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MOUNT MADONNA
SCHOOL
Interview with
James Sensenbrenner, Jr.
Congressman, 9th
District of Wisconsin
May 17, 2000
Mira Vissell: In your eleventh term as a Representative,
what is the biggest challenge you see in the Congress?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: I think the biggest challenge
that we've seen in Congress is how to make Congress
work, and to actually do things besides argue amongst
ourselves.
In the last five and a half years, Congress has really
addressed the issues that are of concern to people,
such as the federal budget deficit, saving Social
Security, not getting consumed by an ever-increasing
national debt, and higher and higher interest payments
that are paid out of debt. However, because the voters
of this country have chosen divided government for
the last five and a half years, this progress has
been incremental. Even still, with neither party being
given the mandate to pass their program in full, there
has to be compromises and deals that are struck.
I think if you look back on how we have turned the
deficit into a surplus, how we've stopped raiding
the Social Security trust fund, you'll see progress.
How last year, for the first time in thirty years,
we reduced the public debt of the United States, and
reformed welfare, and given local school districts
a better opportunity to use federal funds according
to local needs. We have made that kind of progress,
and if you look at the polls, and the level of public
satisfaction, you will see that the answer to that
question, "Is Congress doing its job?" is higher in
the affirmative than it has been in a long, long time.
To do that has been a real challenge, and I think
that we're still a long way to completely fulfilling
that challenge.
Katie Fayram: Do you have a response to yesterday's
Supreme Court ruling on the Violence Against Women
Act?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: No, I don't, because
I haven't read it. I am the second ranking Republican
member of the Judiciary Committee, which wrote the
Violence Against Women Act, and which passed it as
a part of the 1994 crime bill. I can tell you that
we will be looking at the hearing, and the decision,
and if there is a way that we can fix it to pass constitutional
muster. We will introduce legislation, and put it
up to a public hearing with emphasis on testimony
from constitutional experts. The policy issue, in
my opinion, is a closed issue; the question is how
we can do it to get it by the Supreme Court.
Jenny Johnston: In talking with Undersecretary
of State Thomas Pickering, and Theresa Loar, the Director
of the President's Interagency Council on Women yesterday,
we got the impression that the State Department runs
on a really tight budget. What do you think of the
argument that increased funding for the State Department
ultimately saves us more money by decreasing the money
that's required for military purposes, for example,
the recent Plan Columbia.
Cong Sensenbrenner: Well, first of all, I
am against Plan Columbia, because I don't think that
there's any guarantee that giving the Columbian military
more money is going to reduce drug production and
drug exports from Columbia. Secondly, the bureaucracy
will continually cry that Congress does not give it
enough money. When we've listened to those wails of
alleged underfunding, the national debt went from
a trillion dollars to five and three quarter trillion
dollars. We ended up spending more interest on the
debt than we were spending for the entire Defense
Department budget.
Now, if you look at what got countries like Brazil
and Argentina, and Yugoslavia into trouble, it was
the fact that they just kept on printing up more money
to meet their debt service. Sooner or later, those
countries were issuing bills that had zeroes all the
way across the top of it. That sort of hyperinflation
wipes out the middle class. If you look at Germany
in the early 1920s and the hyperinflation that occurred
there, where there were billions and trillions of
marks to the dollar, that was one of the things that
caused the economic collapse that allowed a demagogue
like Hitler to get the public's attention and to nationally
achieve power at the ballot box. Now, he won the election,
but that was the last one they had.
Kyle Felder: Going back to the subject of
Columbia, Congresswomen McKinney and Lee, and Congressman
Farr, have all written letters trying to raise awareness
of the plight of the Uwa people, and their struggle
to preserve their ancestral lands in Columbia. Are
you aware of their plight, and have you taken any
action at all?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: You know, honestly speaking,
that's kind of micromanaging foreign policy. It is
largely because a constituent, or a non-government
organization, brings such an issue to the attention
of the Representative, and then they start passing
letters around and getting signatures. I don't sign
those letters, simply because I think that we ill-serve
the country as a whole in not listening to what the
arguments are on both sides, and particularly the
response of the government of the country that is
involved. The last thing in the world we want to do
if we want to make an impact on countries like this,
is to give the host government country the impression
that we are meddling in the internal affairs of a
sovereign country. Because then they will turn us
off just like that, and we will end up losing whatever
clout we have in terms of trying to influence government
policy in the area of human rights.
Alicia Weston-Miles: During your time as chairman
of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, you were
a strong supporter of the international space station-
Cong Sensenbrenner: And I still am.
Alicia Weston-Miles: What do you believe that
space exploration will contribute to our society?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Well, because we're in
the edge of the envelop, which opens to knowledge,
you really can't see what will happen. Although our
committee and our subcommittee has had a lot of testimony,
particularly from medical doctors, saying that they
need to have an extended period of micro-gravity or
weightless research, in order to unlock secrets of
the human immune system, and how various things like
viruses attach to proteins. Dr. Michael Debachy, the
man who developed the coronary bypass technique is
on the committee and has emphatically stated that
to extend micro-gravity research will be the cure
for cancer. It seems to me that risking a billion
dollars in order to establish a scientific platform,
to be able to do that, is an investment that is worth
making.
I look back at the forty-three years of space exploration
and the type of spin-offs that we've had. First you
can look at telecommunications. Before we had communications
satellites, phone calls both long distance within
our country and internationally were done by wires
and cables. Calling Wisconsin to California, when
I was out at Stanford, was $3.00 a minute. You know,
now I can do it on Sunday and it's 5 cents to get
it off a satellite. You look at the development of
new materials, for example, the lunar rover that Neil
Armstrong drove around the Moon in'69 was developed
because they needed a very strong and very light metal
to put in the capsule of the Saturn rocket to land
on the Moon. Well, the doctors had picked that up
and that's now the material that is used for artificial
joints, and which is now a rather routine medical
procedure. Without the challenge that John F. Kennedy
gave to the country, to put a man on the Moon by the
end of the decade of the 1960s, the driving force
to develop that type of material wouldn't have been
there.
Now I'm sure it would have come sooner or later,
but you know, a lot of people have been able to get
around better because of the investment that we made
in space.
Also the development, for example, of batteries
that last longer, and provide more power, was engineered
by the space program, as well as lightweight microwave
ovens, which most of us now have in our houses. Also
materials like WD-40, and Teflon, were all discovered
or advanced as a result of the space program. In terms
of what benefits occurred down on earth through the
research up in space, I have just given you a list
and that is the tip of the iceberg. I think there
is no evidence to indicate that it will not continue
as long as we don't turn our back on space.
Now with the international space station, there
are some problems that have plagued this program from
the beginning. Before the Russians were brought in
as partners, the design that NASA came up with was
too big, too expensive, and too impractical. After
the Russians were brought in we settled on a much
better, doable design, however; the Russians have
simply not fulfilled their obligation that they made
to the US and the other partners in 1993. As a result,
the station is way behind schedule, and way over budget.
For more details on that, I would recommend the article
that appears on page three of today's Washington Post.
Dante Branciforte: In our interview with Undersecretary
of State Pickering, he made the statement, "We are
a very healthy society, with very serious problems."
He mentioned poverty, gun control issues, and racial
bias. What do you think are the most important challenges
facing our society today?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: None of those. The most
important challenge facing society today, in my opinion,
is continuing the economic prosperity that the United
States has enjoyed for the better part of the last
decade. That means having a healthy economy, so that
when you get out of college, or graduate school, however
long you stay in school, there will be good paying
jobs, either in the public sector, or in the private
sector. In my opinion, that requires investment in
scientific research because the reason America has
done well in the last ten years is that we have developed
new technologies as a result of research that was
done ten to twenty-five years ago. The effect is that
our economy is more productive. Whereas, our principal
competitors in the manufacturing sector have failed
to do so. Europe has had double-digit unemployment,
and Japan has been on the brink of a depression. We've
got to continue and that means adequate funding for
basic research, and a better public-private partnership
in terms of how we develop research. Then we must
figure out how to market it, and we also need to have
a much better system of education in math and science.
There was an international survey that was done
last year that shows that in math and science achievement
at the fourth grade level, the United States ranks
about sixth or seventh among the fifteen industrialized
countries.
By the eighth grade, it's down to about twenty-six
of thirty of them, by the twelfth grade, it's about
forty-six. So there is a free fall, particularly in
the junior high school level. The result of that is
over half of the graduates majoring in hard sciences
at our universities are filled by non-US citizens.
We have got the perennial problem of having to increase
the number of visas for people to work in the high
tech industries. They are called the H1-B visas, because
there are not enough qualified graduates of American
universities and two-year colleges to fulfill those
jobs.
So math and science education is something that is
reaching a crisis at the present time, and really
where we're going to have to start is at the junior
high school level. If kids at that age are turned
off by math and science, they're not going to do well
in the science courses they've got to take when they're
in high school. So when they go off to the university,
they're not going to want to have hard sciences and
engineering as majors; they'll simply go into other
courses of study. We as a country are going to pay
for that in the end, in losing our technological advantage,
which I think is a significant part upon which America's
prosperity is based.
I am not trying to denigrate issues like inequality
and gun control, but if you read the stories of the
'92 campaign where Clinton beat George Bush, there
was a sign in the Clinton headquarters that said "It's
the economy, stupid." It still is the economy, stupid,
even though the economy is doing well.
Alicia Weston-Miles: Considering the fact
that politicians have such an influential role on
determining public policy, should we expect a higher
moral standard from our politicians than we do of
our citizens?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Yes. I believe in leading
by example. I don't know how much you've looked into
my background, but I was one of the thirteen House
managers that prosecuted the President in the impeachment
trial in January and February of last year. We got
demonized by the national news media and the White
House spin machine wanted everybody to believe that
this was all about sex. But it was not all about sex.
I said right from the beginning that whether or not
the President is morally able to lead the country
should not be determined by the Congress in the context
of an impeachment proceeding, but it is an obligation
of citizenship for each of us to determine whether
the President is fit to stay in office. What happened
was that the President committed acts, which would
be crimes if committed by anybody else, and conviction
of the crimes that we thought he committed would have
put anybody else in the federal penitentiary for an
excess of ten years.
And that is simply obstructing justice in the civil
rights suit that Paula Jones filed against him, in
which the Supreme Court said that she had the right
to proceed. I think that Clinton eroded the moral
authority of the presidency, to such an extent, that
it will be a long time before respect for the presidency
is restored to what it was before he took office.
The next president, whether it's Bush or Gore, is
going to have his work cut out for him. Just as Gerald
Ford did in repairing the damage to the presidency
that Richard Nixon caused which led to Nixon's resignation.
Laura Johnson: The poet Dereck Walcott said
that "the language of our politics is bland, neutral
and laid back."
He said "we should be able to characterize a candidate
by the vehemence of his rhetoric; not by the accommodations
of his rhetoric." What is your opinion of the quality
of public discourse in the political arena today?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Well, I've been here
for twenty-two years, and I've served in both the
Wisconsin assembly and the Wisconsin senate before
being elected to Congress. One of the things that
I have done, either at my peril or at my strength,
was to tell it as it is when people come with a concern
to me, and ask for my opinion. At the same time, if
I haven't made up my mind on where I'm going to stand,
I tell people that I'm in the process of getting more
information and seeking more public opinions back
home. When I do make up my mind, I know that more
work that needs to be done to convince people who
would go the other way that I'm not doing something
that they don't like, or arbitrary or capricious or
in partisan treason.
What I've found as time has gone on, is that there
is an increasing political intolerance in this country,
like there was a religious intolerance in this country.
I hear an awful lot of people either saying or thinking
that if he doesn't take my position somebody has to
have paid him off.
That is extremely unfortunate because there is less
and less respect for views that are opposite to your
own. The discourse in issues like abortion and gun
control, I think, are the two issues that show this
kind of disrespect in the most extreme manner. I want
to make two points to follow up on what I have just
said.
First of all, public officials rarely deal with
issues of black and white. If the issue is not controversial
in at least some respect, everybody would agree, and
nobody would spend any time disagreeing about it.
So we're talking about issues of gray. There are good
arguments on the other side of the issue from the
one that you may happen to come down on, either at
the beginning of the debate, or at the end of the
debate.
The second thing I learned when I was in law school,
and that is that an attorney is an advocate for their
client. The way to be the most effective advocate
is to listen to the arguments that are coming from
the other side, and tailor your own arguments to be
able to counter them. You're much more effective than
if you just turned your hearing aid off, or put your
earplug in, when you hear the arguments that are coming
from the other side. I'm afraid that with our political
discourse today, we're not looking at the fact that
with controversial issues there is not a monopoly
of truth on either side. We're not listening to, and
respecting, the arguments that are coming from people's
positions that are opposite to one's own; if only
to find out what they're saying, so that you can be
better in advocating your own side. I think that until
we mature our political discourse, which is going
to require a great deal of greater responsibility
on the part of the news media, particularly the TV
media, we're going to continue going in the opposite
direction.
Laura Johnson: So you think the way to better
public discourse is through the media? What about
in the Congress itself? How do you get people to listen
to each other within the Congress, when there are
all these conflicting interests?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: The thing is that ninety-five
percent of what we do in the Congress is basically
a result of compromise and agreement. That gets about
five percent of the press, because you increase your
ratings and thus are able to charge more for advertising,
or sell more newspapers, by reporting on conflict
and controversy rather than on compromise and agreement.
I suppose that's the nature of the news media, which
are businesses that are out to make money, just like
everybody else who's in any other kind of business.
I guess the way you get around that is either by turning
the TV off when Tom Brokaw is off on a tangent, or
if you happen to be called up by the Nielson ratings
and asked if you're listening to Brokaw, not telling
them the truth and saying no(laughter).
Josh Lewis: Benjamin Franklin once said "they
that give up the central liberty to obtain a little
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." To what
extent can we, or should we consider laws to limit
some freedoms for the sake of public safety? Like,
for example, with gun control.
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Well, first of all, if
you look at why the Constitution of the United States
is such a neat document. It is because it is the first
constitution ever written designed to protect the
citizens from government.
Particularly the Bill of Rights where each one of
the first ten amendments specifically said things
that the government could not do in order to control
citizens.
Getting specifically to the issue of gun control,
the Second Amendment has probably had less litigation
that has reached the Supreme Court than any of the
amendments to the Constitution. Except the straightforward
ones, like abolishing slavery, and giving women and
eighteen year-olds the right to vote. If you look
at the annotated Constitution, the first, fifth, fourteen
amendment, etc. the amount of litigation is much greater
then the Second Amendment. My feeling is that passing
new laws are not necessarily going to solve the problem,
and I no-showed for the NRA. I was the principal Republican
sponsor of the Brady bill, which had the five-day
waiting period and also established the instant check
system. I strongly support the legislation that makes
it a federal crime to bring a gun to school, because
guns don't belong there. But a law does not act as
a deterrent to bad behavior unless there is credible
enforcement. Since the instant check system in the
Brady bill came up, there have been half a million
people who were stopped from buying guns because they
either had a felony conviction or a mental incompetence
adjudication on the record. There's been a federal
law on the books that makes it a felony since 1934
for people who fall into either of these categories
to attempt to buy a firearm of any kind, or to possess
a firearm of any kind. So we had 500,000 people who
broke the law by trying to buy the firearm, and they
were stopped, but they weren't prosecuted, and they'll
keep on trying to buy a firearm. Sooner or later,
there will be a crack in the system and they'll get
it. If they have a felony conviction, the chance is
pretty good that they're going to use it in a criminal
purpose. With respect to the law that makes it a federal
felony to bring a gun to school, in 1998 there were
6,000 students who were caught bringing guns to schools,
and eight prosecutions. When I talk in the high schools
in my district I use the analogy that if the police
department set up a radar trap three blocks away from
school, and clocked 6,000 students going ninety in
a twenty-five zone, and then wrote eight citations,
it wouldn't slow very many of them down, would it?
Everybody knows what the answer to that question is.
I think that better enforcement of this 1994 law will
make a major impact in terms of reducing the violent
crime rate all around the country.
The reason I say that is that the US Attorney in
Richmond, Virginia, alone among the 93 United States
Attorneys in the country, adopted what is called Project
Exile. Project Exile is when the state police or the
local police of Richmond arrest somebody for a crime
while armed with a firearm, and if the defendant has
a previous felony conviction or a mental incompetence
adjudication on the record, then the federal attorney
will indict that person for the federal firearms violation.
The trial takes place first in state court, and regardless
of the verdict in state court, there will be another
trial in federal court. If there are two guilty verdicts
returned by the jury, the defendant goes to the state
pen first, and when that term is served, they will
go to the federal pen, and serve the sentence for
the firearms violation. The result has been that the
violent crime rate has gone down in Richmond, Virginia
by seventy percent, so enforcement does make a difference.
A final point I'd make, which is completely unrelated
in answering your question, is that Adolf Hitler promised
safety, and you saw what the cost of the safety that
Hitler was able to implement during the twelve years
he ran Germany was.
Aaron Jacobs-Smith: We also spoke to a member
of the White House Council on Environmental Quality
yesterday, and we were surprised to discover that
the entire staff consisted of only twenty people,
who have to respond to an overwhelming amount of activity
in this area. This raises the question of whether
you think we are placing enough of our resources towards
solving environmental problems.
Cong. Sensenbrenner: That complaint should
be directed at how the President prioritizes his use
of the funds that he gets from the Congress, and how
he divides it up amongst the various functions of
the White House. I would point out that the executive
branch also includes the Environmental Protection
Administration, and a lot of the other cabinet departments
and agencies which employ literally thousands of people.
With how many employees they have at the White House
it is the President's call on whether he wants to
put more there or fewer here. Agencies of the United
States government, which deal with environmental assessment
and enforcement of environmental laws are quite well
adequately staffed.
Aaron Jacobs-Smith: I guess the real question
is do you feel that the environmental concerns that
have been raised are legitimate? Do you have environmental
concerns?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: I do have environmental
concerns. My concern is that a lot of the outside
groups that rate Members of Congress on environmental
concerns are rating more on whether or not you support
big government. Which means it has more political
implication than environmental implication. I am for
sensible environmental regulations that are based
on good science. And one of the reasons why the EPA
has gotten itself into quite a bit of trouble over
the last three to five years is that they have based
their regulations either on junk science or out of
date science. USA Today, which is hardly a mouthpiece
for conservative Republicans, has run at least seven
editorials that state that EPA proposed regulations
or actual regulations are based upon junk science,
or, if there's more scientific information that's
coming up, they haven't changed the regulations to
be reflective of that fact. I'll give you one example.
When reformulated gas was required by the EPA in California
and southeastern Wisconsin and elsewhere in the country,
the EPA required that most of the reformulated gas
use a substance called MTBE, which is methylturgerybiofunalethanol
(phonetic). The EPA issued that regulation in the
early nineties, after the amendments of the Clean
Air Act that were passed in 1990 with my support and
signed by President Bush. The EPA had scientific data
in their file at the time that supported MTBE, and
they pushed it out of refineries and into everybody's
gas tank. Then MTBE contaminated the ground water
because unlike ethanol, and other types of oxygenates
that one can put in gasoline, MTBE does not dissolve
very quickly. Unless you got an F in your high school
chemistry class, one knows that a product of combustion
is water. So if the fuel is used to combust with MTBE
in it, there will be MTBE residues in the water that
comes out the tailpipe and then goes into the ground
water. As a result, there has been major contamination
of ground water, more in your state than in mine.
But the EPA was simply deaf to the fact that the science
showed that while there might be less ground level
ozone, the consequences of using this additive, rather
than some other additive, is pretty severe. I don't
know what's happened to the price of gas in the last
two weeks in California, but in Wisconsin it's gone
up twenty cents a gallon, because MTBE has been fazed
out of the reformulated gas. This is a result of the
EPA finally realizing that it goofed on this thing,
and there's not the ethanol production to be able
to replace the MTBE on a gallon per gallon basis.
It is a result of the law of supply and demand, which
is one that Congress can't repeal. We've never hit
$1.80 a gallon in Wisconsin. Now California gas is
much more expensive and I haven't been to California
in about three months, but what was the price of regular
gas when you guys left?
Students: A dollar eighty-seven.
Dante Branciforte: Looking back over your
career, are there any special moments that stand out,
that you're especially proud of?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Yes. President's Reagan's
signature on the bill which extended the Voting Rights
Act for twenty-five years in 1982. The Reagan Justice
Department wanted the Voting Rights Act to expire,
and their assistant attorney general for civil rights
at the time was a good Southern lawyer from Richmond,
Virginia. I went in to see the President himself,
and I convinced him that signing this law was the
right thing to do, so he sent the pen over there and
Mr. William Bradford Reynolds didn't speak for me
for about a year.
When I was in the state legislature, also in the
education area, we had a school busing for integration
order that was entered by the federal court in Milwaukee
for my legislative district, as well as my congressional
district, and encompassed Milwaukee suburbs. When
I was in the legislature, I, with the aid of a lot
of concerned citizens from my suburban district, drafted
and got passed a law that allowed for inter school
district transfers, to encourage racial integration.
This was oiled with a lot of money, so that the suburban
districts that accepted transfers from the inner city,
were able to get the full average cost of education,
which is much more than the incremental cost of having
one additional student in the school system. The law
is still alive today, it was passed, although in a
modified form, but that was hailed nationally as one
of the laws that had the biggest impact in stopping
the division of communities that occurred with forced
busing orders of the late sixties and early seventies.
The other thing that I'm really gratified about
is that when I took over as the chairman of the Science
Committee in January of '97, the committee came close
to being abolished, because it was a cesspool of partisan
bickering. This had occurred under my Republican predecessor
and his Democratic predecessor. What I did is I went
to the Democrats, and I said we can do a lot more
for science and for our constituents in this country,
as well as for ourselves, if we can confine our debates
and genuine differences to policy. This is rather
than running a repeat of the two-hour debate on whether
the chairman had the absolute right to close the debate
on every question that we'd had in 1995. We decided
on a party line vote that the chairman did have that
right, then-Chairman Robert Walker of Pennsylvania
came and said I have nothing more to say.
Now that was embarrassing. I squeezed all of this
out by building trust, not only on a Member to Member
level, but also on the Republican staff, working with
the Democratic staff. I think all of the folks who
look at Congress and how the various committees of
Congress work, say that the Science Committee is the
best functioning committee on the House side. Should
we maintain the majority, and I go over to be the
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that's going
to be a lot more difficult job, because of the contentiousness
of many of the issues that the Judiciary Committee
addresses.
Again, I want to work with the Democrats, to get
past the pettiness and have the debates be genuine,
and legitimate. I want to get the job done, rather
than people getting hacked off and end up having to
filibuster by addendum. Every time a member goes to
vote, you know, there are another fifteen amendments
that they have to listen to and vote on.
Jenny Johnston: Drawing on your experience,
what's the most important advice that you have for
our generation?
Cong. Sensenbrenner: Listen to the other side.
You don't have to be convinced, but you do have to
respect. I think that for societal reasons, somebody
has erased the word respect from the dictionary. It's
about time we get a chisel and put that word in marble,
so that nobody can erase it.
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