John Shadegg

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. If that is true at the State level, why do we not make America a supermajority Nation for future tax increases? Why not take that principle which has worked at the State level and adopt it at the Federal level, so that we promote further economic growth across this Nation because we make it slightly harder for the U.S. Congress to raise taxes yet one more time. We force the Members of this Congress, you and I and the gentleman in the Speaker's chair who has joined us in voting tomorrow for this, make it a little bit more important that we look a little bit more carefully at how we spend the dollars. It is worth noting, many people across America are very, very upset at the General Accounting Office audit which came out just a few days ago showing that our government is wasting massive amounts of dollars. Indeed, those numbers show that in some instances we cannot trace where the money has gone. We cannot find equipment that was supposed to have been purchased. We are literally kind of allowing money to slip through the hands of the Federal Government and not even get real value added. That should offend every American taxpayer. That should be, I hope, the driving force which puts this amendment over the top tomorrow. Because if we make it just a little harder to raise taxes, we will have to be just a little bit more careful, hopefully a lot more careful about how we spend those hard-earned dollars that we take out of the pockets of the American people. I compliment the gentleman. I am happy to chat with him about other beneficial aspects of this amendment. I do think that it is important to emphasize over and over again, 75 percent of Republicans favor it, 63 percent of Democrats across America favor it.

Mr. SHADEGG. That is absolutely correct. Now we just need to make sure that those Americans who feel like communicating their sentiments, hopefully 75 percent of all Republicans across the country, 63 percent of all Democrats across the country, will call and let their Member of Congress know that they think that it would be a good idea to vote for tax limitation.

Mr. SHADEGG. Well, I have had a number of people engage in debate. In Arizona we debated this measure. The opponents of it predicted dire consequences. They said that this was an irresponsible measure, that we should never have a supermajority requirement, that we had always just had a simple majority. They even go so far, and you may have heard this in debate yourself, as to say it is un-American to require anything other than a simple majority. And yet the Founding Fathers when they drafted our Constitution inserted a number of supermajority requirements, and when you combine the supermajority requirements that are already in our Constitution, such as to ratify a treaty, with others that have been added----

Mr. SHADEGG. Or to convict a President in impeachment proceedings. If you add those supermajority provisions or requirements that were in our original Constitution with those that have been added to the Constitution by amendment, there are today already in our Constitution 10 different provisions which require not a simple majority, not 50 percent plus one, but a supermajority. And if it is appropriate in those circumstances, you and I are here tonight arguing that it should be appropriate in this one where we actually reach into people's pockets and take the productive efforts of their labor out of their pockets and give them to someone else to spend.

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a couple of points that I think are important and I will be emphasizing tomorrow in the debate, but in case anyone is out there listening tonight and not able to listen to the debate, one of them is an intellectual point that addresses a concern that some people have about, well, is it appropriate to insert a supermajority requirement in the Constitution, and the other is just a practical argument. You know, I do not know if we have a large chart of this, but I have a small chart that I can hold up here and hopefully we can focus on. In 1950 the Federal tax bite was $1 out of every $50. So in 1950, when I was a young boy growing up in Arizona, if my dad earned a hundred dollars, the Federal Government got two of those dollars. He had to send $2 in for every $100 he earned. By 1996 that figure had changed rather dramatically. By 1996 it had become not $1 in taxes to the Federal Government out of every $50 earned but $1 in taxes out of every $4 earned. So today, 1996, or at least in 1996 and it has gotten worse since then, if you earned $100, you did not send in $2 you sent in $25, one fourth, to the Federal Government alone. That is a staggering increase in the tax burden on the American people, and I think it explains why it is appropriate to take the vehicle of amending the Constitution and amend it at this particular time. We have already talked about the fact that Federal taxes are at their highest level that they have ever been in American history and placing a huge burden on the American people. But I now want to turn to kind of a practical side of this issue, and I actually like to quote often the quote which hopefully the camera can focus on at the front of the room. John Randolph, the author of this quote, was a Member of this body, United States House of Representatives, early in our Nation's history. He served in the United States House and then ultimately was elected to the United States Senate and served in the United States Senate.

Mr. SHADEGG. I think that is exactly right.

Mr. SHADEGG. John Randolph said, as that quote reads, and I want people to read it with me and think about it, but he said at one point, talking about government and about the power of the Congress, that ``It has been said that one of the most delicious of privileges is that of spending other people's money.'' One of the most delicious of privileges is that of spending other people's money. What he was talking about is the power of government through taxation to take other people's money, and then for this Congress and Members of it to enjoy the privilege of spending it. Well, I reflected on that quote back when I discovered it in the debate in Arizona over a tax limitation amendment, and about the point he was making. And the sad truth is that the privilege of taking other people's money through taxation and then being able as a government to spend it I believe has become abused. I want to talk a little bit about a practical experience I had which led me to support the tax limitation amendment in Arizona and leads me to fight passionately for the adoption of the tax limitation amendment at the national level. For years in Arizona I worked in connection with the Arizona legislature. I was not a member of the legislature but I worked for the Arizona attorney general's office. And members of the Arizona legislature would call me over to their office, and this happened hundreds of times in my career at the Arizona attorney general's office, and a member of the legislature would call me over to his or her office, and they would either have a letter from a constituent or they would have a constituent sitting there in the room. And the letter or the constituent would be making the case that there was a very serious problem, even sometimes a heart-rending problem, a sad problem, a tragic problem, somebody doing without, somebody suffering, somebody in need. And the legislator member of the Arizona legislature with whom I would be talking would say, ``Look, my constituent has identified this very serious problem, people in need. Can we solve this problem? Could we pass a bill and appropriate some money to fix this problem? Could we create a program to fix this problem? Could we take the resources of government to solve this very tragic problem?'' And the conversation occurred hundreds of times in my career at the attorney general's office, and of course the answer always was that we could, of course, pass such legislation, we could make an appropriation, we could create a program, we could spend money. What occurred to me is that in those conversations there was always one person missing. There was always the constituent who wanted the program. And it was invariably a worthy program, something that you know almost all Americans and all Arizonans would say, ``There really is a need there. We need to take care of that.'' And there was a legislator, a member of that legislative body, like we here in the Congress, with the power to write a bill and make an appropriation and create a program and spend the money to solve the problem. But the person missing in those discussions, and they were missing in every single discussion I ever watched, was the taxpayer, the individual who would have to foot the bill to solve that problem, who would have to pay the tax bill to pay for that appropriation. The taxpayer, the man or woman, the young boy or girl starting their first job at a McDonalds or a Burger King who would have to have wages taken out, taxes taken out of their wages to pay for that program, they were never in the room. They were not a part of the conversation. There was always an empty chair where that person could not speak up and say, ``Yes, this is a serious problem. Yes, maybe we ought to think about it, but we have to consider where is that money going to come from.''

Mr. SHADEGG. There is no doubt about it. As the gentleman well knows, whenever you come to the floor and propose a constitutional amendment, one of the reticences, one of the resistance factors you face, is that people say we should not tamper with the Constitution lightly. We really ought to think about these issues gravely and seriously, about whether it is appropriate to amend the Constitution. We ought to consider the consequences of our conduct. Is a constitutional amendment really necessary? If this was such a great idea, how come the Founding Fathers did not do it? I know, because you have carried this amendment on this floor many times in the past, you face that argument where people say, no, if it was necessary the Founding Fathers would have put a tax limitation amendment in the original Constitution. They would not have said you could raise taxes with a simple majority. They would have said you could raise them only with a supermajority, so you must be wrong. We do not need this. This is a radical idea and bad idea. When I tell the story, if I could just make this point, about that empty chair of the taxpayer who is not there in the conversation, I want to make the point that when we enact new programs, we never talk to the taxpayer, and the role of government is so dramatically different than it was at the founding of this country. The first and most important difference is that we did not have an income tax. I think all students of American government know we did not have an income tax. We could not even have contemplated passing the kind of taxes and tax burden.

Mr. SHADEGG. Until we amended the Constitution with the 16th amendment. So we did not even contemplate reaching into people's pockets time and time and time again with ever-increasing income taxes to pass that money on to some government program to solve a problem. But there are dozens of other differences in the role of the Federal Government today. I firmly believe that the Enumerated Powers Doctrine says that this Congress can only do a certain limited number of things. There are actually only 18 enumerated powers in the U.S. Constitution. Yet this Congress does a whole lot of things that it is not supposed to do under that doctrine. The 10th amendment says you are not supposed to do any of those things, but rather those authorities belong to the States and to the people. Yet the 10th amendment and the Enumerated Powers Doctrine have almost been completely read out of the Constitution. While I regret that, those are the facts. That means that it is appropriate to amend the Constitution and to say wait; before you raise taxes yet one more time, we are going to make the bar a little higher. We are going to say instead of doing it with a simple majority and stealing that money from the American people yet one more time at a higher rate than today, when it is as high as it has ever been in our Nation's history, you cannot do it with a simple majority. You have to have a broad consensus represented by a two-thirds majority. That is why I think this amendment at this point in time is appropriate and is not inconsistent with what the Founding Fathers intended.

Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman will yield quickly on that point, there are a lot of people who are my constituents who say Congressman, why just two-thirds? I would rather it was three-fourths or five-sevenths. They want it to be as high a fraction as possible. I think this is a reasonable figure, and we need to strive very hard to get support for it and encourage our colleagues to vote for it.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) for yielding me this time. I rise in strong support of the gentleman's amendment, and I want to make the point that the people get this issue back home. The editorial in the Mesa Tribune today: ``Pork barrel bribery. Transit bill is out of whack.'' The editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: ``Highway robbery.'' Today's front page Arizona Republic: ``Pork deal raw.'' The answer is this bill breaks every promise we made when we got here. We came here and said we would not do business as usual, but this bill has us spending money the same way money used to be spent. It is pure and simple bribery. Mr. Chairman, if we allow Members of Congress to control how the money is spent in this bill, why not allow Members of Congress to control how the money is spent in every bill? This is the kind of project where it is pork by definition because of the way the support was built. The truth is these decisions need to be made on merit. They need to be based on the real need for these transportation projects. They should not be such that one State with a powerful committee chairman gets hundreds of millions of dollars more, even billions of dollars more than another State which has no Member on the committee. That is the way Washington used to work and under this bill, it is sadly the way this bill still works.

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is not about roads. We desperately need roads. My State of Arizona is a growing State and it has great need for roads. But I rise in support of the Spratt amendment. It is a matter of process. This amendment sets the cart right. The bill, as it currently is proceeding before Congress, has the cart before the horse, simply put. As a matter of budget discipline, we cannot pass this bill at this time without grave consequences. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, came before the Committee on the Budget, of which, and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) are members and said, whatever you do in this Congress, you must not break the caps. He did not say you must not break them by a large amount. He said you must not break the caps. The signal you will send to this economy is dynamic. If you break the caps at all, you will destroy the discipline you have established. This amendment will allow us the time to get the budget figures in mid month, to look at where we are and to do the process in an orderly fashion. The bill, in its current form, spends $26 billion above the budget caps. We have to find offsets that are nowhere in this current legislation. It includes demonstration projects which, as we can see by the debate, are highly controversial. We need to identify those offsets and to proceed in a regular order. And if this bill were so correct and so fitting within the current figures, why does it spend $30 billion more than we authorized just 10 months ago in the balanced budget agreement? I support the amendment.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. That is my understanding.

Mr. SHADEGG. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. SHADEGG. I urge the rejection of the amendment as being an amendment that would set this legislation so far back as to make it nearly meaningless, and I urge the adoption of the bill as proffered by the committee.

Mr. SHADEGG. Certainly. To return to my point, Mr. Chairman, I think first of all, it is important for Members to understand that the language of the amendment is already the language of existing law. We have already told agencies to establish a policy or program under appropriate circumstances for the waiver of civil fines. That language, I think if now reenacted, would make this bill almost meaningless, and I think it is important for Members to understand that this bill, as written and as introduced and brought here by the committee, covers first-time paperwork violations. And it seems to me quite clear that when you understand that we are leaving in place the ability to punish the underlying substantive offense, the underlying violation of the law, and when we are only talking therefore about the paperwork violation, that is, the failure to file the paperwork from which one might discover the underlying violation, I have a difficult time seeing the problem and a difficult time accepting an amendment which would gut that. But beyond that, it is very important to understand that what this legislation does is it applies to first-time violations only. When we think of the businesses across America, no business can start business and exist and be profitable with the heavy paperwork burdens they have, and have to file literally dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of these forms, and there was plenty of testimony before the committee about the paperwork burden. But the point here is that for any kind of a violation that might reveal a pattern of conduct that might result in harm, a one-time violation is not going to cause a serious problem. The form is going to have to be filed over and over and over again. This simply says that for the first violation there should not be a penalty, and it only says that in certain circumstances. If health and safety is still implicated, then there can be a penalty. I will remind the Members of the discussion earlier about the gentleman who was visited at his restaurant. He was missing one form. The form was a data sheet about the safety of something in his restaurant. It was a soap in his restaurant, not a harmful product. He was fined $1,000 by OSHA. During the OSHA visit, his store manager called the company and had the data sheet, material safety data sheet, faxed to the office. It was there within that period of time, there within a matter of minutes, and OSHA still imposed the $1,000 fine. Mr. Chairman, I think that makes no sense, and I think this is a reasonable piece of legislation on which we have tried to work with the other side in a bipartisan fashion, and they have proffered language which has improved it. I urge the rejection.

Mr. SHADEGG. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, it appears we have different interpretations, as occasionally happens. My understanding from the staff on our side is that because we get an IRS deduction for the establishment of a benefit plan which complies with ERISA, that everything that is required to comply with that and that is in order to get the benefit, one is required to do these certain things. That is, in fact, a provision of the IRS Code brought into this under ERISA and that it would apply.

Mr. SHADEGG. Certainly I yield to the gentleman from North Dakota.

Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman will yield further, it is my understanding and perhaps we can get a clarification from staff, that the exemption of ERISA from the provisions; that is, of all the IRS code and therefore of ERISA, takes care of the specific issue that he is raising.

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's comments but I want to ask the gentleman, is he aware that there is a specific exemption which covers all IRS regulations and all IRS paperwork requirements and that as a result of that exemption, ERISA, the act that he has just been discussing, is exempted; that is, the paperwork violation about which he is concerned which comes under ERISA is not covered; that is, is exempted from this provision?

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

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Kucinich amendment and in support of the legislation as introduced. Let me make it clear why I feel that is appropriate. Under existing law, SBREFA as we have passed it, the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act, which was passed in 1996, the language in this proposed amendment, is already present law. That is to say, in the amendment now being offered, any agency which regulates small business would be required to establish a policy or program in appropriate circumstances for first-time violations of a paperwork requirement. The existing law, a copy of which I am holding here in section 223(a), already says that all agencies are required, and I quote, to establish a policy or program under appropriate circumstances for the waiver of civil penalties. The requirement that is embodied in this amendment is already in existing law.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. With all due respect to my colleague on the other side, I am afraid he does not read carefully the agreement which occurred last year. The legislation which addressed this issue was an appropriations bill. It cannot authorize. Appropriations acts cannot do that. In the appropriation bill, it said specifically, no funds in this legislation may be used to implement or field test a national test. But I think listening to the debate, it is clear that we are missing some issues here. Some of us believe strongly in education but strongly oppose a national test. Let me tell my colleagues why. Because if they go across America, as I have done and others have done on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, they discover that schools work where parents and teachers get involved, where they have possession of the curriculum, not where the curriculum is dictated by a national test. But, for purposes of this debate, that is not even the issue. We can indeed, with the passage of this legislation, debate whether or not a national test dictated from Washington is a good idea. This bill lets the Congress do that. This bill gives us a chance to get into the merits of a debate of whether a national test crammed down the throats of the American people is the best thing for the American children. I urge the passage of this bill.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. I do have it here. That is exactly the point. I want to raise a couple of comments. First of all, my colleague from Colorado is exactly right. It is not that we oppose the ability of people in Arizona or Colorado to compare how our schools are doing with other schools in Michigan or California. And there are tests to do that right now. Two of the best that we all have heard of are the Iowa test of basic skills, which I know I took and my children take, and the Stanford test. Those are independent, privately written national tests which enable us to compare how schools in our neighborhoods are doing or our States are doing with schools halfway across the country. There are tests to do that and there should be. We support that. But as my colleague has pointed out, the Clinton proposal is not that we just have the ability to compare. It is that we have the one Federal, correct, written-in-Washington, D.C., written-inside-the- Department-of-Education test and that is where it gets quite scary.

Mr. SHADEGG. There is no doubt about it. It is a wonderful, feel good math test. My colleague on the other side [Senator Ashcroft] who is fighting this fight against national testing, points out that it is really the rain forest test, because they ask children more questions about rain forests than they do about their ability to do math. This, in fact, is the national test in both reading and math as proposed by the national test panel proposed and established by President Clinton. The test is already written and, by the way, my colleague said being talked about by the Clinton administration, the sad truth is, it is not just being talked about, it is about to be implemented. They are ready to go. But the wonderful thing about this test is that you discover, when you examine it, that in the eighth grade test for math, there is not, I want to say this carefully and slowly so people follow it, there is not one single question which requires eighth graders to do a math computation with a pen and pencil. At no point in the eighth grade math test already written is there a single question where they are to do a multiplication problem with a pen and pencil or a division problem with a pen and pencil. There is not one single question. Why is that? It appears that one of the people on this committee, a Mr. Steven Leinwand, a consultant to the Connecticut Education Department, has written a paper and his school of thought has been adopted by the National Association of Mathematics Teachers. And his school of thought is as follows. It is, he writes, downright dangerous to teach children that 6 times 7 is 42. It is dangerous, he says, to teach them basic computational math skills. Why, you say, does he consider it dangerous? He says it is dangerous, and I quote, because it will annoint the few to master these subjects and, quote, cast out the many who fail to do so. First of all, the pessimism in that statement is monumental. I think American children can learn math calculations and do learn them every day. But what he is fundamentally saying is that because some children may not master the multiplication tables, the division tables, may not be able to do a complicated division problem or a complicated multiplication problem, they will feel bad. And we do not want them to feel bad so we should not give them a test that requires them to master those skills. That is in the national math test which the Clinton administration has written and which will be imposed on America if the Congress does not stop it. It needs to do that next week, and we need, really, the help of our friends in the U.S. Senate; 295 of our colleagues in the House here voted to block national testing as proposed by Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, the House wants to compromise on this issue and let a committee be appointed to write a single national test.