David Price

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I would like to engage the ranking member of the Committee on the Budget and perhaps also the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) in a discussion of the situation we are facing with respect to the Medicare Part A Trust Fund. We have had for some years in this body, although sometimes the political rhetoric would not indicate it, an agreement between the parties that the Social Security Trust Fund ought to be off limits, that we ought not to be using the Social Security surplus to cut taxes or to increase spending or for any other purpose, other than to reduce the debt and ensure the future of Social Security, to make certain that those benefits will be there when the baby boomers retire, when that program's cash flow reverses. I would like to ask my colleagues if there is any principled reason why we should treat the Medicare Trust Fund any differently from the Social Security Trust Fund. If anything, the Medicare Trust Fund is facing even more severe problems, even earlier than we face with Social Security.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. This budget would keep the maximum Pell grant well under $4,000. It is simply not adequate to do what we need to do to open the doors to opportunity in higher education. We have been increasing Pell grants several hundred dollars a year for several years. This would increase the Pell grant, as I understand it; and this has been borne out by CBO, only by $150. That is totally inadequate. It really falls over $1,000 short of what President Bush himself promised.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman outlining some of the implications for elementary and secondary education on this budget. Is it not true that President Bush campaigned on getting the Pell grants, in opening up opportunities for students on higher education, getting those Pell grants over $5,000?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we are at present running a slight surplus in Medicare, but the Medicare Trust Fund is accumulating assets which we will need to draw on later. If we, instead, take those funds and use them for prescription drug benefits, as badly as that is needed, would that not reduce our ability to meet our basic Medicare obligations, the prescription benefit aside?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) and the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe) and congratulate all of these teams. These were wonderful games, hard fought; and we are very proud to have survived this Final Four. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from the Eighth District of North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), a Duke alumnus.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, last night, Duke University from the 4th Congressional District of North Carolina was crowned the national champion after the victory over the Arizona Wildcats 82-72 in the Final Four, the king of the NCAA. This is the first national championship for Duke since 1992. It is the third in their history, and we are as proud as we can be. But tonight, Mr. Speaker, we are not going to be hearing from me. We are going to be hearing from a couple of fine colleagues with whom I had an agreement going into this Final Four and who will be all too happy, I am sure, to don the Duke jersey and the Duke cap, and to read a script which they have agreed to deliver in homage to the Duke Blue Devils and their national championship. Let me say, before I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), that Duke in this path to the national championship met not just Arizona, but the University of Maryland in the semifinal, University of Southern California, UCLA, University of Missouri, and Monmouth. We are the adversaries of all. We are as proud as we can be. Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to yield to the gentleman from College Park, Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my friend and colleague.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), who has also been an outspoken advocate of election reform.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from Texas. It is important, is it not, that, for the 2002 election, we be able to deal with this. Why should we wait. If we are going to deal with it, not have another election under these conditions, we have surely got to get the funding in this year's budget.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Madam Chairman, the Republican budget deserves a failing grade on education, there is no question about it, because it only increases funding for the Department of Education by $2.4 billion. That is 5.7 percent, 5.7 percent over last year's levels. That is less than half the average increase that Congress has provided for the last 5 years. Now, to inflate their increase, the Republicans try to claim credit for funding that we already provided for next year. That is not education leadership; that is budget gamesmanship. Democrats, on the other hand, provide $4.8 billion more for education than the Republicans do for next year. This chart makes the comparison very clearly. Our budget provides $129 billion more over the next 10 years. Under the Democratic budget, our country will be in a much better position to address the challenges we face in education like reducing class size, school construction, recruiting and training teachers, boosting title I aid for disadvantaged students, increasing Pell Grants for college students, meeting the Federal Government's obligations to special-education funding, expanding Head Start. There is so much that we need to do. Education needs to be a priority item in this budget, and the Democratic budget resolution provides that priority. Let me ask the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt), who has also joined us here, to discuss how the Democratic budget addresses what I consider to be the number one education issue of the next decade, the teacher shortage. We are going to need 2.2 million new teachers in this country in the next 10 years, and I do not think anybody knows where they are coming from. We need to be anticipating this need. I ask the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) where are we on this question of the recruitment, retention, and professional development of teachers?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me. Madam Chairman, speaking of promises made, probably everyone in this Chamber remembers that when Candidate George W. Bush promised to raise the maximum Pell Grant award to $5,100 for freshman, it was welcomed with great enthusiasm. Well, President Bush, I am afraid, is not upholding that promise. The Republicans in this budget have fallen $1.5 billion short of the amount needed to fulfill that promise. The Republicans are only providing enough funding here to raise the maximum award by $150; that is, from $3,750 to $3,900 a year. With $4.8 billion more for education next year, the Democrats' budget does far better for that. For a final thought, let me turn again to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt), who, as his bumper stickers say, is in fact a rocket scientist, and ask him: Is the Republican budget adequate in terms of critical research funding?

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Madam Chairman I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Madam Chairman, we have a practice in this country of, when we find neighborhoods on the top of toxic waste dumps, we naturally respond to that emergency by buying out the homes to protect the people who live there. When floods wipe out communities, as they did in eastern North Carolina a couple of years ago, we respond by buying out property to protect residents and help them find safe places to live. Well, we have an emergency situation in our democracy today. It was all too evident in Florida in November. Error-prone voting equipment is an emergency situation that threatens us, and the Democratic budget proposes an immediate and an effective response. We want to provide emergency funds to buy out the punch-card voting systems that threaten the accuracy of and the faith in our elections, and we want to do it by the time of the 2002 elections. We also want to look at longer-term election reform. Now our Republican friends at my request have included language in their budget resolution urging Congress to deal with the problem of the replacement of error-prone equipment, but the Republican budget provides no specific funding for this. By contrast, the Democratic budget addresses this critical issue with a billion dollars this year and $500 million next year. Madam Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson), who can tell us more about why this funding is so critical. We appreciate her leadership on this issue.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I would like to begin by picking up on the point our colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey, was making about debt retirement. It seems strange to see our Republican colleagues arguing that, really, we had better not retire too much debt. After years and years and years of piling up debt and red ink and deficit spending, here we finally see the light of day. We are running modest surpluses, and we have the opportunity to reduce that mountain of debt. Let us remind ourselves, that debt is not just an abstract number, that debt is costing this country over $200 billion a year in interest payments alone. Think what we could do with that money. Think of the more profitable public and private investments that could be made with that over $200 billion. We need to systematically and in a disciplined way get that debt paid down. It seems to me that our Republican friends are making a couple of mistakes. In the first place, they are underestimating how much of that debt we can pay down over the next 10 years without incurring unreasonable penalties. Then, secondly, they are using a device in their budget which they call a reserve fund, but they at the same time are making commitments that almost certainly will spend down that reserve fund: increases in defense spending, agricultural assistance. Goodness knows, they are not even taking any account of the kinds of farm payments we have had to make in recent years. They are promising us a prescription drug coverage under Medicare. How much of that is it going to take for those reserve funds to vanish and, therefore, even less debt reduction to be achieved? It seems to me that the approach we are taking in the Democratic alternative is far more reasonable, far more responsible. We are reducing the debt by a good deal more than our Republican friends. At the same time, we are taking more realistic account of the investments that they and we say that we are going to have to make. Instead of the Republican approach, which has been to shout through a tax cut here mainly benefiting the wealthiest people in this country, and then say, well, we will figure out a few months later what the rest of the budget looks like, our approach on the Democratic side has been to roughly take one-third of the surplus and say we are going to commit that to a disciplined paying down of the national debt, beyond what we are already doing with the Social Security surplus, which is applied to debt reduction and to the long-term future of Social Security. We take another one-third of the surplus and say we are going to apply that to tax relief. That is a large tax cut, and one from which this country will benefit. Then we take the remaining third and apply it to investments which really both parties have committed to, in strengthening defense, providing a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, investing in education, investing in research. I do want to return to what our colleague said about the National Science Foundation, an important component of that. We will be investing in roads and transit. Goodness knows, my district in North Carolina is well aware of the need for that investment. It will be one-third, one-third, one-third, a balanced program of debt retirement, tax relief, and targeted, prudent investments. It seems to me that is a sound basis on which to proceed. I very much hope that before this process is over, that is the kind of process that we can all be part of.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. If the gentleman will yield for a brief point, I am sure we all remember that back during the campaign, George W. Bush campaigned on a $5,100 Pell Grant, wanting to get the maximum Pell Grant award for freshman up to $5,100; and yet in this education budget, we are dealing with, it appears, a $1 billion increase in the entire Pell Grant program. And our budget analysts tell us that would get the maximum award up about $150. So the maximum award would become something like $3,900. To say the least, that is not $5,100. And it just does not represent the kind of investment in education we need to be making and that the political rhetoric would indicate that both parties want to make.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I cannot imagine that with the surpluses that we are running now, and seeing the baby boom retirement ahead and the implications that has for Social Security and Medicare, I cannot imagine that we would not want to get that national debt reduced down to the absolute minimum so we do not have this $200-plus billion in debt service each year awaiting us now, and so that we are in a better position to meet that challenge when it arises. It is just incredible in this context to be saying, let us not pay down the debt too much. As one of our colleagues said, it is like a 400-pound man deciding he had better not go on a diet lest he become anorexic. That is not really our problem. Our problem right now is to systematically and in a disciplined way pay down that national debt, get that debt service off our back, get ourselves in a strengthened position to meet the challenges that surely lie ahead.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. If the gentleman will yield, well over two-thirds of that projected surplus is more than 5 years out. There have been a number of analysts in recent days that have pointed out the ominous fall in the stock market and what that will do to capital gains receipts, and the effect that will have on the projected surpluses. Then look at what is happening in the States. In my State of North Carolina, and I understand something like half the States, the budget is taking a dive. The economic situation is deteriorating. We hope that that does not become worse, but surely it would be foolish for us to ignore those signs in projecting our Federal surplus.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, like most Members of this body, I support tax relief. But today we are debating this bill in clear violation of the budget law which states, quote, the concurrent resolution on the budget must be adopted before budget-related legislation is considered. This body is in violation of sound budget procedure, and we are in violation of common sense. Who among us would dream of building a house without a blueprint? That is what we are being asked to do: to shout through a tax cut costing $1 trillion on the way to $2 trillion, benefiting mainly the richest 5 percent of taxpayers, before we have a budget resolution or a detailed budget proposal from the administration. With this tax bill, we would bet the store on shaky surplus projections, more than two-thirds of which are more than 5 years away. If you need any lessons on the unpredictability of projections and forecasts, just ask the school children in my district about the snow day they were promised last Monday! This bill would compromise our ability to pay off the national debt. And it would make it impossible to meet the obligations both parties have made without a high and unacceptable risk of deficit spending. This is a case of putting the cart before the horse if there ever was one. Vote no.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I want to join my colleagues in recognizing February as American Heart Month. I commend the American Heart Association and other organizations for their efforts to raise awareness of heart disease. Their work is essential to reducing the physical, emotional, and economic burden of heart disease on the American public. Heart disease remains the number one killer in America. Currently 20 million Americans are living with some form of this disease. In 1997 alone, over nineteen thousand North Carolinians died of heart disease. Every American is at risk for heart disease, and most of us have loved ones who have suffered from some form of this disease. The financial cost to the American public is immense. Heart disease, together with stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, are estimated to cost approximately $300 billion in medical expenses and lost productivity in 2001. One way each of us can help reduce the number of deaths and disability from heart disease is by being prepared for cardiac emergencies. Unfortunately, too many Americans do not know the warning signs of a heart attack. They include uncomfortable pressure, fullness, squeezing or pain in the center of the chest lasting more than a few minutes; pain spreading to the shoulder, arm or neck; and chest discomfort with lightheadedness, fainting, sweating, nausea or shortness of breath. If a friend or family member is exhibiting these symptoms, you can assist them by recognizing these signs, being prepared to call 9-1-1, and administering CPR if needed. Just knowing these signs can save your life or the life of someone you care about. I urge each of us to dedicate ourselves to learning more about heart disease, how to prevent it, how to recognize it, and what to do if you suspect that someone is having a problem. In the meantime, Congress must continue its strong commitment to the National Institutes of Health so researchers have the tools necessary to find new ways to treat and cure this devastating disease.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce a Resolution of Inquiry to have the President direct the Archivist of the United States, the official of the United States Government responsible for coordinating the functions of the Electoral College, to provide the House of Representatives with full and complete information about the preparations that have been made for the various states to carry out the functions of the Electoral College this year. It is not widely known that the House of Representatives and Senate have a critical role in counting the states' electoral ballots for President and Vice President of the United States. Many know of the ministerial function of the joint session that counts the ballots cast by the electors who are elected in their states. What is not widely understood is the precedent allowing Congress to decide which of two conflicting electoral certificates from a state is valid. Most important is the constitutional function of the Congress to formally object to the counting of the electoral vote or votes of a state and, by a majority of both the House and Senate, to disallow the counting of a state's electoral votes. The House of Representatives should not take this duty lightly, nor should we approach it unprepared. I want to call attention to the 1961 precedent when a recount of ballots in Hawaii, which was concluded after the governor of that state had certified the election of the Republican slate of electors, showed that the Democratic electors had actually prevailed. The governor sent a second communication that certified that the Democratic slate of electors had been lawfully appointed. Both slates of electors met on the day prescribed by law, cast their votes, and submitted them to the President of the Senate. When the two Houses met in joint session to count the electoral votes, the votes of the electors were presented to the tellers by the Vice President, and, by unanimous consent, the Vice President directed the tellers to accept and count the lawfully appointed slate. Thus, the precedent holds that the Congress has the ability to judge competing claims of electors' votes and to determine which votes are valid. The rejection of a state's electoral vote or votes is provided by 3 U.S.C. Sec. 15. The relevant part reads as follows: [A]nd no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one return has been received shall be rejected, but the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified. The only occasion I am aware of when 3 U.S.C. Sec. 15 was brought into play was January 6, 1969. The vote of North Carolina was stated to be 12 for Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew and one for George C. Wallace and Curtis E. LeMay. Representative James G. O'Hara of Michigan and Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine protested the counting of the vote of North Carolina for Wallace and LeMay as not ``regularly given.'' The joint session then divided, and after the House and Senate individually debated the protest for two hours each, as provided by statute, they each voted to dismiss the objection and the vote for Wallace and LeMay was counted. The circumstances that challenged the Congress in 1961 and 1969 were certainly different from those that may come to the Capitol doorstep early next year. If there is a single certainty about the election for president in 2000, it is that there is nothing certain. I believe it is in the interest of the members-elect of the 107th Congress that the 106th Congress make preparations for whatever may come to pass. I propose the first step in preparation is to pass a formal resolution of inquiry, which I have proposed today, to have the President direct the Archivist of the United States to provide the House of Representatives with full and complete information about the preparations that agency has coordinated to prepare the Electoral College to complete its constitutional function. We will need that information to know if the functions are faithfully and regularly carried out. I also have requested the Congressional Research Service to provide information on state laws requiring electors to pledge their support for their political party's nominees for President and Vice President of the United States. Although there is precedent in the House and Senate for accepting the vote of a so-called ``faithless elector,'' as cited in the 1969 instance where a North Carolina elector pledged to Nixon voted for Wallace, that was a case that did not involve state law requiring the faithfulness of electors. There is no precedent for counting or excluding the vote of a ``faithless elector'' when that elector's vote is cast in violation of state law. It is important that we in the House of Representatives have a thorough understanding of state law should such a situation arise in January 2001. Mr. Speaker, time is of the essence in preparing Congress for counting the electoral votes in January. I urge the expeditious approval of this resolution of inquiry.

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina

Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt), my colleague, for this motion to instruct. On this Labor HHS appropriations bill or on another pending bill, we must address this issue of school construction. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) and Representative Johnson have offered a very positive proposal, as has the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Etheridge), my colleague, with his particular focus on high-growth areas. Mr. Speaker, I come from one of those high-growth areas, where thousands of students are going to school in hundreds of trailers, and we have to do something about it. Some have portrayed this as some kind of grab for Federal control; that could not be more inaccurate. The decision about when and how and if to build would remain with local authorities, but the Federal Government would be a partner, using tax credits for bond holders to lessen the interest burden on local communities, to stretch those bond dollars further, and to relieve pressures on the local property tax. A survey in my district recently showed that over 90 percent of our students grades K through 3 were going to school in classes of over 18. Almost one-third of the students were going to school in classes of 25 or more. We need to do better than that. I fully expect us to approve a bond issue next Tuesday that will help in my district's largest county, but we have to stay with this challenge. We need to recruit more well-trained teachers, and we need to build and modernize school facilities so that those teachers and their students can do their best work. Vote for this motion to instruct. This Congress should not adjourn before we have addressed the pressing needs in our communities for school construction.