Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes; I would.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Actually, it is worse than what you are presenting. The fact is that we had hundreds of thousands of Americans in the desert in a very vulnerable situation. They were in a hostile environment, even if there were no enemy troops out to kill them; and what happened, what you are talking about, the vast majority of the members of the Democratic Party who were here in this body decided and voted that they should not be permitted to conduct offensive military operations. What, in essence, that vote was all about was saying our troops, vulnerable in the middle of a hostile desert, facing a well-armed foe would not be able to conduct offensive operations but would have to sit there and fry in the desert and take hits, but were not permitted to take offensive action. This is Vietnam times 10, if they would have succeeded. Luckily a number, Democrats crossed over to join almost every Republican.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Right. Almost every Republican voted to side with our troops. You do not put people out in that condition unless you are willing to back them up, and the last thing you want to do is put them out in the middle of the desert as it is going into summertime and make them sit there and make them take the hits for not letting offensive military operations take place. They voted that way, and then when Schwarzkopf came here, when he came here to give a speech to this body after the great victory that he led us to, I remember the Schwarzkopf reception because all of those who voted, not all of them, but so many of those who voted to make him a sitting duck elbowed everybody else out of the way in order to get their picture with General Schwarzkopf. At that time, if you remember, right after we voted to give them the right to conduct offensive military operations, and it became clear that our forces were going to win a magnificent victory, the Democrats who controlled this body at the time, if you remember, Bob, called us back, immediately called us back in order to have a vote which was nothing but a face-saving vote for them at massive expense to the taxpayers to get everybody back here for just a face-saving vote for-- --

Mr. ROHRABACHER. That is right.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I have always believed that there is an honest disagreement on the issue of pro-life and pro-choice and the abortion issue. I personally, until I came to the conclusion that life begins at conception, I was ambivalent about this whole issue. But once you come to a conclusion, once you say to yourself, I honestly believe that we are talking about a baby, once you actually say to yourself this is the conclusion I have come to, and looking at all the facts, then that is it. There is no more decision. If you believe life begins at conception, you cannot permit the killings of babies. Many of our colleagues have an honest disagreement. They have not come to that. Their eyes have not been opened to that. I did not believe that all the time, either. But as soon as I did, then my decisionmaking was past. No moral person could permit a baby to be killed. But a partial birth abortion, even those people who do not believe that life begins at conception, as I now have come to believe, even those people who do not believe that know that a partial birth abortion is a baby that is well along the way.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. This really is tragic that the other side, who is so opposed to any restrictions on abortion, have been able to blind themselves about what this is. There should be no question about this.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Could this be characterized again, and you looked at these things legally, Mr. Cox, and you are a trained lawyer and I am not, I have a journalistic background, but would it be inaccurate to suggest that this was a game plan for a coverup?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I have not read this memo, obviously. I appreciate the gentleman making this available to me and available to the other Members. But just a quick glance shows you that one of the issues red- flagged in this memo is how to deal with questions about the Vincent Foster suicide. One wonders why, if this was just a straight up and down suicide, which we have always, the news media and everyone else wants to just steamroller anyone who has any questions, serious questions about basically some of the facts behind the suicide and the time immediately thereafter. It just notes here that they are taking, red-flagging Vincent Foster, and red-flagging ``obligation to seal the office immediately.'' And, B, ``to cooperate with law enforcement authorities versus protection of privileged material.'' What we have here is basically an outline for something concerning the death of Vincent Foster and the prevention of certain information from getting to the public. It appears to me, and again I would have to study this further to relate this to other facts of the case and see how it really plays together, but it appears to me what they are doing here is trying to set down a legal strategy for justifying things they did to prevent information about Vincent Foster, coming from Vincent Foster's office or about the suicide, from coming to public attention.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I think it is important that those people who are reading this in the Congressional Record or hearing this over C-SPAN should understand that none of the information we are talking about in this memo, or, I might add, many of the other revelations we have discovered, whether it is the FBI files or the billing records we were trying to find for the Rose Law Firm in dealing with this S&L scandal which the First Lady was in some way attached to, these things would not have been ever disclosed to the public, nothing about this would ever be known by the public, except for the fact that the U.S. Congress changed hands. This memo, it appears that this memo is a recognition that the administration recognized very early on that the game was up in terms of hiding everything from the public. That they could have kept all of this information, if the Democrats would have maintained control of the House and the Senate, and there was no way the public would ever have known about this. Which also suggests one other thing, and this is a point I would like to make and the public should understand: The liberal Democrats, who controlled both Houses of Congress and control the executive branch today, have a total disdain for the press. They do not believe that the press can uncover anything. They in fact trusted that the press would not even try to uncover any of these things. It was only when the House of Representatives changed hands and we had the power then to subpoena and ask people under oath questions about these types of misdeeds, that the administration became cautious enough and became frightened enough to try to look at what their potential vulnerabilities were. If we would not have had control of the House, they would not fear a thing from us.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So we can assume through this memo, can we not, that basically the White House and the upper echelons of the White House were red-flagging every possible problem so that they could build contingency plans in case these things came to the public's attention. So when things like the FBI scandal or perhaps even the billing records scandal, the billing records that miraculously appeared in the living quarters of the first family in the White House, that were lost for so long, that perhaps that was not just an accident. Perhaps actually a strategy was developed on how to handle this crisis. Maybe there is another file someplace else that basically details how to handle all of these problems that are red-flagged.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So Chuck Colson, in the Nixon era, when we had a Republican in the White House, was found guilty of mishandling one FBI file and went to prison. And today we know that there were probably up to 900 FBI files in the possession of a person who had been involved with opposition research for the Democratic Party, yet this question does not seem to be asked of the President by the press anymore.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, having our background in the White House, let us examine this angle of the story. What has happened in other White Houses that we could actually compare it to? Did Chuck Colson not have something to do with an FBI file?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And this man had been involved with opposition research during political campaigns prior to this time?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The first figure we were given by the White House was, I think, 39 or something like that, FBI files were involved, they in fact knew that the number that they were giving out at that time was incorrect. This indicates that they had done a study, at least they had red-flagged this a long time before, and that was probably an intentional, I would say, error, or intentional misinformation, when eventually the figure came out of 900 FBI files. So this is indicating that they were looking into that matter. When the number 39 went up to 900 FBI files, this is all part and parcel of something the White House had thought out a long time before.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Let us remember what happened when the information about the Filegate scandal came out originally. Correct me if my memory is faulty here. Did the President not act like he did not know anything about this? In fact, did the President not say: Well, we are only talking about 39 files, and it has something to do with a military fellow that was over here on some sort of a transfer over here to the White House? So, in other words, this was all an act on the part of the senior staff of the White House, perhaps the President.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, so this document seems to indicate that the senior staff of the White House knew there was something wrong and was looking into this situation that would have led them to investigate what was happening with what a year later became, actually more than a year later, became the FBI file scandal. Is that correct?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman would yield for a question, I have not read these documents. But of course both of us worked in the Reagan White House, so we are somewhat familiar with the internal workings of the White House and also the relationship between the White House and the Congress. Would the gentleman answer for me, does this memo in any way indicate that the higher levels of management in the White House, the White House staff, had prior knowledge of the FBI Filegate scandal?

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today we learned the joyous news our colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. McDade], was found not guilty on all charges against him. Joe was one of the most admired and distinguished Members of this body. He is much beloved by his constituents of his Pennsylvania district. Joe, however, was targeted by a prosecutor looking for a trophy. He wanted to put a trophy of Joe on the wall, he wanted to convict a Congressman, a prosecutor intent on bringing Joe down in order to further his own career. Well, as time went on it was clear that Joe was innocent. The prosecutor, however, had to double his efforts or admit that he had wasted the taxpayers' time on a questionable, very questionable prosecution. Today, after over 4 years of brutal attack by an abusive prosecutor, Joe McDade was found innocent of all the charges against him. A jury of his peers heard the evidence and decided that they were groundless. Unfortunately Joe's defense cost him his entire life savings. He has been put through a travail that none of us would like to emulate. Well, we rejoice with Joe, but we also add the fact that he was found innocent, and we stand committed to try to make up at least for the financial loss that he suffered. He has suffered a catastrophe at the hands of an out-of-control prosecutor, a prosecutor gone berserk in order to bring down a public official in order to make himself look good. And what has the cost been to this man personally, a loyal hardworking public servant who committed his entire life to his country and to his constituents? We will welcome Joe back here joyously after this great victory. But today something else happened. Today President Clinton announced that he is reneging on his agreement, as stated by his White House spokesman, to sign a bill which would pay for the legal expenses of Billy Dale. This is a bill that passed this House overwhelmingly, to pay the legal expenses of Billy Dale. Now you may remember who Billy Dale is. Billy Dale was the civil service employee at the White House who ran the travel office. He was fired by the White House early on in order to give basically a relative of the President a chance to take over that office and to give a Hollywood chum of the President a chance at the contracts to give travel services to the media who cover the White House. Billy Dale was fired unjustly, and when there was a large protest about this, the President decided, and whoever it was, that they would not just be satisfied with firing Billy Dale, but they would have to file charges against this man, this guy, this ordinary working man who spent all of his life trying to do his duty, had been in the military. He was there in a bipartisan job in the White House, just a little public servant, somebody, a civil service fellow, and he was fired, and he was then not only fired but prosecuted in order to cover up the wrongdoing and the wrong action that was taken against him. Well this was something that was again confirmed by the fact that Billy Dale, with all of the prosecutorial power of the Federal Government against him, when it was taken to court it took 2 hours, 2 hours for a jury to find that Billy Dale was innocent of all the charges against him. Yet, like Joe McDade, Billy Dale was not a rich man, and Billy Dale's entire life's savings was destroyed by trying to defend himself against a vindictive President who was trying to cover up his own wrongdoing. Now, after the President agreed through his spokesman at the White House that he would sign a piece of legislation, legislation that passed overwhelmingly in this body, to make up at least to some small degree the injustice that was given to this man, Billy Dale, who ran the travel office there at the White House, the President now is reneging on that agreement. The President said, ``Oh, not until all the legal fees of all the people who were being investigated by this Congress are paid are we going to pay for Billy Dale.'' Well let me remind the President, and I guess I cannot speak directly to the President, but let me remind all of you that the President of the United States is talking about people who were not found innocent of crimes, or are being investigated, versus Billy Dale who was found totally innocent of all the charges against him. This is an absolute travesty. President Clinton must stand by his word. Through his spokesman, he committed to sign the bill that would pay Billy Dale's legal expenses and make up for the wrongdoing that his administration was involved in in basically relieving Mr. Dale of his job in the first place and then bringing criminal wrongdoing against Mr. Dale to cover up that tactic against this civil servant. Mr. Clinton has gone too far, he has to keep his agreement with us, and he must keep faith with the values of the American people instead of treating some civil servant like this. It is a disgrace.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 123 and in opposition to the amendment. Those who support bilingualism in the United States of America no doubt are well motivated. They care about immigrants and they care about their fellow man, and thus they want to make it easier for them not to learn how to speak English. Well, my colleagues are not doing anybody a favor by making it easier for them not to learn English. People all over the world are struggling to teach their children English and struggling how to learn English because they know that is the key that unlocks the door to opportunity. Those people who are making it easier for our own people, people who live in this country, not to speak English are doing them a great disservice. I have a large number of Asians in my district, people who are American citizens who are of Asian descent. When they come to me and ask me my advice on how to make sure they can do well and their children can do well, I always advise them: ``Make sure your children learn how to speak English,'' and I have never had one of them disagree with me. I will tell my colleagues this much: Those people in the Hispanic community who are being led down this downward path by people who care about them are going to resent it in the end when their children do not have the opportunity of other Americans because they are locked out of the American system because they cannot speak English. We care. We are the ones who care about every American citizen when we do not give them an easy way out, but we say, ``Become part of America, we love you, we have caring in our heart. That's why you should learn to speak English and that's why we are doing you a disservice by making it easier for you to exist in our society without being able to communicate, without being able to be fully part of the economic system.''

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, President Thomas Jefferson lamented the tendency, even in his day, of politicians to ``generalize and concentrate all cares into one body.'' Throughout our history, from his day to ours, there has been a constant battle between those who would centralize power in Washington and those who struggled to keep it dispersed among the people and in their local communities. I was proud to have worked for several years for a great man who was in his time one of the Nation's most eloquent voices for the Jeffersonian decentralist tradition, Ronald Reagan. During those years some of his most memorable remarks on this theme were penned by my friend John McClaughry, who served as one of Governor Reagan's speechwriters and idea people. When Governor Reagan was elected President, John McClaughry sold his cow to pay for the moving expenses from his log cabin on Kirby Mountain, VT to Washington, where he served as White House Senior Policy Advisor in the first 2 years of the Reagan Presidency. I suppose very few White House Senior Policy Advisors in this century, at least, can make such a statement. John, who has many friends among this body, went home to Vermont in 1982. He was subsequently elected twice by large majorities to the Vermont State Senate, and is now president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a Jeffersonian think tank in Concord, VT. On June 28 he delivered the keynote address to the National Conference on Decentralism sponsored by the E.F. Schumacher Society at Williams College. I include at this point an excerpt of his remarks on that occasion, which I hope Members and others will find interesting and useful. Prairie Grass Rising (By John McClaughry) When this country was first settled by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was little expectation that we would fall prey to indigenous centralized power. That was what most immigrants gladly left behind them in the Old World. The new settlements were small and widely dispersed, on the rim of a great, fruitful and thinly populated continent. There was none of the industrialization that later did so much to promote giant institutions. Indeed, as late as 1783, Mr. Jefferson could write in advocacy of an agrarian America, ``let our workshops remain in Europe''. Another important fact was that Americans were never subject to feudalism. Feudalism calls to mind castles and crusades, jousting and feasting, Ivanhoe and Prince Hal. Shorn of those romantic garments, however, feudalism was a deadly serious business. At its heart was feudal land tenure. Land could not be owned by anyone save the crowned knave called the sovereign. It could only be held, and the holding carried with it all sorts of duties. The most important was to lead armed men to the aid of the superior in the feudal hierarchy when he got into a bloody altercation with another such ruffian, spotted some easy and unprotected pickings elsewhere, or went off to Jerusalem to free the Holy City from the infidels and get in good with the Pope. Admittedly, feudalism was a strong force for social stability and military security in a tempestuous age. Unfortunately, feudalism stifled liberty, opportunity, and self government. By the time the colonies were settled, it was rapidly dying out in England. Thus it never took root on these shores, with the minor--at least to us--exception of the great feudal estates just to the west of where we meet today, in the Hudson valley. Yet another barrier to the rise of centralized power in America was the ideology of what was called in England the Country Party. That system of political beliefs was found in abundance throughout the writings of the great republican and whig leaders of our revolutionary period. The Country Party was bitterly opposed to the beliefs and practices of its nemesis, the Court Party. It detested a monopoly on religion by the established church. It had an absolute horror of the standing national army and conscription. It despised government run banks and the issuance of paper money, which could be manipulated by rich elites to defraud the honest farmer, artisan and mechanic. It hated corporate monopolies conferred by corrupt governments, taxation without representation, and the gang of fawning hangers-on who subsisted as parasites at the Court. It demanded that the people of a community be given the power to appoint their own judges and justices of the peace, and the members of the militia be given the power to elect their own officers. It resisted with vigor every effort of the Crown to restrict the historic liberties of the common people. As Lance Banning has so ably shown in his brilliant book The Jeffersonian Persuasion, this Country Party ideology became the ruling beliefs of the early Jeffersonians. And when Mr. Jefferson came to the Presidency in the Revolution of 1800, he acted on those beliefs. Mr. Jefferson's motto was ``equal rights for all, special privilege for none.'' He cut in half the nation's foreign embassies, laid off half the little army, began to sell off the western lands to homesteaders, repealed all domestic taxes, and abolished the equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Jefferson's first budget dedicated 70% of the government's revenues to paying off the national debt. The amount remaining for current expenses was less than what was spent by the national government in any year since 1793. He sent out his commissars to ``hunt out and abolish multitudes of useless offices.'' Now there was a true decentralist hero! But even before the end of his two terms, Mr. Jefferson had been forced to backtrack from this auspicious beginning. He had to revive the Navy--without Congressional authorization-- to confront the Barbary pirates. He swallowed hard and committed the new nation to the purchase of the huge Louisiana Territory. Nonetheless, thanks to the wise policies of his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, the national debt was in fact paid off completely in the year 1835. But as the new nation grew and prospered in the first half of the 19th century, the forces of centralization gathered steam. With the growth of invention came the rapid growth of industrialization. Industrialization required capital. The result was what came to be called Finance Capital, interwoven, often corruptly, into the fabric of the state and national governments. The greatest impetus toward centralization in America was the War Between the States. This is not the time or place to recount the centralizing effects of President Lincoln's administration, but suffice it to mention conscription, total war against civilian populations, suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary rule over the conquered states, and the nationalization of money and banking. On the positive side of the ledger, the war did destroy the Slave Power, but the victors tragically failed to deliver on the empowering promises they made to the new black citizens of the South. Half a century later the writer Randolph Bourne was to observe pithily, ``War is the health of the State''. It was proven again in his day, when the Wilson administration laid the modern foundation for the all powerful Federal leviathan. That era gave us, again, participation in a bloody war, conscription, the income tax, the final nationalization of money, the sedition act, the interweaving of Big Business and government, and the beginning of J. Edgar Hoover and the ruthless invasion of civil liberties. By the time of the Great Depression the pattern was well established. As Robert Higgs has documented, every crisis called forth more centralized governmental power. This economic crisis, caused largely by grievous mistakes by the new Federal Reserve Board and an oppressively protectionist tariff law, disappeared only with the onset of the greatest war in our history. As government grew, business used its influence to get government to create new private fortunes. The rapacity of finance capital called forth the organization of what has now become Big Labor. In due course the trend toward giantism has given us Big Media, Big Religion, Big Education, Big Medicine, and a big and all powerful Judiciary. To this centralizing trend, dating back a century and a half, there have been many honorable dissenters. The honor roll begins with Jefferson and Jackson, curiously the alleged patron saints of today's Democratic Party. It drew on the genius of such dissimilar men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John C. Calhoun, Fighting Bob Lafollette and Louis D. Brandeis. It included the valiant Loco Focos, the early Populists and Western Progressives, the followers of Henry George, the anarchists and cooperators, the homestead movement and the Southern agrarians. Years ago I remember the thrill of discovering a yellowed copy of the magazine called Free America, the journal of the distributist movement of the late 1930s. Its credo might serve us still today: ``Free America stands for individual independence and believes that freedom can exist only in societies in which the great majority are the effective owners of property and in which group action is democratic. In order to achieve such a society, ownership, production, population and government must be decentralized. Free America is therefore opposed to finance-capitalism, fascism, and communism.'' To that movement from the past must be now be added many newer voices. They include the many local currency movements represented here this weekend; the communitarians of the American Association for Rights and Responsibilities; the various libertarian groups; the ``new Democrats'' of the Democratic Leadership Council and the ``old rightists'' of the Republican Liberty Caucus; the Civil Society Project and the New Citizenship Project; the groups of all races working for neighborhood renewal in our inner cities and rural renewal in the countryside; and even many of the spontaneously formed groups bearing the honorable name of the militia. To these must be added the names of rising political philosophers like Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, and technofuturists like George Gilder and Nicholas Negroponte. Indeed, in the magazines of the cyberworld articles regularly appear showing how the rise of the Internet and readily available cryptography mean the defeat of the institutions of centralized power, just as perestroika laid the groundwork for the rapid dissolution of the late unlamented Soviet Union. That of course is the reason why the government is trying desperately to gain policing authority over the Internet, and to suppress the distribution of crypto systems the government cannot penetrate. When we survey the sweep of American history, it is easy to become despondent about the march of giantism and centralized power. We mourn the inexplicable absence of a bold leaders to force the issue of centralization and decentralization on the national public. Many of us are doubtless disgusted with the major party candidates for President, both of whom seem committed to preserving and enlarging the central power, albeit for different ends. I daresay most of us here today share the sentiments of an out of work politician who said, back in 1978, that the real issue is not the opposition of Left and Right. ``The real issue,'' he said, ``is how to reverse the flow of power to ever more remote institutions, and to restore that power to the individual, the family, and the local community. Millions of Americans, in both the small towns and great cities of this land, are steadily coming to the same conclusion.'' Three years later that man was President of the United States. Although I can think of nothing his administration did to reflect those sentiments, I can assure you that Ronald Reagan sincerely believed in what he said on that radio broadcast. So too, I think, do many millions of Americans subscribe to that incisive sentiment, although they would describe themselves politically in many diverse and conflicting ways. Out in the western part of Kansas, bordered by waving fields of grain, is an old two lane highway. Once it was the great Route 66, America's mightiest highway, the mainline from Chicago to the Golden West. No longer do the eighteen wheelers speed over its pitted concrete; no longer do the Harleys and travel trailers push forward to new adventures. Old Route 66 is abandoned now; the heavy traffic zooms by on I 70 to the north and I 40 to the south. Even the local small town traffic has passed it by. The prairie grass has grown up through the cracks forced open by decades of exposure to sun and wind. But just as that soft, flexible grass has pushed through the hard, heavy concrete under the hot Kansas sun, the spirit of decentralism, often paved over and ignored, always returns to bring about a new beginning. We may not know quite what form it may take, or what will fertilize its growth; but we know it is there, in the hearts and minds of common people everywhere. All overgrown institutions and centralized tyrannies fear it. It can be and is suppressed, but it cannot be destroyed. We are on the side of history, and though it may not always be apparent, we are winning. John McClaughry is chairman of the E.F. Schumacher Society and president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a state public policy think tank in Kirby, Vermont. From 1980 to 1982 he was Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. and President Ronald Reagan. He later served as a state Senator and was the 1992 Republican candidate for Governor of Vermont.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, this is further proof of the existence of God. Obey and Rohrabacher on the same side talking in disagreement with the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Walker. Let me say that I want to commend the gentleman from Wisconsin [Mr. Obey] and the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Foley] for the great leadership they have taken on this issue. They call this program the light water reactor, but it is mighty heavy on the taxpayers, basically to the tune so far of $200 million; $50 million of that went down the drain this year when General Electric decided to pull out of the program. Although this company makes $4 billion a year in after-tax profits, the Department of Energy could not tell us at our authorization hearing of how they expect to get back that $50 million that we gave to this giant company already. Now Westinghouse, which makes $1 billion a year in after-tax profits, says this program will just disappear unless they get another $40 million. If Government subsidies serve any purpose, it should be to help small companies develop technology. It strains anyone's belief that Westinghouse, which has just purchased a TV network for $4 billion and makes millions of dollars off existing contracts with the Department of Energy, would not pay for its own certification if they believed that this was going to make them a profit, that this was a profitable operation and they could actually sell this product and make a profit from it. Mr. Chairman, I believe that nuclear power is clean, safe, and is a positive alternative source of energy for the people of the United States of America. But supporting nuclear power does not mean that we should be supporting wasteful corporate welfare. If these products are as good as advertised, these big corporations will not need all of this money. They will not need a taxpayer subsidy to be successful. Basically we are being told that we must give more money to a huge corporation that can afford to do it on their own or the project will disappear. That shows how much confidence this corporation has. We should not be putting more taxpayers' money down a rathole. Again, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest to my colleagues to vote yes for fiscal responsibility, yes on the Obey-Foley amendment.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I offer amendment No. 10.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, let me just say I will be asking for a recorded vote on this. This goes right to the core of what we are spending our money on. The fact is photovoltaic cells have shown a great deal of progress. We are taking money right out of research and development to put into promotional programs to get people to put hot water heaters on their roofs, things that are outdated, programs that are just heavy with bureaucracy. Let us keep money in research and development; let us make sure that we develop solar energy and do what we are supposed to do with our money rather than feed the bureaucracy. That is what this choice is all about. I would ask my colleagues to back up what the real purpose of our spending is supposed to be for, science and development, and that is spending it to improve better technology.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this amendment addresses the concerns of many Members, including some on my subcommittee, that we should continue to fund renewable energy research. Unfortunately, the Department of Energy has confused the issue by constantly directing funds away from research and into the commericalization and marketing process. I believe the result has been harmful to the future success of the renewable energies technologies that our country will depend upon in the future My amendment would move the program in the right direction by restoring the photovoltaic research program to fiscal year 1996 levels. It would do so without taking money from other science research programs. Instead, it would add $9.2 million to the photovoltaic program as follows: $5.2 million from program direction, $2 million from the renewable energy production incentive, $2 million from the solar appliance R&D account. In the budget this is still listed by its old name, solar building technology research. So first let us talk about bureaucracy. The Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is funded for two appropriations bills, both energy and water and interior. All together, program direction has $48 million of the total appropriations to run a $700 million program. By comparison, energy research operates a $1.4 billion program with only $30 million in program direction. This amendment would still leave the office with $43 million for this purpose. Why is this number inflated, one might ask? Well, one reason is that this office has become the repository for the Clinton reelection team. Since 1994, the political appointees have nearly doubled from 8 to 15. By comparison, energy research, fossil energy and nuclear energy have 4 apiece, 4 political appointees apiece. Let us put these people back on the campaign payroll and use taxpayer funds for solar energy research. The renewable energy production incentive is nothing more than a handout to utilities and, basically, we are trying to basically convince them to use alternative energy sources. But when it comes right down to it, what we are talking about is a handout to utilities. The solar building technologies program includes many small programs, but its primary purpose is to promote the use of solar hot water heaters. This is a pet project of the solar industry lobbying group, and no wonder it is. The Department of Energy basically extends $1.7 million this year. Basically of that, $265,000 of it goes to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Well, Mr. Chairman, every dime that is not spent on these promotion programs goes to research programs, and every dime that goes to promotion programs comes out of the hide of research. So when we are talking about the photovoltaic program, it is a success story. Since 1976 the cost per kilowatt hour has dropped from $5 to 16 cents. If solar energy is to become a real alternative, the cost must continue to go down. Spending scarce funds which should be going to research on promotional programs may be great for the lobbyists, but it does nothing to help renewable energy. It is also wrong to use other science programs as a cash cow for basically renewable energy, as the Schaefer amendment does. My amendment is the only one that would not cut one research program to fund another. If my colleagues want to support true solar energy research without cutting other science programs, one should vote yes on this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.