Mel Watt

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. We must fight. We must continue to march together. I commend my colleague, Representative Lewis for putting together this special order, and I express my thanks to him for inviting me to participate, but more importantly, I express my sincere thanks to him for the bravery that he demonstrated 20 years ago today when he faced the marshals and the tear gas and the fear that must have existed on that bridge in Selma, AL. Thank you for allowing me to participate, Representative Lewis.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I rise today to stand with this brave man, Representative John Lewis, to commemorate the anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march, one of the milestones in civil rights history. Thirty years ago today hundreds of brave African-American men and women, Representative John Lewis among them, risked their lives to ensure the voting rights of all people, regardless of their race. During the 1960s, the State of Alabama was notorious for its practices of segregation. Like many States in the South, Alabama did not even acknowledge the equal rights of black men and women. In 1965, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other began trying to escalate his Selma voting registration campaign. But whites in Alabama, including then Governor George Wallace, were just as adamant in their protests against the voter registration campaign. On March 7, 1965, more than 600 marchers gathered in front of Brown's Chapel AME Church in Selma to prepare for the 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. This march was intended to dramatize the demands for voting rights. Led by the Reverend Hosea Williams, a King lieutenant and my distinguished colleague, Congressman John Lewis, who at that time was the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the marchers headed for the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma. Unfortunately, they were not prepared for what was in store for them. A solid wall of State troopers, a smoke bomb and an ensuing attack and chase by the troopers and sheriff's posse. The marchers were violently driven back as ambulances shuttled the injured to the hospital and treated others on site for cuts, bruises, and tear gas aftereffects. The infamous bloody Sunday became a monument to history. Many of these marchers, including Representative Lewis, were college students who heeded the call of civil rights leaders for all blacks to become active in the movement. Students in my own congressional district heeded the call 5 years prior to the Selma march in 1960. Four Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC, including one of my constituents, Franklin McCain, made history for the civil rights movement and the State of North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, these African-American students staged a sit-in at the Woolworth's department store counter in Greensboro. This was by no means the first sit-in in North Carolina but this particular one opened the doors for a student movement that began creeping up throughout the South. On the evening following the four students' sit-in, 50 students met and created the Students Executive Committee for Justice. The following day, the four A&T students were joined by more than 300 African-American students from A&T and Bennett College, also in my congressional district. They organized a massive sit-in at various lunch counters across the city of Greensboro. Four days later, 1,600 students decided to halt the demonstrations at the request of city leaders who promised talks and negotiations. However, no compromise became evident to any of the students, so the sit-ins resumed on April 1. On April 21, 45 demonstrators were arrested for their protest. Yet, subsequent sit-ins and boycotts forced the city of Greensboro to reopen lunch counters on a desegregated basis by July 1960. The students' acts made a tremendous difference in both of these historical civil rights milestones: the sit-ins and the march in Selma. Their involvement and commitment not only helped make strides in voting rights but in the entire arena of desegregating America. Mr. Speaker, I had hoped that this would be the end of my presentation in this special order, but when I went back to my office today I was reminded of the significance of the Selma march again. When I went back to my office from the floor today, in March 1995, I had a memo from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. They reminded me once again that we have not yet quite arrived. It said on April 19 the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two crucial voting rights cases from Louisiana and Georgia. These cases ask the Supreme Court to consider whether race or ethnicity can constitutionally be considered in constructing electoral districts. The attack is not limited to oddly shaped or bizarre congressional districts, said the memo. It is not the districts' shapes but their racial composition as majority black and majority Hispanic that is being challenged as unconstitutional. ``The legal principles,'' the memo went on to say, ``established in these cases will have wide-reaching impact.'' Plessy versus Ferguson ensconced the nationwide principle of separate but equal in a case that presented the claim of one person seeking to ride in a white-only railroad car. Brown versus Board of Education directly involved only four school districts, but the decision revolutionized the law of racial equality. And the memo went on to say the lower court in the Louisiana case ruled that any race consciousness in districting is always subject to strict scrutiny. Yet, the creation of majority-minority electoral districts almost never occurs by chance. Because race is such a dominant force in American politics, it would be impossible to provide fair representation to racial and ethnic minorities without taking race into account. Since minorities have been elected almost exclusively from majority- minority districts, the U.S. Congress and State and local legislative bodies are at risk of once again becoming virtually all white. So, today, once again, we are reminded of why these brave people made that march in Selma. And, unfortunately, once again we are reminded that the march and the fight and the struggle for equality in the voting rights area and in every segment of our society still has not been completed.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thank the minority ranking member for yielding this time to me. Mr. Chairman, I want to spend a few minutes putting this bill in a little bit different context than the discussion that has been taking place here because I think my colleagues and the American people really need to understand that this bill is part of a larger package of bills, and they need to have a better understanding of what that package of bills, when considered together, will yield in the legal context. This bill is called the Attorney Accountability Act of 1995. There is a Securities Litigation Reform Act which will follow this bill in sequence. And then finally there is a bill which we around this body call the Tort Reform Act, which proposes to reform product liability cases and punitive damages in a general way, and I do not think we can talk about this particular bill without putting it in the context of this whole reform package in having a better understanding of what my colleagues in this body are trying to do. I have some serious reservations about this whole major reform effort because my experience is somewhat different than many of my colleagues in this body, and I represent to some extent a constituency that is a little different than many of my colleagues in this body. The experience that I bring to this body is one of having practiced law for a total of 2 years before being elected to Congress, and, while I am aware of general assumptions, jokes, negative comments that people make about lawyers and the representation that lawyers tend to have in this country, my experience has been one of being on the side of lawyers and clients who were fighting to secure their constitutional rights and fighting to be free of the invasion of the State into their homes and lives, and fighting to have equal rights in a system which sometimes does not assume that they ought to have those rights, and in my experience lawyers have played an important and valuable role in protecting the rights of people, and I think, if we look at the totality of these three bills that we are debating this week, there are some troubling assumptions that underlie these bills. One of those assumptions is that most lawyers are bad or dishonest. Well, I am not going to come into this body and try to tell my colleagues or tell the American people that there are not dishonest or bad lawyers, but I would come into this body and say to my colleagues that for every one bad and dishonest lawyer, I will submit to my colleagues, that there are thousands of good and honest lawyers who take their responsibilities to represent their clients seriously and view that as a serious responsibility. The second assumption that I think we need to be aware of, as we debate these three bills that are on the floor this week and we need to be very careful about how we approach our assumptions on this issue, is that when our courts get clogged and there are backlogs in the court system, that poor people should not have access to the courts anymore, that the court system should be the place and province only of people who are dealing with big litigation, dealing with lots of money and major business rights that may be at play. That is one of the assumptions that I think is implicit in this whole loser pays system, that everybody who comes in to the court, either, well, both, really, has a case which is frivolous or that they can afford to pay the cost of the other side in the litigation. They have big bucks, so to speak. Well, think about what we are saying when we talk about the loser pays. It says that even if you have a valid lawsuit, a good lawsuit, it is going to cost a lot of money to bring that lawsuit. And if you happen to lose that litigation, not only are you going to have to pay your own litigation expenses and legal fees, you are going to be called upon to pay the litigation expenses and legal fees of the opposing party. Now, this bill that we are debating today started off, as my colleague, the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott], has indicated, to be a lot worse in this regard than the bill that has come to the floor. I am the first to commend the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Goodlatte] for taking what was an absolutely terrible piece of legislation and revising it somewhat in committee to make it a better piece of legislation. But I would submit to my colleagues that this bill still assumes that poor people really do not have a place in the legal process and they are going to be I would submit to my colleagues that if this plays out, we need to be careful that we do not send the wrong message to poor people who are finding a legal process that is available to them. Because if the legal process is not available to poor people to resolve their disputes, then what process is available to poor people to resolve their disputes? Would we have more people go back to the days that they are dueling and challenging each other in the alleys and streets of America? Or would we make available to them on a fair and equitable basis the right to have their grievances addressed in a court of law? There is a third assumption that I think is implicit in these three pieces of legislation that we need to be leery of. That assumption is that we should somehow in this body be protecting the rich and subjecting ordinary people to the whims of the rich business community to even their experimentation and their bad motivation, because I think by the time we get to the third bill and we start to see that we are putting limitations on punitive damages and we are redefining the standards that apply in products liability cases and in other tort cases, to increase the standard to a higher standard of care or a lesser standard of care for the manufacturer and a higher standard of proof for people who seek to come into court and file a claim against the manufacturer, that we are beginning to take sides in this issue. I want to get through this not in the context of this particular bill but in the total context of these bills, all of which started out as one big legal reform package and, I would submit to my colleagues and the American public, will end up back together in one big reform package, if we follow the policy that was followed last week to split these reform measures into little pieces, pass the little pieces one at a time and then at the end of the week come back and make a motion to consolidate all of them into one package so that they can check off or, as I said earlier, punch another little hole in their Contract With America and check off another one of those little contract items, which is what, I submit to my colleagues, this is all about. So the effort in these bills is not only to limit access to the courts. That is what loser pays, in my estimation, is all about, because any time somebody is poor and wants to go and file a lawsuit, they are going to have to think not only once, twice, or thrice, but many, many times before they will have the nerve to file a lawsuit, even if they think their claim is meritorious. It also has the effect, these bills, of limiting the possibility of plaintiffs' recoveries, by making it more difficult to win the cases by raising the legal standards, by raising the legal fees that must be paid to the other side if you lose the case, and even by limiting the amount of attorney fees that plaintiffs can win and be awarded if they win the case to correspond with the amount that was paid by the defendant in the case to his or her counsel. Now, is that not a pretty radical idea? The plaintiff, which comes into court and has the burden of proof in every case that is filed, all of a sudden, even if they have a meritorious case and they win the case, the maximum that they can recover in attorney's fees from the other side is the amount that was paid by the other side to the defendant in the case.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I did not think the gentleman was going to get defensive as quickly as he did, to be honest with my colleagues. But that should show everybody exactly the point that I am making here. This is a radical concept, and if we are going to have equity, that situation ought to be flowing both ways. It should not just be flowing one way. Let me make one final point, and then I will be through. We will have the opportunity to debate this back and forth during the course of this whole week, I expect, that we will be on this legal reform package. The final point I want to make to my colleagues and to the American people is that somebody in this process ought to be worried about protecting ordinary people in our society. I submit to my colleagues that neither one of these bills, neither this bill that is coming to the floor today, the securities litigation bill that will be right behind it, nor the products liability limitation and punitive damages limitation bill that will come later in the week is designed to be in the interest of ordinary American people. We have gotten to the point in this body that we are so consumed with lifting the burden off of business that the pendulum has swung completely to the other end of the spectrum. I would submit that the American people ought to be concerned about that and my colleagues ought to be concerned about it. We ought to be opposing this bill.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I will not take 5 minutes. I just want to say ``Amen'' to my friend, the gentleman from Hawaii [Mr. Abercrombie], and rise immediately after him so that everybody will quit thinking that I am the least mild-mannered fellow in this body. It is always nice to speak after the gentleman from Hawaii because then I do not sound like I am the ranting, raving guy in the body. But what he says is absolutely correct, and it goes back to what we discussed in the general debate, and that ought to be attacked as if it were a gnat, and we are using a sledgehammer to attack it, and we have come in with a solution that swings the pendulum all the way to the other extreme and, in the process, does an injustice to a system of justice and a system of addressing grievances in this country that has been in place for centuries and centuries. Mr. Chairman, we started by saying that our objective is to deal with lawsuits that have no merit, that are frivolous lawsuits. I say to my colleagues, ``The problem is you can't deal with those lawsuits with this bill without throwing out the baby with the bath water, and so you come in with a piece of legislation that is designed to revamp and reshape the entire system of justice in civil cases just so we can deal with one, or two, or even a handful of, or a thousand frivolous lawsuits or abuses of the process, and that is not the way we ought to be proceeding.'' The amendment that has been offered by the gentleman from California [Mr. Berman] would limit this bill to frivolous lawsuits, which we were told was the primary motivating factor for coming forward with this bill in the first place, and, as we get further and further into it, now we find that we are not dealing just with frivolous lawsuits, but we are putting in place a whole a new system that encourages, demands, forces people to resolve litigation whether they want to do it or not, and in the process disadvantaging people who need access to the justice system and makes it impossible for them to come into the court without substantial fear of risking all of their assets. I think we ought to step back from this, as the gentleman from California [Mr. Berman] has encouraged us to do, and put this system into place, limit it to frivolous lawsuits, which is the primary motivating factor and the factor that it should be applicable to and bring some sanity back to this process. I say to my colleagues, ``Don't throw out our whole system of judicial works just to get a few bad apples out of the system.''

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. That is correct, and I think the best analysis we heard of it is, ``You win and lose cases in the real world. The burden of proof is on one side or the other, but you win a case with a 51 percent versus a 49 percent.'' Every case that gets filed, most cases that get filed, 90 percent, 95 percent of the cases that get filed, are close questions. They are not slam dunks, as we say in basketball lingo, and that is what this bill is designed to discourage----

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, this is a copy of the Constitution of the United States. I want Members to know that in this body it is under siege. Every time our Speaker shows up here and punches a hole in his laminated Contract With America, we can be almost guaranteed that they are punching another hole in the Constitution of the United States. Last week, it was the fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution that they punched a hole in systematically; before that, the fourth amendment, habeas corpus, and division of responsibility between the executive and legislative branch. I will be back here to tell Members every time they do it again. Do not be fooled when they punch that hole in the Contract With America. It is another notch, but it is another gap in the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. If the gentleman would yield, as I understand it, in every other situation where a judgment is obtained against Government agencies, it is the Federal Government that stands behind that judgment and the full faith and credit of the United States is at risk any time a judgment is entered. If this amendment is to have any meaningful effect, if this bill is to have any meaningful effect, and people who we have not guaranteed if this bill passes that they will be compensated will be subjected to the whims of the appropriation process or nonappropriation. It is like we have got these naughty Federal Government agencies over there that are somehow separate and part from the Federal Government, itself, and the laws that the Congress passes who are out there acting as renegades and we are looking for somebody to blame, and trying to tell our constituents that somehow we are compensating them and protecting them against these naughty Federal Government agencies and hiding our head when really the agencies and the rules that they are applying and promulgating that result in these reductions in value are pursuant to the laws we passed here in this body and this is all a charade designed to make it appear that it is not us that is causing the problem by passing the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Water Act, but it is some Federal Government agency over there that is separate from us over here in Congress and they What I want to make sure the public understands is that there is no Federal Government agency, and Congress, that this is one Federal Government. If the Federal Government agency does something wrong, it is being done pursuant to a law that we have passed and we cannot just pass the buck over there and leave the public out there saying they have a valuable constitutional right, yet they have no assured means of collecting the judgment that is at play.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, the effect of this amendment will become apparent very quickly. If we read the provisions of the fifth amendment, my colleagues here have spent a lot of time and rhetoric talking about the fifth amendment. The provision we are talking about in this particular bill says ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'' They have told us throughout this debate that the purpose of this bill is to assure that people who are deprived of their property receive just compensation. They have told us that a reduction in value of people's property is a taking, and therefore, they should be compensated for it under the fifth amendment. Mr. Chairman, I want to talk about this for a little bit, and find out from my colleagues whether we believe this right is a right that is a first-class right, or whether it is a right which is a second-class right that we have under the Constitution. Mr. Chairman, we started out with a bill that said ``If you have a diminution in the value of your property, a reduction in the value of your property as a result of any agency action, you would be compensated.'' We then spent hours debating whether to limit that bill to compensation for just two kinds of agency action, that agency action being for the Endangered Species Act other agency actions that might have the impact of reducing the value of an individual's property. We then spent hours more debating the issue of whether the reduction in value that would be required to trigger this amendment, or this bill, would be 10 percent reduction or whether it would be 30 percent reduction, or where we finally got to under the last amendment, the 20 percent reduction. I am not interested in talking about a constitutional right that triggers only if it is 70 percent. We do not have any constitutional rights in our country that trigger at 70 percent, or 80 percent, or even 90 percent. We cannot put a value on our constitutional rights. Now we come to the amendment that I have offered, and I want to direct my colleagues' attention to the bill because in the first section of the bill, it says the Federal Government shall compensate on owner of property whose value has been diminished. Then we read on over to the fine print of the bill and we got to the source of payment and it says, ``Any payment made under this section to an owner and any judgment obtained by an owner in a civil action shall come out of the agency's budget'' and the agency, if it gets a judgment against it, must come back and seek appropriations. My question to my colleagues is, is this a constitutional right, or is it a second-class right? The gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin] has been very articulate about the rights that we are talking about here. They are all constitutional rights. Do they apply only when the Clean Air Act steps on them or only when the Clean Water Act steps on them, or only when the Endangered Species Act?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Or is this a real constitutional right that we are wiling to pay for as we pay for all other constitutional rights in this country? So when our constituents come and say, ``We can get recovery if our values are diminished,'' will we scratch our heads and say, ``Oh, well, if we appropriate the money, you will get a recovery''? If someone gets a judgment against the United States of America and the agency does not have the money, will we say to them, ``Oh, no, the agency is bankrupt now. You must wait until next year's appropriation''? That is what the bill says. ``It shall be the duty of the head of the agency to seek the appropriation of such funds for the next fiscal year.'' I have never known anybody who got a judgment against the United States who we can put off until the next fiscal year and tell we are not going to pay that judgment until a year from now, or 2 years from now, or we may not pay it at all if they do not appropriate the funds. The question I ask my colleagues in this amendment is to abolish this provision that says you can get your money only from an agency. There is no agency. This is the U.S. Government. I call on my colleagues to make this a first-class constitutional right, not a second-class constitutional right.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment to the amendment in the nature of a substitute, as amended.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I am concerned about Marge and Roger Krueger. The question I would ask the gentleman is if whatever agency that caused that adverse impact to Marge's land runs out of money, and they have gotten a judgment against the United States or against that agency, and the agency then comes back a year later and asks for an appropriation, what kind of protection has the gentleman provided in this bill for Marge Krueger?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. They have the judgment already.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thought the final part was that the Watt amendment would come up last and be the final issue.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, what I still have not heard is the final part of the uanimous- consent request. I never heard what I understood to be the final part of the unanimous-consent request.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, it may come as a surprise to Members of this body, but I really had contemplated whether to support this bill. I thought that we were engaged in a populist effort to get to a point where we were compensating the American people for the diminution in value of their property that the Federal Government was causing by laws and regulations. That is where the bill starts. That is where Mr. Canady's substitute starts. I thought I was going to be able to come with a straight face and consider, do I support this, and consider the possibility of voting for this bill. Now I come with the gentleman from Louisiana, Mr. Tauzin's amendment, and we get to what this bill is really all about. It is not about compensating Americans whose value to their property has been diminished. It is about doing away with legislation and regulations that my colleagues in this body do not like, because it seems to me that we have now sold out if we adopt this amendment offered by the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin], the whole underlying purpose of the bill, to compensate the American people for agency actions and regulations that diminish the value of their property. Look, America, at what is happening. This amendment will only deal with the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. That is all they are trying to do, is undercut these regulations under these laws. So when you hear Members on this floor talk about is this a budget buster, it is not about busting the budget if you amend the bill as has been proposed. It is about forcing the agencies that enforce these two specific pieces of legislation, forcing them not to promulgate any regulations that will effectuate those laws. Mr. Chairman, I would say to my colleagues I do not know how we can start with one purpose, which is a healthy, genuine purpose, to compensate the American people, and sell out the whole idea to wipe out two pieces of legislation, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, and then go back and tell the American people ``We were up there fighting for you.'' If you believe in compensating the American people for diminution in their values, then you believe in compensating them regardless of whether it is done by the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act or any other act that we pass in this body So we have come to the point where we fleshed this thing out, we brought it out in the open now. At least we know what this bill is all about. It is our political opportunity to do away with these two pieces of legislation. And we are so gutless in this body that we will not, even with the new majority having the votes, they say, they will not bring these bills up and deal with them directly. They will say, ``Oh no, it is not us. It is some agency over there across Washington that we are beating up on. It is the agency over there.'' Understand, Members of this body, that no agency has written any regulations that are not pursuant to a piece of legislation.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I was kind of thinking that we were stalling for 9:35 and that somebody might want to make a motion to rise. We have debated this at some length now, and I do not know that anybody can add anything else to it. We have acknowledged that there will not be another vote tonight, so maybe somebody could make the motion to rise and my colleagues could quit talking about something that has been debated for the last hour and a half. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.