oh, we must have this, or we just can't function around here, is simply not true.

I don't give my proxy to my Ranking Member. If I am not there, I don't want to be recorded as voting, and it works. And I don't get any guff, because I—and I can't be everywhere, just like you can't. But do something about the proxy voting.

The joint referrals, that has already been mentioned at some length, and mostly done I think to kill and bury bills, or to make sure you don't offend somebody about their territory. That desperately needs to be changed.

Limiting terms, I am not a big fan of term limits for congressmen. I am only going to be a congressmen a small period of my life, and when I am not a congressman, I don't want anyone telling me who I can vote for to represent me. So I am not a big fan of the term limits, like you and I have from our States, but I am in favor of term limits on committees.

I am on the Armed Services Committee, and it is important for me from Colorado Springs to be on the Armed Services Committee; but at the same time, I suppose they would survive if I wasn't on the Armed Services Committee, and if I had to rotate off of that. And the previous Speakers have talked about that, but that is something I hope that you will look into.

And then, finally, the last point I would mention is the practice of exempting ourselves from the laws that we put on everybody else. Last night was a perfect, tragic example. We are putting on the American people with the parental leave bill, we are putting on them a tremendous burden out there. If you look at that bill in its detail-not the concept, which sounds like a good concept, but look at it in its detail and what that is going to require; and obviously we in Congress voted overwhelmingly last night that, yes, that is good for the American public, that is good for business out there. But that is not good for Congress, because we turned that down. Now, we have got to stop doing that if we are to restore confidence.

This is another thing that enrages the American public, that we exempt ourselves from things that they have to comply with.

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I will stop and thank you for your time.

[The statement of Mr. Hefley is printed in the Appendix.]

Mr. DREIER. Thank you very much, Mr. Hefley. You have done an excellent job certainly of venting your frustrations, the frustration of a Minority Member.

Mr. HEFLEY. I thought I was very friendly.

Mr. DREIER. Well, you are obviously friendly and frustrated. Let me just say that your point on proxy voting is very well received from my perspective, and it seems to me that if we are going to deal with the question of proxy voting, hand in hand with that we will see a reduction in the number of committees on which Members serve; because if they have to show up and have to participate in the committee process, it is apparent that they will be forced to give up some of the committees on which they serve. So I hope that we will be able to see that kind of reduction.

I thank you for your testimony.

Mr. Spratt? Ms. Dunn?

Mr. DUNN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I enjoyed your testimony very much, Mr. Hefley, and I just wanted to go back to your initial comments, and you commented about how there was a lot of respect, not much good pay, but good respect for Members of Congress.

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It occurs to me, it is going in the wrong direction. The pay is better, but the respect level has decreased; and that is really why we are here. I think those of us who want to enhance the reputation of this body are Members who are very concerned about change, and substantive change; and that is my hope for this committee, that we are going to be able to listen to what you have to say, and in a bipartisan way, be able to make substantive changes, so we don't need just another good PR program on why the Members of Congress are great guys and women, but we can go back to our constituents and say, we listened to what you have been saying the last few years, and we are in fact going to take some substantive steps on some of the very issues that you just mentioned to us. Thank you.

Mr. HEFLEY. I hope that is exactly what is done. By "substantive," we don't mean things like raising the cost of haircuts and the gym fees. That may be fine. But we need substantive change in the system up here if we are to restore that confidence. Thank you. Mr. DREIER. Thank you very much, Mr. Hefley. It was very helpful.

Mr. Bacchus.

STATEMENT OF THE HON. JIM BACCHUS, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA

Mr. BACCHUS. Thank you, Mr. Dreier. Mr. Chairman and Members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to come before you today and discuss the important, the urgent issue of congressional reform.

I am proud to have been an original cosponsor of the HamiltonGradison resolution, and I believe that my class that was elected in 1990 played a pivotal role in making certain that that resolution passed and that this reform effort became a reality.

I believe that the work of this committee is critical to restoring public confidence in the Congress and making the Congress truly more responsive to the needs and realities of America. The Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress will allow us to take a bipartisan, deliberative approach to streamlining and modernizing our committee structure and improving the work of the Federal Government as a whole.

Mr. Chairman, this is the way to seek real reform, not by demagoguery, not through sound bites, but with hard, deliberative fundamental work toward building a consensus on how best we can reinvigorate this timeless institution to meet the needs of our time. I fully support the reforms that many have discussed that are so desperately needed in this body.

For example, I agree with my preceding colleague that we need to impose the same rules on ourselves that we apply on others. And I am a cosponsor of that effort and others to achieve reform.

But Mr. Chairman, my primary goal in appearing before this committee today is to urge your consideration of two specific reforms that I believe are critical to regaining the people's trust.

Mr. Dreier, I would like to thank you especially for inviting me personally to make this presentation. You will recall that I appeared before the Rules Committee a year ago with my colleague, Mr. Zimmer, to seek a vote on these two proposed reforms on the Floor of the House, and I hope fervently that this committee will address these two issues today, and in its deliberations toward reform.

The first proposal pertains to open meeting rules as they are applied to committees of the Congress. And the other pertains to financial disclosure requirements for Members of Congress and candidates for Congress. While there have been laudable improvements in these areas in recent years, the fact remains that both our meeting and financial disclosure rules are riddled with loopholes. Closing these loopholes and increasing the openness of the Congress, in my view, are essential to our efforts to regain the people's trust.

I am from Florida, and in Florida we believe in government in the sunshine. In fact, in Florida we invented government in the sunshine in the 1960s. In the past two decades this Congress has made remarkable progress in opening up hearings and markups that had routinely been closed to the public. However, our current rules still contain a giant loophole in that committee Members can vote to close meetings for any reason.

Personally, I was appalled 2 years ago when a subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee behind closed doors voted to delete funding for the space station Freedom. This was funding that the House had just, days before, approved overwhelmingly in an authorization bill.

Now, separate and apart from the separate issue of whether we should have a space station-and I think we should-there is the very real issue of whether such a decision should be made behind closed doors; and I believe that it should not.

I am refiling legislation to allow meetings to be closed for only two reasons: Disclosure of matters to be considered that would endanger the national security, or if evidence or testimony at an investigative hearing would defame, degrade, or incriminate any person. I believe that the public's right to know is fundamental and overrides any other reason for a closed meeting. After all, it is the people's business that we are conducting.

Secrecy can be especially dangerous at a time when there is so much public concern that government is working for special interests and not for the people. One way to help restore public faith in the integrity and accountability in the Congress is to improve our rules governing open meetings, and I might add, open records.

Mr. Chairman, finally, my second concern involves our financial disclosure rules. In 1976 when I was working as a young aide to Reuben Askew, then the Governor of Florida, I helped him in a State-wide petition drive in which we collected more than a quarter of a million signatures from the people to put full financial disclosure as a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Florida and we passed that. That was the first time that an initiative of the

people had ever been passed in Florida, and we mandated full financial disclosure through the sunshine amendment in our State. In Congress we need to do something akin to that. Currently Members of Congress are required only to list assets and liabilities within broad categories of value in our annual disclosure forms. The ranges are so broad that it is impossible to tell from a report whether a Member received a large increase in income from particular sources.

I am refiling legislation to require much more detailed financial disclosure by Members of the Congress and by candidates for Congress as well. This bill calls for the listing of exact amounts and sources of all assets and liabilities down to the last cent. It also would require Members and candidates to file an annual statement of net worth and also copies of their tax returns from the previous year for public scrutiny.

I have made such full financial disclosure voluntarily as a candidate for the House; and as a Member of this House, I have not suffered personally from having done so. And I believe it has added to my credibility and my ability to serve the people.

These changes in our financial disclosure laws would provide the public with information that ensures that Members of Congress are not benefiting financially from holding this office. The public deserves to know what we own, what we owe and who we owe down to the last penny. Only then will we know that we are working for them and not for ourselves or for some special interest.

Mr. Chairman, I commend these two pieces of legislation to this committee for your deliberation. I applaud you for your work, and I thank you for this opportunity.

Mr. DREIER. Thank you very much, Mr. Bacchus. We clearly will be spending time looking at those two proposals, and I congratulate you for having been on the forefront of this issue of reform as a Member of your class. And I do recall very well when you came with Mr Zimmer before the Rules Committee last year, and I appreciate your thoughts.

Senator Boren.

Chairman BOREN. Thank you, Mr. Vice Chairman.

I want to thank our colleagues for presenting these ideas. I regret that I was detained in another meeting this morning, but I am going to read all of this testimony and also the excellent written statements that have been sent to us by those that could not testify in person.

We had a very good day on Tuesday with a number of sitting Senators coming before us, and I think getting the input from our sitting colleagues in the House is extremely important.

As has been said, this committee intends to get something done. We are not here to pass out some cosmetic proposal and call it reform and say our work is done; we intend to do something major. We were urged by Senator Byrd, for example, who is not known as one who would be overly critical of this institution, to make sweeping changes by reducing dramatically the number of committees and subcommittees-for example, rationalize jurisdiction. And I asked him, should we do it incrementally or should we do it in a sweeping way. He said, you will have a better chance to do it in a sweeping way. So I was elated to hear that.

And I think there is a growing sense from the Members of this committee that we really have a chance to get something done.

So I want to thank both of you for being a part of this panel, and I wanted to take this opportunity to especially welcome my colleague from Oklahoma, Congressman McCurdy, and to express appreciation to him for testifying. We have had an opportunity over the last 2 years to work together on Intelligence reorganization, and Chairman McCurdy during his tenure as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee made a very major contribution in that area, to modernizing the community so it can do its job better and so it can do its job at lower cost to the taxpayers as well.

It was a real privilege to work with him in that endeavor, and I am especially pleased that he is here to testify today and to give suggestions for reorganizing and making some reforms and changes in this institution; and I look forward to working with him on this issue, just as we worked together on Intelligence reform.

So Congressman McCurdy, we welcome you to the panel today. Mr. MCCURDY. Thank you, Senator Boren.

Mr. DREIER. Thank you very much, sir.

Ms. Dunn, did you have any questions of Mr. Bacchus?
Thank you very much, it was very helpful.

Mr. McCurdy.

STATEMENT OF THE HON. DAVE MCCURDY, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA

Mr. MCCURDY. Thank you, Mr. Dreier.

First of all I want to thank you, and obviously thank my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Boren, for his comments, but more importantly for his efforts in bringing about this special committee in order to look at, review and reform of the process here in the Congress.

It is fitting that Mr. Bacchus testified before me because, since 1990, I have been meeting with him and a number of moderate Democratic colleagues called the Mainstream Forum. We are united by a desire to make a difference in Washington in a way that our constituents can understand and support. We want to be relevant in their daily lives.

Today we are frustrated. Our constituents feel detached from Congress. Washington is a confusing array of debate and work product. We announce deadlines and then break them. As individual Members, we keep impossible schedules, running from one appointment to another, but our institution appears to move at a glacial pace. Thus, the ideas that I bring today are aimed at efficiency and accountability.

I first want to reiterate what a growing chorus of Members and congressional experts have previously stated regarding the need to reform House committee structure. I could not agree more with the comments of Senator Boren in reference to rationalizing the jurisdiction, the size, and the number of committees. I personally have supported for some time the idea of eliminating secondary committees and only having primary committees, but making those real committees of real jurisdiction that are relevant to the concerns of today.