Mel Watt

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I will say that I am not a member of the Committee on Ways and Means so I thought I would take this opportunity to say what I have to say on the rule itself. There are some things in this bill that cause me some heartburn and there are some things in this bill that I think are very valuable. And I am not sure exactly which one is taking precedence for me on the bill itself, but I did want to thank the Committee on Ways and Means for addressing a concern that had been raised about the administrative expense part of this bill by the Morehead Foundation, which is a major scholarship giving foundation in North Carolina. The Committee on Ways and Means addressed their concern, and I wanted to acknowledge that and thank them for doing that.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 49, the Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act. H.R. 49 would permanently extend the existing moratorium against taxes on Internet access by all State and local governments, including those that were previously grandfathered by the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Although this bill will necessarily result in the loss or potential loss of revenue to some States, it will promote the continued development, emergence and widespread access to the Internet and it will do so in a fair and technologically neutral manner. During the full committee markup of H.R. 49, I, together with the chairman of the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, the gentleman from Utah, offered an amendment to help clarify the meaning of Internet access and to put an end to the current confusion that has led to discriminatory and inconsistent State taxation on Internet access. The bill before us today incorporates that amendment and is the product of industry-wide and bipartisan negotiations. The principle I pursued in offering the amendment was simple. If we are to prohibit taxes on Internet access, we must do so regardless of how that access is provided. Otherwise, we would give a competitive advantage to those providers covered by the moratorium over those providers that remained subject to taxation. This would limit the choices of consumers and raise the costs of alternative means of accessing the Internet, such as DSL. By making the moratorium applicable to all Internet service providers, we have created a level playing field for the consumer. In the process, we have had no intention to otherwise undermine State and local telecommunications tax bases. Indeed, I, along with the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) and other colleagues on the subcommittee, have insisted throughout that we remain mindful of the fiscal crisis currently confronting many of our States. Toward that end, Chairman Cannon has agreed to conduct hearings this month on the States' attempt to establish a unified tax system that would enable them to impose and collect sales taxes on transactions over the Internet in a manner that is fair and manageable. I commend Chairman Cannon for his commitment to those hearings and look forward to working toward a solution to the streamlining issue. In closing, I believe that H.R. 49 ensures that the ban on Internet access taxes is neutral as to technology, speed and provider. I believe that the bill will lower costs to the consumer, enhance competition, clarify for State and local governments the type of services subject to tax, and facilitate narrowing the digital divide that presently impedes access to the Internet in disadvantaged communities. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 49. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I also yield to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bass) for 1 minute. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ose.) The gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Bass) is recognized for 2 minutes.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), a member of the Committee on the Judiciary. (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), ranking member of the full committee.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, in 1996, or when the original fair credit reporting bill was passed, which I do think was 1996, there was quite a bit of controversy about whether the Federal Government should be the controlling entity with respect to these kinds of credit issues. You had your classic States rights versus Federal Government debate. That has been much less of a debate this time because over time we have come to realize that commerce, both intrastate and interstate, is substantially impacted by the availability of credit. Just about everybody is using credit in commerce. Nobody is paying cash anymore, or seldom are people paying cash. So the argument about whether the Federal Government has a legitimate role in this fair credit process kind of has gone by the board over the years and was less of an issue in this debate and gave the committee in my estimation the opportunity to focus on really creating a comprehensive kind of approach to dealing with credit in this country, dealing with some of the problems that people face when credit reporting agencies get the wrong information, dealing with identity theft and medical privacy, and the whole range of issues that can come into play when a credit transaction is about to take place. I think the gentleman from Ohio (Chairman Oxley) and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) have done just a magnificent job of hearing all of the input from all of the different sides and coming together on a bill that came out of committee with not unanimous support, but virtually unanimous support. Now, there are some things that may be tweaked between the committee process and the floor, and there might be some need to change one or two things that have been agreed upon, but there are some amendments that I think could have a negative effect on this kind of bipartisan agreement that has characterized this bill. So I hope that as we go forward into the amendment process, all of us will remember how hard we worked to keep this a bipartisan bill, to deliver a bill to the Senate that had just broad-based support so they would not sit there and not do anything and let the authorization run out. We need to maintain this bill in its current form as much as possible, unless the Chair and ranking member have agreed to amendments. I hope that my colleagues will keep that in mind. Mr. Chairman, it is time for us to pass this bill, move it over to the Senate, and hope that they will produce a product that will keep credit available to people in this country on a set of fair and equitable rules. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) who has had such a tremendous impact on this bill, particularly the medical privacy portions of the bill. He has been a stalwart.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore), a valued member of the committee who was chairman of the Democratic task force on this bill.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Kilpatrick amendment, in strong support of it in fact. I cannot think of many occasions when I have had more phone calls than following the President's State of the Union Address and letters from people throughout my Congressional district, some of them Republicans and Democrats, applauding the fact that the President was finally beginning, it appeared, to take some steps to live out or live up to his commitment to be a compassionate conservative. My response to them was, well, I am also delighted by the statements that the President made in his State of the Union Address about making a substantial commitment to fight HIV and AIDS, but we should be not too effervescent about this because I had seen by that time a President who had gotten all of the rhetorical benefit out of making a pledge to leave no child behind, and I had seen this House coalesce, Republicans and Democrats alike, around that commitment to leave no child behind and to pass an authorization bill only to find the President come back in the next round appropriations or budget round and not put money into his budget to honor the commitment that had been made. I expressed concern to my constituents who called that the same thing could occur with respect to the commitment to HIV and AIDS. I never really expected that to happen, but if you look at what is happening now, the exact same thing seems to have happened. We have gotten a statement of commitment from the President for a $15 billion fund over 5 years. We have gotten an authorization passed by a bipartisan coalition in this House to that $15 billion, and now the gamesmanship starts to be played because straight out of the shute the commitment is not being funded at the level at which it was made. Now, I am a big supporter of the Millennium Challenge Fund, and so it is not an easy vote to talk about taking money from the Millennium Challenge Account and transferring it to this purpose. But I do understand that if we do not do this up front and now, we will be paying more later and more people will be dying later. I am told that by spending $3 billion in 2004 and 2005, the U.S. can prevent an additional 2.3 million people from contracting the HIV virus in those 2 years alone, which means that the U.S. will save approximately $1.3 billion per year on the anti-retroviral therapies those individuals would eventually require for their treatment. So even if ones looks at this as a business proposition rather than as a compassion proposition, spending money early to save money later is kind of like making a commitment to preventative medicine as opposed to reactive treatment, a last ditch method, which is not uncharacteristic of our policies in this country but I think is very short-sighted on our part. Congress has passed the authorization, but the public should know that an authorization means absolutely nothing without money appropriated to fund what has been authorized. I think we have got to live up to it. I encourage my colleagues to support the Kilpatrick amendment as an important step in that direction.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen for yielding me this time to give me an opportunity to express myself on this resolution. We obviously are all supportive of the resolution dealing with Habitat for Humanity and encouraging our colleagues to participate in the effort here in the District of Columbia. We are supportive of anything that does decent and affordable housing for people in this country. Mr. Speaker, it is for that reason that we are so perplexed by the President's decision not to go forward with the Hope VI project by zeroing out Hope VI and saying that Hope VI has apparently served its purpose in this country. I just came from a meeting with a group of students, one of whom was Ms. Audrey Evans who is a student at North Carolina A&T State University, and without knowing I was coming here, she said I want to commend you on the Hope VI program. She said she was raised in public housing, and our commitment to Hope VI helped to change her life because putting public housing in communities and allowing her to be exposed to people around her who are interested in succeeding educationally and economically and personally is something that has meant so much to her. Throughout America, we have heard these stories about how successful Hope VI has been. On a bipartisan basis in our committee, just like both of these gentlemen have yielded me time, we are perplexed as to why such a successful program, which coincidentally was a Republican program instituted by Secretary Kemp when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, how could we terminate such a program as this? We are supportive of this resolution, but we also want this administration to be committed to housing in general in this country.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman yielding me time. Every time a black Member of Congress gets up to talk about an issue like this, it always becomes a race debate; but I want to tell the gentleman that he is absolutely right. We used to file every race discrimination case in America in the Federal court, but the law allows those cases to be filed in the State courts, too. And in many cases now, because the States have started appointing judges who came out of this century as opposed to the 19th and 18th century in their racial opinions, then you can get a fair trial in the State courts. And I think you can get a fair trial in the State courts on this issue if you will let the State courts do what they are supposed to do.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I have followed my colleagues' debate about this, particularly my colleague on the Democratic side, the gentleman from Virginia, who says that there are no substantive changes in this bill, there are only procedural changes, and that this is a modest change. The thing that is amazing about that is the modest change is going to move a tremendous volume of cases from the State court to the Federal courts, which is exactly why the Federal judges are opposed to this. If this is only procedural in nature, I am not sure that I, for the life of me, can understand why we are doing it. If this is only process, it would seem to me that we should be able to get the same result in the Federal court or the State court, because if we listen to what the supporters of this bill are saying, they are not making any substantive changes. Now, I used to think that I understood my Republican colleagues when they said that they believed in States' rights, and that when we have the level of government or a judicial system that is close to the people, that is where we are likely to get the best kinds of results in cases. Why, then, if we follow that theory, would we take all of the cases that are now being tried in State court and pick them up and move them into Federal court? For some reason, there is something wrong with that picture. They say the rights of the parties will be carefully preserved in the Federal court. I think that is what I heard my friend, the gentleman from Virginia, say. Well, does that mean that the rights of the parties for all of these years have not been carefully preserved in the State court? I thought that is what the Republican Party stood for, taking things back to the local and State level. I thought they believed in States' rights. They said, well, if we move to Federal court, we are going to get fairness. We are going to get fairness. They have also said, for some reason, if we move the cases into Federal court we are going to get fairness. The opposite of that is if we leave them in the State court somehow we are not going to get fairness. If we are not changing the substance, then why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? So this must be about the results that some people are getting that they are not happy with. I am telling the Members, I think if we have the same case in Federal court or State court, we ought to get the same result. That is the way it has always been, and that is the way it would be in the absence of this new bill. I encourage my colleagues to oppose the bill.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. WATT. Yes, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I am proud to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the chairman yielding, because the chairman has made that point several times. Does the chairman understand that future Supreme Courts may, in fact, have a completely different interpretation of that, and that my amendment does not say anything about those decisions? It just respects the system under which we are operating.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I have not been involved in the debate up to this point on the proposed constitutional amendment, but I want to commend the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary and my colleagues who have conducted this debate up to this point on the quality of the debate. This is always a debate which I think has the capacity to bring out the best of the Members of our body. It does not always do that because there are strongly held positions, and sometimes emotion overtakes the day and we see the debate deteriorate. There have been instances when that has happened today, but by and large, I think this has been a high-quality debate, and I want to compliment my colleagues for maintaining the high quality of that debate. I was, at one point, the ranking member on the Subcommittee on the Constitution, occupying the position now held by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler); and during my time in service as the ranking member of that subcommittee, I realized that the quality of the debate on this proposed constitutional amendment was not the kind of quality that I really wanted to be involved in. What I saw was that Members who supported the proposed constitutional amendment would come to the floor and they would claim that Members who opposed the constitutional amendment were somehow unpatriotic; and Members who opposed the proposed constitutional amendment and were on the opposite side from the proponents of the amendment would come to the floor, and they would accuse the other side of being somehow unpatriotic. And I would have to admit that when I first became a party to this debate, I was a part of that name-calling process. I thought that anybody who really supported the first amendment to the Constitution had to respect, even if they did not admire or like, they had to respect the right of people who wanted to express themselves in opposition to various kinds of injustices that were taking place in our society by expressing themselves verbally, expressing themselves through political action, expressing themselves by even burning or desecrating the American flag. I thought it was a fairly simple proposition because I was not listening very carefully to the people who were on the other side of that debate, and I was not honoring the strong positions and commitments that they held to the fact that the flag was somehow different and that burning or desecrating the flag was somehow different than other kinds of free speech that citizens could engage in. And then I started to listen to what the other side was saying, and I started to study this issue with a little more intensity, and I concluded that it could not possibly be the case that you could have a five-person majority on a United States Supreme Court that had nine members, and the court was split five people on one side and four people on the other side, and this not be a very, very difficult issue. Can Members imagine that Justice Scalia supports the position that I am advocating here that when one burns the flag, they are engaging in protected speech; yet Justice Rehnquist, somebody who I think most people think is pretty close philosophically to Justice Scalia, takes exactly the opposite position. I tried to imagine during the course of that debate whether Justice Scalia ever looked at Justice Rehnquist and said, ``You are unpatriotic''; or on the other hand, whether Justice Rehnquist looked at Justice Scalia and said, ``You are unpatriotic.'' So I started to listen to my good friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson) and what he was saying, and I said, those Members believe as vigorously in the position they are asserting as the Members on our side believe in the position we are asserting, and we could have a high-quality debate about this flag burning amendment if we honored each other's positions and opinions and really came in and talked about the merits of this proposed constitutional amendment as opposed to calling each other unpatriotic. So I decided I would offer an amendment which simply says, not inconsistent with the first article of amendment to this Constitution, the Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States. I thought that if we framed the issue in that context, we could really have an honest debate not only about what the physical desecration of the flag might consist of, but we could have an honest debate about what is or is not protected by the first amendment. Now, I should say straight off that my opinion is that adding to the underlying proposed constitutional amendment, which itself says the Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States, simply adding to that that whatever statutory act we take as a Congress must be consistent with the first amendment to the Constitution, I pretty much assumed was a given. And a number of my colleagues who have supported the underlying proposed constitutional amendment have said, we do not want to do harm to the first amendment, we are not trying to cut off speech. So it seems to me that at some point, even if we pass the underlying proposed constitutional amendment that we are debating here, the one that says that Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States, that at some point the Supreme Court is going to be called upon to make that constitutional amendment reconciled with the first amendment, which says that this Congress shall make no law that tramples on the right of free speech. So it may be that the amendment that I am offering here is kind of a redundancy. I am just basically saying that whatever we do as a Congress to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag must be done consistently with the first amendment to the Constitution, not anything revolutionary here. Well, what does the first amendment mean? I thought I knew what the first amendment meant. I had a good law school education from what they tell me is one of the best law schools in the country, Yale University. Some of my colleagues will differ about whether it is the best or the second best or in the top 10 or in the top 30, but most people agree that it is at least one of the good universities, one of the good law schools in the country; and I will tell Members, Mr. Robert Bork was my constitutional law professor. We had some free-wheeling discussions in that class about what the first amendment meant. I thought once I got out of law school, I understood fully what the first amendment was all about. And then I went back to North Carolina, and I went into the practice of law, and one day my senior law partner, a gentleman by the name of Julius Chambers, came to me and said, I want you to go down to eastern North Carolina and represent some Native Americans who have been charged with parading and threatening with a tomahawk in a demonstration that has taken place out there. They have been charged with resisting arrest and all of the things that people get charged with when the police do not like what they are out there parading about, and these Native Americans had been arrested, four or five of them had been arrested. And my senior law partner sent me to eastern North Carolina to defend them against the criminal charges. I did not know much more about those criminal charges until I got down to eastern North Carolina, and I sat down with my clients, and as I started to talk to them about what they were demonstrating about, they looked at me and they said, well, we did not want to go to school with black people. So we were out there demonstrating against going to school with black people. So I kind of swallowed hard and finished that day of activity, and I went back to my law office in Charlotte and I confronted my senior law partner and said, Julius, why would you send me down to eastern North Carolina as a black man to defend people who were out there demonstrating against going to school with black people? Julius Chambers looked me straight in the eye, and he told me that day what the first amendment was all about. He simply said to me, ``Don't you believe in the first amendment?'' Those are words that I have never forgotten. That same law firm represented the Ku Klux Klan when they wanted the right to demonstrate and it was unpopular. This is a difficult issue, and there are patriots on both sides of this issue. This is not about whether one side has a monopoly on patriotism or the other side has a monopoly on patriotism. This is a difficult issue because we love the flag and the one kind of common theme that I was able to gather from all of this discussion over all these years because we have been debating this constitutional amendment for 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 years. Ever since I have been here, it seems like, we have this constitutional amendment. But the one thing that I think we all have agreed upon is that none of us like people who burn the flag. We are all patriots. There are 435 of us in this body. Every single one of us represents over 600,000 people. Can you imagine 600,000 people sending somebody to this Congress who was not patriotic? This, my friends, is not about whether you are a patriot or not. It is about your idea of what the first amendment truly means. It could not be that you could have Justice Brennan, Justice Marshall, Justice Blackmun, Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy saying that this is protected speech when you burn the flag in certain contexts and them be not patriotic. These men are not unpatriotic. And it could not be that Justice Rehnquist and Justice Stevens and Justice White and Justice O'Connor are out to lunch on this issue, either. This is a difficult issue. And I think the important thing here is that we should not minimize the difficulty of the issue and we should not minimize each other because some of us happen to be on one side of this issue and some of us happen to be on the other side. I value the first amendment, not that the people on the other side do not value it, too. I am sure they do. But in the process of having the Congress draft and pass a law to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag, the last thing I want is for us to do it in such a way that violates the first amendment to the Constitution. That amendment has been there for years and years and years and it has served us well. Nobody has tested this new amendment that is being offered here today which says the Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag. Who knows what the United States Supreme Court might read into that. But what I can tell you is that our first amendment has served this country well. And people have fought and died for the right of people to express themselves. Maybe they do not like them expressing themselves by burning the flag, but it is considered by some people protected speech. And it cannot be, even in current day, more recent times, that Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who happens to believe that this proposed constitutional amendment is unnecessary and ill advised, surely we would not dare to call him unpatriotic. Whatever we do, my colleagues, I simply implore us to do it consistent with the first amendment to the Constitution. And if we are able to do that, then I think we will have served our country well. What I suspect is that Congress wants to just, let's pass this amendment and leave the difficult part, which is crafting something that really prohibits the physical desecration of the flag without trampling on the first amendment, to a future time. Let us just finesse that issue. This proposed amendment in the nature of a substitute does not allow us to finesse it. What it says is that whatever we do when it comes time to start drafting our statute that prohibits the physical desecration of the flag must be done consistent with the first amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.