Benjamin Gilman: “Mr. Speaker, we have all heard the President's State of the Union promise to end the era of big government. President…”

“Mr. Speaker, we have all heard the President's State of the Union promise to end the era of big government. President Clinton's own Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, showed that over a year ago when he moved to close three outdated international affairs bureaucracies and fold their functions back into the State Department, giving the President the discretion to pick and choose of those three agencies which he wanted to fold. This is not an isolationist policy. Responding to Secretary Christopher's plan, this Congress passed a major reform bill to follow through with this plan, reducing waste, duplication, and overlapping among these Federal agencies that are best designed to fight a cold war that ended 5 years ago. And what was the President's response? His lobbyists responded by promising to, and I quote, ``delay, obfuscate and derail'' our bill. They failed, and the Congress passed the first sweeping foreign affairs reform bill in over 40 years. The President then used a congressional recess on a Friday afternoon, after the press deadline, to veto the bill which his own Secretary of State first suggested. With this veto, the President defended the bureaucracy and the status quo in opposition to his own Secretary of State. This is clear proof that under this White House, the era of big government is not over. It lives on, despite the best advice of senior members of his own Cabinet.”