Political Quotes

“I yield myself 2 minutes, to make it clear that the gentlewoman from California has made a very important point here. There were two ways that we could have moved in this area. One is to direct the U.S. Sentencing Commission to increase penalties for child obscenity violations. The other was to go into the underlying statute of some of these antipornography laws and attempt to increase the penalties there, but we might have gotten into a wide area that would infringe on civil liberties questions and other highly technical questions, and this bill would not have come up. What I am recommending to the committee is that we do not consider this matter ended because of what we are doing here today. This matter should and has to be revisited. I would strongly suggest that we examine ways to directly increase the statutes without getting into a tangle of other problems that would not have prevented the speedy passage of this bill. This is one of the few bills during this first 100 days that, by moving with some dispatch, we have not offended any sensibilities or precluded anyone from participating in the method that we used here in terms of recommending that the Sentencing Commission itself increase criminal penalties.”