Date: 1998-10-12
Speaker: LINDA SMITH (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Washington

Mr. Speaker. I rise today to offer a solution to the gridlock between this body and the President. one that our President says he is willing to shut down the government over. I ask the President to stay in town at least one day. to cancel his trip to New York to the fundraiser for an important friend of his. and consider this: There is a simple solution available that will satisfy both the President and Congress and avert the potential crisis that this Nation faces if he does not start paying attention. In fact. the problem could be resolved today. First of all. both the President and Congress have promised to save Social Security. Now. in order to really put action behind that promise. neither side can spend the phantom surplus Social Security dollars. not through new spending. not through tax cuts. Second. our focus is on education. a value that we all wholeheartedly say must be a priority. Now. let us keep these two goals in mind and consider the Presidents words. One week ago. two weeks ago. about once a week for some time. the President has proclaimed that his top goal is to save Social Security. Now his goal has changed this week. but that is what he has been saying. This week he says he is going to shut down the government. not for the goal of saving Social Security. but he is going to shut down the government if we do not agree to dig deeply into the Social Security trust fund and spend billions of dollars. new dollars. on education programs. Now what we have is the President pitting the needs of elderly Americans against the needs of children and asking us. the American people. to choose. He says we have to choose between protecting Social Security for our elderly or shoring up education for the future of our children. I stand here today to say this is a false choice that Congress and Americans do not have to make. There is another way. The solution is simple. Common sense. something that came directly from the people. not this body. and it is to return money directly to local school districts and bypass the bureaucratic cost and the red tape of Washington. D.C.. the most askedfor educational change from all the teachers throughout America. The House of Representatives has passed a model piece of legislation.. the Dollars to the Classroom Act. that provides enough money for schools and school districts to hire 110.000 teachers. It just simply does this by taking a portion of the education bureaucracy and blockgranting 95 p rcent of these 31 Federal education programs directly to our local classrooms. The beauty of this bill is that it allows local people the flexibility to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes. or. if their district needs it more and their class sizes are already low. buy new computers. books or supplies. Basically. they can use the money to buy whatever the children need most. not what is directed by bureaucrats 2.500 miles away. The President threatens that if we were to do this. he would veto it. because he still believes. as many on the Hill here in Washington D.C. believe. that bureaucrats know better than parents. I think they are wrong. This budget battle should remind Americans of how difficult it will be for politicians to leave Social Security trust funds alone. so that it is to protect our elderly neighbors that we should be standing here. It is what we should be about. But here we are. just a week away from a promise to save Social Security. Last week. the week after. the week before. and the President came back to town to posture long enough after he read the polls. He knows we care about children. He knows I think daily about my six grandchildren. but he has decided that for the sake of campaigns. that this is the right thing to do. We need to bypass the bureaucracy. We need to get out of the political rhetoric. and we need to get into the hearts and the neighborhoods and the school districts. We need not to separate generations. I stand here today to plead with America to call the President back to town to negotiate a fair budget.