Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, some may think that my vote of ``present'' on this Resolution is a cowardly way out. In fact, a vote of ``present'' seems to me to be the only reasonable and logical vote to cast for the following reasons: I dare not vote ``no'' and express opposition to the two parts of the Resolution I so strongly support. Those two parts of the Resolution put Congress on record to express the ``unequivocal support and appreciation of the Nation to the members of the United States Armed Forces serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, who are carrying out their missions with excellence, patriotism, and bravery; and to the families of the United States military personnel serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom, who are providing support and prayers for their loved ones currently engaged in military operations in Iraq.'' If the Resolution limited itself to these two parts, the Resolution would no doubt enjoy the unanimous support of the Congress.

On the other hand, I cannot in good conscience vote ``yes'' for the part of the Resolution that ``expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the Nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.'' I have previously stated that I do not support the President's decision to pursue this war without having exhausted every possible alternative short of war. I have also expressed my firm belief that pursuing war to enforce a United Nations Resolution without having even majority support of the members of the United Nations and the UN Security Council will undoubtedly feed the perception of U.S. arrogance around the world and increase the prospect of terrorism domestically and internationally. While our military superiority will no doubt assure our military victory in the war against Iraq, we have no effective way to defend ourselves and innocent people against individual acts of terror. For me to express ``unequivocal support'' for the President to follow a course of action I believe is misguided would be both contrary to my own beliefs and contrary to the overwhelming sentiments I have heard and continue to hear from my constituents on a daily basis.

I applaud the efforts of those who sought to craft a Resolution supporting our troops and their families. I am in full support of their efforts and those parts of this Resolution. While 1 do not agree with them, I also respect the opinions of those who believe, in good faith, that the President's actions deserve ``unequivocal support.'' I resoundingly reject the efforts of those who would use this resolution as a means of dividing Congress at this critically important time, especially those who would do so for political reasons or to make themselves appear more patriotic than those who intend to vote ``no.'' I do not feel obliged to be put to such a choice on a Resolution that has no substantive or binding effect. Consequently, having made this explanation, I am content to vote ``present.''

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Virginia for yielding time; and I hate to disappoint my good friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), to advise him that our fear is that by burdening this bill down with various provisions, other than the AMBER Alert provisions, it will follow the same route that it has followed in the past.

It will be passed here in the House, it will go to the Senate, and it will not receive action because the AMBER Alert part of this bill is burdened with other bills which we have passed many times on this side, but have never been taken up, and the Senate has refused to take them up on the other side. So while I applaud his efforts to support the AMBER Alert part of this bill, doing it in the way that we are doing it is probably the kiss of death for the bill.

Before I go on that, I want to take a moment to praise the efforts of my good friend and colleague from Virginia who for the last 11 years has been the voice of sanity in the criminal law area. He has sat in hearing after hearing after hearing and taken politically difficult positions on bills, trying to reinforce to us that everything that sounds good, that may be politically popular, is not an effective crime tool; and he has done it at a time, on a sustained basis, when many of my colleagues have used as their spring, summer, fall and winter exercises the politically popular exercise of beating on their chest and saying I am hard on crime, without considering the consequences of what they are voting for.

Again, parts of this bill today do exactly the same. I am struck by the argument that the chairman of our committee has put forward to us. On the one hand, he says the AMBER Alert part of this bill really does nothing that is not already able to be done, and then I scratch my head and I said, well, if that is the case, why are we even here doing the AMBER Alert part of this? Is the AMBER Alert part of this bill, which all of us feel so strongly about, which all of us would vote for in a heartbeat if it were a stand-alone bill, is it being used as a bus to load on all of these other controversial provisions that otherwise would not be considered?

If these other provisions have merit, let them be considered as separate stand-alone bills, let us evaluate them, let us evaluate their impact on reducing crime and addressing the problems that exist in our Nation, and let the

Senate and the House vote on those things separately.

What we appeal to the leadership to do and have been for the last 3, 4, 5 weeks is to give us an AMBER Alert bill that is a stand-alone bill, that could pass this House by unanimous consent. There would not be one dissenting vote. And not only would it pass this House by unanimous consent; it would go to the Senate, and the Senate would pass it immediately, probably this week; and it would go to the President's desk and be signed into law probably early next week.

Instead, what we have done is used the AMBER Alert part of the bill as a vehicle to bring other more controversial provisions into a debate; many of those provisions have already been passed by this House and sent to the Senate and have languished there in the past. We have done this before.

The question is why are we doing it again? Is there some real motivation that is different than the one we understand or is there a real desire to pass the AMBER Alert part of the bill? If there is, I would appeal to my colleagues to let that bill, release it, do not hold it as a hostage. Release that bill, and let it stand on its own. Let us vote on it. Let us send it to the Senate; let them vote on it. Let it be sent to the President for signature, and then we would have a national AMBER Alert bill that does and gives us the benefit of that system for the States that wish to use it.

I appreciate the gentleman yielding time; but more importantly, I appreciate him standing and fighting for things that make sense in the criminal justice context, rather than just things that are politically popular, that allow us to beat on our chest and say we are hard on crime regardless of the impact on reducing crime.

Mr. Speaker, later today, with the bipartisan unanimous support of the members of the North Carolina delegation, I will be dropping a bill to rename the United States Post Office at 2127 Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte, North Carolina, in honor of Jim Richardson, one of my constituents.

James Franklin Richardson, Sr., known by most people simply as Jim, was born in 1926 in Charlotte. In 1949, Jim began a 33-year career with the United States Postal Service. During his 33-year career, Jim had numerous positions, including Postal Service Clerk in the Charlotte Post Office and Railway Postal Service Worker. He subsequently held a number of supervisory positions and retired as the U.S. Postmaster in Mt. Holly, North Carolina, receiving a certificate of appreciation from the U.S. Postal Service.

I honor him today and will drop this bill. I ask for support from my colleagues.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Jim Richardson, a man who has dedicated a lifetime to making the world around him a better place. As a lasting tribute to Jim's dedication to his country, his community and to the State of North Carolina I will shortly introduce legislation to designate the United States Post Office at 2127 Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte, North Carolina as the ``Jim Richardson Post Office.''

Mr. James Franklin Richardson, Sr., known by most people simply as ``Jim,'' was born on May 20, 1926 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He grew up in Charlotte where he attended Isabella Wyche Elementary and graduated from Second Ward High. Jim served in the United States Navy during World War II and, following an honorable discharge, attended Johnson C. Smith University, where he graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Education and General Science.

In 1949 Jim began a 33-year career with the United States Postal Service. During his 33-year career. Jim held numerous positions within the Postal Service, including serving as Postal Service Clerk in the Charlotte Post Office and later as a clerk with the Railway Postal Service, where he served on many train routes. When mail routes on trains were eliminated, Jim returned to the Charlotte Post Office and held a number of supervisory positions. He served the last eight years of his tenure as U.S. Postmaster in Mt. Holly, North Carolina and received a Certificate of Appreciation from the United States Postal Service in Recognition of Exceptional Performance in the Interest of Improved Postal Service.

In 1985 Jim was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives, where he served one two-year term before being elected to the North Carolina Senate in the Senate District I previously represented. He served four terms in the state Senate before his retirement in 1994. With strong, bi-partisan encouragement, Jim ran for and was elected to the Mecklenburg County Commission where he served six years. There are few people I know in North Carolina who enjoy the kind of bi-partisan admiration Jim has that I believe results from his affable demeanor, willingness to work on issues across party lines and willingness to vote his convictions without regard to partisan expectations.

I hope this House will join me by honoring Jim Richardson for his civility and for his role as a true American patriot, a great communicator and a tireless voice for the voice-less.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

I was listening to my colleagues say that this was the Joint Economic Committee, and we are supposed to talk about monetary policy, and I want to return us to monetary policy, because I am kind of reflecting back to when I first ran for Congress in 1992. That was the year that deficits were approximately $130 billion, $140 billion. All of my Republican opponents, colleagues, economists, everybody at that time was telling me that there was something sinister about budget deficits, and I could not quite understand what their preoccupation was. But I did realize over a period of time that it was projected that the budget deficit for 1993 and 1994 was going to keep going up, and at that time, the maximum budget deficit that anybody was projecting was $260 billion. It was sacrilegious for anybody to think that we ought to be projecting a $260 billion budget deficit.

So it is kind of amazing to me now that I could see a Republican budget for the year 2004 project a $319 billion deficit.

I was talking to a reporter before I came over here and he said, well, are you all talking about war today? I said, no, we are debating the budget. He said, oh, you are talking about money for the war? And I said, no, there is not a dime of money for the war that we are fighting in the budgets that anybody has proposed today, except for the defense spending, which would be there even if we were not fighting a war.

Well, over time I came to understand that when you have those kinds of budget deficits every year accumulating, they keep adding into the national debt, and when you have a national debt, you have to pay interest on that national debt. So to see a Republican budget that in the outyears, 2009, 2010, projects that we will be paying $250 plus billion in interest only on the national debt, it does not take much for me to understand, well, if I had that $250 billion in my budget, I could do something with it, like pay for education and health care and things that are important to our country's future.

That is the microbasis that I want to talk about.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Throughout the time that I have been a Member of Congress, it is always the Congressional Black Caucus that has come forward with a budget that has priorities in it that describe the aspirations that I have for this Nation: the aspirations for quality health care, for education, for economic opportunity, foreclosing of the gap between the richest and the poor, between black and white. It is the Congressional Black Caucus budget that has always been the aspirational budget and again this evening, Mr. Chairman. It is the Congressional Black Caucus budget which among all of the budgets is the best budget that has been to the floor.

In a multitrillion dollar budget, there is always going to be some parts, various things in anybody's budget that everybody can agree to. But this is the best budget that we will debate this evening. It is the most honest budget that we will debate this evening because we say point blank to the American people what my constituents are saying to me over and over again: How in the world can we be cutting taxes? How can we be cutting taxes and spending from deficit spending? How can we be cutting taxes for the richest people in America when we are going to war? And my constituents ask me that all the time. I do not have any answer for them, and some of us are honest enough to say to our constituents we think this is a bad tax cut policy. It makes no sense to turn around and cut taxes and then have a Republican budget that essentially has all of our discretionary spending in every year that we are 10 years out being funded with deficit spending. That is outrageous. That is outrageous.

So this budget is honest. It sets the aspiration for universal healthcare and coverage for all American citizens. It does not play games with it; and I submit that if we pass just the health care part of this budget, there would be so substantial a savings in our health care industry that we would see the benefit of it just from healthier people, from people getting preventative health care rather than rushing to emergency rooms and getting their health care in the most expensive and least efficient manner. That is what we have forced our people to do in this country. We aspire to a better America. That is what this budget does, and I ask my colleagues to support it.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Chairman, this process has been going on for quite a while. I am one of the people who has been involved with the process from the very beginning. Before there was a bankruptcy bill, there was a bipartisan consensus, and I was included as part of that bipartisan consensus, that reforms needed to be made to the bankruptcy law. There was no means test in the bill at that time, and there was no bill. There was just a bipartisan consensus that something needed to be done to address the gaming of the bankruptcy system. A number of us were willing to sit down and roll up our sleeves and try to deal with the fact that people were gaming the bankruptcy system.

I was among the people who was the first to concede that there was a problem in the bankruptcy system. Unfortunately, 2 or 3 months into the process, we started to see that some concessions were starting to be made that made this bill really not address the gaming of the system, the games that were being played within the bankruptcy system, in a way that was going to have a fair impact.

First of all, consumer groups and representatives of poor people said, ``We are not going to let you do a reform of the bankruptcy system unless you make some concessions to us,'' and they were a powerful lobbying group. Unfortunately, the people who wanted this bill said to the consumer groups, ``We'll give you something if you just keep quiet. What we will give you is a means test that allows people who fall under a certain income level, regardless of whether they are gaming the system or not, we'll let them continue to operate business as usual.'' So emerging from that kind of compromise was this whole concept of a means test, which has the terrible public policy impact of setting up two parallel bankruptcy systems in our country, one for the poorest of the poor,

which I call the paupers' bankruptcy court, and one for the not so poor, which are kind of the higher-income people whose incomes fall above the means test.

Unfortunately, that does not address the gaming of the system. There are people who fall above the means test, who need the benefits of bankruptcy, who are not gaming the system, and there are people above the means test who are gaming the system. But there are also people below the means test who are gaming the system as well as people below the means test who are not gaming the system, who really need the benefit of bankruptcy.

And instead of coming up, rolling up our sleeves and addressing the real problem, which is the gaming of the system, we just abdicated and set up a terrible public policy mechanism here, this paupers' bankruptcy court and the not-so-poor bankruptcy court.

The other concession that got made was that despite the fact that, and I cannot blame this on the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. He presides over the Committee on the Judiciary. But this bill got a joint referral to the Committee on Financial Services, and part of the gaming of the system is taking place by credit card companies, and everybody can relate to this. You must get 50 solicitations a month at your home: Let me give you $10,000 or $25,000 worth of credit. You get my credit card, no real monitoring of whether you have the ability to pay. Poorest people, students in college, everybody gets these solicitations, and those people, the credit card companies who are into giving easy credit, are gaming the bankruptcy system in the same way that the people who are filing bankruptcies are gaming the system.

The problem is, yes, we have got a bill, but it does not solve the problem that we set out to solve, which was the gaming of the system.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Let me say first of all that I do not argue with the right of California to do tort reform or North Carolina or New York or any of the States. There are crises in some States, situations vary from State to State, and State legislators have the prerogative to set whatever tort laws they think are desirable. But I think it is the ultimate act of arrogance on our part as Members of Congress to think that we should dictate to the States in an area that has historically and forever been the prerogative of the State and in a way that I think substantially adversely impacts our whole Federal form of government, and in a way that runs contrary to just about everything my Republican colleagues say they stand for, which is devolving things back to the States.

I talked to a doctor this morning and I said to him, I have never seen a malpractice take place across State lines. To the extent that you operate on a patient from North Carolina, you being a doctor in North Carolina and the patient is from South Carolina, that creates diversity of citizenship and gets you into the Federal court. I offered an amendment in the Committee on the Judiciary designed to restrict this legislation to suits that are brought properly in the Federal court. I think we have the prerogative as the Congress to define what the Federal tort standards should be. But when we start dictating to the States that you have got to follow this one-size-fits-all bill, I think we have just kind of lost sight of the whole thing.

This should not be about getting the result that we want in any particular lawsuit that is pending. It should be about setting a framework, a public policy framework that honors the parameters that our Founding Fathers set up. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what the Federal nexus is for having a bill this broad. We can argue that there is a crisis; I do not think that is really the issue. The issue is how should we respond to the crisis and what should be our role at the Federal level in this context.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time.

Mr. Chairman, I do serve on the Committee on the Judiciary and confess that I have talked to a number of my colleagues, not a single one of which has said to me that they believe in human cloning. I think if there were a bill on the floor that prohibited human cloning, it would pass 435 to 0.

To me, it is somewhat distressing that this bill has been postured in much the same political context as the abortion debate around the question of when life begins and in a way that would make it impossible to do any kind of cloning, even for research or therapeutic research purposes. And I think the thing that is so distressing about that is that every single one of us knows someone who needs the benefit of science to come up with a therapy, a treatment that could prevent or stop the progress of a distressing disease; and most of the promise is in the area that this bill would prohibit.

So I just want to appeal to those people who would like to make this a political issue, a debate about when life begins, that I think different religions have different beliefs about that, and different individuals have different beliefs about that. The thing that I hope we all agree on is that when research advancements, therapeutic or otherwise, can make it possible for people to live their lives with higher quality and for longer periods of time, or to keep them from dying, we ought to allow that kind of research to progress and not get into a political debate that serves somebody's political purpose.

Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to join with my colleagues this evening in participating in this Black History Month Special Order. In my neighborhood, we do not only celebrate Black History Month in February; it is a year-round, ongoing celebration.

The thing that always gives me great pleasure when I rise on this floor and participate in this 1 hour of comment with my colleagues is that I am always fascinated that I learn a lot from my colleagues of their experiences and other things that I did not know about the history of the African American people in this country. I am tremendously proud to be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and this body.

Our celebration of black history is a daily event because we understand that we stand on the shoulders of Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois and Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks who sat down so that we could stand up, and those four gentlemen from my congressional district in Greensboro, North Carolina, who sat in at the fountain, at the counter there, and started a movement that spread throughout our Nation to guarantee that the fight for justice and equality would continue.

Unfortunately, most of what we have talked about, a lot of what we have talked about today, suggests that many of the inequities, many of the injustices, many of the inequities still continue today. It is on that that I want to focus a little bit because some of our colleagues would have us believe, and our President, I think, would have us believe that the era of addressing these inequities is over, that there is no need to have an affirmative action program anymore.

I have often wondered, if you started a race at one point and you started somebody 100 yards ahead and the other participant in the race 100 yards behind, how long would it take and how fast would they have to run to make up that 100 yards. There is, I am sure, a mathematical formula that could anticipate that. Unfortunately, we cannot run faster, we cannot learn quicker, we cannot make up the economic disparities that exist. We cannot make up the health disparities that my colleague, the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen) has described, that continue to exist, by running the same pace without some kind of adjustments being made.

We could not make up our position in this Congress of the United States from North Carolina from 1898 until 1992 without an affirmative action that took into account that racism existed and disparities existed and the unwillingness of part of our community to vote for another part of our community.

So I think Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois and Sojourner Truth and all of these people that we pay tribute to during our Black History Month celebration would not want us to dwell necessarily on giving them honor because they were not about honor. They were about justice and equality and running faster and trying to catch up to close that gap. Unfortunately, that gap continues to exist today in education, in economic disparities, in health care.

As part of our obligation as members of this caucus, and as part of our obligation as Members of this Congress, not only members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to assure that what took 200 years or 300 years to create, we do not assume can be wiped out with running faster for 30 or 40 years. It is going to take a long time to make up these disparities, and I applaud my colleagues for continuing to run faster and work harder and to work for equality as all of these people on whose shoulders we stand worked for equality.

We must continue to do the same.