Major Owens

I thank both of my colleagues from the Committee on the Judiciary and congratulate them on the magnificent job that they are doing

I ask my colleagues to pardon my ignorance, but I am not a lawyer and I have not been impressed with the legal gymnastics of the Committee on the Judiciary hearings

I think it is time for a brief review of our policy in Haiti. I would like to begin by stating that it is as desperate a situation now as it has ever been. Just a few days ago a new wave of killing resulted in the destruction of a group of…

I would like to appeal to the gentleman from Indiana and other Members of the party of Lincoln to act in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln. We have a situation here unprecedented in the history of the world, where there has been a peaceful…

Is H.R. 4114 neutral on the question of military intervention? Does it discuss it at all?

This amendment is not silent on the question. This amendment rules out the use of force, and H.R. 4114 does not deal with the use of force at all.

I would like to clarify a position. The gentleman is the sponsor of a bill, H.R. 4114, on which I am a cosponsor and all the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are cosponsors, and there are in all more than a hundred cosponsors, and…

I rise because I think this is an unprecedented amendment. We are considering an authorization of the Defense Department, and we suddenly plunged into foreign policy. We consider the issue of Haiti so important that we have forced it on…

I would also like to add my congratulations to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Ford], and the gentleman from California [Mr. Martinez] and all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who helped to make this legislation possible. I would…

I welcome the opportunity to use these special orders in order to tie together a number of very important things that are happening here with some of the kinds of catastrophes we see and the serious problems being experienced in my…

I want to congratulate the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Education, the gentleman from California [Mr. Martinez] for his rapid movement of this very important bill through the process. We are…

Crime in public housing developments certainly deserves special attention. A tiny percentage of criminal predators prey upon the overwhelming majority of hard-working families in public housing. Periodic police sweeps of public areas and…

the House is presently considering the crime bill, and this afternoon we experienced something that might be called a frenzy, a frenzy of applications of the death penalty. We seem to be preoccupied with death. In fact, Mr. Speaker, the…

We are driven by some forces that are irrational here. I said before I hope welfare reform does not become revenge on the poor where we throw away any reason because there is a scream out there by people who really do not know who the fat…

It is more reasonable to take the 5-year-old and 6-year-old as the cutoff point where the child is older and able to go to Head Start or school, kindergarten or regular school, and they are just going to overlook all of the evidence that…

It is very interesting to note that it appears that welfare would be one of the more efficient Federal programs, in that people who receive assistance, large numbers, do get off and make the attempt after 2 years. Not so with the farm…

So we have to have more support services for them when they get to regular school, and then eventually they are going to have a larger percentage of the juvenile delinquents, and later on the criminals. We are just going to throw away all…

What about the habits of the mothers who are on welfare and the child is 6 years old? They are saying that they cannot be saved?

More intelligent, more well-directed job training and education program and a program fully paid for by the Federal Government, because States and local governments have balked at supplying any percentage of the funds needed for the…

So we would go down from 5 million families to something like 3 million families.

So 42 percent of the people do not need to be told, 2 years and you're off, because in less than 2 years they are off.

They become record clerks, x-ray technicians. There are a number of jobs where they can come out of the program and not only get a job immediately in the New York City area or the Brooklyn area, they can go anywhere in the country, because…

For a long time in New York State we had a debate on whether or not welfare would provide, help keep women on welfare who wanted to go to college. They have to get a special waiver to go for 2 years, and that was permitted for large…

A program to train people for 1 year. In 1 year of training one can get certain categories of jobs: practical nurse, child care aide, and one or two others. So just to have a 1-year training, one gets trained for a job that is going to…