A bill to facilitate and expedite direct refunds to coal producers and exporters of the excise tax unconstitutionally imposed on coal exported from the United States.

I ask unanimous consent the amendment be agreed to.

I appreciate the commitment of Senator Ensign and Senator McCain on the issue of border security. They have been aggressive in their commitment and have done a lot of constructive work. I will leave it to the Senate to decide how to handle this amendment.

I make these points for the purpose of fair disclosure. First off, the amendment takes about $360 million out of the first responder program and moves it over to the Border Patrol for the purpose of hiring 1,000 new border agents. That means first responder money would go from $1.9 billion to $1.4 billion.

In addition, the money that will be moved would be money that would go out under threat. In other words, there are two pools of first responder money. There is the money that is distributed on the basis of threat, and there is the money that is distributed on the basis of formula.

Now, the language of the amendment says ``may.'' I respect the decision of the authors of this amendment to use the term ``may'' because that will leave it up to the Homeland Security agency to make the decision as to where the money should go, whether it should stay in the area of first responders or whether it should be moved over to the Border Patrol. That is probably good policy in many ways.

The second thing I think that needs to be noted, however, is the reason we arrived at the number 1,000 that we funded--myself and Senator Byrd--in this bill for new Border Patrol is because when you combine that number with the supplemental, where there were 500 new Border Patrol agents added, you are up to 1,500 Border Patrol agents, and we know, through efforts of our staff and requests of the Department, that because of the facilities' restrictions--we moved most of the training from South Carolina over to

New Mexico--we can only train probably about 1,300 agents a year right now.

Now, this bill has money in it to get those facilities up to a position where they can do a much more robust effort in the area of training. In fact, my hope is next year we can train upwards of 2,500 when we expand these facilities. But right now they have, basically, limits on the number of people they can train. So it is not clear these additional Border Patrol agents would be able to be trained should we want to bring them on line. We do want to bring them on line; it is just a question when we can bring them on line. So that is a concern I think Members should know about.

In addition, the physical effort of hiring Border Patrol agents has become a problem for the Border Patrol. One of the reasons they were not able to hire up to the 2,000, which was originally requested a few years ago, was because they could not find qualified people to meet the enlistment rolls. We are not sure whether they are going to be able to find 1,500 new Border Patrol people. We hope they will. It will put a lot of pressure on them to try to find 2,500 new people, which is what this number will be if this amendment is adopted.

But, again, this is an issue of policy. I think the body has the right to make a decision on this issue. I do not intend to make any points of order against it. I will leave it to the majority of the body to decide where they want to have this money spent and how they want to set the policy on this issue when the amendment comes up for a vote.

I yield the floor.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1155, as Modified

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1201

Mr. President, we are in the process of trying to reach an understanding on votes. It is not clear what that understanding will be, but we do intend to have votes this evening, maybe as many as five. In addition, I understand the Senator from Nevada wishes to be recognized on an amendment. I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have no problem agreeing to this amendment if

the Senator wants to ask unanimous consent for its approval.

I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. President, I send a second-degree amendment to the desk and ask it be reported.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it appears we will be able to begin voting here around 6:30, just for Members' edification. The first vote will be on the point of order relative to the amendment of Senator Dodd, followed hopefully with a second amendment dealing with one of the amendments of Senator Akaka.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I appreciate the concern of the Senator from Connecticut and I know he is working hard in this area, but the response to this amendment is not bureaucratic. The response to this amendment focuses on the fact that this bill, and our efforts as a Nation, must be threat based as we address terrorism.

I was interested today in a quote from Mayor Bloomberg in one of the New York papers. He essentially said if a professional terrorist, whose purpose it was to kill Americans indiscriminately, wishes to attack the transit systems of New York, it is virtually impossible to stop that individual at the site of the attack.

Where do you stop that individual? You stop him by obtaining the intelligence necessary to interdict him before he can attack us. The energy we in this Nation are putting in the area of fighting terrorism is to do exactly that.

One of the primary reasons we are fighting in Iraq, one of the primary reasons we are fighting in Afghanistan, is in order to develop intelligence which will give us the capacity to stop these individuals. These individuals come from that part of the world. One of the reasons we have Guantanamo Bay is to develop intelligence capability. A significant amount of our intelligence capability coming out of that facility is as a result of taking their prisoners, who are bad actors, people who are fundamentally focused on hurting Americans, and getting information from them in a proper way.

One of the reasons we have the PATRIOT Act is to develop the intelligence we need to interdict an attack.

One of the reasons we do profiling is in order to get the intelligence we need to catch these people before they attack us. This bill addresses intelligence. We have significantly improved or are trying to improve with this bill what is our highest risk relative to the capacity of a terrorist to attack us, which is the porousness of our borders.

And so these funds which are being proposed here, $16 billion, which literally represents 50 percent of the entire budget of the Homeland Security agency being put into first responder programs when we already have $7 billion in the pipeline that hasn't been spent yet because the assessments and plans for spending the money haven't been properly prepared, would really be a true misallocation of resources, a true misallocation of resources in our effort to defend ourselves. They simply could not be handled, these types of dollars. The dollars already in the pipeline we have not been able to handle. This bill puts $4 billion into these accounts, and we know that $4 billion will not be out the door as quickly as it should. To put $16 billion on top of that is a political statement but is not going to have a dramatic impact because the system to handle the dollars is not there and lot of money will be wasted. Taxpayers will find that instead of getting more security, what they are getting is dollars that could have been used more efficiently somewhere else, that will have been drained off, and those dollars should be going into intelligence gathering and protecting our borders and to fighting these wars which we are participating in and making sure our military has adequate support in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Independent of that, the amendment dramatically exceeds the budget and is therefore subject to a point of order, which I have made, and the motion to waive has been made by the Senator from Connecticut, and we will have a vote on it.

So at this time, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 6:30 this evening the Senate proceed to a series of votes in relation to the following amendments and the motions where pending; further, that no second-degree amendments be in order to any amendments prior to the vote, and that there be 2 minutes equally divided for debate prior to each vote: The first amendment will be the Dodd amendment, a motion to waive the budget point of order, and the second amendment would be Akaka amendment No. 1112, and on that amendment there will also be a point of order and I presume the vote will be on the motion to waive the point of order since that amendment also significantly exceeds the budget allocation of this committee.

Mr. President, I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Mr. President, I ask that the pending amendment be set aside and the amendment No. 1112 of Senator Akaka be in order.

Mr. President, I raise a point of order under section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act that the amendment by Senator Akaka provides spending in excess of the subcommittee allocation under section 302(b).

I am sorry, I reserve that motion and I guess Senator Akaka is going to send a modification to the desk.

Mr. President, at this point I raise a point of order under section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act that the amendment provides spending in excess of the subcommittee's 302(b) allocation.

It is my understanding that we will now have a vote on Senator Dodd's amendment, on the motion to waive the Budget Act, followed by a vote on Senator Akaka's motion to waive the Budget Act. I should inform Members that we actually are going to have three other votes following those two votes as soon as we line them up. The first vote will begin at 6:30.

I think Senator Akaka wanted time.

Mr. President, I appreciate the work of the Senator from Hawaii. He is always a very positive and effective spokesperson in the Senate for a variety of different issues. He brings this amendment forward. The simple fact is that you can't disregard the fact that there is $7 billion in the pipeline for first responders--$3 billion from the year 2004, $4 billion from 2005--that hasn't been spent. This bill puts another $4 billion into these accounts, so we are not shorting these accounts. One of the reasons the Senate has offered this bill is it takes money from first responders that is not going to be spent in a timely manner, moves it over to Border Patrol where we do need the money, moves it over to weapons of mass destruction where we do

need the money, and that is the priority we set as a committee, in a bipartisan way, because this has been, as I mentioned a number of times, a threat-based bill. This is the first time this bill has been brought forth recently, or ever, really, based on threat, and we determined the threat was weapons of mass destruction and border porousness. The fact there were $7 billion in the pipeline, retaining $4 billion in this account we felt was an adequate amount to fund those accounts for first responders, knowing that down the road we are going to put more money into first responders as it can be absorbed. But to put more in now would mean just holding it, and that money can be much more efficiently used as we propose to use it by adding more Border Patrol agents and detention beds, and more aggressive attempts to fight the use of a weapon of mass destruction against us. So that is why we are opposed to this approach.

Clearly, it breaks the allocation which we have received. Therefore, it would add $587 million to the deficit, which would also be inappropriate, and that is why the point of order lies against it and that is why we oppose it at this point.

I understand we are now on a minute equally divided on the Dodd amendment.

This is $16 billion, $16 billion into an account where there presently is sitting $7 billion in the bank.

We as a nation obviously have a lot of vulnerabilities because we are an open society. I wish we could cover them all. But the simple fact is there is not enough money to cover them all. We need to prioritize. This bill does that. This amendment basically flies in the face of good utilization of the dollars because we simply could not spend these types of dollars if they were appropriated effectively. They may get spent but not effectively, in our opinion.

It is much more appropriate to look at addressing weapons of mass destruction, border patrol, airline security, and to make sure we have in place the proper systems in order to protect the homeland through these assessment programs which are going forward before we put a large amount of money--$16 billion, which would be half the budget of the Homeland Security agency--into new spending initiatives or additional spending initiatives, the $4 billion in the bill and the $7 billion in the pipeline.

The point of order has been made. This is a motion to waive it. This amendment would add $16 billion to the deficit. We do not think it would accomplish what its purpose is.

Mr. President, at this time I call up amendment No. 1172 on behalf of Senator Thomas and ask it be reported.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be agreed to.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1173 on behalf of Senator Hutchison, and I send a modification to the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment, as modified be agreed to.

Mr. President, I ask for the regular order on Senator McCain's amendment No. 1171, as modified.

Mr. President, I send a second-degree amendment on behalf of Senator Hatch to Senator McCain's amendment No. 1171.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the second- degree amendment offered by Senator Hatch be agreed to.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 10 a.m. tomorrow, the Senate proceed to a series of votes in relation to the following amendments or motions where pending; further, that no second- degree amendments be in order to any of the amendments prior to the votes, and that there be 2 minutes equally divided for debate prior to each vote; finally, that the first vote in the series be 15 minutes, with the remaining votes in the series limited to 10 minutes each. The first amendment will be Senators Ensign and McCain second-degree amendment No. 1219; the second amendment will be Senator Schumer's amendment No. 1189; third will be Senator Schumer's amendment No. 1190; fourth will be Senator McCain's amendment No. 1171, as modified, as amended by the Hatch amendment; and fifth will be Senator Stabenow's amendment No. 1217.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1075

Mr. President, I ask for the regular order with respect to amendment No. 1075. It is Senator Voinovich's amendment.

I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be agreed to.

Mr. President, I ask for the regular order with respect to McCain amendment No. 1151.

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

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

Mr. President, I am told that the time has been running against the 15 minutes, and I may have less than that. But if I run out of time, I have been authorized to maybe take as much as 5 minutes off of Leader Reid's time. Hopefully, I will not get to that point.

I rise today to support the Byrd rail security amendment. I know even though the Presiding Officer is new to this body he is aware I have been like a broken record for the past 4 years about rail security. When I look at the clerk, she probably thinks: Here he goes again because I have been talking about this so much since 9/11.

Quite frankly, we have an abysmal record, an irresponsible record, dealing with rail security. For the longest time, we had trouble in 2002, 2003, 2004, up until 2005, getting any traction. We have passed serious rail security bills, including Amtrak, in the past under the leadership of Senator McCain, and Senator Hollings, who was my seatmate for years, who is now gone. The McCain-Hollings-Biden amendment that was passed called for $1.2 billion. We even passed a $1.7 billion amendment. The House and the President seem--I do not know what it is. I just do not get it. I thought that maybe this time around my colleagues in this body would understand that, as my dad, God love him, used to say before he died, if everything is equally important nothing is important.

There are priorities. How there could be anything from a tax cut to even an education program that could take priority over dealing with our homeland security is beyond my comprehension. I do not get it. But obviously we are not prepared to do what I was prepared to introduce, and did introduce the beginning of the week, to add $1.1 billion for rail security, which would have brought the total number for rail security up to $1.2 billion, which was in the bill we passed last time around which would have provided $670 million to deal with security in tunnels and the places where cataclysmic events could take place--$65 million, $4 million immediately to Amtrak to go out and buy canine patrols, put more cops on, put in cameras and detectors, secure the switching stations, and all the things that lend themselves to providing for a catastrophe. The bottom line is I do not have the votes to get that done.

So I joined with Senator Byrd, who has been a leader in this area, in my sincere hope that $265 million for rail security in this amendment, which is one-fourth of the amount passed in the Rail Security Act of 2004 last October, will actually pass.

The positive piece is that although it does not give us a straight line to deal with the long-term security interests of rail, it would give them enough money and all the money they could reasonably spend in 1 year to be able to begin to upgrade our system.

The tragedy in London has focused the Congress and the Nation on rail security again this week, but quite frankly I learned from Madrid. I thought Madrid would be a wake-up call. I thought after Madrid people would say: Hey, Biden, you are right, man. We have a real problem with rail. We should really do something about this.

Nothing, nothing, nothing happened. Now, our closest ally and friend maybe gives us a different perspective on the floor. The Madrid attacks should have done it, but they did not. Our negligence to this point has been inexcusable.

Many of us have been talking about this for years. The bottom line is that nearly 4 years after September 11, over 1 year after Madrid, our rail system is as vulnerable as it was 4 years ago.

I met earlier this week in my office with the head of Amtrak security and all of his attendant folks. I cannot reveal publicly everything I learned, but it is quite alarming. Let me talk about a few things I can reveal. Critics argue that we cannot protect, for example--there are 22,000 miles of rail in this country, and critics say: Joe, you cannot protect all 22,000 miles.

That is a little bit like saying we cannot protect the airlines. We should not have air traffic controllers because we get baggage put in the holds that are not inspected? Now, is there anybody on the floor saying that?

Right now one gets on a plane and the baggage that is put in the hold is not inspected thoroughly like the baggage that is carried on. But is anyone

saying we should not spend the money on TSA to inspect the people going through the gates? Of course not. Let us not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

The fact that we cannot do everything does not mean we do not do anything. That has been the mantra with regard to rail.

As I said, the argument is 22,000 miles cannot be protected, but guess what. We can prevent a Madrid or a London-style attack in the United States. We can make our rail system much safer and reduce the chance of attack because we understand that the terrorists want spectacular, cataclysmic attacks with large body counts in this Nation. Because we know that, we can narrow our focus to critical areas such as stations and tunnels, areas that security experts and common sense, as well as the CIA, tells us are the most vulnerable.

When I first did this 4 years ago, people said, oh, my God; do not point out that the Baltimore Tunnel was built in 1869, has no ventilation, no lighting, no escape, no way out. You are going to alert the terrorists. The terrorists know this. They know all the vulnerabilities. The problem is the American public does not know. So there is not enough pressure put on all of us here to make the right decision.

For example, every day over one-half million people pass through New York's Penn Station. This morning there were more people sitting in an aluminum tube below New York City--aluminum tube meaning a train car-- than in a half dozen full 747 aircraft. Tell me what happens when sarin gas is released there. Tell me what happens when there are a series of explosions that far underground. Tell me what happens if anything remotely approaching a chemical weapon is used. There is no ventilation.

Riding in New York City today in the tunnels one will see construction going on, as it should, with these great big things that look like jet engines being put up in the ceiling. That is ventilation, exhaust. So, if something goes off in the tunnel, 2 people or 20 people die, not 200 or 2,000.

Do you know what the single most visited facility in all of Washington, DC, is? It is 2 blocks down the street. I walk to it every night: Union Station. More people visit Union Station than any other facility in Washington, DC.

Go down there with me, Mr. President, and get on a train with me, as I do every night, and stand on the last car as you ride out of the station. Look; tell me if you identify a single camera. Tell me if you identify any barbed wire fencing around the switching devices. Tell me whether you see any security. Tell me whether you see any guards.

There are a half-million people going through the station at Penn Station, and do you know how many police officers are on duty at any one time there? Twelve. There are 12 in New York, 5 in Union Station.

As I said, if you walk over there with me right now, you will find no real police presence, no fencing, inadequate security cameras, all of which anybody with common sense would say made no sense.

For some reason, there is an animus toward Amtrak in Washington. I kind of figured it out, actually. I think a lot of folks here think that it is a back-door way of funding Amtrak. Otherwise, I can't understand why you wouldn't do this, after the billions we spend on airlines, as we should. I am not talking about Amtrak subsidies here; I am talking about protecting American lives.

In addition to the 64,000 daily riders on Amtrak, there are 23 locations where Amtrak facilities, stations and rails, overlap with transit facilities. In the Northeast corridor, Maryland Area Regional Commuter, has 400,000 daily commuters that utilize Amtrak--400,000 daily commuters on MARC that utilize Amtrak facilities. They walk in the station, get in a car, and it gets on an Amtrak track.

My friend from Rhode Island can tell me more about the transit systems in Rhode Island, and New York Transit, and Long Island Transit, and Connecticut Transit--et cetera. They all use Amtrak facilities.

Amtrak can only pay a starting salary of $31,000 to its police officers, and I cannot pay them more than $38,000, no matter how long they have been there, and they have a 10-percent vacancy rate on the force right now. Most of these positions are in New York and Washington where they need them most, but very little anyplace else. As I stated, in an amendment I proposed to add $1.1 billion for rail security, but the Byrd amendment only comes up with some $240 million right off the bat. We can use it. We can use it desperately. It is my understanding the Committee on Commerce and Transportation is going to mark up a comprehensive rail bill again next week, but we cannot wait for that. We need this $200-plus million right now. The $265 million in the Byrd amendment will provide urgent funding for Amtrak, including 200 additional police officers, 40 additional canine patrols, and improved fencing, lighting, and basic cameras--just basic block-and-tackle equipment that, if we have them, we can save thousands of lives.

The London bombers were identified by an expansive system of closed- circuit television in the London Metro. They have roughly 6,000 high- quality cameras there. We don't have anywhere near that capacity. We need that capacity.

Another area that needs attention is the transportation of hazardous chemicals. We have already voted this down before but, God, we should rethink this. The Naval Research Laboratory was asked what would happen in an attack on a traditional 90-ton chemical tanker. If you look at a train at a railroad crossing, you see the freight rail go by and you see these tankers--not containers, tankers; the whole car is one unit. You see them go. They are about 90 tons.

A 90-ton chlorine gas tanker, having an IED like those that explode in the streets of Baghdad placed under it on a track or under the tanker, exploding in a metropolitan area, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, will kill up to 100,000 Americans. Do you hear me now? One chlorine tanker exploding in a metropolitan area will kill 100,000 Americans. And we have trouble getting Homeland Security to come up with a plan to force these kinds of tankers to circumvent the population areas? Because it costs more money? It costs business more to do that. It costs more in the products we will buy. My Lord, what are we doing?

I might add to my friends in the Congress, when you leave Union Station and you head south to Richmond, you go under tunnels. Do you know what the tunnel goes under? Straight under the Supreme Court and under the House Office Building. If you explode a chlorine tanker underground, under that, you implode the Congress, you implode the office building called the Supreme Court.

If you want to make a statement--again, these are the IEDs, the roadside bombs that are killing our brave soldiers every day in up- armored humvees. There is no camera to detect anybody walking through those tunnels. There is no security. And we sit here like darned fools and say, No, that costs money. That is going to cost us money.

I understand the procedural restrictions will prevent us from considering that bill today, but I think this is a critical issue, one we simply have to address. I am going to be pushing this legislation until the cows come home.

After Madrid and London, we simply have run out of excuses not to act. This Byrd amendment does not solve every problem, but it goes a long way toward dealing with the beginning attempt to prevent catastrophic damage to American infrastructure and American lives. We will never be able to stop someone placing a bomb on a track somewhere along the 22,000 miles of track we have. We will only be lucky, one in three or one in ten times, with a dog getting someone who walks on a train with dynamite or K-2 strapped to their body or carried in their knapsack.

But to use that as an excuse to do virtually nothing, or to use it as an excuse that this breaks the budget--give me a break. We are breaking the budget on the inheritance tax. We are breaking the budget on an additional tax break for the superwealthy. We are breaking the budget on so many less worthy expenditures than homeland security.

There is much more to say, but I know my colleagues, over the last 5 years, are tired of hearing me say it.

I have a prayer, a literal prayer, that I never have the occasion to walk on

this Senate floor and say: We should have done this and we failed.

For God's sake, you guys and women who are going to vote on this, think about it in terms of how will you explain to the American people if something tragic and preventable happens after having voted against measures that, if put in place 4 years ago or put in place now, had a reasonable prospect of preventing it? That is a question I think you have to ask yourself.

I will end where I began, with my dad. My dad used to say:

Champ, if everything is equally important to you, nothing

is important to you.

Every hard decision we make is about priorities. I ask the rhetorical question: What priority is higher than the public safety of the American people in the face of a demonstrable threat that isn't going away?

I yield the floor. I see my friend from Maryland is on the floor.

If the Senator will yield for a comment, the Senator, who lives in Baltimore and has commuted to Baltimore every day for the last 20-some years--more than that, from when he was in the House--he will remember that there was a fire in an automobile tunnel going into Baltimore Inner Harbor a couple of years ago. It shut down all of Baltimore in the harbor region.

Just that fire. Even if there were not a terrorist threat, the idea that we are continuing to have, in and out and under the Baltimore harbor, this antiquated, 150-year-old tunnel, without any reasonable upgrade, is mind-boggling.

If the Senator will yield, I compliment the Senator from Maryland. This is not a mutual admiration society, but he has jurisdiction in the Banking Committee over surface rail, intracity rail, and he has taken care of this amendment. I realize he wanted to reach out further and take Amtrak into this, but he does not have that jurisdiction.

I know.

That is my point.

Mr. President, I will speak to the underlying bill for a moment. I find it interesting in debating this Homeland Security appropriations bill, there have been many colleagues come to the floor expressing the intention to amend the bill to add more resources here or there or someplace else. I think it is instructive that the chairman of this subcommittee has this year determined it is beyond the time that we need to begin fully funding some of the particular accounts that enable us to better control our border and that my colleagues are now coming, I suggest in the case of some later than I would like, but at least to the realization that we have not begun to put the resources to controlling our border and some of our other homeland areas of need that we should have.

This is a good development in the sense that we are finally beginning to realize we have not done what we should do. But I am troubled a little bit that there still is not adequate funding available to do everything we need to do on the border that I am concerned about, and that is our southwest border.

Compliments to the subcommittee and to the Appropriations Committee for substantially increasing the funding for more Border Patrol agents, for more detention space for people whom we have to detain who should not be in the United States and who cannot be returned to their country of origin immediately, for the technology which is funded here, and for all the other things we are trying to do to secure our border. Congratulations to Chairman Gregg and to the other members of the committee for doing this. For my colleagues who would like to add more, I appreciate their efforts as well because we all know that whatever we are able to do this year, it is still not going to be enough to actually gain control of our border.

One of the problems that has arisen is the problem of what the border control calls ``other than Mexican'' illegal immigrants. As we all know, most of the people coming across our southwestern border are from the country of Mexico, but a lot of them are simply transiting through Mexico. This population is of increasing concern to us. In fact, we were recently informed that already this fiscal year over 119,000 third-country nationals, that is third country other than Mexico, have been apprehended crossing our borders. We know there is a rough rule of thumb that three or four are not apprehended for every one that is apprehended, so you get a situation here where it is pretty clear that we have a huge influx of people coming into the United States from countries other than Mexico.

What does this mean? We know most of the people coming in from Mexico are coming for work. Perhaps some have criminal backgrounds or other nefarious purposes, but at least we don't suspect most of them are coming here for purposes of harming us. In the case of these ``other than Mexican'' nationals, the same thing cannot be said because between 20 or 30 of these countries are countries of special interest to the United States; in other words, countries from which terrorists have come. The question is both on the southern and on the northern border, which is equally a problem here, how many of the folks coming into this country from countries other than Mexico mean us harm?

We all know, for example, that in the days of testimony from former DHS Deputy Secretary Loy, advising the Senate Intelligence Committee, that:

[r]ecent information from ongoing investigations,

detentions and emerging threat streams strongly suggest that

al-Qaida has considered using the southwest border to

infiltrate the United States. . . . Several al-Qaida leaders

believe operatives can pay their way into the country through

Mexico, and also believe illegal entry is more advantageous

than legal entries for operational security reasons.

Secretary of State Rice commented later that:

We have from time to time had reports about al-Qaida trying

to use our southern border. . . . [it] is no secret that al-

Qaida will try to get into this country . . . by any means

they possibly can. . . . [t]hat's how they managed to do it

before and they will do everything they can to cross the

borders.

There is at least one specific case of a terrorist having been apprehended coming into the United States.

There is more we can discuss here, much of it involving intelligence, but on both the northern and southern border there is a threat that people could come into this country and we would not be able to stop them. We wouldn't even know they are here. And clearly because of that means of entry as opposed to coming, say, from an airplane from London or another city, you could at least be carrying contraband here that could be detrimental to us in the form of a chemical or biological agent. It is even conceivable you could bring nuclear material in as well.

So the security of our borders is critical to homeland security, yet up to this year we have not had the kind of appropriations necessary to begin making a dent in the problem. I am, again, exceedingly grateful to the chairman this year for seeing to it we are able to get that funding to begin this effort.

One of the concerns about these ``other than Mexican'' detainees I mentioned is that, unlike the case in Mexico where we can simply send people back to the border to be returned, to be repatriated to their country, it is not that easy in the case of people from other countries. Obviously Mexico will not take them because they are not Mexicans, even though they transited through Mexico. So you have to begin a long, drawn-out process of contacting the country of origin and trying to get the paperwork in order to see if you can get the country to take the individual back, to begin that repatriation process. Some countries will not even take their people back. Other countries take a long time. What do we do in the meantime?

Obviously we need to detain those people. So we detain them--right? Wrong. There is not adequate detention space. So we give them a piece of paper and say, Come back in 90 days or 30 days, whatever the time period is, and report in so we can remove you from the United States.

Guess how many of them voluntarily return for removal to their country of origin? The percentages differ, but you get my drift. A very high percentage choose to simply meld into American society and become part of our illegal population here.

That cannot continue. We have called repeatedly on the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a plan to ensure that we can detain these individuals until their time for removal. It has yet to come to us.

One very worthwhile program is called ``expedited removal.'' The chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, testified before my Terrorism Subcommittee recently that it is their intention and hope to begin to expand this expedited removal program to all of the Border Patrol sectors on the southern and southwestern border. There are 20- some sectors, but only two have expedited removal today, the Laredo, TX and Tucson, AZ sectors. Here is why that is important. In most cases the average time to remove one of these detainees from another country is at least 3 months. It is about 90-some days. In the case of expedited removal we can actually accomplish this within less than 30 days, so at least you lessen the time for detention. You cut that in third, by one-third, and therefore if you have to put somebody in a detention space that is federally owned, you don't have to kick somebody else out in order to detain this person. If you have to rent the space from somebody else, it is going to cost you about one-third as much. It costs about $90 a day to house one of these detainees, and you can do that in State and local detention facilities.

The bottom line is we don't have enough of that detention space, so even today people are not being detained. They are being released on their own recognizance, told to come back when the paperwork has been developed with their country of origin so they can be returned.

That is wrong. We have to get the money to detain these folks and make sure we have a policy to do so at the same time we are trying to expand the expedited removal. There is money in this bill for that detention.

Again, I thank Senator Gregg for his alertness to this problem and willingness to put money in against the problem. But I fear the Department of Homeland Security has still not got a plan in place to both pursue the expedited removal for all sectors and, in the meantime, detain those who need to be detained.

If we should have a situation arise, as arose in England recently, in Great Britain, where people have come into the country--in this case they appear to be indigenous to the country itself--but where they have decided to engage in some act of terrorism, and it has been our own fault that we have allowed them to meld into our society illegally, then obviously we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I am calling this to the attention of my colleagues in the hope we can continue to both provide the funding the administration needs and to encourage the administration to get onto the solution of this particular problem as well.

The problem here is multipronged. I think all of us have understood that with the event in Great Britain a week ago, it illustrates to us the kind of harm that can be caused by a conventional kind of attack of terrorists. It doesn't take a major 9/11 kind of attack to create this kind of chaos. Yet it calls into question what we could do to provide total security within our homeland, because a train station, a bus station, other places of public congregation--be they shopping areas, sports events or the like--all suggest it is a virtual impossibility before the fact to provide 100-percent security. It simply cannot be done. That is why you have to try to prevent the problem from arising in the first place.

I will close by noting that part of our effort, in this appropriation bill, in order to control the border itself, is to provide a thousand new Border Patrol agents at the border, also 300 new Immigration and Customs investigators, the new enforcement agents. This bill provides 460 of those. Incidentally, all of these are in addition to numbers provided in the supplemental appropriations bill. So we have added to the number that we already acted on at the end of last year.

We fund over 40,000 positions dedicated to protecting our borders and enforcing immigration laws. To break it down, over 12,000 Border Patrol agents, 18,000 Customs and border protection officers, nearly 6,000 criminal investigators, nearly 1,300 deportation officers, 2,700 immigration enforcement agents and detention officers. We also have money for more training of Border Patrol and immigration enforcement personnel.

We have money to support the deployment of the US VISIT Program, which will help us better track the people who both come into our country and leave the country. We have over a half billion dollars for air and marine operations, as I mentioned before, money for over 2,000 new detention beds for these apprehended illegal aliens, and with the supplemental, that adds about 4,000 new detention spaces for this purpose.

We more than double the number of ports that have our container security initiative, 41 that take part in that, and nearly $1 billion for biological countermeasures. These things, by and large, are in place to try to prevent the capability of the terrorists from pulling off an attack in the first place. They are not responding to an attack after it has occurred. We have to have responses, but our primary goal here should be to take the fight to the enemy, to try to provide the protection going in, because there is no way, once they are in the United States, to protect every bit of this wide-open and liberty- loving society. So it is better to

try to stop them before they get here, and it is better to try to degrade their ability to attack us by taking the fight to them.

That is why later on we are going to get into things such as reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act, on which we just heard testimony, as a critical component in our war on terror and protecting our homeland and other ways in which we can take the fight to the enemy. For now, this appropriations bill provides us a significant capability to stop the terrorists at our border as well as providing some internal protection in those areas that have the highest priority and for which we can get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of protection.

Again, I compliment the members of the Appropriations Committee, particularly the chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security, for their attentiveness to this issue, their willingness to make a significant effort to help fight this battle.

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation when we get to that point.

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

Mr. President, we are about to begin a series of votes. There will be five votes. Many of these votes are on proposals to spend money above the allocations which we have in this budget. That is unfortunate and I think probably not good fiscal discipline or appropriate action.

I do think, however, it is important to look at the underlying bill as to its substance and its implications because I believe, through a bipartisan effort on the Appropriations Committee, working closely with the Senator from West Virginia and other members of the committee, we have been able to put together a bill which responds to many of the concerns that our Senate colleagues and the American people have.

I think if you ask the American people what they most fear relative to terrorist acts in the United States, it is terrorists who get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction. We know if biological or chemical weapons were used or, God forbid, a nuclear device was used in any of our major cities, the damage would be overwhelming. We know from his own testimony that it is Osama bin Laden's intention and the intention of his organizations to obtain those types of weapons and to try to use them against western cultures. Why? Because they are willing to kill people indiscriminately to make their political points. They are people without regard for human life, and they are people who act outside the boundaries of any norm of civilization.

I think if you talk to most Americans, they will tell you they are concerned about our borders. The fact is they read every day in the papers and they see on the streets situations which reflect the fact that people are coming into our country unaccounted for, that we have approximately 3 million people every year who are entering this country illegally, that we have somewhere between 8 million and 16 million people who are in this country illegally, that of the 300 to 500 million people who come across our borders legally, we do not have any idea who most of these people are and what their purposes are.

The vast majority of those people coming into this country legally are coming here to take advantage of America's good lifestyle or our business climate or to visit us and see our Nation, which we appreciate. But a very small percentage, unfortunately, come here with ill intent. And the American people rightly ask, Why is the Federal Government unable to control our borders?

Of course, there is a history to this. We are a nation that has always honored the openness of our borders. I remember growing up in New Hampshire, as does the Presiding Officer. We took great pride as a nation in the fact that people in the northern tier could travel into Canada and people from Canada could travel into the United States at will. They did, and they still try to. They still do, to a large degree.

People along our northern border in the New England region shop in Canada for their groceries. They get their haircuts in Canada. They take their boats up across the Canadian border and go fishing. And the same goes the other way. It used to be historically, until the Canadian dollar got a little weak, that the No. 1 tourist in New England was a Canadian coming down to take advantage of our coastlines or our mountains and enjoy the summer weather.

So this relationship has built up over literally hundreds of years. But now we have to be more vigilant. We know that, and especially along our southern border, where not only are there people coming across the border who are coming here to seek jobs, but there are people coming across the border who wish us ill will.

This bill has attempted to address this issue. We have done it in an aggressive way. As I said, there are 3 million people coming across our border illegally, as this chart shows. Of that group, unfortunately, a large number are not Mexicans. This is the biggest change we are seeing. For the most part, we know most people coming across our border who are of Mexican lineage are seeking jobs. They are seeking a better lifestyle. They are trying to improve their quality of life.

We now also see a large number of people coming across the Mexican border illegally who are not Mexicans, almost 100,000 a year. This is a serious problem for us because we do not know what countries they come from, and we know some of the countries they come from have a history of producing individuals who wish us ill will.

So what we did in this bill is we radically increased the number of Border Patrol agents. We are trying to expand our capacity as quickly as we can in putting feet on the ground on the border. That is what we have done here. We have added 1,000 new agents in this bill. We added 500 in the supplemental. That is 1,500 new agents. That is actually more than the Border Patrol has the capability to train--about 200 or 300 more--but we are putting pressure on them to accomplish that.

We also have increased training facilities so next year we will hopefully be able to add 2,000 or 2,500, and the following year 2,500, and the following year 2,500. Our goal is to increase the number of Border Patrol agents by 10,000 people over the next 4 or 5 years. But we have to ramp up to it. This year we are making an aggressive step in that direction with 1,500.

In addition, we have added over 4,100 detention beds because we know when a Border Patrol agent catches someone who is in this country illegally that, unfortunately, they are having to let a lot of people go or send them out on their personal recognizance. That is not acceptable. So we added 2,200 beds in this bill. We added 1,900 beds in the supplemental. We are ramping up our capacity to hold people here who may be a danger to us.

This bill is focused on threat. That is the purpose of this bill. It realigns our efforts as a Senate to focus the Homeland Security effort on what are the priority threats, the No. 1 threat being weapons of mass destruction. The No. 2 threat is the fact that our borders are so porous.

I appreciate the courtesy of the Presiding Officer and the Senate.

Amendment No. 1219 To Amendment No. 1124

Madam President, this amendment would add to the deficit by $302 million. It exceeds the committee's allocation. More importantly than that--or equally important--the Department cannot spend this money. The Department does not have in place yet the plans necessary to pursue this type of technology.

The administration asked for $40 million in this account. The committee

put $50 million into this account. We believe the first focus should be on pilot security relative to cargo, which is what we are working on right now, and then moving forward with technology which we are also working on, but we should do it in an orderly way, and this amendment would create a disorderly process and, as I said, add $302 million to the deficit.

I hope people will vote not to waive the budget point of order.

Mr. President, I point out initially that this amendment exceeds the budget allocation of the committee and is a deficit spending item. More important than that, the Department of Homeland Security does not yet have the technology nor the pilot programs capable of doing this. They will be pursuing this course of action when they are ready to do this in an effective and comprehensive way, and we will fund it.

Again, there dollars are being put in a problem that there is no solution for at this time. The Department has not asked for money for this because they know they are not capable of handling it yet. We will certainly pursue this activity, if it is appropriate, as the Department gets their pilot programs in place and shows that they can handle this type of program. Right now it is premature. In addition, of course, it is deficit spending.

I hope Senators support the budget point of order and vote against waiving it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the previously agreed to Hatch amendment numbered 1221 be modified with the changes that are at the desk.

Mr. President, I suggest all time be yielded back.

I ask unanimous consent that after this vote, which is the final vote of this group, there be 3 hours to be divided in the usual form to be used concurrently on the amendments; provided further that following the use or yielding back of debate time, the Senate proceed to the votes in relation to the following amendments: Senator Byrd's amendment 1218; my amendment No. 1220, as modified; Senator Shelby's amendment 1205. Provided further that no second-degree amendments be in order and the amendments be prior to the votes.

The time will be divided as follows under the 3-hour agreement: Senator Shelby, 15 minutes; Senator Schumer, 15 minutes; Senator Reed of Rhode Island, 15 minutes; Senator Carper, 15 minutes; Senator Biden, 15 minutes; Senator Sarbanes, 15 minutes; Senator Byrd, 15 minutes; and I will retain an hour.

I yield.

Proceed.

As I understand it, the prior unanimous consent request that I asked for reflects the Democratic leader's time was also agreed to.

Thank you.

Amendment No. 1217

Reserving the right to object.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I have no objection to the request by the Democratic leader.

Mr. President, I understand I have a minute now in opposition to the amendment by the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. President, this will be a $5 billion budget buster. It is $5 billion above the allocation. Just as significant, it is declared an emergency. Now, under the budget rules, an emergency is something that is sudden, urgent, or unforeseen. Clearly, this is not a sudden, urgent, or unforeseen event. In fact, we have spent over $1.8 billion already on interoperability. There are significant dollars in the bill for interoperability.

The problem with interoperability is, quite simply, no one can agree on what the interoperability should be yet. In fact, we spent 10 years trying to reach a regime on this. It is called standard P25. It has not been reached yet. We will continue to put money into interoperability, but this money will be misallocated and misspent if it is put in at this level. And it would clearly add to the deficit by $5 billion.

So I hope people will support the budget point of order to make the point this is not an emergency. Should this point of order be sustained, there may be another vote. We will have to wait and see what the Senator from Michigan wants to do.

Mr. President, I thought the motion was on the emergency designation. The amendment would survive that, and we would need a vote on the amendment. I ask for a voice vote on the amendment.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, we are now proceeding under a prior unanimous consent agreement relative to debate on the three amendments dealing with mass transit and rail. I hope that Members who have time allocated under that agreement will come over and begin the debate. Otherwise, I recommend that the time be equally divided in the quorum call between my hour and the 2 hours on the other side and that the time come off those in the proper proportion.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 1117, Senator Nelson; amendment No. 1118, Senator Nelson; amendment No. 1137, Senator Collins; amendment No. 1108, Senator Lott; amendment No. 1197, Senator Lautenberg; and amendment No. 1194, Senator Nelson, which are at the desk, be called up and agreed to en bloc.

Mr. President, I send a modification to the desk of amendment No. 1111, on behalf of Senator Dorgan, and ask unanimous consent that it be agreed to.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment No. 1113 of the Senator from Hawaii, Mr. Akaka.

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

Mr. President, I rise in support of the fiscal year 2006 Homeland Security appropriations bill. The first fundamental responsibility for our Federal Government is to protect the American people through a strong national defense and effective homeland security. Border security and immigration reform are essential elements of providing for a secure homeland. With that, I am here this afternoon to commend the chairman of the Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, Senator Gregg, and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, for their aggressive and decisive steps forward that are being demonstrated in this legislation.

This bill continues to improve that which made our Nation and our people much safer than we were before and immediately after 9/11. I am proud to serve with the chairman and the ranking member and our colleagues on this subcommittee. We need to do more to improve our border security and immigration enforcement, however. It is important for Americans to understand that this Congress is making significant progress in this area.

Earlier this year, as a result of a Byrd-Craig amendment to the fiscal year 2005 emergency supplemental appropriations bill, we began the process of adding 500 new Border Patrol agents, 1,950 additional detention beds, and approximately 118 additional investigators, agents, and officers to the whole effort at Border Patrol. In fiscal year 2006, the bill that is before us continues to implement and build upon the progress that we have made in the Byrd-Craig amendment.

This bill, as reported by the committee, provides for 1,000 more Border Patrol agents. It increases the total number of beds at immigration detention centers by 2,240 to a total of 22,727.

It also adds 300 new immigration investigation positions and 200 new immigration enforcement agents and detention officers.

This bill, as reported, in combination with the supplemental bill we passed earlier, makes record increases to commit record resources to border security and immigration enforcement.

In total levels of key personnel alone, the Appropriations Committee has provided for 12,400-plus Border Patrol agents; 18,200-plus Customs and border protection officers; 6,000-plus criminal investigators for Customs and immigration work; 1,200-plus deportation officers; and 2,700-plus immigration enforcement agents and detention officers.

In other words, in these positions alone, this bill provides for literally an army of more than 40,000 agents and officers fighting on the front lines for border security and immigration enforcement.

The committee has made an earnest attempt to add resources and personnel as fast as the Department of Homeland Security can absorb them and use them effectively. The bill, as reported, makes available more than $7.1 billion for Customs and border protection, and more than $4.5 billion in immigration and Customs enforcement.

While those dollars and personnel numbers reflect something of our commitment to improve border security and immigration enforcement, it is important to emphasize the work being done and the progress being made for the American people.

More than 1 million individuals a year are being apprehended attempting to enter the country illegally, and formal removals have increased sixfold over the last decade. Worker identification checks have intensified. Development continues on US VISIT--the United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology Program. Personnel are being trained. Technology is being modernized.

This bill calls on the administration, and provides resources to help, to close the gaps at our borders, to improve interagency coordination inside the Department of Homeland Security and with outside agencies, and to meet the challenges remaining from the historic, and massive, reorganization that created the Department.

As I have said, we do need to do more. The Federal Government has no laurels to rest on when it comes to border security or immigration. The problem of illegal immigration has grown

to crisis proportion, with an estimated 10 million undocumented persons now living here in this country.

During much of the 1990s, and at different times in preceding decades, the Federal Government simply paid lipservice to enforcing the law while mostly looking the other way. This was with the quiet complicity of much of the public, in large part, because whole sectors of the economy have become increasingly dependent on the labor of these people. This is an intolerable situation.

Our Nation's immigration system and laws are broken. Whether we are talking about more money, more law, or both, a policy that focuses exclusively on more enforcement is not enough, and it will not work. It is a part of the total picture.

The United States has 7,458 miles of land borders and 88,600 miles of tidal shoreline. We can secure those frontiers well, but not perfectly. As we have stepped up border enforcement, we have locked persons in this country at least as effectively as we have locked them out of the country. Even as we have increased border enforcement, net illegal immigration is estimated at 400,000 to 500,000 a year. Fellow Senators, that is a figure worth repeating. Net illegal immigration in our country still, today, at this moment, in this year, will be between 400,000 to 500,000. To search door to door, as some would advocate, to find 10 million persons and flush them out of their homes, schools, churches, workplaces, and other areas is simply something the American people, in the end, would never tolerate. The question of civil liberties would grow and that effort would fall apart. We fought a revolution once in this great country of ours against search of our homes and, once again, I think the American people would react to that as not only unconstitutional, but dramatically intrusive.

So what do we do? This bill is a major step in the right direction. First and foremost, we secure our borders. As I have said, that is step one. Step two, to me, is we change the law and we change the character of the law to deal with the problem that clearly is at hand; provide incentives for those inside our borders to come forward and identify themselves; laws that ensure there is a supply of legal guest workers to take jobs Americans don't want or won't take. For example, when American agriculture briefly had a widely used legal guest worker program in the 1950s, illegal immigration plummeted by more than 90 percent. That program was called the Bracero Program. It worked well, but it had lots of criticism for the way the foreign nationals were treated inside this country. As a result, it fell apart. We were then given what we have today--a very cumbersome law that no longer works.

Last year, that law identified about 42,000 to 45,000 legal workers for American agriculture. Yet, we know there were well over a million working in this country for American agriculture that were probably illegal. That, too, is an intolerable situation. It is why several years ago I began to look at ways to solve this problem--at least for agriculture--because American agriculture is nervous, and they ought to be; they know that even though those workers who come to them have what appear to be legal documents, the reality is that they are, by 70 percent of their workforce, working illegal foreign nationals. If it is not corrected, it is an intolerable situation for American agriculture to be in.

That story can be played out in a variety of other industries. But as I began to focus on this a good number of years ago, I recognized there was a significant problem that had to be dealt with. It is not a popular thing to do, but immigration and immigration reform is never popular. Those of us who are the children of immigrants sometimes hold the attitude, close the border and let no one in. Yet, today, in the American workforce we know that at a growing high record of employment we still have well over 10 million foreign nationals, undocumented, working in our economy in jobs that Americans oftentimes choose not to work in.

That is why I created the bill AgJOBS, now supported by well over 60 Senators. We got a vote this year of 53 to 45 on a procedural motion to allow that Agricultural Job Opportunity and Benefit Security Act to come to the floor and ultimately work through the process and become law. Other colleagues of mine are working on types of reform.

So what we are doing today with the Homeland Security Appropriations bill is making a quantum leap in the right direction. No immigration policy, no matter how forward-looking, how flexible, and how reasonable it might be to identify those who are in the country, to allow the ebb and flow necessary to meet both the economic needs and humanitarian needs that we are all for--you cannot do it without controlling your borders, without controlling the flow that comes across them. That is what this bill makes a major step in doing.

I am pleased to be a member of the subcommittee and to join with Chairman Gregg and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, whom I have worked with on this issue before. I believe this bill deserves the support of the Senate. If you are for immigration reform, if you believe in controlling our borders, if you recognize this is an issue that has gone well out of control, then you would want to vote for this legislation. Is it a tremendous investment? You bet it is. But it is an investment long coming, because it is the investment we have denied and ignored as necessary to make for well over two decades. As a result of that, we have the consequences of the situation we deal with today.

Now is the time to correct it. Now is the time to reshape immigration policy in our country, and to do so recognizing that it is a two-front issue--both to have the right law in place, and to secure our borders so that those who come across are identified and move across legally and appropriately, consistent with the laws of our land.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.