2000 Budget Information Section:

Excerpts from Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin of November 15, 1999

GOP DUCKS CONFLICT WITH CLINTON BY PREEMPTIVE SURRENDER TO HIS DEMANDS

GOP IS NOW THE PARTY OF "BIG SPENDERS"

GOP CONGRESS BACKS BILL CLINTON'S UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAND GRAB

BIPARTISAN CONGRESS JOINS BILL CLINTON IN SUPPORT OF FOREIGN AID

1999 Budget Information Section:

How did YOUR Senators and Congressman vote on this outrage?
Read the full Budget (at Thomas)

Excerpts from Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin of December 15, 1998

LEST WE FORGET

PLANNED PARENTHOOD, ET AL GETS ANOTHER $215 MILLION

MORE DETAILS OF THE CLINTON-LOTT-GINGRICH BUDGET

Excerpts from Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin of November 15, 1998

GOP BUDGET DEAL BOOSTS BIG GOVERNMENT

Aaron Steelman asks "How much is $1.75 trillion? Here's one way to look at it: The number has 13 digits – $1,750,000,000,000.

"Here's another: It's larger than the gross domestic products of Canada, Mexico, Ireland, New Zealand and Sweden combined.

"And here's yet another: It's the size of the '99 federal budget....

"‘I would describe this not as a budget negotiation, but as a GOP budget surrender,’ added Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute...."

YOU PAY THE RENT --- THANKS TO BILL, NEWT, AND TRENT

"Congress already had approved a bill to give 50,000 new housing vouchers to people moving from welfare to work, so they can live in private apartments.

"The same bill also allows middle-income families to move into public housing. In some regions of the country, people with annual incomes of up to $35,000 will be eligible.

"‘This is the most significant progressive legislation of the Clinton administration as far as Housing and Urban Development is concerned,’ said HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo...."

FUTURE TAX CUTS MADE MORE DIFFICULT

"Pete Sepp, a vice president at the National Taxpayers Union, says continued inaction might cause some Republican activists to give up hope for tax reform.

"‘(Congress) can use the Chicago Cubs' strategy only so long. After enough losing seasons, the troops just won't come out to fight,’ Sepp said.

"‘The real problem is that by not passing a big tax cut this year or last year, they have allowed revenues to keep flooding in,’ Cato's Moore said. ‘That means you can't do a 20% flat tax on a revenue-neutral basis any more.’...

"‘The bottom line is that domestic discretionary spending is now at higher levels than anything seen during the Carter administration after adjusting for inflation,’ [Scott] Hodge [a senior fellow at Citizens for a Sound Economy] said."

DEMOCRATS WERE MISERS COMPARED TO GOP

"Moore added that in their first three budgets ('96-'98), Republicans boosted domestic spending by more than $180 billion, compared to a $155 billion increase in the three years prior to GOP control of Congress...."

GOP GAINS COULD MOVE CONGRESS FURTHER TO THE LEFT

"‘[O]n budget issues, I'm not convinced that more Republicans would make much of a difference,’ Moore said. ‘Even if they got 60 senators, what that really does is maximize the leverage of the Jeffords and Chafees (liberal Republican senators) of the world.’...

"Moore said, ‘Most of the big spending initiatives that Republicans are now approving would not have had a breath of life if Republicans were in the minority. They would have blocked them.’

"He added, ‘A lot of fiscal conservatives wouldn't shed tears at this point if Republicans lost control of Congress – including myself.’" Source: Investor's Business Daily (10/19/98, p. A1)

SO YOU THINK THEY READ IT BEFORE THEY APPROVED IT

"‘Who among the rank-and-file members of the House can say they've read and understood the entire package?’ asked Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.). ‘Heck, half the members couldn't even lift it, let alone read it.’

"The 40-pound, 16-inch-tall bill includes dozens of high-profile spending compromises....

"‘Do I know what's in this bill?’ asked Senate Appropriations Committee ranking Democrat Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.). ‘Are you kidding? No. Only God knows what's in this monstrosity.’...

"Despite criticism from conservative Republicans that the bill broke budget discipline and was laden with special-interest projects, the House voted 333 to 95 to approve it. Sixty-four Republicans joined with 31 Democrats to oppose the bill." The Washington Post (10/21/98, pp. A1, A4)

GOP YIELDS TO CLINTON ON BILLION DOLLAR FEDERAL CHILD CARE SCHEME

"Although details are still in flux, GOP negotiators appear to have yielded to White House demands on several programs, approving the entire $1.1 billion sought by Clinton for low-income home heating assistance, all $871 million the White House requested for summer youth jobs and the entire $1.2 billion proposed for child-care block grants to the states."

INTIMIDATED GOP SUCCUMBS TO HUFFING AND PUFFING OF BIG BAD WOLF IN THE WHITE HOUSE

"‘They [White House negotiators] are cleaning our clock,’ complained a senior Senate aide standing outside the House chamber as members voted on the resolution to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. ‘Over here they are scared to death if they don't give [Clinton] enough money he'll close the government down and they'll suffer at the polls.’

"‘The Republicans are giving in [on] every demand by the White House, period,’ said Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a senior House Appropriations Committee member involved in the talks....

"[T]he Senate voted 96 to 1 for the legislation that would offer public housing to families with incomes of up to $40,000 a year...." Source: The Washington Post (10/9/98, p. A4)

COULD IT BE THAT THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN WHAT NEWT & BILL BELIEVE?

"Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute best captures the GOP's submissiveness: ‘One can imagine Clinton being dragged from the White House in handcuffs and Republicans still making last-minute budget concessions.’...

"The GOP can't mount a lucid position because too many in the party can't let go of their fondness for big government." Source: Investor's Business Daily (10/8/98, p. A28)

NEA HAILS PROSPECT OF 100,000 MORE MEMBERS

The Washington Post (10/17/98, p. A6) reports that "The day the budget deal was announced, President Clinton heralded what he called a ‘truly historic’ victory: $1.2 billion in federal money to hire 100,000 new elementary schoolteachers....

"Republicans are touting the deal in public. Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, called it a ‘huge win’ for educators and parents....

"The National Education Association said the funds included for training should make recruiting possible."

The Washington Post (10/19/98, p. A19) reports that the "provision agreed to on Friday, would expand prescription contraceptive coverage in the federal employee health insurance program for approximately 1.2 million women of childbearing age....

"‘This is a huge victory for American women,’ said Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.), the provision's chief sponsor, after learning she had prevailed in the negotiations. The federal health benefits program, she added, ‘will and should be a model for this country.’...

"Under Lowey's provision, the approximately 300 health insurance plans in the federal employee program would have to cover prescription contraceptives in the same manner that they cover other prescriptions....

"The Senate accepted the provision in September, on a voice vote...."

ABORTIFACIENTS MANDATED

"Some congressional conservatives objected to the provision, since IUDs prevent a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the lining of the uterus and because the pill sometimes prevents pregnancy the same way. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said the provision ‘leaves open the possibility that abortifacients...will indeed be mandated.’"

"Under the provision, insurance plans in the federal employee health care program would be required to cover all five methods of prescription contraceptives: the pill, the diaphragm, IUDs, Norplant and Depo-Provera. Currently, only 19 percent of federal health plans cover all five methods, Lowey said." Source: The Washington Post (10/16/98, p. A16)

NO "CHOICE" FOR THOSE WHO OPPOSE FUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD

The Life Advocacy Alliance, in Briefing #5-41 (10/19/98), underscores the same point. "The Omnibus bill does include Planned Parenthood's top legislative goal for the 105th Congress. For the first time ever, the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan will carry a mandate. Participating insurers and providers can choose what benefits to offer across the broad range of medical care – except every package offered to every federal employee must now include coverage of the full range of contraceptives approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

"The mandate applies not only to the insurers but also to the employees. There goes choice! As Rep. Ann Northup (R-KY) pointed out in House debate on the issue only days ago, ‘We [Congress] take away the one choice that federal employees have today that they will not have in the future, and that is affordable health insurance, because when one starts adding mandates, one starts ... adding to the cost of health insurance. And as it goes up, one starts on that slippery slope.

"‘Every woman who is 31 years old and is paying for every form of contraceptives for everybody in the workplace [but] who cannot get pregnant says,’ notes Rep. Northup, ‘"why should I pay for their contraceptives and they not have to pay for my fertilization?" And every 60-year-old woman says, "why should I have to pay for all the young women's contraceptives and they not have to pay for my estrogen?"’

"The goal is not choice. It's funding Planned Parenthood, and that's why the White House ultimatum. Inclusion of ‘Lowey’ reveals the real negotiating ‘principle’ for the GOP Leaders: whatever the White House demands."

HHS GETS BIGGEST FUNDING BOOST IN 7 YEARS

"In total, the appropriations bill will allow the Department of Health and Human Services to increase its discretionary spending by 10 percent, the biggest jump in seven years. The final budget agreement restored cuts the House had made to Head Start." Source: The Washington Post (10/16/98, p. A16)

LOTT AND GINGRICH DELIVER $193 MILLION TO PROMOTE KYOTO TREATY

The Washington Times (10/22/98, p. A12) reports that "Republican leaders included in the massive budget bill $193 million for a global environmental fund that the White House uses in part to coax Third World nations to join the global-warming treaty...."

GOP AIDS CLINTON ON "GLOBAL WARMING" RATIFICATION STRATEGY

"‘This is to advance a treaty that the administration does not have the guts to send to this body to debate because they know it would be defeated,’ said Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican...."

HOUSE AND SENATE OVERRULED BY GOP LEADERSHIP SELLOUT

"Mr. Hagel noted that the Senate rejected any increase for the environmental fund earlier this year, while the House actually cut the fund's $47 million appropriation in its environmental-spending bill. Yet a huge boost for the fund was included in the $500 billion spending compromise that Congress passed and President Clinton signed yesterday...."

REPUBLICAN SURRENDER SURPRISED EVEN CLINTON

"The administration was surprised and delighted by the GOP concession....

"Another Clinton official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the White House had not expected the GOP budget negotiators – Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Georgia Republican – to concede the big increase in funding....Republicans all year have attacked the treaty...."

REPUBLICANS SHOULD FIRE THEIR LEADERS

"‘We don't know why the congressional negotiators, in particular Lott, decided to give in on this,’ said the Clinton aide. ‘They went from saying we couldn't even discuss plans to implement the treaty to giving us $200 million for it. It was a major environmental victory for the administration.’"

A WAR CHEST TO UNDERMINE U.S. LIBERTY AND INDEPENDENCE

"Environmentalists said the funding increase will be useful in prodding Third World countries to join the treaty – meeting a key demand of congressional treaty opponents."

Excerpts from Howard Phillips Issues and Strategy Bulletin of October 31, 1998

BARNEY FRANK HAILS CLINTON VICTORY

The Washington Post (10/16/98, p. A17) reports that "Many Republicans were almost in shock yesterday, stunned that their congressional leaders had blessed a 4,000-page, $500 billion colossus that appeared to have shattered the pledge of fiscal austerity they thought they had taken when Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) led them to power in 1994....

"Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) gave full credit to President Clinton for the budget outcome, achieved barely a week after the House voted to open an impeachment inquiry against him....

"And Frank remarked gleefully that ‘people who voted Republican in '95 could probably bring a bait-and-switch suit against the GOP for pork barreling.’"

GOP "LEADERSHIP" FOLLOWS CLINTON

Robert D. Novak observes in The Washington Post (10/15/98, p. A23) that "The first consecutive four years of Republican control in Congress since 1930, which began with a bang, are ending this week with a whimper as GOP leaders succumb to White House mastery. But more than tactical ineptitude, the Republican surrender on Capitol Hill suggests a deeper malaise."

NO AGENDA EXCEPT PERSONAL POLITICAL SURVIVAL

"One biting critique: ‘Today, the Republican Party is adrift, without an agenda and without purpose beyond its seeming preoccupation with saving the congressional seats of its incumbents.’..."

DOWNSIZING AND DEREGULATION ABANDONED --- ALONG WITH TAX CUTS

"Having long since abandoned the priorities of governmental downsizing and deregulation they professed when taking control of Congress in 1995, Republican leaders months ago gave up on this year's goal of tax reduction. The further retreat came this week when they gave President Clinton very nearly everything he wanted in order to wind up the 105th Congress and get home three weeks before the election."

A SHAMEFUL AND SHAMELESS SELLOUT

"That House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had the white flag ready to wave was no surprise. What stunned some of their compatriots was that they were not prepared for the Democratic endgame. ‘Our side looked like a bunch of peasants who just fell off the turnip truck,’ grumbled one veteran Senate Republican...."

"They had surrendered on tax cuts and everything else important in order to avoid the threat of what they feared most: a Clinton veto closing the government. But now, the president was upping the ante, knowing Gingrich and Lott would do anything to get out of town...."

CLINTON'S CONSTITUENCIES ENERGIZED AND SUBSIDIZED

"Nor was education money the only thing on the table this week. As long expected, Republicans capitulated on the $18 billion International Monetary Fund authorization with only a fig leaf of reform. A myriad of liberal proposals – abortion-like contraception, drug-needle exchange, subsidies for black farmers – attached themselves to the catchall bill. It seemed less Clinton's agenda or the Democratic Party's agenda than the left-wing stance of the Congressional Black Caucus and House Judiciary Committee Democrats who will vote on the president's impeachment."

EVEN JACK KEMP SAYS GOP LACKS PRINCIPLE

"The last indignity came Monday evening. Republicans had complained that the president had not submitted fiscal offsets in the form of reduced spending to pay for his education schemes. But now, to provide revenue for a school bond proposal (which was not fully revealed until the eleventh hour), Clinton's agents called for selected tax increases (including extension of the Superfund tax).

1996 GOP Vice Presidential nominee Jack Kemp "said his very close friends in the congressional GOP leadership ‘have squandered [Ronald Reagan's] bequest to the party of Lincoln.’ Although Republican candidates across the country campaign for tax cuts, Kemp said, ‘voters may think a political party whose leaders are unwilling to risk losing a vote on principle once it is in office is unworthy of winning the next election.’"

THE TIMID, UNPRINCIPLED GOP ELEPHANT DANCES TO BILL CLINTON'S TUNE --- AND DOESN'T GET PEANUTS

The New York Times (10/17/98, p. A8) reports that Fred Greenstein, a historian at Princeton University said "the President had rallied once-panicked Democrats behind him by playing the budget game skillfully and maintaining his high public approval ratings. The reversal of political fortune, he said, was ‘full of anomalies and paradoxes – like who would imagine a President would be strengthened by being the third person to have impeachment hearings?’...

"If Mr. Clinton ‘gets any weaker,’ Paul A. Gigot, the political columnist, summarized today in The Wall Street Journal, ‘Republicans may pass Hillary's health-care plan.’"

CONSERVATIVE VOTERS ASKED TO LOBBY FOR REMOVAL OF GINGRICH AND LOTT

At a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. on October 20, speaking as Chairman of The Conservative Caucus, I said:

"The Gingrich-Lott-Clinton budget agreement...is a comprehensive betrayal of Constitutional obligations and a rejection of the conservative policies for which many Americans thought they were voting in supporting Republican control of Congress in 1994 and 1996."

GOP SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES IN CONGRESS WHO SUPPORT INCUMBENT GOP LEADERSHIP SHOULD LOSE YOUR SUPPORT

"So long as Republican members of the House and Senate vote to retain Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott as their leaders, then they are responsible for the decisions negotiated with Bill Clinton by Gingrich and Lott.

"Even those members of Congress who may, quite properly vote against this latest budget agreement will still be responsible for it, if they vote to re-elect Gingrich and Lott to leadership positions when Congress reconvenes in January."

$17.9 BILLION TO IMF IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

"Among the most egregious decisions made by the Congressional GOP leadership are these:

"1) A $17.9 billion transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund and the financial power brokers in behalf of whose private profit they act.

Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution begins by asserting that "All legislative Powers...shall be vested in a Congress of the United States". Congress unconstitutionally surrenders legislative authority vested in it when it assigns control over resources and policy to the IMF."

REPUBLICANS EXPAND FEDERAL CONTROL OF EDUCATION

"2) There is no Constitutional role for the Federal government in education. Most grass-roots conservatives have accepted at face value the no longer operative assertion that the Republican Party wants to return control of education to parents and local communities.

But how can that be true when the GOP Congress supports so many of Bill Clinton's primary Federal education control objectives, including Goals 2000, School-to-Work, and Outcome Based Education. The GOP's latest $1.2 billion concession (at our expense) further undermines local and parental control, while enhancing the power of left-wing special-interest pressure groups such as the National Education Association."

CONGRESS FAILS TO BAR PRESIDENTIAL USURPATION OF AUTHORITY RE OFFENSIVE WARFARE

"3) While it is good that Congress has committed additional funds for defense, it is outrageous that they have subtracted from that total an additional $1.9 billion to sustain the unconstitutional U.S. presence in Bosnia.

At the same time, the GOP leadership has failed to take decisive action, via NATO, to block United States military action against Yugoslavia, a country which, whatever its faults, has not attacked the United States of America and which is beyond the proper scope of the NATO alliance.

The President has the authority to act unilaterally in defense of our homeland, but he has no authority to launch offensive operations without a Congressional declaration of war."

$200 MILLION MORE FOR U.N.

"4) The decision to send another $200 million-plus to the United Nations – at a time when the U.N. has failed to reimburse us for more than $10 billion worth of international intervention operations which have weakened our military and caused American soldiers to fight under foreign commanders bearing the insignia of the United Nations – is an additional mark of the absence of principled Republican leadership on Capitol Hill."

$7 BILLION MORE IN USDA SUBSIDIES

"5) The agreement to enact an additional $6 to $7 billion in agriculture subsidies is a significant retreat from the progress toward free market principles which, previously, was one of the few bright spots on the Republican agenda."

HOMOSEXUAL ADOPTIONS PERMITTED

"6) The Republicans surrendered on a provision to bar adoptions by homosexual applicants in the District of Columbia."

EUTHANASIA ALLOWED

"7) They gave up on a measure to block doctors from "helping" people who are terminally ill to kill themselves."

RU-486 DISTRIBUTION ENABLED

"8) They abandoned a widely supported proposal to bar the Food and Drug Administration from licensing RU-486, a poison pill the exclusive purpose of which is to kill innocent, unborn children."

FEDERAL LAND CONTROL EXPANDED

"9) They authorized $325 million – $55 million more than last year – to purchase private lands for purposes beyond what the Constitution authorizes with respect to Federal government ownership."

MORE WELFARE FOR NON-CITIZENS

"10) In the area of immigration, they decided to authorize massive new welfare subsidies for non-citizens from Haiti and Nicaragua, even as they voted to, in effect, kill – by virtue of a 30-month delay – a previously enacted law to require border patrol officers to keep track of non-residents entering and leaving the USA from Mexico and Canada."

HIGH-TECH JOBS FOR FOREIGNERS

"And they undermined American workers seeking jobs in high-tech industries by virtually doubling the number of employment visas available for foreign workers from 65,000 to 115,000 over the next two years and 107,500 in the third year of the agreement."

NO TAX CUTS

"One of the most transcendent disappointments is the failure of the Republicans to give back any of the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases to which they agreed in 1997 – not even the modest $80 billion in cuts which they had promised."

NO BUDGET SURPLUS --- $98 BILLION STOLEN FROM SOCIAL SECURITY

"The Republicans claim that they have preserved a budget surplus. But, taking into account Social Security taxes which have been diverted from the Social Security Trust Fund – $98 billion this year alone – there is, in fact, a budget deficit – not a budget surplus.

"Of course, the basic question is whether we should have a $1.7 trillion budget at all. Even taking into account inflation, $1.7 trillion is a lot more than the $1.2 trillion being spent at the end of the Reagan Administration and the $600 billion when Jimmy Carter left office.

"And, of course, that $1.7 trillion is merely a down payment on the $1.9 trillion budget which America's bipartisan political establishment intends to saddle us with right after the turn of the century, if not sooner.

"The Conservative Caucus plans a massive grass-roots effort calling on conservative voters to contact their GOP Senators and Representatives in Congress, urging that they replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House and Trent Lott as GOP leader in the Senate."

REPUBLICANS HAVE ABDICATED THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO AMERICAN TAXPAYERS

Brad Phillips, Administrative Director of the U. S. Taxpayers Alliance, made the following comments: "The Republican leadership of the Congress has betrayed the hopes of American taxpayers that, following GOP Congressional victories in 1994 and 1996, the size and cost of the Federal government would be reduced.

"Instead, since 1994, overall Federal spending has grown from $1.46 trillion per year to a current level of $1.72 trillion per year, and, under the Clinton-Lott-Gingrich budget deal agreed to in 1997, that number will grow to $1.9 trillion shortly after the turn of the century.

"Tax collections, similarly, will have increased by some $550 billion annually to a grand total of nearly $1.9 trillion.

"The individual income tax alone currently yields $791 billion per year, compared to $543 billion in 1994. It is projected to yield $877 billion in FY 2002.

"We were promised that we would get a paltry $80 billion refund on the Republicans' $550 billion tax hike, but we wound up getting virtually no refund at all.

"It is time for Republicans in Congress to either choose new leaders or forfeit their claim on the votes of tax-paying Americans."

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