John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. In just a short time I think we have shown that there are lots of objections to the bill before us. First of all, at a time when our trade deficit is reaching record highs, this bill, H.R. 2644, is totally one-sided. It lowers tariffs, it lifts quotas on apparel and six or seven different kinds of imports from 26 countries in the Caribbean and Central America, and it does so unilaterally. These countries are not required to make in return any trade concessions whatsoever to the United States. Second, this is a blanket grant of trade benefit to these CBI countries without any sanctions, without even any questions being asked about sweatshops or child labor or whether or not the country in question cooperates with the United States when it comes to interdicting drugs, money laundering and dealing with corrupt practices and corrupt customs, and those problems are endemic in some of these countries. Why do we do this? Why do we make these unilateral concessions? All in the name of fixing a nonexistent problem. Before NAFTA, the CBI countries exported, this is volume, 1.39 billion square meter equivalents of clothing to the United States. Since NAFTA, 1996, the CBI countries increased their exports to 2.26 billion SMEs, square meter equivalents. Before NAFTA, CBI imports accounted for 18.4 percent of all apparel imports into the United States. Since NAFTA, CBI imports have increased to 23.4 percent of all the apparel imports coming into the United States. They have got a huge share of our market. These countries are not suffering from NAFTA, far from it. They are shipping us more clothing, more apparel than ever.

Mr. SPRATT. That is indeed the consequence of this and other legislation, no question about it. Slipping this bill through under suspension makes it appear to be uncontroversial or inconsequential. The point I am trying to make is that H.R. 2644 will have a greater impact on the U.S. apparel industry and U.S. apparel workers than NAFTA ever had. Because of rules, long-standing rules known as item 807 and item 807(a), cloth that is cut and made in the United States can be sewn and assembled under clothing in a CBI country. Then when the clothing is reexported to the United States, the duties imposed when it comes back into our country are only imposed on the value added in the CBI country. Because of this concession, which has existed for a long time, the CBI countries now export to the United States more than twice as much apparel as Mexico, whether we measure it by volume in SMEs or by value. In 1996, the CBI countries shipped the U.S. 2.26 billion square meter equivalents of clothing. Mexico shipped us 1.1 billion square meter equivalents. Let me also comment as the ranking member on the Committee on the Budget on the revenue losses, the budgetary impacts of this bill. It results in substantial revenue losses. To get around these revenue losses and the pay-go rules, this bill uses a low-ball estimate from CBO, then it uses a contrived accounting technique. Mr. Speaker, all we have is the choice to vote this bill up or down, and I say we should vote it down.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Hawaii to comment on the lack of sanctions and labor provisions.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to express my concerns about two provisions in the conference report on H.R. 1119, the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998. Although I was a member of the conference, I was not a conferee for these provisions and was not aware of their final resolution until the completion of the conference report. Sections 522 and 523 of H.R. 1119 mandates that the Secretary of Defense submit a plan to eliminate 4,350 nondual status military technicians. These are Federal civilian employees working for the National Guard and the Army Reserve, often in administrative and administrative support positions, who would not be required to report with their reserve units during a deployment. The bill directs the Secretary to recommend ways to convert the status of these employees if it is determined that their positions can not be eliminated or filled by dual status technicians. In many cases, these employees fill support positions which would be subject to high turnover if filled by dual status employees. Current nondual status employees have provided stability to these positions, often at low rates of pay. This provision appears to prejudge the need to eliminate these employees before it has been established whether such a move will provide a savings to the Government, or will improve national security. Further, I am troubled that this provision gives the Secretary of Defense no direction on the need to provide for the protection of pension and other employee benefits in the conversion process, especially for those employees whose length of service would reasonably entitle them to expect such benefits. Second, I am sorely disappointed in the conference reports resolution in regards to a Senate amendment which would have elevated the Chief of the National Guard Bureau to a four-star ranking and made the Chief a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS]. Although I did not support putting the Guard chief of the JCS, I do believe that there is currently a serious problem in resourcing for the Guard which can be improved by elevating the Chief of the Guard. I supported giving the Chief a fourth star and appointing him to the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee [JROC]. Sec. 901, H.R. 1119 instead creates two new assistants to the Chairman of the JCS: one for National Guard Matters and one for Reserve Matters. Two 2-stars do not make a four star, nor does it solve the real budget problem within the Army. When I and several of my colleagues wrote the Chairman of the National Security Committee to urge the inclusion of legislation that would elevate the Chief of the National Guard Bureau from 3-star to 4-star general and place him on the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee, I believe then, as I believe now, that this is the right thing to do. There are those critics that argue that making the Chief of the National Guard a four-star would be disruptive to the total force policy or is not justified. I disagree, because there is precedence, just look at the Marine Corps, the commandant of the Marine Corps at one point in time was a three-star general and did not have a seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Marine Corps to my knowledge are to this day part of the Navy. The Marine Corps to this day is a shining example of the total force concept, fully integrated across the spectrum and fully funded. Another example is the Coast Guard, while not part of the Department of Defense in peacetime, they support the Navy in times of war. Currently, the Coast Guard has a four-star admiral and four three- star vice admirals, for a $3.8 billion force of more than 75,000 active and reserve Coast Guard members across the country. The Coast Guard does a tremendous job of supporting maritime law and drug enforcement, maritime transportation support and disaster assistance in their domestic role. Now let's compare this to the National Guard. The National Guard has a three-star lieutenant general for $10 billion force of more than 466,000 full-time and part-time members in the Army and Air National Guard who are performing vital missions throughout the country and the world right this minute. This in itself is justification for the National Guard to have a four-star, not to mention that the National Guard has 54 percent of the Army's combat force structure and is located in over 2,700 communities in all States and territories. Finally, concerning sec. 411, end strengths for Selected Reserve, where the Army National Guard was reduced in endstrength by 5,000 spaces. I do not support reducing the Army National Guard endstrength. The bottomline here is that the Army National Guard is the only service component, active or reserve, to be reduced below the President's budget request. The conference report cites the Army off-site of June 5, 1997 as the reason for reducing the endstrength of the Army National Guard. As I understand the results of the off-site, the active Army should have been reduced by 5,000 spaces as well, but that was not included in this bill. In fact the Army is not able to meet its endstrength. In fact the Army National Guard is currently meeting its endstrength goals. It makes it very difficult to justify reducing the Army National Guard, in essence punishing them for meeting their strength. In conclusion, I believe that the provisions I have mentioned do nothing to enhance the resourcing and readiness issues faced by the National Guard and Reserve. I do believe that we should revisit these provisions next year as we prepare the fiscal year 1999 Defense authorization bill.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to salute Mrs. Martha Dominick, of Gaffney, SC for her years of distinguished service to the people of my State. Martha Dominick was a school teacher and guidance counsel for 44 years, and inspiration for hundreds of students. As a member of the Gaffney Business and Professional Women's Club, she worked tirelessly to raise the status of women in our society. She campaigned for the equal rights amendment, helped women compete for political office, taught study courses for women in the Methodist and Lutheran churches, and became the only woman to serve on Gaffney's Zoning Board of Adjustment and Appeals. Martha Dominick's fight for women's rights has not gone unnoticed. The South Carolina Conference on the Status of Women presented her with their Distinguished Service Award. She won recognition as the Outstanding Business Woman and Leader in South Carolina. This week, she will receive South Carolina's most prestigious award, the Order of the Palmetto. And this December, the Gaffney Business and Professional Women's Club will break ground on the Martha Dominick Women's Center, which will provide skills and training for women entering the job market for the first time. Martha Dominick has reached out not only to women and young people, but to her entire community, volunteering for the American Heart Association, March of Dimes, Community Chest, and 4-H Club, and helping families in need. Her love and compassion, her intelligence and wit, and her style and grace inspired all whom she touched. Mr. Speaker, I am proud that Martha Dominick is one of my constituents, and I am pleased to recognize her today on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove my name as a cosponsor of the bill, H.R. 2332. The SPEAKER pro tempore [Mr. Pease]. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from South Carolina?

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding this time to me and for his compliment, and, Mr. Speaker, I would like to note, as I did yesterday, the reason we are here near the passage of a major tax cut bill. In 1993, we dealt with the deficit and dealt with it squarely on both sides of the ledger, revenues and spending, and today we reap the benefits of what we sowed. Because of what we did in 1993 the deficit has come down 5 years in a row; it is down to at least less than $40 billion this year, and that is phenomenal. It happened because we capped discretionary spending, we applied a pay-as-you-go rule to entitlements and tax cuts, and we restored the revenue base of the Federal Government. Corporate tax revenues, for example, were up last year by $72 billion, more than 70 percent over 1992. The reason we were able to pull together yesterday's spending bill and today's tax bill is that on May 1 CBO finally agreed with OMB that the Government's revenue tax increases are not episodic, not 1-year phenomena, they are permanent. These are permanent phenomena, such that over the next 5 years CBO was willing to add $225 billion, all together, to its revenue estimates. That made today possible and yesterday as well. And having come this far, our goal is clear. We want to balance the budget and finish what we have started. We want to do tax cuts, sure we do, but we want to do them in a way that we achieve a balanced budget in 2002 and thereafter. That is why we decided in the balanced budget agreement to keep our tax cuts within strict limits, $85 billion in net revenue losses over the next 5 years, $250 billion in net revenue losses over the next 10. When this bill left the House it was outside those limits, and in the outyears it threatened revenue losses that would have undermined a balanced budget for the long run. It was also tilted to top bracket taxpayers. It made room for a double-barrelled capital gains tax cut with both a low rate and indexing, but it could not find room for a child tax credit for families with 2 or 3 children making less than $30,000. I voted against that bill, but I will vote for this one, and I do not agree with everything in it, but I think it comes from conference to us in far better shape than it left the House, and let me give my colleagues just three examples. First of all, the children's tax credit which we all supported now goes to families who need it the most, families with 2 children or 3 children or more who work hard but earn less than $18,000 a year. It would have been unconscionable to pass something called a child tax credit and leave those families and 9.5 million children out. Democrats fought to get them in, we prevailed, and we should be proud of that. The tuition tax credit which the President made the centerpiece of his tax cuts, which we as Democrats all of us heartily support, now it will not stop in midstream after the first 2 years in college as it did in the House bill. Once again we prevailed. This bill has a credit that will apply to the third year and fourth year and graduate education, a 20-percent tax credit of tuition expenses. And the capital gains tax which the Republicans wanted is their piece of the pie. It is in this bill too, but unlike the House bill, this bill does not stack one preference on top of another. A lower capital gains rate is in, but indexation is out, and by taking it out we have taken out a time bomb that would have caused revenue losses to explode in the outyears, undercutting our whole objective, which was to balance the budget in 2002. Mr. Speaker, frankly I would have held off the tax cuts until we had our bird in hand, a balanced budget. But I believe this tax bill is consistent with our objective of balancing the budget by 2002, and I know this, it is much fairer than the tax bill that we passed in the House just a few weeks ago. It is fairer for hard-working Americans who need tax relief and deserve it, much fairer than the first bill. That is why I intend to vote for it.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, today for the first time in the 15 years that I have served in the House, we stand within reach of a balanced budget. The question before us is will we finish the job. We stand here within reach of a balanced budget because we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us, Democrats in 1993, who leaned into this problem at great political cost. We paid for it at the ballot box. The deficit was ratcheted then at $190 billion and rising. We voted to do something about it. To frame the context of what we are doing, I pulled from my office shelf this afternoon the Economic Report of the President filed by George Bush on January 13, 1993, 1 week before Bill Clinton came to office. If Members turn to page 69 of that economic report, they will see that the Bush administration projected that the deficit for fiscal 1993 would be $332 billion. The next year, 1994, they said it would be $297, the next year $265, the next year $241, and this year, $266 billion. They had another track. They assumed that possibly we could rise to a better result if we had higher growth in the economy. And in that case they assumed the deficit this year would be $207 billion. Members know the results. As Yogi Berra says, you can look it up. It is a matter of record. We passed that bill with one vote in the House and the skin of its teeth in the Senate. Guess what? The deficit came down in fiscal year 1993 to $255 billion. The next year when we closed the books on fiscal 1994, it was $203 billion. In 1995, when we closed the books on that year, it was $164 billion. And last September 30, 1996, the deficit was $107.8 billion. Phenomenal. We cannot deny it. We are now looking and confidently expecting a deficit which will be this year below $50 billion, probably below $40 billion. The question is, will we complete the job? Will we finish what we started in 1993 and claim the victory to which we are entitled? I address now my side of the aisle. This is our legacy, and today we should lay claim to it by voting this bill up and by finishing the job. When we started this year, it was not clear at all that we would be able to muster the effort, mount the bipartisan kind of cooperation that would be necessary to bring together a bipartisan agreement and finish the job. I want to give credit again to President Clinton because as in 1993, again this year he leaned into the problem. He issued a call for us to come together, those of us who are on the Committee on the Budget, to sit and talk, then to negotiate and finally to hammer out the terms of a bipartisan budget agreement. And I give full credit to the Republican leadership of the committee and of the House, because they responded in earnest and in good faith to that call for talks and for negotiations, and they stood firmly with the process to the very end. The talks were hard fought, no doubt about it. We can sit here and believe that the product that lies before us was hammered out, hard wrought. But throughout those negotiations, there was civility and cordiality from the beginning to the very end. That is why we come here with an agreement that I think we can call a bipartisan agreement. I noted earlier that when we brought that bipartisan agreement to the floor of the House in the form of a budget resolution, in the form that we had negotiated it, 133 Democrats, nearly two-to-one, voted in favor of it. When the Committee on the Budget then put the resolution out to the committees of jurisdiction, nine all together, it picked up a lot of extra baggage. From my side that baggage contained some bitter pills. It was hard to swallow. We lost more than half of our support for this bill. I voted for the reconciliation bill, notwithstanding all of those contentious provisions that were bitter to swallow for my side of the aisle. And when I did it, I said, I am betting on the come. I have seen the bipartisan cooperation that we have had in the negotiations so far. If it prevails in the conference, I think we can clean out the bitterness in this bill and bring back to the House a reconciliation bill that a large majority on my side can and should support, because a large majority of the things in this will be things that were our ideas, our initiatives, things for working families who are our constituents and our supporters. I stand before my colleagues today to say I think we have reached that result. I am not completely pleased with this legislation, of course not. But I have rarely had the occasion to vote for the perfect bill in the 15 years that I have been in the House. And I think that this conference, in this conference we have had far more successes than setbacks. We have a bill that is as close to the budget resolution as we could possibly make it. This is called a deficit reduction bill. Most of the focus has been on balancing the budget. But in truth, this is more than just a balanced budget, more than just a deficit reduction plan. As I have said before and I think it bears saying again, we did not get so fixated on the deficit that we forgot that other problems exist in this country. Working families need relief. They need help, and we have tried to reach out and help them provide health insurance, ensure that they have got an educational opportunity, an opportunity for higher education. We have taken Medicare and dealt with Medicare because it is the biggest spike in the budget, fast growing, high spending, we have to deal with it. We cannot ignore it. We have reduced the cost by a net of $115 billion. But we protected the beneficiaries, and Democrats can be proud of that because we fought hard for that. We saw that that had to be in this final package. We have not only protected beneficiaries, we have added $4 billion in preventive care coverage to this final package, which is something, too, that we can be proud of. There are lots of victories in here. I say to my colleagues on my side of the aisle in particular, count the victories. Count the wins that we have got in this package. Count the ideas that are our ideas, that we should lay ownership to and take credit for in the passage of this package. I think this bill achieves far more than we as Democrats in the minority could ever have hoped to achieve acting by ourselves alone, even with the help of the administration. I am pleased with the outcome. I am going to vote for it. I urge all of my colleagues to do the same.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton]. (Mrs. CLAYTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Levin]. (Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Moran].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Cardin].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Levin]. (Mr. LEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Price].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Sisisky]. (Mr. SISISKY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, this is the last station on the track. The train leaving here will take us to a balanced budget. But I would never let the occasion to open up pass without recalling exactly why we are here, what brings us to this point where we can say credibly that we are within reach of a balanced budget. I have to take us back to 1993. George Bush was about to leave office. January 13. He filed his Economic Report of the President, and in it he predicted that the deficit for that fiscal year would be $332 billion. That was the deficit that President Clinton found on the doorstep awaiting him when he arrived at the White House 1 week later. On February 17, he laid on the doorstep of the Congress a plan for dealing with that deficit. I would take exception with the gentleman from Wisconsin who said this is the first time we will begin to stand up to this problem. We stood up to it in 1993. We passed that deficit reduction bill by the skin of its teeth, and the deficit went down in 1994 to $203 billion, in 1995 to $164 billion, last September 30 when we closed the books on fiscal year 1996, the deficit was $107.8 billion. Five fiscal years in a row, because of that legislation, the deficit has come down. This year, according to today's predictions, this year when the books are closed on fiscal year 1997, the deficit should be less than $50 billion; almost certainly it will be. It will probably be less than $40 billion. We have come from a projected deficit of $332 billion in 1993 to an actual deficit in 1997 of about $40 billion. That is phenomenal progress. It is the reason we are here, the reason we are about to claim victory, because of the foundation that has been laid since 1993. The deficit has been brought down by 80 percent. Nevertheless, when we started this session of Congress with a divided government, the House and the Senate held by Republicans, the White House held by a Democrat, it was not clear at all that in a divided government we could mount this effort to finish the job, balance the budget and say we had finally achieved victory. We did it. We are here today because the President leaned into the problem, he called the Republicans to negotiate, and they responded earnestly, in good faith. We sat down to talk, then to negotiate, and finally to hammer out the elements of an agreement which took months and months to accomplish. That agreement, when it came to the floor in the form of our budget resolution, drew big support on this side of the aisle. One hundred thirty-three Democrats, if I recall correctly, voted for it. That is a margin of nearly 2 to 1. But when the budget resolution was put out to the committees of jurisdiction, it picked up all kinds of unwanted baggage, controversial, contentious things from medical malpractice to multiple employer welfare arrangements, things that we not only did not support, we had resisted and fought for years. As a consequence, we lost traction on this side. A number of Members simply said they would not vote for the bill with those things in it. I stood here in the well of the House and said I am going to bet on the come. I am going to bet we can go back to conference and recapture that bipartisan agreement that built the agreement in the first place and bring both parties back together behind an agreement, a genuine budget agreement that deserves the moniker, deserves to be called a bipartisan budget agreement. I can say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle today, I think we have succeeded to an extent that I was not sure at all when I cast that vote we would succeed. There are more successes by far than setbacks as a result of this conference. We call this a deficit reduction act but we need to remind ourselves that what we have here is more than just a deficit reduction bill. What we have hammered out in this bill is a plan to balance the budget over 5 years, yes, but it is really more than that. We have not been so caught up, so fixated on balancing the budget that we forgot that the country has got other problems, too. We are wiping out the deficit but we are also doing more than has been done in years to see that all Americans have the opportunity to obtain higher education. We are taking down the deficit but we are also taking steps to see that children in working families have medical insurance. We hope to reach at least 5 million of them as a result of this bill. We can all be proud of that. We are lowering the cost of Medicare and Medicaid because Medicare is the biggest spike in the budget, the fastest rise. Yet not only are we protecting beneficiaries, we are actually making the program solvent so that they do not have to worry about its solvency for 10 years; but we are adding $4 billion in preventive care benefits for things like annual mammograms, and in time I think they will more than pay for themselves. There are still provisions in this conference agreement that I do not like. I wish they were not there. They will be hard to swallow. No doubt there are many on my side who will find many other things in this agreement to which to object. But on the whole, I think what we have achieved here accomplishes far more than we on our side as Democrats could ever have achieved without a bipartisan compromise. I am satisfied with the outcome, and I plan to vote for the conference agreement today, and I encourage my colleagues, particularly those on this side of the aisle, to do the same.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 15 minutes to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. McDermott] and ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to yield that time to Members on my side in opposition.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Roemer].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maine [Mr. Baldacci].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Fazio].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm]. (Mr. STENHOLM asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Bonior], the minority whip.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee]. (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts for yielding this time to me. Mr. Speaker, I intend to vote for this conference report, and I am satisfied, and even proud, of the outcome, but I cannot vote for the rule in this case, and I want to explain why. I think it is being brought to the floor, this conference agreement, with unseemly haste for something so serious and so far-reaching. I was here until midnight last night. The Democratic staff of the Committee on the Budget were here until after 2:30. Most of that time of our staff on the Committee on the Budget was spent trying to prepare reports so that we could tell Members on our side from our inside perspective as the Committee on the Budget just what is in this conference agreement and what is not, what compromises have been cut, what deals have been done that they need to know about before they make their decision to vote, and it was a frustrating, sometimes fruitless, effort to call different places on the Hill and try to find out what was in the conference report because we did not have a copy of the conference report. The staff left at 2:30, the conference report was filed at 3:20 this morning, it was not until we got back to work this morning, just an hour before the House convened that we found the conference report on our doorstep. We finished posthaste the reports so that we could deliver it to Members on our side. They got it at 10 o'clock this morning, just before the House convened to take up this matter. Now there are strong reasons for having a certain delay. The rules of the House, the rules of the House longstanding, call for a 3-day layover for conference reports, 24-hour layover for rules which have been waived, but 3 days for a conference report, and there are good reasons for that. Conference reports are the last station on the track. We are making law. There are no more opportunities on our part to correct mistakes, to add something, change something, to perfect a piece of legislation. Furthermore, in the House we have what in the State legislature they call free conference powers virtually. As everybody knows, conference reports are hammered out behind closed doors. The conferees make deals, cut compromises, go out of scope all the time, and the rule waives any points of order for going out of scope. And my colleagues will find plenty of things in this conference report, I am sure, which are out of scope, one in the House bill and one in the Senate bill, that have been concocted by the conferees. That is why the longstanding rules of this House have provided 3 days for Members to see what is in it, sauce and blow it, weigh it and come to a deliberate decision as to whether or not they would support it. And then when the matter finally comes to the floor, there ought to be ample time to discuss something so far-reaching as this because this is not just an ordinary conference agreement, this is probably the single most important piece of legislation that this Congress will adopt in the 105th Congress. Yet we are going to take it up in an hour and a half. The Senate provides for 10 hours of debate, 10 hours on the tax reconciliation bill, 10 hours on the spending reconciliation bill. We have an hour and a half, and I have Members over here pulling at my coattails because they want to say something. Mr. Speaker, they want to explain why they are voting for it or why they are voting against it; they want to say they are in favor of this. That is the way the House operates. They want to have a real debate, and we will not be able to have it with the truncated time that has been allowed for this particular bill. This is too fast a track for legislation so serious. It should not be railroaded against this House. We should vote against the previous question.