Curt Weldon

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I thank my friend and colleague for yielding. I want to start off by just making one statement at the beginning here because, Mr. Speaker, while we cannot directly speak to those people who may be watching this at home, I can speak to you, Mr. Speaker. I can repeat what is, in fact, the case. As you know, I objected from a parliamentary standpoint to our colleagues who for the past hour or so have been raising questions about the ethics case of Speaker Gingrich. The reason I raise those, as you pointed out, Mr. Speaker, is we are not allowed to discuss an open ethics case in this body until it is concluded. The problem is that they can keep speaking. I have to sit here and every minute raise the objection again, and you would warn them, and that would just go back and forth all night. So we just sit down and let them speak. But I just want, Mr. Speaker, to remind everyone, including our colleagues, that we could have sat here and we could have discussed the ethics case against the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Bonior], which to my understanding is still pending before the Ethics Committee, or perhaps to my understanding there was an ethics case, maybe it has been resolved, against the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt]. But we did not choose to do that because we play by the rules and we know that, in fact, as a Member of this institution, any matter currently pending before the Ethics Committee is not to be discussed because the Ethics Committee is totally bipartisan, equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, and until it is ultimately resolved and brought to a recommendation of this body, we are not supposed to respond. So we could have done the same thing. We could have got up here and laid out all the facts on the Bonior allegations and all the facts about the Gephardt allegations, but we did not choose to do that. We choose to just let them vent their frustrations, if you will, because of their concern of Speaker Gingrich's impact on revolutionizing this country. So if, Mr. Speaker, there are those who think that we were not prepared to respond, that is why, because we, in fact, are abiding by the rules of theHouse. Just to further respond and thank my good friend and colleague who has been a leader in this body, I want to commend him for today passing one of the most historic and most important bills that this institution will pass in this session, and that is how POW Accountability Act, which the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] has worked on diligently for how many years?

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I thank my colleague and friend for yielding. Mr. Speaker, as a senior member of the Committee on National Security and chair of one of the subcommittees, I understand the gentleman's concern about having a vote on this floor and very frankly I agree with him, but I have a great deal of concern with the Senate resolution in light of the actions that have taken place over the past several days. In fact, in a recently adjourned House Committee on National Security meeting where I asked Chairman Floyd Spence if he or Vice Chairman Ron Dellums have been briefed on what is occurring now, they both replied no. I questioned the chairman of the Committee on International Relations, Ben Gilman, and he has not been briefed. Chairman Livingston has not been briefed. We have a President announcing that we are sending F-117 planes to the base in Kuwait because we cannot base them in Saudi Arabia and now Saddam Hussein is saying by basing them in Kuwait, that is in fact Kuwait declaring an act of war against Iraq. These are situations that require under the War Powers Act this body to be consulted with. That, in fact, is not taking place. In face the U.N. resolution which authorizes us there in the first place in fact requires this President to abide by that resolution. To my dear friend and colleague, I say we have to have a vote but not on the Senate resolution. This body needs to vote on whether or not we support this President and what he is doing with our troops right now. I am going to demand that next week and I will be glad to support my colleague but not with a Senate resolution and giving this President the authority to put our people in harm's way with no plan. That is my question to my friend.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman, and I would just say, Mr. Speaker, the real outrage of my feeling here tonight is best expressed by what this President and his party are doing to those workers who work in the defense and science technology base of this country. Here is a President talking about job creation, and here are national AFL-CIO leaders saying, ``We are going to take a dollar a month out of your check and put it into a $35 million fund to defeat freshmen Republicans so that we can create jobs.'' Where were those big labor leaders, Mr. Speaker, when this President decimated defense spending? Over the past 3 years 1 million men and women in this country have lost their jobs. Now were these minimum wage jobs? No, they were jobs represented by the UAW, by the International Association of Machinists, jobs represented by the Electrical Workers, by the building trades who build and construct the base housing and the facilities on our military bases. They were jobs held by building trades and teamsters and machinists and boilermakers who build our ships and UAW workers across the country. This President's cuts in defense spending eliminated 1 million of those jobs. We did not hear a peep out of the national labor leadership in Washington about those job losses. Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, over the past 2 years the Congress under the Republican leadership has brought defense spending back to a sensible level of spending. Have we increased it dramatically? No. We have given the service chiefs the dollars that they feel are necessary, not what Bill Clinton's political appointee wants in terms of the Secretary of Defense, but what the members of the Joint Chiefs say they need to protect our troops. Now here is the irony, Mr. Speaker. This President has railed publicly, and the administration has railed publicly, about the Republican Congress increasing defense spending. In fact, I was one of the few Republicans who voted against increasing funding for the B-2 bomber. I felt we could not afford it. Now this President said he was opposed to the B-2 bomber. What did he do last year after Congress prevailed and increased funding for the B- 2? Well, he took a trip out to the California plant where the B-2 is manufactured, and he gave a speech, and he said to the union workers and the management standing in back of him we are going to build 1 more B-2 bomber, and we are also going to have a study done of our joint deep strike bomber needs, and that study will come out in November right after the election is over. Again, rank-and-file union workers have been used. Mr. Speaker, here is the real irony of what is happening this year with the AFL-CIO, and this to me is absolutely outrageous. That $35 million that is being collected right now from every member of every AFL-CIO local in America is being used to target Members who voted for funding the jobs that many of them now hold. Now is that not outrageous? Can you imagine being a worker at the C- 17 plant where Republican Members voted to increase funding for the C- 17 and now having those workers--and I totaled this up based on the number of workers at that facility, 8,000 of them--they are now contributing forcibly $350,000, not with their consent. It was forced out of their pockets to defeat those Member of Congress who supported the funding for the jobs that they now hold. I wonder if those workers really understand what is happening, Mr. Speaker. I wonder if they are aware that a few, and it is only a few, Mr. Speaker, because the bulk of the labor leaders in this country are honorable men and women. Many of them in my district good friends of mine. Many of them here in Washington are good solid friends. But when I talk to them about this issue, they nod their heads and they say, ``We know. We know what you are talking about, but it was a decision made above our pay grade.'' So here we have a decision made by a few leaders in the AFL-CIO to siphon money off of workers, to use that money to spread misinformation and defeat candidates who in many cases have been supportive of the very jobs that those workers have. To me that is an outrage, Mr. Speaker. And let me say this and to make this point clearly. We did not increase defense spending to create jobs. We increased defense spending because of the threat that is out there. But when this President criticizes this Congress for increasing defense spending, and then talks about the loss of jobs in this country, and then has the audacity to go out to plants where the ships are being built, where the aircraft are being manufactured caused by that increase in spending, and cut the ribbon on those projects, then that to me is outrage, and that is what is happening right now, Mr. Speaker. This President in his political campaign is going around the country and he is boasting about jobs being created. He is going to plants where ships are being built, where planes are being manufactured, where bases are being rehabbed. He is criticizing the Congress in Washington for increasing defense spending, but he is going out across America, one State at a time, especially in California, and he is saying, ``I am here to support your job.'' And on top of that, Mr. Speaker, those Members of Congress who stood fast for increases in science funding and the technical base and the space program and in defense because they were the right decisions are now having money forcibly taken from those workers who have benefited to be used to target those Members for defeat. That is not America, Mr. Speaker. It is not America when a few people inside the Beltway can force people to put money into candidates that they know nothing about or perhaps are voting against their very interests. Now do I rise to say all this as someone who is upset because of what the AFL-CIO is doing to me personally? Absolutely not, Mr. Speaker. As a matter of fact, out of the 21 House races in Pennsylvania when the State AFL-CIO in Pennsylvania endorsed, they endorsed 20 Democrats and left one district with no endorsement. That is my district. They are not running ads in my district, Mr. Speaker, so I am not here complaining about what is happening to me. But I cannot sit by any longer and allow my friends who are working people across this country to have their money be taken and used for a partisan political purpose, and that is exactly what is being done. You see, Mr. Speaker, I am a Republican, but I was involved in a labor movement. I was a teacher for 7 years, vice president of my association, taught in the public schools right next to west Philadelphia, served on a negotiating committee for 3 years, so I know what it is like to be active in the association. For the 7 years before that, and while teaching and going to college, I worked in a market and was an active member of the retail clerks union. I come from a large family of nine children, the youngest of nine. My father was in the textile workers union most of his life. I am sensitive to issues involving working people because I think we as a society and as a country need to be fair. But I stand before you tonight, Mr. Speaker, and I say through you, Mr. Speaker, to all of those millions of men and women across this country who are involved in labor unions: Your leadership is not being fair. They have taken your money forcibly, and they're not using it for just to support what is right for you. They're using it for a narrow focus political agenda to support one party. Mr. Speaker, anyone who analyzes the history of this institution could quickly show that no piece of legislation supportive of working people has ever been passed without bipartisan support. From family and medical leave, to anti-strikebreaker, to plant closing legislation, to any other piece of legislation that is significant, every one of those bills has had bipartisan support. Yet, Mr. Speaker, in this election $35 million was pulled from the pockets of working men and women to be used for a national agenda, in many cases to defeat those Members of Congress who voted for the funding to keep those very people employed. My contention is, Mr. Speaker, we heard earlier some of our comrades and colleagues from the Democrat side saying the polls are showing there is a huge lead. Once the American people see through the rhetoric and the demagoguery, once they see that a few people in Washington have siphoned off forcibly $35 million to be used to misinform the American people, those numbers are going to change. Let me say this, Mr. Speaker. How much outrage would this country have if corporate America forced rank and file management employees to kick in $35 million to defeat Democrats across the country? You would have a national scandal unfolding. That does not happen. In fact, all the studies that have been done show that most companies allow the workers who contribute to their PACs to have a say where the money goes. In the case of this $35 million siphoned out of the pockets from America's working people, they will not have a dime's worth of say as to where their money will go. Now, we logically should ask the question, does that mean that every rank and file labor union worker will vote Democrat? In fact, Mr. Speaker, in the last election the polls showed that 40 percent of the American unionized work force voted Republican. What happens to those 40 percent? Are they being disenfranchised? Are they having money pulled out of their pockets to be used to defeat people that they in fact are going to vote for? That is not American, Mr. Speaker. That is not right. Mr. Speaker, I stand here tonight because I have credibility with working men and women in this country. I am not out to hurt them. I want to support them, as I have done this session, in protecting Davis- Bacon. It was a group of Republicans, largely freshmen Republican Members, who went to the leadership and said, do not strip away Davis- Bacon protection. Do you know what, Mr. Speaker? Those rank and file building trades workers across the country who rely on the prevailing wage now have been forcibly taken, had money taken out of their pockets to be used to defeat those freshman Republicans who stood up for the prevailing wage. I am the author in this session of the modification to Davis-Bacon that has bipartisan support. At last count, 128 Members from both parties cosponsored my bill to reform Davis-Bacon, with the support of the national labor leaders of the building trades and the manufacturing groups. I will stand up for what is right, and I will be honest. As a Republican, I will disagree with my party from time to time if I feel we are not being sensitive enough. But I cannot stand by silently and see a few, and I am talking about a handful, a handful of people in this city forcibly take $35 million from the pockets of working men and women and use that money to hurt those same people. What is the feeling of our Republican Members, Mr. Speaker? I can tell the Members, in talking to a number of my colleagues who are sensitive to labor issues, there is a feeling of absolute outrage, absolute outrage, because these Republican Members, and there are about 40 or 50 of them, have walked side by side in standing up for what is right for working people, even when right-to-work Democrats voted against every one of those initiatives. Yet, what has the national labor leadership done? It has defied the rank-and-file worker, saying we are talking about your money, we do not care about right-to-work Democrats, we do not care about Democrats who do not support labor unions or labor's agenda, we are only going to target Republicans because we are totally in bed with the Democratic leadership and Bill Clinton, the President of the United States. Excuse me, Mr. Speaker, I should not say his name. This is an outrage and I am not going to let this election go by without doing what I can to expose what is taking place in this country. I said earlier I was a teacher for 7 years, active with the education association in my State, vice president of my local association, and a negotiator. Mr. Speaker, there are 25 classroom teachers in this Congress in the Republican Party. The NEA and the AFT, the two largest labor unions, over the past 2 years have contributed $3.5 million to campaigns, 99 percent of it to Democrats. Forty-four to one. For every $1 of money to a Republican, $44 to a Democrat. It does not matter whether they were teachers or not, or whether they support good schools, or educators. This was our Republican candidate's point, Mr. Speaker, It was not what we heard from the other side about taking on teachers. This party is not against teachers. This party is against large institutional labor union leaders who have a political agenda as opposed to an agenda for rank-and-file workers. Mr. Speaker, that is where the battle is. The battle is not with those classroom teachers who need more support and who need decent pay and benefits. It is against those leaders who have a totally political agenda that is in many cases a personal agenda to move themselves forward, as opposed to the people they are siphoning money from. Mr. Speaker, I hope, as this election unfolds over the next 2 months, in every city, in every town, in every county we expose what is happening to every rank-and-file worker in this country. We can have honest differences in how to increase people's economic viability. We can have honest differences in how to improve the economic lot of people who are trying to work for a living. But no one should be forcibly made to contribute to an agenda set by someone else. That is what is happening in this country right now. To those rank-and-file workers, Mr. Speaker, across America who will see this or hear this, and I guarantee you we are going to spread this message, I say that they need to let their labor leaders know that enough is enough, they are not pawns in the game. As my local labor leaders back in my county so ably know and do, they support those who are friends to them and they oppose those who are enemies. But Mr. Speaker, the national labor leadership cannot understand that, because they only see one thing. That is a political agenda of one party. So in effect, they sell out the millions of rank-and-file workers who want to have people represent their views. They sell them out for a larger political agenda that supports one party and one idea and agenda of bigger Government. Our job, Mr. Speaker, is to dispel this notion and to get the facts on the record as they are. I am going to go to every district I can and provide every piece of information I can to every defense plant in this country represented by a labor union. I even heard that the administration, the President and the Vice President, wanted to come to Philadelphia, Mr. Speaker, to go to a local plant where the V-22 was built. That is nice they wanted to do that. I wonder if, when the President came up there, he would mention the fact that it was not he who supported the increased funding for that program, but rather, it was the Congress that supported that increase in funding. Why? Because the Marine Corps has it as their top priority. I understand the President may want to travel to some shipyards where he can cut the ribbon on some ship keels. I wonder if he is going to tell those workers that it was not he who supported the increased funds for those ships, but rather, it was he who criticized the Congress for increasing funding by the level of $12 billion in this year's authorization and appropriation bills. I wonder if when the President goes out and talks about programs, whether it is the B-2 or missile programs, he is going to be honest in telling those workers that he opposed the funds that have been requested by the service chiefs that we in this Congress, in a bipartisan way, have brought forward. Let me make that point again, Mr. Speaker. Our funding for defense in this Congress was not a Republican base alone. In fact, the defense authorization bill, which passed on this floor, had almost 300 Members vote in the affirmative. In fact, the final conference report had over 300 Members voting in the affirmative. That is not a Republican plan, that is a bipartisan plan supporting what is good for America. My point is that those voters, those Members of Congress who voted to support that increase in funding to provide for those new programs at the same time are having their Washington handful of labor leaders siphon off $35 billion to defeat the very Members who have supported their jobs. Mr. Speaker, we cannot let this administration have it both ways, as they try to do all the time, as this President did when he went before APAC, the largest association of supporters of Israel in this country. He want to their national conference and he said how supportive he was of Israel. He said, furthermore I am going to increase the funding for the Nautilus program, a new missile defense initiative that will protect the people of Israel from the Katyusha rockets being fired into Israel. What he did not tell the people at APAC, Mr. Speaker, which we have now put on the record many times, is that in fact this administration zeroed out funding for the Nautilus or high-energy laser program for each of the last 3 years. They tried to kill the program. But this year, because, I guess, the President felt it was a good political time, he went before APAC and said, we are going to move this program forward. If it had not been for the actions of this Congress in a bipartisan way, that money would not have been there for that decision to be made. But again, this President was able to have it both ways. As we just recently saw with the debate over terrorism, it was this Congress that increased funding for antiterrorism initiatives long before the downing of the TWA flight, long before the killings in Saudi Arabia of our troops. It was this Congress over the past 2 years that held hearings and put additional funding in for anti-terrorism initiatives to the extent of $200 million above and beyond what President Clinton said he needed, but well in line with what the service chiefs said was important for the security of our country and our people. Mr. Speaker, I am outraged tonight, this, the week of Labor Day, when we celebrate the rich history of this country, where those of us in both parties can support the right of people to work and have decent paying jobs, and even to join and be involved in labor unions, I am outraged because in this week, a week that we celebrate the rich history of this country and the labor movement, I have to go through you, Mr. Speaker, to tell the rank and file workers across America that their interests now are being circumvented by those who have a larger political agenda, not based upon voting records, and I say, Mr. Speaker, and I hope that our workers across the country are listening, remember that, not based upon voting records. The gentleman from Pennsylvania, Jon Fox, in suburban Philadelphia, is not being targeted because he is insensitive to working people. To the contrary, Jon Fox voted with labor on many of their issues. He is being targeted because the leadership of the presidency and the Democratic party has gotten totally in sync with the leaders of the labor movement down here, and their goal is to defeat freshmen Republicans all across the country. At the same time they are spending half a million dollars, the AFL- CIO, in targeting the gentlemen from Pennsylvania, Jon Fox, they are letting other incumbent Democrats who have zero voting records on labor issues go scot-free. Why? Not because they care about issues that the labor unions are concerned with, but because they happen to have a D after their name. I cannot stand by and let that happen, Mr. Speaker. As someone, again, who has supported the labor movement in this Congress over the past 10 years, who has no target aimed at me this time, but I am not going to sit by and let my rank and file union workers and my members of the UAW and the Teamsters, and the building trades and the firefighters union have their money siphoned off and forcibly contributed to defeat those Members who in many cases I have had to go out and get the support from, to support the initiatives those very workers think are important. That is what is happening in this country this year. I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that as we get closer to election day, more and more rank and file workers across this country would begin to ask questions. Because I can tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, there is going to be an election in November, and we may have the Republicans keep control of the House and the Senate, we may have the Democrats take control of the House and Senate, but I can tell the Members this, it is not going to be by a large margin. It is going to be by a close margin. I can tell the Members, we will remember. Those who have been supportive of issues that are important to working people will remember. I hope that those workers across America who are listening to this debate tonight, who are listening to the message that I am bringing forth tonight, will remember also that they are being forced to contribute in many cases to a national political party's agenda that has nothing to do with the security of their job. In fact, the ads that are being used running against the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Jon Fox, have nothing to do with labor. They are saying Jon Fox voted to cut Medicare. Mr. Speaker, those are the same ads they are running across the country. Why? Not again because these Members have supposedly voted against working people's interests, but because they happen to be Republicans and they feel the best way to defeat them is to run false ads scaring senior citizens. It is called Mediscare. So they are running these ads, even though we are increasing Medicare spending by a significant amount over 7 years, they are running these ads in the hopes that senior citizens will become alarmed enough to go out and vote straight Democratic. That is not what is in the interest of those workers who every day form the backbone of this country. I cannot be a Member of this Congress and let this outrage continue without speaking up for what I believe to be the most ridiculous, the most unfair and I even think the most illegal action that any single group of leaders could take to harm the interests that they are supposedly representing. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an editorial from the Washington Times dated Sunday, September 1, and the results of a study done by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution on AFL-CIO contributions to congressional candidates, as follows: [From the Washington Times, Sept. 1, 1996] Educators or Lobbyists? With many school systems across the country opening for the new school year last week at the very time the Democratic Party was convened to crown Bill Clinton and Al Gore, no doubt many public-school teachers faced a difficult dilemma. Should they attend the convention, or should they report to their schools? Evidently, they decided to visit Chicago, the home of what former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett once described as the worst public education system in the nation. Once again the National Education Association (NEA), the 2.2 million-member teachers' union, flexed its muscles in the Democratic Party, comprising more than 10 percent of the Democratic delegates--405. The other large teachers' union, the 875,000-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT), accounted for another 4 percent. Amazingly, nearly half of all unionized delegates were teachers. The NEA delegation, about the size of California's, again represented the largest special-interest block, a distinction it has prized for each of the last six Democratic conventions. No wonder Mr. Bennett, referring to the NEA, has said, ``You're looking at the absolute heart and center of the Democratic Party.'' The NEA delegates did not merely attend the convention. One of their alumnae literally ran it. Debra DeLee, the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee who served last week as the chief executive officer of the Democratic National Convention, easily made the understandably smooth transition to the Democratic Party from her previous positions as head of the NEA's political action committee, NEA-PAC, and chief NEA Washington lobbyist. According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a non- profit, nonpartisan campaign-finance research organization, during the 1994 election cycle, NEA-PAC gave $2.26 million, 98.5 percent of it to Democrats. CRP reports that AFT political contributions to congressional candidates totaled $1.29 million in 1993-94, 99.1 percent to Democrats. Combined, the two national teachers associations' PAC's donated more than $3.5 million to congressional candidates, nearly all them Democrats. But even this sizable sum is dwarfed by the total contributions from the NEA's state- and local-level affiliates. After studying four representative states, Forbes magazine extrapolated its findings and calculated an astounding $35 million for the two-year period. An analysis of Indiana's one state and 31 NEA- affiliated local PACs revealed they alone raised nearly $700,000 and spent nearly $500,000 in a single year. According to John Berthoud of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, ``The NEA spends $39 million a year on 1,500 field organizers across the country to promote their political agenda.'' In the unregulated, so-called ``soft-money'' category of political donations to national party committees, which ostensibly use the funds for ``party-building activities,'' the NEA contributed $600,000 to the Democratic Party in the 1993-94 cycle, reflecting a 44 percent increase from the 1991-92 cycle. The AFT chipped in $236,000 in ``soft-money,'' a 53 percent increase over 1991-92. Given the high growth rates of ``soft-money'' contributions in the past and the fact that 60 percent of the NEA's and 72 percent of the ATF's 1993-94 ``soft-money'' contributions arrived during the final six months of that two-year period, it remains to be seen how generous they will be in 1995-96, especially since the national conventions occurred during this period. Nevertheless, a Common Cause study released this month covering the first 18 months of the 1995-96 cycle has already tallied ``soft-money'' contributions to the Democratic Party: $305,000 (NEA); and $263,500 (AFT). The trend seems unmistakable. Considering that the Clinton and Gore families have both forsaken--for good reasons--the failure-plagued public school system in the District of Columbia in favor of two of its most elite private institutions, causing considerable embarrassment for the public-school establishment, one would think that some teachers might be reluctant to support Clinton-Gore '96. Then again, studies have shown that large majorities of big-city public-school teachers send their children to private schools, too, boycotting the very institutions that employ them. So of course the NEA enthusiastically endorsed the Democratic ticket--as it has since Jimmy Carter. To celebrate the return of Democratic control of the White House, in January 1993 the NEA mailed posters to more than 25,000 junior high and middle schools. The subject? ``Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's Most Excellent Inaugural.'' What do the teachers' unions expect in return for all of the financial and in-kind support to the Democratic Party? After losing both houses of Congress in 1994, the unions clearly want the Democrats to regain control of the legislative branch. As Mr. Berthoud has observed, ``If every item on the NEA's legislative agenda for the 104th [Republican] Congress were adopted, federal spending would increase by at least $702 billion per year. This translates into a tax increase on a family of four of more than $10,000 per year.'' Talk about leverage. But the nightmare scenario that most frightens the NEA is not only failing to recapture Congress but losing the White House as well. Consider their horror at the prospects of dealing with a president who believes as Bob Dole does, that ``at the heart of all that afflicts our schools is a denial of free choice,'' which Mr. Dole declared in July when he announced his modest school-voucher program. ``Our public schools are in trouble because they are no longer run by the public. Instead, they're controlled by narrow special interest groups who regard public education not as a public trust but as political territory to be guarded at all costs.'' Any guesses whom he had in mind? Mr. Dole predicted the issue of school choice would evolve into ``a civil rights movement of the 1990s.'' Indirectly referring to the Clintons and Gores, Mr. Dole observed that ``some families already have school choice . . . because they have the money.'' Just as the G.I. Bill expanded both opportunity and choice to millions of World War II veterans, many of whom would otherwise have been unable to attend college, Mr. Dole has proposed a four-year pilot program that would provide 4 million children low- and middle-income families educational choice and opportunities their families otherwise would never be able to afford. The experimental program would cost a relatively miniscule $5 billion per year, which is less than 2 percent of annual public expenditures for elementary and secondary schools, but it would make choice available to nearly 10 percent of the 45 million students in our nation's public schools. Most important of all, targeted as it is to low- and middle-income families, the program would offer a lifeline to millions of poor students confined to the worst schools in our large cities. The money would be split equally between the federal and state governments. It would provide vouchers worth $1,000 for elementary schools and $1,500 for high schools. The vouchers would be redeemable not only at public schools but at private and parochial schools as well. Combined with family contributions, partial scholarships and other private financing, the vouchers would clearly meet a demand and fill a niche to provide immediate opportunities to children most in need. Because vouchers would introduce competition for the taxpayer's education dollars, the teachers' unions fear them like the plague, knowing full well that vouchers would jeopardize their monopoly power. That there is a link between America's failing inner-city schools and the terrible circle of poverty is indisputable. As David Boaz of the Cato Institute recently observed, ``Education used to be a poor child's ticket out of the slums; now it is part of the system that traps people in the underclass.'' What is so tragic is that it doesn't have to be this way. But as long as President Clinton, the Democratic Party and the special-interest teachers' unions stand in the way, blocking educational opportunity the way George Wallace once did in Alabama more than 30 years ago, yet another generation will be sacrificed to satisfy the demands of the special pleaders. If rhetoric would solve the problems of inner-city schools, the Democratic convention would have been part of the solution. Unwilling to do anything to immediately address the crisis, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle piously pronounced, ``Every child should have the freedom to go to a good school.'' Current Democratic Party Chairman Don Fowler, quoting Thomas Jefferson, rhapsodized about the benefits of ``a free public education for all our citizens.'' Public education may be free to its young consumers, but to their parents and other taxpayers it clearly is not. All the more ionic was the fact that this fatuous rhetoric emanated from Chicago, of all places. After observing the Chicago public schools for the Chicago Tribune, Bonita Brodt wrote in 1991 that she found ``an institutionalized case of child neglect. . . . I saw how the racial politics of a city, the misplaced priorities of a centralized school bureaucracy, and the vested interests of a powerful teachers union had all somehow taken precedence over the needs of the very children the schools are supposed to serve.'' What was that about the benefits of ``a free education for all our citizens?'' Benefits for whom, Mr. Fowler?

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence and the staff's indulgence. I will try not to take the entire 60 minutes, but I have something that I have to say to you and hopefully through you, Mr. Speaker, to the workers of this country. The workers of this country I want to speak to tonight, partly because this past Monday was Labor Day. As you know, the Congress was out of session. We were not here in Washington. But there were a lot of speeches given, a lot of rhetoric was passed. And I think many of the Washington labor leaders laid the foundation for what they hope will be a very successful political campaign totally in concert with the Democratic Party, both from the standpoint of the presidency and congressional and senatorial races across the country. I want to talk about that for a moment, Mr. Speaker and, through you, I want to talk to those rank and file union workers across the country who I think have been sold a bad bill of goods or, in fact, I would say have not even been sold the case. They have been had. What do I mean by that, because that is a very serious charge? The basis of my outrage and my concern is that last spring when the AFL-CIO leadership met in Washington, they had a vote to require every AFL-CIO member in the country, whether they agreed or not, to put up a dollar of their dues over a period of 3 years that would raise a total of $35 million. This $35 million that is being taken from the paychecks of workers in the Teamsters, in the building trades, in all the major unions across this Nation, is not going to elect just labor-sensitive Members of Congress. It is going to support one political party and one political party only. To me, Mr. Speaker, that is an outrage. Is it an outrage to me because I am a Republican or because I hate labor unions? I do not think it is the case, Mr. Speaker, because I am one of those labor-sensitive Republicans who during my 10 years in Congress been out front supporting many of the issues important to working men and women and in many cases the leaders of my local labor unions back in Pennsylvania. So I am not someone who has been against many of labor's top priorities. But what outrages me is what a few leaders in this city have been able to force upon the millions of rank and file workers across the country and it is to their workers, those workers that I want to speak tonight, because I do not think they really understand the facts. We would think if labor was going to assess every member of its rank and file across the country and every local labor union, that in fact that money would go to defeat those Members of Congress who do not support the priorities of organized labor. That is not the case. Because in fact, Mr. Speaker, of the $35 million that is being used to run ads, for instance, in the district of my neighbor, Jon Fox in Montgomery County, even though Jon Fox has supported many of labor's top priorities, that half a million dollars being used against Jon Fox and being used against Phil English and against Jack Quinn and against a number of Republican Members across the country who have been supportive of labor's priorities is not being used against Democrats who have zero voting records on labor issues. Now, one would wonder why the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Speaker, would not do an inquiry, if we have an organized group in this country forcibly assessing $35 million from rank and file workers and yet only targeting that money against incumbent freshman Republicans and yet that is exactly what is happening. In fact, Mr. Speaker, my office has done a study and we have looked at the voting records as determined by the AFL-CIO, and we have found that no incumbent freshman Democrats, even those from right-to-work States, even those who have zero or 5 or 10 percent AFL-CIO voting records, are being targeted. None of them. All of the money that is being forcibly collected from organized labor is being used to only support Democrats and to defeat incumbent Republican Members of Congress. Now, why would this happen? Would it be because the national leaders and the rank and file workers across America are so unhappy with the agenda of the past several years and all of the Republicans? I would think not, Mr. Speaker. Let me go through some items point by point. First of all, Mr. Speaker, I can tell you that when Bill Clinton was first running for office and the Democrat Party controlled the Congress, both houses, I was the Republican who offered the compromise Family and Medical Leave Act that is now law. Do you know something, Mr. Speaker? That bill passed the House and the Senate a year before the final conference was brought before us for a final vote. Why was that done? It was because the Democrat leadership was not concerned about rank and file workers who wanted family and medical leave. Rather, they waited an entire year because they wanted to have George Bush veto the bill in the middle of the Clinton-Bush election. Were they concerned about rank and file workers? No, they were concerned about scoring political points. Then maybe it is because the President has been so supportive of labor's agenda over the previous 3 years. Well, let us look at the President's agenda in line with the rank- and-file labor movement's agenda over the past several years. Organized labor, Mr. Speaker, in this country, the first 2 years of the Clinton administration, had two top priorities. Their two top priorities were defeating NAFTA, the North American Free Trade zone legislation, and passing the anti-strikebreaker legislation. Now let us look at each of those pieces of legislation and see what this President did to help enact each of those. The President was not with labor on NAFTA, Mr. Speaker. The President lobbied hard to pass it. He passed NAFTA in the House, largely with Democrat and Republican votes, he passed it in the Senate, and he signed it into law. I have introduced legislation in this session, Mr. Speaker, that says that this President was not truthful with the American people. He said that when NAFTA was passed the side agreements would raise up the worker standards and the environmental laws in Mexico to avoid the drain of jobs south, and that has not happened. My bill says that each year the President must certify that progress is being made. My bill was introduced because I opposed NAFTA. I was supportive of labor's position; the President was not. Let us look at the anti-strikebreaker bill, Mr. Speaker. Here was a piece of legislation labor said was their top No. 1 priority. That bill passed the House, Mr. Speaker, and it passed the House with Republican support. In fact, there were enough votes to pass it in the Senate. Now President Clinton says he was in favor of the anti-strikebreaker bill, but let us look beyond the rhetoric, and let us look at whether or not he really was truthful to the rank-and-file workers across America who are paying a dollar a month for 3 years out of their pay to support this President in this election whether they like it or not. To get a bill on the floor of the Senate without a filibuster or to avoid a filibuster you need 60 votes. As you know, Mr. Speaker, it is called invoking cloture. The anti-strikebreaker bill passed the House with more than enough votes because it had Republican support. There were enough votes in the Senate to pass the anti-strikebreaker bill. But guess what, Mr. Speaker? They could only get 59 Senators to vote for cloture to cut off the debate. Now how does that relate to President Clinton, Mr. Speaker? Neither Senator from Arkansas voted for cloture to allow the antistrikebreaker bill to come up on the floor of the Senate for a vote. Now here we have a President from Arkansas, and do we really believe that the rank-and- file workers of this country really believe that President Clinton could not convince one of those two Senators to vote yes for cloture to give the 60-vote number and then vote against the bill, because it still would have passed? You see, Mr. Speaker, this President wanted to have it both ways. As he has done repeatedly throughout the last 3\1/2\ years, he wanted the Congress to pass NAFTA, and he wanted to say to the rank-and-file workers, ``I am for it and I am going to sign it, but, oh, by the way,'' as he told small business owners, ``it will never come to my desk for a signature.'' Why? Because he would not lift a finger to help get the votes to invoke cloture in the Senate. So again rank-and-file union workers across the country were betrayed. Where was the Washington leadership, Mr. Speaker? Where were they on strikebreaker? Where were they on NAFTA? And let us look beyond that, Mr. Speaker, because we saw and we have heard the rhetoric coming from the national labor leadership about the minimum wage vote. The first 2 years of the Clinton administration both the House and the Senate were controlled by the Democrats in the majority. There was not one movement to bring up a minimum wage bill in either body. And, as a matter of fact, the President is on the record as having said in the first 2 years of his administration that he thought the minimum wage increase was a mistake. But this session, with Republicans in control, he thought it would be a wedge issue. Where were the organized labor leaders who were mandating contributions from the workers the first 2 years of the Clinton administration? Why were they not siphoning off that dollar a month out of the paychecks of those workers to support those who supported the minimum wage? But it even gets worse than that, Mr. Speaker. announcement by the speaker pro tempore

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I introduce this bill today to help enforce the environmental and labor side agreements sold to the Congress by President Bill Clinton to obtain ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]. NAFTA's detrimental effect upon both the environment and the American worker are being further realized the longer we allow current practice to continue. Today, I propose a mechanism that requires the President to verify the enforcement of the side agreements that were used to gain Congressional approval of NAFTA. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned, feel good side agreements have no teeth, and thus, provide none of the environmental or labor protections promised during the passage of NAFTA. My bill requires the President to certify to Congress, on an annual basis, the compliance of NAFTA parties--Mexico, Canada, and the United States--with the side agreements. Should a party fail to meet certification, the United States will deny financial assistance-- including loans or extension of credit by international financial institutions--to that country. As a last resort, targeted tariffs against products most benefitting from side-agreement noncompliance may be pursued. In short, my bill merely requires the President to verify side- agreement compliance and creates a mechanism to help ensure Mexico enforces its own laws. It is my hope that such enforcement will protect the environment and economy of the United States, two things that are endangered under current practice.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, this debate is not about whether this institution is concerned with terrorism, because we have a track record in that area. Our problem has been with the administration. In this year's defense bill there was a requirement that the administration give us a report on enhancing domestic terrorism, response due by July 1. We still have not received that document. The bill that we passed 2 days ago requires it by the end of this year. But what did we do? We took the request the President had for antiterrorism and we increased it by how much? By $220 million. We voted on this. We passed it 2 days ago. What did it include for my colleagues, who perhaps cannot read or who did not read? It includes $65 million for domestic emergency response programs and training; $30 million improved border security; $10 million counter-proliferation; $4 million counterterrorism explosives research; $16 million to replace, sustain and maintain chemical and biologic detection equipment. None of that was requested by the President. All of that was added in by this Congress in a bipartisan manner because we held hearings last year, not after the TWA crash, not after the Saudi Arabia bombing, but all through the last 2 years, because we care about terrorism, not because it is on the front page but because of the importance to protect our citizens. We have been working in a bipartisan manner. The problem is the administration does not follow through. We allocate the dollars, and we all voted for it. Further, beyond that, our bill that we passed 2 days ago provides for a computerized inventory of all the resources to be made available to local emergency responders. It provides for a computerized data program to analyze chemical agents so that our local people can deal with these incidents immediately. All of these things are now passed. They are awaiting the President's signature. None of them were requested by this President. All of them were added by this Congress, under the leadership of this half of the body that has been concerned about terrorism, not in words and not in sound bites but in substance. Vote for the bill.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend and chairman of the committee for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I thank both the chairman and the ranking member for their cooperation in bringing forth what I think is an excellent bill that we all should get behind and support. It is an excellent bill because it deals with the quality-of-life issues, issues involving pay raise, cost of living, housing, child care, and all those things that are important for our military personnel around the world. It also deals with our readiness problem to make sure our troops are properly prepared. Mr. Speaker, I rise today, however, to ask for the support of our colleagues because it deals in a real way with the two major threats that I think we face over the next several years: that caused from terrorism, and that caused from the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Speaker, we fully fund increases in the area of terrorism, far above what the administration requested. Long before incidents were occurring in this country, as we have seen this year, it was this Congress, led by this chairman, who had the foresight to put additional funds into chemical and biological technology, into efforts to allow us to better train those civilian personnel around the country who have to respond and better prepare our military. We deal with terrorism in this bill, and it is a very important priority for us. Secondarily, we fully fund missile defense technologies, national, theater, cruise, and space-based sensors. In addition, Mr. Speaker, we fund the Nautilus Program for Israel; even though the administration never requested dollars for that program, we fully fund it to make sure that Israel is secure. Unlike the past requests of the administration where they tried to zero out funds for the high-energy laser program, we continue the funding. In the R&D area, we maintain our technology base with a robust funding profile. We put money in for dual-use technology and capabilities. We fund the new ocean partnerships initiative, with the Navy in the lead. But I am disappointed in two instances, Mr. Speaker. We should have had the ABM provisions in here dealing with multilateralization and with the demarcation issue. But all is not lost, because in the compromise with the Senate we remained silent. We took out our language and they took out their language. What does that mean, Mr. Speaker? That means prevailing law is the case. When this administration attempts to amend the ABM Treaty, they must bring back those changes to the appropriate bodies of this institution, the Congress, to achieve support and ratification. So when this administration tries to dumb down our capabilities through demarcation negotiations in Geneva or through the multilateralization of the ABM Treaty, the Senate will have a rightful role to play in approving those changes before they in fact become law. So all is not lost. I applaud once again my chairman for the outstanding job he has done for our subcommittee chairman. I think we have a good bill here that everyone should get behind. It may not be perfect, but it certainly deals with the needs of those men and women who are serving our country today.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, the debate over the success of NAFTA continues. Two years after this legislation became law, we look back and see whether or not it has been successful, and there is still disagreement. Tomorrow I will introduce bipartisan legislation, Mr. Speaker, however, that all of us can join together on. My legislation, the NAFTA check bill, will require the President of the United States to certify each year to the Congress whether or not those side agreements that he told us would raise up the workers standards in Mexico and would enforce tough environmental laws in Mexico are actually working. Mr. Speaker, I ask our colleagues to join with us to allow this President each year to certify to us as to whether or not what he told us to get our votes for NAFTA has in fact been occurring for the past 2 years. That is an annual certification as to environmental protection and as to worker standards in the state of Mexico as parties to the NAFTA agreement. I urge our colleagues to sign as cosponsors when this bill is dropped tomorrow. We can move it quickly in September to get passage in this body and the other body.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Shuster] and the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Murtha] for the words that they spoke today. The two of these gentlemen, as the deans of our delegations respectively, Republican and Democrat, have been there for Joe as friends over the past several very difficult years. Mr. Speaker, I just want to rise and say it is a tribute to this institution that so many Members of the House on a day-to-day basis asked about Joe McDade, asked about his health, about his well-being, about his family. And through a very difficult ordeal it was the Members of this institution, people like the gentleman from New York, Mr. Rangel, who I understand went up and testified as a character witness for Joe McDade, that is a real testimony to the character of this institution. So, Mr. Speaker, I applaud not just his verdict but the fact that all of us did not cut and run when Joe McDade had a charge levied against him. All of us who know Joe personally stood by his side through thick and thin, and all of us can share in that joy today, both Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. The gentleman makes an excellent point. Two key considerations here. First of all, while the administration puts out the rhetoric of being concerned about drug use and supposedly doing something about it, the facts and this is typically the case throughout this administration, just do not bear out the rhetoric. As the gentleman and my friend pointed out, the office of Drug Enforcement Administration reporting to the White House has in fact been cut by, I think the figure used was 84 percent. In fact, it has been decimated. But this President, knowing that he can use perception as opposed to substance, in his last State of the Union Speech appointed one of this Nation's heroes, General Barry McCaffrey, to head up the drug effort because he wanted to give the people the perception that he in fact is really doing something substantive. So he appoints a genuine hero in this country, whom all of us have the highest respect for and whom all of us want to help, while at the same time he is decimating the funding to allow the programs under the control of that individual and that agency in fact to go forward. Furthermore, perceptually, this administration has created a casual atmosphere about drug use. That casual atmosphere then gets translated to our teenagers across the country, and they then think maybe it is okay to do some drugs or limited use and we see the numbers start to go up, as our colleague has pointed out. We saw descending use of drugs in this country for the previous 12 years, and in the last 3 years we have seen an increase in drug use by the use of this country. While we cannot blame any one person for that, we can look at the factors that may in fact be causing that increase and the fact that we have to be doing more substantively to deal with that increase. As the gentleman points out, that is one of the issues that we have been fighting to have as a top priority for the past 2 years since the Republican Party has controlled this institution.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I am pleased to join with him this evening in a portion of his special order. As he knows, I will be taking a special order following this to discuss our defense bill that will be on the floor this week. But I thought it very important to highlight the key areas the gentleman has raised that are really, I think, going to frame the debate as we move into the final 3 months of the election cycle into September and October and talk about what is the status of this country today in five key areas and what is the vision for the future and which party and which candidate can offer the best vision for America. I start out by saying to the gentleman and my friend, I ran for office and got involved in public life because of drug use in my hometown and my county. I come from a town that was one of our most distressed communities in Pennsylvania. I was born and raised, the youngest of nine children, there, was active in the community a number of ways, including the volunteer fire company and the Red Cross and the Boy Scout troop, and was upset because our town had become the national headquarters of one of the five largest motorcycle gangs in America. That gang controlled all the drug trafficking along the east coast of this country. They had 65 members living there, and the national president lives there and because we were just a small town, we had no resources of coping with the problem of drug abuse. We have continuously seen since that point in time, approximately 20 years ago, a declining use of drugs in America. During the era of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, we saw a marked decrease in the use of drugs in this country. The gentleman has some factual information that he might want to insert in the Record. My understanding is that in the past 3 years the use of drugs in this country has in fact reversed, and we are now seeing an increase in the amount of drug use by 14-year-old's. Is that correct?

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, on the issue of immigration, again, this administration wants to create the perception among the American people that Republicans do not care, that we are not sensitive, that we are not compassionate. And we have to rise up and we have to shout as loud as we can the facts, because that is not the case. What we are trying to do is to stop the abuse. I think the best case that I can point to of what is going haywire in this country was brought to my attention by a good friend and colleague from California, Elton Gallegly, who has been the leader in this Congress in terms of immigration. Elton Gallegly showed me a brochure, I think it was the last session of Congress, printed in Spanish, paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. This four-page brochure was being handed out in southern California to anyone who was Spanish speaking that needed health care. And what it said was that if you are pregnant, you can go to any hospital within the jurisdiction of the brochure being given out, I think it was Orange County, and you can get prenatal care, postnatal care, and have the cost of delivering your child borne by the taxpayers of this country. If you are a young Mexican mother and you know in a brochure printed in your native language that you can come across the border to America, where health care is the best in the world, and you can go to any hospital and have your prenatal care provided, your baby delivered and your postnatal care provided, what are you going to do? You are going to do everything you can to come across that border. Here is the real rub. The person also knows, the mother also knows when that child is born in America, guess what, that child is an American citizen. Even though that child is born to an illegal immigrant in this country, that child becomes a full U.S. citizen with the same rights as any other child born here. But what really bothered me about this brochure, which should bother every Member of this institution, was a paragraph in the bottom of the third page that said, you cannot be turned into the immigration service even if you are here illegally. Now we wonder why we have an immigration problem. Here is a brochure printed by the taxpayers of this country in Spanish given to people all over the southern part of California and in Mexico, and we wonder why they are all coming across the border. We just cannot continue to be the health care resource center for the world. That is what we are talking about, immigration reform that stops that.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, under paragraph 803 of Jefferson's Rules there is a provision, section 10, that states that no dilatory motion shall be entertained by the Speaker. This particular section of the rules is very explicit. It goes through to proclaim that the clause was adopted in 1890 to make permanent a principle already enunciated in a ruling of the Speaker, who had declared that the ``object of a parliamentary body is action, not stoppage of action.'' Mr. Speaker, we have seen several motions to adjourn, one of which was offered by a colleague who then voted against that motion to adjourn. We now have the second case, Mr. Speaker, of a chart being put up that is blank, that in fact has no substance. The Speaker, has declined on a number of occasions in the history of this body or refused to allow procedures to continue that in effect stop the orderly process of business in this body. I ask the Speaker, to rule on that section that, in fact, prohibits dilatory action. I ask the Speaker to rule on the parliamentary stature of an attempt to basically stop the action of the House through what in my opinion may be considered as a dilatory action under this particular rule of the operations of this body. point of order

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I will attempt to not take the entire hour, but I did want to rise this evening first of all to commend my colleagues for the excellent work they did in discussing the message of the Republican Party, and not just the Republican Party but, as evidenced by the vote on the welfare reform bill today, the overwhelming majority of Members of this institution. In fact, on the final vote there were 98 Democrats who voted for the bill and 98 who opposed it. So it truly was a bipartisan effort. While there is much perceptual criticism of the Republicans in the Congress this year, the fact is that most of our initiatives have passed with bipartisan support and our colleagues on the other side have joined us. That leads me to my point of discussion tonight, which is also bipartisan and which I expect to hit the House floor tomorrow, and that is the final conference report on the defense authorization bill for 1997. Mr. Speaker, I rise as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Development for the House Committee on National Security and one of the conferees who chaired two of the panels with the Senate in deliberating the final conference report that will come before us tomorrow. Let me start out by saying, Mr. Speaker, that I think it is a good bill. It is not everything that I had wanted. I will talk about some of the weaknesses that I think we did not get in this bill, but all in all it is a good piece of legislation that deserves the support from a bipartisan standpoint of the majority of the Members of this institution. But I want to start off by clearing up some misconceptions. The President and certain members of his administration and some on the other side in the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party have gone around the country talking about the Republicans wanting to have massive plus-ups in defense spending and that in fact the Republicans are giving the Pentagon programs that they really do not want, that we are just about buying more weapons systems and that we really are not concerned about the human problems that people in this country face. Let me start out by saying, Mr. Speaker, that I come to this body as a public school teacher. I taught for 7 years in the public schools of Pennsylvania. I ran a chapter 1 program for 3 years in one of my depressed communities like West Philadelphia, then worked for a corporation running their training department and ran for office as the mayor of my hometown. All of those things I did to try to help people and to try to make a difference. In my 10 years in Washington, I have tried to exercise in every possible way through my votes and my actions support and compassion for those needs that ordinary people have. In fact, I take great pride this year in the fact that, working with my colleague the gentleman from New York, Rick Lazio, after Speaker Gingrich had asked Rick and I to cochair an effort dealing with anti-poverty initiatives, that we were able to plus-up the funding for the community services block grant program in the appropriate appropriations bill on the House floor by $100 million. This money goes directly to a network of 1100 community action agencies nationwide that basically is totally consistent with the Republican philosophy of empowering people locally to solve the problems of the poor. This plus-up in funding did not get much play in the national media. It was the single largest plus-up in the community services block grant program in the history of that program, which dates back to prior to the 1980's. In fact, these CAA's nationwide leverage, on average, $2 to $3 of private money for every $1 of public money we put in. So it is a tremendous investment in helping local folks through the nonprofit CAA's nationwide solve the problems of poverty and ways that we can work to empower people who have the greatest needs. That is just one example of the kinds of things that this Congress has done that have largely been ignored by the American media in its rush to embrace the liberal wing of the Democrat Party and this President, who talk a good game but do not seem to follow through with the deeds that match their rhetoric. I say that, Mr. Speaker, because we have also heard the rhetoric coming out of both the White House and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that somehow we have dramatically increased defense spending. I want to get to that point because that is the topic of my special order tonight. Again, the facts do not bear that out. The analysis that I use, Mr. Speaker, is to take defense spending and compare it today versus what we were spending back in the 1960's. I pick the time period of the 1960's because we were at relative peace in the world. It was after Korea and it was before Vietnam. John Kennedy, a Democrat, was our President. He believed in a strong defense for our country and worked hard to maintain our national security interests. During John Kennedy's tenure, Mr. Speaker, we were spending about 9 percent of our country's gross national product on the military. We were spending about 55 cents of every Federal dollar that we take in in terms of taxes on the defense of this country--55 cents of every Federal dollar and 9 percent of our total gross national product. This year's defense budget that will be finally approved tomorrow, in the final conference report that we will vote on, will see us spend less than 3 percent of our gross national product on the military and about 16 cents of the total Federal dollar that we take in this year. Now, those are glaring differences, Mr. Speaker; 9 percent of our GNP in the 1960's versus 3 percent of our GNP today; 55 cents of every Federal dollar in the 1960s versus 16 cents of the Federal dollar that we take in today. In addition to those numbers, Mr. Speaker, we have to let the American people know that there are some differences in today's environment. First of all, we have an all-volunteer military. We no longer have the draft. We pay those people who join the services a much higher salary and, in fact, a much larger percentage of our military personnel today are married and they have kids. So we have added housing costs, we have cost-of-living increases, we have a much larger health care system. The quality of life for our service personnel today is dramatically improved over what it was back in the 1960's and, in fact, a much larger percentage of that lesser amount of Federal money is going for the quality of life for those men and women who serve in the various branches of our Armed Services. So, in fact, while we have decreased the percentage of Federal spending on our national defense, we in fact, Mr. Speaker, are spending more of today's defense dollar on the quality-of-life issues for our men and women who serve in the military. We have over the past 8 and 9 years made dramatic cuts in defense spending. Now, these were not all done at the suggestion of President Clinton. I am not here to say that tonight. In fact, some of these cuts were proposed under the Bush administration because the world was changing. And, in fact, many of those cuts I supported, but nowhere near the draconian cuts that are taking place today. Those cuts, Mr. Speaker, that were proposed during the Bush administration were based on threat assessments that we were given from the situations that existed around the world that threatened American Security Interests and our allies' security interests. Today's dollars that we spend on the military are largely not spent based on threat assessments, they are largely determined by numbers pulled out of the air. The Clinton administration, in fact, just pulled a number out of the air and said this is what we are going to spend on defense, in spite of the fact that when Les Aspin served as Secretary of Defense and completed his bottom-up review, he said we would need enough money to be able to fund the support for two simultaneous conflicts. The General Accounting Office has said on the record that there is no way, given the Clinton administration numbers, that we could ever come close to funding up two simultaneous operations. So, in fact, Mr. Speaker, the numbers that we are basing our defense budget on today are not based on reality, they are not even based on the philosophy that this administration established for our military leaders, and that was established in the bottom-up review headed up by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. What is more ironic, Mr. Speaker, with where we are today is that in dramatically cutting defense spending over the past 3 years, by the most significant cuts in the last 50 years in this country in terms of our military, we have seen 1 million men and women lose their jobs. Now, Mr. Speaker, the defense budget is not a jobs bill. It is not like public works projects and it is not designed to ultimately just employ people, but we have to understand the irony of what is occurring in the country today, Mr. Speaker, and I want to point it out. We have the Clinton administration over the past 3 years cutting defense spending by draconian amounts, resulting in the forced layoffs and cutbacks in defense industries and subcontractors that have caused 1 million men and women to lose their jobs in America. Now, Mr. Speaker, the irony here is that most of those 1 million men and women were union employees. They were members of the United Auto Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the IUE, the electrical workers. They were involved in the building trades who worked in our bases and in our facilities. So the bulk of the 1 million men and women who lost their jobs over the past 3 years, caused by this administration's actions, were union personnel. Not only did they lose their jobs, and all across this country, Mr. Speaker, we know of hundreds of thousands of our constituents who are out of work today who were employed at defense plants and subcontracting machine shops and subcontracting companies, but the irony is that the national AFL-CIO this year is forcing from every union employee in this country a $39 assessment. That $39 assessment is being taken out of the pockets of union personnel who work in defense plants to defeat Republican Members who have supported the dollars to fund their jobs. Now, that has to be the ultimate irony. I look particularly at one plant, McDonnell-Douglas. My understanding is they have 8,000 union employees. Mr. Speaker, if we look at the amount of assessment that the AFL-CIO has levied on those defense workers working for McDonnell- Douglas, it amounts to over $300,000, and that money is being targeted not to people who are voting against their jobs, but it is being targeted to support the ideals of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and only to target freshmen Republican Members, most of whom supported a more robust defense budget which in effect provided the dollars for those very jobs. That is the ultimate irony, Mr. Speaker. And all of this money is being taken from those rank-and-file union workers without their support and without their ability to determine where that money should be spent, in spite of the fact that in the 1994 elections, 40 percent of the rank-and-file union workers in this country voted for Republican candidates. Mr. Speaker, that is outrageous; yet we have not heard one national labor leader in Washington talk about the Clinton elimination of 1 million union jobs in this country. We are now in the process, Mr. Speaker, of taking that message to every plant in this Nation. And why are we going to do that? Because this President will go to every one of those plants and stand up on the podium next to the CEO and the union leader and talk about the jobs that are there, and he will talk about what his administration is doing to keep those workers employed. Yet this administration, in concert with the national AFL-CIO leadership, is in fact targeting, through forced contributions, funds to eliminate those freshman Members who have largely voted for the defense funding level that we are going to have on this floor tomorrow. To me, Mr. Speaker, that is outrageous. Now, the further hypocrisy of this administration, Mr. Speaker, is that last year the Congress, bipartisan support, plussed up defense spending by about $5.5 billion above the President's mark. We did not pull that number out of the air, Mr. Speaker, we took it from the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are not political appointees, they are career servants of the military, whose command responsibilities are to protect the lives of our troops. We met with them and, based upon their advice, we funded the Defense Department funding levels to the requests that they gave us. Actually they wanted more money than we could provide. This year, Mr. Speaker, when the President again chose in a draconian way to cut defense spending, we brought in the service chiefs, and the service chiefs were very candid. They said the budget proposed was unacceptable. In fact, Mr. Speaker, when the House Committee on National Security had the four service chiefs in front of us, it was the late Admiral Boorda, the CNO of the Navy, and a very fine leader of our naval forces who said publicly, when asked if he had the ability to provide a wish list for additional funds, where would he put those dollars, and he replied back to us, Congressmen, there is no wish list. These priorities that I will give you are absolutely essential to protect the sailors under my command. We then went to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and when the Commandant, General Krulak, had his chance to respond, he likewise said, look Congressmen and Congresswomen, I am not going to make any bones about what we need here. My warriors need additional funding, and the request I give you is going to be real. To every last one of the four service chiefs, they gave us the dollar amounts that they need to support the internationalist escapades of this administration around the world; to fund the operations in Somalia, to fund the $3 to $4 billion we are currently spending in Bosnia, the $2 to $3 billion we are spending in Haiti, the escapades that the President is committing our men and women all over the world. These four leaders told us the dollar amounts that they felt were absolutely necessary to meet the requirements of quality of life and protection of these troops. Mr. Speaker, the bill that we will provide tomorrow will begin to do that. It will not completely provide the support they requested from us, because we cannot get additional dollars in this budget environment where we are committed to balancing the budget over a set period of time. We do not have additional money to put into the military. Therefore, we have to make do with this plus-up that we are providing. Now, here is the outrage again, Mr. Speaker, the outrage that I feel every day I serve in this body. This President criticized this Congress last year for plussing up defense spending over his request. When Secretary Perry came before our committee this year, he had a chart showing the amount of defense spending that the Clinton administration would provide. In that chart, it was a line graph, he showed a flattening out of the cuts in the acquisition programs to buy new equipment and he said that the Clinton administration was taking steps to stop the decline and that decline, in fact, stopped in 1996. I said to the Secretary of Defense, this is an outrage. It is the most outrageous presentation I have seen from a Secretary of Defense. Why? Because here we had the Secretary of Defense, who last year joined with President Clinton in criticizing us for plussing up defense spending, now this year taking credit for what they criticized us for doing last year. That same thing will happen this year, Mr. Speaker. My prediction is that with all the criticisms from the White House and from the Secretary of Defense, they in fact will accept the final bill that we pass, the funding will be provided, and then this President will go to every one of those plants and every one of those bases, and this President will take credit for those items that we funded through a bipartisan action of this Congress that he opposed and criticized us for. It even gets worse than that, Mr. Speaker. The hypocrisy coming from the White House is unbelievable. The B-2 bomber is a perfect case in point. Let me say, Mr. Speaker, that some would say you are just down here as a Republican hawk who supports every defense weapon system and that is why you are mad at President Clinton. That is not the case. Let me give the example of the B-2. I have opposed the B-2 bomber for the last 3 years, Mr. Speaker, even though I chair the National Security Research and Development Subcommittee. My party leadership, as you know, has supported the B-2 bomber; in fact, the majority of my colleagues on the Republican side support the B-2 bomber. I felt it was great technology, but we cannot afford it. Given the budget numbers that we have to work with, we cannot afford to spend money on a program that we cannot continue. Therefore, over the past 3 years I have consistently, in committee and on the House floor, opposed money for the B-2. Now this President, Mr. Speaker, has said that he too opposes the B-2 bomber, just like he has criticized us for plussing up defense spending. But after the President signed the defense appropriation bill last year, which had B-2 funding in it, what did this President do? He went out to southern California and he went to the plant where the B-2 bomber is manufactured and he gave a speech with the head of the union and the head of the company standing on both sides of him and what did he say? He said to those workers, I am here to support building one more B-2 bomber. And then he went on to say, and I have authorized the commission of a study that is going to be done that will determine whether or not we need more deep strike bombing capabilities. Now, there is the President, who supposedly was against the B-2, had criticized this Congress for funding it, now out at the plant where the program is under way taking credit for it and, furthermore, leaving all of these workers in southern California believing that somehow this President is having a change of heart and leaving the option out there that perhaps there will be a change, and after the election is over, somehow will reverse and we will start building more B-2's. In fact, the President told these workers that that study will be released at end of November. Which oh, by the way, Mr. Speaker, is a couple of weeks after the Presidential election. All of those B-2 workers, Mr. Speaker, are union employees. Where is the outrage from the national leadership? There is none. The hypocrisy of this administration on defense programs is mind boggling. One final example, Mr. Speaker, this President went before AIPAC, a national association of Jews in America who support Israel as much as I do. He went before AIPAC, they had a thousand or so people here in the Capital, and he gave a very commanding speech about our relationship with Israel and especially Israel's national security. And during that speech, he pledged publicly that he would move forward with a bold new defense program called Nautilus. This new missile defense technology would protect the Israeli people from the threat of a Russian Katyusha rocket being launched into Israel, like we saw the Scuds launched in there during Desert Storm. That speech was met with thunderous applause as the AIPAC members stood up and applauded President Clinton for his bold words of support for protecting the Israeli people. But again, Mr. Speaker, we have to look beyond the rhetoric and the words. In fact, Mr. Speaker, as I said the next day after I read the text of the President's speech, the Clinton administration for the past 3 years has zeroed out funding for the high energy laser program each year. In fact, this year they put $3 million in their budget request to kill the program totally. That was in January. Mr. Speaker, the high energy laser program is Nautilus. So here we had a President standing before thousands of supporters of Israel's protection and freedom, getting rave reviews and cheers, not telling these same people that he has tried to kill that program 3 straight years. Only because of the Congress' action, Democrats and Republicans alike, was the high energy laser program kept intact and can we now fully fund that tomorrow in the bill that we will bring before this body. In fact, Mr. Speaker, there was no request by this administration for funding for the Nautilus program at all this year. Now that is outrageous. The President gave a speech; the President said he was for the program. There was never a request given to this body or our committee for funding the Nautilus program. We funded it. Democrats and Republicans working together made sure the full funding for Nautilus is in this bill. And tomorrow we vote on it and it will be there. My bill, Mr. Speaker, in fact, is a good bill. It provides for the quality-of-life issues that are important for our service people. It provides for a pay raise. The first year of the Clinton administration he did not even request a pay raise for our troops. He wanted them to forgo a pay raise; send them to Somalia or Bosnia or Haiti, but do not give them a pay raise. Extend the deployments. Have them go 6, 8, 9, 12 months, but do not give them a pay raise. We found the money in the Congress to fully fund the pay raise the first couple of years of the Clinton administration. In this year's bill, Mr. Speaker, that we will vote on tomorrow, a pay raise for our troops is consistent with other Federal employees. We have also provided funds for a COLA for our retired military employees. We have also, Mr. Speaker, taken aggressive steps to deal with those human issues of impact aid to affect those school districts where kids of people who are in the military go to school to make sure we take care of those extra costs associated with the sons and daughters of our enlisted personnel. We have also, Mr. Speaker, gone to great lengths to provide for the quality-of-life support for our men and women in the military. And much of the increase that we provide, over the President's request that he has criticized us for, will go for day care centers, will go for family housing, will go for cost-of-living adjustments for those men and women serving this country around the world. They are justified. They are right, and they are supported by an overwhelmingly bipartisan group of this body and the other body. I am happy to say they are in the bill. Mr. Speaker, our defense bill that we will finally enact tomorrow with the help of our colleagues also does some other things. In my particular area of concern, there are some new initiatives. For instance, we fully fund our laboratories. The laboratories allow us to maintain state-of-the-art research on new technologies. That, in fact, is a key part of the R&D portion of our conference report tomorrow. We fund our national science and technology initiative to make sure that our universities are continuing to do research in new technologies, in new materials, to make sure that we are always on the cutting edge. The bill that we enact tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, and we will vote on tomorrow, does some other things that are very important. It provides a whole new oceans partnership initiative that Congress and Pat Kennedy and I offer. This new initiative, Mr. Speaker, again bipartisan, allows the Navy to take the lead in bringing together all of our Federal agencies that do oceanographic research to better coordinate the dollars that we spend and provide new partnerships with the private sector with academic institutions like Woods Hole and Scripps and those other facilities around the country that are looking at the environmental impact of our oceans and what needs to be done to protect coral reefs and our ocean ecosystems. Much of the work that we are seeing off the coast of New York in searching for those remains of TWA flight 800 are being done with the Navy, because of the extensive capabilities the Navy has. And there is a whole new initiative in tomorrow's bill to further enhance the Navy's capability in the area of oceanographic work, oceanographic mapping, and ocean partnership activities. Mr. Speaker, we have also taken great steps forward to keep in place a dual-use initiative so that we encourage the military to use dual use wherever possible, so it is not just benefitting the military but it is also benefitting civilian life so that wherever we can take a technology, use it for the military, but also have civilian benefit, that we provide the dollars to make those kinds of things happen. That is a major part of our bill that we will be voting on tomorrow. But, Mr. Speaker, the real purpose of my special order tonight is to focus on what I think are the two major threats that we face as a Nation, both of which are addressed in this bill and both of which the leadership has come not from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but rather from this body. Democrats and Republicans working together have crafted a bill that has allowed us to address the two major threats that we face as a Nation. These threats are critical, they are real, and we see evidence of them as we just look around the world today. The first is terrorism, and we see it every day in every possible aspect of our society and our lives, whether it be in the air, on the ground, or whatever. It is a major problem and a major concern. The other is missile proliferation. Those are the two major threats, Mr. Speaker, that we see emerging around the world which this bill directly addresses and they both involve weapons of mass destruction, whether they be the use of chemical, biological, nuclear or conventional arms. How did we address that, Mr. Speaker? Despite, again, the words and the rhetoric coming out of the White House because of the downing of the TWA and because of the bombing of our troops in Saudi Arabia, it was this Congress, Mr. Speaker, that in the last 2 years plussed up funding under Republican leadership for chemical and biological research and development. My subcommittee and our full committee and the final conference in last year's bill and this year's bill plussed up funding in that area so that our military spends more money and more focus on the threat from chemical, biological, nuclear and conventional weapons of mass destruction. It is money that has been in the bill since we started this process last January; not money that we put in because of the TWA incident or because of the Saudi Arabia bombing. Money that we put in because the hearings that we held last fall and this winter showed that the administration was not requesting enough dollars. Well, we met the shortfall and we put the money in. We put the money in another area where the President was quick to criticize our actions. Now though, changing his course, he wants to have a huge meeting at the White House about what can we do about the threat of terrorism and chemical and biological weapons. Again, because the media's focus is there, the President is there. Well, this Congress has been there long before the media was focused on these kinds of incidents. Mr. Speaker, we also provide additional funding for what is being called Nunn-Lugar Two. We did not accept everything that Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar wanted in the other body, but we took their recommendations dealing with terrorism and disposal of nuclear weapons in Russia and other former Soviet States and we modified and changed it and we modified the domestic side, so that we have a robust program to assist our towns and cities in dealing with terrorist acts around the country. Now, again, Mr. Speaker, these are not new issues. I introduced a piece of legislation three sessions ago that would have required FEMA to establish a computerize inventory of every possible resource that a city mayor, a fire chief, or an incident command scene coordinator could have at his or her disposal if a mass incident occurred, whether it be the World Trade Center bombing or the Oklahoma City bombing or some other incident. FEMA has still not acted on that request. That is in our bill tomorrow. Mr. Speaker, that will be part of the requirement; that FEMA working with the DOD and other Federal agencies has to computerize every resource that this Federal Government provides that could be brought to use in the case of a disaster in our cities, our towns, our rural areas, wherever it might be. And it is about time that took place. That did not come about because the White House said it was important; it came about because this Congress took the action. Mr. Speaker, we also provide a new thrust for local emergency response personnel. Our portion that we forced through the conference process on the House side and agreed to by the other body provides dollars to train local emergency response personnel, firefighters, EMT's, paramedics, police officers, so that when they are called upon to respond to disasters involving terrorist acts and terrorist weapons, they know what they are dealing with and they can respond accordingly. Those plus-ups are in this bill. They are valid and they are worthy of our support tomorrow. Last week in one of our other appropriation bills we plussed up money, $5 million, for a local emergency responder, so it adds to that effort that we have already approved in this body. Mr. Speaker, we go a long way to addressing the issue of responding to terrorist acts and to better equip not just our military, but to better equip those civilian entities around the country that are the first responders in these types of situations. The bill also, Mr. Speaker, addresses the second major threat that we face as a Nation, and that is the threat of missile proliferation. Mr. Speaker, around the world, there is a mad rush by scores of countries to develop new capabilities in terms of missile technology and these new capabilities, Mr. Speaker, present real challenges for the United States and our allies. We, to look at Israel and see the concern of just those very antiquated Scuds being fired and the damage they caused during the Desert Storm. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the only major loss of life from one single incident in Desert Storm to American troops was caused by an Iraqi Scud missile being fired into one of our barracks. If we would have developed and deployed systems that we know we have the capability of putting into place today, perhaps we could have prevented those kinds of incidents from ever occurring. The threat of missile proliferation is more real than it has ever been and countries around the world today are developing capabilities that we have never seen before. This Congress, Mr. Speaker, has taken the effort to plus up funding in the area of defending our country against a missile attack. There has been a lot of misinformation, Mr. Speaker. The liberal media and the White House basically rails against missile spending, saying we should not be spending this money. We have not been talking about building new offensive weapons. We are not talking about building MX missiles. What we are talking about, Mr. Speaker, is defense, protecting the American people, our troops and our allies against an accidental or deliberate launch by one or two missiles. Today, Mr. Speaker, we have no such capability. Our troops are vulnerable and our people are vulnerable. What we want to do in this Congress is, we want to deploy those technologies that we know are available today and will be available over the next several years. It is the single biggest area of disagreement with this administration, how fast and how much we should be developing and deploying missile defense systems for the troops, for our allies and for the people of this country. The Clinton administration would have us believe that the world is rosy. Again, the President has misinformed the American people. Remember what we heard earlier about words. Words seem to be everything in this White House. Actions and facts seem to fall by the wayside. On two occasions, Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States has stood at this podium right behind me in the State of the Union speech and he has said to the American people, as he bit his lip, that the children of America can sleep well tonight because for the first time in 20 or 30 years, there are no Russian offensive missiles pointed at America's children. During the past year, Mr. Speaker, we have totally refuted what the President said, not by Republican experts but by his own personnel working in the military. First of all, Mr. Speaker, during a series of 14 hearings we held in this session of the Congress, we had the experts from the Air Force, from the intelligence community come in and tell us on the record there is no way for us to verify whether or not the Russians have retargeted their offensive weapons. We have no way of verifying that. The President has no way of verifying it because our intelligence community cannot verify it. But the President made the statement. The second thing is, Mr. Speaker, if we even could verify that, our targeting experts have said on the record that we can retarget an offensive missile in less than 30 seconds. Why then would the President say this? Because the President wants to create this impression that somehow all is so well and somehow the American people do not have to worry. Let me make a point here, Mr. Speaker, I am not a reactionary alarmist. In fact, I probably do more work with the Russians that any other Member of the Congress. I will talk about those initiatives again tonight. Since my undergraduate degree in Russian studies and since my days in speaking the Russian language and in my numerous visits to Russia, I have worked in helping them with their energy needs, their environmental needs, and, in fact, I am right now setting up a new initiative that the Speaker has tasked me to do with Mr. Vladimir Lukin, chairman of the International Affairs Committee for the Russian Duma, that will have Members of this Congress and the Russian Duma come together for the first time in a real way on an ongoing basis. It will be an institutional process that will last beyond Members. Right now I am working with the ambassador of Russia to help develop a new technology transfer center in America for Russian technology. I put money in the defense bill, Mr. Speaker, this year for $20 million of joint Russian-American missile defense technology so that we work with the Russians, so that we do not try to squirrel one up on them. I was the one last year who opposed those in my party who wanted to offer an amendment on the defense bill last year that would have forced the President to abrogate the ABM treaty. Mr. Speaker, I am not some rabid conservative who thinks that perhaps the Russian government is still the evil empire. I want the same ultimate objective that I think Bill Clinton wants. I want the same ultimate objective that I think Strobe Talbott wants; that is, a free, democratic Russia to succeed with free markets and security and less of a threat to America and the rest of the world. But there is one key difference, Mr. Speaker. I am willing to go to the Russians when there are problems that we have to confront them with and confront them openly. This administration's pattern has been to ignore reality and in effect to try to bury or brush over or create a perception that there are no problems there. We all know that Russia is going through problems of severe internal turmoil. We were all happy that Boris Yeltsin won the presidential election a few short weeks ago. And we are all happy the Duma is committed to working with him. Mr. Speaker, there is one very important fact we have to keep in mind. The leadership in the Russian military today is the same leadership that was there during the Soviet Communist domination. Perestroika and glasnost has not come with the Russian military. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I obtained a document earlier this year that was published by one of the leading Russian think tanks, the Institute for Defense Analysis, it was published by a gentleman of the name of Anton Surikov. It is called the Surikov document. This document, which was briefed to the former defense minister Pavel Grazhdye and the current chief of command for the Russian military, General Kalesnakov, has some very interesting material in it that every American and every one of our colleagues should read. It says in it that in the end America is always going to be an enemy of Russia. In the end America is always going to be a threat to Russia's sovereignty. In the the end, the Russian government should look to establish linkages with emerging rogue Islamic nations and it names them. It names Libya. It names Iraq, Syria as those allies of Russia that should be nurtured and where technology should be transferred to benefit a mutual relationship. This is not put out by some American think tank. This is an internal document published within Russia. Mr. Speaker, I am not here to say that every Russian believes this because they do not. Boris Yeltsin does not believe this, I firmly believe. But there are people in the Russian military who still believe this, and this President and this administration do not want to call them on that. That is what is so outrageous. Mr. Speaker, we have seen some evidence of that. Last year about this time there was a transfer of accelerometers and gyroscopes that went from Russia to Iraq. Why is that so important? Mr. Speaker, gyroscopes and the accelerometers and the gyroscopes that were retrieved by the Jordanian intelligence agency and the Israeli intelligence agency could only be used for one purpose: They are so sophisticated that their only purpose is to be used in long range missiles; that is, short range Scuds, long range missiles, long range missiles that ultimately could pose a threat to the U.S. Now these missiles, these devices, the accelerometers and the gyroscopes were going from Russia to Iraq. The Washington Post, in December, reported the story on the front page, that the Jordanians and Israelis had intercepted these devices. I asked the administration to give me a briefing on it. I got some remark that it was too early. I was in Moscow in January, and I met with our ambassador at the time, Ambassador Pickering, who is a fine gentleman and I think doing a great job in Moscow. I said to him, Mr. Ambassador, what is the response of the Russian government to the fact that we have intercepted these devices being transferred to Iraq, because it is a direct violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime. The MTCR, which is very complicated, is basically an arms control agreement that we brought Russia into that says they will not transfer technology involving missiles to another rogue Nation. This is a clear violation. When I asked the ambassador what the Russian response was, he said, Congressman, we have not asked them yet. I said, What do you mean you have not asked them yet. We have not requested them yet. We have not officially asked the Russians why and how these materials were being transferred from Russia to Iraq. I came back to the U.S. and I asked the question again and again. In fact, I wrote to the President in late February. I did not get a response until April 3. The President's response to me was, Mr. Congressman, we have asked the Russians for a full explanation and they have promised us they will get it to us. I have asked when and we have no answer. But the important point, Mr. Speaker, is, that is a violation of an arms control agreement that this administration maintains is the cornerstone of our relationship with Russia. Now, if we are not going to hold nations accountable when they violate arms control agreements that this President feels are the cornerstone of our relationship, how can we expect the Russian people to have any respect for us? We cannot, because they do not. Missile technology is being transferred around the world. I am not saying it is being done openly by the Russian government, because I do not think they would do that. But it is happening. The rise of the Mafia in Russia that has stolen nuclear material, nuclear fissile material, that has transferred technology, that has gained control of certain elements of the arms control system in Russia, is spreading around the world and this administration is not taking aggressive steps to deal with that. This Congress is. This Congress is dealing in reality, Mr. Speaker. And we are not doing it in such a way to tweak the Russians. Everything I have talked about is to do it holding the leadership's hands in Russia, to show them that we want to work with them. We want Russia to succeed. We are not about getting an edge up on that. We do not want to gain an advantage over Russia. But we do want to provide a protection for our people that we do not have that the Russian people have had for the past 15 years. Mr. Speaker, under the ABM treaty, each country is allowed to have one missile defense system. The Russians have one. They have had it for 15 years. They have upgraded it four times. We have none. We have none because the liberals in this city have never wanted the U.S. to be able to achieve its rightful place in providing a defensive system to protect the people of America. Mr. Speaker, that is outrageous. We are not talking about offensive missiles. We are not talking about killing people. We are talking about a defensive system that Russia already has. Mr. Speaker, I hope this becomes a major issue in this year's presidential race because this President is totally and completely vulnerable on the issue of arms control and our relations with not just Russia but those nations developing missile technology. This Congress is doing something about that. This Congress does not wait until Israel gets hit by some Scuds and it goes before AIPAC and makes a big speech and then tries to put money in. This Congress looks at the facts. This Congress has deliberated, Democrats and Republicans, and based on the threat as we understand it, has said we are not doing enough to protect the American people and our troops. In fact, Mr. Speaker, it has become somewhat outrageous. Last year the commanding officer for our troops in South Korea wrote to General Shalikashvili, the commander's name is General Luck. General Luck is charged by the people of this country with the responsibility of protecting the lives of our sons and daughters who are in South Korea today. General Luck wrote to General Shalikashvili and he said, I need to have a theater missile defense system as soon as possible, because I feel that my troops are vulnerable and I need you to give me a deployment as soon as you can give it to me. The system he is talking about, Mr. Speaker, is not national missile defense. It is not the new variation of protecting our own country. It is theater missile defense, which this President has said publicly he supports. It is called THAAD. The Navy version is called Navy Upper Tier. Now this President has come out and said he supports theater missile defense. This Congress supports theater missile defense. But in this year's defense bill, Mr. Speaker, that we are now implementing, the 1996 defense bill, we put two specific dates in that bill for deploying THAAD and Navy Upper Tier. Never once did this President or the Secretary of Defense or any general come to us and tell us those dates were unattainable. Never once did they say, do not put them in there, we cannot meet them. The dates were 2000 and 2001, the earliest possible dates for having systems in place to protect our troops. This President signed that bill into law in February of this year. Within a week of signing that bill into law, his people came before the Congress and said: We are going to restructure the program, we are not going to be able to meet those dates, we are not going to obey the law. We are going to slip the THAAD program until 2006. We are going to slip the program requested by the general in charge of our troops in South Korea by 6 years, even though it is law and even though this President signed that bill into law, and even though this President never objected to that date, and even though the commander in chief of our troops over there says it is vitally important we have them in place. We have no recourse, Mr. Speaker. We are suing the President in Federal court right now to get him to abide like the law like we all have to do. There are major areas of disagreement, Mr. Speaker, between this Congress and that White House in terms of national missile defense, theater missile defense, and cruise missile defense. Unfortunately, we have an administration that waits until the right media opportunity, the APAC speech, the Scud attack, the Saudi attack, the TWA bombing, and then raises its hands, calls a press conference, invites people to stand behind the President, and then all of a sudden there is concern that we are going to do something to solve the problem. Yet all along while this Congress is in a very deliberate way providing the dollars to meet those very threats and needs, this President and his people are criticizing this Congress and attempting to make the case to the American people of providing funds to meet threats that do not exist. Mr. Speaker, to me as someone who devotes the bulk of my time to both national security and Russian relations, it is outrageous, and I am not going to stand for it. I am going to use every possible opportunity I have for the next 3 months to expose this administration for the hypocrisy that occurs every day. Whether it is the lack of enforcement of arms control agreements, whether it is the lack of calling the Chinese on the transfer of ring magnets to Pakistan, or whether it is the M-11 missile technology transfers, or whether it is the accelerometers and gyroscopes going from Russia to Iraq, we are going to call this administration. But that is not enough, Mr. Speaker, because the world is dangerous. The Russians are hurting for cash right now. In our bill tomorrow we are going to provide some dollars to help them dismantle nuclear weapons, and I will stand up and I will support that on the floor, as I have done repeatedly, but that is not enough. In the rush of the Russians to try to find new markets, they are now offering for market sale their most sophisticated offensive strategic weapons. These are long-range weapons. The SS-25 is what they are technically referred to: These missiles have a range of 10,000 kilometers, which means that these missiles can hit any city in the United States from any place in Russia. Now, Mr. Speaker, I am not here to say tonight that I think Russia is going to launch a SS-25 at America, so I do not want my liberal friends to go out saying, ``There goes Weldon, scaring the American people.'' I am not saying that. There is a possibility of a rogue event occurring. The Russian military has tremendous problems with morale--underpaid, finding proper housing. They have got problems with crime. But I still have some degree of confidence in the Russian military's control of their systems. We are not talking about that, Mr. Speaker. What we are talking about is taking a SS-25 launcher, and we know the Russians have over 400 of them, they are all mobile, they are on the back of a truck, you can drive them any place. They are on rubber tires. You can drive them through the country, and the CIA has said on the record it would be possible to move one of those launchers out of Russia without our surveillance camera detecting it. Here is the rub, Mr. Speaker, I do not really think that the threat comes from Iraq developing its own long-range missile. I do not think it is going to come from Libya developing its own long-range missile. What I think is going to happen is one of those nations will pay the right price to buy one of those mobile launched SS-25 systems that is currently being marketed for space launch purposes. Now the Russians tell us that they are controlling the launches, that they are all going to occur on their soil, even though they originally wanted to have a launch capacity in both Brazil and South Africa until we objected. But the point is, at some point in time in the future, mark my works, Mr. Speaker, there will be an incident involving a transfer of one of those launch systems, and when that occurs, we have no protection. Mr. Speaker, we have no system in this country today to protect the American people. If we are threatened, we have nothing we can do except offensively go in and attempt to take that missile launcher out, if we know in advance it is going to occur. That is where the threat is, Mr. Speaker, and that does not even include the threat coming from North Korea and China. The Chinese are now on their latest variation of the CSS-5A. This missile has a range of 13,000 kilometers. We know it can hit any city in America. Now the Clinton administration tells us we do not need missile defense because we have the ABM Treaty and therefore, since Russia is part of the ABM Treaty, we do not have to worry about Russia attacking us. China is not and never was a signatory to the ABM Treaty. There is no prohibition in China, and their offensive weapons today have the capacity to hit any city in the United States. North Korea is developing the Tae Po Dong and the Tae Po Dong II. These missiles will eventually have the range, very shortly, in a matter of years, of hitting Hawaii and Alaska. Again the outrage, Mr. Speaker. Instead of this President talking honestly to the American people about the threat, what did he have the intelligence community do? In a threat assessment that was leaked to two Democrats last December before it was done, even though General O'Neill was the customer for that threat assessment, this administration said in their intelligence report there is no threat to the continental United States that we have to worry about for the next 10 to 15 years. Now the intelligence community is going back now and kind of rethinking what they said there, but here is the important thing. Here is an administration that would go to this length, in terms of disagreeing between the Congress and the White House over missile defense initiatives, to say no threat to the continental United States. In other words, forget about Alaska and Hawaii. Because they are not a part of the continental United States, we are not going to worry about the North Koreans having the capability of hitting Hawaii or parts of Alaska. Mr. Speaker, that is outrageous. This administration said that, and this administration has sold that to Members of Congress and the American people. Thank goodness this Congress has not bought it. Mr. Speaker, our bill tomorrow provides full funding for missile defense in response to what the President's own ballistic missile defense organization said it could use. We did not go out and put money into programs just because we felt they are important, and I have no programs anywhere near my district in this area at all. We went to General O'Neill, who ran the President's own operation up until he retired last month, and said where would you put the dollars, and that is where we put the money. But this President, Mr. Speaker, is not providing honest information to the American people about reality today, reality in terms of the threat and reality in terms of what we should be doing to protect the American people and our troops. Here we are putting our troops around the world, yet not giving them the protection they need through capabilities that we have technically available today. There are two major provisions that were deleted from the final conference bill that I am very disappointed with. The first would have prevented the administration from making any changes to the ABM Treaty in terms of adding in other nations without the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. To me that is outrageous. This administration right now is over in Geneva negotiating changes to the ABM Treaty. They want to bring in other former Soviet states. Why is that so significant? Because when we want to modify that treaty, we do not just have to get Russia's approval, we have got to get Belorussia's approval, Ukraine's approval, Kazakhstan's approval, Tadzhikistan's approval, none of whom have offensive nuclear weapons. When I was over in Geneva as the only Member of Congress to visit the discussions and the negotiations taking place this year, for 2\1/2\ hours I sat across from the chief Russian negotiator General Kotunov. He is a hard-liner, but a decent person. We had a frank discussion. Sitting next to me was our chief American negotiator, Stanley Riveles. I looked General Kotunov right in the eye and I said: ``General, tell me, why does Russia want to amend the treaty to bring in all of these other countries? They do not have offensive weapons, they do not have offensive missiles.'' He said, ``Congressman, you are asking that question of the wrong person. I have not raised the issue of multilateralizing the treaty. You should be asking that of the person sitting next to you. Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe that our administration would be so beholden to an arms control treaty that they would want to involve other countries so it would be more difficult for us to amend that treaty down the road. That is what I feel this administration is doing, and I feel that is wrong. It is also certainly wrong without the advice and consent of the Senate. We had to remove that language from the bill because this President threatened to veto it, and the Senate would not go along with us. The second thing we had to remove from this bill was on further discussions in Geneva relative to demarcation. Now there are not many people who understand the demarcation issue because, to be honest with you, I cannot understand it fully myself. But I can tell you what is going on. This administration, unlike the previous 12 years of administrations dealing with Russia, has interpreted the ABM Treaty in such a way to require us to go in and negotiate systems that we have never before felt came under the terms of the ABM Treaty. This administration is right now about to give us an agreement, probably in October, that will limit our ability to fully develop our Navy upper-tier theater missile defense system. We call it dumbing-down our technology. There is no reason for it, Mr. Speaker. The previous two administrations set a standard that this Congress, Democrats and Republicans, agreed to. It is called the demonstrated standard in terms of where the ABM Treaty applies. This administration went over to Geneva and opened up a whole new can of worms, and so we are going to negotiate an agreement with the Russians on what is or is not allowed in terms of theater missile defense systems; the bottom line being, we are going to further limit, self-limit and self-impose, limitations on our own capabilities. It reminds me of what we did with the Patriot system. A lot of us saw the Patriot used during Desert Storm and we thought what a great system. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that system was dumbed-down? That system was originally designed to take out planes and not missiles. We had a change at the eleventh hour because of the missiles coming into Israel. Is that what is going to happen here? Are we going to wait until something happens, and then let the President have a major national press conference and pound the table and talk about his commitment to missile defense for our troops? Are we going to wait until we have a missile land in South Korea and then say that we are working hard on this new initiative? Are we going to wait until we have a Third World nation get a capability that threatens our sovereignty and then say we are going to move ahead? That is not what this Congress is doing. This Congress is taking steps to protect our troops and to protect our American people in spite of this administration. I just hope that as this year goes on our colleagues join with us in telling the message of truth about what is happening to our national security.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I had not intended on speaking on this particular issue today but sitting back in my office listening to some of my colleagues speak, I had to come over here and I had to say a few words. As a Republican who supports labor a good deal of the time, as a Republican who voted against NAFTA, who voted for the antistrikebreaker bill, who cosponsored the family medical leave bill, I have got to respond to some of the assertions made by my colleagues on this side about what Republicans have done to working people in America. It was Bill Clinton who jammed NAFTA down the throats of this country. It was Bill Clinton who told us the side agreements were going to raise up the working conditions and the environmental laws in Mexico. Where are those side agreements, Mr. Speaker? And to all those rank- and-file workers out there, you ask your union leaders, what has this President done to enforce those side agreements? Zero, zilch, nada. The jobs are going south. It was Bill Clinton, Mr. Speaker, who said he was for the antistrikebreaker bill which I voted for. But, Mr. Speaker, tell the workers of this country that it was Bill Clinton who would not lobby one of his two Senators from Arkansas to vote for cloture when it only needed one vote, because the votes were there to pass it, but he would not use his ability to get one of the Senators from Arkansas to vote to invoke cloture so that bill could become law, and I voted for it. Where is the outrage there? And, Mr. Speaker, where is the outrage on the other side at those 1 million UAW workers, those 1 million machinists, those 1 million electrical workers who have lost their jobs in defense plants all across this country because of Bill Clinton's cuts? Where is the outrage from the union leaders and from this side of the aisle on those losses? There has been total silence on those issues. And they have the gall to come to this floor and say that somehow a bill that allows workers the ability to decide whether they want some time off when they voluntarily have agreed to it is hurting labor. I am outraged and disgusted by what I hear on this side as someone who supports labor and supports working people. Mr. Speaker, I say get real. I say this is solid legislation that we should all get behind. And as a prolabor Republican I am going to vote for it, and I am going to challenge my colleagues on that side to match their actions to their rhetoric. They have not stood by labor on NAFTA, they have not stood by labor on antistrikebreaker, they have not stood by labor on the millions of jobs that have been lost in defense contract cutbacks by this President and this administration. We have a fair and an ideal dialog that benefits working people in this country, instead of the Beltway labor leaders that are totally in bed with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who have placed $35 million running ads on every TV station in America, with none of those ads against right-to-work Democrats. We have right-to-work Democrats with zero voting records and there is not one dime of that money going against any of them. Why? Not because the rank-and-file labor workers disagree but because the leadership in Washington has targeted all of that money against Republicans. That is the outrage I feel and I am going to lead the effort to have this bill become law.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, is the gentleman apologizing for his statement?

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Then I object.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. I want to rise to thank the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. Rogers] for working with the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer] and I to reach a compromise on this important amendment dealing with the fire and emergency services in this country. As our colleagues know, terrorism is no longer a foreign problem, it has hit American soil, and we must better prepare ourselves to deal with it. We all know the situations that have occurred over the past several years involving attack to the World Trade Center, the attack at the Oklahoma Murrah Federal Building and, most recently, TWA flight 800. In each of these tragic cases our Nation's first responders were the first on the scene to actively work to save lives. While I applaud the work of the fire and emergency services personnel from New York and Oklahoma, overall our Nation's first responders are unprepared and untrained on how to respond to terrorist events. Accordingly, fire and emergency service providers, especially in metropolitan areas, unfortunately need specialized training, strategic and tactical training, on how to handle the gamut of known types of terrorist attacks. Last year, Congress recognized the importance of terrorism training and acted to provide our Nation's first responders with crucial funding. In fact, Mr. Chairman, right now in the defense conference we are working on Nunn-Lugar II, which my panel is overseeing to deal with this issue to further enhance the lead taken in this particular bill. I applaud the work of the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer] for his leadership in this effort, and I especially applaud the subcommittee for their aggressive effort to provide funding in the form of the chairman's amendment or mark to provide funding for the Nation's fire and emergency service. We have 1.5 million men and women in this country, Mr. Chairman, from 32,000 departments who respond to disasters every day. What this amendment will do is allow FEMA to provide some training in the area of dealing with these most difficult situations that face this country and our metropolitan areas. So with that I rise to thank the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. Rogers] and thank the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer].

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to an outstanding singer-comedienne, woman, mother, grandmother, and wife, Mrs. Julie DeJohn Patterson, who passed away Sunday, July 14, 1996, at the age of 68. Julie was born and raised in Chester, PA, and spent most of her adult life residing in Concord Township, PA, with her husband, David, and their two sons, David and Patrick, who is a longtime member of my congressional staff. Known to many as Delaware County's Sweetheart, Julie had a career in show business which lasted for over 40 years. Her career took her around the world to the most popular night clubs and concert halls in Canada, Europe, Australia, and the United States, including an engagement at Carnegie Hall. Julie's television career included the ``Ed Sullivan Show,'' the ``Tonight Show,'' and a record 77 appearances on the ``Mike Douglas Show.'' But some of her brightest moments came when she was performing locally before audiences in Delaware County and the New Jersey Shore. Even though it would have been easy to remain totally absorbed in her career in show business, Julie's greatest pleasure in life was being a wife, mother, and good neighbor in Delaware County. She was a role model for many women today who seek to balance the pressures of a demanding career and the challenges of raising a family. In addition, her involvement in her community was exemplary. She helped raise money for various youth clubs, local charities and also produced and directed youth variety shows and presented benefit concerts to raise money for uniforms and equipment for community sports organizations. Julie will not only be missed by her family, but by her countless friends in and out of show business, and by the many people and organizations she touched throughout her life. The Philadelphia area and, indeed, the Nation has lost a great talent and role model.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 3230) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 1997 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe personnel strengths for such fiscal year for the Armed Forces, and for other purposes, with a Senate amendment thereto, disagree to the Senate amendment, and agree to the conference asked by the Senate.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of the gentleman from South Carolina, Floyd Spence, the distinguished chairman of the Committee on National Security, and agree with my colleague in the motion to instruct. We on this side have looked at the motion and agree with the contents and think it is well stated. Certainly we agree with it, and we think our actions speak to the points raised in the motion to instruct. The chairman of the full committee would be here, but at this point in time he is joining a number of our colleagues as we in this body pay tribute to the distinguished former chairman of our committee, Les Aspin, in unveiling the portrait of him which will hang in our committee hearing room. So Chairman Spence is speaking at this point in time or else he would be here on the floor to lead this discussion. But I rise to say to my friend and colleague and distinguished ranking member of the full committee that we agree with him and we agree with the motion in terms of the three key issues and areas that he has focused on, and we think our actions in the bill in fact speak to those issues. We think that we have addressed the issue of modernization but, at the same point in time, have taken those steps in terms of readiness, in terms of quality of life, that will allow us to keep up the morale and protect the well-being of those troops that are serving this country today around the world. In the area of key personnel actions, Mr. Speaker, we have included a 4.6 percent increase in the bachelor allowance for quarters to combine the department's highly touted underfunded 6-year effort to reduce out- of-pocket housing expenses. We support a 3 percent military pay raise. We provide for a substantial package of enhancements for permanent change of station move reimbursements, and we establish a minimum variable housing allowance to ensure all service personnel are compensated at a level sufficient to acquire safe and adequate housing in high-cost areas. In the area of key infrastructure improvements, Mr. Speaker, we provide $214 million, 38 percent above the President's request, in added funding to the construction of new barracks and dormitories. We provide $303 million, 45 percent above the President's request, in added funding for the construction of new family housing units and the improvement of existing units. We provide $28 million, nearly 5 times the President's request, in added funding to build new child development centers. We provide $25 million, more than double the President's request in added funding to support the ability of the Secretary of Defense to enter into public-private partnerships to produce more military housing at a lower cost to the taxpayer. Finally, Mr. Speaker, in terms of key morale, welfare and recreation improvements, we provide $60 million in additional funding for high priority MWR programs identified by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Quality of Life. Mr. Speaker, there are just a few of the highlights, but they are totally consistent with the points raised by the distinguished ranking member of this committee. They are well founded, and therefore, on behalf of Floyd Spence, I would say that the majority agrees with this motion to instruct. We look forward to working with the distinguished ranking member as we move toward the conference and, as conferees are appointed, to negotiate the differences that we have with our Senate counterparts and reach a final bill that hopefully the President will sign into law.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion.

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania

Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, I want to commend Chairman Porter for the outstanding job he did with this piece of legislation. Make no mistake about it, people on both sides of the aisle here have the same ultimate purpose. We want to help kids. We want to make sure kids have a chance to go to college. We want to help protect our workers. We want to make sure that education is a key priority. We agree on that. My personal experience as someone who went to school on a student loan and could not have gone otherwise, as someone who taught in a public school for 7 years and in an urban depressed school district and as someone who ran a Federal title I program for 3 years, I think I know something about some of the programs we are talking about. There is a key difference, Mr. Chairman, between what the administration wants and what this Congress wants. The difference is that the administration wants to empower the bureaucracy and we want to empower people. It is very simple and very fundamental. We heard in the debate on the other side from our more liberal friends that there is no help for job training, for housing assistance, for energy assistance, for child care, for homeless shelters, for health care for the poor and for housing rehab, to name a few. What they did not say, Mr. Chairman, is that this bill increases the community service block grant by the single largest amount in the program's history since 1981, $100 million, Mr. Chairman. Where is the rhetoric coming from the other side in the largest single increase in this program's history? And where is the acknowledgment, Mr. Chairman, on the other side that this will allow us to assist 2.1 million more people than we assisted last year to a total of 10.3 million? And where is the information from the other side about the leveraging of another $267 million of private sector investment which is what all 1,200 community action agencies across the country do in every one of our Members' districts. This is a good bill. It is a key difference between what the liberals want and what we want. We want to empower people. We want to empower grassroots decisionmakers. We want to empower those people who are involved in community action agencies like the one I started in my county back in 1979 which has grown to a $14 million a year agency providing all of these services. I say vote ``yes'' for this bill and I thank the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter].