Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, President Kennedy once said, ``To govern is to choose.'' I think it is very interesting, in the very week that the President was telling the Governors that we had no more money for their health care, Medicaid plans, their education, college, every State is raising tuition on middle-class families who are affording college and higher ed, the Leave No Child Behind. The very week that the President of the United States said to our Governors, I am sorry, there is not another penny for them, is the very week that we upped and sweetened our bid to Turkey; so we have now given Turkey $24 billion.

I want to meet the person that was negotiating for Turkey. They have done themselves a wonderful job. We finally got ourselves a job plan and economic growth package. The problem is it is for Turkey, not for the United States. And we have done ourselves, I think, a world of damage here. And I believe personally that we need a northern front in our fight if we are going to war in Iraq and I do not think we should spare anything to save our lives; so clearly having a northern front in this war is going to be important. But I want my colleagues to think about the fact that in the very week that we told our Governors and, most importantly, the citizens of our States that there would not be another penny for higher ed, there would not be another penny in assistance on health care, that we could not fully fund the Leave No Child Behind on the education program, is the very week that we sweetened our offer to the nation of Turkey.

To all the police departments that need money for fire, for all the cities that need assistance for police departments and fire for training on terrorism, I want them to now know Istanbul has their money. So I have come to the conclusion that maybe our States need to apply to Turkey for foreign aid. They have our money.

When it comes to making sure that all our police departments and fire departments are fully trained for dealing with terrorism, they do not have the resources to deal with that. We do not have all the money that they need. They are not going to get all the training they need to deal with terrorism. And when we have an act here at home, which everybody knows that this war will instigate as further terrorism here in the United States, our police and fire departments do not have all the resources they need to act on that.

I want my colleagues to think about the choices here, because as I have said early on, that President Kennedy once said there are choices. The amount of money that we have now guaranteed for Turkey, $24 billion, is twice the money we spend on Pell grants. We spend $11 to $12 billion a year. It is twice the money for Pell grants. The loan guarantees for Turkey, the same amount of money that we have now given Turkey, we could make two thirds of the existing tuition free at public universities.

These are choices we are making. So as we make this assistance, as we tell our Governors we do not have money for them and there is not another penny for them and yet we tell Turkey here is another $2 billion, the same week we did that, I would like the left hand of the administration to meet the right hand of the administration, because somebody has not got a clear plan; and we are giving money away to Turkey while we are telling our own people here at home we do not have enough money for them.

How did we get there? I have a chart here that shows the last 50 years of fiscal and economic management by Presidents. It goes back to the second term under Truman, and it goes through all the Presidents and tells how they did in managing the economy. And our present President, our President, has the most anemic economic growth of any President in the last 50 years. And since we are in the mood of quoting former Presidents, Ronald Reagan once said, ``Facts are a stubborn thing.'' And since the 2000 election, we have lost 2\1/2\ million jobs in this economy; 925,000 manufacturing jobs in the years 2001, 2002; 4 more million Americans are without health insurance; nearly a trillion dollars' worth of corporate assets have been foreclosed on, and 2 million more Americans have left the middle class for poverty.

Facts are a stubborn thing. That is the record of this present President and the economic management at this time. And what has he chosen to do and what has the administration chosen to do? Having argued for a tax cut 14 months ago to get the economy moving, the net result has been the worst anemic growth of any President in 50 years: More people unemployed, more people without health insurance, more businesses closed, and more people joining the ranks of poverty. He has decided to put his foot on the accelerator and pushed further for more tax cuts. He is the only President in history, in a time of war, who has decided to have tax cuts. So we will ask our men and women to sacrifice, that those in the wealthiest corridors of our country will not be sacrificing and joining the rest of us as we do sacrifice.

This is the wrong way to economic management. We can have a bipartisan approach that puts our fiscal house in order, invests in our future, and defends our interests overseas. As a person and individual Member of this Chamber who does support in some capacity military action, I think the notion of the last 2 weeks in Turkey where it was let us make a deal, unfortunately Turkey has walked away with the resources that our kids need, our police departments need, and our doctors and nurses need to provide health care.

Mr. Speaker, no. But I am thinking of recommending to the Governors Association that they hire the person who was negotiating for Turkey and maybe he could do them a good job. So there is no indication of that. In fact, what has happened is if the gentleman will read the Wall Street Journal report out of the meeting that the President had with the Governors, in fact he told them there will be no more assistance in that area. And mind you, this is not a partisan issue. It is the worst fiscal condition of all 50 States since World War II.

Correct.

Right.

Mr. Speaker, what we have decided is we just do not have the same sense of urgency. And let me add one other point that I lost in here is that today there was a story, I think in the Wall Street Journal again, that States have borrowed more money this year than at any time in the last 50 years for the States, greater I think in times by a magnitude of 3 in borrowing

more money, and again they are making cuts again at the same time, the most severe cuts in the areas of health care and education; and we are basically mandating they have to meet certain obligations, not giving them the assistance and resources they need to meet those obligations.

What are those obligations? They are in the area of health care where we have a health care crisis; 42 million Americans who work full time without healthcare. We do not have an agenda or plan to help them meet that obligation.

We have not had a raise in the Federal level in the Pell grant to help people go to college. In over 4 years, the tuitions on average are going up 9, 10 percent this year. So we have put not only a burden on our States and our Governors, our State legislatures, to fund requirements that we pass here, most importantly we are putting demands and further burdens on middle-class, hard-working families who are trying to raise their kids right, with the right sense of values and get on to college so that they can succeed in life, and yet we are not giving them the resources they need.

And that is why I brought up this point about both the Pell grant or public universities and the choices we make. We make choices. We have said that Turkey in that effort over there is more important. We have given Turkey now, in one year, twice the money we have given in Pell grants in this country to help middle-class and lower-middle-class children go to college. If we took the same type of resources, we could make free two thirds of public university education to kids. These are American children. We have a commitment to do right when we win this war, if we are going to go to war. I want our troops to succeed, but we have an obligation over here, and the truth is if we had a balanced deal we would not have to make a choice. These are not either/or choices.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 4, the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2003, and in support of the Democratic substitute amendment.

For twenty years, a complicit agreement regarding welfare existed between conservatives and liberals in this country. Conservatives refused to devote more money to the program, and liberals refused to demand anything of recipients. We lost two generations of Americans to this failed system of dependency.

I am a long-time believer in welfare reform. I worked in the White House and with the Congress to help enact the welfare reform legislation of 1996--and I was proud to be a part of the strong, bipartisan reform that legislation created. I applaud my colleagues in the House on both sides of the aisle who helped to pass what has been a landmark of successful reform. The 1996 reforms broke from the past with a new approach that grounded the welfare system in the values of work and responsibility. It was a bold and daring experiment that worked.

Instead of simply handing needy families a check, we created new opportunities for families on welfare. By providing access to education and training, we helped welfare recipients to get better and more lucrative jobs. Recognizing recipients' need to care for their young children, we helped them to get child care, and allowed mothers of young children modified work requirements. Realizing that many low- paying jobs do not provide health insurance, we instituted transitional medical assistance for families coming off welfare.

Since enactment of the 1996 reforms, enrollment has plunged more than 50 percent. The percentage of welfare recipients who work has increased five-fold over the past decade, and states now spend more on work support than on cash benefits. Thanks in large part to welfare reform, 8 million people left poverty in the 90s, teen pregnancy dropped by more than 20 percent, and child support collections doubled. We are moving in the right direction because we were true to our common values.

The most important thing we've accomplished with welfare reform has been to connect a generation of children with the culture of work. Most of us grew up watching our parents go to work. We internalized the value of work and now are passing these values onto our own children. Today, millions of children who would otherwise have grown up in a home where work was alien, now are being raised in a home where they are learning the routine of work.

In my state of Illinois, caseloads dropped 74.9 percent between 1996 and 2001, and, despite the recession, continued to fall an additional 23.7 percent in 2002. Many credit our strong success in caseload reduction to the state's innovative use of the flexibility in the original legislation, allowing Illinois to provide appropriate support for families making the transition from welfare to work. The proposed reauthorization will have a particularly disastrous effect on states like Illinois that have taken advantage of family support provisions to make notable progress. By removing the support system that has allowed many to get off and stay off welfare, this legislation is likely to create major setbacks in the progress of reform.

The Democratic substitute amendment builds on the success of the 1996 reforms. It retains the strong work incentives that not only help individuals go back to work, but provide then with greater job security by helping them become better educated, and train for better jobs. It recognizes the importance of giving mothers with young children the flexibility to take care of their children. It eliminates the current exclusion of legal immigrants from the system.

The Republican legislation represents a return to the failed ideologies of the past. It is not realistic to count the number of new hours of work mandated by this bill, and call reform a success. In voting for this legislation, you are voting against education and training to help current welfare recipients get out of dead-end jobs. You are voting for standards that will create hardships for working mothers, and add thousands to waiting lists for child care. You are voting to continue to exclude legal immigrants from participating in a program that would help them to contribute to this country rather than being simply a drain on the system.

In fact, I find the title of this legislation ironic: The Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act in fact stifles personal responsibility, discourages work, and creates hardship for families. Inherent in the concept of personal responsibility is making the choice to work towards self-improvement. By mandating more hours of work while limiting the training and education options are available to workers, this bill removes all incentive for personal responsibility.

Promoting work is not as simple as increasing work hours. There are likely to be countless individuals who, because they do not have the time, health, or child care resources to work forty hours each week, or simply cannot find a job where they are permitted to work forty hours, will choose instead not to work at all. If this legislation aims to promote work, it must do so by making work more realistic for workers and their families, not by imposing mandates that make working more difficult.

Lastly, the legislation creates untold hardship for families. By increasing mandated work

hours, while eliminating the current accommodation for women with young children, the bill will vastly increase the need for child care, without providing resources to the states to pay for it. Beyond this, the fact that the legislation limits opportunities for education and vocational training will keep many individuals in dead-end, low-paying jobs, with limited possibility to create better opportunities for their families.

Creating bipartisan compromise on welfare reform is never easy. It took us three tries to find a bill that worked in 1996. However, in this time of economic hardship for our nation, and our states in particular, it is even more essential that the Congress works in a bipartisan fashion to forge compromise on a welfare reform reauthorization that works. Welfare reform succeeded in 1996 when we stopped making it a political issue, and devoted our selves to passing meaningful legislation.

I have no illusions about what is going to happen today. However, I am disappointed that this Congress has chosen to take an enormous step backwards, prioritizing politics over pragmatism on an issue on which we have allowed good principles to rule in the past. I know that there are good people on both sides of the aisle, with good values, who have seen reforms we created improve the lives of people back home. To those in this Congress with whom I worked in 1996, let us not walk away from that we have accomplished. We have a mutual obligation not to let bad politics undo our good work.

I am confident that there will be no shortage of politics and partisan fights this session--about their tax cut, the deficit, Medicare reform, prescription drugs. To give up on proven success on welfare reform to engage in another unnecessary partisan fight is wrong.

Welfare reform is about demanding responsibility, encouraging work, and making work pay. Over the past six years, we as a nation--and millions of individuals--have benefited from our willingness to move beyond the old politics. This legislation represents a return to the failed politics and policies of the past. It is not compassionate nor is it conservative. It does a disservice to millions of families who have moved from welfare to work, and to the millions still struggling to do so. And it does wrong by our value as Americans.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) for yielding me time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 4 and in support of the substitute amendment. For 20 years an unwritten agreement regarding the old welfare system existed between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives refused to devote more money to the program. Liberals refused to demand anything of recipients. We have lost two generations of Americans to that failed system of dependency.

I was proud to be part of the strong bipartisan welfare reform that the White House and the Congress enacted in 1996. The 1996 reforms were a bold experiment that broke from the past with a new approach that grounded the welfare system in the values of work and responsibility.

Enrollment has plunged by more than 50 percent since 1996. Eight million people left poverty in the 1990s. Teen pregnancy dropped by more than 20 percent and child support collections doubled. We are moving in the right direction because we were true to our common values.

The most important thing that we have accomplished with welfare reform has been to connect a generation of children to the culture of work. Most of us in this room grew up watching our parents go to work. We internalized the value of work, and now we are passing those values on to our own children. Today, millions of children who would otherwise have grown up in a home where work was an alien concept are being raised in a home where they are learning the routine of work.

I know that there are good people on both sides of this aisle with good values who have seen reforms we created improve the lives of folks back home. To those in this Congress with whom I worked in 1996, let us not walk away from what we have accomplished. We have a future obligation not to let bad politics undo our good work.

I am confident, I am extremely confident, there will be no shortage of partisan fights this session, tax cuts, the deficits, prescription drugs. To give up on proven success to engage in another unnecessary partisan fight is wrong.

Mr. Chairman, welfare reform is about demanding responsibility and encouraging work. Over the past 6 years we as a Nation have benefited from our willingness to move beyond the old politics. This legislation represents a return to the failed policies of the past. It is not compassionate nor is it conservative. It undermines our common values as Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H. Res. 26, a resolution honoring the contributions of Catholic schools. I am pleased to have voted for this bipartisan resolution when it was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives last night.

The tremendous success of Catholic schools is evident around the country and particularly in the Fifth Congressional District of Illinois where outstanding scholastic progress has been achieved in schools like St. Ferdinand Catholic Elementary, St. Patrick High School, and Notre Dame High School for Girls. These schools provide strong academic curriculums and engender significant parental involvement. They not only teach students the importance of academic achievement, but also provide a balanced perspective on life that promotes responsibility, justice and social service.

Catholic schools also promote ethnic and racial diversity. Increasing numbers of children in Catholic schools in my district come from our minority communities. We must also recognize that students in Catholic schools are achieving exceptionally high graduation rates with increasing numbers advancing to higher education and giving back to the community through volunteer service.

It is also important to recognize that the Catholic school experience fosters more than just scholastic excellence. It provides spiritual guidance to students by encouraging fundamental ideals and an appreciation for family values, community service, and faith in their own lives. This, in turn, shapes Catholic school students into leaders of tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, I support this important resolution and encourage Catholic schools in my district and across the United States to continue contributing to the development of strong moral, intellectual and social values in America's young people.