Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I do not think that the Stenholm amendment is necessary, but I believe it is preferable to the base bill. There is a distinction.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the majority party will not respond to the gentleman's question, let me give the gentleman my understanding of what the situation is. The majority party pretends that by cutting $648 million in callable capital they are reducing the deficit. But as the gentleman knows, the deficit is measured only by what we actually outlay in any given year. And the fact is that the estimate of the outlay savings for that item, according to CBO, is zero dollars saved. Secondly, with respect to the Export-Import item, they pretend because they are cutting $25 million in budget authority that they are saving a corresponding amount. In fact, CBO says they will save at most $3 million from that item. With respect to PL-480, they claim that $30 million will be saved because of budget authority cuts, but in fact that translates only into a deficit reduction of $16 million. Then we get to the nuclear weapons item. Our friends on the majority side say, do not worry, this money is not going to be spent this year anyway, so we will not hurt these nuclear agreements. But the Congressional Budget Office says that there they are going to take an $80 million outlay cut in those proposals this year. So it seems to me that not only are their arguments inconsistent, they are inaccurate. And if they are right or wrong, the result in real world terms is most destructive in terms of the confusion that will be caused in the international markets and the setback that will be provided to our efforts to rid the world of plutonium which can make 15,000 nuclear weapons.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, let me simply say that what the Treasury Secretary is saying, and I would respectfully suggest that he probably knows more about international finance than all of the Members of this House put together on both sides of the aisle; the Secretary of the Treasury is telling us is that this money, indeed, will not be spent. Callable capital is never meant to be spent. It has never been spent in the history of the international financial institutions. It is there simply to send the message that the full faith and credit of the United States stands behind those financial institutions so that they can provide the credit necessary to keep our export markets going. And when we, for the first time in our country's history, withdraw previously appropriated callable capital, we bring into question our commitment to those processes. That in turn creates the likelihood that interest rates are going to be raised in those markets, and that means that we wind up shrinking our own export markets. Why that is smart is beyond me.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), if in fact this bill does fully offset the new expenditures in the bill, then why does the bill need an emergency designation? Is it not true that it would have no emergency designation if in fact these items were fully offset?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would yield further, but he claims they are fully offsetting them, so then they do not need the emergency designation.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield further, the fact is that the reason they need the emergency designation is that they do not fully offset this. In fact, this bill will add $445 million to the debt and to the deficit because they do not fully offset it.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) who is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would yield further, I would simply say that response is incorrect. The offsets for the military only are $195 million. The add-on to the deficit under their bill is $455 million. So they still have not fully offset this bill and they ought to quit pretending that they have.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will vote for this resolution because I am against all unilateral agencies in the Middle East. But do not kid ourselves by saying this is a balanced resolution. It is not. If it were, it would take note of all unilateral actions taken by all parties in the Middle East, including some unilateral actions taken by this very Congress. I believe that there will be a Palestinian State someday, but I think it should be established through direct negotiations with Israel. I believe the United States will have an embassy in Jerusalem, but I believe it should be, again, at the end of the process because to attack precipitously will simply inflame the situation and make the peace process more difficult. I also believe, however, if this Congress is going to be fair-minded in urging people like Mr. Arafat not to unilaterally declare a Palestinian State, and I agree he should not, then this Congress should also be fair-minded in noting the actions on the part of the Israeli government in taking unilateral actions with respect to some settlement activities in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem neighborhoods. It just seems to me that if Congress wants to be constructive rather than simply political, that when it brings resolutions to the floor such as this, they ought to be more balanced than this is. I say that as a friend of Israel. I say that as the person who, for 10 years, chaired the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs. During that time, that committee provided immense amounts of aid to Israel with my support. But I think that, if Congress wants to help move the peace process forward, it needs to be more balanced and more constructive than it usually is. This resolution I think, while it is correct in asking Mr. Arafat not to proceed, it is most certainly not correct to call it a balanced resolution because most definitely it is not.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number or words. Mr. Chairman, I rise to oppose the Fowler amendment. I absolutely agree with the last speaker. Let me tell my colleagues, I want to make quite clear where I come from. I regard Mr. Milosevic as a sociopath. If I had my way, NATO would have gone after him a long time ago. I think he ought to be tried as a war criminal. I think he is one of the most useless leaders to ever walk on the face of the earth. That is what I think about him when I am in a mild mood. But let me tell my colleagues my problem today. My problem is that I totally agree with what the administration is trying to do in the region, but I am not happy, frankly, with their implementation. I think they have not accurately gauged the position of the Russians in this situation, and I think that they misjudged the reliability of the Kosovars. And under those circumstances, I am not convinced, while I agree with what they are trying to negotiate, I am not yet convinced that their negotiating partners have demonstrated enough maturity to rely on them in a sensitive situation like this. My problem is, like the gentleman from Alabama, I believe this should not be here today. And the reason I say that is this: I think it is here because a lot of us have a fundamental misunderstanding of our constitutional role. You can make a very respectable argument that we ought to have a vote before we do something such as bomb Mr. Milosevic. I would vote for such an explicit action. I think he has got it coming, and I think NATO needs to lead and we need to lead NATO. But I also do not believe that this Congress has any business whatsoever interposing its judgment on questions that involve the President's Commander-in- Chief responsibilities. With all due respect to the Fowler amendment and the Gejdenson amendment, both of which I will vote against, there is not a Member on this floor who has any qualification whatsoever to say what our troop levels ought to be in a peacekeeping situation. The most dangerous human being on the face of the earth is a Member of Congress who has taken a 3-day trip somewhere and thinks that they have learned enough to tell the entire country what we ought to do on a crucial issue. Nine times out of ten they are more of a menace than a help. I do not believe we have the personal expertise to make military decisions. I want the Joint Chiefs of Staff to decide what the level ought to be, if we do have a peacekeeping force. I do not want that decision made on a political basis by the Congress or the White House. And I certainly do not want it made on the basis of a budgetary question. I do not want to have to look into the eyes of any more parents and explain why their sons or daughters were killed in an operation. And sometimes, to protect those sons and daughters, we need more troops not less. I happen to think that this is probably one of those cases. So I am going to vote against the Fowler amendment. I am going to vote against the Gejdenson amendment. I will not vote for the Gilman resolution because I do not believe in giving Presidents blank checks, and I am not going to endorse an agreement until I know what it is and until I have had an opportunity to gauge the reliability of the people that we are negotiating with. But I also will not vote against it today, because if we vote against it, we help assure that those negotiations will not come to a constructive conclusion. And that is why, like the gentleman from Alabama, I will vote present. Because until we have an agreement to judge, Congress has no right to muck things up when the result will be lost lives.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I think it is ironic that on a day when we are swearing in a new colleague, the House is losing one of its best Members. I have known the gentleman from Louisiana a long time. He came here a little over 20 years ago. He served as my ranking member on the Foreign Operations appropriations subcommittee. We had many differences. But I have to say that never for one moment did I doubt that he felt that he was putting the national interest above every other consideration in dealing with American foreign policy. I have to say that I think the chances of the peace process moving forward in the Middle East would have been much less without his steadfast commitment to sometimes taking the tough actions on this floor that were necessary to help promote that process. I also have to say that I think that we would not see countries such as Poland and some of the other former East European captives of the Soviet Union, we would not see those countries in nearly the good shape they are in today if it were not for the very active efforts made on a bipartisan basis by the gentleman from Louisiana and his predecessor in that same committee slot, Mickey Edwards. He served honorably and fairly when he served as my ranking member on the committee. He then succeeded me as chairman of the full committee and again we had very large differences, but we never surprised each other and we learned to trust each other implicitly. We all have conflicting responsibilities and conflicting loyalties in this place. We have responsibilities to our party, to our country and to our institution. The gentleman from Louisiana in every case that I know of always put those priorities in the right order. He put country first, he put this institution second and he put his party third, and sometimes his own self-interest fourth. He and his wife Bonnie Livingston have graced this institution with their presence. They are both wonderful people. I will miss them both. I respect Bob. Sometimes I think he has been off the wall. I am sure he feels the same about me. And sometimes we probably both were. But I also love him. And I especially want to honor him because I think he has demonstrated that the word politician is not a bad name. As John Hume, that great leader for peace in Northern Ireland, said, politics is the alternative that democracies have to war in sorting out and settling our major differences. I think the gentleman from Louisiana has always recognized that. The House has been better for his being here. The House will certainly be lesser for his leaving. I know that Bob and I are living examples of what Will Rogers meant when he said that if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary, but nonetheless we have been good friends. I think we can all agree that as Bob leaves this place, we can say that he has indeed been a good and faithful servant.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I honestly believe this is the worst day for this institution in this century, and history will see it as such. The tool of impeachment was inserted in the Constitution to protect the country from irreparable harm, not to punish the President. Under our system, the proper institution to punish the President if he violated the law is the court system, a legal institution, not the Congress, a political institution. The House Republican leadership has said that this is a vote of conscience. It is denying the right to cast that vote of conscience to those of us who believe that the proper course is to censure, not impeach. That decision dooms this House to go down in history as tragically lacking in both perspective and fairness. To those who say censure has no bite, my response is this: I come from the State of Joe McCarthy. Tell him censure has no bite. It destroyed him. Whether the President has committed perjury or not is a legal, technical question that can be decided by a jury and a judge and our court system at the proper time. There is no question that the President has misled the country and the Congress. That is unacceptable. But, in my view, it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense, because the lies essentially grew out of sex, not public acts. If the House ignores that distinction, it fails in its obligation to put the President's acts in perspective. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) said earlier in this debate that there cannot be one law for the ruler and one law for the ruled. I agree. But I would say, respectfully, that this House should not have one standard of judgment for truth telling for the leader of the Executive Branch, and another for the leader of this institution, who was found not to have told the truth to this House. In that case there was no removal from office; there was not even censure. There was simply a reprimand and then reelection by the Republican House majority to the Speakership. Mr. Speaker, for the House Republican leadership to, in effect, predetermine the outcome of this vote by refusing to allow a conscience vote on censure in this instance is a massive failure of fairness. If the House leadership can only win this vote by denying any alternative, it will have failed the country as much as Bill Clinton has. Mr. Speaker, because of time limits imposed on debate today I would like to extend my remarks at this point updating the thought on the issue that I expressed earlier in the year, to place my conclusion in full context. Mr. Speaker, three months ago, as I tried to wade through my copy of the Starr Report, and as I came again and again to gratuitously graphic and voyeuristic descriptions of ``sexual encounters'' contained in that report, I reached the point where I could read no more. I had voted to release that report earlier that day, but I really began to wonder whether I would have done so if I had known it was so graphic. I say that because while reading the report I was continually asking myself what we had done to our own children, to the President's privacy and dignity (and that of Monica Lewinsky) and even to the dignity of the nation itself by the placement of that report on the Internet. Putting down the report, I turned on the t.v. set to see, as an unreconstructed Cub fan, if I could find out if Sammy Sosa had hit another home run or not. The tube came on and within seconds I heard a CNBC reporter describing the Starr report, using language I never expected to hear on the nation's national news programs or what passes for them these days. At that moment I reached the same conclusions that millions of Americans have probably reached. I have had it--not just with this story, but with something far more disturbing. What I felt was a conclusion that has been building within me for months, even years. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this report is a phenomenally gross verification that our society and our country is faced with nothing less than the accelerating failure of institutions that are central to our functioning as a decent society and as a democracy that works the way our Founding Fathers wanted it to work. Please do not misunderstand. This is a great country. In many ways it is a good country. There is much that is good in our society, and we have had much good economic news in recent years. Nonetheless, I believe that the most crucial institutions and institutional arrangements in this country and in this society are failing in their responsibilities. That failure is affecting our economy, our culture, our political system, our long-term environmental security, and even our own spirituality. The evidence of the failure of our most important institutions is all around us--in this and in other events. At the moment that our nation is transfixed on the most pornographic document ever produced by government, global challenges face us everywhere. The world's economy is in turmoil. We have almost no tool but persuasion to move the Japanese government off a course of economic and fiscal impotence and incompetence that threatens the economic health of all of Asia and indirectly threatens our own as well. International financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund are being overwhelmed by changes in the world economy, changes in currency relationships, changes in capital flows that each day weaken the ability of the major institution the world has to stabilize economic relationships between nations. The nation with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons that could possibly one day be arrayed against us (Russia) is experiencing political and economic chaos. Much of Europe is focused on that chaos, but here in America we give it only intermittent attention and analysis. The most irrational, paranoid and dangerous government in the world (North Korea) is facing military, political, and economic instability that could easily threaten the lives of 50,000 American servicemen and women stationed in South Korea and hundreds of thousands of others. Our ability to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons has been brought to the edge of failure by events on the Indian subcontinent and in Korea. And yet, the discourse in this country about how to deal with that issue is shallow and in some cases downright dangerous. The best change in a generation for peace in the Middle East is slowly but surely sliding away. This decade has produced the hottest known global temperatures in 200 years with huge potential consequences for worldwide agriculture, fisheries, economic dislocation, public health, and environmental stability. Yet commercial disputes about profit levels are threatening our ability to take even marginal action to minimize potential catastrophe. On the home front, the Supreme Court, the institution that we, in the end, rely upon more than any other to preserve the balance of forces that protect our democratic processes and our liberty, has handed down two very different sets of decisions that have crippled the ability of our political system to function as a democracy should. (1) The spectacularly myopic decision in the Paula Jones case that the government would not be distracted if that case went forward now rather than two years from now when the President was out of office and his private activities could be handled as a private civil matter rather than as a national governmental soap opera. (2) The mind-bogglingly naive decisions that the constitutional rights of Americans to have a political system that functions for them would be protected by a series of naively libertarian decisions that equate money with speech, establish absurd legalisms about campaign financing that have no relationship to reality, that have turned politics into a money chase and political campaigns into the competition of dollars rather than ideas. And other domestic institutions are also failing in their fundamental responsibilities. Large sections of corporate America are making economic decisions, devoid of any values except the maximization of financial benefit to the management and investment elite of this country--in almost total disregard of the impact of those decisions on loyal workers, their families, and their broader communities which have nurtured them. These decisions, and policy decisions by government, have together produced the greatest disparity between the economic well- being of the wealthiest 5 percent of our people and everyone else in the modern history of the country. If we as a people are concerned with moral outcomes, should we not be just as concerned about how the nation deals with poor people and sick people as we are about how we deal with each other on matters of sexual intimacy? The political elite has largely debased what passes for political dialogue on many crucial issues. It has allowed its reliance upon the community of pollsters and consultants to produce lowest common denominator discourse in which winning and holding power drive out any consideration of the need to educate and enlighten the public on almost every front. We should ask ourselves: Are there no lengths to which we will not go to seize or hold power? Is there no amount of pain we will not inflict on each other for political gain? More and more, individuals are entering Congress and other political institutions who see issues not as problems to be confronted, but concerns to be manipulated and toyed with around the margins in order to seize and hold power. So many debates are split along party lines and driven by ideological enforcers (the modern day American counterparts of Michael Suslov, the old guardian of the purity of Soviet Orthodoxy) that when bipartisanship does occur, we are almost startled by its appearance. And the focus and limits of much of that debate are set by political elites in both parties who rub shoulders with the financial and economic elites of the nation far more often than they do with every day working people. The press itself, with all too few lonely and valiant exceptions, has fallen into the same bad habits it legitimately criticizes in the politicians it covers. The press too (especially the electronic media) drawn by the realities of the marketplace, has often become little more than the public affairs entertainment division of profit making corporations who will do almost anything to preserve market share instead of responding to the public's need to understand the substance of issues before the country. The press, driven by market surveys and polls, produces story after story that portray politicians as gladiators and celebrities rather than problem solvers--responding to and strengthening some of the most unhealthy public biases on the landscape. For every question I get from a reporter about the substance of an issue, I get five from other reporters about the politics of that same issue--reflecting both a laziness and a shallowness that the country cannot afford. And worst of all, some reporters cannot resist using any device to win a point, no matter how much damage they do to the country and innocent individuals in the process. One need look no further than the incident last Sunday in which a report from a Sunday talk show, during his interview with the President's lawyer, David Kendall, snidely asked Mr. Kendall what Mr. Kendall's wife's definition of sex was. That reporter owes his own profession, his viewers, and Mrs. Kendall a public apology for his inability to resist his ``Dennis the Menace'' impulses which have increasingly made that reporter a caricature of himself. Is there no length to which some segments of the press will go to humiliate other human beings in the name of ``news values''? Even religious institutions have allowed themselves to fail the Nation in too many instances and have allowed politicians to manipulate religious concerns, more to find political advantage than to find spiritual answers. Debates and discussions about the nature of humankind, our origins, our purpose, and our relationship with our creator are essentially conversations about the unknowable--at least in this life. And yet the certitude with which some political and religious figures attack those who have legitimate differences of belief are disheartening and appalling and border on the sacrilegious. Too many political and religious leaders alike have allowed religion--or the superficial reference to religion--to be used for nonreligious purposes. They wrap political commercial and ideological preferences in religious ribbons and desecrate both religion and politics in the process. The Ten Commandments represent a guide for living and for the treatment of others. God did not give them to us to provide a roadmap for human beings and politicians to destroy each other. They are not a political program or an economic platform. As Mario Cuomo once said, ``God is not a celestial party chairman.'' To the best of my knowledge, God has not yet taken a position on capital gains or other tax plans, but you would never know that by listening to some of the self- promoting political manipulators who pass themselves off as the ``Clergy of the Tube.'' Politicians have no special qualifications to judge the private lives of other people. In the end, only God can do that. The Nuns at St. James taught me a long time ago that we have enough to do worrying about the stewardship of our own souls to pass judgment on the private lives of others. Neither do religious leaders have any special competence to judge the specific mechanisms by which elected officials in a democracy accomplish decent public ends. Those of us in public life owe due consideration to their opinions, but we have, after all, taken an oath to uphold the Constitution in accordance with the dictates of our own-- not someone else's--conscience and that is our own sacred public duty under the Constitution. We--religious and political leaders alike--have allowed debates about religious truths and values to be used all too often as weapons to inflict pain and gain political advantage rather than as tools to find moral answers that take decent account of the moral values of others as well as ourselves. We have all too often allowed the substitution of moralizing for morality and have allowed the search for God to become a journey that develops hatred and contempt rather than love for our fellow searchers. Example: On abortion, perhaps the most agonizing, troubling, and divisive of all moral debates in the public realm, both sides have allowed their own certitude about the will of God or their dedication to unbending individualism, their desire for tactical advantage, to get in the way of their responsibility to recognize good intentions and honest nuances of conscience. And so that debate has become more and more a political manipulation of the legislative process rather than a search for areas of agreement that would reduce the world's acceptance of abortion at the same time that it recognizes the dignity of individual conscience. All of these institutional failures are rooted in two shortcomings. One, simply a lack of knowledge or understanding about how the world and institutional relationships are changing. The other is the triumph of a ``me-first'' rampant, materialistic individualism that prevents the leaders of almost all of our social, political, commercial, informational, and religious institutions from really focusing on the answer to one simple question: ``In addressing whatever decisions confront us, how can I, or we, take into fair account the needs, concerns, and interests of those who are not `just like us' in social or economic standing, cultural outlook, or political or religious beliefs?'' We desperately need to address our key institutional shortcomings because institutions are the major tools available to any culture, to any nation, to any society to shape its future. Yet we continue to be transfixed on the Starr-Clinton-Lewinsky soap opera. The nation has been moved to this focus because of two people: (1) Mr. Starr: On a number of accounts Mr. Starr's report grossly represents the overreaching zealotry of a personally upright, but ideologically and politically partisan, individual who, before he was appointed special prosecutor, was already contemplating filing a court brief on behalf of Paula Jones and who had indicated that he was planning to join Pepperdine Law School, and institution financed in large part by a person who has contributed millions of dollars to try to bring down the President. Mr. Starr from all reports is a fine, upstanding human being, but a person of his partisan and ideological mind set should never have been appointed to a position that called for, above all, unquestioned fairness balance and judgement. (2) President Clinton: Up to this point, he has been the most personally talented politician of his generation. He appears to be a person of good heart and courage who wants to do good things for the country. But his career has been both promoted and crippled by a tendency to manipulate language in ways that are technically in conformance with the truth, but often are designed to obscure rather than clarify! For example: As frustrating as I feel the President's lack of candor to be in this episode, I'm even more unhappy about the lack of candor demonstrated by both the President and congressional leaders in jointly obscuring the real effect of the budget agreement they both sold to the nation last year on our ability to meet our domestic responsibilities in strengthening education, health, environment, housing, and social services. Why does that frustrate me more? Because the lack of candor in the first instance was meant to hide private, personal conduct, but the second was a public event which had direct substantive consequences for American citizens and their families. After finishing reading Mr. Starr's submission of opinion and the response of the President's lawyers some things are clear to me and some things are not. I cannot really reach a final judgement on this depressing matter until I have had an opportunity to evaluate the thousands of pages of backup material which are still to be released. But my first impressions of what I read are these. First, after four years and the expenditure of over $40 million since Mr. Starr was first appointed to review the facts surrounding the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas in the 1970s, we still have no finding of illegal conduct by the President in Whitewater, no finding of illegal conduct by the President in the investigation of the White House travel office which Mr. Starr subsequently undertook, no finding of illegality by the President on the matter relating to the FBI file case. All we have is a document which is largely focused on what actions the President took to hide sexual conduct that had not even occurred when Mr. Starr was first appointed Independent Prosecutor. There's no doubt that some conduct cited in the allegations is indeed troubling. Many other allegations clearly overreach. Mr. Starr's allegation that the President acted illegally by misleading his own staff about his sexual activity is a real stretch as is his allegation that the President acted illegally by pursuing legitimate questions of Executive Privilege. Mr. Starr's active advocacy of impeachment, going so far as to draw up potential articles of impeachment, is, as the Washington Post has said, an ``arrogant'' act that claims for Mr. Starr a responsibility that is solely the prerogative of Congress. Mr. Starr's job is to lay out the facts in ``Joe Friday style''--as Mr. Starr himself has on occasion pointed out. It is not to reach a conclusion about what actions Congress should take. That is our job. But, Mr. Starr's overreaching does not obscure the fact that the President appears at this moment to have provided information to the public in the Paula Jones suit and possibly to the grand jury that obscured the truth, even if it did not technically violate it. If that proves to be the case, the question we will then have to answer is: ``What is the proper action for Congress to take?'' The actions taken by President Clinton, regrettable though they may be, are far different from the actions President Nixon took in Watergate. The actions in Watergate involved burglarizing and wiretapping political opponents, attempting to use the IRS to intimidate political opponents, financial payoffs to defendants in criminal cases, and other uses of the levers of governmental power to subvert the very democratic process that underlies the essence of America. In contract, this case is largely about actions taken by the President to obscure personal conduct. They are not in the same league as Mr. Nixon's. That does not necessarily mean that some action by Congress may not be warranted. If it is, based on what we know now, the case of Speaker Gingrich may be instructive. In the case of the Speaker, the House determined that the proper action for the House to take was to reprimand the Speaker for having misled the House in the ethnics investigation of his political activities. Because the essence of the charges against the President seem to be similar--that his actions also appear to have been designed to obscure the truth--a congressional reprimand or sanction of some sort, rather than removal from office, may prove to be the most appropriate action. It would be especially so if it allowed Congress to end this matter in a much shorter period of time so that the Congress and the Presidency can refocus our attention and our activities from the past private misdeeds of this President to the future public needs of the nation and the people we are supposed to represent. I do not know how this sad chapter will end, but I do know that this episode and the way it has been handled by the leadership circles of our major institutions demonstrates a desperate need to examine how we can renew those crucial institutions. In two years the millennium will draw to a close. This nation's institutions are simply not ready to lead this country into a new one. I would never in three lifetimes call for a new Constitutional convention because this generation of political leadership is highly unlikely to improve on the work of the Founding Fathers; it is much more likely to muck it up. But I do believe we need to have Millennium Conventions convened for the purpose of examining ways to reshape, redirect, and refocus almost all of our institutions--economic, corporate, political, communication, religious, and even our international institutions such as the IMF, the U.N., and NATO. In the political area, we need special attention paid to the presidential nominating process to try to find ways to reduce the importance of candidates' media skills and increase the role of peer review by people who know them best, if both parties are to produce candidates with the qualities necessary to lead the nation. I do not know how we can change the human heart, but we need to find ways to reshape the major institutions of this society so that there are more incentives to produce a new focus on selflessness. That is the major task that we each face as individuals on life's journey, and we need more help--and less hindrance--from the institutions that dominate our lives along the way.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I am most reluctantly going to vote yes for this bill, because in contrast to the Republican bill which gutted the President's education budget, this bill is $2.6 billion above the President's education budget. This bill restores the fuel assistance program. This bill restores the summer jobs program. It funds to some degree our international responsibilities, and I think, therefore, that unless we want to tie up the government for another month, we have no choice but to vote yes on this bill. I have already made quite clear in my previous statement on the bill why I think, or what I see in this bill that I believe is wrong. And I have also made quite clear what should be in this bill that is not. Having said that, let me simply say that I do not find it surprising that a majority party which would say no to campaign reform, a majority party which would say no to HMO reform, would, in the end, be reduced to bragging about the fact that they have killed the plan to provide better schools for many children in this country who go to schools which, if they were prisons, would be closed by Federal judges because they are in such a mess. I know that there are many other items that we would like to see in this bill that are not. We will simply have to take that debate to the American people. I make no apology for the effort that those of us on the Democratic side of the aisle have made to try to restore key funding in this bill for education, for health, for job training and the like. I think the differences between the two parties is pretty well summed up by something I heard Studs Terkel say a while back. He said the following: Cursed be the Nation where all play to win and too much is made of the color of the skin, or we do not see each other as sister and brother, but as being threats to each other. Blessed be the Nation that keeps its waters clean, where an end to pollution is not just a dream. Cursed be the Nation without equal education, where good schools are something that we ration, or the wealthiest get the best that is able, and the poor are left with crumbs from the table. Blessed be the Nation with health care for all where there is a helping hand to all who fall, where compassion is in fashion every year, and people, not profits, is what we hold dear. I really believe that that, in the end, sums up the differences in budget priorities between those of us on this side of the aisle who have fought for education and health care and environmental cleanup, and those on the other side of the aisle who have fought on most occasions for tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest 5 percent of people in this society, for defense expenditures that go more to reward military contractors than to improve military preparedness, and we will just have to take these issues into the campaign. Let me say that I once again think that the process by which this bill has been produced is an abomination. It represents an absolute, total institutional failure. We should not be here in this position, but we are, and we have to make some hard choices, given the only choices before us. That is why I will reluctantly urge a yes vote on this proposal.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Stokes).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the distinguished gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), Democratic whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hefner). (Mr. HEFNER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say to those Members on the other side of the aisle, if you do not like the process that produced this bill, I would simply point out that your party runs this place. It was your party that set the schedule that provided more days off than we were in session in the past year so that the Committee on Appropriations could not finish its work. It is your party that could not pass a budget for the first time since 1974. It is your party that allowed its own caucus to be governed by the CATs, the conservative Members of your caucus, that decided that you wanted to produce partisan bills rather than bipartisan bills and, as a result of that, wound up with legislation that could not pass this House and legislation that your Republican friends in the Senate would not even buy. If you do not like the length, if you do not like the weight, if you do not like the height of this bill, I would suggest that you simply look in the mirror, because your party and the way it ran this House produced it. With respect to the supplemental, I would simply note the President, bad as it is, the President asked for $14 billion in the supplemental. This bill now contains 20.8 in the supplemental. And all but about half a billion dollars was added at the insistence of your leadership, not ours. So, again, if you do not like most of the added emergency spending that was added in this bill by the Congress above the President's request, look in the mirror because your party demanded it.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Mr. OBEY. I support the conference report, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield two minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this bill is here because of a massive institutional failure on the part of the Congress. Now, it is true that there are some major victories for the President and for my party in this package. In my judgment, those major victories are here because we had a large portion of the Republican Caucus, known as the CATs, who early on this year indicated that they did not like the way the Congress handled appropriations bills the year before when we had a relatively bipartisan approach, and they decided they wanted a much more partisan approach; they wanted the bills to be written only on the Republican side of the aisle. They did not want the minority party included; they did not want to hear what our views were; they wanted to bring their agenda to the floor, so they did. They cut $1 billion out of the President's education program. They eliminated the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program. They eliminated the Summer Jobs Program. They laced the appropriation bills through with antienvironmental riders. They proposed all kinds of measures which they thought they could impose on what they perceived to be a weakened President, and then something happened. What happened is that the moderate Republicans decided they could not support that package, and the Senate Republicans also decided that some of these bills were so extreme that they would not vote for them. And so we wound up in a colossal end-of-the-year, after-the-deadline negotiation on more than half of the budget. Now, as a result of that process, a lot of the decisions that were made were made by four people. They were made by the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Livingston), the chairman of the committee, my good friend; by me; by Senator Stevens, who represents the majority party in the Senate, and by Senator Byrd, who represents the minority party in the Senate. We made hundreds of decisions on the specific appropriation items. But then a laundry list of other items were kicked upstairs and there judgments were made by only one person in this House so far as I know, that being the Speaker, and they were made on the other end of the avenue by representatives of the President. We are in this mess because this Congress did not do its job. We are in this mess because the Congress passed only a tiny number of the 13 appropriation bills that we were required to pass by the end of the year. And now we have this god awful mess on the floor, which while it contains a number of, I think, needed victories for us on education and on other items, still represents an incredibly outrageous way to do the country's business. So we have as a result of this process some 70 extraneous provisions laced through this bill. We do have a bill which is now $2.6 billion above where the House was on education, and for that the President deserves credit and so do the minority party negotiators. We did restore fuel assistance, we did restore summer jobs, we did protect the National Labor Relations Board, we did keep the full IMF funding, and we did get a number of other victories. We did get $1.6 billion additional funds to help our farmers. We did get language which extends contraceptive coverage under Federal health benefits for women. We stopped the punitive action that the majority party wanted to take against the Federal Elections Commission. But in the process, an awful lot of garbage stuck to this bill. The most outrageous action taken of all was action that was insisted upon by the Committee on Ways and Means. There was a provision in this bill which would have allowed the brother of the Unabomber to get the full reward that was promised for solving that crime without being taxed. He wanted to give the full amount of that reward to the victims of the Unabomber, but because of jurisdictional dumb Hill considerations, the Committee on Ways and Means decided they would not allow that money to be provided to the victims of that crime tax-free. I have never seen a more disgraceful action on the part of anyone in this Congress than that action in denying those funds to the victims of the Unabomber, and yet that is one of the pieces of garbage that we had to swallow in this bill in order to get the bill that would be supported by the majority. We have a number of other items on tax legislation that were added to this. We have $4 billion added to the defense budget without a dime of that $4 billion going into readiness. It goes into a lot of the Speaker's pet projects, into a lot of third-tier, third-rate intelligence activities, (one good one), and yet none of the funds go directly to military readiness. It is really a lousy way to prioritize national needs. So I am going to ask Members to do the only thing we can under these circumstances, because the country does need a budget. I will ask them to vote for the bill when we finally get to it, because thanks to the incredible mismanagement that we have seen in this Congress all year long, we have no other choice. But that does not mean I am proud of the product. I think this product, at least the process by which we got here, is a national disgrace, and I think the House ought to be ashamed of itself for all of the decisions that led to this ridiculous process. I want to make clear in my criticism that I make no criticism of the majority party on the Committee on Appropriations. They did everything possible to work under these ridiculous circumstances to bring a decent bill to the House. But I have to tell my colleagues, wait until you see the stories that the press will write for weeks and weeks on some of the provisions that are in this bill, and more importantly, some of them that are not, and we will get a clear idea of just how low this Congress has sunk.