my statement.