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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H4488-H4489]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

        NORTHEASTERN OHIO PLEASED WITH THE CONTRACT WITH AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Hoke] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOKE. Mr. Speaker, we are here after the first 100 days have been 
completed, and I think most of us have had the experience of going back 
to our respective districts, and being involved in a number of 
engagements, and town hall meetings, and the kinds of things that we do 
in order to try and find out exactly what our constituents are saying 
about how they feel about what has been done, and I want to report to 
the Congress that I have had extraordinarily positive feedback from the 
people of northeastern Ohio regarding what we have called the Contract 
With America and regarding the direction that they believe that this 
contract or that this Congress is now taking our highest legislative 
body in the United States, the direction we are going and the direction 
we are trying to pursue for the people of America.
  And what I hear from my constituents is that they could not be 
happier, they could not be more pleased, that they finally feel that 
they have in the Congress of the United States men and women who are 
willing to actually commit to what they said that they would do, that 
this whole notion of keeping a promise regardless of what the promise 
happens to be, even the fact of making a promise and keeping it as a 
group of elected officials elevates that group of elected officials 
from politicians who, as Winston Churchill observed, are defined by 
being concerned about the next election to a level of being statesmen; 
that is, people who are concerned about the next generation, and I 
cannot tell you how much positive feedback I have gotten from the men 
and women of northeastern Ohio, the west side of Cleveland and western 
Cuyahoga County regarding the efforts we have made and the efforts to 
make Government smaller, to make it more responsible, to reduce taxes, 
to reduce the burden of Government on the people, and to try and bring 
that burden of Government to its closest and its most local area. That 
is the local communities.
                              {time}  1730

  If you think back to George Washington's time, what was it that 
George Washington believed in with respect to the House of 
Representatives? He thought of districts not in the sense that we think 
of today, where we have 572,000 people in each district on average, at 
least in the State of Ohio. It varies a little bit from State to State. 
But he thought of districts as neighborhoods, that neighborhoods were 
in fact the building block of the House of Representatives.
  Well, that is when we had a fraction of the number of people living 
in this country that we have today. But it was a remarkable thing that 
he would observe that we should be as neighbors and act that way.
  Well, that is how we should act in the House of Representatives, and 
we have a tremendous challenge coming before us in the next 3 or 4 
months, and that is the challenge of delivering a budget to be voted 
upon by this House and then to be signed into law by the President of 
the United States.
  The fact is that that is going to be a tough fight and a tough 
battle, because in making a budget, what we do, just as a family does, 
just as an institution does, just as a company does, our country will 
be redefining, or defining and redefining its values, because it is 
through the budget process that we truly do define what we believe in, 
what our priorities are, what is most important and what our values are 
as a Nation.
  That is exactly what we will be doing. That is why the budget process 
is so important, not just because it spends money, not just because of 
the way it describes the appropriations bills, but in fact because what 
we do is we tell the American people, we tell ourselves, exactly what 
it is that we value as a people and what direction we are going to be 
going in.
  I can tell you as a member of the Committee on the Budget, the 
direction we are going to be going in is we are going to, in fact, have 
a balanced budget after a 7-year period. We have committed to it; we 
have worked on it all last week. We were here when the rest of the 
House was still in recess; we came back early; and we will, in fact, 
deliver for the American people a balanced budget after a 7-year 
period.
  It is tough sledding, it takes a tremendous amount of work, and it 
takes a tremendous amount of decision making in terms of making the 
tough choices and making the hard decisions. But that is what we have 
been working on, that is what we will continue to work on. We are going 
to Leesburg, VA, to a conference, and then we will 
[[Page H4489]] present through hearings and ultimately at the end of 
May for a vote in early June, a budget resolution which will show the 
American people just exactly how we can get to a balanced budget after 
7 years.

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