Small Business and Farm Energy Emergency Relief Act of 2005

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, is it in order at this point for me to engage in a short discussion of an amendment that I have pending?

Mr. President, let me take the 5 minutes now. I know people are trying to put together unanimous consent requests. I indicated I would take just a few minutes to describe the amendment I have offered, which I hope will be voted on at 12:30. They are discussing a consent agreement by which they might vote on the amendment I have offered and I believe the amendment that Senator Clinton has offered. Even though the unanimous consent agreement has not been entered yet, let me at least describe the amendment I have offered.

The amendment I have offered is an amendment that I offered to the armed services bill, the Defense authorization bill that came to the floor of the Senate and was on the floor for some while. This amendment is pending on the Defense authorization bill, but the Defense authorization bill has been taken off the floor and it appears it

will not come back to the Senate, and therefore I will not get a vote on this amendment. So I offer the amendment to the appropriations bill, understanding this is not the optimum place to do this. I will have to suspend the rules to accomplish it. But let me describe what it is.

We are spending billions and billions of dollars on reconstruction in Iraq. I will read some headlines.

Let me say at the start, the minute anyone comes to this floor and mentions the word ``Halliburton,'' they think it is partisan, political, going after the Vice President of the United States. It is not. It is true he was the CEO of Halliburton, but that was long before he reentered public service as Vice President, and none of this has happened under his watch. This has nothing to do with the Vice President.

What it does have something to do with is large, no-bid contracts given to a very large company, large no-bid contracts with virtually no oversight and a substantial waste of the taxpayers' money. Let me read some headlines.

Houston Chronicle, February 3, 2004:

Uncle Sam Looks Into Meal Bills; Halliburton Refunds $27

Million as a Result.

Houston Chronicle, February 4, 2004:

Halliburton Faces Criminal Investigation: Pentagon Proving

Alleged Overcharges for Iraq Fuel.

Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2004:

Ex-Halliburton Workers Allege Rampant Waste: They Say the

Firm Makes No Effort to Control Costs.

May 18, 2004, Houston Chronical:

U.S. Questions More Halliburton Meal Charges.

July 27, 2004, Houston Chronicle:

Millions in U.S. Property Lost in Iraq, Reports Say;

Halliburton Claims Figures Only ``Projections.''

The Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2004:

Halliburton Is Unable to Prove $1.8 Billion in Work,

Pentagon Says.

Is anybody investigating this? No. This is a company that charges for 42,000 meals served in Iraq, and it turns out they are serving 14,000 meals to soldiers. We are paying for 42,000 meals. Does anybody care? Overcharges for fuel? These are big, no-bid contracts. And oh, by the way, the courageous woman in the Pentagon, Bonnatine Greenhouse, the highest civilian in the Corps of Engineers responsible for making sure these contracts are handled the right way, is the one who objected to these contracts saying it was, in effect, a good old boys club giving contracts to their friends. Guess what. This woman, who received excellent reviews all of her career and rose to become the highest ranking civilian officials in the Corps of Engineers, has been demoted. Why? Because she had the courage to speak up and speak out.

Nobody is investigating the rampant misuse of funds and waste of funds in these no-bid contracts. There should be oversight hearings in the Congress, but there are not. There is not an oversight hearing held on these issues, so I have chaired Democratic Policy hearings, and let me tell you a couple of things we have heard.

How about brand new trucks, $85,000 trucks. Drive one down the road in Iraq and get a flat tire and what do you do with it? Abandon it. It gets torched. A brand new truck. If it has a fuel pump that is plugged, what do you do with it? Abandon it. It doesn't matter--no-bid contracts. It is all taxpayers' money. It is unbelievable what we have uncovered.

Serving food to soldiers with date stamps that have long since expired and the supervisors say it doesn't matter: Serve them anyway.

They order towels. The guy who worked for the Halliburton company as the purchaser said he was told you can't just order towels for soldiers that are just towels; you need to put a logo on the towels. So you put the company logo on the towels, and you double the price of the towels that go to soldiers, so you have the company logo on the towel. It is unbelievable waste, fraud, and abuse. It is not millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, it is billions dollars, and nobody is minding the store. Nobody cares.

Some years ago, in 1941, Harry Truman stood in this Chamber, and he said there is rampant waste, fraud, and abuse going on in military contracting, and we ought to get to the bottom of it. He was relentless. He was a Democrat here in this Chamber, and we had a Democrat in the White House. It didn't matter. I am sure that was kind of an uncomfortable thing; it didn't matter. They set up a Truman committee, a special committee that uncovered massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.

In this case, we know it is happening. We have direct testimony it is happening with big, no-bid contracts--particularly with Halliburton, but there are others as well--and nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care.

I propose that we create a type of Truman committee, of the type we have had previously, that starts taking a good look at waste, fraud, and abuse that is occurring. Whenever you give massive quantities of money on a no-bid contract and say go ahead and spend, you are going to have this waste, fraud, and abuse.

There are stories about someone saying: Let's air-condition that building in Iraq. We will buy some air-conditioners through this reconstruction funding, and then it goes from a contractor to another subcontractor to a sub, and pretty soon the job is done, you have a ceiling fan, and the American taxpayer has paid for air-conditioning. It is unbelievable, and it is going on all the time.

My proposal is very simple. When American taxpayers' money is doled out in such enormous quantities--billions of dollars--somebody ought to watch the store.

I held up a poster the other day of stacks of 100-dollar bills which were wrapped in Saran Wrap--stacked in big piles because the contracting officer, who testified at the committee which I chaired, said that is the way it was. We said to the contracting companies: Bring cash and bring a bag. We do business in cash. He said: We used to actually play football with these stacks of 100-dollar bills with Saran Wrap. You could actually throw them back and forth across the room. They were paying for the ministries, among other things, in Iraq during the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was us, by the way. They were paying one Iraqi ministry for 8,206 security guards on duty-- paying 2,206 of them salaries--and there were only 602.

Does anybody care? Does anybody care about this? Will this Congress finally do what it is required to do--to require accountability for the expenditure of the taxpayers' money?

We have spent a massive amount of money dealing with contracting in Iraq for reconstruction. What we are finding is that the few people who had the courage to blow the whistle about favorite contracts--no-bid contracts--having contractors even in the room, in the meeting, when they were with talking about what the specs of the contract should be. Bunnatine Greenhouse, a young African-American woman who rose to the top, the highest civilian job in the Corps of Engineers, blew the whistle on this old boys network that was doling out that money to private contractors, she is going to pay for it with her job, we are told. Shame on them.

This Congress ought to have the courage to stand up on the side of the taxpayers and say: If we are spending taxpayers' money, the taxpayers ought to get full value for it. We ought to put an end to waste, fraud and because.

When Harry Truman got to the White House, he had a sign on his desk that said ``The Buck Stops Here.'' For accountability on this sort of thing, the buck doesn't stop anywhere. Nobody wants to look them square in the eye. It is time for Congress to look truth in the eye and understand what is happening. My amendment is the first opportunity to do that.

I regret that we didn't have a vote on it on the Defense authorization bill. That is where it should have been. I offered it on the authorization bill. The bill has been pulled from the calendar and from the floor and apparently will not come back. I will offer it today and to other appropriations bills. It is uncomfortable, I suppose, for those who do not want to vote against this, but they are going to have to keep voting against it until at some point there will be sufficient votes in this Chamber to do what is right. To do what is right is to follow the model of Harry Truman. Even when there was a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat said: We insist, we demand, accountability on behalf of the American taxpayers, and we are going to put an end to waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayers' money.

It is very simple. This is not a complex amendment. It is the simplest of

amendments and the simplest of choices.

In this Chamber--the Chamber of the Senate--we don't do very complicated things. Every single choice that we make every day on this floor is either yes or no. There is no maybe, no later; it is when it comes time to vote yes or no.

That, it seems to me, is an enormously simple choice with respect to an amendment that is this persuasive.

I hope the Senate, when it votes midday today on this amendment, will do the right thing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to the notice properly filed, I move to suspend the rule with respect to amendment No. 1670, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Durbin be added as a cosponsor of that amendment.

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Clinton, pursuant to the notice she properly filed, I move to suspend the rules with respect to amendment No. 1660, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we are on the Commerce-Justice appropriations bill. My understanding is there are a number of amendments left, one of which is the amendment I have offered. It is an amendment that is germane, an amendment I expect to have a vote on. I know that amendment has caused quite a lot of consternation on the floor of the Senate in recent hours, also in the Washington Post, and now in a letter from two members of the President's Cabinet, on behalf of the President, suggesting that were this amendment to come to his desk in a piece of legislation, they would recommend a veto.

This is about trade issues and about whether we are finally, as a country, going to stand up for this country's economic interests.

I only take the floor again to urge those who do not want to have a vote on this amendment to relent. We have a right to have a vote. I properly offered this amendment, and I would expect a vote before the day is out.

The vote is very simple. It is an amendment that says no funding in this appropriations bill can be used by the Commerce Department or the trade ambassador's office to negotiate a trade treaty that reduces or eliminates the protections that we have in this country to protect domestic producers against unfair trade.

I have mentioned before that some years ago I drove to the Canadian border one day with a man named Earl Jensen. Earl had a 12-year-old, 2- ton orange truck. We drove to the Canadian border with some durum wheat. We got to the Canadian border and we were stopped. They said: You can't take American durum wheat into Canada. They stopped us.

On the way to the Canadian border, we saw 18-wheelers hauling Canadian wheat into our country. We saw truck after truck after truck bringing Canadian wheat across the border into our country, and we couldn't get a little old 12-year-old orange truck into Canada with about 150 bushels of durum wheat.

What was happening was the Canadian Wheat Board--which is a sanctioned monopoly by the Government, which would be illegal in this country--was selling all that wheat into our country at secret prices, undercutting American farmers, engaging in unfair trade, taking money straight out of the pockets of American farmers with unfair trade. You could not do anything about it.

We demanded of the Canadian Wheat Board all of the information--the materials, the data--that defined their sales that they were making at secret prices. We sent the Government Accounting Office, the GAO, up to the Canadian Wheat Board. They thumbed their nose at us and said: We don't intend to give you any of that information. We don't intend to do anything that gives you information. Go fly a kite, they said.

So year after year after year that unfair trade existed, until finally an action was filed against the Canadians, and some countervailing duties were levied against that wheat coming in as unfair trade. Well, that countervailing duty represents a protection we have in our country for farmers, yes, for businesses, for industries-- protection against unfair trade by other countries that attempt to destroy a business or destroy an industry in our country by sending in products that are deeply

subsidized or sold at dumped prices in order to injure this country's economy or injure an industry in this country.

We have laws against that. The laws are antidumping laws and countervailing duty laws. We have laws that would prohibit another country from targeting our country with unfair trade. We have a right to stand up for our interests and say: You can't do that. That is what these laws are about--countervailing duty laws and antidumping laws.

But now there is a new set of trade negotiations occurring in Doha, halfway around the world. They are occurring in secret, and our country is involved in them. Our country has indicated, at the demand of other countries, that we will get rid of our protections, such as countervailing duties and antidumping laws. Our country said: OK, we'll negotiate some changes in that.

Let me read what this morning's Washington Post has to say. It says:

The Bush administration agreed to negotiations on U.S.

anti-dumping and countervailing duty laws when the latest

round of world trade talks was launched in 2001. Many other

countries view the measures as an unfair trade barrier and

want to discipline U.S. ability to use them.

In other words, other countries are saying it is unfair we have antidumping laws in this country.

It is unfair that we have laws that prohibit other countries from dumping their products in this country at far below the cost in a way that would endanger U.S. industries and businesses and workers. It is unfair, they say. So they want to negotiate an end to those few things left in our trade laws that allow us to protect our own economic interests.

The administration, involved in the Doha talks, has said they would agree to put all of these things on the table to potentially negotiate away our antidumping laws and countervailing duty laws. Rather than the $2 language of trade, another way to describe it is to talk about what it means to this country and to its workers and businesses. As you know, I have talked at great length about the number of companies that have outsourced their jobs, told their American workers: We don't need you any longer, don't want you, because your jobs are gone. They are now in China or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Indonesia or any number of other countries where we can hire people for pennies on the dollar and not have to worry about all the nuisances that exist in this country with respect to child labor and safe workplaces and the ability of workers to organize and form a union, and so on.

So as companies increasingly move their jobs offshore to other countries, we are engaged more and more in unfair trade practices against our country, and our trade negotiators are willing to negotiate away the last vestiges of protection we have.

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration urged the Senate on Tuesday to

reject an amendment they said would cripple chances of

reaching a new World Trade Agreement.

The measure . . . is aimed at preventing U.S. trade

negotiators from agreeing to change any laws that allow the

United States to impose duties against unfairly priced or

subsidized imports.

The trade ambassador says:

We strongly urge the Senate to reject this unwise

amendment.

The provision would ``provide our trading partners an

excuse to refuse to negotiate on sectors and subjects they

consider sensitive'' and greatly diminish our chances of

reaching an ambitious world trade deal.

I am not particularly interested in anybody reaching a deal if the deal is not fair to this country. The objective of negotiating is not to negotiate a deal, if a deal is not fair to us. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about GATT, United States-Canada, NAFTA, CAFTA, at the end of the day, our trade negotiations in the last 25 years have left this country in a weaker position and have put this country in a position where our jobs are leaving this country. I am not interested in a trade deal unless it represents this country's best interests.

It is time for this country to understand that trade agreements must be mutually beneficial. This week, to a giant yawn in the Senate Chamber, there was an announcement that we had the fifth highest trade deficit in the history of our country. It was only $58 billion for a month. Did that create a traffic jam for people to come to the Chamber to say: Maybe we ought to stare truth in the eye and deal with this issue? No. It wouldn't interrupt any naps around here. Nobody cares about trade. Nobody cares about jobs. Nobody wearing blue suits is going to lose their job because politicians don't get outsourced; it is just workers. They are the ones who come home and say: Honey, I lost my job. I worked there 20 years and did a great job, but they have told me my job is now going to India. And by the way, I am going to train the person in India that works my job because they are bringing them over to get training from me. Then I am done.

My only purpose for offering this amendment is to say that at some point this country might want to stand up for its own economic interests, for its farmers, businessmen, and workers. It has not done that. I am anxious to have a discussion about how anybody in this Chamber thinks it advances our interests to go to Doha and, in secret, negotiate an agreement that would weaken the protections we have for our producers to require competition in trade be fair. I wish to have a discussion or a debate with anybody in the Senate who thinks that is a good deal for this country. I don't know. Maybe we have become immune to the news when in a month our trade deficit is $57 billion, $59 billion, $55 billion. Our trade deficit with China alone in a month is $16, $17, $18 billion. Every single day we buy $2 billion more from abroad than we send abroad, 365 days a year.

You can make a case, if you are an economist with real tiny glasses and not much breadth of thought, that the budget deficit and our budget is what we owe to ourselves. You can make that case. You cannot make a similar case with respect to the trade deficit. That is a deficit that we owe to others outside of this country. Those are claims against American assets. It is what Warren Buffett, a businessman I hugely admire, calls creating an economy of sharecroppers.

It is fascinating to me that somehow we are told there is a doctrine of comparative advantage with respect to the Chinese, which is our largest trading partner in terms of the deficit. We have a huge deficit with China that is likely now to reach close to $200 billion in 1 year. What is the comparative advantage? Is it a natural economic advantage such as the Portuguese and English trading wool or wine? No. The advantage is, you can hire somebody for 33 cents an hour, work them 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. If they complain, you can throw them in jail. And if they try to form a labor union, you can fire them first, then throw them in prison. That is the advantage. The advantage is borne on the backs of workers.

We are not exporting enough product because we are importing $2 billion a day more than we are exporting. What we are exporting is misery, the misery of people who are working in circumstances where they don't have a voice. They are fired if they attempt to form a labor union. They work in unsafe plants. They work 7 days a week and they are paid pennies an hour. That is the export of misery.

I didn't intend to speak at great length about this. The administration has written a letter saying, through Rob Portman, trade ambassador, and Carlos Gutierrez, the Secretary of Commerce:

We and other senior advisors will recommend to the

President that he veto this legislation if the Dorgan

amendment were included.

God forbid that we should include an amendment that stands up for this country's economic interests.

All of these folks have painted these wonderful mosaics with respect to trade agreements, whether it is CAFTA or any of the others. After each single trade agreement, our trade deficit has increased, and the number of American jobs lost, the number of American jobs moving overseas has increased. You would think at some point just by chance the Congress would decide, this doesn't make any sense. At some point when you see things don't work, you probably decide you might want to reevaluate them. Not this Congress. In fact, if something is not working, this Congress says: Let's do a lot more of it. It is like the old story about the guy hauling coal. He is losing money so he

starts hauling a lot more coal. That is the attitude of this Congress: It doesn't matter, $700 billion a year in deficits. Let's do some more. Let's send our guy to Doha.

It is interesting. Why do you think trade negotiations are going on in Doha? Why not London or Paris or New York? Why in Doha in secret? Because if they had these trade negotiations in London, Paris or New York, the streets would be jammed with protesters. So they go to Doha and have a negotiation that is in secret, and they come back and tell us--with fast track, so that you can't offer any amendments--here is what we negotiated behind that closed door. Like it or lump it; you can't change it.

This is now a new world order. It is going to affect our country in a lot of ways. It won't affect anybody wearing blue serge suits, just workers. If workers lose their jobs and those jobs are sent overseas, that is part of the advancement of an enlightened economy.

This is not enlightenment, not after you work for 100 years, to decide that you want to create a standard by which people can live well, work, get paid a decent wage, work in a safe workplace, have job protection, the ability to organize, and then negotiate all of that away which is exactly what is happening.

I mentioned yesterday James Fyler. I probably shouldn't have said: James Fyler died of lead poisoning. He was shot 55 times. James Fyler was a labor organizer, and he lost his life for trying to organize for rights of workers. That was in 1914. Over a long period of time, we finally made progress and decided there are conditions of production with respect to the environment and workers and other things that make sense. And now all of a sudden, once we have established those rules, you can avoid all those rules as a company by pole-vaulting over them to India or China and deciding: That is where I am producing because I don't have to put up with all this nuisance such as not being able to hire kids or having to pay a livable wage or having to put up with workers that want to organize with respect to workers' rights.

I mentioned yesterday how much I admired liked Lech Walesa. He was the fellow in Poland who took down a Communist Government, leading workers' rights strikes in the country of Poland. We deeply admired him. Maybe we ought to stand up for similar issues in other parts of the world on economic matters. Maybe once we ought to decide that our real role is to bring others up, not push us down. That is why I offer this amendment.

I know there are plenty of people who feel very strongly that I am dead wrong about this, but they are not supported by the facts. All of the evidence is opposed to it working. There isn't anyone who can come to this heir argument that the current trade strategy is floor and tell me that a strategy that produces $700 billion a year in trade deficits, $2 billion a day in trade deficits, somehow works to the advantage of this country. It does not. It weakens America. We will not long remain a world economic power unless we have a strong manufacturing base and decide to stand up for the standards we fought for, for a century, that created a broad middle class that represented the purchasing power to move America forward. That is what so many forget.

Mr. President, I wish to make one other point. The amendment is nearly identical to the amendment offered by Senator Dayton and Senator Craig when we had fast track before the Senate, and it received 61 votes. It passed the Senate, though it was dropped in conference. That is why I assume they do not want to vote on this amendment today. They worry they will lose the vote in the Senate.

My hope is they will understand that I have timely filed this amendment. It is germane. I have a right to a vote. I insist on a vote. And I believe it is the only conceivable way we can finally begin to change this country's trade policies and tell trade negotiators they cannot get into an airplane, fly halfway around the world, shut the door of the room in which they are going to negotiate, and negotiate away protections of American businesses and workers who demand fair trade. They cannot do that. We will not allow them to do that.

I say to the leadership on the other side, I hope they will now come back and have a vote on my amendment this afternoon. Win or lose, I feel passionately that this country needs to speak about this issue and do so in support of this country's economic interests.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I know my colleague from Arkansas is intending to seek recognition in a moment. I wanted to ask the manager and ranking member of the subcommittee, I offered the amendment that deals with trade and weakening of trade remedies. I offered that previously, and I am wondering where that might exist with respect to the vote we might have this evening. I know the manager wants to finish the bill. I want to be helpful in doing that, but I think my amendment is germane. It has been offered. I have debated it. I wonder what we might expect with respect to a vote.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama. I believe the amendment is germane. I have debated it, and I hope we can find a way to have a vote on that amendment. It is a very important amendment with great merit. My expectation is we ought to proceed.

I thank the Senator, and I will look forward to having the opportunity to have this vote.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield time to the Senator from Michigan to speak on her amendment. I believe her amendment on interoperability is the pending amendment.

I yield her such time as she may require.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, as I understand it, in about 5 minutes we will be voting on two amendments. One is to establish a Truman-like commission to see if there has been profiteering in the contracts in relation to the Iraq war.

Amendment No. 1660

Madam President, there is also another amendment offered by the Senator from New York, Mrs. Clinton, on a Katrina commission recommendation. I am a cosponsor of that amendment. Prior to the vote, I would now like to make a few remarks in support of the establishment of a Katrina commission.

This weekend I reflected--as I am sure the Presiding Officer did when you

were with your family and maybe made it back to Alaska with constituents--that two tragedies have hit our country. One is 9/11, which we can never, ever forget. How grateful we are to the 9/11 Commission for their rigorous investigation as to what happened: what went wrong, what went right; what went wrong--the failure of communications and technology and intelligence; what went right--the bravery of people, the spirit of America.

Then, also, the 9/11 Commission made concrete recommendations. In fact, they are meeting this week to issue a report card on how well we have done to implement their recommendations. Three cheers for the 9/11 Commission on what they have done and what they continue to do.

All of America has been mesmerized by what has happened in the Gulf-- in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in Alabama, and, of course, in Mississippi.

Senator Clinton's idea--she will be here shortly to express it, and I concur--is that we also have a commission now to look at the response to the Katrina situation. We appreciate the fact that the President has taken responsibility, and he himself wants to know what went right and what went wrong. We think that is a very good move on the President's part. We support him.

Second, we know there will be good efforts by our own colleagues, particularly in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is very ably chaired by our colleague from Maine, Senator Collins, and of which Senator Lieberman is ranking member.

But it is us investigating us. It is the President looking at his own executive branch. I do not doubt the integrity of the President. I do not doubt the vigor and pursuit that the Governmental Affairs Committee will have. Golly, just look at their record on intel reform. I think we know they really do operate with intellectual rigor and integrity. But I do believe we need an outside group that will look at us and develop an opinion that will be truly independent, made up of appointees from both sides of the aisle. They would absolutely not be political, even though some might have a background in politics.

Governor Kean did a fabulous job chairing the Commission along with our former colleague, Congressman Lee Hamilton. They had a wonderful array of people on the 9/11 Commission.

So we owe it to the people of the Gulf and we owe it to the people of the United States of America to examine this situation and not to do finger-pointing. We do not need any more finger-pointing but we sure do need pinpointing as to what collapsed, what was not in place.

Some years ago, I led the reform effort of FEMA. We started with President Bush 1 and then kept going under President Bill Clinton, who gave us James Lee Witt. FEMA should be one of our premier agencies focusing on readiness, response, and recovery. What went wrong? Was it us? Did we neglect in oversight? Did we neglect funding Corps of Engineers projects? I really don't know that. And maybe we did not neglect anything, but nature had enough with our bad behavior and kicked us a little bit.

So I really want to know that, and why. One reason is so it will never happen again, just like we never want a predatory attack on the United States of America, which is why out of 9/11 came intel reform and now the followup. We do not want this result ever to happen again when a natural disaster strikes--whether it is a hurricane that hits coastal States or whether it is an earthquake, which I know the Presiding Officer's own dear beloved State is possibly subjected to and which our colleagues from California worry about, and our colleagues from Missouri worry about that fault that goes right down through Missouri.

So we have to make sure we have an independent analysis. We would then take what the President finds, take what our colleagues find, and listen to an independent commission so we can make sure we are truly ready, we are truly able to respond, and then to make sure we have the wherewithal to do recovery.

This could have been a dirty bomb in any city in the United States. Could we evacuate? Would communications be interoperable? What would happen to the poor and the sick? Are they collateral damage? Nobody in America is ever collateral damage. We have to have plans. What happens to our first responders? If there is an evacuation plan, who evacuates their families while they are protecting us? These are the kinds of questions, these are the kinds of things that need to go into the planning.

Right now, all that many of us see is that we have spent a lot of money on homeland security. But what I see is a lot of salesmen out there selling gear. In fact, sometimes I think there are more salesmen selling gear than there are first responders. We need to be effective. We need to be smart. I want my country to be safer. I want my country to be stronger. But I think we need to be smarter. This is why I think a good step forward would be an independent commission, not to finger- point but to pinpoint, so that never ever again would any community have to suffer or that they could be in a position to recover better.

Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, we, too, concur with the managers' package. We think the amendments are very good. We look forward to moving the bill. We are ready to vote.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I know for those who are watching on C- SPAN, they wonder what are we doing as we go through names such as Akaka and Baucus in a quorum call. Actually, what we have been doing is working very quietly with other Senators to see, where they have offered amendments, if we could negotiate compromises and just take them. We have been working very collegially with my wonderful colleague from Alabama, Senator Shelby.

As you can see, we just cleared eight amendments on which we could come to bipartisan support. So there is a lot of work going on right in back of these doors and also with other Senators in their offices.

Amendment No. 1648

Mr. President, pretty soon we are going to be debating the Coburn amendment. We could not reach an agreement on it, even though there was a good-faith effort.

This Coburn amendment could bring great damage to the efforts for innovation and discovery in this country. What the Senator from Oklahoma wishes to do is eliminate a program called the Advanced Technology Program that is currently at the National Institute of Standards.

This is a Government agency under the Department of Commerce, and its job is, No. 1, to establish standards of products that are coming to the marketplace so that they would be uniform--for example, that every firehose would have the same gauge so the guys coming down from New York, working with the people from Alabama, could bring their equipment and it could be joined together. That is what a standard is.

Madame Curie discovered radium, and it was there they established the Curie standard on how to measure radioactivity. But it does more than that. The Advanced Technology Program actually promotes innovation and technology transfer.

The amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma would eliminate the funding, and commitments that have already been made to those people primarily in the private sector would be eliminated. It would hurt critical research and development. This is very important to our competitiveness. We keep talking about offshoring. We don't want to offshore jobs. What we need to do is come up with the new ideas, come up with the new products that create the new jobs right here in the United States of America.

The amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma is well intentioned. He wants to eliminate a Government program and provide it to local law enforcement and to weather. We understand what his priorities are. In the bill, working on a bipartisan basis, we feel we have done that.

I know, in the reading of the bill, one can see we provide over $1 billion to State and local law enforcement. We provide half-a-million dollars to the COPS program that helps local law enforcement be able to add more COPS on the beat. We add more money, $775 million, to the Weather Service operation, which has proved so wonderful and effective in predicting hurricanes and, actually, tornados and other things.

I support the goal of the Coburn amendment to increase funding for these critical programs, but we cannot support the cutting of the Advanced Technology Program.

On March 17 of 2005, 53 Senators voted to support the ATP program in an amendment to the budget resolution. So I am going to urge my colleagues to defeat the Coburn amendment.

I have come not to defend another Government program. I am not here to defend another agency. I am here to protect the interests of the United States of America in innovation, discovery, and partnerships with the private sector that actually come up with those new ideas. Many of those ideas save lives, and they create the jobs that save livelihoods.

My colleague from Oklahoma had some great charts, and it implied that ATP was corporate welfare. This is not corporate welfare. This is a creative approach that offers partnerships between the Federal Government and the brain power of the private sector. Through these partnerships, ATP accelerates the development of innovative technologies that promise significant commercial payoffs and widespread benefits for the Nation, but they are so early in the development it is very difficult for them to attract private investment, even venture capital.

How does this agency work? ATP funds development in technology that is too new or too risky for private sector investment in the so-called ``valley of death'' between research and commercialization. There is lots of money around for research and there is money around for commercialization but not for that bridge between those. ATP fills this gap. It does not displace private capital because these projects cannot get private capital. ATP applicants are required to look first for private capital, venture, wherever they can find it. ATP is the funder of last resort.

For example, in the 1990s, NIH was conducting research on the human genome and DNA. It was a breakthrough effort, and at the same time NIH worked simultaneously with ATP and industry. Why? We needed practical tools to use the discoveries that benefit the Nation so we just would not have this research in the lab. Guess what came out of it. ATP's investment came out with new ideas for DNA technology to detect disease, to get lifesaving drugs to the market, to catch criminals.

State crime labs are using that technology. They are using DNA to go back to old death penalty cases to make

sure that we have the right person who committed a particular crime. DNA is saving lives, and it is also restoring justice in this country. It is a phenomenal breakthrough. We helped take it from the lab, worked with the private sector, and came up with these new ideas.

Is ATP important and effective? Sure. It has benefited the Nation for two reasons. One, we partnered the Government with industry and the private sector to develop those new technologies. For example, ATP was a partner in the development of something I am tremendously interested in, and I know the Presiding Officer is. It helped come up with a new generation of digital mammography and radiology. It provided far more accurate detection at far lower cost, and it is projected to save over $200 million in health care costs. Helping develop that one idea is saving lives, helping families and, at the same time, what it saves in the burgeoning health care costs would pay for ATP itself.

ATP has contributed to the development of more than 240 new technologies that have been commercialized. It improves our economy. Just 41 of their 700 projects to date have given us economic benefit.

The other thing that my colleague from Oklahoma suggests is, again, we are funding big corporations. Why are we doing that? I will not give their names but this blue chip and this S&P 500 and so on. Well, what colleagues need to know is that 75 percent of all ATP recipients are small businesses.

Are large companies involved in ATP? Yes. How? Because they have joint ventures offered with smaller companies in their chain of development. In these arrangements, almost all ATP funding goes to the smaller company, but the larger companies handle all administrative costs so that the small companies can focus more on product development. By the way, large companies do not get a free ride. Large companies must match the ATP by 60 percent. So this is a partnership to leverage these private sector efforts.

For example, large automakers partnered with the auto parts supply people to improve the manufacturing of American automobiles. It has improved our aerospace industry, making manufacturing more competitive.

Finally, ATP does not subsidize companies to do product development. Companies have to have their own scientific plan. They have to have a business plan on how the technology will go to market. Our ATP only funds the development of the new technologies. Companies must then take it to the marketplace.

We understand that our new colleague wants to use the Federal taxpayer dollar wisely, and he wants to protect communities by using the money to go to law enforcement and weather. We want to help that, too, and we have put the money in the budget for that. What we want to do, when we are talking about protecting the American people, is protect them through innovation, discovery, and the new ideas for the new products that lead to the new jobs that keep this country ahead and an economic superpower.

I hope that when our colleague comes and discusses this and we have a vote, my colleagues--certainly those on my side of the aisle--will take my word for it that we have supported law enforcement, we have supported the Weather Service, and this Advanced Technology Program is crucial to the future of our country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. LEVIN, Mr. President, the Advanced Technology Program, ATP, promotes the development of new, innovative products that are made and developed in the United States, helping American companies compete against their foreign competitors and contribute to the growth of the U.S. economy.

We have lost nearly 2.8 million manufacturing jobs since January 2001. In the face of these losses and strong global economic competition, we should be doing all we can to promote programs that help create jobs and strengthen the technological innovation of American companies.

The ATP is a very modest program which, according to the Department of Commerce, has had a result eight times more in technologies developed than the amount of money we have put into the program. This is an eight-time return on investment in advanced technologies which is achieved when the Department of Commerce partners with industry through the ATP.

During consideration of the Senate budget resolution in March, the Senate adopted a Levin-DeWine amendment to restore funding for the Advanced Technology Program, putting the Senate on record in support of this program. Leaders on the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee also support this important innovative program and have funded it at $140 million in their bill for fiscal year 2006. I urge my colleagues to continue their support for the ATP and oppose this amendment that would gut the ATP.

Mr. President, I would like to thank Senator Cantwell for her tireless leadership in the fight against meth. Meth abuse has reached epidemic levels across our country, and by working to ensure that we don't shift the burden onto local communities, Senator Cantwell has given State and local law enforcement an important ally.

Accepting her amendment to add $20 million to the hotspots program brings funding for meth State and local law enforcement to $80 million. Coupled with the bipartisan addition of $43 million of meth authorization dollars that Senator Cantwell cosponsored and other meth- related funding, this bill makes an enormous Federal commitment to help our State and local effort to fight the meth battle.

Senator Cantwell's amendment sends vital Federal support to law enforcement officers and first responders on the front lines of the meth epidemic everywhere. These crime fighters need more funds to help combat this dangerous drug, and Senator Cantwell has fought to give them resources they need. I appreciate her work to improve this bill, as do countless law enforcement officers across America.

Mr. President, I rise as the ranking member of this subcommittee, and also as a cosponsor of the Pryor amendment.

First of all, I thank the Senator from Arkansas for offering this amendment which would give $1 million to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether there is some type of price gouging, price fixing, going on in the marketplace.

I thank the Senator for his leadership and the fact that he wants to proceed on the basis of fact and not just rhetoric and finger-pointing.

We thank the Senator from New Mexico, the chairman of the Energy bill. This has received bipartisan support, exactly what we need. Boy, do we need it.

We in Maryland are hot. We are absolutely hot about these gas prices. Maryland has the third highest gas prices in the United States of America. Who are we behind? Are we behind California with complicated environmental rules? No, we are behind the District of Columbia, and we are behind New York. No one can say why. Our Governor convened a special meeting of oil executives to tell him why, and he is dissatisfied. Our general assembly is working on it to see if there is something we can do at the State level.

There is clamor for getting rid of the Federal or State taxes. People want the prices to come down.

We want to know, is there gouging? Is there fixing? We want to operate on the basis of fact.

In my home State of Maryland, my cost of commuting has gone up $30 a week. I can afford it, but many Marylanders cannot. I saw on a local TV station a mother who filled up her minivan, a soccer mom. It was $90. She put her head on the windshield and cried; how could her family afford it?

We see the variance in prices, block by block; in one neighborhood gas is selling for $3.49 and less than 5 miles away, in Baltimore City, it is selling cheaper. Go to another pump further out in a valley situation and it is selling for $3.63. Guess what. Over in another neighborhood, it is selling for $3.03--a 60-cent-per-gallon difference. Can anyone tell me what it is about the marketplace that it is 60 cents difference? Who is pulling the strings?

The consequences are severe. If you have a family and are a commuter, you wonder how you can continue to be a soccer mom and a dad and go to work every day.

Business in my community is affected, big and small; small businesses, from the florist who delivers the flowers, to the pharmacist who is willing to deliver prescription drugs, to the electrician, to the plumber using a pickup.

Much of our food supply comes by truck to our supermarkets. They will have to charge more. It means food is going to go up. People love Maryland and love our crabs, but our watermen are aghast to take the boat out. It is costing a fortune. Marylanders want to know the facts.

I am pleased to join with the Senator from Arkansas. This has been a bipartisan agreement. This will move it forward. Let's fund this at the FTC. Let's get the investigation underway and get ahold of the gas prices affecting so many Americans.

I thank the chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Shelby, for his patience while we worked so assiduously on the bipartisan agreement.

I ask unanimous consent the Pryor-Mikulski amendment be agreed to.

I move to reconsider the vote.

I will talk about another amendment from the senior Senator from Arkansas. I ask that Lincoln amendment No. 1652 be withdrawn because that policy content will be accomplished on another bill.

I thank the Senator for his withdrawing of the amendment yet maintaining his stand. I, too, am sympathetic to the policy direction the Senator is interested in under eminent domain.

The Senator might not know my history, but I got into politics fighting a highway. Had the recent Supreme Court decision stood, we would not have had a fighting chance. Just to tell the consequences of that, the highway would have gone where our Inner Harbor is; it would have gone through Camden Yards, the Ravens Stadium, and where we are trying to create the digital harbor. We got our economic development but not the way the planners wanted.

I am sympathetic. It has raised some liberal eyebrows, but I look forward to working with you, and maybe we will have a Sununu-Mikulski amendment.

Mr. President, first I would like to thank the senior Senator from Illinois for his kind words about my advocacy.

You see, I wanted not only new leadership at home--that is why I called for Michael Brown to step down--but I believe FEMA needs a new focus. It needs a new energy. And it needs a new independence.

In the 1990s I worked to form FEMA, after Hurricane Andrew, and actually worked with President Bush (I) and Andrew Card. We started that. President Clinton came in, we kept our reform efforts up, we got James Lee Witt, and what we really focused on was, No. 1, that FEMA become independent; No. 2, that it be run by professionals--meaning emergency management, military, or even private sector people with crisis management experience because this is enormously important to saving lives, saving livelihoods, and quite frankly, being good stewards of taxpayer money. We are about to spend $60 billion, and we are into no-bid contracts? OK?

So that is why I wanted Brown to go. The President has appointed someone. I look forward to getting acquainted. I supported the commission, not to finger-point, but to pinpoint, just like the 9/11 Commission. Where do we need to reform? Where do we need to reinvigorate? Where do we need to refocus?

Yes, the President is going to look into it, and he should. Yes, the Congress is going to look into it, under the able leadership of Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman. But I believe in independence. Frankly, as you know, I say to the Senator, just as in medicine, nothing goes wrong when you get a second opinion from outside. So that is what I hoped would happen. But I look forward to working with the President on recovery.

We have to make sure we are ready and able to respond if it happens again. Thank you for your kind words.

Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 1688, which was submitted by Senator Stabenow, be modified with

the changes that are at the desk and, further, that the amendment be considered and agreed to with the motion to reconsider laid upon the table.

It has been laid upon the table.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1662

I concur.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, we know the country has been hit by the catastrophe of Katrina. We know hundreds of lives have been lost. We know tens of billions of dollars of property damage has been done. We know there are thousands of people who have been displaced, who are without their homes. We know there is widespread devastation across an entire region of the country. We know the insurance losses to the country apparently approach $100 billion. We also know enormous damage has been done to our budget situation with the Federal Government.

I thought this was perhaps an appropriate time to come to the floor to talk about the changes in our budget situation and the implications for the future and how important it is that we begin to focus on the damage that has been done to our fiscal condition and to begin the process of thinking through what our response will be. Are we going to stay with the same plan that was in place before, or are we going to recognize a new reality and move to a different plan and hopefully steer the country back to some fiscal course that has better long-term prospects?

We know, putting in perspective before Katrina, where things stood; that we faced in this country very large deficits in historical terms. We go back to 2001, when we actually enjoyed a surplus of $128 billion, and each year since that time, the deficits have grown to record proportion. In 2004, the deficit reached a record level of $412 billion. The estimates for 2005, before Katrina, were $331 billion, still an enormous deficit, and in many ways it understates the seriousness of our fiscal condition because, as the occupant of the chair knows very well, the budget deficit is a more conservative look at how serious our situation is in the sense that it understates what is actually happening because the amount of the increase in the debt of our country is far greater than the reported deficit.

I find there is a lot of confusion on that as I go around my State. People think the amount of the deficit is what gets added to the debt, but that is not the case. What is added to the debt is much greater. In fact, we anticipate now that the debt will increase in 2005, not by $331 billion, but now with Katrina, well over $600 billion.

We now know Katrina has absorbed already $62.3 billion of additional spending. We were last told that the Federal Government was spending about $2 billion a day in response to Katrina, truly a stunning amount of money. That is over and above all other Federal expenditures. And this $62.3 billion is just a downpayment.

There was a report in the Wall Street Journal that the first estimates on Katrina costs for Washington hit $200 billion. This is in a story that just appeared on September 7. The lead says:

The Federal Government could spend as much as $150 billion

to $200 billion caring for the victims of Hurricane Katrina

and rebuilding from its devastation, according to early

congressional estimates--a total bill that would far surpass

the initial costs of recovering from the 9/11 terror attacks

and could put Katrina on track to become the most expensive

natural disaster in American history.

None of us begrudge spending this money to help the victims. We all understand that is a Federal obligation, a tragedy of such sweeping dimension that it requires a full Federal response. But we need to evaluate these enormous expenditures in light of the very deep deficit ditch we are already in in this country, a deficit ditch that is only exceeded by the debt ditch that is being dug by the policies that are being pursued in Washington.

I think all of us who have been engaged in these debates know how serious the long-term outlook is. To evaluate what has happened in the past so

that we better understand our future, I wanted to go back to 2001. After the 2000 elections, the 2001 Congressional Budget Office, looking ahead, told us this was the range of possible outcomes for the budget going forward. This would be a projection on what the surpluses might look like going forward. They picked this midrange going forward.

They were projecting surpluses. That was the long-term outlook. The Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, told us we could expect something like $6 trillion in surpluses over the next 10 years at that time. I remember many of my colleagues told me repeatedly, when I urged them not to be betting on this 10-year forecast: Kent, you are being much too conservative.

Do you not understand that when we have these tax cuts, we will get much more revenue? We will not be at the midline of this range of possible outcomes. Instead, we will be significantly above it because if you cut taxes, the theory was there is going to be more money.

Well, we can go back now and look at what actually occurred, not what some ideological slogan predicted, but what actually occurred in the real world. In the real world what happened with deficits is this red line. It is far below the bottom of the projections that were made by the Congressional Budget Office. Not only did we not achieve the midpoint of the range, nor anywhere close to that, we were not even at the bottom of the range of possible outcomes. We are far below the bottom. So the theory that if we cut taxes, we get more revenue and this would all work out has not worked very well in the real world.

That can be seen if we look at the revenue line in historical perspective. This is the revenue line going back to 1959 as a percentage of our gross domestic product. The economists say that is the best way to look at it because that takes out the effects of inflation year to year. Look what we see. Revenue was almost 21 percent of GDP in 2000. The President at the time said revenue is very high historically, and he was exactly right, revenue was high historically. His answer was to cut taxes. But look at what has happened. Revenue in 2004 was 16.3 percent of GDP, the lowest it has been since 1959. So once again, the notion that if we cut taxes we are going to get more revenue did not work. We cut taxes repeatedly and revenue has collapsed. The result is the gap between spending and revenue has once again opened up and is producing massive budget deficits.

If we look ahead, it is all too predictable where we are headed. The administration earlier said they are going to cut the deficit in half over 5 years, but they got that result by leaving things out. They left out the full effect of war costs. They left out the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax, which costs $700 billion to fix. The alternative minimum tax is the old millionaires' tax. It is now a middle-class tax trap. The alternative minimum tax affected 3 million people this year. Ten years from now it is going to affect 30 million people if we do not respond. So, of course, we are going to respond. We must respond. But it costs money and the money is not in the budget, just as war costs passed September 30 are not in the budget.

When these things are put back in, what one sees is a much different outlook going forward, and this is before Katrina. I want to emphasize this is before Katrina. What we see is a deficit picture that gets much worse, especially after this 5-year budget window. The budget the President submitted was for 5 years. Previously we had been doing 10- year budgets. I think one reason the President changed to 5 years is because we see the deterioration that is going to occur if the President's budget proposals are adopted, because the President is saying, spend more money but cut the revenue base as well. In fact, he is proposing over $1.5 trillion of additional tax cuts.

If we do a reality test, I think we have to ask ourselves the question, where is this all headed? We cannot pay our bills now. We are running near-record deficits. Spending is exploding. Sixty billion dollars has been appropriated to Katrina alone in the last few days. The President says, cut the revenue base by $1.5 trillion. Most of that cut will occur beyond the 5-year budget window, and this is before the baby boomers retire. What possible sense does this policy make?

We have before us a budget plan that makes the situation worse. The budget itself will increase the debt $600 billion a year every year for the next 5 years, and I will discuss that in the next chart. In addition to the budget plan, there is a plan called reconciliation, a process of fast-tracking legislation that was supposed to be used to reduce the deficit. In passing their budget this year, our colleagues decided to use that fast-track process to actually increase the deficit. Why? Because they have $35 billion of spending cuts over the life of the budget but they have $70 billion of revenue cuts. The result is the deficit is increased. The debt is increased--not reduced, but increased.

When one looks at the budget that was passed in the Senate and ultimately passed in the House and then passed both Chambers, what one sees is the debt of the country going up dramatically before Katrina. The debt was going to go up over $600 billion a year each and every year of the budget that was passed.

I know it is hard to believe, but these are the numbers in the budget document itself. In the budget document itself, their prediction of what will happen to the debt of the country shows that the debt will go up $683 billion this year. That is not the deficit, it is the increase in the debt of the country. Very often I find people are confused between the deficit and the debt. I think we should be focusing at this moment on the debt because that captures the money that is being taken from Social Security and all the other trust funds, money that has to be paid back, but there is no plan to pay it back.

The debt is going to increase under the plan of the budget that is before us, before Katrina, $683 billion this year; $639 billion the next year; $606 billion the third year; $610 billion the fourth year; $605 billion the fifth year.

There has been some improvement in this year, more than $50 billion of improvement from when this budget resolution was drafted. But, again, that is before Katrina. That improvement this year has been wiped out next year by the two legislative acts we have passed so far to deal with Katrina, over $60 billion in those two, with much more to come.

So we are right back in this neighborhood of increasing the debt by these massive amounts. What is most alarming is this increase in debt is occurring in the sweet spot of the budget cycle, before the baby boomers retire. When the baby boomers retire, then we see the real challenge begin. To look visually at what is happening to the debt, I prepared this chart because I think it communicates about as well as I can how we are building a wall of debt. The gross debt of the United States at the end of this year is estimated to be $7.9 trillion. One can see, with the course we are on, that debt is going to be jumping by $600 billion, some of these years more than $600 billion, each and every year for the next 5 years; massive increases in debt. At a time the President told us if we adopted his plan back in 2001, one will recall he said there is going to be maximum paydown of the debt. Do we see any paydown of the debt occurring? No paydown of the debt. The debt is skyrocketing.

There is not much interest in this town, or perhaps elsewhere, about this problem. But there will be. I predict there will be because, one, the markets cannot be fooled; reality cannot be fooled. The reality is, we are going deeper and deeper into hock.

Who are we going into hock to? Well, increasingly we are going into debt with other countries around the world. We owe Japan over $680 billion. We owe China over $240 billion. We owe the United Kingdom over $140 billion. My favorite is the Caribbean banking centers. We owe the Caribbean banking centers over $100 billion. I like to ask audiences back home if anyone is doing business with the Caribbean banking centers. I have never had a hand go up. I do not know where the Caribbean banking centers get their money, but we owe them $108 billion.

The debt is skyrocketing at the worst possible time, before the baby boomers start to retire. Because this debt is skyrocketing, we owe more and more countries around the world. In

the last 4 years alone, foreign holdings of our debt have increased more than 100 percent. Think about that. Other countries' holding of debt has gone up more than 100 percent in 4 years. That is utterly unsustainable. It has taken us over 200 years to build up a debt around the world and we have doubled it in the last 4. That is not a sustainable circumstance.

Couple that with the trade deficit--the trade deficit running over $600 billion a year--it seems to me it is very clear that as a country we are living beyond our means.

There are real consequences to doing so. Here is the pattern of Social Security beneficiaries. Of course, the same chart would apply to Medicare. We are just below 40 million people now eligible. By 2050, there are going to be 81 million. This is the demographic tsunami that is headed our way, and it is going to swamp a lot of boats. Our country has to get ready. We have to respond.

The biggest long-term problem we have is not with Social Security. Social Security's 75-year shortfall is estimated at $4 trillion. I personally do not believe that. I think that overstates the shortfall in Social Security. Why? Because this is based on an assumption. The shortfall in Social Security is based on an assumption that the economy is only going to grow 1.9 percent a year every year for the next 75 years. In the past 75 years, the economy has grown at 3.4 percent a year. If the economy were to grow in the future as it has in the past, 80 percent of this shortfall would disappear.

Does that mean we do not have a problem? No. I wish it did, but we have a big problem. The problem we have, as I diagnose it, is first of all those very large budget deficits we are running now, coupled with the shortfall in Medicare, which is seven times the projected shortfall in Social Security. This is the real 800-pound gorilla: Medicare--a shortfall of almost $30 trillion estimated over the next 75 years. This shortfall, I believe, is much more likely to come true than the projected shortfall in Social Security because it is based not only on an aging population but medical inflation that is running far ahead of the underlying rate of inflation.

If you put it all together, we have massive budget deficits made much more severe by the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that is adding $6 to $8 billion a month; coupled with Katrina, who knows what the ultimate cost will be? It is at least $60 billion and counting. And then we have these massive long-term shortfalls, especially in Medicare.

Then I look at the President's plan. The President says: Steady as she goes. Spend the money, but on top of it add massive additional tax cuts, tax cuts that are represented by these red bars, tax cuts that explode at the very time the Social Security and Medicare trust funds go cash negative. There can only be one possible result, and that is massive red ink, massive deficits, massive debt--a completely unsustainable situation.

It is not enough to curse the darkness. We also have to talk about what can be done here to begin to dig out. I believe on the revenue side of the equation, before we talk about any tax increase for anybody, we ought to talk about this tax gap. That is the difference between what is owed and what is being paid. It is estimated now conservatively at over $350 billion a year.

The vast majority of us pay what we owe; companies do, individuals do. But increasingly there are people and companies that do not. They now estimate that amounts to $350 billion a year of lost revenue. That is utterly unfair to the rest of us who are paying what we owe, and we ought to insist that everybody pay what they owe. If we could do that, we would close this yawning chasm by some significant amount--nobody knows quite how much. On the revenue side of the equation, I believe that ought to be our first order of business.

On the spending side of the equation, the first order of business ought to be to focus on Medicare and the 5 percent of beneficiaries who use 50 percent of the money. Five percent of the people use 50 percent of the money. They are the chronically ill. What can we do about it? What we can do is focus like a laser on those who are the chronically ill and better coordinate their care.

A pilot problem was done with 22,000 patients like that; assign nurse-practitioners to every one of those cases to better coordinate their care. The first thing they did was lay out the prescription drugs the patients were taking, and they found in many of the cases they were taking 16 prescription drugs, and they found in many cases half of them they should not be taking or didn't need to take.

I did this with my own father-in-law. I went into his home when he was ill. Sure enough, he was taking 16 prescription drugs. I got on the phone to the doctor and I went down the list. About the third drug I listed, the doctor said to me: He should not be taking that. He should not have been taking that for the last 3 years. I went further down the list. About two other drugs, the doctor said to me: He should never be taking those two together. They work against each other.

By the time we were done, we had eliminated 8 of the 16 prescription drugs he was taking. I said to the doctor: How does this happen? The doctor said to me: You know, it happens all the time. He said: I am the family practice doctor. He has a heart doctor, he has a lung doctor, he has an orthopedic doctor. He is getting prescription drugs at the hospital clinic, the corner clinic, the clinic down at the beach, and he is getting them mail order. He is sick and confused. His wife is sick and confused. The result is chaos.

All too often, that is what is happening. When we put nurse practitioners on the 22,000 chronically ill cases that were studied, they reduced hospitalization 40 percent, they reduced costs 20 percent, and they got better health care outcomes because they got people to stop taking drugs they should not be taking. They got them to stop having duplicate medical tests that didn't have any value but to put them through more stressful procedures. We ought to take that study on 22,000 and we ought to ramp it up to a quarter of a million or something like that and see if we could get those same results on a much bigger universe and see if we could continue to save money and get better health care outcomes.

Those are just two ideas, closing the tax gap and dealing with the tremendous explosion in costs in Medicare where, again, 5 percent of the people are using half of the entire budget. We ought to focus like a laser on that half of the expenditure, and we ought to do it quickly. The sooner we act on these problems and challenges, the better off we are. The longer we stay with our heads in the sand, the more Draconian will have to be the solution.

Katrina was a disaster of unparalleled dimension. All of us weep for those who have lost family members and friends. We are saddened by the other losses that have occurred as well. But we should not compound the problem by sticking with a fiscal plan that puts this country deeper and deeper into the deficit and debt ditch. That would add to the calamity. That would compound the disaster.

We ought to take this opportunity to begin to plan how we dig out. It is imperative that we act sooner rather than later. It is imperative that the Congress and the President begin a plan to put us back on a more sound fiscal footing. It would truly be ironic if this disaster were allowed to spread to an even deeper fiscal disaster, one that could cause the harm of Katrina to spread outside the Gulf region to every part of our country.

I am very hopeful that the President will provide leadership and that Congress will respond. If the President does not provide leadership, the Congress should demonstrate leadership and take this bull by the horns and recognize we need a new fiscal blueprint for this country. We need to start digging out of this deficit ditch and prepare a brighter and better future for our country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the continuing scenes of the suffering and devastation in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast weigh heavily on our hearts and minds. It is clear that as a nation we have a monumental challenge ahead of us to rebuild and restore one of America's most unique and important regions. There is the challenge of repairing and replacing the physical infrastructure of a number of cities, including the great city of New Orleans. There is also the challenge of restoring jobs and income and opportunity and hope to hundreds of thousands of desperate and displaced people.

Hurricane Katrina did more than rip the roofs off buildings along the Gulf Coast. It also ripped off the mask that has covered up the plight of millions of working Americans who live in poverty, as well as nearly one out of every five American children who are now growing up in poverty. Too often the poor are out of sight and out of mind. Katrina changed that. Hurricane Katrina opened the eyes of people all across this country. The poor are now in sight and on our minds. Americans are shocked. Frankly, we are ashamed that such desperation and deprivation could exist on such a large scale in the wealthiest nation on Earth. Americans expect more, and we deserve more.

Those of us who are working in the cool air-conditioned buildings of Washington have to take a long, hard look at the priorities and choices that have contributed to a situation where Americans, moms and dads, husbands and wives, people of all walks of life, work hard but still are unable to make ends meet and still live in poverty. One might think that we would be so embarrassed about these misplaced priorities that have contributed to this situation that we would change course, that we would do all we can to support those who work hard to make ends meet.

One would think that reordering priorities would be especially important in our efforts to rebuild the Gulf Coast, to restore jobs and create new opportunity, get income into people's pockets so they can rebuild their lives and jump start the local economy.

Unfortunately, as if we had learned nothing at all, one of the very first actions taken by President Bush in the wake of this storm was to issue an executive order suspending the Davis-Bacon Act, the Federal law that requires employers on Federal projects to pay employees the prevailing wage of that area. This is a law that has been supported by every President since Franklin Roosevelt, Republican and Democrat.

Even more disturbing, if press reports are to be believed, the President is apparently planning to compound the damage by also rescinding what is known as the McNamara-O'Hara Service Contract Act which contains similar wage protections for employees working on Federal service contracts. It is a law that goes back over 50 years.

Until now, I have muted my voice. I have not criticized the President nor anyone else on what has happened in New Orleans and what happened in the wake of Katrina. I have said that the time for that would come later. For now, it is time to get food and shelter and clothing and health care to the people so devastated. That is why I am so disappointed with this action by the President which will negatively impact workers' wages. So, while we need to set up a separate commission to look at what happened in the aftermath of the hurricane, why the planning was not done, why so much suffering and death before poor people were moved to places of safety, the fact is things are now moving ahead.

With the stroke of a pen, the President is going to remove the requirement for the prevailing wage to be paid for workers in this region. If press reports are to be believed, he is now going to compound it by rescinding the McNamara-O'Hara Service Contract Act that would apply that prevailing wage to Federal service contracts.

This is exactly the wrong way to put the Gulf Coast region back on its feet. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama already have low wage levels compared to the rest of the Nation. For example, the current prevailing wage in the New Orleans area for a truck driver working on rebuilding the levees is $9.04 an hour. In the New Orleans area, the prevailing wage for an electrician is $14.30 an hour. Think about it. That comes to an annual income of barely $18,000 a year for a truck driver and about $28,000 a year for an electrician working full time. It is hard enough for a family to rebuild their lives in that devastated area at that income. Why in the world would the President want to slash that income, especially at this time?

Let's look at some more of the workers who would be negatively impacted by this action. We are talking about sheet and metal workers in Pearl River County, MS, who currently make less than $19,000 a year. That is their prevailing wage. We are talking about carpenters in Mobile County, AL, who currently make less than $20,000 a year. We are talking about laborers in Livingston Parish, LA, who make less than $20,000 a year. At this time, why would we want to cut their already meager income? These are the very workers we will be counting on to rebuild the highways and bridges, reconstruct houses and schools and hospitals, get our electricity up and running again in all those areas. These are the workers who will do the hazardous waste cleanup. Their wages are already barely at the poverty line. The President's actions will drive those wages down even lower.

Given the conditions these people will be working in--areas rife with bacteria and mold, chemical contaminants--we ought to be giving them a wage premium to work in these areas. Instead, the President's action will give them a wage cut. This policy fails the basic test of fairness and equity. Is the President calling for a cap on executive salaries? I haven't heard him call for that. Is there any effort to see if the companies involved in the cleanup and rebuilding would be willing to accept less than the normal profit? I see that one of the first no-bid contracts let was to Halliburton.

We know who the former president of Halliburton is: Vice President Dick Cheney. We know that one of the chief clients of the former head of FEMA, Mr. Albaugh, who now has a consulting firm, is Halliburton. We know that Mr. Albaugh's hand-picked successor, Mr. Brown, was the head of FEMA when they gave the no-bid contract to Halliburton. It sounds like a sweetheart deal to me. Is the President calling for a cap on profits earned by those companies? Of course not. So why in the world is the President singling out low-income workers in that area and saying: We are not just going to put a cap

on what you make. We are going to lower prevailing wage. We are going to take it away. Why is he cutting their pay at a time when we should be trying to boost income and give a helping hand to people in this area?

For the life of me, the more I think about this, the more I read about it, I don't get what the President is trying to do. They have a prevailing wage. He is saying, you are not going to get that. What happens when you don't have a prevailing wage in a desperate situation? There is always somebody worse off than you that will take a job at less pay. There is always somebody a little bit more desperate. So if the prevailing wage for a truckdriver was $9 an hour, if there is no prevailing wage, the company could come in and say: Anybody want a job for $8 an hour? Someone says: Yes, I will take it for $7. Someone else will say I will take it for $6 because I am so desperate. I need work. I need income.

You end up with a race to the bottom on the wages these jobs pay if you don't have that prevailing wage. That is precisely what is going to happen in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. It is a blow to the workers who have already lost their homes. Many have lost jobs, families disrupted, coming back to clean up the mess in their neighborhoods. Now they are being told their wages are going to fall. Think about this. Before Katrina, a truckdriver would be making $9.04 an hour. Post-Katrina, they will get less money. Can someone please explain to me what sense this makes? Pre-Katrina we pay you more for the work you do; post-Katrina, we are going to pay you less.

I say to the President of the United States: You are going to be on television tomorrow night to talk about the cleanup effort. Please explain to the American people why it is you took away the prevailing wage for workers. Explain why it is necessary for them to make less now than they made before. Explain why it is necessary to cap their wages, but we don't cap the profits of the companies doing the work. We don't cap the executive salaries of the executives of those companies.

This is devastating. I have held my criticism of the President, but this is unconscionable. This is not right. It is not right for individuals, and it is foolish economic policy for a region that we are trying to get back on its feet. FEMA is already signing scores of contracts for vast sums of money. The question is: Will a fair share of this money work its way down to the ordinary laborers who do the dirty, hazardous jobs of cleanup and rebuilding? Or will it mostly go for executive salaries and corporate profits? Certainly, we do not want a replay of Iraq, where billions of dollars in contracts have been awarded, enriching people at the top, but with precious little trickling down to ordinary Iraqis to put income in their pockets and encourage a grassroots economic recovery.

Surely we can learn from the mistakes we made in Iraq where we just threw billions of dollars to these companies, and not much of it got down to the people in Iraq. Surely we can learn from that and not repeat those mistakes in the Gulf Coast.

The good news is that it is not too late for the President to correct this misdirection. We are still at the beginning of our response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. As we saw when the FEMA Director was reassigned earlier this week and has since left, of course, the President and his team have shown a capacity for shifting gears and making midcourse corrections. That is fine.

Tomorrow night, the President needs to take a second midcourse correction in the strongest possible terms. I urge the President to use his prime-time address to the Nation to reverse course and reinstate the Davis-Bacon protections for the Gulf Coast region.

I also urge the President to put in place a network of auditors and overseers to ensure that the billions of dollars going to Katrina relief is spent effectively, that the lion's share is used to restore and create jobs, to boost incomes, to spark a bottom-up economic recovery and revival all across the devastated region.

There have been numerous articles written in the days since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast underscoring how shocked Americans are to see with our own eyes the poverty and the deprivation that unfortunately still exists on a large scale in the wealthiest Nation on Earth. We need to address the issue of poverty in this country. We knew before Katrina struck. We saw the data. The U.S. Census Bureau issued updated poverty data showing that 37 million live in poverty--13 percent of our population. Since 2001, 4 million more Americans have fallen into poverty. Nearly 5 million more Americans are without health insurance. And worst of all, poverty is increasing sharply among the working poor, people who have full-time jobs. The Census Bureau's numbers show that over the last year alone, the number of Americans who work but live in poverty increased by 563,000 people--over half a million. Meanwhile, the latest Census numbers show that over the last year, real median earnings fell by nearly $1,000 for male workers, more than $300 for female workers.

It should offend our basic sense of fairness to know there are any Americans working full time, playing by the rules, and still living in poverty. Once again, it is not too late to act. Katrina can serve as a wake-up call to all of us to reorder our priorities, as I said earlier.

Before Katrina, people in the Congress, the leadership, the Republicans in Congress were poised to slash food stamps and Medicaid for the poor at the same time that we were supposed to get a bill to eliminate the estate tax and extend other tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Prior to Katrina, their agenda consisted of coming back here and cutting food stamps, cutting Medicaid for the poor, cutting estate taxes, giving more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Let's hope Katrina has been a wake-up call that these are misordered, wrong priorities. They would have been misordered before Katrina, and they are glaringly misguided in a post-Katrina America. We should be focusing on initiatives that lift people out of poverty, not slashing programs that provide health care and food support to working families.

We must increase the minimum wage, which today is not even a living wage but a poverty wage. We need to increase education and job training opportunities. We need to be making college loans and grants more widely available and cheaper. We need to be strengthening the ladder of opportunity that allows people to achieve their own American dream. We cannot do that if we keep doing what we have been doing--if we keep cutting taxes for the wealthiest of Americans, then turning around and compensating for the deficit created by those huge tax loopholes by slashing food stamps and Medicaid and taking away the prevailing wage for workers in the Gulf Coast region.

I close my statement by, again, calling upon President Bush to do a midcourse correction. I don't know who advised you, Mr. President, to use your pen to cut the prevailing wages for our workers in the Gulf Coast region. Whoever advised you, they were wrong. Now is your time to do a midcourse correction. Tomorrow night, when you address the Nation, Mr. President, tell the American people that you are going to reinstate the prevailing wage for our workers in the Gulf Coast. In fact, give them a premium for all the dirty, hard work they'll have to do. And then don't suspend the act that also provides a prevailing wage for our service workers because they are going to be doing a lot of the hard work also in cleaning up the mess in New Orleans and around the Gulf Coast region.

It would be a terrible thing if we take hard-earned taxpayers' dollars that we are committing to rebuilding the Gulf Coast region, to rebuilding the economy and helping people rebuild their lives--it would be a slap in the face to the American taxpayer if we allow that money to go disparately into the pockets of the executives of the companies that get all the contracts, and in turn cut the wages of the workers who will be physically doing the hard work and the heavy lifting. That is not the America that we want post-Katrina.

Mr. President, tomorrow night, do the right thing: change your course.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate as in morning business.

Mr. President, at the outset, let me praise my colleague from North Dakota for his wisdom and his leadership in addressing an issue this Nation has forgotten for too long a time; that is, the notion of fiscal responsibility and the fact that the

United States of America today finds itself in a fiscal ditch. How we address the fiscal challenges of our future will largely depend on his leadership and the leadership of our colleagues in the Senate to make sure the legacy we pass on to our children is not a legacy of debt that will hang around their necks for generations to come. I appreciate the leadership of Senator Conrad from North Dakota.

Last week I stood before the Senate and said that Congress needed to take a three-pronged approach to responding to the devastation brought to this Nation by Hurricane Katrina. That three-pronged response, from my perspective, required us to do as much as we could to save lives and make sure we were responsive to the victims of Hurricane Katrina; second, we needed to move forward with a Gulf Coast recovery plan to help that part of our Nation recover; and finally, we needed to move forward to address the lessons to be learned from this horrific devastation of a great part of our Nation.

On the first step, this Congress has taken steps in rushing billions of dollars in emergency funding to the Gulf Coast. That funding should help the victims of Katrina begin their long road to recovery.

On the second step, it is my hope that Congress and the President of the United States will move forward and embrace a Gulf Coast recovery plan. As the minority leader has stated over the last several days, we need to have a mini-Marshall Plan that runs the program which will invest billions and billions of dollars in an effort to try to recover the 90,000 square miles of land that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

I commend my colleagues from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and throughout the country. They have been working on developing a plan. They are showing true leadership and taking the primary role in getting assistance to their States. I am working with them and sharing my ideas with them.

I believe a Gulf Coast recovery plan should, in fact, be created and announced soon. That Gulf Coast recovery should require a plan to be developed for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast. It should identify the costs that will be associated with the implementation of that plan, and it should oversee its successful implementation. Finally and very important, that plan should minimize the corruption and waste that might occur where there are billions upon billions of dollars that are being spent in this recovery effort where much of that money is being allocated through noncompetitive bids.

Third, I strongly believe it is important for us as a United States of America to move forward to learn the lessons from this devastation. The independent commission that has been proposed by my colleagues in this body should, in fact, be embraced by the President of the United States and this Nation. When we look at what happened with respect to the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, it is clear to me, as a person who for much of the last decade of my life served as attorney general of the great State of Colorado, that our Nation and our Government failed to protect the lives of people, to protect people and their families, and to protect their property.

It is elemental with any kind of emergency preparedness effort that we must be ready for any emergency that occurs. We must respond to an emergency that occurs, and we must recover from that emergency. It is beyond dispute that this Nation failed with respect to the effort to be ready to address the issues of Hurricane Katrina, and once Hurricane Katrina made landfall we failed again to provide the kind of response that our National Government should have in fact responded.

We need to have this investigation occur so that we can learn the truth and learn the lessons. We need to know why, when the Governor of Louisiana declared a disaster emergency on Friday the 26th of August, it took up to 3 days until President Bush declared the area a disaster area. Why did it take 3 days for that to occur? Why did it take 4 days for the Department of Homeland Security to declare Katrina an incident of national significance--4 days for the Department of Homeland Security to declare Katrina an incident of national significance--5 days before National Guard troops arrived in significant numbers, and 6 days before FEMA took over the evacuation of New Orleans?

These are important questions we need to ask. We need to have some answers to these questions.

The resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown is a step in the right direction.

I also applaud President Bush for taking personal responsibility for the Federal Government's failure in this arena.

Congress now needs to move forward with a full bipartisan investigation into what went wrong. We did it when the 9/11 Commission was created in this Congress and in this Senate. The results of that Commission are now being implemented.

We hope the administration and the majority leadership in the Senate will change their minds and support legislation to create an independent Katrina commission.

Over the last week, we have seen the terrible toll of the worst natural disaster in our Nation's history. The images of devastation and human loss will haunt all of us, and the emerging statistics of the scope of this disaster are overwhelming and continue to date. One million people have been displaced from their homes.

I sometimes think about the town that was nearest to the ranch where I grew up. The place matters in perspective. My town had 1,000 people and probably about 400 residences within that town.

We are talking about 1 million--one-fourth the population of the State of Colorado--displaced from their homes because of Hurricane Katrina. More than 500 people have been confirmed dead, and we yet are counting additional casualties and will not know the final number perhaps for weeks.

With the more than 200 people who died in Mississippi, the more than 200 people who died in Louisiana, or the people who died in Alabama and Florida--the fact is that their deaths should not be deaths in vain; that we should learn from the hurt of this Nation, from their loss of life.

Eighty percent of New Orleans is still underwater today, and much of the Gulf Coast is in tatters. The recovery pricetag--who knows what that may be. Many people are saying the ultimate pricetag for both the response and the recovery will exceed $200 billion.

Yet spread among this despair and destruction we have seen many instances of the greatness of heroism examples of Americans. The great State of Colorado is no exception. Colorado's emergency workers are on the ground on the Gulf Coast participating in the rescue and cleanup efforts and assisting evacuees.

Just this week, two firefighters from Centennial, CO, helped rescue a family of four still stuck in their home in New Orleans. Coloradans, like Americans throughout the Nation, have donated tons of supplies, millions of dollars, and thousands of volunteer hours to Katrina relief. Coloradans by themselves have already given more than $6 million to the American Red Cross.

That is a spirit of generosity and a spirit of community that is fundamental to this Nation.

Colorado has already accepted 1,000 evacuees to the Denver area. To prepare for their arrival, volunteers scrapped Labor Day plans and scrambled to clean and outfit the old Lowry Air Force Base barracks. Since the evacuees arrived, volunteers helped serve food, pass out donated clothes, and drive evacuees around to complete chores.

These examples give us great hope and resolve to begin the long process of rebuilding the millions of broken lives and hearts on the Gulf Coast.

The American people and their generosity and bravery are the strongest tools we have to help our countrymen and women recover from Hurricane Katrina.

To that end, I will today introduce a piece of legislation to nurture that American spirit of generosity and enable more Americans to contribute to the hurricane effort.

The first thing the legislation I will introduce will do is help folks who have generously taken in hurricane survivors into their homes, and to be able to do so in a manner that provides them a tax benefit.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 248,000-plus evacuees are staying at 774 shelters across

the country. This figure underscores the fact that more than 700,000 evacuees are staying elsewhere. An estimated hundreds of thousands of hurricane victims are staying in private homes. In Colorado, at least 600 hurricane victims are staying in private homes. They are staying with family and friends, and sometimes even with strangers.

Right now, a person who writes a check to the Red Cross can get a tax deduction. But people who open up their homes to victims, feed them and help them, do not get a similar tax deduction. That generosity should not be penalized in any way.

My bill would offer a tax credit of a simple $20 per day to help Good Samaritans cover the cost of feeding and keeping evacuees in their homes. That is $20 a day to help Good Samaritans cover the cost of feeding and keeping evacuees in their homes. Households that take in an evacuee would be able to claim up to $900 in tax relief. Households that take in more than one hurricane victim would be eligible for up to $2,000 in tax relief. And low-income families who have no tax liability would be able to receive up to $500 in a refundable tax credit to help take care of hurricane victims. This assistance wouldn't cover all the costs of lending a helping hand, but it would recognize the sacrifice and generosity of folks who open their homes and hearts to Katrina survivors, and they should be applauded by our Nation.

The second thing my bill would do is to raise the limit of charitable contributions for Katrina relief. Right now, the amount of tax deduction an individual can get for charitable contributions is limited to 50 percent of the person's adjusted gross income. My bill would lift the limit for 4 years to allow individuals who can give more to do so.

Americans are aching to help, and this provision would allow them to do just that, and even more. Senators Grassley, Baucus, chairman and ranking members of the Finance Committee, have developed a package of tax incentives to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. I applaud them for their efforts. Their bill also touches on these two issues of offering assistance to households who house victims and extend caps on charitable giving. I commend them for tackling the issue, and I am glad to work with them to include these provisions.

My bill is slightly different in that it offers good neighbors a more generous tax credit as opposed to a tax deduction, and lowers the barriers to low-income families to get help.

We have many challenges ahead, but because we have witnessed the bravery, generosity, and ingenuity of the American people, I am confident that the gulf coast's best days are still ahead.

I will introduce my bill later today. I urge my colleagues to support the bill and take a small step to nurture and encourage the best part of the American spirit and American generosity.

The Pledge of Allegiance

Mr. President, I also wanted to take a minute to address an issue concerning a decision that was handed down by a Federal district judge concerning the Pledge of Allegiance--a decision of the district court judge in San Francisco in which he determined that it was unconstitutional for the public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the classroom because of the reference it makes to ``one nation under God.''

He declared that decision to be one that was founded on his view that such a requirement in our public schools was unconstitutional and in violation of the first amendment. I disagree with the finding of the district court judge.

Last year, as attorney general for Colorado, I joined many of my colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, in making an argument to the U.S. Supreme Court and to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that, in fact, it was constitutional for us to allow our children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and to use the term ``under God'' in that recitation in our schools.

I believe the Ninth Circuit decision back in 2002 was wrong, and I believe the district court judge's decision today is also wrong.

I will later today write a letter to Attorney General Gonzales asking him to participate in behalf of the United States in the appeal of the Federal district court judge's decision, again to the Ninth Circuit, and hopefully up to the U.S. Supreme Court so that we can get a final determination on this issue concerning the Pledge of Allegiance and how it is recited in our public schools.

In my own reading of the Constitution, and joined by most of my colleagues on both the Democratic and the Republican sides of the aisle during the time that I was attorney general, it was our conclusion that, in fact, the Pledge of Allegiance could be recited and that the reference ``one nation under God'' was, in fact, in keeping with the constitutional requirements of the first amendment.

I thank the Chair. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.