Tom Harkin

I believe the Record will show the Senator from Texas voted when the Balanced Budget Act passed the Senate.

My experience in my years here is that the distinguished chairman of the committee has been very successful in getting documents and papers out of the State Department in the past. I would hope that the committee would at least try to get…

If the Senator will yield, now we get two sides. It seems to me if there is a meeting with the Secretary of State--it was James Baker at the time--and Mr. Gorbachev and our Ambassador, there would have been--there has been at every meeting…

I feel strongly about this aspect of going into NATO enlargement. More than anything else, I want to explain the purpose of my amendment and lay down a marker regarding an issue that I know concerns all of us here and which could have very…

Is the Senator then saying that the cost of this is going to escalate greatly in the future, that it is not $400 million, it is going to be something much above that because we are going to subsidize a lot of sales? Is that what the…

I believe it is important now to limit our taxpayers' exposure rather than a blank check. If there is an emergency in the future, if something does happen, yes, the Appropriations Committee will respond. The Foreign Relations Committee and…

I think all we are saying is that the other members of NATO have to be as fully involved financially in upgrading and modernizing their force structure as the taxpayers of this country. I basically would submit that this amendment is more…

Again, I respond to the Senator from Delaware. Again, what he is basically arguing for is giving a blank check to the American people. I disagree with the Senator on the point that he just said about conventional structure. We are talking…

I am talking only about subsidies to the national military budgets, the national expenses of those three countries to meet their national commitments.

I will not argue constitutional principles with the Senator from West Virginia, I know that. But treaties under--I forget the article--treaties become the law of the land.

Again, I think the arguments, if I might respectfully say so, of the Senator from Delaware are arguments that we would have heard on the Senate floor in the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s. The Senator's arguments pertain to a world that…

Yes, out of our taxpayer dollars, subsidies to those countries. But it has nothing to do with our military expenditures for our nation's forces stationed in Europe.

After a treaty is signed. And keep in mind, treaties override the Constitution of the United States. Once those decisions are made, we are going to have to meet, as the Senator from Virginia said, our moral obligations.

It is talking about the subsidy. It is not talking about what we spend ourselves in terms of our own military. It is talking about what subsidy we provide to these countries.

Well, wait a second. I do not think the answer is yes. What GAO said is NATO enlargement could entail costs in addition to those countries in the Partnership for Peace, for example, others who may not be invited to NATO but because of the…

I thank both Senators from North Dakota for their strong voices and strong support for the crop insurance program. To sum it up, our farmers, our refugees, our asylees, should not be penalized because of the delay on the part of the House…

First, let me commend my friend and colleague, Senator Kennedy, for his long-time commitment and leadership on this issue, among many others, but especially on this issue

I think that gives us some hope that we can work together here, we can negotiate out some differences, and we can come up with a bill that the President will sign and that will, indeed, benefit our producers.

Last evening, President Clinton did the right thing, did the right thing for this country and did the right thing for our farmers and for people who live all across rural America

I, too, appreciate the leadership of my colleague from New Jersey on this issue, and concur with the Chairman that the NIH should give appropriate consideration to proposals from the International Center for Public Health.

I appreciate what he just said about Bobby Silverstein. Senator Jim Jeffords has always been in the forefront assuring that people with disabilities have their full constitutional and civil rights in this country.

I will respond to my friend this way. That is true. We have had a lot of great poets and writers who received no NEA grants. How many more, though, were out there in the little towns of Missouri, in the fields of Iowa, around the coal…

I just had a long conversation on the phone with Jorie Graham, the poet from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year. She told me without that NEA grant--she had a little child--she would not have been…

He'll find people like John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Jane Smiley, who just wrote the wonderful book ``A Thousand Acres'' and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It is now being made into a movie. Writers…

I just have a sense that some people may have voted on this and not understood exactly what was going on in terms of stripping away all of these measures and taking away the prohibition that we had in the past to limit how much could be…