Paul Sarbanes

Mr. SARBANES

Mr. SARBANES. If the Senator will yield, you have it in section 5 to do a waiver for a military conflict you require a whole number of each House.

Mr. SARBANES. Either in the Senate or the House.

Mr. SARBANES. How could you have had it? Those votes could not qualify under your amendment. Is that correct? Neither of those votes qualifies under your amendment.

Mr. SARBANES. Certainly.

Mr. SARBANES. Speaker Rayburn walked the Halls of the Congress. I am now quoting this article. Rayburn put it off for one day out of respect for a Republican Member who had died over the weekend. I must say those were the days when there was a degree of civility that prevailed in the workings of the Congress. With the President out of town meeting secretly in New Foundland with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to frame the Atlantic Charter, Rayburn spent the additional day roaming the corridors of Capitol Hill trying to win over recalcitrant Democrats and wavering Republicans. His lobbying style was like the man himself, honest, direct and intensely personal without a hint of intimidation. The debate went on for 10 hours in the House. Finally at 8:05 p.m. the reading clerk began calling the roll. I reach back into history to try to bring you a real, live example.

Mr. SARBANES. The Senator from New Hampshire is my dear friend. But how can the Senator stand here and say, ``We easily would have gone somewhere else and found the money'' when at the time, on the very issue itself without that constraint, without that additional complication in terms of getting support for the measure, without the further complication of the dynamics of trying to achieve a majority vote, when at the time they only passed it by one vote, 203 to 202? That was the vote.

Mr. SARBANES. My dear friend.

Mr. SARBANES. How do you know they would have done that?

Mr. SARBANES. It is 261. Are you telling me that a good number of the 202 who voted against it then would have voted for it, so you would have had 261 votes? Where are you going to come up with these? You barely got 203 votes. It almost lost. It passed by one vote. And now you are telling me, ``They did not have the three-fifths requirements then. If they had the three-fifths requirement somehow, miraculously they would have gotten the other votes in order to do it when they voted against it at the time?'' They almost beat it. They almost beat it on a straight up or down vote: 203 to 202. And now you are telling me, ``Well, they did not have the three-fifths requirements. If they would have had the three-fifths requirement, namely that he had to get 261 votes then a big chunk of these 202 who voted against it then, to prevent it from happening, would have switched over and voted for it?'' Is that what the Senator is telling me? I cannot believe it.

Mr. SARBANES. It is 261.

Mr. SARBANES. Will the Senator yield on that? Is the Senator telling me that on a measure that passed the House 203 to 202, that if at the time there had been a three-fifths requirement of the entire membership of the House of Representatives--which would be 261 votes?

Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I say to my colleague we are just being given these kind of bland assurances. ``Surely this would happen. No question this would be done. It is common sense that we would respond.'' Yet I am giving you a real, live, historical example. There was nothing hypothetical about it, nothing conjectural about it. It happened at a critical time in American history. We were faced in the Congress with a very fateful decision. We are talking literally months before Pearl Harbor. Literally months. And the Congress was faced with this difficult decision. The Congress reacted, I think, appropriately. But by very narrow margins. And neither of the margins in the Senate nor the House are adequate to meet the requirements contained in your proposal, which only dramatizes the point that the Senator from West Virginia has made so effectively here this morning about the danger of going against the Founding Fathers, against Madison and Hamilton, and writing in these supermajority requirements. The real danger to the Republic is that you will not be able to deal with crisis situations when they emerge. The Senator says, ``Oh, no, we will take care of those. Do not worry about it. Do not worry about it. Surely we would respond.'' I am saying to the Senator: I am giving an example right out of history where we, under his standards, would not have taken care of it. Fortunately the standard was the one laid down by the founders, the one that the Senator from West Virginia propounded here. In other words, we decide things by majority. We were able to address the situation. But with your provisions here that situation could not have been addressed. It is clear on its face.

Mr. SARBANES. If I could say to my dear friend from Utah, the Founders specifically discussed this. They debated whether the quorum should be more than a majority of the body and they rejected the notion that it should be more than a majority. They said then that you would prevail on a measure by majority of those present and voting.

Mr. SARBANES. Let me bring the Senator back to the very real-life problem that I wish to discuss with him based on a very clear example in history, because what the Senator has just done is what is consistently done here. If we try to focus, in a tough-minded way, on a particular problem they say, ``Oh, well, don't worry about it; somehow or other it is going to be taken care of.'' Now, I want the Senator to come with me for just a moment or two and to look at some history, and I want to read from this article that appeared in the summer of 1991. Fifty years ago last Monday, on August 12, 1941, House Speaker Sam Rayburn saved the draft from legislative defeat and kept the U.S. Army intact to fight a war that was only 4 months away. The reason I am citing this story is because we are constantly told that if we have an emergency situation, we will get this waiver. The Senator from New Hampshire has just told me we are going to get a three-fifths waiver. He left the section I was focusing on that required a majority of the whole number, namely you had to actually have 218 votes in the House or actually have 51 votes in the Senate, and he has now gone to three-fifths of the whole number. So you have to have 290 votes in the House and 60 votes in the Senate in order to address the crisis. He says if we have a crisis, we obviously will address it. I am going to point to a lesson in history in which I think people would now agree we had a crisis that had to be addressed. We did address it. But if we had been operating with these requirements, either one of them, we would not have addressed it because we would not have gotten the vote that was necessary to do it. Let me read on from the article. The margin of victory was a single vote. And the battle could have been lost as easily as won except for Rayburn's personality and leadership and mastery of parliamentary procedure. If Rayburn had failed, the Army stood to lose about two-thirds of its strength and three-fourths of the officer corps. At issue was whether to extend the 12-month service obligation of more than 600,000 draftees already in the Army, thousands of others being inducted every day, and the active-duty term of several thousand National Guardsmen and Reservists who had been called up for 1 year. Without an extension, the obligations of both the draftees and the Guardsmen and Reservists would begin expiring in the fall. The United States had adopted its first peacetime draft during the previous summer after weeks of heated and acrimonious debates in both congressional Chambers. The article then goes on to point out: Although the legislation limited the draftees' terms of service to 12 months, it provided that the President could extend the period indefinitely if Congress declared that the national interest is imperiled. On July 21, 1941, with the prospect of war increasing, Roosevelt acted. In a Special Message to Capitol Hill, he asked Congress to declare a national emergency that would allow the Army to extend the service of draftees, guardsmen and reservists for whatever period the legislators deemed appropriate. Despite the measure's unpopularity and strong lobbying by isolationist forces, the Senate approved a joint resolution on August 7, declaring the existence of a national emergency and authorizing the President to extend the service of most Army personnel by 18 months. The vote was 45 to 30, I say to my good friend from New Hampshire; 45 to 30. That vote would not have qualified inadequate. You needed 49 now you would need 51, if you did it by the whole number, or 60 if you are doing the three-fifths. I am now quoting the article. In the House it was a different story. The Republican leadership viewed opposition to draft extension as a political opportunity too good to ignore. Others had their own reasons for opposing the measure. It then discusses what Rayburn went through, and of course the final vote was 203 to 202. Mr. President, I say to the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, 203 votes is not enough under the provisions of the proposal that he is now seeking to place in the Constitution of the United States. So, here we have a real situation. This is not hypothetical. This was a critical issue. It was carried under the provisions of the Founding Fathers, which the very distinguished Senator from West Virginia has been expounding. Under the provisions of the Founding Fathers, the Congress was able to make a decision. You had a majority in both Houses for it, 45 to 30 in the Senate, 203 to 202 in the House of Representatives. They addressed the situation. Under this proposal, we would not have been able to address that crisis.

Mr. SARBANES. That underscores my point even more. If the Senator's answer to me is you can waive it on a three-fifths vote, then in neither of these instances in the Senate or the House for the extension of the draft did they come anywhere close to the three-fifths vote. They did not have the three-fifths vote.

Mr. SARBANES. By a three-fifths vote.

Mr. SARBANES. By a three-fifths vote.

Mr. SARBANES. I am focusing on the section 5 provision, and its supermajority requirement of the majority of the whole number of each House.

Mr. SARBANES. This requirement requires the supermajority in the sense that it required that it be adopted by a majority of the whole number of each House. You see, this is very important, and I am glad we are having this discussion because it is important to know exactly what this resolution provides and how it would work in real-life situations. There is a great tendency to just brush it all aside, and in fact I think this exchange illustrates that because I am not now focusing on the three- fifths requirement. That is a different issue.

Mr. SARBANES. You can waive it?

Mr. SARBANES. I am addressing a situation in which we are not actually engaged in military conflict, but we want to take actions to forestall a military conflict. Can you waive it?

Mr. SARBANES. I know the Senator from New Hampshire is reading the report, but it does not really answer the question. The first provision says that Congress may waive it for any fiscal year in which a declaration of war is in effect. I am addressing a situation in which a declaration of war is not in effect.

Mr. SARBANES. No, no, I yield to the Senator to respond to my question. The question is on the national security issue. The question is specifically addressed to section 5 of House Joint Resolution 1, and it specifically goes to the question of whether you could have a waiver where we were not engaged in military conflict but needed to take action in order to address a potential military conflict.

Mr. SARBANES. Certainly.

Mr. SARBANES. I ask the Senator. It says, if engaged in military conflict, you may waive it. Suppose you are not engaged in military conflict but you need to prepare for a possible engagement in military conflict; you need to take actions which will cost money, which will unbalance your budget, in order to deter the potential of a forthcoming military conflict. Can you waive that under this provision?