Eleanor Norton

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow).

Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette).

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time. I ask fervently for the defeat of this provision based on its wording: ``Directly or indirectly,'' it says. That is a virtual death sentence, especially for black and Hispanic men, women, and children, who, in hugely disproportionate numbers, are dying of AIDS, and the science tells us now that this is needless. A third of all AIDS cases come through needles. We are setting a terribly dangerous precedent here. The Committee on Appropriations said, let us not do something dumb. Let us ask the world-class scientific investigators. Now they have asked, and they have heard the answers. Three criteria we said had to be met: No spread of drugs, no spread of AIDS, and save lives. They tell us, dramatic saving of lives. NIH, NAS, GAO. And the most that Mr. McCaffrey, who should resign, can think to do is try to pick off members of the Black Caucus, who rise, almost all of us, to say that indeed this disease which is spreading (and it is the leading killer in our community) can, in fact, be eradicated if we can get to the hard-core addicts, clean needle for dirty needle, until we finally lure them into treatment. Do not vote for death in our communities. Vote for the science. Do not say, look, give us the facts, and then say, we do not want to be confused by the facts, we choose death.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding this time to me. We failed for decades to control addiction. At least it was contained with addicts. Now, with AIDS, needles have taken a deadly disease into the community itself. Now it is not addicts and not even those who addicts, when they become criminals, prey upon. It is women. It is children. Two-thirds of AIDS in women comes for needles. Fifty percent of AIDS in children comes from needles. The Congress asked the scientists for the answer. Because the scientists gave them back an answer they did not want to hear, they want to ignore the science, and it is unmixed. Race looms larger and larger in this issue. We are stabilizing AIDS among white homosexuals. It is spreading like an epidemic among blacks and hispanics, and the reason is unsafe needles. One-third of AIDS deaths today come from needles. Mr. Speaker, when my colleagues cast their vote they should remember who they are voting for life, and who they are voting for death.

Mr. NORTON

Mr. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to 23d Annual Capital Pride Festival, a celebration of and for the National Capital Area's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual communities and their friends. Since its 1975 inception, the Capital Pride Festival has grown from a small block party into a nine-day series of events which culminate in a parade and a Pennsylvania Avenue street fair on June 7th. Last year, nearly 200 contingents marched in the parade. Hundreds of exhibitors participated in the street fair. More than 120,000 people attended this celebration. This year its organizers and sponsors, the Whitman-Walker Clinic and One-In-Ten have selected ``Diversity+Unity=Strength'' for the Festival's theme. Mr. Speaker, I ask the House to join me in saluting the 23d Annual Capital Pride Festival, its organizers, and the volunteers who make it possible.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Mildred Kiefer Wurf, the distinguished and high respected Director of Public Policy of Girls Incorporated who has been a powerful voice for girls for nearly three decades. Mrs. Wurf began her career as a senior staff member on the President's Council on Youth Opportunity and established contacts with more than 175 voluntary and professional organizations for this White House agency, promoting programs for disadvantaged youth within the nonprofit sector and among federal agencies. She has served as an appointee to the U.S. Department of Labor, Citizen Review Commission, Comprehensive Youth Employment Commission, US Travel Service Advisory Committee, U.S. Department of Commerce, and the National Commission on Youth, Kettering Foundation and the Government Relations Committee of the Independent Sector. Mildred Kiefer Wurf served as the founding coordinator of the National Collaboration for Youth, where she brought together directors of 13 national organizations, developed management and funding symposiums, drafted statements on youth issues, wrote testimony and briefed principals and facilitated large youth employment and delinquency prevention grants. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Wurf was the first director of the Washington Office of Girls Clubs of America. She monitored hearings and legislation, testified before Congressional Committees, was responsible for staffing the Expansion, Development and Advocacy Committees of the National Board and originated and wrote a Washington newsletter for affiliates and Board. She has persuasively applied her passion for words both as a spokesperson and as coauthor of Girls, Inc. Advocacy publications that were used to remove barriers, provide gender equity and fight for equitable allocations of resources--``Today's Girls, Tomorrow's Women,'' ``An Action Agenda for Equalizing Girls' Options,'' ``Service Through Advocacy'' and ``Leadership Through Advocacy.'' She has initiated successful collaborations with national women's organizations including the American Association of University Women, National Council of Jewish Women, The Committee of 100 Black Women and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs Inc., among others, that resulted in noteworthy initiatives such as the ``Women Helping Girls With Choices'' Project. She has been an active volunteer serving on the Board of the National Committee for Citizens in Education, Business and Professional Women's Foundation, National Child Research Center, Fund for an OPEN Society, as Board Chair of the Center for Youth Services in Washington, D.C. and on the Advisory Committee of the Center for Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina. As Director of Public Policy of Girls Incorporated, she continues to monitor issues affecting girls and young women, informs the National Board, staff and affiliates of relevant legislation and public education events, recommends and drafts public policy positions and serves as a strong, smart, bold and ``vigorous advocate for girls.'' She is the proud and loving mother of a son, Nicholas Wurf of London, England and, a daughter, Abigail Wurf of St. Louis, Missouri. Mr. Speaker, I ask that this August body join me in applauding Mildred Kiefer Wurf for her dedicated service and exemplary record of highly effective advocacy on behalf of Girls Incorporated and the millions of girls of this nation and extend to her our best wishes for every success in her future endeavors.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, the House has just set another record, 55 strong; 55 strong women, that is, two new Democrats, one new Republican, all three gentlewomen from California, Representatives Lois Capps, Mary Bono, and Barbara Lee. Our thanks to California for sending us all three, for it is California that has made us 55. The gentlewoman from California (Representative Mary Bono), a Republican, and the gentlewoman from California (Representative Barbara Lee), a Democrat, were both sworn in yesterday. They embraced warmly on the floor in the spirit of our bipartisan Women's Caucus. Congratulations to the Democrats for the gentlewomen from California, Representative Lois Capps and Representative Barbara Lee, congratulations to the Republicans for the gentlewoman from California (Representative Mary Bono), and a special message for the Republicans: If they must send us more Republicans, please let them be women!

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, along with the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), I am due later to cosponsor a special order for Bella Abzug, who died last week. I will need to be in my district for an event, and wanted to offer these 5 minutes of commemoration at this time. When I heard that Bella was dead, I immediately said something close to, ``Well, she can't die. She doesn't die. Bella doesn't do things like that.'' I think this was my spontaneous reaction, because Bella seemed to many of us incapable of dying. There was so much life there, we felt that by the time she was to die, there would simply be leftover life. In the permanence of the memory of her life and times there, of course, is leftover life. Feminists will compete with the other great causes of Bella's time for entitlement to her energetic legacy, for Bella's feminism owed as much to her universal sense of justice as to her gender. Bella has been called, ``The bravest, smartest, brightest progressive of our generation,'' and I think that the vote in the House where she served would not be close on that one. Civil liberties and the antiwar movement, civil rights and the environment, economic justice and the labor movement, Bella did not simply taste the great social movements of her time; she drank deeply, more often than not after being among the first to pour the energy into them that started their growth in the first place. Every new movement needs a Bella. Few get them. The second feminist revolution got Bella, and Bella is just what feminism needed then. Women had been patronized and placated for so long in this country, they needed a woman who could not be ignored. Bella of the Bronx, in case you had not noticed; Bella, daughter of the live-and-let-live meat market; Bella, who learned to live by the opposite credo; Bella was a force that spread through this House and has made it never the same since. Then there were 10; now we are 55. Today we celebrated three new women who bring us to 55 strong. Bella so filled the place, there must be some who cannot even tell that our numbers have grown since she left; so large was her impact that those three short terms beginning in 1970 seemed not to have ended. After Bella left, she showed she did not need this House to have impact. While she was here though, she brought her causes to the House floor, and often made them law, from the resolution to withdraw from Vietnam introduced on her first day in the House, to her place as the first to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Make no mistake, Bella was a legislature par excellence and a procedural expert in this House. She coauthored the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act, bringing into law her lifelong crusade against the excesses of the FBI and the CIA, and the prominent battle for which she will always be remembered, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment. Once Bella got in, they could not get her out, so they redistricted her out. Her State came within 1 percent of getting her in the Senate, however. For many women who serve in the House, Bella's place will always be in the House and in our hearts. If the truth be told, however, Bella, the outsider, never came fully into this House or any part of the establishment. For public officials today, this capacity not to take your official self so seriously that you lose sight of the outside causes that sent you here in the first place may be the most valuable legacy of her service in this place. If we remember only that part of her fact legacy, all of us who serve here will serve better, and all of us who seek to be better public servants shall have found in her an important guiding principle left over from Bella's abundant life.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, this must be an election year or something. The Republican majority this year fancies itself a constitutional convention, so many constitutional amendments have come forward. The framers gave us a flawed document, but this was not the flaw in it. Why is two-thirds so rare in the Constitution for a presidential veto, for a constitutional amendment and for expulsion of a Member? Because the framers were democrats. They reserved minority power for fundamental rights only, not for everyday business of the House. This amendment would create a field day for lawyers: the ``de minimis'' language in the amendment, for example ``De minimis'' in relationship to what? Who is the majority afraid of? They control the House. Are they afraid they will raise taxes, like taxes on tobacco, for example, to save the lives of children? We are not smarter than the framers. I like the framework they gave us. Let's keep it.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, don't vote for the Roukema amendment to destroy the Disadvantaged Business Enterprises program (DBE) or you will pay the price with your women small business owners. I have listed just a few examples of how women business owners can tell their own stories about the success of the DBE program.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, in anticipation of bringing a bill to the floor, the Republican majority is pouring thousands of dollars into ads for a voucher bill. But I challenge them to use that to send some of the 7,500 kids they want to help to parochial schools, as they claim they want to do. This is a political exercise. It has become a political perennial, because it comes every year. This year it is an election year charade. We know it is a charade because the President has promised to veto. If the majority is sincere, I challenge them to sit down with me and write a bill that can be signed. This year a bill of this kind is a real insult because we have a real shot at exponential improvement in the D.C. public schools, finally. One good example is the Summer Stars program about to begin. We will become the first big city school system to eliminate social promotion and replace it not only with a remedial program but with a program in the summer that helps youngsters catch up so they do not fail in the first place. A rigorous academic program is going to be put in place. Our youngsters are going to have to read 25 books next year in order to pass the grade. Want to help? There are ways to make a real difference for the many and not merely the few. It is cruel to raise the expectations of 75 youngsters for 2,000 school vouchers. It is cruel because there are two insurmountable barriers, and we know they are insurmountable. First is the veto, but, second, no serious constitutional scholar believes public school vouchers are constitutional. As I speak, there are two injunctions on public school vouchers right now. Two courts in Wisconsin have stopped public school vouchers with injunctions on constitutional grounds. An appeals court in Ohio has stopped public school vouchers on constitutional grounds. D.C. schools need help. If Members want to raise people's expectations and then let them fall, they should go do it in their own districts. Do not come in and do it to my folks. I challenge the majority, if they want to see D.C. kids go to parochial schools, I will join Members in raising private funds to send them to private schools. Everyone knows what they are doing. They are preparing for a $1 billion raid on the public Treasury to take money that would go to public schools and give it to private and parochial schools. We are not going to let them do it. Either the President will stop them or the courts will stop them. Meanwhile, they are playing with the lives of the people I represent. I ask Members to stand back and instead come forward and join me in truly helping youngsters who are crying out for help but cannot get it, as Members know they cannot, in the way they have chosen. We can work together. No one has even come to me and approached me about this issue. They would not dare go into the district of another Member without even approaching her on the district. They have not asked me if there is an approach that we can agree upon. I can tell them that the approach that they are depending upon, a starkly partisan approach that has nothing to do with the youngsters I represent, will in fact be turned down not only by me but by those I represent. And, for them, I resent Members coming forward to raise their expectations, knowing full well that they cannot meet them and having no intention whatsoever to meet them in yet another election year charade designed falsely to show what Members cannot show, and that is that public schools cannot be improved. Perhaps they cannot be. Neither, I assure the Members, will the courts of this great country allow us to empty the Federal Treasury of funds and put them into private schools. If Members want to help my kids, understand that they want your help, need your help, and that their Member is willing to cooperate with others in order to get help. But I ask Members to cooperate with us, not to exercise their will on us.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today, I introduce a bill that would give the District of Columbia and the four insular areas a privilege the 50 states already have, namely, the ability to choose a design for the reverse side of the quarter coin in order to commemorate our history as part of the United States. After I protested the exclusion of D.C. and the four territories when the original bill came to the House Floor, Congressman Mike Castle, Chair of the Domestic and International Monetary Policy Subcommittee, agreed to co-sponsor this bill with the other Delegates and me and to allow the District and the four insular areas to participate. I want to thank Chairman Castle for his great cooperation in helping us with this effort that is important to our districts, and I thank the Delegates from the four insular areas who have worked hard on this bill from the beginning. Although the residents of the District and the insular areas are American citizens, there are some differences between us and the states. However, qualification to be part of a program to redesign quarters to commemorate Member's home districts is not one of them. There is no legal or constitutional reason to exclude D.C. and the territories from this bill. Congress should be at great pains to avoid any appearance of treating the District and the insular areas as colonies. I am sure this initial exclusion was an oversight. My bill would extend the 10-year commemorative coin program for an additional year to include the District of Columbia and the four insular areas--American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands--in the program. In the District, I am suggesting that we hold a competition to choose the design for our quarter. Although to some American citizens the Commemorative Coin Program may seem like a minor activity, the ability to participate in this program is important recognition to my constituents. I am sure that the same is true for the insular areas.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from California would not yield to me, and I will not yield to the gentleman one moment or one word. Mr. Chairman, I warn my colleagues, hundreds of thousands of women's faces are trained on us now, particularly the faces of women small business owners. They are taking names and they are counting votes and they want to know which side my colleagues are on. Mr. Chairman, I want my colleagues to listen to them. Roberta Verdun, president, Summit Graphics, North Brunswick, New Jersey: Without the DBE program, I would not have opportunities to bid against the big businesses out here. Deborah Ayars, A-TECH Engineering, Vineland, New Jersey: Without the DBE provisions of ISTEA, the ever-larger majority firms would let none of the work out of their firms. The DBE program is one of the most successful programs the government has developed.'' Elaine Martin, MarCon, Inc., Nampa, Indiana: I was low bidder on a job in 1987 where the owner told the estimator to give the job to a larger, male-owned firm that had a higher bid than mine. The estimator told the owner that the job had DBE goals and as low bidder, I should be given the opportunity to perform. In the 10 years since that one $100,000 job that I would have lost without the DOT DBE program, my company has grown from $200,000 to $3 million annually.'' Finally, Joanna Pierson, Joanna Trucking, Inc., Sioux City, Iowa: My company is very good at what it does, but that does not mean anything. What does mean something is that I am a ``foolish female,'' ``stupid woman,'' I'm sure you've heard them all. To get rid of this program means putting me and other women like me out of business along with 25 of my employees. Mr. Chairman, these are the voices of women small business owners. This amendment would end the program for socially and economically disadvantaged white men who also qualify for DBE. Mr. Chairman, they will not be counting quotas in this bill, because there are none, but votes to see which side my colleagues were on when this amendment came up for vote.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Tauscher) for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, shame on the gentleman from California (Mr. Campbell), my good friend and fellow law professor, for racializing this issue. Not once, not once did the gentleman allude to anything but race. This issue does not involve race. This issue involves race and sex. My good friend and colleague puts a woman's face on an antiwoman amendment.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his generosity in yielding. Mr. Chairman, I have come to the floor to take head-on this notion that transportation and infrastructure money in today's America is pork. This is displaced rhetoric from prior decades before our infrastructure declined dangerously. There are two ingredients that make the United States a world class power. One is human capital. The other is our infrastructure. We cannot maintain our place in the world if we continue to allow our infrastructure to rot. Go to India. Enormous investment in human capital, but not in infrastructure, and so they are exporting their human capital, sending their people, their technicians and their scientists, around the world. A great power must have balanced investment. I am still a tenured law professor at Georgetown. Human capital advantage, I understand. That is why I support education so strongly. But neither must we lose the huge advantage infrastructure gives us in world markets. Instead of maintaining that advantage, we have been disinvesting in our infrastructure. There is no excuse for continuing to do so, because this bill is fully paid for out of transportation trust funds. Nor are the earmarked projects pork. Each and every one of mine came from my transportation department, prioritized for vital projects for the economy of my city. Yet, the Washington Post this morning, under a headline about, ``Record Pork'' goes on to say the following: ``Among these earmarked projects are $24 million to replace the crumbling 61-year-old Missisquoi Bay Bridge in northwestern Vermont, which local officials described as an accident waiting to happen.'' If that is so, how could it be pork? Mr. Speaker, this is not pork. This is steak. If we want to continue to be a prime rib country, we better pass this bill quick.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, we must reject this conference report and allow families in the developing world to plan their families just as we insist upon planning our own. How many times are we going to have to scrub this bill of abortion to allow impoverished women and families life-saving funds for family planning? Do we care about life? We have taken care of the life of the fetus in this bill because there is not one dime for abortion. It is time to move on to care about millions of children in Africa and in South America and in Asia. Do we care about life? Then care about family planning, the most important and effective tool against abortion. Do we care about life? Then care about the 20 children and the one pregnant woman who lose their lives per day in the developing countries for lack of family planning. Do we care about life? Then care about the 25 percent of women who lose their lives in childbirth because they have no family planning. Do we care about life? Then care about sparing the lives of millions of children who are twice as likely to lose their lives before their first birthday because they are spaced less than 2 years apart because of lack of family planning. First care about life, millions of these lives, and then care about the freedom to speak and to petition your government. We do nothing in this Chamber but talk and listen to our constituents talk. How can Americans, flag bearers of the First Amendment, condition funds on silencing people on any subject when we censor other nations for doing just that? You might oppose abortion, my friends, you might oppose family planning, but not one of you would limit the right of any American to advocate abortion or family planning. Who are we to tell Africans and South Americans what they must say? We are Americans. We promote speech. We do not pay people to silence them.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, any list of all-American, to-die-for rights will find the right to organize there at the top of the list. This bill tears up the right to organize, throws it in the dumpster. How many violations of basic rights can the majority cram into one bill? The answer is, as many as it will take: freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to organize, due process. How many ways are there to break unions? We will find a litany of them in this bill, including a brazen new employer right to discriminate against a worker who wants to organize a union in their company. We want to start a union today? We already take our job in our hands. Ask the 10,000 who are unlawfully fired every year for union activity. We have blocked labor law reform to balance and bring fairness to labor law in this Chamber for 20 years. Now we are trying to kill what is left of the right to organize. What do they want? We are already down to only 14 percent of workers organized in unions in this country. Have we forgotten that collective bargaining is a legitimate and time-honored part of the market system? In America, trying to organize a union should not make one a second- class citizen. Defeat this rule.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Our Lady Queen of Peace Church on its 50th Anniversary as a Church and Parish in the Archdiocese of Washington. Fifty years ago, Our Lady Queen of Peace was little more than a mission of the St. Francis Xavier Church that at the time was said to be the largest parish in Southeast Washington. On the eve that it was formally announced as a parish, it had no building of its own and was in fairly embryonic state. It had been established as a mission in March 1943 during the turbulence of World War II by the late Monsignor Joseph V. Buckley. If there was a physical edifice to call home, it was distributed between three buildings: The City Bank Building, the Senator Theater and a small store building, all of which were clustered along Minnesota Avenue just below Benning Road. These were indeed humble circumstances and remained so for nearly nine years. The church's early parishioners, bolstered by their first pastor, Reverend James H. Brooks, set to work helping him to build and organize the new parish. In January of 1950, construction began on the church and school at its present location, the corner of Ely Place and Ridge Road, SE. The first Mass of the Eucharistic Celebration was held on December 24, 1951, in the building while it was under construction. Even in that long ago generation, before Queen of Peace had a home of its own, its members were founding organizations to address social concerns extending beyond the church membership. That membership was composed of many converts and non-Catholics who were regular Sunday mass worshipers. Many of these organizations are cornerstones of Our Lady Queen of Peace and have been active for almost as long as the parish has existed. Such groups as the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Sodality, the Parish Credit Union, the Parish Council, the Men's Club, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), and the Scouting programs fall in this category. They have done much to make Our Lady Queen of Peace the still ``young, but strong and active'' church that it is. These groups, and their activities, encourage brotherhood in the true sense of the word both within and outside the parish. Since that time, mainly under the umbrella of the Social Justice and Community Outreach committees of the Pastoral Council, new organizations have emerged in response to the needs of the neighborhood-at-large as well as the parish family. One particular endeavor the Church recently worked on with the community was to put pressure on the city to remove abandoned buildings located on Ridge Road SE that had become havens for drug traffic. There are now groups and ministries providing real support: food for the mind as well as the body. Ministries such as Visitation of the Sick and Shut-In, the Community Empowering and Outreach in Public Housing and the Reclaiming Our Youth and Mentoring Program are but a few of these organizations. There are also ministries such as SOME and SHARE that prepare and distribute food for the hungry, the Prison Ministry and the Youth Ministry. The HIV/AIDS Ministry of Hope and Love is only a few months old and works side-by-side with the venerable St. Vincent de Paul Society that has been meeting the needs of the poor in the community for its 50 years in existence at Our Lady Queen of Peace. Mr. Speaker, I ask this august body to join me in saluting a snapshot of this church, itself homeless for more than eight years of its early life, yet rooted from the start to build, love and serve families.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I would like to use my remaining time to thank the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary of the Committee on Appropriations. I appeared before him to seek an increase for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I had twice sought such an increase, and have once gotten one on the floor with the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt) as the cosponsor. And, again, as chair of the Women's Caucus, when we sent a letter the chairman had been responsive to us. This year I tried a different approach and said to Chairman Rogers that I sought support for the President's call for a $37 million increase for the EEOC, which has a serious backlog and runs backlogs every year, but I sought it in a different way, in a way that would keep the EEOC from coming back for annual increases. I raise this now because the EEOC is vitally important to women. Pay equity, sexual discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, job discrimination comes through its doors and through its complaint process. We had an extraordinary case, the Mitsubishi case here, involving virtually pornographic, outrageous actions by male co-workers, and the whole Women's Caucus got involved. Essentially what I said to the gentleman from Kentucky is that I would like to have the EEOC do something comparable to what I tried to leave in place when I was at the EEOC, which was a system of alternative dispute resolution, a way that processes cases rapidly, using settlement techniques, and a way that I found also increased the awards to women because after a woman has remained in the system for 2 years, she is likely to get no award at all because the evidence falls away. If she settles, she gets often some money, assuming the case is worthy. Chairman Rogers was intrigued by the notion that EEOC might not come back every year if they got an increase this time, and put in place structural changes that would then last for some considerable number of years. That is what happened when I was at EEOC. I said, forget this increase. You will not see me again. I was at the EEOC for 4 years. I never came back on increase. I put in place something called rapid charge processing. We brought the average time of processing an individual charge from 2 years to 2\1/2\ months and raised the remedy rate from 14 percent to 43 percent using settlement techniques that are commonly used to resolve cases in the court system. Chairman Rogers said, show me a plan. And perhaps if we can tie the President's request for an increase to a plan, that would mean that the EEOC would have to show structural changes and not come back for annual increases. Perhaps he would look more closely at this substantial increase for the EEOC. I thank the chairman for looking closely at my proposal. When I came to the EEOC, it was known primarily for a backlog of 125,000 cases. We got rid of most of that backlog before I left the agency in about 3 years' time. I raise the case of EEOC not only because I am a former chair, but because I believe not only in quality, I believe in equity and efficiency. And I think those of us that are for equality had better stand for efficiency or we are not going to get equality. The best way to go about cases is to try and work them out. Then they deter employers and then there is a win-win for everyone. Mr. Speaker, I remind this body that I have been speaking here this evening not for myself but for 50 women in this House, some of whom will embrace some of what I have to say, all of whom who stand for fairness and equality for women during Women's History Month.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New York for her valuable contribution. May I also thank her for her very valuable work as vice chair of the Women's Caucus. Mr. Speaker, I want to speak this evening specifically on pay equity for women. This is one of the great issues, working women say their most important issue, more important than issues which also are among their great priorities, education and choice and health care. They say pay equity. Why should this be so, Mr. Speaker? Well, part of the reason is that women are now close to half of all the workers in the United States. Mr. Speaker, that is an enormous increase from just 1996, when not half, but only less than a third, actually 30 percent of women were in the workforce. Why have they come in such numbers? I am not sure that all of them are like me, Mr. Speaker, born to work. I think that we all know why women are in the workforce today in such huge and increasing numbers. I think we all know that wages have been stagnant since the early 1970s, that even with the splendid economy, the American family has sent everybody who could work out to work. First and foremost, it is women and so almost half of the work force now is female. Perhaps the stagnant wages and increasing entry of women into the labor force helps us understand why pay equity now shows up in polls at the top, the number 1, top issue for men and women; not women alone, Mr. Speaker, but men and women. I would hypothesize that the reason that people are saying that equal pay or pay equity, traditionally a woman's issue, is at the top of their agenda, that the reason is that women's pay has now become central to family income. When the women go out to work with the men and if there is a male in the household, he looks at her paycheck and then looks at his, and he says, how come you are not bringing home what I am bringing home, pay equity shoots to the top of the agenda, because he is talking about his family now. What we have seen is truly extraordinary. This women's issue has morphed into a family issue and into the number 1 issue according to the polls. That is driven, Mr. Speaker, not only by the fact that women have come in such huge numbers into the work force, it is driven by their lower wages compared to men. Study hard and do your homework, girls are told, and you can grow up to be anything you desire. I was told that, even as a skinny little black girl in the segregated public schools of the District of Columbia. And so that is exactly what good little girls do; they become good students. And today, it turns out that they have been good at everything except getting the equal pay they have earned. They have cracked open virtually every profession, but they have yet to crack the wage barrier, Mr. Speaker. They now collect 55 percent of college degrees. Men, Mr. Speaker, get only 45 percent of college degrees today. Women get 65 percent of the 3.5 grade point averages. None of that has done it. Study hard, little girl, and you can grow up to be anything you desire, so long as you do not ask to be paid the same as men who do the same work. I confess, Mr. Speaker, that I have been chasing fair pay for women for 20 years, since the Carter administration when I chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We had the first hearings on pay equity at the EEOC in 1980, and later commissioned the landmark study by the National Academy of Sciences that is remembered and referred to still today because it confirmed that there is comparable pay discrimination against women. Mr. Speaker, women today have a comparable pay problem, not an equal pay problem. A comparable pay problem comes when people, mostly women, have the same skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions as men, but get paid less for jobs that are not the same, except in all the essentials of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions. When I came to Congress, I brought my experience at the EEOC to the only place that can do something about gender bias. My bill, H.R. 1302, the Fair Pay Act, now has more than 60 cosponsors; and I thank the Members of this body who have cosponsored this bill with me. It takes the pay gap head-on by barring discrimination based on section or race when jobs are comparable in skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions. The Fair Pay Act would end the discrimination between, for example, the pay of a probation officer and the pay of his wife, a social worker. Both these people have gone to college. They may have even come out at the same time, they work every day. He hears from people who have been released from jail and may be on probation for years. She goes into some of the most troubled neighborhoods to work with disadvantaged people and their children. It is time that the Nation seriously ask whether we can expect women to continue to pursue higher education with the same vengeance only to earn close to $800 more than men who pass up college altogether. The budget reconciliation bill we have just passed offers tax breaks to help more women and men go to college. We should engage in some self-congratulation for that bill passed last year, Mr. Speaker. Now we must make the incentives to pursue higher education equal for women as for men. Pursuing pay discrimination will send the signal that college pays. Over and over again we say, we need to send more young people to college. Women have heeded that call so that they can meet the global competition in greater numbers than men. We do not want to have a reverse effect after some years when they figure out that college does not matter in pay. This signal is surely needed now to counter the danger signals of the 1990s on pay for women. The gender gap has stabilized again. Mr. Speaker, the increase in closing the gap, or should I say the ``decreasing of the gap,'' has stopped. It stopped at the end of the 1980s. We have seen no real movement since closing in on a man's dollar, and we keep fluctuating, all in the upper 70s, between 70 percent, sometimes getting as high as 75 percent or 76 percent, but always going back down in the ensuing year. The country simply cannot afford another 25 years of wage gap stability, not with so many women in the work force, not with the greater call for education, not with family income increasingly dependent on women's wages. As we have seen by the gender gap retrenchment of the 1990s, the gap will not close itself, or else it would have simply continued, unabated, to close. Congress has an obligation to eliminate the gender discrimination that sustains the gap. Good girls who go on to be good students deserve better when they go to work. I think they deserve what my Fair Pay Act would bring them. Mr. Speaker, I know that this is not a country that will allow the rise in real wages for women that we saw during the 1990s to simply top out, that is it, glass ceiling in wages, you have had it; go on for another 10, 15 years, and maybe you will slip up again the way you did in the 1980s. The country will not tolerate that this time. Too many women in the work force are too dependent on their income. And yet, between 1979 and 1997, we have seen increases that encouraged us. Women earned $395 in median weekly earnings in 1979. That $395 turned to $431 by 1997. Women reached their highest ratio of earnings to men in 1993 when the ratio was almost 77 percent of a man's dollar. Since 1995, and this is the bad news, Mr. Speaker, the wage gap has actually increased so that women in 1997 are showing about 74 percent of men's median earnings. Some have asked whether or not women have caught the so-called ``male wage disease.'' That disease is the disease, as it were, that has stalled men's wages for what seems like an eternity when they stopped rising in the 1990s. We have every reason to be concerned, Mr. Speaker, because we are now living in the best of times economically. The fact is that over and over again we are told by everybody from the President to the nightly news that we are now living in the longest period of sustained economic growth since the end of the Second World War. How then to explain the lack of real growth in women's wages and in men's wages during the 1990s? We explained it for men's wages by saying, well, men were in manufacturing, they were moving overseas, it would all straighten itself out. In that sense, they are in worse trouble than women, because it has been downhill all the way with no respite such as women got during the 1980s when the gap, in fact, was closed. Mr. Speaker, what concerns me most is that women's wage gap-closing is not explained by the growth in real wages. A substantial amount of the closing of the gap is not closing at all. It is because men have not, in fact, had an increase in their real wages, and that simply leaves them where they are, or declining, causing women to meet them more easily than if their wages had continued to go up since the early 1970s. This, Mr. Speaker, is not what we had in mind when women started to close the wage gap. We do not mean to do that at the expense of men, our husbands, our fathers, our brothers; and of course, it is not at their expense that we are doing it. What these figures show is simply that they are not rising for whatever reasons women's are and, thus, there is the appearance of the closing of the gap that is in fact not the case. Beyond the fact that much of the closing of the gap of women's wages is really nothing more than a decline in men's wages, there is also a serious problem, and that is that most of the closing of the gap is not due to an increase in women's real wages. Mr. Speaker, 41 percent of the closing is due to an increase in women's real wages, but that leaves 59 percent which comes because of the decline in men's wages, and Mr. Speaker, the proportion of the gap that is closed due to the growth in real wages is only 19 percent; and that is in this decade, the 1990s. Compare that to the 1980s, when the proportion of the closure of the gap for women due to real wage growth was 51 percent. Fifty-one percent of the gap closed because of real wage increases in the 1980s. Nineteen percent of the decrease in the gap in the 1990s is due to an increase in real wages for women. That is unsatisfactory, Mr. Speaker, and it tells us perhaps all we need to know about why pay equity has found itself at the top of the agenda for men and for women. We are talking family business here, Mr. Speaker. It is family wages that are falling. There is no such thing as women's wages anymore. Women are single heads of households. Imagine what this slow-up in the rise in women's wages means to women who have to support children by themselves. A third of all children in this country are born out of wedlock. Many more simply live for huge periods of time after divorce or separation with their mothers alone. These women are out here trying to make it on a woman's wage. Even when a woman is part of a two-earner household, men are so disquieted by the failure of the woman to bring home her fair pay that they have joined with women to put pay equity at the top of the list, at least according to the polls; a serious, serious problem. Mr. Speaker, to get some sense of just how serious it is and why this body needs to pay attention to it, and I offer my Fair Pay Act as one approach at hand, an example comes out of what has happened to the pay of the women one would most expect to be ahead of the game. Let us look at women with Bachelor's Degrees. Mr. Speaker, they earned $28,701 in 1996. A man with a Bachelor's Degree earned $46,702. Let us look at high school graduates. A woman with a high school education earned $16,161, Mr. Speaker. A man with a high school education earned $27,642. Even if we consider that there are some reasons to discount part of this discrepancy, such as perhaps the woman has taken some time out to have children, perhaps the woman, and these are all either high school or college graduates, perhaps the woman has taken some time to have a part-time job, but can you really tell me that the difference should be almost $20,000 between a man who graduated from college and a woman who graduated from college? That gap is simply too great to be explained away by any explanation except some degree of discrimination in wages for women. We think that discrimination comes because, Mr. Speaker, wages in this country and throughout the world have been designed for women. When a job is a traditional women's job, throughout human time, that fact and that fact alone has depressed the wage scale. What the Fair Pay Act asks is that one eliminate that factor and that factor alone from wage-setting. My bill respects the market system. I am not crazy. This is a free market system, and I do not want to change it one bit in that regard. But the free market system does not allow men and women who do the same work to be paid dissimilarly, and the reason is because discrimination is not a market factor, or at least it is not a legitimate market factor. In the same way, the free market system should not allow discrimination to be a factor in the difference between what a probation officer and a social worker receive. Assuming they are measured objectively by the grade point scale widely used throughout industry, they are performing work that is comparable in skill, effort and responsibility, and working conditions. Mr. Speaker, there are a number of ways to rectify this matter. I shall be speaking about the filing of a complaint, but I would like to speak to an old-fashioned market system way to rectify this discrimination. That is through collective bargaining. In every market system one way to legitimately raise wages is simply to bargain for increases, and the theory of bargaining for increases is that the market will keep the union from getting more of an increase than the market will bear. If it does not, workers will be laid off or other sacrifices will have to be made, and the employer's bargaining position in a market system will keep the wage from becoming higher than the market should allow. I believe we should take a very close look at what unions have done to bring pay equity for women. It is worth noting that white union women earn $151 more than their counterparts who are not unionized, a 38 percent difference; that black union women earn $73 more than their counterparts who are not unionized. Mr. Speaker, these figures are weekly earnings, of course. That figure is an 18.5 percent difference. Hispanic women earn $24 more per week than their nonunion counterparts. That is a 6 percent difference. Looked at at the bottom line, women who are in unions are about one- third closer to union white men's earnings. Why does this occur through unionization? Why are women increasingly coming to unionization? Why are so many people of color attracted to unionization? Because it tends to standardize wages in and of itself by the way bargaining occurs, and therefore, naturally, to eliminate some of this wage disparity and to reduce wage gaps. Of course, the fact that women and minorities have a voice in wage- setting through their unions and the democratic practices of unions means that they can exert pressure on their unions to keep men and women's wages from getting out of line. If the difference is out of line and their consciousness is sufficiently raised, then they can in fact democratically compel their union to bring about greater equalization. Unions themselves, frankly, have stepped to the forefront often to raise the consciousness of their own members, rather than the other way around. I would like to offer some examples, because I think that they point up what can be done using this traditional market system approach. AFCSME, which by the way also represents many Federal workers, in the private sector has raised over $1 billion in wage adjustments alone for women workers. This is the American Federation of State and Municipal Employees. Their Minnesota pay equity contract is particularly noteworthy. AFCSME in fact bargained for a pay equity study in 1985, and looking at comparable skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, AFCSME got a contract that provided $21.7 million to reduce wage and equity in female-dominated jobs. That was an approximate increase of 9 percent, and it occurred without reducing the number of jobs for women in State government, where this landmark win took place. That is important to note, again, because the way in which collective bargaining works, if the union finds that it is asking for an increase that the employer will make up for by laying off women or other workers, it gets nowhere. So again, the market system, using collective bargaining, disciplines how one bargains for increases in wages involving pay equity for women. It is a wonderfully neat and classic approach to improving wages for women. Occasionally this straight-out collective bargaining will not do it. Occasionally, therefore, there have been strikes. In 1981, AFCSME Local 101, Council 57, had to go on strike. This occurred in the City of San Jose, California. What happened as a result, however, was a $1.5 million increase in female-dominated jobs. It says something about a union that is willing to go on strike to bring pay fairness to its women workers, because it means that the men and women went on strike. And if the strike was successful, and it was, it was a nine-day strike, by the way, and it was, then what it means is the employer in fact gave an increase, but obviously, not from his point of view, more of an increase than the market would bear. Another union, SEIU, Service Employees International Union, has moved aggressively in the pay equity area. I am most intrigued by a settlement they won in 1987 in San Francisco. Essentially what SEIU did was to negotiate a $35 million settlement with the City of San Francisco. In order to do that, the city had to put a referendum on the ballot, and the pay equity referendum passed by 60 percent. Twelve thousand workers benefited. Here we see a combination of democracy, collective bargaining, and pay equity for workers. SEIU deserves a lot of credit for being among the first to raise the issue of pay equity for men of color as well as for women. SEIU has forced a study that shows that in L.A. County, 81 percent of the jobs were sex-segregated and 21 percent were segregated by race. This is the kind of study that often produces action through collective bargaining, Mr. Speaker. More recently, in 1994, there was another pay equity victory for the SEIU. The Local 715 in Santa Clara, California won nearly $30 million through achieving changes in job classifications of traditionally women-dominated jobs and jobs dominated by minority workers. In the end, these workers were brought to the wage levels of mixed-gender occupations. Mr. Speaker, the National Education Association represents not only teachers, but many education support personnel who have been left behind. The NEA has had some notable success in negotiating pay equity for these support workers in various school districts. More than two dozen contracts to be exact; 14,000 personnel affected. The estimate is that over a worker's career, their pay equity program has brought raises of a minimum of $10,000 for most of the employees involved, and as much as $40,000 in the career earnings for many others. In 1991, the utility workers of America negotiated a pay equalization increase at Southern California Gas Company. Traditional female- dominated jobs saw increases of 15 percent. Typical of the occupation comparisons was the case of the female customer service representative who was equalized with the male service representative or meter reader. That is the way it is parsed out. The inside job is less, the outside job is more. Maybe it should be. But, in fact, often when we look at skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, that should not be the case. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International, Local 34, negotiated a famous contract with my own university, Yale, where I went to law school, in 1988 for its clerical and technical workers, winning for these female-dominated occupations 24 to 35 percent over 4 years, and they had to go on strike to do it. I was on the Yale Corporation at time. Yale held out for a long time. There was a 10-week strike. It was the first pay equity strike in the private sector. Mr. Speaker, if workers have to do that, they have got to do that. Hopefully, more and more employers will see that it is in their best interest to settle these matters peacefully, a strike peacefully, but a strike, of course, is almost inherently peaceful. But I would hope that most employers would understand that it is in their best interest to raise the wages of women workers so that they do not have people doing comparable work who are paid less than men who sit beside them or who work outdoors doing comparable work. The Newspaper Guild, perhaps some think of that as an unlikely union for pay equity, but it is no such thing. Here there have been three pay equity increases in three different newspapers. Examples of jobs that have been equalized are the female insider classified sales jobs and the historic male outside sales jobs. Mr. Speaker, nonunion workers may also get themselves into voluntary associations of one kind or another to try to negotiate pay equity disparities, but they will be at a severe disadvantage. They may advocate, but each and every one of these cases have required technical expertise, political support and financial resources. Pay equity case or matter cannot be argued without enormous backup. It must be shown that the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are indeed unequal. That is not the case simply because the man in the workplace earns more than the woman in the workplace. The jobs may not be comparable. Most jobs are not comparable. Complainants have got to find in the same workplace two jobs that are comparable and then have to show by a very detailed and technical study that each and every one of these areas, when added up, should result in the same pay. Mr. Speaker, it is a very difficult thing to do, and cannot be done by getting on a PC and figuring it out. It takes lawyers, economists, statisticians, and a whole host of skills. That is why unions have proved most valuable to women and people of color in correcting pay disparity. Tom Donahue, a good friend and former Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL- CIO, said it best in a hearing in the 1980's: Bargaining about wage rates is something, after all, that we have been doing for decades. That is what unions do. I recognize that not everyone in this body favors unions or collective bargaining, strange as that may seem in a great democracy like ours. But that is indeed the case. It is either going to be done through that traditional market-oriented approach, collective bargaining, or my Fair Pay Act would do it for nonunion workers and, for that matter, for union workers if the union cannot or does not move forward. And one way or the other, look at the polls. We will see that the American family is demanding that we do something about it. Mr. Speaker, this discrimination in wages results in no small part because women have only a limited number of occupations, really about six major occupations to which they have essentially been consigned. If a woman walks into a workplace and says, ``What jobs do you have open,'' Mr. Speaker, if we would like to do the testing, what will happen is the woman will be sent to the woman's track and the employer will not even recognize what he is doing. It is just what he has always done and the company has done for decades. And what happens results in crowding often of qualified and overqualified people into a few job categories whose talents could take them almost anywhere in the workplace. The way to undo this is to bring it to the employer's attention, make them undo it, make them understand that it is against the law and the law then has a deterrent effect and it begins to then undo itself, as much discrimination does today. It is discrimination that has reduced these wages. Mr. Speaker, I repeat, where these wages are unequal, and the cause is not discrimination, I do not call for equalization. I am not trying to build a command wage-setting economy. Not only do I respect the market economy, I glory in what it can do. Of course when it does not do what it is supposed to do, that is what this body is here for, to make sure that people do not unduly suffer while the economic cycle works its way out. I am talking about pinpointing the discrimination factor in wage- setting, and only the discrimination factor, and I am talking about making the woman do that as a plaintiff if the matter were to turn out to be a discrimination suit. Mr. Speaker, my backup on that, and perhaps my preference, is collective bargaining. Ultimately, though, we have got to take responsibility for this. We cannot keep sending the woman out to work or having her, as in most cases, go out to work on her own or having her have the responsibility for the family income on her own and saying you are on your own; if you encounter comparable pay discrimination, you are still on your own. Discrimination, and only discrimination is what I am after, Mr. Speaker. The women of America have so many priorities that we often lose sight of what really is the priority. Is it child care? Is it osteoporosis? Is it breast cancer? Is it affirmative action? Women have spoken in unison with the men. They say it is pay equity. I am out here working every day and want the same pay that I would get if I were a man going out here on the job. If I do not get it, give me a statute that gives me a tool, and employers will begin to do it on their own. Nobody in this body would want to say to a woman who was a 911 operator, an emergency service operator, that she is worth less than her husband who is a fire dispatcher. Can my colleagues imagine what it is like to sit at 911? I can tell you one thing, Mr. Speaker, it is probably more hectic than it is to be a fire dispatcher, unless fires occur every moment. It is time we said to working women that they are on their own except when you encounter discrimination, and then the Congress of the United States is with them. The Fair Pay Act, like the AEPA or the Equal Pay Act, the historic landmark statute that we passed in 1963, will root out the discrimination I am after without tampering with the market system. A woman may file a discrimination claim, but as in all discrimination cases, she must prove that the gap between herself and a male co-worker doing comparable work is discrimination and no other reason such as, first and foremost, legitimate market factors. Gender is not a legitimate market factor. Mr. Speaker may I inquire how much time I have remaining?

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to lead a special order on economic equity for women. I expect to be joined by other women Members of Congress, perhaps by some men as well. They would be welcome. I have already been joined by the energetic and able gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney), to whom I will yield in a few moments. I come to the floor this evening during this special Women's History Month, Mr. Speaker. During this month, women Members, and we are proudly 50 Members strong in this House, of course, when you consider that there are 440 Members, we are the first to concede that we are proud, but not pleased, but we are proud to honor Women's History Month by participating in a number of floor speeches simply to keep before this body what I know most Members would not want to forget, and that is that women's issues increasingly dominate much of what concerns America, often as family issues. This evening I want to devote my own time to discussion of specific aspects of economic equity, but I remind the body that this general subject covers a multitude of problems, among them old-fashioned discrimination against women in everything from sports to jobs, women's new rise in small business, women's special place as now primary in their dependence for their economic survival and benefit on a whole set of gender neutral economic programs, among them Social Security. We say watch when you change Social Security, particularly when you talk about privatization, that you do not forget who lives the longest and who is most dependent on Social Security, and consider whether or not they will quickly and freely enter the market, particularly since it is low wage workers, among whom women are the predominant group who are most dependent on Social Security. The earned income tax credit where many women, this very month, simply would have thousands of dollars in reduction in pay were it not for the earned income tax credit, which goes in this country predominantly to women who are, again, the low paid workers of America, minimum wage. We got a minimum wage through, I think in no small part because this body understood it was talking about women, women vote, and women understood that that vote was a women's vote because two-thirds of those who qualify for the minimum wage, in a very real sense, to our shame, are women and women with children at that. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney) and thank her for coming to the floor to speak on an aspect of this subject.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise to bring to the House a report on the capital of the United States and its progress in relieving itself of financial and management distress. Mr. Speaker, this House has had, and justifiably so, a special interest in its capital city. Almost 3 years ago the capital of the United States met the same fate as several large cities before it, as Cleveland, as New York, and as Philadelphia. The capital found that its bonds were no longer at investment grade and it could no longer borrow money without the assistance of a control board. To its credit, this House, working in a bipartisan fashion, passed a bill, very much like bills that had been passed to assist other cities who had met such problems. That bill preserved self-government in the District of Columbia, but as a result of quarrels between city officials and the control board and as a result of a pace that perhaps was too slow in fixing the city's problems, the Congress, largely through the appropriation committees, infringed upon self-government in the District of Columbia. And so we have a strange situation to be sure. The capital of the United States has less democracy than any other piece of American soil. I know that this body joins me in wanting to assure that this state of affairs does not last much longer. I have indicated to my own constituents in the District of Columbia that, though they have every reason to be outraged that there would be any less democracy here than elsewhere, there is only one way to assure that democracy will be restored and that we will go further and have the same level of democracy as the States and the territories, and that is for the city to quickly bring itself to the point where particularly its services and operations are services that the residents of the District of Columbia, first and foremost, can be proud of, that every American would be proud of, and that of course this Congress would be proud of. It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, that it is my obligation to keep this body informed of whether or not progress is indeed being made, especially since this body and the other body were concerned that progress had been too slow. Very substantial changes are beginning to occur and very substantial progress is beginning to be made, Mr. Speaker. Therefore, it is my intention to come to the floor sometimes in 5-minute debate period, sometimes in one-minute debate period, and sometimes for a special order debate period, as today, and report to this body on progress that is being made. Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago I came to report that the District was actually experiencing a surplus 2 years ahead of when the District budget was supposed to be balanced on an annual basis under congressional mandate. I reported that in a 1-minute speech before the House and I noted that Members on both sides of the aisle applauded, and I remember saying, only half jokingly, Mr. Speaker, let the record show that this body applauded for the District of Columbia. I know that this body will indeed applaud when the capital city of the United States is brought back to its full majesty. Mr. Speaker, let me begin with a report not of the surplus and what it contains, not of the large picture, but, rather, of a small part of the picture that I think would especially please this body. Of all of the services in the District of Columbia, none has the attention or perhaps deserves the attention that this body has given to education. This body knows where to focus on when it looks to see whether the city is improving, and so it has looked at the schools and it has looked at education. Mr. Speaker, on the front page of the Washington Times, just yesterday, I was surprised to see a report, something that I did not know of, and I doubt that anyone in this body knew of. The headline reads, Mr. Speaker, ``Computer Castoffs Inspire Teens.'' Mr. Speaker, this is a report of how at one D.C. school, Wilson High School, students are taking outdated systems and computers, repairing them and rebuilding computers, this in a city which has had to beg, borrow, I will not say steal because that has not occurred, computers. This school needs 400, it has 150. But what is amazing about this piece is that there is a teacher at Wilson High School who decided to make a course of getting old computers, taking them apart and repairing them. The students keep a journal of the steps they go through to repair the computers. They obviously learn much about the complicated nature of these machines. There are some of us trying to become computer literate. These youngsters are beyond literacy and into making the things, making them work. They have a computer lab. This is the largest public school in the district. It has got almost 1600 students. What it has done, one teacher, many like him, the problem is they do not make the front page of the Washington Times or any other newspaper, one teacher is doing what I would imagine is probably not being done anywhere else in the United States; if so, by very few. And that is not only teaching youngsters how to become computer literate but getting deeply analytically into computers. Can you think of any better way, Mr. Speaker, to teach youngsters problem solving or how to exercise their analytical faculties? Can you imagine the confidence a youngster gets who has not thought himself very good at much to learn that he can actually work on computers and make them work again and work for every one? Apparently these renovated computers can also be borrowed and taken home by a student so long as that student remains in school. So the computers do double duty. They help youngsters to understand that there is a reason not to drop out of school in a town that has had a high dropout rate. Mr. Speaker, the progress in the schools has been difficult to make. I point out this progress because it is at that level that the progress is being made and it is at that level that this body is likely to hear too little just by the nature of things. I want to say something further about the schools, again, because of the special interest of this body in schools and because so much that is good is happening in schools. I have to tell you, it is not good enough for the residents of the District of Columbia. There is still a lot of contention around the schools, but compared to where we were, I think this body would be pleased to see forward movement. There is concern that the schools open three weeks late because the roofs were not fixed in time. Well, for some of us, we remember when the roofs were not fixed at all. Of course, what happened was that a whole bunch of roofs got fixed and are still being fixed and when roofs on schools are fixed, then all kinds of damage and other problems that come from leaky roofs also disappear. May I take this opportunity once again, Mr. Speaker, to thank the 254 Members of the House and Senate who during that three-week period when school was closed answered my call to take youngsters from D.C. high schools as interns. I want to thank those Members. And there were many who buttonholed me, staff and Members alike, to tell me how these youngsters were doing, helping them as volunteer interns in their offices. Some of my colleagues may know that we have started a small program, to become larger in the summer and to be full-blown next year, for permanent volunteer interns from the D.C. high schools to come into the House and the Senate. My colleagues can imagine what this will mean to youngsters in the District. Here they are in the Nation's Capitol, and the Capitol to them is an awesome, almost fearsome place, especially when we consider the power this body has over the District that it does not have over others, almost unapproachable. And here they are invited in by Members of this body and of the other body to actually work in their offices. The experience was a salutary one for the youngsters and for the Members, and I thank the Members for the way in which Members, I must say, of every persuasion and tendency and across both sides of the aisle answered this call. I have a special program, indeed, called D.C. Students in the Capitol because of the unapproachable nature of the Capitol to the folks who live here. And it says teachers should bring their students. There is a time when they come, I meet with them for a few minutes, they tour the Capitol, they get to sit in on a hearing, and they get to feel at peace and at home with this place. Now, I recognize that even though the facilities are being improved, even though, frankly, top to bottom, changes that have not yet fully manifested themselves are going on, that there continues to be great concern about the schools. I want to speak about one program that thrills me. The District, like almost every other city in many States, has social promotion. They have social promotion because they do not know what to do with the youngster. They do not want to keep the youngster back because they think that will hurt the youngster's self-confidence. They do not want the youngster to be larger, bigger than the other kids. They just move them forward. And the harm that that does ought to be clear by now, but, frankly, one of the reasons it continues to be done is people do not do the grunt work it takes to figure out a better way to do it. Arlene Ackerman, the new chief educational officer of the schools, has done just that. She has started a program called Summer Stars Program. Twenty thousand students this summer are going to have made probably so little progress, because Ms. Ackerman just got here and the reforms are just beginning, but instead of being socially promoted, these youngsters are going to go to what would have been called summer school, but is no longer called that because it is no longer that. It is the beginning, here in the Nation's capital, of a year-round school, the kind of school we think every jurisdiction in the United States should have today. Do my colleagues want to know why Japanese kids do better? Not because they are smarter. They do better than American kids, blacks, whites and Hispanics, because they go to school longer, and they study harder. That is the key to it. Well, for youngsters who are behind, they will be in the first class of the year-round school. Now, the year-round school is going to have classes in the evenings during the regular school year so that many kids next year will not have to go to school in the summer because they will be part of the year-round school program. But students who score below basic on the so-called Stanford 9 test in both reading and math must go rather than be promoted. These students must go even though they have not been retained in their grade. And ninth-graders and seniors who need one credit to graduate or for promotion must go to this Summer Stars Program. They are also telling students who should go who they are. And there are a whole set of students who should go, who do not need to go, who we expect to go, because if they do not go, they are going to need to go. This, we think, is the way to approach education today; not by screaming and yelling and engaging in the kinds of fads that education tries out year by year and still leaves us with the same problems, but by doing the grunt work to figure out what we need to do to get hold of it. These youngsters are going to receive highly structured remedial work with 2 hours of reading and 2 hours of math. They will receive phonics instruction. They are going to receive oral language activities. They are going to receive writing activities. They are going to receive individual instruction. They are going to receive group instruction. They are going to receive computer instruction. They are going to go to school, grades 1 through 11. First-graders are going to go, and people about to go into their senior year are going to go, and all the grades in between. And they are going to go for 4 full hours a day; 8:30 to 12:30. And then some will go from 8:30 to 1:30, and some will go from 3:30 to 8:30 for enrichment programs. There will be 10 middle schools, 10 high schools and 60 elementary schools; 15 students to one teacher. These youngsters are going to learn when that is the student-teacher ratio. Who will be the teachers? There is going to be not only an internal search, those teachers already there, but there will be an internal and external search. Only applicants with outstanding qualifications will be selected for the year-round Summer Stars Program. The initial screening of these teachers is going to include a writing sample, for example. One of the reasons my colleagues have seen me on the floor in opposition to the vouchers program that some still continue to propose for the District is not only that I do not think that is the best thing, the best way to approach education for the majority of the youngsters, but I have a very special reason this year, Mr. Speaker, and that is this program. This Summer Stars Program is simply too good to be turned away for yet another experiment, whether it is vouchers or, frankly, my favorite experiment. If there is $7 million for youngsters for private vouchers, who would say that that money should not be used for this first year- round program to end social promotion in the Nation's capital? Who would say that that is not, at this juncture, given where the District of Columbia public schools are and where the city itself is, that the best use of that money would not be that? It takes $10 million to run this program. If $7 million are to be found in a vouchers program, and the Congress is serious about the attention it has paid to schools, it will help us start this first year-round school. It will help us to become a model for Baltimore, for Philadelphia, for New York, for L.A., for Chicago, for the small towns and the large cities that need to do precisely this kind of thing. I have started with the schools, Mr. Speaker, because the schools have been, and rightly so, of special interest and special concern to this body. I do want to make a correction, because people, for understandable reasons, when they talk about the District, talk about the District 4 years or even 10 years ago. And one of the things I hear from time to time is that the District has the highest cost per pupil in the United States. Well, that may have been so once, Mr. Speaker, but it has not now been for a very long time. The District has downsized tens of thousands of employees and perhaps too much in the schools, if anything. Now, an independent analyst tells us that the District is spending about $7,000 per student, and even that amount includes our payments to the teacher retirement fund, which often is not included in per-pupil reports. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, it is important to have a sense of what that $7,000 figure means. The best way would be to compare the District to its immediate region. We are at $7,000; Prince George's County, $7,120; Fairfax County, $7,650; Montgomery County, $9,000; Arlington County, $9,300. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues should see straight away that that means the District of Columbia has the lowest per-pupil cost in this region, even though it has by far the largest number of children who need special care and special programs. We cannot talk cost anymore. We have to say to the District that they have to do the best they can with what they have. But if the Congress, in its wisdom, has additional money, it has to put that money where the biggest payoff is for the average child in this system. And as my colleagues know, Mr. Speaker, the average child in this system can do a whole lot better. Arlene Ackerman said, for example, in a hearing we had just this week, that District of Columbia students will be reading the equivalent of 25 books this next school year. In one fashion or another, each child is going to read the functional equivalent of 25 books. That is what I call raising standards and raising standards big time. Mr. Speaker, the Congress should come forward now and help us raise those standards. I ask my colleagues not to dash the hopes and the efforts of the District by going back to one of my colleagues' favorite notions. If my colleagues are for vouchers, bring a voucher bill before the floor and vote it up or down. My colleagues control the House and the Senate. Better yet, find some districts that, in fact, would like vouchers and make sure that they, in fact, get vouchers. But when we have a district that has voted 89 percent against vouchers, who in America would say that in the face of that, a body of people, where no one represents the District with a full vote, should overturn what 89 percent of the people of the District of Columbia have said? But I do not come to the floor to have another philosophical or ideological fight on this floor about vouchers. This is too serious, Mr. Speaker. We are now to the point of where we are seeing real progress in the District; a surplus, movement on school facilities, a new chief educational officer who has her head on straight and knows that we have to raise the bar and youngsters will jump to meet it. Help us help them. Now, Mr. Speaker, perhaps the best news for the city overall has been the emergence of a general fund surplus. This is a city that had the exact opposite only 2\1/2\ years ago. Its audit was in such bad shape that it could not even get a so-called clean opinion, because in order to get a clean opinion from the auditor, all the papers have to be in shape so the auditor can, in fact, know whether the entity is in shape. The District got a clean opinion this year and reported a general fund surplus of $185.9 million. The District clearly continues to attract my colleagues' constituents to this city. Whatever the District's reputation, people are coming in larger numbers than ever. We have the largest turnout of tourists ever. The economy of the city is beginning to come back, Mr. Speaker. One indication of that is the sale of homes in the District. All across the region there is beginning to be some greater sale of homes. But when we look at the District and compare it to the rest of the region, we know that something very different and very important is happening in this city and that it is moving forward. The District over the past year had a 31-percent increase in the number of homes sold. The next highest in the region was only 17 percent. The District is coming up with almost twice as much of an increase in homes sold as the rest of the region. If that is not some indication that there is a return in confidence in the city, I do not know what is. When people decide to move here and live here and buy a home here and risk their capital here, they are saying that something has turned around in the City. Mr. Speaker, may I thank this body for contributing to those figures? Because, although those figures were going up, I believe that a bill passed by this body at my request last year has helped to make home sales go up; and that is a bill that was included in the tax benefit package, that is a $5,000 home buyer tax credit. Essentially, it says that if they have an income and they are joint filers up to $130,000 or single filers up to $90,000 and they buy a home in the District of Columbia, they can get a tax credit up to $5,000. I do not need to tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that that is enough to make some people go out and buy a house or a condominium, and it certainly is enough to make some people who are renting in a house or condominium to say, I think I might stop paying the rent man and pay myself and buy this house and get a tax credit. I have strongly supported the kinds of tax credits that have this effect, and I want to thank this body here and now for helping to make what was already a housing sale increase sail forward even faster. Mr. Speaker, when I look at the budget surplus, and remember those home buyers are going to be paying taxes to the District of Columbia in sales taxes and other kinds of taxes and that is going to ease the burden of the District, but when I look at the surplus the City is already showing, I want my colleagues to know that it is not simply because we have a good economy. This administration deserves credit for its role in the good economy, and it has gotten credit from both sides of the aisle. I certainly take nothing away from the President and the administration when I say that some of the credit belongs simply to good management in the District of Columbia, at least when we are talking about the surplus that the District is now experiencing. The District is now collecting taxes from people it did not collect taxes from before because its system for collecting taxes was in such disarray. The District's deficit had, in part, to do with the fact that the District would wait weeks upon weeks to cash checks. Now it cashes a check within 1 day. When the Chief Financial Officer was hired, he found records scattered in boxes on floors. Mr. Speaker, I cannot say enough about what it took to clean that kind of mess up. They could not go to a computer and push some buttons and say voila. Somebody had to get down on their knees, go through these files and straighten them up and computerize them. Surplus is due as well to other internal controls. Reducing, for example, the improper extension of emergency contracts. If somebody gets a contract and then he keeps on getting it on an emergency basis, the City may never know whether somebody else would do that same job for less. Those kinds of controls are showing up now as part of a surplus. Extensive training of agencies and of accounting staffs have been part and parcel of this improved management. Mr. Speaker, there have been real sacrifices made to achieve these improvements. Employees in the District of Columbia have not gotten a raise since 1994. Imagine what that would be like. Imagine what our Federal workers would think if we were to deny raises in that way. I had to press the school system when they came before us just before Christmas because there were workers in the school cafeterias, the lowest paid workers there, who had not received a wage in 7 years, even though there were arbitrator awards twice awarding them wages and they had begun to be paid. So we cannot get work out of people if we continue to deny them annual raises. What is good about what is happening, Mr. Speaker, however, is that accountability is being demanded for increases in pay; and it is that accountability that is different about the way the District is approaching its business. The District still has to reduce its government more, and it has a long way to go to get the kind of government that District residents deserve. But Mr. Speaker, let me put before you another figure that will surely convince you that the District has turned the corner. There has been a 20-percent decrease in crime and a 40-percent decrease in homicides over the last year. We were hitting in the top when it came to crime. Everybody else's crime was going down. Ours continued to go up. The District is now at the end game of recruiting a new police chief. It has got a half dozen top-notch people competing for the job. By moving analytically, step by step, on reorganizing the police department, putting more and more cops into the streets, and there is still more to go there, reorganizing the department into community policing, we have gotten an almost immediate payoff in the reduction of crime. There is nothing more important that could have been done, even more important, if I might say so, than schools, than to reduce crime. People are not going to live in a city where they fear for their lives, and the reduction in crime is a salient indicator that this body would surely want to use in deciding whether progress is being made in the District of Columbia. Now, Mr. Speaker, a good friend and Member wrote a dear colleague when I asked that money for vouchers be spent on the year-round program, the Summer Stars Program, this summer, in order to finally, finally, eliminate social promotion. A good friend responded that, no, we could continue to use that money on vouchers, as he apparently desires, because the District can simply use its surplus to fund the year-round program. Wait 1 minute, Mr. Speaker. In last year's appropriation, the District was admonished to use every cent of its surplus to pay down its deficit. The District is still carrying an accumulated deficit of over $300 million. When I say that your capital is a balanced budget, I mean on an annualized basis, the way this country has a balanced budget on an annualized basis but is carrying a huge deficit. So the District is carrying an operating deficit from the time when it went down and went bankrupt. Now, the District was told, and I thought prudently, do not spend that surplus. Do not use it on anything, not even your schools, not even crime. Use it to pay down your debt. Do not borrow to pay down your debt. So, Mr. Speaker, I do not want to hear anybody say now that the District should use the surplus for the Summer Stars program, especially when Members of this body are coming forward and saying that there is $7 million to be used on school vouchers. That money should be used for the Summer Stars program; and the District should, in fact, use its surplus to pay down the deficit. The only other function that it has identified for use for some of this surplus is for the management reform that this body has mandated on the District. The District must have not only its finances straightened out but its management straightened out in 4 years if, in fact, the control board is to sunset. And I know that the howls from this body about the disarray of the operations of the District of Columbia are such that they would want the District to spend that money first on deficit reduction, then of course on straightening out its management. And there we are into something that will not even be done by the end of 4 years when the control board is to go, because part of the District's problem is an almost absence of technology in its agencies. Would you believe, Mr. Speaker, the District still has rotary phones in most of its agencies? We cannot even do computers as long as we do not have push button phones. So certain kinds of priorities are there. If there is money for schools, it certainly should go for Dr. Ackerman's Summer Stars program. The District should do what the Congress told the District it should do. The Congress said, the District should use all the money to pay down the deficit. It also said, the money should be used for tax cuts for D.C. residents. I am trying to get a tax cut on the Federal side for D.C. residents with a bill that has strong support from the Speaker and the majority leader that would be a progressive flat tax. I would certainly like to see some reduction in D.C. taxes, but I think that the Chief Financial Officer is correct when he says that the reduction in city taxes, given the outstanding deficit, should take place on a planned course as the city is downsized and improved so that all of that occurs in tandem and so that we do not throw out of sync the very good building of a surplus that has begun to occur. Mr. Speaker, the improvements in the District abound, and I am going to be coming forward with others. I must speak at some length about one that I think almost no one expected. The District was on not the dirty dozen list, because there is a whole lot more than a dozen cities on the list of troubled public housing authorities, and the District was big-time on that list. Two and a half years ago a man came from Seattle, Washington, to try to take hold of this chaos and put it back together again. The District, over 20 years it had more directors of its public housing than anybody could count. The District, frankly, was no different from other troubled public housing; but nobody expected anything to happen. When we talk about things we can at least do something over the short run, perhaps we think of schools and public housing. Well, in 2\1/2\ years David Gilmore, to his great credit, has taken the District off the list of troubled housing authorities. The District had a score of 22 out of 100 when he came here. Now it has got a score of 65.5, which puts it well up in the list of housing authorities around the country. It is how David Gilmore has done this that I think we all should take note of. I have said to District officials, everybody ought to sit at the knee of David Gilmore, because here is a man who obviously knows how to manage people, manage ideas, and manage hardware. Somehow he has put them all together. He has moved the crack addicts and the nonpayers out of public housing. I do not even hear anybody screaming about it. He knows how to manage people so that that occurs. He moves into a public housing complex where he sees that the whole thing has to be taken apart and you have to start all over again. What does the man do, Mr. Speaker? The first thing he does is to put in the sod. Can you imagine the effect it has on public housing tenants who have lived with crime and chaos for years to see somebody coming in, he says he is going to fix it and they hold down, they hunker down and prepare to have dust and nails and debris flying all around them. But they wake up and the first thing they see that morning is that the sod is being planted. This is a man who knows how to manage people, Mr. Speaker. He knows how to bring hope to the hopeless. What he has done is to organize tenant societies within those public housing authorities. You can imagine what happens when you have moved out the troublemakers, moved in the sod, fixed the public housing, got it in shape again. There is a new chief of police for public housing. Mr. Speaker, I have met with that man. He tells me that his job mostly consists of getting stray dogs and cats and taking them back to their owners, because the people are taking care of their own renovated public housing, because we have got in place a man who knows what he is doing. I have to tell you that I do think that is the key to everything in this world. I think that perhaps David Gilmore with all the good work that is being done in the District is the very best and is something to teach everybody, from the Control Board to the Mayor, to the City Council, to the Member who represents the District and the Congress, because he has put it all together. When you go to him and tell him about a problem, he fixes it, he finds a way to fix the system to have you get to him more quickly. He knows how to hire good people, and he knows how to take the staff who is there and to get work out of them and to get rid of those you cannot get work out of. There are all the stories in the Washington Post or the Washington Times about how the whole world is being shook up down at the public housing authority. I think this man needs to write himself a manual and pass it out. And first pass it around the District and then pass it around the country, because he is showing us something about how to fix a broken city. Yes, it was broken, Mr. Speaker. You are listening to a fourth generation Washingtonian. When my hometown became broken, there was a very special level of sadness for this Washingtonian, because my own great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, walked away from a plantation in Virginia. No runaway slave, Richard Holmes, he just walked off a plantation in Virginia in the early 1860s and came across the river to the District and planted the Holmes family here. Somehow or the other, through our 4 generations in this city, with problems that you might expect would have occurred in the early part of this century when my grandfather entered the D.C. fire department, later on when my father was in high school during the Great Depression, in 1954 when I was sitting in Dunbar High School, segregated, and heard the bell chime and the principal tell us that the schools would now be integrated under Brown v. Board of Education, to the time of my own children. Through all of that, Mr. Speaker, throughout this century, there was no time in which this city saw the bitter, bitter experience of bankruptcy. So for me, it was a time of special trial, especially since it was during that time that I represented the District and it was I who came forward and said that it had to have a Control Board. That was painful, but it was necessary, because it is necessary to do what has to be done for a city when it has to be done. I have shared the disappointment of this body that what had to be done has not been done as quickly as it should have been done and, if I may say so, Mr. Speaker, could have been done. And so you have not found me to be an apologist for the District. You have found me to be its defender, to ask people to step back and treat the city with respect, but no apologist for a city that does not stand up and do what has to be done to save itself. And so that is what the city is doing now. Mr. Speaker, the city has a great challenge. It was able to keep its population, because it is such a livable city, much longer than most large American cities which experienced a total drain of residents. The District did not begin to experience that until the late eighties and now we have come to that moment, so that the great burden on the city now is to recoup and retain its middle class. The District has had a frightening loss of residents. It is experiencing that just as it is beginning to turn the corner and get its full majesty back. But once that drain continues to occur, it is very difficult to turn it back. That is why the $5,000 homebuyer tax credit passed by this body has been so important. The fact is that between 1989 and 1997, Mr. Speaker, the District has shown itself to be losing 3 times as many residents as it lost in the whole of the 1980s. In other words, we are having devastating population loss. People do not look to see if the budget is balanced, if there is a surplus or even if the public housing is being fixed to decide whether to cross the District line, going the reverse of where my great-grandfather came when he came to Washington. Instead, they simply go where the grass seems greener. Mr. Speaker, they do not even look at what business sees. While we have been losing population, business has been coming back to Washington, again, Mr. Speaker, an indication that something important is happening in this town. Look at the new MCI Center. That was located in Prince George's County. That has done a reverse migration from the suburbs to the city. Mr. Speaker, the MCI Center has been built by Mr. Abe Pollin. He has built it 100 percent with his own money. There is virtually no other example of an arena in the United States that was built with private money. Arenas are being built almost exclusively with taxpayer money. Why would Mr. Pollin build an arena in the capital of the United States with his own money? Mr. Speaker, he knows something that I hope this Congress finds out soon and that business clearly knows first. There is money to be made here. There are 20 million visitors who come each year. I see some of them in the galleries. This is a city with unused economic potential. There is a wonderful infrastructure here. There is a metro that brings a whole region into the center of the city and so Mr. Pollin, who took his arena out of the District 20 years ago, has brought it back in a marvelous new center where the Caps and the Wizards, if you please, now play, as does Georgetown University and other teams from the region. But the very fact that somebody would build an arena with private money and take it from the suburbs and move it back to this city tells you that the capital of the United States is coming back and coming back fast. If you need another example, let me give you one just as spectacular. In the United States today, convention centers are built everywhere, in small towns, big cities, little hamlets, everybody wants a convention center. You build it with taxpayer funds because that is the only way you can get it built. But not in the District of Columbia. The hotel and restaurant industry came to the District 3 years ago and said, ``Tell you what, District. Tell you what we're going to do. We're going to tax ourselves and build the convention center ourselves.'' Why would the hotel and restaurant industry which complains that it is overtaxed, tax itself to build a convention center in the Nation's capital? They know where the money is, Mr. Speaker. The District cannot attract the big conventions, like the AMA Convention and the ABA Convention because our convention center is too small. Who loses? The District of Columbia loses, which is to say the taxpayers who then have to make up for what visitors to conventions would pay, but the hotel and restaurant industry loses, because those visitors do not come to use their facilities, either. And so instead of waiting the District out, they have stepped up and they will be breaking ground, with their own money, money that is already being built in a lockbox, with their own money, to build the convention center. Mr. Speaker, you do not build a convention center with private money if you think the city has no future. Mr. Speaker, you do not build an arena in a city with private money if you think the city has no future. The city has a future. The city is coming back. The first people to understand it are those who have the most to lose, private businesspeople who have put their money where their mouth is, which is what I am asking this Congress to do when it comes to our schools, to put their money on the summer program and not on vouchers, where it will have no measurable effect on the average kid in the District of Columbia. Nevertheless, Mr. Speaker, you have never seen me give the rosy, merry picture of the District. That is why I have spoken about the frightening decline in the D.C. tax base. I have introduced a bill, as recently as last week, called the D.C. Economic Recovery Act that would give a tax break to District residents from their Federal income taxes. I come forward to do this for the District, recognizing it would not be done for others because the District is a special case and you have made it so, and it is so under the Constitution of the United States. We have no State, Mr. Speaker. So that when residents leave the District, a very different phenomenon occurs than when they leave Baltimore or Richmond because when they take their money with them, there is no State to recycle their money back to the District of Columbia, as the State recycles money back to Baltimore and as the State recycles money back to Richmond. If there is no State to recycle the money back, then you say, ``Well, why don't you tax the people who come in every day to work here and use the same services that residents use here during the day?'' The reason we do not do so, Mr. Speaker, is because this body, and the other body, the Congress of the United States, has indeed barred a commuter tax. So the District is left high and dry. People leave, no way to make up for them because no State to help make up for their flight, and no way to make people who come in and use our services pay for the use of those services because the Congress has barred a commuter tax. I am asking this body to help make up for putting your capital between a rock and a hard place, and I am pleased and may I give credit to the leadership of this body and of the other body for supporting the D.C. Economic Recovery Act. Mr. Speaker, the figures speak for themselves. We want to hear them now so that we will not be the last to turn out the lights. The figures speak for themselves. If we look at who the movers are, we see that 25 percent of them earn between $35,000 and $50,000, and 38 percent of them earn between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Speaker, those are middle-income taxpayers right there. That is 63 percent of the people moving in that core, prime middle-income group between $35,000 and $100,000. Those are the people who pay taxes to the District government. If the District does not have people to pay taxes to the government, no amount of surplus can make up for the flight of its core tax base. That is why I have introduced the District of Columbia Economic Recovery Act, not as special treatment to the District, but to make up for the special detriment that this body has placed on the District because we believe that that is necessary because it is the capital of the United States. Who is not leaving the District, Mr. Speaker? Those who make under $15,000; or put it another way, it is the poor. That is to say, under $15,000, only 3 percent left. The years I am talking about for these numbers, Mr. Speaker, are 1990 to 1996. The very rich are not leaving in large numbers either. Only 10 percent of those who make $100,000 or more are leaving, and we are overly dependent upon these very rich people, and I love every last one of them, and I hope they do not go anywhere.

Ms. NORTON. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) for taking the time to come to the floor. I do have to say to this body that the gentleman from California, who represents his own district with great energy and great distinction, nevertheless decides he always has to do good where he is and has initiated a program here that he is now spreading through the rest of the country. He came to me, imagine how I felt, when a distinguished and senior, not in age, but in longevity in the House came to me and said, we want to build a house by the Congress of the United States here in the capital of the United States, and I want to thank the gentleman for his work for the District.