Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I rise in support of the substitute amendment. Mr. Chairman, I understand the frustration of the Member who just spoke, but I will point out, those of us on this side of the aisle did not vote for the rule that required this procedure. They did. We asked them not to. They brought a rule to the floor which violated agreements which were made with the ranking Democratic member of the subcommittee on how amendments would be dealt with on family planning. They brought a rule to the floor which established a 5-hour cap on all debates, so that if one amendment took longer than it should, other people would be squeezed out and would not be able to offer theirs. And then when the gentleman from California (Mr. Torres) did precisely what the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling) asked, said that he should have done, he tried to offer his amendment on the School for Americas, and he was precluded from doing so because of the nature of the rule. So what happened was that the gentleman from California (Mr. Torres) and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Kennedy) were left with no choice but to use the rule that they imposed on us to enable us to debate this issue, and the reason we did it is because this amendment goes to the core values of what it means to be an American. What it means to be an American is not to support a school for the Americas that produces some of the biggest butchers who have reigned in Central America or Latin America. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman has had his time, and I would be happy to yield to him after I make my point, but the gentleman said his piece and I am going to say mine. This bill should never have come to the floor under this rule. In my view, it is absurd to allow any Member of the House to offer an amendment put into the Record by someone else. But they passed that rule, we did not. We are simply operating under the rule, the only rule that they gave us, and we found a way, using their rules, to get the amendment onto the floor which goes to America's core values. And so the question is: Do my colleagues want to continue to provide financial support for a school which has a track record which would embarrass any decent American who is concerned about human rights? When this school produces people like D'Aubuisson, who goes on national television in El Salvador and publicly threatens the life of the American Ambassador there, it is time to question whether that school has a curriculum worth teaching. We have heard for years they are cleaning up their operation. We have seen the results, we have seen the blood, we have seen the torture, we have seen the human pain, for far too long to tolerate it. So it seems to me that these gentlemen should not be condemned, they should be congratulated for enabling the House to reach a vote on this issue, even though the rules were contrived to prevent it in the first place. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Yates).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I think the House has an obligation here to think not about whether we like or dislike the North Korean regime, but what will most protect the interests of the United States. There is no regime in the world that is one-tenth as crazy, as wrong, as abusive, and as dangerous as the North Korean regime. Everybody understands that. But the way to deal with an unstable regime, which at any moment could take an action which could put 50,000 American troops at risk, is not to eliminate the administration's flexibility in dealing with it. With all due respect, if we are going to leave in the middle of October and not be back in session until late January or February, we cannot afford to have the administration without the authority to react to the world. And this amendment, in my view, simply adds to the reckless nature of the provisions already in the bill. It is misguided because we do not like certain folks, if we take away our own tools in protecting our national interest in dealing with those folks. I do not think it is an either wise or responsible thing to do and I would urge opposition.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, picking up on the comments of the previous speaker, let me state that I am not speaking in a pro-Armenian mode or a pro-Azeri mode. I am trying to be pro-American and pro-American values. I think the question before this House on this issue is whether or not, when we look at this or any other region of the world, we look at it in terms of what all of our values are, or whether we will, in fact, simply look at a region in terms of our economic or materialist values. It seems to me that we have to have a flexible view of our insistence on human rights. The best writing I ever saw on the subject of human rights was by Father Brian Hehir, who was the driving force behind the creation of the Catholic Bishop's document on nuclear war. He observed in that statement that we had an obligation in promoting human rights to take into account both our ability to affect the situation and other considerations that impacted on the world's safety, the possibility of war, and our own security. The point he made is that there are some occasions when other issues are so overriding, such as the necessity to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the use of those weapons, that perhaps human rights have to take a second or third seat on the train. But when those issues are not at stake and we have a greater ability to press for human rights without interfering with our security or other values, then we have an obligation to do so. I think we face that situation in this instance. I have often been at odds with representatives of the American- Armenian community because I have never favored earmarking funds in any foreign aid appropriation bill for anybody. An earmark means that you require the President to spend at least a certain amount of money. I have always been opposed to that for Armenia or anybody else. But on this issue, while I must confess to a certain degree of uncertainty because there are value judgments on both sides that are important, in the end I come down on the side of the amendment simply because I think that whether we are talking about the Executive Branch of government or the Legislative Branch of government, that all too often in this country and in our political system, when big business and big dollars speak, we tend to listen to them more than we do any other sector of our society. I think that is wrong. Does anybody really believe this amendment would have a chance of a snowball in Hades if we did not have a list of 14 oil companies who were lobbying for it? I do not say that to question the motive of any Member, because there are a good many other reasons for Members to be for this amendment. But when we see that we do have the Amoco, Exxon, Mobile, Penzoil and a number of others interested in seeing us change our position, then we see a likelihood that Congress will switch its position. But if we have other regions of the world where we do not have large economic players, then we do not pay any attention to them. I think that that represents a gap in what our values ought to be. I think that the best thing to do is to stick with the policy that we have stuck with the last 2 years. Support the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. It still dropped a huge amount that day. And I would simply say this Congress has a responsibility to take any action necessary to try to stabilize the situation rather than continuing to contribute to its destabilization.

Mr. OBEY. If the gentleman would let me reclaim my time to make one observation, I would point out today that the stock market is down again by a huge amount. We are in the midst of incredible political and economic uncertainty around the world. This Congress should not do anything that adds to that uncertainty, creates additional shakiness in the markets and creates more opportunity for people to lose their hard- earned investments because we have lagged in meeting our responsibilities. That is what has happened.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to say that we just heard the committee chairman say, ``Look, I may vote with you at some point.'' In fact, I have heard them say, ``We probably will vote with you at some point.'' The problem is, that is what we have been hearing for a year. Every time we bring this up, we are in essence told, well, you may be right, but this is not the right time. It is long since past the right time. We need to end the leverage or the efforts at seeking political leverage. We need to end the debate. We need to end the delay. We need to get about the business of doing the best we can to stabilize the world's economic system before it costs our constituents jobs.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I will make one additional point. In Russia, within a period of three months, people have lost 85 percent of the value of their investments, 85 percent of the value of the stock market. If that had happened in this country today, we would be in the midst of a revolution. It is a minor miracle that they are not. They have a few thousand nuclear weapons which can very easily be pointed at us. I would suggest to everyone who cares about the subject that the very fact that we have such chaos in Russia is an argument for strengthening, not denying, resources to the only instrument we have left to prevent that kind of chaos.

Mr. OBEY. Reclaiming my time, I would simply make one observation. Obviously, I agree with the gentleman's concern about that. I am extremely unhappy about that. But I ask the gentleman to remember the advice that we have had from Alan Greenspan and from virtually every other person with major responsibilities in running our economy. They have all urged us to pass this.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I think the remarks of our distinguished committee chairman have really revealed what the situation is here today, because he has granted that these funds are authorized. And I would simply say that the only thing that is holding this up, in my view, is that the majority party continues to try to exercise political leverage on the White House to obtain certain things they want, running the risk that our position in the world economy is going to become a whole lot shakier than it is today. We have heard many criticisms about the IMF and certainly many Members on this side of the aisle have made many criticisms, including myself. I recognize that the IMF is not sufficient today to deal with our international economic challenges. The IMF was created in a world of fixed exchange rates. Today we do not have fixed exchange rates. The IMF was created at a time when we had much smaller private capital flows than we have today. Today private capital flows when somebody punches a computer button that can overwhelm the IMF in many, many parts of the world. But we have seen the world when we did not have the IMF. We did not have the IMF in the 1930s. And in the 1930s, when we had first an Austrian banking collapse, followed in turn by a collapse of the currency in Germany. And when the markets were then in turn destroyed in Britain, and that chaos came across the water and engulfed the United States, we had the greatest depression in modern history. All that happened because of that is that Adolf Hitler came to power, over 50 million people died in the world, and that is why the ``Wise Men,'' as they were known after the end of World War II, created institutions such as the international financial institutions and the IMF so that we would have some ability to stabilize economic relationships between countries, so we would not have the conditions repeat themselves that led to the political instability that led to the military actions that led to the human devastation that we saw in that period in our history. At this point, imperfect though the IMF is, it is the only instrument we have to try to recognize the fact that currencies have collapsed in Asia, that our export markets for agriculture and other products have collapsed. That has, in turn, helped create greater instability in the Soviet Union. We have seen great uncertainty in Latin American markets. How long do Members of this House think we can survive as an island of economic success in a world of economic chaos? The answer is, not very long.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand the gentleman's words be taken down.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding this time to me, and she has done a terrific job on this bill as she does on virtually everything else she deals with, and I also want to express my appreciation to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Callahan) for his efforts this year and through the years to try to produce a decent bill. Having said that, I very much regret what I am about to say. I have supported this bill for years, but I do not believe that I can any longer do so. Since 1989 we have really had euphoria in this country. The Iron Curtain collapsed, democracy was restored in a good many countries in central Europe, South Africa is a far different country than it used to be, we have many more democracies in Latin and Central America than we had a decade ago, and I think we have almost come to expect that to be the norm. Unfortunately the real normalcy seems to be raising its ugly head in many parts of the globe, and I do not believe that this bill meets the task of dealing with those problems. It is first of all, Mr. Chairman, terribly inadequate in terms of the way it deals with our international economic situation. We have a crisis in terms of what is happening in the Asian economy, and that sooner or later is going to collapse in on us, ruin our ability to export, and take away American jobs. And yet the majority party has refused to even allow us to vote on the question of providing full funding for the IMF, and this issue has been hanging around for a year. We cannot afford to wait any longer. If my colleagues will take a look at the former Soviet Union, first of all this bill does not provide sufficient resources to meet the problems in dealing with those states and then, after it has cut substantially the funding for those states, it then has the functional equivalent of earmarks which tie the President's hands in responding to any change in circumstances in that part of the world. We should not be requiring the President to spend specific amounts of money in any area in the former Soviet Union unless the situation on the ground warrants it. And yet that is what this bill unfortunately does. As far as Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, Azerbaijan are concerned, I am not at all convinced that the solution that this bill has produced is not more in the interests of American oil companies than it is in the interests of the American people. I do not believe that this is a healthy outcome. I also have to simply say that I think more and more, this bill has become a bill that satisfies the needs and desires of virtually every country in the world and every special interest in our own country. The only thing that seems to be left out is our national interests. That I think is no reflection on anyone who has tried to work on this bill, but it is a reflection on the shortsightedness of many of the groups that make up this body and force the committee to produce a bill which is essentially a political accommodation rather than a package that meets our real, substantive needs. Then finally we come to the issue of Korea. In Korea we have the most reckless, irresponsible and dangerous regime in the world in North Korea. We have 5 different foreign policy goals that we are trying to reach in dealing with that outrageously out-of-line regime. We have only been able to achieve one of those goals: the shutting down of the Yongbyon reactor complex which is capable now today of producing weapons-grade fuel to produce several nuclear bombs a year. And yet, this committee has produced a product which blows apart the one success that we have had in the midst of a lot of failures in dealing with Korea. It is highly dangerous to the national interests of the United States, and I therefore urge a ``no'' vote on the entire bill.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Livingston), my good friend, has given an interesting speech. It really does not have a whole lot to do with what the previous speaker just said. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Livingston) has indicated that this is not an unprecedented situation. The fact is, I believe, if he will check the record he will find out, that we have never gotten to the end of the session without the passage of a budget resolution. I would point out also that the responsibility for that is very clear. It lies with the people who run the Congress, because the President does not sign the budget resolution. He has no role in determining what the budget resolution is. The budget resolution is a Congressional Budget Resolution. There is none, and that is why this institution has been forced to operate on an ad hoc basis. Mr. Speaker, I would point out also that just because there was a budget agreement to live within certain caps, does not mean that this Congress is free to load up all of these appropriation bills with anti- environmental riders, with anti-consumer riders, with all kinds of unrelated and nongermane amendments, which turn relatively benign appropriation bills into highly controversial matters that the majority party itself is split over. So it just seems to me, and I do not want to continue this, I raise this simply because I believe that if we are going to get out of here before November 3, we must have a different mind-set than we have seen this year. This Congress must return and the majority party must return to the mind-set that they exhibited the year before when there was strong bipartisan cooperation, strong cooperation with the President, and as a result we had a year that I thought all of us could be proud of. This year has not been that kind of year because of the decision to revert to a confrontation mode on the part of the House Republican Caucus, at least some elements of it. I think it is that mind-set which must be changed if we are not going to be here two and three more times before the end of the calendar year, providing for yet another short- term continuing resolution. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman continue to yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that just yesterday I agreed to a motion to roll a number of votes in order to facilitate the Republican conference. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) was in our conference. We have a rather serious issue before this House, and I think it is understandable that people be pulled in different directions. But if procedural cooperation is going to break down on a minor matter like this, we are going to have a terrible time getting to the right conclusion on appropriation bills before October 1.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have not even yet seen the motion of the gentleman from Maryland. I trust his judgment on it, and I understand the thrust of it, and I agree with it. But there are some other fairly important issues that all of us have to tend to these days, and I think we all need to give each other a little bit of running room on these questions.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, first of all, let me apologize for keeping you here after 10 o'clock at night. Also, let me apologize to the staff. I do not ordinarily talk to myself in an empty room, as the other two gentlemen have been doing for an hour. But there is something tonight that I feel I simply have to get off of my chest. Mr. Speaker, I intended to speak tonight to address some of the institutional failures that I believe are besetting this country as we deal with the matter involving the President. The Speaker's recently announced guidelines about what comments are permissible about the Starr report that we voted to release, and the President's conduct, prevent me from saying on the floor certain things that I wanted to say. In deference to those guidelines, I will honor them. But the whole text of what I intended to say will be available in my office. Mr. Speaker, Friday night after 2 hours of reading, after our vote on Friday, I began to wonder about the correctness of my vote earlier that day in light of my concerns about the appropriateness of what should be electronically directed into people's homes in this country. Taking a break from my reading, I turned on the TV to see, as an unreconstructed Cubs fan, if I could find out whether Sammy Sosa had hit another home run again. The tube came on, and within seconds I heard a CNBC reporter using language that I never expected to hear on the Nation's national news programs, or what passes for them these days. And at that moment I reached the same conclusion 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 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. Mr. Speaker, 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 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 other events. At the moment our Nation is transfixed on this episode, 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 economic health 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 IMF. 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 other human beings. 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 down right dangerous. The best chance in a generation for peace in the Middle East is slowly but surely sliding away, and this decade has produced the hottest known global temperatures in years with huge potential consequences for worldwide agriculture, fisheries, economic dislocation, public health, and environmental stability. And 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. First, the spectacularly myopic decision by the Court in the Paula Jones case that the government would not be distracted if that case went forward now rather than 2 years from now and the President was out of office. Second, the mind-bogglingly naive decision 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. 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 low 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 our 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 on the community of pollsters and consultants to produce the lowest common denominator discourse in which winning and holding power drive out almost any consideration of the need to educate and enlighten the public on every front. Is there no length to which we will not go to hold or seize 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 the ideological enforcers, the modern-day American counterparts of Mikhail Suslov, the old guardian of the purity of Soviet orthodoxy, that when bipartisanship does occur, we are almost startled by its appearance. The focus and limits of much of that debate is 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 everyday working people. The press itself, with all too few lonely and valiant exceptions, some of whom work in this building, 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 needs 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 that I get from a reporter on 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 this country simply 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 reporter who last Sunday on a Sunday talk show in an interview with a guest snidely asked that guest what his wife's definition of sex was. That reporter owes his own profession, his viewers, and the wife of that guest a public apology for his own 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 members of the press will not go in order to humiliate other human beings, all in the name of news values? I wonder. 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 and our origins, our purpose and our relationship with our creator are essentially conversations about the unknowable, at least in this life. 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 10 Commandments represent a guide for living and for the treatment of others. They are not supposed to be a road map for human beings or politicians to destroy each other. They are not a political program or an economic program. 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 it 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 conscience, not someone else's. 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, an issue which we will be debating again for the thousandth time tomorrow, perhaps the most agonizing, troubling and divisive of all moral debates in the public realm. On that issue, 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, I believe, are rooted in two fundamental 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 answers 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? That is the important question. We desperately need to address our key institutional shortcomings, because institutions are the major tools available to any culture, to any nation, and 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 largely. First, Mr. Starr. On a number of accounts, Mr. Starr 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 he was planning to join Pepperdine Law School, an 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 in my view never have been appointed to a position that calls for, above all, unquestioned fairness, balance and judgment. President Clinton is the second person. 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 it has often been noted in the press that the President's causes have been both promoted and crippled by a tendency to use language in ways that are technically in conformance with the truth but often result in obscuring rather than clarifying. As frustrating as I feel about parsing of language in this episode, I am 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 service. Why does that frustrate me more? Because the second was a public event which had direct, substantive consequences for American citizens and their families on questions that we will be voting on every day. At this point, some things are clear to me and some things are not. I cannot really reach a final judgment on this depressing matter until I have had an opportunity to have all of the appropriate information. But my first impressions 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. At this point all of the Nation is focused on something which had not even occurred when Mr. Starr was first appointed independent prosecutor. At this point, Mr. Speaker, I intended to comment on some of the concerns I had about both Mr. Starr and the President, but I am precluded by the Speaker's guidelines from doing so. The complete text of what I had to say on this point will also be available in my office, but I will not address them here. As we ask the question, what is the proper action for Congress to now take, I will say that this episode in many ways is very different than 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 processes that underlie the essence of America. In considering an appropriate action for the Congress to take, I would urge the House to consider the course it took in another case a year earlier. At this point, what is important for us to determine is what is the best thing for the country. A congressional reprimand or other sanction may prove to be the most appropriate action, especially if it allows Congress to end this matter in a much shorter period of time so that the Congress and the presidency can refocus our attention and activities from issues of the past 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 the country into a new one. I would never in three lifetimes call for a new constitutional convention, because this generation of political leadership in my judgment 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 arena, 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 the candidates best if both parties are to produce candidates with the qualities necessary to lead this country. I do not know how we can change the human heart, but we do 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 we each face as individuals on life's journey. We need more help and less hindrance from the institutions that dominate our lives along the way.