Martin Hoke: “tonight I have asked some of my good friends in the House to join me in a special order where what we are going to do is…”

“tonight I have asked some of my good friends in the House to join me in a special order where what we are going to do is review some of the legislation that has already been passed in the 104th Congress, and then we are going to continue to talk about some of the things that have not been passed yet but that we are working on. It is all part of the program that we call our Contract With America. I have asked the gentlewoman from Washington [Mrs. Smith] the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston], and the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Byrant] to join me in this, and what I wanted to do first is I have got a nice chart here that is courtesy of the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston], and I want to use this red pen to talk about some of the things that we have done already. What we have done is on the very first day of Congress we had promised that a Republican House would, first of all, require Congress to live under the same laws as every other American. We have done that. We also said that we are going to cut one out of every three congressional committee staffs. We have done that. And we said that we would cut the congressional budget. We did that as well. In addition, Mr. Speaker, we promised the American people that we are going to pass a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto, and we said that we would give relief to our States, counties and local cities on unfunded mandates, and we have done that as well.”