The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“LEGISLATION LEFT UNDONE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S11401-S11404 on Oct. 31, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
LEGISLATION LEFT UNDONE
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I listened to my colleagues today--Senator Feingold, Senator Durbin, Senator Wellstone, and now the Democratic leader, Senator Daschle--talk about a number of different issues. I want to take a moment to discuss my disappointment, as we near the end of this legislative session, with what this Congress could have accomplished, what we could have done for the American people, and what we left undone.
I note that in this Presidential campaign Governor George W. Bush talks about his desire to come to Washington, DC, to serve in the White House, and end the partisan bickering. As he says, he wants to ``end all of the partisan bickering.'' Well, it takes two to bicker and it takes two parties to bicker in a partisan way.
We have almost, on occasion, had debate break out in the Senate on some very important issues. But we never quite had that happen this year because we can't get to an aggressive, robust debate on the things that really matter.
My colleagues talked about the bankruptcy bill. How did they do the conference on the bankruptcy bill? One party goes into a room, shuts the door, handpicks their members, and writes it by themselves. It is hard to have bickering, and it is hard to be partisan when one party is doing the work behind a closed door and saying to the other party: Here it is; like it or leave it.
The tradition of debate in this country is the sound of real democracy. The sounds of democracy results from bringing people from all around America into our centers of discussion and debate. From all of those areas of the country--from a different set of interests and concerns, from the hills and the valleys and the mountains and the plains and different groups of people--we have ideas developed and nurtured and then debated.
Someone once said: When everyone in the room is thinking the same thing, nobody is thinking very much.
We have people here who kind of like the notion that you must think the same thing. Apparently, Governor Bush thinks we must all kind of think the same thing; we ought to stop all this disagreement.
Disagreement is the engine of democracy. Debate is the engine by which we decide what kinds of policies to implement and what course this country takes in the future. The issues on which we never quite had the aggressive, robust debate that we should have had in this Congress include education. Do you know that for the first time in decades this Congress didn't reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act? We didn't pass it. Why? Because it was feared that when the bill was brought to the floor, people would actually offer amendments. Then we would have to debate amendments and vote on amendments. God forbid a debate should break out in the Senate. So the bill was pulled after a short debate. So we let the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lapse. It just didn't get done.
The Patients' Bill of Rights is another issue. We had sort of a mini debate here in the Senate on that because it was judged that there wasn't enough time to allow a robust debate. The Patients' Bill of Rights was not considered significant enough to allow a very robust debate on the different positions of the Patients' Bill of Rights. These, of course, are not just abstract discussions. The issue of whether we need a Patients' Bill of Rights is a very significant issue for a lot of American people who are not only battling cancer, but also having to battle their HMO or insurance company to pay for needed medical treatment.
I have shown my colleagues many times during discussions on the floor of the Senate a picture of Ethan Bedrick. He was born with horrible difficulties. He was judged by his HMO to only have a 50-percent chance of being able to walk by age 5, which means that his HMO said a 50-
percent chance of being able to walk by age 5 was ``insignificant.'' Therefore, they withheld payment for the rehabilitative therapy that Ethan Bedrick needed.
An isolated story? No, it goes on in this country all too often, day after day. I have told story after story on the Senate floor about it. We weren't able to get a final vote on this issue. We should have had a vote on the issue of a Patients' Bill of Rights toward the end of the Senate session because we would have had a tie vote, and the Vice President would have sat in that Chair and broken the tie. The Senate would have passed a real Patients' Bill of Rights if given the opportunity to vote again.
Do you know why we weren't able to do that? Because those who run this place didn't want a debate to break out. So they managed the Senate in a way that blocked any amendment from being offered. Since September 22 until October 31, not one Member of the Senate on this side of the aisle was allowed to offer one amendment on the floor of the Senate that was not approved by the majority leader. That is why a real debate didn't break out on the issue of the Patients' Bill of Rights.
The issue of fiscal policy is important in this country because we are now in the longest economic expansion in our country's history, and how to continue it is something we would want to have an aggressive, robust debate on. The majority party said: Well, all of this economic expansion is just all accidental. It didn't really result from anything anyone did.
Well, of course, that is not true. We passed a new economic plan in this country in 1993.
In 1993, we had the largest deficit in the history of this country. This country was headed in the wrong direction, and a new Administration, President Clinton and Vice President Gore, said let's change that; we have a new plan. It was controversial. It was so controversial it passed by one vote in the House and one vote in the Senate. Not one Republican voted for it.
They stood on the floor and said: If you pass this, you will throw this country into a depression, and you are going to cost this country jobs, and you will just crater this country's economy.
Well, we passed it and guess what happened? The longest economic expansion in our country's history. Unemployment is down, inflation is down, home ownership is up, personal income is up, welfare rolls are down, crime is down, every single aspect of life in this country is better because of what we did in 1993.
Now comes George W. Bush and the Republican Party saying: Do you know what we need to do now? We expect budget surpluses in the next 10 years. We need to take a trillion and a half dollars and use it for tax cuts. Let's lock those tax cuts into law right now.
Well, a number of groups have provided some very interesting analyses of this plan. Do you know what the threat is? Providing substantial tax cuts, the bulk of which will go to the top 1 percent, will put us right back in the deficit ditch we were in 8 years ago.
Don't take it from me. The risks of this kind of fiscal policy were described last week by the American Academy of Actuaries, which is one of the most respected nonpartisan organizations of financial and statistical experts. Their report says the Bush plan would probably signal a return to Federal budget deficits around 2015.
I encourage anybody to read their analysis. This is an independent, nonpartisan, respected group that says this tax cut proposal doesn't add up at all; it doesn't add up.
One of the questions is, Do we want to jeopardize the economic expansion that has been going on in this country, the progress we have made in this country, an economic plan that turned this country around? Do we want to jeopardize that with a fiscal policy that doesn't make any sense, that will put us back into the same deficits? Or what about having a debate on the question of Governor Bush's proposal of taking
$1 trillion out of the Social Security surplus and using it for private Social Security accounts for younger workers?
This is what Governor Bush said about that:
. . . and one of my promises is going to be Social Security reform. And you bet we need to take a trillion dollars out of that $2.4 trillion surplus.
I don't know whether Governor Bush knows this, but the trillion he is talking about is already pledged. The reason we talked earlier about putting Social Security surpluses in a lockbox is we need them. The largest group of babies ever born in this country will retire in the next 10, 15, and 20 years. We are saving to meet their retirement needs. That is the $1 trillion. You cannot use it twice. It has been saved to meet the needs of the Baby Boomers, which is what it was designed for, or you can take it away and use it for private accounts for younger workers, which is what Governor Bush suggests. If that is the case, you will short change Social Security by $1 trillion. You can't count $1 trillion twice.
I simply make the point that on the issue of fiscal policy, we should have had a real debate on the floor of this Senate on fiscal policy. When Governor Bush and others say they don't like the partisan bickering, I don't suppose anybody likes it in those terms. I like robust, aggressive debate. I think that is the sound of democracy in this country.
When people say they have plans to take $1 trillion out of Social Security, I say let's debate that. When they say let's have tax cuts that go to the upper income people and I think that will put the country back in a deficit ditch once again, I say let's debate that. When they say we don't have time to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because somehow it is not important enough, I say that ought to be the subject of aggressive debate in the Senate.
Let's not shy away from debate. Let's understand what good, aggressive, honest debate does for this democracy, and let's have a few debates from time to time on things that really matter.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa has 10 minutes.
Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I was going to speak about the bankruptcy bill and how bad it is for working families, especially the elderly, and talk about how most of the people who are getting into bankruptcy situations are families who have unusually high medical bills. That is true in my State of Iowa, and many of these are elderly people. I will talk about that as we go along.
However, I have to take a few minutes today to follow up on what our minority leader, Senator Daschle, just spoke about a few minutes ago. That is the status of the most important bill we have to pass, the education bill.
One day has passed since Republican and Democratic negotiators came to agreement on the health and education appropriations bill for this year. As I said on the floor yesterday, the agreement we reached was a product of long and difficult bipartisan negotiations. Senator Stevens, Senator Byrd, Senator Specter, and I, along with Congressmen Bill Young, Dave Obey, and John Porter, worked for months to craft this agreement. We worked past 1:30 yesterday morning to hammer out the last remaining differences. As I said yesterday, as with any honorable compromise, both sides gave and got. At times, the negotiations got a little heated, but both sides hung in there.
In the end, we came up with a good compromise. Chairman Stevens and Chairman Young led these final negotiations. They have been charged by their leadership to come to closure so we can conclude our business and pass the bill. That is exactly what they did.
Less than 12 hours after we reached an agreement and our staffs were busily writing the final conference report, a faction within the House Republican leadership, led by Congressman DeLay and Congressman Armey, decided to renege on our bipartisan compromise. As I said yesterday, I hope, in the interests of our children and our country, they will reconsider and let the bill go forward.
None of us is happy with everything in this bill. That is what bipartisan compromise is all about. Overall, passing this bill is in our Nation's best interests.
Right now, I will mention a few more details of the agreement we reached to demonstrate to my colleagues and the American people why it is so important. There is a 16-percent increase overall in education; class-size reduction, 35 percent more. That means 12,000 new teachers will be hired across America this next year.
There is a provision I have been working on for 8 years called school modernization. There is $1 billion included for school modernization, the first time we have ever had it. If the Iowa experience is any standard--and I think it will be--this should generate somewhere between $7 and $9 billion in needed school repairs around the country.
Individuals with disability education grants go from $4.9 billion to
$6.9 billion, a 40-percent increase, the largest in history, to help our local school districts educate our kids with special needs; also,
$250 million in funds to increase accountability and to turn around failing schools. That is almost double what it was before. We had the largest increase ever in Pell grants, to make college affordable to working families. In this bill, 70,000 more kids will be able to get Head Start, bringing the total in our Head Start Program to 950,000 kids.
There is money in there for youth training and youth opportunity grants; a 66-percent increase in money for child care; community health centers, up $150 million to $1.2 billion, meaning 1.5 million more patients can be served next year; the important low-income heating and energy assistance program, $300 million more; Breast and cervical cancer screening, so that women can get the needed preventive health care they need, an $18 million increase; NIH, a $1.7 billion increase, the largest in our Nation's history. Afterschool care is almost double; it means 850,000 children will be served by afterschool programs. Also in the health end, 9,600 more research projects, one of which could bring major medical breakthroughs in cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, or Parkinson's disease. That is what is in this bill. Forty-
two thousand more women would be screened for breast and cervical cancer. That is cost effective and saves lives.
There are a lot of things in this bill that are too important to be destroyed by last-minute partisan politics. As I said, nothing is perfect. The conference agreement has a number of items about which I have concern. For example, at the insistence of Republicans, an important regulation protecting workers from workplace injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome was delayed yet again. We have delayed these worker protections for 3 years now, and last year's conference report contained explicit language that they would not be delayed any further. Yet as part of the give and take of the final negotiations, language was included to delay implementing this regulation until June 1.
Each year over 600,000 American workers suffer disabling, work-
related muskoloskeletal disorders, like carpal tunnel syndrome and back injuries. Employers spend $15 to 20 billion a year just for workers compensation related to these injuries. The estimated annual total cost to workers and the Nation due to ergonomics is a high as $60 billion, according to the Department of Labor. So this is a major problem.
This proposal was initiated under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole in the Bush administration 9 years ago. This is not a partisan issue. It is a worker protection issue plain and simple.
Apparently, that is not good enough for Mr. DeLay. He wants to kill this important worker protection outright. I do not see how we can face the 600,000 people who are injured each year and say, ``No, your health and your safety just aren't important enough to be protected.'' How can you say, with a straight face that protecting these workers from serious injury is a ``special interest provision.
So I again urge the House Republican leadership to reconsider their decision to kill this important bill. We had a good, honest bipartisan agreement. Nobody loved every part of it, but it was decided upon honorably and in good-faith.
This is what the American people want and need. They want us to work together in good faith and to come up with a product that is in their best interest. A lot of sweat and debate and compromise went into doing just that. It is late, but it is not too late to bring back our agreement.
I am confident we would have more than enough votes in the House and Senate to pass it. And I have personally been assured by President Clinton that he would sign it as it come out of committee.
We ought to do what is right.
I just learned a few minutes ago that there is a possibility we are going to renege on the agreement that we reached in conference; that the language we adopted there is now being changed to reflect original language that we conferees talked about, fought over, discussed, changed, modified over a period of about--over a period of a couple of months but finally, Sunday night, over a period of about 2 or 3 hours. We finally reached language with which everyone agreed. I am now being told that language is being thrown out. It is being thrown out and we are going back to the initial language that was the source of the contention.
If that is so then, indeed, we have reached a very bad situation in this Congress. If this is what happens, what it means is when we go to conference with the House and we come up with our compromises and we shake hands on it, we sign our names to it, if you happen to be in the majority, and you want to change it, then tough luck; it means absolutely nothing. We operate on our word around here.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
Mr. HARKIN. Our word is our bond. When you can't trust people to keep their word, this institution goes downhill. I am afraid that is what is happening now.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
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