Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a tribute to Vivian Malone Jones.

It is my generation's tragedy that so few of us knew the name of Vivian Malone Jones. It is a cruel twist of history that George Wallace's ``stand in the schoolhouse door'' is itself a vivid memory but that the protagonists of the event--the ones being stood against-- were off site and out of view.

Vivian Malone Jones died too young last week at age 63. In prose, she was the first black American to earn a degree from the University of Alabama. In poetry, she was proof of the power of dignified commitment, and was a trailblazer to young black women my mother's age, whose own dreams seemed more attainable when they contemplated her boldness.

Part of Jones' current anonymity was based on the choice she made to forge a conventional career as a government employee, rather than as a traveling icon of the civil rights era. She did not frequent the reenactments, the marches, or the annual seminars revisiting the sixties, and I never recall her weighing in on whether the war in Iraq was unjust or whether a Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed.

But these choices of when and where to cast her influence were hers, and they were noble and worthy of respect. And the value Vivian Malone Jones put on respecting choices meant that I never heard her offer those facile denigrations of the caliber of this generation's African American leaders.

My last memory of Jones is the Newsweek cover the week she registered at the University of Alabama. The cover featured the unattributed quote, ``We owe them--and we owe ourselves--a better country.'' It was so true, for Jones and her cohorts, and it is so true, for the children of poverty and depressed schools, for the working poor who are losing ground, and for the anonymous challengers to glass ceilings who are themselves broken for trying to climb to higher altitudes. Blessed are those whose courage moves us to make the ultimate commitments.

Mr. Speaker, because of my tremendous personal admiration and professional respect, I am particularly honored to rise today to introduce a resolution that gives tribute to Judge Myron Thompson's 25-year legacy of upholding the Constitution in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama--considered one of the most important courts of the American civil rights movement. Judge Thompson's tenure on the bench reflects years of honest, diligent, and fair jurisprudence. This resolution documents Judge Thompson's distinguished service to the federal judiciary, the people of Alabama, and to the United States. I am pleased to ask the House to express its gratitude to U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson.

Judge Thompson was appointed to the Federal bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 after an already distinguished legal career. A product of Alabama's segregated public schools, he attended Yale University and proceeded directly to Yale Law School, after which, he returned to Alabama to work for the state Attorney General's Office. Judge Thompson went on to private practice, as the only African-American practitioner in Dothan, AL, his mother's hometown. He later became the founding director and Board Chair of the Legal Services Corporation of Alabama.

Once appointed to the Court, Judge Thompson inherited some of the most significant cases in the Middle District. He addressed the needs of mentally-ill residents in the Wyatt case, upholding principles of humane treatment that have become part of the fabric of American law. He addressed the needs of workers, presiding over numerous employment discrimination cases involving, at times, the claims of hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. Judge Thompson's rulings in voting rights cases broadened the civic participation of Alabama's traditionally disenfranchised. In the Dillard case, Judge Thompson found the Alabama legislature culpable of racial discrimination in fashioning and authorizing at-large election schemes for local jurisdictions. As a result of Dillard, there have been African-American city council members, county commission members, and school board members elected in places where previously there had never been an African-American elected to public office. Judge Thompson upheld the Constitution's promise to insulate every citizen from inhumane conditions while in government custody by finding the conditions at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women unconstitutional and pervasively unsafe. These are just some of Judge Thompson's more significant cases.

Judge Thompson's judicial career has thrust him to the forefront of many of the most pressing social and political controversies of the day. His compassion for the marginalized, love of learning, and knowledge of the law are reflected in his courage, insight, and sound judgment. We are fortunate to have Judge Thompson on the federal bench, and America has been a direct beneficiary of his extraordinary service. I ask the House to join me in endorsing this resolution of appreciation and commendation for the service of District Judge Myron Thompson.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a tribute to Mr. J. George Mitnick.

Jasper, Alabama was not George Mitnick's first home--he was a Connecticut Yankee who migrated south--but Jasper was where George made his fortune and found his wife. Jasper is also a city that he shaped for over 5 decades: his footprints include the presidency of the local Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club; the Mitnick Wilderness Boot Camp for troubled teenagers; and of course, his role in founding Top Dollar, a retail chain of over 250 stores in 11 states.

George Mitnick helped make modern Jasper, but what made George Mitnick, above all, was the days he spent as an army captain helping to liberate Nazis death camps. George was a committed Jew before he entered those camps, but the degradation that he saw there alerted him to an existential threat to his people, and to the capacity of humans to violate each other.

Those camps never left George Mitnick's soul. They made him a vigilant defender of Israel's future and of American politicians who understood how essential Israel's future was to any vision of a just world. The death camps made him an activist--and I am honored that his activism led him to embrace my candidacy against a foe of Israel's aspirations. George was honored and humbled that his activism also made him AIPAC's ``Man of the Year'' in 2003.

I think that those awful, wretched camps also made George understand his adopted home better. George lived in Alabama during the years when the racial cauldron was boiling, and Alabama's ill temper on race was one of the aspects of his new state that he most disdained. He was a quiet, but real, force for integration in Jasper. George also raised a daughter who raised a daughter who married a black man. His grandson- in-Iaw James, an African American, was one of George's pallbearers, and it is a measure of the Jasper that George help make that virtually no one stared at James' role. George's friends knew that tolerance was a Mitnick family value.

On August 6, 2005, J. George Mitnick died at the age of 87. I thank George for his faith and his life and for the promises he kept. I hope that my tenure in Congress will honor the world and the state he wanted to build. May the God of Abraham bless George Mitnick and his surviving wife Willene.

Thank you for organizing this Special Order tonight. Because our time is limited, I want to make my remarks suitably brief. But I want to pick on something that has been a theme of what I have heard from a lot of my colleagues in the last several minutes.

We have talked a lot, appropriately, about the question of national will in this country of ours, and I am reminded that several hours ago we passed a resolution on the floor honoring a woman named Rosa Parks who was a seamstress in the city I was born in, Montgomery, Alabama.

When Rosa Parks made the decision to stand up by sitting down, by refusing to give up her seat on the bus, my grandmother was a 46-year- old woman who lived in Montgomery; my mother was a 12-year-old child. And they both vividly remember at times when they were escorted or asked to leave the front of the bus, to go to the back.

And in that generation of Americans, there was a certain percentage of people who felt that, well, it is just the way it was. There was a certain percentage of people who felt that racial segregation, separating people based on color, was just in the fabric and the atmosphere of what we were as a country.

And when the Rosa Parkses of the world asserted themselves, a lot of people dismissed their effort. A lot of people said that it is a quixotic venture.

And here we are 50 years later with a whole lot of political power for this community, a whole lot of an ability to stand here and to talk about these kinds of questions. We are a long, long way from the Montgomery, Alabama that Rosa Parks and my mother and grandmother lived in.

What has changed about that 50 years is our will changed as a country. Our sense of what we would and would not tolerate changed over a period of time, and that which seemed tolerable many years ago, all of a sudden came to be seen as intolerable. It is my sincerest hope, as a Member of this House, that when our time is long done, when the youngest of us here have left this body, that some group of Americans will look back and they will say that we managed to take these questions of poverty, impenetrable, cutting, wounding poverty, off the table, that we somehow managed to find a way to build enough of a net in this country that everyone who tries to build a family has a maximum opportunity to do it, that we managed to build enough of a net in this country that when anyone gets sick, that we find a way to give them a quality of care, that we found a way to build enough of a net in this country, so that if there is an ambition in our children, the ambition will always be rewarded.

The hope that I have is that we will one day reach a point where these kinds of questions come off the table, just as the question of what side of the bus you can sit in came off the table. If we are going to get to that point, it will require a lot more than the reaction to Hurricane Katrina.

It will require a lot more than the reaction to the Gulf that was exposed in New Orleans. It will require a sustained commitment to be serious about these questions. It will require a sustained commitment to talk about issues of day care for working mothers, issues of health care for indigents, issues of exclusion for all kinds of groups who have been marginalized in America.

But I think those things are within our reach. The reason I think so is because I think that we have the capacity as a country to come back to a vocabulary and a dialogue of national greatness. We have the capacity as a country to talk about a vision that will make America great, that will not simply be based on the force of our arms, that will not simply be based on our intercontinental ballistic missiles, but will be based on the quality of the institutions that we build.

I will end by mentioning someone that I know inspired many of my colleagues in this body, Robert F. Kennedy, the Senator from New York who died seeking to change the country by winning the presidency.

He often ended his speeches by saying, ``Some men see things as they are and say why? I see things that never were and say why not?''

That has to be the constant challenge of all the Members of this institution who style themselves as progressives. The constant challenge has to be that we will see a range of visions, a range of opportunities and quality of life for our people that we have not previously seen and that we will have a national will to move toward that time.

So I thank the gentlewoman for organizing this event. I thank my colleagues for speaking.

In the final seconds I have here today, I will simply make the point that all of our citizens in this country ought to understand that we are impacted when some of our people do not share in the same circle of opportunity, but yet they are working and striving and pushing themselves every day to do it. That exclusion and that absence does not just wound African Americans, it does not just wound Latinos, it wounds everyone in this country that shares our national identity.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for yielding. I certainly thank all of my colleagues in this Chamber who have expressed solicitude to me. But, frankly, that solicitude is better spent on my colleagues from Mississippi and Louisiana. My State of Alabama was gratuitously spared virtually all of this damage. There are certainly people in my State who lost power, there are people in my State who were hurt. But God did not create all suffering on the same scale, and I know the difference between what has happened in my State and what has happened to my colleagues.

I am very proud of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), I am very proud of the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) for all of the work that they do in this Congress, but particularly for their fortitude in the last week, because, Mr. Speaker, we have been able to sit at these things from a distance. We have been able to talk as compassionate people about these losses.

The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) have the very hard work of going into their communities and talking to people who are in pain and saying, ``I will use my power to try to help you,'' and seeing the tears in response. So it is they who very much deserve our solicitude tonight, and I am proud to serve with them.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make three points that I think are related. The first one is this:

So many of the people who died, and we understand that the numbers of the dead will likely exceed 10,000, the largest single disaster in American history, so many of the ones who died had lives that do not put them on the front page of the newspaper. They had lives that were relatively anonymous. They were hard-working people, trying to make it through their lot in life, and all of a sudden they were cut down in blameless circumstances.

The challenge of leadership though is to give an honor and a place to those who die in tragic circumstances. The challenge of real leadership is to lift the anonymity and to put an honor on the table.

One of the things that I wish we would see in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, is for the President of the United States to do what he did the last time our country was seared, to come and gather the House and Senate together in this body, to address the Nation and the Congress, and to paint a vision of how we can do better next time and a vision of how we can rebuild these people.

I would love to see the President go to the National Cathedral, a place he went 4 days after September 11, because when he went to the National Cathedral, he gave an honor to those victims and lifted them up to a certain place of honor. I would love to see that done for the people in your State of Mississippi and the people in the great State of Louisiana.

We cannot let the anonymity that lingered over the lives of these people mask the honor of their death, because the honor of their death is this: They were innocent, hard-working Americans who lost their lives in part because of nature, but in part because of the errors of our government. And it is that second point that I want to turn to tonight.

The country needs this President to admit that his government failed; the country needs this President to come here and say that the standard that was set by FEMA last week is one that was unacceptable for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana; and the country needs this President to name this as the disaster that it was. I cannot say it nearly as eloquently as our friend and colleague the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), but our country is embarrassed when we have power and do not use it intelligently and effectively. Our country is embarrassed when we have the means, the capacity and the ability to know what was happening last week, and still fail to adequately respond to it.

I have heard some of my friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle say that they were pleased and satisfied and thankful for the job that happened last week, and I would simply differ with them in this one sense: Can we truly be pleased with the lack of response, the constant underestimation, the constant miscalculation? Because if we are pleased with that and we consider that to be good work, our standard is far too low.

The final point that I want to make, I say to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), is one that perhaps should be more obvious to us. The fissures that already exist in our society become even more painful and more acute when there are stresses in our society. Last week, as so many people in this Chamber have said so well, the people who were left in the Superdome, the people not evacuated in time, so many are the people we often do not see. And we owe this next quote to Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA. Mr. Brown said that we learned that there were people that we did not even know existed.

Mr. Brown did not mean to be profound when he said that, but he was unintentionally so, because we did learn and his administration did learn last week that there are people that they did not know existed, who live in the cracks and fissures in our society. And that ought to pain us.

The last point that I want to make, and it is the point I would hang over this Chamber as we think over this next several weeks: We owe people in this country a better place than the margins of life. There are people who, because of their own faults and their own demerits, end up in a particular place. We understand that. We know that. The Bible tells us that. But we ought to be strong enough and bold enough as a country to not let people who are trying to live their lives fall into the margins because we do not care enough to build a net around them. The absence of a net in New Orleans, the absence of a net in Mississippi, the absence of a safety net in much of the South, was laid bare last week, and we ought to be moved by that.

I will not cheapen this tragedy by saying there is a silver lining in it. Too many people died for that. But I will say that I hope that we draw some inspiration. I hope that as we go about fashioning a strategy for relief, that we fashion a strategy for relief that can lift up the weakest of these people and the least of them in an economic sense.

But I hope as we move past Hurricane Katrina, and, frankly most of us in this Chamber will find a way to do that, it is the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) who will continue to you live with it, but for a lot of the people in this Chamber, we will be able to move past this. We will be on to the next crisis of the month or the next political cause of the month.

But I hope as we move on, we carry this lesson with us, we carry this notion that if we are a just country, we cannot be a country where being left behind and being left out has the consequences that happened in the gentlemen's State of Mississippi and in Louisiana last week. If we are to be the country that we say we are, we have to do better by all of our people.

The final point before I yield back my time, I turn once again to the President and his leadership. This President would not serve himself or our country well if this is turned into an attack on the mayor of New Orleans or the governor of Louisiana. This is not the time to make false comparisons and to wonder whether the governor and the mayor did not do this or did not do that, because there is something we ought to understand: The governor and the mayor lived in the midst of a crisis.

The people who sat comfortably in this city last week were removed from that crisis. They were in a position and had the level head to do better, and they came up with the sea of incompetence that we saw. So how dare we look at the mayor and the governor sitting among their people in the midst of all of this and blame them, when people sat in this city far removed from the danger and could not do better?

Mr. Speaker, again I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for his leadership, and I hope that his constituents, and know that his constituents, appreciate it. I thank the gentleman for his work as the ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, because it ought to be said, What is the measure of homeland security if we cannot find a way to secure our own people in the midst of danger?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for his leadership on this issue.

Let me begin with an image the President of the United States laid out before us. In his inaugural address very close to where we stand today, the President said that we have the capacity as a superpower on this planet to change the world, to reform it, to make it a better and more democratic place.

I wish that with respect to this debate, I say to the gentleman from New York, that those same values and that same vision had been brought to the floor, because the reality is that, as one who believes an American power can make a difference, this agreement is a missed opportunity.

Instead of taking these nations that struggle so much day in and day out, instead of challenging them to move to a better place, we gave up and we accepted the status quo. And one of the cruelest and strangest arguments, I say to the gentleman from New York, that I have heard tonight is that somehow we are not standing by these countries if we defeat this agreement.

What a bizarre, upside-down world we would have, Mr. Speaker, if we think that we are standing by these countries when we are not standing by the millions of children between the ages of 5 and 14 who got up to go to work this morning, will get up to go to work again tomorrow morning. What a strange and bizarre world if we think we are standing by these countries when we cannot stand by the dignity of their women. And what a strange and bizarre world if we think we stand by these countries when we do not stand by their voiceless and by the people who work and who are shot down in fire because they speak up for their political rights.

For the Republicans and the conservatives who support this agreement, if you believe in what your President said, if you believe that the superpower has the capacity to help remake this world, then let it begin in Central America, and let it begin by pushing these nations to do better.

The final statement I will make is that this is a values statement. We hear the word ``values'' in this Chamber a lot. Well, the strongest value is what we take of our conscience and how we extend it to other people. A value is whether or not we push others to do better, and we fall short on the value scale tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his thoughtfulness and for his leadership on this issue over the better part of a decade now.

And I thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for his bipartisanship and his thoughtful approach.

I would say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), one of the things that strikes me about this debate is when I tell many people in the business community, I tell some of our editorial writers that I am firmly opposed to this agreement, there is a regular refrain that they have. They say to me, Mr. Davis, why are you against globalization? And they say, why are you against trade? And it strikes me that that is such an enormously false way to frame this argument. To say that someone is against globalization if they oppose this treaty is a real misstatement of what we are debating and what we will be voting on 1 week from now, and I want to talk about that for a moment.

There are some of us in this Chamber who have voted for every trade agreement that we have seen since we have been here. I voted for agreements with Australia, with Morocco, with Chile, with Singapore. I am someone who firmly believes in this modern economy that we cannot disengage ourselves from the rest of the world; and I, by no means, subscribe to the label of being anti-trade or being anti-globalization. But I think that there is another way. There is a possibility if we are thoughtful enough and serious enough about this economy and our obligations to build a trade policy that actually prods countries around this world to change. There is a possibility of building a trade policy that elevates conditions around the world.

And I would submit that there are two kinds of trade policies. There is one set of policies that challenges the rest of the world to rise to a higher standard, and there is another set of trade policies that takes the world as it is and does not seek to move, does not seek to bend it, does not seek to change it.

And I and so many of us believe in the first kind. I believe in a set of principles that say that we can use our trade as we occasionally use our economic might, as we occasionally use our political might to improve conditions. The reality is that if this agreement is somehow passed next week, despite the great opposition to it, it will open up a new low-wage market, and it will say to five countries in Central American and to the Dominican Republic that your low-wage conditions, your failure to protect your workers, your failure to protect your women from discrimination laws, your failure to prevent children from working, is acceptable in the community of nations, it is acceptable in the economic community of nations.

And I remember, as the gentleman from Ohio does, when President Bush gave his second inaugural just a few months ago. Most of that inaugural was devoted to the proposition that, as a superpower, we have an ability to change the character of this world. Much of that inaugural was dedicated to the idea that, as a superpower, we have the ability to challenge this world and the most repressive countries in this world to move in a better direction.

Here we stand, just 7 months later; and that challenge is not being posed to the House, not by the administration. That challenge is not being posed to us. And all of a sudden the same President who told us 7 months ago that we have in our power to move this world toward reform, apparently does not believe that we can do so when it comes to the dollars and cents that people earn every day, apparently does not think that we can do so when it comes to the quality of community the people live in every day around the world.

There is a very cruel argument that I have heard in the last several days I want to mention to you. I have heard it said that if you do not support CAFTA that somehow you are not standing by the countries of Central America. I have heard it said that if you do not support CAFTA that you are somehow abandoning these poor miserable nations and that you are somehow leaving them to just be cut adrift.

What I do not understand is how we can say that we are standing by the CAFTA countries when we are not standing by millions of children, 14 million in the whole region who are between 5 and 14 who got up and went to work this morning and who are being put in bed tonight and will go back to work tomorrow morning. I do not understand how we can say that we are somehow standing by Central America when we cannot stand by the rights of women in these countries.

I do not understand how we can say that we are standing by Central America when we cannot stand for the rights of the voiceless and those who work and want to express their political beliefs or their desire for better conditions in the workplace and can be fired because of those opinions.

I do not see how we can say that we are standing by Central America when we are leaving it unchallenged to change itself. That is what this debate is about. This is about, to use a word that is used on both sides of this aisle very freely, this is a debate about values because I define values as what we demand from others, what we demand from ourselves and the vision that we offer to others.

This agreement offers such a narrow vision. It offers such a limited notion of what our economy can be. It tells us that we can roll back our trade deficit on the backs of unskilled workers around the world. It tells us that we can somehow improve certain industries and the profits of certain industries by diverting them to low-wage economies. And it somehow says that we can trade off the fortunes of our people and the fortunes of other people interchangeably without any higher standard to lift them both.

Another point that I want to address, so many of the editorials that I have seen on this issue have a certain bloodless quality to them because they say if you believe in globalization, yes, you have to accept that there are winners and losers, and there will be more winners than losers, and the losers simply have to get over it. They simply have to adjust.

Well, like the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones), I represent some of the towns in west Alabama that are full of some of the people who will lose, families who today are working in textile companies, apparel companies, hosiery companies, who may not be able to work there if this agreement puts a set of forces in place. And I do not think of those people as being losers. I think of them as being families who are struggling to build a future for their families. I think of them as being people who want their kids to be able to come back and work in west Alabama. I think of them as being people who desperately want a better life for themselves and their children and their grandchildren. And I think that we should keep this in mind as I begin to close today.

How do we promote and defend a vision to the American people that concedes that so many of us will be losers?

How do we promote and defend a vision and a set of values that accepts that so many of our people will be left to fall behind under the trends of this agreement we set in place, and that so many people in Central America will be left in their substandard condition?

There is no wonder why this agreement is struggling to pass Congress. There is no wonder why, if almost any of us went back to our States, we would find either a mystery or we would find out right confusion around CAFTA. The reason the case has not been made is because the American people are tired of being denominated and delineated into winners and losers. They are tired of being told that you may lose, but you have to get over it. And that is the final point at stake here today.

Can we build a trade vision which offers a better way for so many workers in our country? Because it is not enough to simply say that, well, there are these abstract benefits that are off in the distance. We have to be able to talk to people in the gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. Brown) district and my district and the gentleman from Idaho's (Mr. Otter) district and the gentleman from North Carolina's (Mr. Jones) district and the gentleman from Virginia's (Mr. Goode) district.

We have to be able to talk to them and say here is why your Congress is doing this. And right now we could not justify it. Right now we could not say to them that these agreements will create a higher standard of living in America or abroad. Right now we could not say that these conditions will meet the American test of reforming the world for the better. We simply cannot make the case. The administration cannot make the case.

So in closing I simply call on my colleagues tonight, 1 week from now, or 1 week and 1 day from now when we, in all likelihood, vote on this agreement, to vote on their principles, to vote for trade that has values lying beneath it, to vote for a vision of how we can reform the economies of the world, and not to accept this limited vision.

And I am reminded so often of something that William Jefferson Clinton who was elected the same year that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) was to Congress. He often said that he was so tired of what was cold blooded being passed off as courageous in politics.

I fear that our indifference to the fortunes of the people who live in these countries, our failure to prod their governments toward reform looks a lot like that cold bloodedness that President Clinton was talking about. And it is so wrong for the editorial boards, so wrong for so many lobbyists in this city to say that that cold bloodedness is really courage. It is not courageous, and it will not be courageous to take your voter card and to stand on the floor in the well of this House next week and to vote for an agreement that is so empty and so vacant of values.

I thank the gentleman from Ohio for his good work. I thank our Republican colleagues who are here tonight for joining us in that bipartisan cause and thank them and hope the American people recognize that this is a critical vote, because it is a statement of what kind of community we are and how we exist in the international community of nations.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, I did not want this debate to end without expressing my support for what the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) is doing today.

The reality is that, while this economy has improved in the last several years, while housing starts are on the rise, while the number of Americans with the chance at the dream of homeownership is rapidly expanding, there are a lot of breaks and gaps in this economy, and this program, Section 8, exists to remedy those breaks and those gaps.

The score of the amendment of the amount of money that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) proposes to add to this budget is roughly 1.6 percent of this bill. This is a fractional investment in the scheme of things, but it is a significant investment for numerous families who will benefit from Section 8.

So I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) for his outstanding work in raising this issue and being persistent and bringing it before this body.

I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, the response I would make to that is that it is my understanding that because the funding has been zeroed out for HOPE VI, we are entitled to raise the amendment and that we can, in effect, either reach forward or reach backward as far as capturing these funds goes. That was the information relayed to me by the Parliamentarian.

If that is the Chair's ruling, I would ask, without prejudice, permission to address it now, based on the absence of other people being on the floor. I would ask unanimous consent to address it now.

I am, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 4 minutes, and let me begin by thanking the chair of this committee and the ranking member of the committee for their diligence. We have obviously had a difficult task this budget year, given the constraints that we have; and I recognize this whole argument proceeds in that context.

Let me begin by stating that this is a bipartisan amendment that speaks to a program that was created by George H.W. Bush, the 41st President of the United States, and by Jack Kemp, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In 1989, the Bush administration came up with a striking insight, that rather than write off a lot of our inner-city neighborhoods, that we try to revitalize them; that we sustain a public and private commitment to draw resources back into the inner-city; and that we literally change the face of abandoned neighborhoods. And they encapsulated this vision as HOPE VI. It has been around for 16 years. It is very much a bipartisan creation, and it is zero funded at this point in this budget.

Mr. Chairman, we ask that $60 million be added, which of course is literally 1 percent of the value of this whole appropriations bill; that $60 million be added to sustain this program and to allow its good works to go forward. And perhaps the best recommendation that I can offer comes not from my side of the aisle, but it comes, frankly, from the other side.

Our friend and colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent), speaking on June 6 in a press release announcing the HOPE VI project in his district said, ``More than just an upgrade, this $75 million project will be a catalyst for the revitalization of the entire community, and it will serve as a model of what public housing can and should be.''

I also quote our friend and colleague, the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Pickering), announcing a HOPE VI grant in his district in June of 2004: ``This grant represents a significant investment into the overall economic development and renewal of the East Mississippi region.''

I would next quote our friend and colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), who states that ``This is tremendous news for the Ben Harbor community. It is another example of local, State and Federal levels coming together for the betterment of Ben Harbor and surrounding areas.''

And I could go on and on, Mr. Chairman; but the reason that this program has captured so much bipartisan support is it draws down our two best instincts. It draws down our public instinct that we can reinvest in abandoned communities, and it draws on our private instinct that we can use private sector dollars.

I am told by CBO, frankly, that this amendment is budget neutral because of the nature of the way HOPE VI funds are disbursed, the nature of the way they are drawn down in escrow. So as a practical matter, there is no significant dollar consequence from this amendment, no significant dollar objection to this amendment. The only question is whether or not we believe this is a valuable program.

We are told by some that the program is backlogged. We are told by some that the program takes a while to work its way to completion. And I think all of us in this House are hoping to change some of the structure of HOPE VI, but the changes should not be such that the program cannot go forward. The thrust of this bipartisan amendment is that we restore a level of funding, whatever changes can be made administratively can be made, and we give these communities a chance to flourish.

Mr. Chairman, I make the very simple proposition that 4 days after the U.S. Supreme Court has granted unlimited powers of domain to many of our communities, HOPE VI represents a principled, balanced approach that respects the needs of people living in the community and draws on our instincts for the betterment of those communities.

I am happy to be joined by my cosponsor, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Harris), who has been so stalwart on these issues. I thank her for lending her bipartisan voice to this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Harris).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As further proof of the bipartisan nature of this amendment, the National Home Builders Association, one of the larger lobbies that deals with this Congress, has also expressed its support for restoring these funds.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

First, in response to the gentleman's observations, with respect to where this account goes to sustain itself, where it goes to get the $60 million, the GSA building fund, that fund is $7.6 billion out of this budget. That is a $550 million increase over last year. I do not think moving $60 million from $7.6 billion is of any consequence.

And I will also reiterate what I said at the outset: Because of the way that Hope VI funds are drawn down, this amendment is viewed by CBO as being budget neutral. In fact, it is actually viewed by CBO as being an amendment that will actually save outlays of around $56 million this year. So, frankly, there is no dollar consequence this year. And in the scheme of things, even over the outyears, this is a very well-growing fund of $7.6 million.

The second point, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) has made observations, and Democrats and Republicans have made, about some of the weaknesses and some of the delays in Hope VI, and I do not think there is any opposition on this side of the aisle, and certainly not from proponents of this amendment, to looking closely at why the projects do not expedite and why it takes them awhile to move to completion, but that is not an argument for doing away with the program. That is an argument to reforming the program.

Mr. Chairman, $60 million will amount to three or four projects around the country, but that will be three or four neighborhoods that have been written off and abandoned that can be reclaimed.

Finally, given the small dollar consequence of this, I think we ought to err on the side of these communities. We ought to err on the side of the community of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Pickering), we ought to err on the side of the community of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), we ought to err on the side of the community of the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Harris), and so many like it around the country.

We are in a phase where we can either write off a lot of our inner city neighborhoods, or we can reinvest in them. We can either consign them to being blighted places of neglect, or we can rebuild them, and this does it with our private and public dollars. I urge a ``yes'' vote on this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I am a little ashamed to confess my mother is around the age of the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt). My mother used to tell me stories when she was a young woman in the segregated South that she would drive through parts of rural and western Alabama and that she would see crosses burned. My grandmother used to tell me stories that after Brown v. Board of Education, she remembers riding through parts of rural Alabama and seeing crosses burned.

The interesting thing about that is the burning of those crosses did not keep a single black child out of a public school. The burning of those crosses, frankly, did nothing to slow down the march of justice in this country over the 40-or-so years I have been around. I think that is relevant to this debate today.

Mr. Speaker, 15 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court would not let Congress ban flag-burning. And here we stand 15 years later in a country that is still deeply patriotic, a country that is still full of love of Americans toward each other. Frankly, I would submit in this last 4 or 5 years we have seen a rising tide of patriotism. We feel a greater faith in each other and a greater faith in our fighting forces now than we ever

have. I wish advocates of this amendment understood we have won this battle. Those of us who believe in this country, those of us who believe in its decency, and those of us who believe in its power, we have won. Within our borders, we have won.

The people who would burn flags, just like the people who would burn crosses, have lost. And not only have they lost; they have been thrashed. They have been banished to the margins. They are not a legitimate part of our political debate. They are not acceptable viewpoints to most of us.

I wish we understood that every time we think about saying that one kind of speech is so obnoxious or so offensive that we ought to get rid of it, every time we even let ourselves think that, we would be so much better off if we trust in our better angels, because the best angels in our nature tell us that flag burners are wrong. They tell us that the instinct behind them is wrong and we have prevailed.

There is a reason we have had this 230-year constitutional tradition. It is because we have been strong enough and powerful enough and our values have been deep enough to withstand even the worst of ideas.

I thank the gentleman for offering this amendment and for calling us back to an understanding that even this august institution is limited by the United States Supreme Court, and that even the best values that we pronounce in this Chamber are limited by our Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, let me begin by joining the various Members of this institution who will speak today and who will urge the passage of both of these bills. I certainly cannot speak with the particular passion of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Matsui) who has been touched by this issue, but this is a very good day for the House of Representatives. It is a very good day, because we have managed to reach across the partisan divides, I believe twice today, or we will manage to reach across the partisan divide, I believe twice today, to pass bills that are good for the American people and good for countless numbers of Americans who need this research.

I want to say something about the cord blood bill in particular. I have had the honor for 2 years of working with the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) on this bill, and I am a Democratic sponsor on it; and I want to thank him for his good work.

This bill will make an enormous difference to the African Americans around this country who often struggle with blood matches. Cord bloods do not require a blood match. The young man that we saw on the Cannon terrace yesterday who suffered from sickle cell anemia whose life has been permanently transformed by cord blood cell technology speaks to the power of this bill. We talk a great deal about health care disparities, and we ought to talk about health care disparities in this country; but rather than talk, this bill acts. It actually provides relief for a group of people who otherwise would not have seen it.

But I want to talk for just a moment about the concept of principled difference, because I think it is very much illustrated today. Mr. Speaker, the reason that this cord blood bill made it to the floor is in large measure because rather than digging in in opposition to stem cell opposition, as strongly as the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) feels about this issue, rather than digging in in opposition, the gentleman worked with the scientific community, he worked across the aisle to try to find another approach. And as circumstance has it, both of these approaches are before us today.

If we would somehow as an institution learn from his example, if we figured out how, rather than digging in and deciding how much we disagree with each other, what other ways exist, what ways can we find to work together, we would not have a 34 percent approval rating as an institution.

The final point that I will make is that I firmly believe that we have all of our genius and all of our brilliance as a scientific and medical community for a very good reason. I think that we are meant to use it. I am hopeful that all of the technological advances that have happened in the last several years, with cord blood cells and with stem cells, can make a significant difference.

So to all the Members of this institution, I simply urge them and encourage them to vote for both of these bills but, even more importantly, to accept this as an example of what happens when Democrats and Republicans find intelligent common ground. There will be people who will benefit from this, and I do not think it is going too far to say that lives will be saved because of these two bills.

So I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) for his good work and, again, I am honored to be the lead Democratic sponsor of the cord blood bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for yielding to me. Let me begin by thanking my colleagues and my friend, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I have only served with the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) in the Congress for a very short period of time, but the gentleman has been such a stalwart on this issue during the time that we have been in Congress.

This is not a subject that necessarily just jumps out at people as an exciting or sexy subject, but it is so important to our country to talk about the problem and the consequences from our debt and our deficit. There is no one who has been more of a stalwart in this institution than the gentleman from South Carolina, and I certainly thank him. As well, I welcome the person who will follow me tonight, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) who has, in a very short period of time, just since January, already distinguished herself as one of

the ablest and most intelligent Members of this institution; and we are thankful to have her here this evening.

I know that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) was in my district very recently, in Selma, Alabama, with me during March of this year when we commemorated the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge; and the day after that march, I had a town hall meeting in that same city, Selma, and the purpose of the town hall meeting was to talk about Social Security and our country's future. There was a moment at the end of the town hall meeting that I want to share with the Chamber of that night, because I think it is so illustrative of the challenge that we are facing.

There was a young woman who was about 19. She said she was a college freshman, and she stood up and she asked me and the panelists a question, and her question was something like this: she said, young people today, and younger workers today are paying into a Social Security system that may not be around or may not be around in its current, robust form for us young people. So she asked the question, why do we have to pay at all? Why do we as young people, she said, have to even pay into a system that may not be there for us?

When I heard that young lady make those comments, two things occurred to me. The first one is that we have fallen a ways in this country if our young people today are full of cynicism and not idealism; if our young people today are wondering why we have to meet our burdens instead of wondering why we cannot meet greater burdens, something has happened to us that is wrong.

There was another thing that occurred to me.

Sometimes I think in this Chamber we have the illusion that we are arguing about money. We have the illusion that we are arguing about line items in a budget, that we are arguing simply about techniques of accounting. That young lady's comment made me realize we are arguing about something far more fundamental in this Chamber every day, and I would define it this way: exactly what do we owe each other? Are we obligated to each other, or are we cut off from each other's common destinies? That is what this political debate is about, and I hope that is what the American people understand this debate to be about.

As we saddle future generations with debt, as we saddle future generations with the consequences of tax cuts that we could not afford, as we saddle future generations with our mistaken fiscal choices, it is a retreat from the politics of obligation; it is a retreat from the idea that we are connected to each other and each other's fate and each other's destiny.

Increasingly what I fear is that we are entering a world where the only morality that we recognize in our public space is the morality of the marketplace. The gentleman from South Carolina touched on that. He talked about morality, and that word should not be in any way omitted from this conversation, because the morality of the marketplace is a very narrow morality. It says that to whom much is given, much will continue to be given. It says that the strong shall have the opportunity to get stronger, and it says that other than a little bit of sympathy and a little bit of charity for which we get a tax write- off, we do not owe a whole lot to the other people in our society.

I think that if we are to be true to the legacy of this institution and true to the people in this country, that we need a broader public morality than this narrow morality of the marketplace. We need a public morality, a way of talking in the public square about what we owe each other, what we owe our veterans, what we owe our young people, what we owe our working families, what we owe our college students, what we owe our disabled workers, what we owe all of the people who may not sit in the circle of prosperity today, but who desperately want to do so and want to have a chance to sit there tomorrow.

The budget resolution that we voted on 2 weeks ago and, essentially, we voted on it 2 months before that, because it did not change a lot from the House version to the final resolution passed by both Houses, it is a document that I think does not meet our best moral impulses; it does not meet our best impulses about what we owe each other as a community.

The gentleman from South Carolina and others have detailed on this floor and elsewhere the cuts to veterans, the cuts to our young people, the cuts to all kinds of commitments and obligations that we have to our environment, to our workforce development system in this country; but once again, the stakes are broader. Because what this budget does is to slowly but surely begin to walk away from the idea of national commitment and national obligation. It slowly but surely begins to walk away from the idea of community.

I make these final two sets of points before I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida tonight. I happen to think that we do have an obligation to get our fiscal house in order; there is no question about that. We cannot sustain these deficits; we cannot sustain this debt. It is unconscionable the President wants to add to it with his Social Security plan. It is unconscionable that the President does not have a long-range plan to pull us back from deficit.

But this is what is the real moral rub, I think, for a lot of us. So often in the last 4 years, the Bush administration and our friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Republican side, have asked sacrifice, but they only do it of some of the people. John F. Kennedy, whom I admired greatly, and whom I know the mother of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) admired and whom I know you admired a great deal, when he was inaugurated, he spoke on the idea of sacrifice and the idea of common burden and obligation. He did not speak of a sacrifice that falls only on working families who need Medicaid in Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama. He did not speak of the sacrifice that falls only on veterans whose premiums do not need to go up. He did not speak of a sacrifice that falls only on families who are needing section 8 housing and do not want the program gutted. He did not simply speak of burdens and obligations that fall on the weakest of us.

I listened to the discussion that happened in the hour before us tonight, and the eloquence of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) on who has power in this Chamber, who has power in this institution. It is increasingly the most well-off among us, the most narrow-minded among us who are committed to a very narrow pursuit of the private interest. That is a full-scale retreat, with guns blazing, from the idea of what we owe each other as a people and as a community.

So if our country is going to move forward, I say to the gentleman from Florida, and if we are going to move forward and become what I think that we can be, we have to return to this idea that we do owe each other something more than sympathy, that we do owe each other a commitment to building a financial future that will work for our children. We owe each other a commitment toward a true and enduring retirement security for our seniors. We owe our young people a commitment and an investment in their skills; and, finally, we owe our country a way of talking about politics and a way of talking about our expenses and our expenditures, a conversation and a dialogue that somehow draws us together.

The final point that I will make tonight is, and so often I see this when I go back to town hall meetings in my district, last night I was in Choctaw County, Alabama in Butler, and so many people are frustrated when they see us arguing about things that do not matter to them.

We have been here for 4 months, and we have had a pretty busy schedule. We have voted on all of probably one really truly important piece of legislation this year, and that was the budget. We have had a lot of distractions, and we will keep having distractions on the floor.

But the people are so frustrated that we are angry at each other over things that do not matter in their lives, and they want us to repair to a higher standard. So I thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) for being here tonight. Again, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for his leadership and his wisdom. And I would be happy if the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) will yield to my good friend, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

Mr. Speaker, let me follow up on the comment that the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) just made, because a lot of very reasonable people, as you know, believe that this scenario you described is not accidental. It is not just a by-product of the President's strategy, but it is, indeed, the President's strategy, to turn Social Security, which is a universal benefit that the American people collectively pay into, to transform it from that world into a world, frankly, where it looks like a conventional welfare program, a program where very poor people receive a benefit from it and the rest of the population receives very little.

Now, what happens to those kinds of programs? Number one, the Republicans cut them every year. They do not fare very well in this budget process. If you look at the programs that we have in this country that we fund out of our sense of charity, Section 8, walking away from it, housing, dealing with the disabled and mentally ill, all the programs that we fund out of our altruism, unfortunately, those are the programs that are getting cut. I do not believe that this is an accident, that the Republican party and President of the United States are taking this plan that has worked enormously well and refashioning it into a program where, frankly, people will have less of a stake in paying into it.

The second observation, I would say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), is that it is indisputable that Social Security is the most successful government program in the last hundred years in terms of its ability to move people from the margins of life to a state of security. When Social Security was passed in 1938, 52 percent of the seniors in this country lived in poverty.

Today that number is down to 9 percent.

If every other government program had been as effective in reducing poverty, there probably would not be more than 20 or 25 Republicans here because we would have won the whole political debate. This has been an extraordinarily successful program and part of the reason it has been successful is the stake that we all have in its benefit.

I make one other point tonight. A lot of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle say, well, you Democrats have been criticizing our proposals. Why do you not come forward with a better and stronger plan for saving Social Security, and never mind that the President has no plan to make it solvent, why do you all not come to the table with one?

There is a part of this debate that we should not miss tonight. Part of the reason that we are expecting a gap in Social Security financing, a shortfall in Social Security financing, is because of this administration's estimates of slow growth in the next 30 to 40 years. And a Republican Party that used to pride itself on economic optimism even in the face of no evidence has now become the party of slow growth. They tell us that our productivity will inch around at a rate of around 1.9 percent for the next 30 years, or our growth rate will be around 2.1 percent.

What is the reason that they project slow productivity and slow growth? The major reason is because right now in our country the gap between skilled and unskilled workers is more pronounced today in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century than it was in the early 1970s and the late 1960s.

In other words, the gap between the people who know how to do the work in this country and who are trained to do and those who are not so lucky or so fortunate is greater than ever.

That is creating an albatross on our whole economy. And if we are serious about tackling the Social Security problem, we have got to come up with a growth strategy. We have got to come up with a strategy to close that gap between skilled and unskilled workers. And the extraordinary thing about this budget is that it cuts money for workforce development. It cuts out programs like Upwards Bound and TRIO that take at-risk kids and give them a leg up. It cuts economic development programs. It cuts all of the things that would narrow and close down the gaps that exist in American life.

In other words, at a time when we ought to be investing more in our future, we are investing less. Once again it takes us back to the point that the gentlewoman made about the fundamental definitional divide between these parties.

President Clinton who grew 22 million jobs in his Presidency understood that when you spend money on education, when you spend money on worker training, when you spend money on developing skills you are making investments. And those investments reap an enormous return for this generation and the next one.

So I say in conclusion before I take my leave tonight that if we are to deal

with this problem of Social Security having a shortfall over the next 30-some years, if we are to deal with these gaps that exist in our skilled and unskilled workers that lead to the slow growth the administration promises us, we need a different set of priorities. We need to remember the value of expenditures that are investments.

Mr. Speaker, let me join other colleagues of mine in standing today in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. We celebrate this year, 2005, the 60-year anniversary of the end of World War II.

We also look back at the enormous human loss that occurred in concentration camps all over Eastern Europe, all over that continent during World War II, and I think it is enormously important that if we can somehow distill just three lessons from this time frame, that it be the following things: first of all, we instill in our society and contemplate the question of hatred, of intolerance, of racial and religious bigotry, and we still try to put it in perspective, how some human beings can have animus toward other human beings.

The reality is that in 1930 in the depths of Nazi Germany, there were many people who did not take seriously the rhetoric of the Third Reich. There were many who did not take seriously the venom that came from Adolph Hitler. They had this mindset that it was simply a misbegotten ideology. They had the mindset that it was simply words that were meant to wound or meant to win an election. They did not realize that there was a comprehensive plan to destroy another set of human beings that was at stake.

Similarly today, when we hear lingering anti-Semitism in our society, when we hear lingering bigotry and racism in our society, we have a tendency at first to think that it is mere words. We have a tendency to try to strip those words from any context or any meaning.

The reality is that what the Holocaust teaches us is that words do matter, because they can signal the human soul and just how depraved it can be. That is an important lesson that we take from that time frame.

There is another important lesson that we take. Every now and then, there is this tendency to engage in a hierarchy of suffering, to ask which was worse, slavery or the Holocaust; which is worse, racial bigotry or anti-Semitism or religious bigotry.

The reality is that there is no hierarchy of hatred. All hatred has a tendency to wound and corrupt and to spoil the human soul. All hatred has a tendency to degrade both the person who hates and the target. And what we have seen in our last half century of human conduct, indeed our last century of human conduct, is that neither the left nor the right has given ground to each other on this front.

Both the left and the right have shown enormous capacity to pick up weapons against each other and to degrade each other. And it is a lesson in these contemptuous times in American politics.

It is a lesson that if we want to build a sense of humanity in this country, that we have to find a way to see past the bitterest and darkest divisions of the left and right.

There is a third lesson, Mr. Speaker. As we look at our place in the world today, this is only several weeks after the world lay to rest Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, the leader of the Catholic Church, the leader of 1 billion Catholics around the globe. He had a particular insight about humanity.

He understood that poverty and totalitarianism are both threats to the human condition. They are both threats to the human soul. Frankly, neither the left nor the right in our country have done a good job of appreciating the linkage. Neither the left nor the right in our country has done a good job of appreciating that these two sources of darkness, totalitarianism and intense poverty, are just as destructive of what human beings can be. Well, John Paul II understood that.

As we look at the last 50 or 60 years of suffering in this world, I hope we can, as a Congress, challenge the world to a higher standard. One that from a standpoint from the left and the right manages to condemn political and economic threats to the human spirit.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, let me speak for a moment about these victims. I had an opportunity in August 2003 to visit the state of Israel and I remember going to the museum commemorating the concentration camps in the Holocaust. And I remember going specifically to the children's section of that museum. As some Members of the Chamber recall, when you walk inside the children's section, you are in this very small circular room and in the middle of the room sits a glass case. Inside the glass case are pictures and photos of children who lost their lives in the Holocaust and their voices who read their names over and over again.

I will remember that image, Mr. Speaker, as I conclude, for a very, very long time because it speaks of a Europe and a history that never was. It speaks of a destiny for the world that never was. Somewhere in those pictures is someone who would have been a chief of state, someone who would have been an Olympic athlete, someone who might have discovered a cure for cancer.

As we contemplate this last 60 years may we remember that every time we lay waste to a human being, every time we lay waste to a child, that there is all kinds of promise that is lost and there is another destiny that was there waiting to be born.

So on behalf of these 6 million victims who were murdered by a state, may we think of them today and may we think of them on this Holocaust Remembrance Day. May we remember in conclusion the danger whenever human beings are degraded and belittled by others.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the exceptional leadership, character, and outstanding achievements of Mrs. Jessie Hale Downs.

In 1944, a young couple expecting their first child began a ministry known as the Jimmie Hale Mission with the purpose of reaching out to the poor in downtown Birmingham. The couple did not have much material wealth, but what they lacked in money they made up in vision. Unfortunately, the young husband passed away eight months later, leaving his 27-year-old wife and unborn daughter widowed and fatherless.

A single, homeless mother, Jessie Hale resolved to continue the ministry. Serving as the Executive Director for 46 years, Miss Jessie shepherded the Mission to its present state of 6 different facilities in central Alabama. Mrs. Downs has touched the lives of countless men, women, and children through her selfless acts of compassion and charity.

Now 88 years old, Miss Jessie remains the matriarch of the Jimmie Hale Mission. She continues to travel around central Alabama speaking about the vision and ministry of the Mission. She is the epitome of compassionate activism, and I am proud to call her one of my constituents.

Mr. Speaker, a minute is not a long time, but I want to spend it for thanking the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for building unanimity on this side of the House. I make that observation because, frankly, this is only the second time on a major vote this year that this side of the House will have been

united, and that is in large tribute to the gentleman's good work, but it speaks to something else.

To everyone in this caucus, to everyone in every corner of America who styles himself or herself as progressive, if you want to know if Democrats still stand together, if you want to know if we still have a common ground, I submit that you see it in the debate over this budget. The common ground that we occupy is in defense of 46,000 families in Mississippi who have been cut from the Medicaid rolls; 300,000 families in Tennessee who have been cut from the Medicaid rolls; 13.5 million children in this country who live below the poverty line who cannot stand to see subsistence programs cut further; millions of veterans who cannot stand to see their premiums rise; and it is a common ground for everyone who believes in a more generous, more responsible, more inclusive America.

So I thank the gentleman for building that unanimity, and I hope it stands for the whole country to see. As it is so often said by the leader on the other side, there are profound differences between these two parties. We stand for a fairer country. They stand for a narrower country and a narrower vision, and I hope the people will take note of that.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) for presenting a budget that has a better vision for the American people, and for the gentleman's hard work that he does for the American people.

Mr. Chairman, this is the third year that I have been in the Congress. There has been a similar routine every year I have been here. We debate the budget and our side says it is a statement of our values, and we say it is a statement of who we are. I would add one observation to that. This is a process that tells us a great deal about whether we are who we say we are, because there is an irony that I see with my friends from the other side of the aisle.

As we move into the year and move into the holiday season, we spend a lot of time talking about shared benevolence, but they will pass a budget tomorrow that will cut $5 billion from

food stamps, and only 2 percent of people who are eligible receive food stamps. It is not a program filled with waste and fraud.

A lot of our friends on the other side of the aisle will talk about benevolence and their belief in families and families having strong values, and yet they will vote tomorrow night to cut child care assistance. A lot of our friends on the other side of the aisle will talk about cutting taxes, and yet they will vote tomorrow night to raise taxes on people receiving the earned income tax credit.

And the other side of the aisle will talk about their belief in Social Security and their faith in that program and their refusal to touch it, and then they will cut SSI payments which are a major part of Social Security. A lot of our friends on the other side of the aisle will talk about their commitment to housing, and then they will vote to eliminate one of the most effective housing programs in this country.

And finally, a lot of our friends on the other side of the aisle will talk about their commitment to children and helping families raise their children with the right values, and then they will vote to freeze or leave virtually frozen child care services and day care services.

I am not one who likes to call names, but the word ``hypocrisy'' means you say one thing and you blatantly endorse another set of practices.

This is a debate about exactly who we will ask to sacrifice in this country. There is no question we have asked our veterans to sacrifice an enormous amount, and they belong in a category of their own; but there is another class of Americans who we also ask to sacrifice in this budget. We ask the most vulnerable people, the people in our society who are working and living by the sweat of their brow every day. We ask them to give up so much in this budget, and there is an irony because we have heard it said by the chairman and various other Members on the other side of the aisle, we have heard it said that people want these tax cuts and they will trade these programs off for the prevalence and the prevailing of these tax cuts.

But here is the problem. The average people that will receive the cuts that I described got a tax cut of $28 to $35 a month. That is not an equitable trade-off; that is not a fair trade-off.

I simply end by saying the Spratt budget presents a better vision for the American people and introduces a six-letter word into this debate that we have not heard all day, a word called ``equity.'' That is what separates our approach from theirs.