Mel Watt

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, let me reclaim my time because we are operating on my time here, and I will reserve the balance of my time and let the gentleman make his point on his time since I have limited time here. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment, amendment No. 2, Watt No. 2.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman making my amendment better and clarifying it, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This should not take 5 minutes. I actually engaged in some degree of debate on this amendment during the period of general debate. This amendment simply would strike the provisions in the bill having to do with the award of attorneys' fees. I now realize that I may have the wrong amendment at the desk. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to substitute amendment No. 3, Watt No. 3, and have that one read instead. I ask unanimous consent that the amendment that was originally read be withdrawn and that the Watt amendment No. 3 be substituted.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such additional time as I may consume and would like to address a couple of questions, after I make a comment, to the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Canady]. Again, this is one of these situations like we saw yesterday and day before yesterday where I am not sure the other side has read the provisions of its own bill. Mr. Canady represents to my colleagues here that under one part of this, the 30-day provision, no order needs to be in effect. But I do not know where he is getting that from if he has read the provisions of his bill. It says, beginning on the 30th day after such motion is made in the case of a motion made under subsection B. Subsection B of this bill, an order is already in effect by a court because subsection B deals with termination of relief, relief that has already been ordered by the court. So on that point, I think he is just absolutely wrong in his reading of his own bill. Second, I would simply ask the gentleman whether he knows of any other situations, legal situations in this country, in which, where an order is in effect by the court, and somebody is trying to get from under that order, and they file a motion with the court to terminate it, a disposition of that motion is made in one way or another without the court having acted on it? Is there any other legal precedent for this that he can cite in any other area of the law?

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

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thank the ranking Member for yielding to me. I guess my concern goes substantially beyond the ones that have been expressed and back to the provisions of the fourth amendment to the Constitution which says excessive bail shall not be required, and yet here we are kind of micromanaging the State courts again and having it done by a group of people who have told us that they believe in all these States' rights, and all of a sudden we are telling the States what to do in every area of the court system, every area of the incarceration system. That is basically where I am. I mean, I just cannot understand why States' rights advocates are consistently coming into this body and micromanaging what the States have been doing. We have had no involvement in all of this time. I just have trouble understanding that.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I offer my new amendment.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this amendment actually relates to the procedure by which an appeal is taken from an order in which relief has been granted in a prison lawsuit.

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. The gentleman's side has a copy of them. We redesignated the amendments because when the bill came out of committee it came out in a different form that the amendments that were printed in the Record conform with. So we have gone back and conformed the amendments to comply with the actual printed bill. Does that address the gentleman's concern?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I happily accept that proposed modification. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Yes; yes.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. We are not talking about appeals. We are talking about going back to the same court that entered the order. This provision has nothing to do with appeals. This has to do with a motion in the court where the relief was granted. Is there any other precedent in the whole body of law in this country where a similar provision exists?

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I just want to point out to the gentleman from California that this amendment, if the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum] is right, that the States are already required to do it. We are not adding one iota of paperwork other than one page in the grant request that says, ``We have a process for doing this,'' where one sentence in the grant request says that. But if he is wrong, that we are not collecting it, I cannot believe we would take the position that we are setting up for program grants billions of dollars of money and will not require the States that are applying for the money to at least have in place some process for tracking the impacts on crime.

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. I am not inclined to withdraw it, because if we are already checking the data, it seems to me that this amendment is harmless, because all the State would have to do, and if the gentleman will look at the bill where I have put this, this is under an additional requirement, and all the State would have do, if they are already providing the information, is to assure, and that is the bill's term, now, not my term, is assure that the information is being collected already, and so even if we do have a process already for doing this, all the State would be required to do is give the assurance that there is a process already in effect, and I do not know what harm that would do.

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Just for the purpose of inquiring whether you might entertain a revision, this just simply says that if the information has already been checked under some other process, we would exempt that State from it.

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

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I had given the gentleman's side a copy of this amendment and the revised amendments yesterday afternoon. Mr. Chairman, resuming my time, the bill provides that when an order has been entered by the court and the defendants in the case who have already been found to have violated a constitutional right by prison overcrowding or in some other way violating a prisoner's rights and an effort has been made to try to correct that, when the motion to revise that order is made, that order continues in effect during the pendency of the motion to revise the court's order. Well, that is exactly what happens in any lawsuit. If the court ever enters an order in a case, that order stays in effect until the court comes back and changes that order or until some higher court changes that order. The provisions of this bill would say if the court has entered an order, the order is in effect, the defendant files a eliminate that order, then simply because the defendant filed a motion to change the order, if the court did not act on that motion within 30 days or some arbitrary time, the defendant would win the motion. There is absolutely no precedent for this kind of radical change in any area of the law. Basically, what it says is you take overcrowded, overworked Federal courts, and you, without adding any additional personnel, any additional space, any additional opportunity for them to get the aid that they need--and everybody knows the courts are already overworked--and you take that and use it as an excuse to, in effect, change the whole burden of proof and process that we have followed in our country for years and years and years. Another example of some political sloganeering taking precedence over reasonable public policy and thought in this body. I would simply submit that this provision makes no sense from a public policy perspective. It may make some sense from an appeal to the political electorate's perspective, but I would even think it does not make any sense once you think about it and talk it out from that perspective. So I would ask my colleagues to be reasonable, go back to the process that has existed in all other cases in our court system and allow that process to continue to exist in this case. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I take the gentleman to mean, reclaiming my time briefly, that this is not a Federal mandate. I say to the gentleman, anytime it's good for all of you to call something a mandate, you call it a mandate, and it's not convenient this time to call this a mandate; OK, I understand that. I yield to the gentleman.