David Skaggs

my amendment removes the provision in the bill that caps spending for population planning activities at a maximum of 65 percent of the fiscal 1995 level. Humane and respectful assistance to other nations seeking voluntarily to limit their…

I rise in strong support of increasing the minimum wage for this Nation's working poor. The minimum wage law is designed to help ensure working Americans earn enough to live on. Under the current minimum wage, a full-time worker earns…

Mr. Chairman, debate concluded a few minutes ago on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Conyers] about the question of declassification of the aggregate amount of intelligence expenditures. I wanted nonetheless to…

I want to support this bill because I believe on balance it does meet vital national security needs. However, I do have some serious concerns about it. It is obviously essential to support the activities of the intelligence community as we…

I just want to register my concerns in opposition to what I believe is a very ill-advised move that the Congress seems determined to take. Not that any of us want to see consumers paying more for gasoline or other products. But we should…

this is bad budget policy. It is going to make it $30 billion-plus harder to balance the budget over the next 6 years. It is bad consumer policy, unlikely that our citizens are going to see very much of this reflected at the pump. It is…

Again, as I understand it, just looking at Russia, the funds from the Nunn-Lugar program have involved removal of over 3,000 nuclear warheads in Russia.

I suspect the ultimate irony of this is that in a year or two from now, if this becomes law, that we will have Members arguing that we need to increase defense spending because the nuclear threat from Russia has not been reduced, and the…

In other words, if we do not do what the gentleman wants to do in these categories, we are going to shoot ourselves, is the practical effect of this.

Mr. Chairman, many in the new majority seem determined to do anything they possibly can to interfere with a woman's privacy rights and freedom of choice about abortion. They even want to turn this bill into a battleground on that issue…

I have three ideas that come to mind in this debate right now: footholds; duplication; and the legitimate interests of my Republican colleagues. There has been, I think, fairly casual use of language and logic in suggesting that the…

this is a serious matter. It deserves sober debate. The uncontroverted facts underlying all of this are as follows: They involve no U.S. covert action, nor any ``action'' for that matter. The President of the United States sent to our…

the point is that Senator Rudman said no illegality, no covert action. What is left, as he put it in his words, is a matter of politics.

If I can reclaim my time, if the gentleman meant raising income taxes by more than a de minimis amount, why did the gentleman not use that term in the constitutional amendment rather than the term internal revenue, which has a much broader…

Let me interrupt the gentleman on this point as well, because I think it really bears looking at some concrete examples. As the gentleman has pointed out, a piece of legislation could pass the House, the body that directly represents…

If I may interrupt the gentleman again, as I mentioned at the outset, the gentleman from Texas, who is the principal sponsor of this proposal, and I agreed we would try to have a free exchange. I see he is on his feet. Perhaps he can…

I want to address myself for the moment to the process by which this proposed amendment has been brought to the House. Passing for the moment the fact that I believe it is a bad idea and bad constitutional law, even worse is how we…

I submit that this is a very artful redefinition on the fly of these terms in a proposed amendment to the fundamental charter of the country, and we do not know what we mean.

let me look at another recent example in our collective experience here earlier in this Congress. When we took up the majority's reconciliation bill last fall, I believe as I recall, there was a significant revenue-raising component to…

Reclaiming my time, I submit that there is a fundamental disagreement about what we mean. What the gentleman is saying is that, ``Well, we may not know what we mean today when we're amending the Constitution, but we'll figure it out some…

Could I engage the gentleman just on that point because, you know, you stop to think of it, we would not have this Constitution to amend had it not been for the fact that a supermajority provision in the Articles of Confederation, just…

Or is that the case, because it talks about reasonable legislation. Are we going to have the courts deciding whether a Congress has reasonably exercised its judgment about what de minimis means?

let me just say, I have discussed with the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton], who I believe is scheduled to have the hour special order following this one, and I think the country will be well served by a real give-and-take kind of debate…

But would the gentleman agree there is nothing to prevent some future Congress from coming up with whatever arbitrary definition of de minimis it might see fit to impose?

As someone who studied Latin for 4 years, I do not find de minimis offensive, I just find it vague and confusing as something to put into the U.S. Constitution. Now would it not have been preferable for this to go through the committee…