Eleanor Norton

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I join in the request of the gentleman.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, thanks to Chairman Bill Clinger, ranking Member Cardiss Collins, and subcommittee Chairman Tom Davis, we are seeing a rare moment in any Congress, and certainly in this one. A very difficult bill has been crafted and then unanimously embraced in subcommittee and committee because of their leadership. Yet, H.R. 1345 has no precedent in this House. It has substantial precedent in this country, of course. New York City, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, among other jurisdictions, became insolvent and have had similar authorities or boards established to guide them back to fiscal health. To those inclined to harshly judge the District, the self-same ordeals of these great American cities should give some pause. And, unlike those cities, the District has had to fund not only municipal but also State and county functions as well, among them today's daunting costs of Medicaid and prisons. Before long, the Congress will have to face the reality that no American city today can fund these State and county missions alone and that the District will need more funds from the Congress. Such huge cost, as well as the congressionally imposed unfunded pension liability, in today's atmosphere of urban distress, have simply overwhelmed the city. Chairman Clinger and ranking Member Collins were executive producers of this effort, setting the tone, steering the course, insisting upon flexibility, yet drawing the bright lines to achieve an effective bill. Subcommittee Chairman Tom Davis was the producer. He worked closely with D.C. Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jim Walsh, whose strong and skillful leadership is also reflected throughout the bill. Chairman Davis has given the world ``freshman'' new respect for the extraordinary reach of his vision for the bill and the determined skill with which he carried his vision to fruition. Setting for himself the expansive goal of a consensus bill, Chairman Davis first wrote H.R. 1345 simultaneously with majority Members in the House and the Senate. Onto this bicameralism, he superimposed bipartisanship, inviting ranking Members to suggest and negotiate changes. Representative Julian Dixon, the ranking member of the D.C. Appropriations Subcommittee, was an indispensable party to this bill, bringing unmatched depth, intelligence, and objectivity. Some of our changes were rejected and others compromised, but many were accepted. The process that Chairman Davis developed is what has enabled me to cosponsor H.R. 1345 and to urge my colleagues to vote today for passage. Like all bills that come to the floor, it is the majority's bill, but it has accommodated many changes and compromises not only from me but from the Mayor and the chairman and members of the city council of my city. Thus, this bill is quite literally a collaboration among all directly concerned: The chairs and ranking members of the authorizing and appropriations committees and subcommittees of the House and Senate and the elected representatives of the District of Columbia. Section upon section of the bill vindicate both the process and the substance of H.R. 1345. Many of the changes are modifications and nuances that only locally elected officials and others who live with the District's problems could recognize. By accepting changes that reflect the experience of governing and living in the District, Chairman Davis and his colleagues have gone a long way toward assuring that H.R. 1345 is able to do its job. Two urgent reasons make this bill not only mandatory but also the only viable option available: First, without the authority established in this bill, the District, already technically insolvent, will run out of cash sufficient to pay its employees and keep services in operation within the next few weeks; second, without the authority established in this bill, the District will bear a destructive penalty for being in violation of existing law that requires a balanced budget, a mandate that cannot possibly be met without spreading the city's huge structural deficit over several years. However, I am able to cosponsor H.R. 1345, not only because of its urgent necessity. I am a cosponsor of this bill because it does not violate the other essential and overriding principle--the right of District residents to maintain every bit of what limited home rule powers we have managed to achieve. Our democratic right to self- government is more precious to us than to other Americans quite simply because they, all of them, including the four territories, have it, and we don't. For this reason, I have measured self-government by the strictest standard I could locate: whether the provisions of H.R. 1345 are any more intrusive than those of the other similarly situated has suggested that with the establishment of similar authorities, New York, Philadelphia, or Cleveland lost their dignity or independence. Anyone who takes the time and trouble to compare H.R. 1345 with prior State statutes, especially New York's law, as I did throughout the negotiations, will find the self-government standard fully met. The Mayor and the city council retain their respective powers. The initiative in all matters committed to them under the home rule charter remains theirs alone. This is important not only to preserve democracy. It is important because the point of this effort is to encourage elected leaders to take responsibility so that when the authority recedes, their necessary discipline is fully built into the way they conduct the city's business. Thus, the authority is a monitor whose purpose is to check and enforce new rules of fiscal and operational discipline that the Mayor and the council place upon themselves in multiyear plans and annual budgets that these elected officials themselves will write. I have no doubt that the District will take the initiative to solve its own problems, just as our elected officials have helped make H.R. 1345 a better bill. This morning before this matter had even come to the floor, at the invitation of the Mayor, I went to his cabinet meeting to discuss H.R. 1345 and what it means for District officials. Further, today the Mayor has announced a nationwide search for a chief financial officer, who will be a central figure in the District's financial recovery. I take special pride in these early initiatives by the Mayor to make H.R. 1345 work and in the recent rough and tough actions of the city council, who even without the monitoring authority, have made courageous cuts and taken their lumps for their trouble. I take particular comfort from Members of the House, who have uniformly expressed respect and admiration for what authorities like that established in H.R. 1345 have done, working with local officials, in their own cities. Expect no less from the District. Notwithstanding this crisis, the District remains one of the most promising large cities in the United States. Among the 25 largest cities, we proudly rank first per capita in residents in the Nation's top job categories, third per capita in residents with college and post-college degrees, and fifth per capita in income. In the midst of this crisis, our business community is using its own private resources to build an arena and a convention center which will bring many millions in revenue to the District. This is the raw material for a dazzling comeback. Just beyond the horizon, the Capital of the United States is a city with a future. But, it is more than that. It is such livable city that more Members of the House and Senate have chosen to live here than in any part of the region. It is city of world class beauty. The District's problems must not be allowed to obscure its potential. With help from the Congress, but under its own initiative and by its own hand, this shall soon be a city on the rise like the sun on a clear morning. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. (Ms. NORTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to my good friend and always ally, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Moran], also a Member from this region.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I have remaining?

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer], my good and helpful friend, a member of the Committee on Appropriations, and a leader of this region.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I want to say, do not feed the alligators but please feed the children. Seldom, my friends, does this body have the opportunity to make wholesale change in a bad and a dysfunctional system, and we are about to blow it if we do not support the Mink substitute, because the Republican bill fails the reality test. It is an invitation to do welfare on the cheap. A State has to do nothing, nothing to provide jobs. And they will do nothing. We know that from what happened in the 1987 bill. If we provide an unemployment office for people who have been recently attached to the work force and provide nothing to people who have never had a job, how do we expect them to get off of the rolls? Do my colleagues know what the inner city unemployment for people who have recently had work was in 1993? In this city it was 88.6 percent; in Detroit, it was 13.7 percent. And I could go on down that list. When I go across the river to Anacostia, my friends, no one ever says to me, ``Brother, can you spare a dime'' or ``give me some more welfare.'' They say, ``Sister, can you get me a job.'' This bill will not get anybody a job and that is what we need to do. This bill does exactly what the American people told us not to do. It repeals the entitlement of children to food and shelter. It is a bill that allows a State to refuse to put up a single dollar of its own money to support its own children. People told us what to do. They told up help get the parents off welfare. Do you make things worse for the kids. Your bill, the Republican bill, betrays the public trust. It is not welfare reform. It is welfare fraud.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, this is welfare week. For me it started not in the abstractions of bill language. It started on Sunday when I picked up my mentee, a 13-year-old who lives in a D.C. housing project, to bring to Sunday's school lunch rally at the Capitol. She gets her breakfast and lunch at school. Welfare week continued for me at noon today when I went to the elementary school I attended as a child. Then we brought our lunch or went home to eat it. Today 95 percent of the children in my elementary school each lunch at school. You can talk until you are red, white, and blue in the face about only cutting the growth in school meals. The truth is the School Nutrition Programs will lost $2.3 billion over 5 years under the contract. A cut in kids' lunches is a foul. Let us stop playing kids' games. Pick on somebody your own size.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, we are pedaling backward fast, crushing kids as we go. Cut the heat at home, cut the lunches at school. There is no escaping the cuts, kids. Have we forgotten the shameful revelations of hunger and poverty that produced the American majority for school lunches, WIC and low income energy assistance? What about that contract? Contracts are supposed to be win-win propositions. Tax cuts for the wealthy paid for with lunch money from kids is a rotten tradeoff. As $5 billion wallop at WIC and child nutrition programs is child abuse. If Washington cannot afford to feed hungry kids, cash-starved cities like the District will hardly be able to pick up the pieces--or the children. It is time we stopped eating our young and their lunches.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I come forward as a former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, very disquieted that in this bill mandatory sanctions could apply to civil rights actions, and disquieted on the basis of the record. First, I ask my colleagues to be consistent. We have already exempted civil rights matters from the unfunded mandates bill and from the Regulatory Transition Act. Let us repeat that consistency here. Why did we do it there and why should we do it here? Civil rights actions are very difficult to bring. They always have been. They are more difficult to bring today than they were 30 years ago when the acts were passed. At that time getting an attorney was more likely because the discrimination was so widespread, and on the surface there was a bar, a private bar, that developed. Ten years after the act, when I came to chair the EEOC, that bar had virtually disintegrated. The reason is that when lawyers take an action under a civil rights case, they are taking a very large chance. They are hoping to get their fees back. They have to borrow money in order to mount a substantial case. So if there is any hurdle in the way, what we found, even 10 years after the act--and we find 30 years after the act now--they hesitate and the bar itself simply was not available. First of all, for a person to come forward, that plaintiff has to make a very difficult decision. She is almost always going against power. Who are the plaintiff's lawyers in the first place? These are usually small practitioners going up against counsel from large corporations. These people have lawyers on staff that can file endless motions to tie up these small practitioners whom we have said we want to bring these cases in order to vindicate civil rights. Do we want people to bring these cases, or do we not want people to bring these cases? We have said in these two previous bills we do not need to destroy or disassemble the civil rights superstructure that we have put in place. We have not been inconsistent here. Civil rights actions are different in all kings of ways. For example, for most of those actions, punitive damages are not available. Compensatory damages are often unavailable. Under Title VII, all you can get is your back pay. Most of these cases are settled by the time the case gets to court. The case has gone through some kind of conciliation often, or at least there has been an attempt to settle the case. If we want to chill the right to bring a civil rights action, then we go back to these mandatory sanctions. I do not know where we could find a lawyer, almost all of them small practitioners, willing to come forward under these circumstances. Mr. Chairman, the courts are very experienced. They know how to handle cases that are frivolous in the civil rights area. There have been hundreds of thousands of civil rights cases. This is a unique area of the law. We have encouraged people to come forward. We have continued to do so in the 104th Congress with the two bills I have named, the unfunded mandates bill and the Regulatory Transition Act. I ask my colleagues please to be consistent. Let us stay together yet again on a civil rights provision. Let us support the Conyers amendment.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his support. The fact is that the word quotas has become quite a dirty word in the language and I did not want to add any dirty words to this bill, and I think what we do by adopting this amendment is to take that word off the table, to indicate that we certainly do not mean quotas, and thereby make this bill that every Member can support. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Again, Mr. Chairman, let me just indicate that the Civil Rights Act most recently passed by this body in 1991 bars quotas, and I certainly mean to conform to that act, and I believe the gentleman is entirely in good faith in his use of the language to conform to that act, and certainly I do not mean any quotas, and the use of preference in this context interchangeable with quotas is satisfactory to me. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Illinois [Mrs. Collins], the ranking member of the full committee. permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's amendment and the work he has put into it. I certainly do not mean to create the impression that anything in my amendment does anything but conform to existing law. So I take the use of the words ``quota'' and ``preference'' to be interchangeable because otherwise the one word is so wide open and does not have a fixed meaning in law, and on that basis I would accept the gentleman's secondary amendment.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I say consume. Mr. Chairman, the only difficulty this amendment presents for me, and I believe for most of the Members, is that it is not already in the bill. Had I not had a conflict that prevented me from being at the committee for part of the time, I have every reason to believe that the bill would have come to the floor with this amendment in it. The proof is that the language I now propose has already been adopted by this House in the unfunded mandate bill. I would simply exempt, to use the language of that bill, ``regulatory rulemaking action to establish or enforce any statutory rights that prohibit discrimination on the basis of age, race, religion, gender, national origin, or handicapped or disability status.'' If this language was appropriate for the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act of 1995, it is more so for the Regulatory Transition Act now before us. Unfunded mandates seldom sound in equal rights terms. Regulations do far more often. For example, as we speak, administrative action is under way to conform the time limits for filing civil actions under the Age Discrimination Act to those of the Civil Rights Act we passed in 1991. This is an action of particular importance. Several years ago, hundreds of middle-aged and elderly workers lost their rights under the age discrimination statute because of differences in time limits for filing. This body had to pass a special bill to reinstate those actions. Now administrative action is pending that would safeguard these rights and promote efficiency by eliminating inconsistencies in time limits allowed for people to go to court. There should not be one time limit for filing based on gender or race, for example, and another time limit for those who claim discrimination because of age. Another pending example would conform the Rehabilitation Act to the Americans With Disabilities Act. The Rehabilitation Act is the Disabilities Act as applied to Federal employees. The regulatory moratorium bill was not drawn with regulatory actions of this kind in mind, Mr. Chairman. This body's action that exempted civil rights matters from similar and prior legislation this very month shows a bipartisan intent to leave matters of equality untouched by legislation designed to attack other problems. The last thing the country needs is a notion that the House regards the right to be free of discrimination not as a right at all, but as an unfunded mandate or a paperwork problem. In fact, that is not the view of this body, to its credit. We have said so once and we should say so now. These have not been the best of times for equal rights. There is polarization where there should be reconciliation. We need a more problem-solving, sober leadership on equal rights on this delicate yet volatile issue than it sometimes attracts. My aim is designed to bring us together where we ought to be on equal rights. We will not be able to be there all of the time. It should not be difficult to be together on this amendment at this time. I ask for and urge Members' support. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. amendment offered by mr. mc intosh to the amendment offered by ms. norton

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise to respond to a number of issues that have been raised in this debate. First of all, the Watt amendment does not talk about innocence, but uses a word which is much stricter in the law, and that is that the matter would probably have resulted in an acquittal. That is a very high standard. We are not using the more amorphous word ``innocent'' here. Moreover, you have just rejected the Schumer amendment. More than half of all attorneys handling capital trials have had no previous death penalty experience. So the probability of finding newly discovered evidence is great, and we are not even willing to say that a man or woman standing on trial for his or her life should have competent counsel. At the very least then we ought to say if incompetent counsel has not found evidence, newly discovered evidence can be brought forward. There was discussion of due diligence here. It may be in the bill, but the fact is it is a judge-made rule in any case, and probably the court would find, based on the way courts have looked at these matters in the past, that if due diligence had not been exercised, the court would be more likely to find this was not newly discovered evidence at all. We are dealing with a situation where 40 percent of death penalty cases heard in the Federal courts have been granted relief because of significant constitutional error. I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, judges have been sitting all these years, where they detest these cases and would love not to find relief, and have been easily finding relief. We have a problem here. The problem we have is that these cases have been tried, often by people who are not competent to try them. At the very least you would think if newly discovered evidence overlooked by such counsel could be found, that the person would get a second petition. The 40 percent of the cases I speak of where significant constitutional error was found have been found in the last few years, since 1976. And we are talking about judges appointed by the two previous Presidents. We are talking in the last 10 years about petitions representing only 4 percent of all civil filings. Whatever is the problem in the Federal courts, it is not presented by habeas corpus petitions. And while I can understand the need to reduce the number, surely given this new rule for truly exceptional cases, for cases that can find their way through this narrow hole where the person probably would have been acquitted-- and we are not talking about innocence, we are talking about acquittal, and that has a fixed meaning in the law--surely, that person should be able to get into court. This does not open a large hole. I am left to ask, what are the Federal courts for if not for looking at cases where newly discovered evidence means that the person would probably have been acquitted? As to Governors, I say to you, this is not a country where Governors or Members of Congress ought to judge whether constitutional rights have been violated. So it is certainly not the appropriate remedy to move from the courts to the Governor, who will look to the polls and decide whether he ought to exercise a remedy that is almost never exercised. That is no remedy. That is not a remedy at law; that is a political remedy. There should not be a political remedy for a constitutional right. This is the death penalty we are talking about. This is the great habeas corpus remedy we are talking about. The bill more than protects the rights of the victims and their families. We create here the kind of right that I believe the average American would want us to protect.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. I thank the Chairman. We must keep them out of the fray, we must keep them from appearing even to be in the fray. There is such a strict sense of ethics in the profession that the judiciary may only come to Congress and testify on limited matters, even when those matters involve themselves. We must engage in conflict avoidance when it comes to the judiciary. We must show restraint when it comes to the judiciary. It was no part of the intent of the sponsors of this bill to alter the balance of power between the Executive and the judiciary. The intent clearly was to alter the power balance between the Executive and the Congress. We do not seek to alter this balance here. We do not need to alter this balance here. It has never been much of a temptation. Yet we are creating the impression we would like to open up that temptation. The judiciary cannot speak for itself today. There is a good reason for that. That reason is to completely depoliticize the judiciary. Ironically, their silence, their mandated silence is part of their independence. So I rise to speak for an independent judiciary. Our bill loses nothing by insisting that the judiciary remain impregnable as a matter of fact and as a matter of appearances.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, we spent a lot of time in committee. I do not think that it was expected that we would spend as much time, but the debate was, indeed, revealing, and many Members simply had not spent a lot of time thinking about the judiciary and the role it plays or might play generally. For this amendment, for example, there were Members who thought that in effect what you could do is to strike a line from the judiciary budget, and the debate clarified that you could get down to the lowest level of expenditure, because you could strike a partial expenditure as well. What was fascinating about the debate was that there was not always a deep appreciation for the uniqueness of the judicial branch. Many Members think of the judicial branch--and you have heard some of the debate this evening--as just like the rest of us, just one of the rest of us. That is what I want to speak to. Indeed, I rise to speak for the branch that cannot speak for itself, and in that respect it is particularly different lawyer partial to the judicial branch. On the contrary, I was one of the leaders in committee in the 103d Congress to cut 10 percent from courthouses, but we were cutting from the GSA budget, not the Article III budget, the Article III court budget. This House, of course, can cut from that budget in open debate for the world to hear and see, and you would have to be able to do that because the Framers understood they would have to leave the purse power for all branches here. When we found that there were luxurious courthouses that were heavily influenced by the judges themselves, we took the judges out of what the judges should not be in, the courthouse-building business. But we do not ever want to give even the appearance of getting into judges' business, and what I have heard here does not show a true appreciation for both fact and appearances from the Congress, a branch for whom appearances do not mean nearly what they must mean for the courts. Of course, we have a precedent of actual interference with the judiciary through the budgetary process, and I do not speak, of course, of the F.D.R. packing of the Court, because perhaps that kind of overt activity is most easily checked. It is the chipping away at the budget that is far easier to cover up or pass off as budget-cutting, especially when you need a two-thirds vote to override a veto. Retaliation to the courts does not have to be very large to be very effective or to put in play a branch that should never be in play with us and where we should only have something to say about how much money they spend and just leave it as it be, and particularly leave them far away from the executive. The courts are a sitting target for the Executive because it is the Executive that is the prime litigator before the courts, and they have a massive opportunity to tick the Executive off precisely because the Executive is always there before them. The Congress was so concerned about what in fact exists in actual precedent that the Budget and Accounting Act says that the Executive has to submit the budget of the Judiciary as is. We are told that nothing here would change this. Nothing would change that, of course; instead of a crack on the front end we open a crack on the back end. If you mean the Budget and Accounting Act, and you act like you mean it, then you don't give up a whole lot when you leave the judiciary independent; you do give up a whole lot when you say we are going to treat the Executive the way we treat everybody else, no different from anybody else. Go back to Civics 101: You do not have to go to law school to appreciate that the courts are different, and we have to concede that they are different. There are reasons for safeguards here. You have to ask yourselves, ``Yes this will be another check.'' But I ask you is that check on the courts worth it? Is it worth giving the appearance that the Congress would like to get to a part of their independence, allow the Executive to get to a part of their independence, as indeed he could do. The Executive and the Congress are not independent branches; we are meant to be responsive branches. In that way we are very different from the judiciary. We, the Congress, and the Executive are much more alike than the judiciary is like either of us. They deal with cases and controversies, especially cases and controversies involving the Executive. We do not. We must keep them out of the fray.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I recognize that a rhythm has developed here with Republicans voting one way by rote, Democrats perhaps voting another, and I recognize we have come forward with our most favorite issues and I confess and concede that this is one of mine. But the gravamen of my argument does not have to do with the substance and the considerable merits of this issue. I am aware that no issue has more bipartisan support, perhaps, in the 104th Congress than collecting child support from deadbeat parents. For the women of the Congress especially, there has been painstaking, grueling work that is going to culminate, hopefully next week, in the introduction of the Child Support Responsibility Act, which indeed will create a new mandate. But I am not at the moment arguing the merits, the very considerable merits, here. I myself put in an amendment and support this amendment, which is even more inclusive than my own. But, Mr. Chairman, as a technical matter, child support does not fit the framework of this bill. Child support is, in our country, exclusively a matter of family law or State law. The unfunded mandate in this case is on the Federal Government to help the States with a State law function, collecting child support from their own citizens to pay to support their own children. This is not Federal law. This is not a Federal function. So why are we now, and will we in the new Child Support Act, be in it at all? What we have discovered now, after decades of experience, is that the States cannot perform the State function well without the Federal Government, not the other way around, which is what we have been talking about, almost entirely, when we have heard other amendments. We now, if we vote against this amendment, are voting where the perverse result of the bill before us would be to allow a vote on whether States should carry out and continue to carry out the State functions of collecting child support. Think about it: that does not fit this bill and that is why it should not be in this bill. We, in the child support bill, will be talking about State policy being carried out through the Federal Government. The Federal obligation is the one that is supplementary. The Federal obligation is the one that is an unfunded mandate. Indeed, we have been doing our part with such a mandate all along, providing matching funds and incentive payments to the States to strengthen their own enforcement and increase collections. Unfortunately, this has not worked well enough. And so we ourselves appointed this Interstate Child Support Commission, because this is an interstate matter, and this is the essence of federalism. This matter, my colleagues, cannot work unless each of us accepts an unfunded mandate, the States and the Federal Government. Our own Commission, where the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Mrs. Kennelly] has just told you she served, said, and I am quoting the Commission, ``In order to create seamless case processing, some of our recommendations by necessity apply to both intrastate and interstate cases.'' As it turns out, most of these are in fact interstate cases, and even those cases will get nowhere, will fall of their own weight, unless each accepts willingly his own part of the mandate, yes, mandate. The problem is so serious and remedies have been so illusive that our own Interstate Commission considered having the whole kit and caboodle federalized, but then they said, ``wait a minute, this is State stuff. This is family law. We do not want the Federal Government taking it over.'' Instead, they said, let us have a standardized, State-based system to enable these matters to move across State lines. The Commission said that the State boundaries were inherent limitations on collecting child support. We have to recognize, my colleagues, that child support is different from every other function we have been discussing here. It is rare, indeed, for the Federal Government to insert itself into a State function, but we have done so before and we will do so again, when our bill is introduced by next week.

Ms. NORTON. By definition, this area requires a State mandate funded by the State. We certainly would not want to take over State child collection, to do its still-mandated function of collecting support payments from its own citizens to support its own children. Even considering for this, I say to the distinguished chairman, as an informational matter to come up for a vote is positively dangerous. The States will sit there and say, ``hey, wait a minute, maybe we will not even have to pay for what we are paying for it they vote that this is an unfunded mandate.'' At the very least, it sends a contradictory message to the States where we are trying now to say, ``hey, more, more, take your mandate more seriously.'' Now we are voting on whether or not they ought to have a mandate at all. The Child Support Responsibility Act to be introduced next week, Mr. Chairman, is close to a sacred congressional promise already. Please, do not take back the promise to collect support introduced.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I appreciate that you raised the incident affecting every Member, the water crisis here in the District of Columbia as an example of interstate problems created by this bill. The Towns amendment, in a real sense, gives us the best case for an exception, because it cures a federalist defect in this bill, and that is interstate wrongdoing. In a real sense, it is why we created the Federal Government in the first place. The Articles of Confederation left us with no way to deal in an equitable fashion among the States, and we created this federalist system. I want to say a word about motivation here, because all day we have heard that the point of this bill is information only. Well, let me remind my colleagues that we have had to fix this bill so that there was more than a point of order, so that there will be a point of order vote. I really wonder why that was not in the bill to begin with, if the point was to provide Members with information before they voted--when you did not even provide a way to vote in the first place. If it was for information only, then why is it not the case that the information would come out in debate, my colleagues? Are people so afraid of mandates, which they should be, then the kind of debate we are having here today would surely have been enough to deter Members from voting to put mandates on their own people in the States and cities. I will tell you that you are disguising, and not very well, the real motivation of this bill. You want to now force to have a vote, to have an isolated vote, on costs, because you know that that is the heart of----

Ms. NORTON. Because you know that that is the most difficult vote; having been forced now to vote, you want to have an isolated cost vote, a vote that will force debate on cost alone when we could have had the kind of debate we had here anyway highlighting cost and getting the same result, if that is all you want. Moreover, the fact is that you are forcing a vote on full funding. You have got a full funding standard in this bill. The fact is that in the federalist system, we have always been about shared funding. We always think that if there is dirty water or dirty air that the State or the city ought to take some part of that cost. Why have you not put a provision for shared funding in the bill, if that is, in fact, what you mean? You put full funding in the bill, because, again, you want to make it almost impossible to support new bills, and some of you have said as much, have said you want these bills repealed. This is an interstate compact, my friends. By ignoring or opposing the Towns amendments, you are giving a direct incentive for the States to commit wrongdoing, one against the other. You are creating disputes among the States that will carry them into the courts. You are wiping out a central feature of federalism. You ought to own up to it.

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

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, no district needs an unfunded mandate bill more than mine. We are close to insolvency in part because of mandates. Thoughtless mandates are a regressive tax. But we deserve better than this blunderbuss bill that throws out the baby with the bath water and then throws in the tub for good measure. It is irresponsible to try to fix all mandates with one bill. This bill applies to everything from Medicaid, which is 80 percent funded, to crime bill measures like sexual predator, which are completely unfunded. Yet the critical vote on every bill will be on costs. This bill is brimming with unintended consequences. It is not about mandates. The real subject has not been discussed here, and that is the appropriate role of Federalism in the 21st century. We need an unfunded mandate bill, but in the vernacular of the streets, this ain't it.

Ms. NORTON

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I have a special interest in this bill as a former member of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. I want to his tenacity on this bipartisan matter and to give the House credit for what it did last term in passing this bill and the Senate, finally, credit for catching up with the House. Mr. Speaker, this bill, to be sure, affects Members. When I chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, what really bothered me was that thousands of employees here were also exempted, and that is really what the gravemen of this bill is. It should affect Members, but where the complaints are going to be filed most often are against staff who supervise others. There is an important difference in this bill from legislation affecting the private sector. The Senate has removed the demographic section. I want Members to know that every private and public employer has to submit demographics on its employees. The House should remove this notion that it is exempt from our knowing whether or not we are in fact hiring fairly in committees.