H 4488 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—HOUSE May 2, 1995

But I also come to commend the rescue workers who worked tirelessly,

sometimes around the clock, in a rescue attempt to reduce the pain and suffering and to bring out of the rubble

the loved ones in Oklahoma City. I

want to take a moment to specifically

commend a group of rescue workers

from my own district in Montgomery

County who went down to Oklahoma,

as did many other rescue workers from

around the country, to lend a hand. In

the truest American spirit they did a

wonderful job, and I want to thank

them one and all.

I also want to join with what I believe is a rising chorus speaking on behalf of Federal workers.

Now I know this is a somewhat sensitive issue, and let me be clear that I

am not here to suggest that conservative speech, antigovernment speech,

disagreement with Government policy

or disagreement with Government bureaucracy was the cause of the bombing in Oklahoma City. That is not my

argument. But I rather hope that, if

there is any legacy to the people who

lost their lives in Oklahoma City, it

will be a legacy of respect for Federal

employees.

I say to my colleagues, ‘‘If you go

down the rollcall, you see the employees from all agencies, from Housing

and Urban Development, from the Department of Transportation, from Veterans Affairs, from Social Security,

from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco

and Firearms, from General Services

Administration which were all in that

building. These are some of the same

Federal employees who have been

showered with contempt, who have

been described as the worst, as Government vultures, as lazy bureaucrats, as

worthless Federal employees. These are

the same Federal employees whom we

have attempted to cut benefits for, the

same Federal employees whom we have

increased pensions costs on, at least attempted to increase pension costs on,

and it seems to me there is a general

attitude of hostility toward Federal

employees.’’

Legitimate criticism, of course, is intrinsic to this body; contempt for hardworking Federal employees is not. I

would certainly caution my colleagues

of both sides of the aisle who may have

occasion to be contemptuous of Federal

employees and their performance to

keep in mind that they do not make

the laws. We do. They only try to execute to the best of their ability the

laws that we make, and, yes, some do

not do as good a job as we would like,

and some merit criticism, but certainly

the kind of contempt and condemnation that I have heard on the floor of

this body is not deserving. These people, as we now know, have families, and

young children, and dreams and desires, many of which were snuffed out

in Oklahoma City. They are people just

like us. Now is not a time for finger

pointing. Now is the time for sympathy, for condolences, for words of encouragement.

But I hope there will be a legacy out

of all this, a legacy of tolerance for

Federal employees, support for Federal

employees, a legacy of restraint on the

part of Members of this House and on

the part of certain Members of the

media when addressing the issue of

Federal employees because, while these

words did not cause the bombing in

Oklahoma City, they certainly showed

a contempt for Federal employees

which they do not deserve. Let us leave

the victims of Oklahoma City with a

better legacy in the future.

previous order of the House, the genThe SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a

ftleman from Illinois [Mr. PORTER] is

recognized for 60 minutes.

[Mr. PORTER addressed the House.

His remarks will appear hereafter in

the Extensions of Remarks.]

NORTHEASTERN OHIO PLEASED

WITH THE CONTRACT WITH

fAMERICA

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.

b 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
May 2, 1995 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—HOUSE H 4489

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.

TRIBUTE TO FEDERAL

EMPLOYEES

fThe SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. ENSIGN). Under a previous order of the

House, the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DELAURO] is recognized

for 5 minutes.

Ms. DELAURO. Mr. Speaker, it’s been

nearly 2 weeks since a terrorist’s bomb

ripped a hole in the Murrah Federal

Building and ripped a hole in the heart

of the Nation. The images of bloodied

children being carried from the rubble

will stain our collective memory for a

long time to come. How could it happen here, we asked.

Through media reports, we have

come to know the children who were so

brutally murdered—we know their

names and faces—Baylee Almon, Colton and Chase Smith, Aaron and Elijah

Coverdale and Ashley Eckles. They

have become our children, too.

And, we have learned about other

victims of the bombing, as well. We

know that more than 500 people who

were working in the Murrah Building

on that awful day were federal employees. Many were killed. Federal employees were at the Social Security Administration, helping seniors in their retirement; they were there at the Housing and Urban Development Office,

helping families find affordable housing; they were there at the BATF and

the Secret Service helping to enforce

our laws and protect our people.

To understand the scale of this tragedy, one need only to talk to employees at the Department of Housing and

Urban Development, which had approximately 90 workers in the building

at the time of the attack and suffered

the greatest loss of life. At last report,

32 HUD workers have been pronounced

dead, two are hospitalized and another

3 are still missing.

To understand the scale of this tragedy, talk to employees at the U.S. Secret Service. All six of their employees

assigned to Oklahoma City are now

gone: Mickey Maroney, Alan Whicher,

Kathy Seidl, Donald Leonard, Cynthia

Brown and Linda McKinney. Together

they leave behind 6 spouses, 6 parents

and 11 children.

Too often, we in this Nation, and, in

particular, in this body, have been

guilty of forgetting who these people

are—they are not nameless, faceless

bureaucrats. They are husbands and

wives, brothers and sisters, and they

are parents.

One of the 32 HUD employees who did

not survive the Oklahoma blast was

Lanny Scroggins. Lanny was a decorated Vietnam veteran who spent the

last 23 years as a Federal employee,

helping others. How is it that Lanny

Scroggins could survive the jungles of

Southeast Asia, but be taken by a terrorist’s bomb while at work in America’s heartland? No one has the answer.

But, while Federal employees were

the victims in Oklahoma City, they

were also the heroes: Federal employees from FEMA pulled survivors from

the wreckage and helped feed the hundreds of rescue workers.

Federal employees from the FBI,

BATF and Secret Service launched a

swift and sweeping investigation that

brought the primary suspect into custody within hours of the explosion.

But Federal employees are heroes

every day. Every day they work to

take care of our seniors, to house our

poor, to enforce our laws, to bring food,

shelter and clothing to those stricken

by natural disasters and manmade

atrocities, like the one in Oklahoma

City.

And, yet, for these heroes there are

no Congressional Medals; no parades

down Main Street; no statues in town

square. Instead, these heroes too often

are belittled as bureaucrats. In debate

on this House floor, Federal employees

have been the target of overblown political rhetoric, on both sides of the

aisle.

We don’t know what impact our

words have on deranged individuals or

the lunatic fringe groups we’ve read so

much about over the past few weeks.

We do not know. Wouldn’t it be best to

err on the side of caution? Let’s not

rely on others to do the right thing, let

us do the right thing and leave nothing

to chance.

Make no mistake, there are groups in

this country who are waging a war

against Federal law enforcement. For

many of these fringe groups, law enforcement has become the enemy. They

are not ‘‘jack-booted Government

thugs,’’ as the National Rifle Association asserts. And they deserve better

than to have voices of hate on our airwaves advising listeners about ‘‘shooting them in the head.’’

We need to have congressional hearings in the wake of the Oklahoma

bombing on the increasing threats

against Federal employees. By doing

so, we don’t politicize a tragedy. Rather, we live up to our responsibilities to

address this tragedy and make sure it

doesn’t happen again.

And, we also need to look at the

words we use. All of us in this body

want to cut the size of the Federal

Government. But our goal in reducing

the size of Government should be to

make it work better for people. We

should be able to make those arguments based on the facts, without demonizing Federal employees—without

belittling their contributions.

The Federal employees who were

killed in Oklahoma City dedicated

their lives to serving us. Now we

should serve their memory by standing

up to the forces that seek to divide us

with words of hate.

DISTRICT APPROVAL OF FIRST 100

DAYS OF 104TH CONGRESS

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under

the Speaker’s announced policy of January 4, 1995, the gentleman from Iowa

[Mr. LATHAM] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority

leader.

Mr. LATHAM. Mr. Speaker, I would

just like to take the opportunity tonight to reflect a little bit as to what

we heard back on recess. I personally,

in my district in northwest Iowa,

which is primarily agricultural, held 16

town meetings and attended four agricultural hearings. And, Mr. Speaker, I

will tell you, the people in the Fifth

Congressional District of Iowa are 100

percent behind what we did in the first

100 days in the new 104th Congress.

People told me to keep going, do not

give up the fight, continue the ideas

and the motivation behind the Contract With America. They were very,

very pleased to hear what we did on the

very first day as far as reforming this

Congress itself, how we do business,

cutting the number of people in committee staff, cutting the number of

committees, limiting the terms of the

chairs of the committees and subcommittees, limiting the term of the

Speaker himself, and, most importantly, on the very first day when we

passed the Shays-Grassley Act, it held

Congress subject to the same laws that

the rest of the country has to abide by.

Also, we received tremendous support

at every meeting for the items in the

contract itself, when you talk about

the balanced budget amendment, the

welfare reform, doing away with the

outrageous regulations that we have

had in the past few years, having the

first vote forever in this body on term

limits, something that people have

tried for years and years and it was

never allowed to happen before.

But, again, Mr. Speaker, the people

in the Fifth District of Iowa told me to

continue the fight. They believe that it

is a refreshing wind blowing through

Washington when you have a group of

people who go to Washington and work

very, very hard to make real change

and reform, and, most importantly, to

keep their word as to what they said

during the campaign. It is a major

change. People are responding. People

do not believe the liberal pledge that

they are getting from Washington.

They know the facts.

I have another gentleman here,

would you like to comment, the gentleman from Georgia?

Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. Speaker, I

thank the gentleman.

I, too, have a district which is somewhat similar to the gentleman’s. My

district, which is in the very heart of

the State of Georgia, stretches from

the middle of the State all the way to

the Florida line. I have three military

installations in my district, two Air

Force bases and a Marine Corps logistics base, and the balance of my district is made up primarily of agriculture and agribusiness industry as