Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent the Senate now proceed to the immediate consideration of H.J. Res. 86.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent the Senate agree to the amendments of the House.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. We have a problem when two people are working and they are making $30,000 a year--just two, a man and woman. They fall in love. They get married. At $30,000 a year each, they end up paying about $800 more a year, which is $60 or $80 a month in extra tax simply for getting married. I want to eliminate that. If somebody wants to deal with the other problem, they can. Frankly, I am beginning to observe there is a feeling on the other side that this bill needs to go away, that people are not willing to confront it directly. I hope that is not so. I hope we can see this legislation go forward.

Mr. SESSIONS. Ten minutes would be fine.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will just say this. The Senator is correct in saying this legislation deals with the penalty provision and does not attempt to increase taxes on married couples, to try to reach some sort of ideal level. It is designed to provide relief from the penalty that occurs. Does the Senator propose that we increase the taxes on those who may be paying less because they are married?

Mr. SESSIONS. We are solving the marriage tax penalty problem. You may be complaining about the bonus some might get.

Mr. SESSIONS. I think it would be a matter of some discussion if the Senator would like to have some hearings in the Finance Committee on whether or not these bonuses occur. I don't think they are as substantial as the penalties may be. They are not. But, at any rate, if the Senator wants to have hearings on whether they ought to be raised, then I think that is something that is worthy of evaluation.

Mr. SESSIONS. That is exactly all it does. Does the Senator disagree? This bill eliminates the penalty. That is what it intends to do. That is what the President says he supports. That is what the Senator from Montana says he supports. That is it. I have the floor. I will yield for a question.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would be glad to hear the Senator's question on the point.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator from Texas for her stalwart leadership in this bill. The President of the United States said in his State of the Union Message that the marriage tax penalty should be eliminated. Polling data shows that the overwhelming number of American citizens believe it should be eliminated. I had a meeting and a press conference with a number of families in Alabama on Monday, and we sat down and talked with them about the struggles they have. One couple had eight children. They are paying additional taxes because they are married. Another couple had just gotten married and had a young child, and they are paying more because they are married. Those are the kinds of things that are unexplainable to the American people. They are unjustifiable in logic, fairness, and justice. On a fundamental basis, the marriage tax penalty is an unfair and unjust tax. It is not that we are doing a tax reduction so much as we are eliminating a basic unfairness. As I have said before, the challenge we are facing today is to create, as Members of this Senate, public policy that improves us as a people, that helps us to be better citizens. On every bill that comes through, every piece of legislation that we consider, we need to ask ourselves: Will this make us better or improve us as a nation? When we have legislation and laws in force that give a bonus to people to divorce, we have something wrong. I have a friend who went through an unfortunate divorce. They got that divorce in January. I was told: Jeff, had we known about it and thought about it at the time, we could have gotten the divorce in December and we would have saved another $1,600 on our tax bill. The Federal Government is paying a bonus to people who divorce. In effect, that is what our public policy does. If they are married, they are paying a penalty. It is $1,600, according to CBO, for an average family who pays this penalty, and $1,400, according to the Treasury Department, President Clinton's own Treasury Department, that says the families who pay this penalty pay an average of almost $100 per month. That is a lot of money. That is tax-free money that they could utilize to fix their automobile, get a set of tires, go to the doctor, take the kids to a ball game, or buy them a coke after a game, or go to a movie, and do the kinds of things families ought to do.

Mr. SESSIONS. Yes.

Mr. SESSIONS. I am not sure about any bonus factor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Well, 21 million, I believe, pay more taxes.

Mr. SESSIONS. That is perhaps so.

Mr. SESSIONS. It is a factor, as the Senator indicated, relative to the income that each person earns.

Mr. SESSIONS. We are paying down the national debt in record amounts. As the Senator knows, we are down $175 billion this year. That will continue. The tax reduction that would be affected by this bill represents only, let us say, a small fraction of the total surplus we will be looking at in the next number of years. If these so-called bonuses that the Senator refers to are primarily given to the one-income earner couple where a mother stays home and is not working, they receive some benefit from that. I think the bonus is not sufficient to make up for the fact that one of them stays at home. Also, one of the most pernicious parts of this bill--the Senator from Texas has talked about this previously--is that we are attempting in America today to break through the glass ceiling to have women move forward and achieve equal income in America. That is happening to a record degree. But under the present Tax Code, the more equal the marriage partners are in income, the more tax penalty falls on them. In a way, as a practical matter, it seems to fall against working women in a way that you would not expect it to, and it is something we would not want to see happen. We have unanimous agreement that the marriage tax penalty is a matter that ought not to continue. This legislation deals directly and squarely with that. It doubles the standard deduction. It doubles the brackets for married couples, which is the simplest and best way to achieve that. It will give hard-earned relief to married couples. We had the spectacle reported of the witness who testified in the House committee that each year he and his wife would divorce before the end of the year, file separately, get the lower tax rate, and then remarry at the beginning of the next year. We ought not to have tax policies that would make somebody feel as if they could get ahead of the system and save money for their family by divorcing every year. It is the kind of thing that is not healthy. I appreciate the fact we are finally moving. I hope in a bipartisan way to see this bill become law. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we want to do the right thing. But there is a constitutional right to keep and bear arms in this country. How far do we want to go? These laws that are not being enforced, does that suggest this administration is guilty of hypocrisy? They said this was so important, that we had to pass it, and we were going to enforce these laws. But their prosecutions have plummeted under the administration. I say to the people of America, and the Members of this Senate, if we replicated, throughout this country, Project Exile in Richmond, and if it were carried out under existing laws, that all these laws and those gun laws were enforced steadfastly--if criminals who are using guns are given enhanced sentences, as Federal law requires; if you carry a firearm during a drug deal, you must receive 5 years without parole consecutive to any sentence you receive for the drug offense--the word starts getting out. It did in Mobile, AL, where I prosecuted. Drug dealers quit carrying guns because if they carried a gun, they would be taken to Federal court, and when they were prosecuted, they would be sentenced and sent off, in exile, to some Federal prison way out of the State. It does work. It worked in Richmond. That is what we need to do. We need to be skeptical of the news media that always judges whether or not somebody is against gun violence by whether they vote for every bill the Clinton administration proposes. If you do not vote for every bill they propose, then you are for gun violence. I was a prosecutor. I prosecuted a lot more cases, firearms cases, than the Clinton administration did and my brother U.S. attorneys did. So that offends me. I do not believe it is right. This amendment that has been proposed, this sense of the Senate, is just a political deal. I worked hard with Senator Hatch, and others on the Judiciary Committee, to pass a juvenile crime bill that I believe will work to reduce crime in America. It has some gun amendments on it that restrict gun use in America. It makes it a felony to sell one of these assault weapons to a young person. And there are other offenses we added to that. But they are not going to really affect crime in America, frankly. Certainly, they will not if they do not get enforced. I suggest that what we need to do is to enforce the laws we have. I know Mr. Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the National Rifle Association, made the comment that the President wanted violence in America, and that is why he would not enforce these laws. He got so mad about it, he said he thought it was deliberate. I do not agree with that. But I will say to you right now what I said in the hearings before my committee: There have been good and decent people all over America who are dead today because this administration will not enforce and carry out a proven program such as Project Exile in Richmond, VA, to target criminals who are using guns to kill people. They claim they have had a 30-percent reduction in murder in Richmond. Think what would happen if every city in America could achieve that by carrying out such a program. It could be done if the Attorney General would direct it, if the President would insist on it, and we would get about that business--instead of just talking about guns, talking about some new esoteric law, some wording in some transaction at a gun show, as if that is going to make a difference. Trust me. I have been there. I prosecuted these cases. I care about this issue. I believe we need to quit playing politics. We need to pass that juvenile crime bill. It is a good bill. It is being held up because we will not go as far as the President wants to go on gun show legislation. The House voted it down substantially, with some Democratic opposition. We need to get that legislation passed, quit playing politics with this issue, and get on with the business of the Senate. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Georgia and welcome the opportunity to share a few remarks about violence in America and what we can do to make our streets and communities safer and, specifically, what we ought to do about firearms in America. Over half the homes in America have a gun. It is a traditional part of American life, and it will always be. It is protected by the second amendment to the Constitution. It provides the right to keep and bear arms. That is a tradition and a legal right given to the American people, unless it is taken away by an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. However, even though we have firearms, firearms are dangerous and they should not be in the hands of people who are dangerous. We have a string of laws that help us deal with that, laws that I used to enforce for 15 years as a Federal prosecutor, and 12 years as U.S. attorney. We had a project under President Bush called Project Triggerlock, which he promoted and I promoted in my district. I sent out a newsletter to every sheriff and every chief of police telling them that we were willing and able to use tough Federal firearms legislation to help them crack down on crime where firearms were used; that we would prosecute people who had been convicted of a felony who possessed a firearm; that we would, indeed, prosecute them aggressively if they wanted to bring those cases to the Federal prosecutors. We increased those prosecutions substantially. I believe that helped reduce crime. I believe it helped make our communities safer. Years went by and President Clinton took office. I expected, since he talked so much about illegal guns and stopping guns--they talk about this inanimate object, a metal firearm as if it is an evil force, when, obviously, the person behind it is the one who causes the trouble. I thought we would see a further step-up of the prosecution of laws. As one can see from the chart behind me, exactly the opposite occurred. It is astounding to me. I left office in 1992, and under President Bush's administration, there were 7,048 prosecutions of criminals for illegal use of guns under existing laws then, and we have more laws today than we had then. Look what happened. They steadfastly set about to reduce those gun prosecutions to 3,807 in 1998. I find that astounding. I came to this body 3 years ago. I know how to pull out the Department of Justice statistics book. I used it every day as a Federal prosecutor. I could see how my district was doing and other districts were doing. I looked at the numbers. It was stunning to me. In the last 3 years I have been here, I do not believe I have missed one opportunity to call those numbers to the attention of the Attorney General of the United States, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the Associate Attorney General of the United States, or the Chief of the Criminal Division. It has been 10, 15, or more times. Most of the time I have had this very chart with me. I said: I am astounded. They said: The States are prosecuting more cases, and we are trying to go after big gun cases. Fundamentally, the numbers went down. The intensity of the effort went down. Then an experiment occurred. The U.S. attorney in Richmond, VA, appointed by President Clinton, got with the chief of police in Richmond, who is a young, aggressive African American, to do something about gun violence in Richmond. So they attempted to do what we called Project Triggerlock. They called it Triggerlock with Steroids. They prosecuted the types of cases we were doing, and they ran TV advertisements and announcements. They thought the combination would help. They credited their efforts in Richmond, VA--President Clinton's own appointee--with a 30-percent reduction in the number of deaths and murders in Richmond, VA--40 percent. It may be more than that over 2 years, but 30 percent was the number they testified to in a hearing I held. Oddly enough, the day before the hearing, which was going to be on a Monday, the President, the Department of Justice, and Janet Reno tried their best to put off the hearing. They did not want to go into these numbers. They did not want to talk about them. Finally we said: We are going to have this hearing; we have been talking about it for years. So we set it and went forward. Then that Saturday before the hearing was to be held, President Clinton dedicated his national radio address to Project Exile in Richmond and bragged about how good it was. He said in that radio address: I am directing the Attorney General of the United States and the Secretary of the Treasury--which has the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that does most of the investigations--to step up their prosecution of criminals with guns. A month or so later, the Attorney General came before the committee on another matter, and I asked her about it. She apparently had not done anything about it. I remember asking her: How did she get the message from the President? Did she have to turn on the radio or did he send it to her in writing? He said it on the radio: I am directing you to enhance these prosecutions. He should; but it has not been done. A lot of other laws have been passed in recent years that are supposed to work. I am telling you about the 7,000 prosecutions of felons who were in the possession of a gun during the commission of a crime, the 7,000 prosecutions of felons, in the possession of automatic weapons, lying on their forms when they applied to buy one, and that sort of thing. That is the bread and butter of prosecuting gun cases. That is the meat and potatoes of it. We passed a lot of other laws. They want to pass another law to go even further than what this Congress has passed to restrict the sale of guns at a gun show saying it is going to affect crime in America. That is absolutely bogus. That is baloney. That is politics. We tried to reach a reasonable agreement, but I am not going to vote for some sort of restriction on gun shows that says to people who have been doing this for 50 years that they have to wait 3 days before they can sell a gun. By then the show is closed and has gone back to a State somewhere far away. That is not necessary. We have tried to reach an accord with the White House on that. They do not want an accord. They think they can get a political issue. Let me show you what I am talking about, what is really important on guns. They passed a law called 922(q), title 18, involving the possession of firearms on school grounds. That was a few years ago before I came to the Senate. It was not too many years ago. In 1997, they had five prosecutions in the whole United States. In 1998, they had eight prosecutions in the whole United States. They passed a law that it is unlawful to transfer firearms to juveniles. I support that law. I support the one on the possession of firearms on school grounds, too. But, look, in 1997, they prosecuted five of those cases; and in 1998, six of those cases. Another law deals with the possession or transfer of a semiautomatic weapon; that is, the assault weapons. You remember we had to have this assault weapon ban. It was worthy of debate. An assault weapon looks like a military M-16, an AK-47, but it really is not. The assault weapons are semiautomatic, not fully automatic as are the military weapons. If it is fully automatic, if it is a machine gun, an automatic weapon, it has been illegal since the days of Al Capone. I do not believe I have ever failed to prosecute a case in Alabama when a person had an automatic weapon, a machine gun. We did not need these new laws to prosecute that. But if they had a weapon that looked like an M-16, they wanted to make it illegal, even though it fired one shot. That was eventually done. That was going to stop crime in America. Right? In 1997, there were four prosecutions; in 1998, there were four prosecutions. Look, we want to reduce crime in America. We want to reduce the incidence of illegal weapons. Children do not need to be playing with weapons. Everybody who has a weapon in their home needs to keep that weapon locked up.

Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, in order to make some logic out of this vote-arama process, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent that the first 10 amendments to be voted on tomorrow be the following and that as stated earlier all votes after the first vote be limited to 10 minutes, with 2 minutes for explanation prior to each vote. The amendments are: the Santorum amendment on military/vets benefits; the Conrad amendment on lockbox; the Abraham amendment on SOS lockbox; the Johnson amendment on veterans; the Ashcroft amendment on SOS Social Security investment; the Mikulski amendment on digital divide; the Bob Smith amendment on RX; the Graham of Florida amendment on education; the Voinovich amendment on strike tax reconciliation; and the Kennedy amendment on Pell grants.

Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield on one point?

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I now ask unanimous consent that there be a period for the transaction of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, if there are no Senators seeking to speak in morning business, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today it adjourn until the hour of 9 a.m. on Friday, April 7. I further ask consent that on Friday, immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then resume consideration of S. Con. Res. 101, the budget resolution.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will begin the vote-arama at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. To make this process as smooth as possible, on behalf of the leader, I ask all Senators to remain in the Chamber between votes. As a reminder, there will be 2 minutes, equally divided, between each vote for explanation of the amendments. The majority leader asks all Senators for their cooperation.