A bill to authorize appropriate action if the negotiations with the People's Republic of China regarding China's undervalued currency are not successful.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I was not aware that time had to be yielded for the purpose of offering an amendment. I appreciate that, but the Presiding Officer was asking ``who yields time.'' My understanding is a Senator can seek recognition and, therefore, offer an amendment on his own volition.

Mr. President, I offer an amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Dodd, Senator Boxer, Senator Reed of Rhode Island, and Senator Lieberman. I send the amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, this is not a new subject. It is one myself, Senator Dodd, and others have spoken about on the floor, as a matter of fact, in recent days and weeks.

Let me describe briefly that it is, in fact, an amendment that is identical to the legislation we have offered that would create a windfall profits tax on profits of the major integrated oil companies, profits above $40 a barrel for oil, the purpose of which would be to collect that money and rebate it in its

entirety to consumers. Or in the alternative, if the major integrated oil companies are using that money to invest into the ground or to build refineries above ground to expand the supply of energy and, thereby, bring down the price, they would be completely exempt from the windfall profits tax.

If they are using their profits above $40 a barrel for the purpose of buying back stock, ``drilling for oil on Wall Street,'' as I will describe in a few minutes, or for other purpose that will not expand the supply of oil or the supply of energy, then they would be paying a windfall profits tax on profits above $40 a barrel at the rate of 50 percent--a 50-percent excise tax--all of which would come into the Federal Government, all of which would be rebated by check to individuals in this country in order to help pay for the higher cost of energy that individuals are now facing.

This is very simple. This is not a complex amendment. We are not trying to recalculate income or do things that are particularly difficult. The proposition is simply this: Last year, the major integrated oil companies in this country earned the highest profits in their history. The average price for a barrel of oil was $40 a barrel, and at that price the major integrated oil companies had the highest profits in their history.

Now the price is dramatically above that. It has bounced around from $50 to $60 to $70 a barrel, well above the $40 a barrel, and the profits by the major integrated oil companies--and that is all our amendment deals with, the major integrated oil companies--the profits have been extraordinary.

The third quarter profits: $9.9 billion for ExxonMobil. I have a list of a number of them I can show. But the third quarter profits are very substantial--the highest in the history of corporate America. So you have all of this gain by the major integrated oil companies, and then all of the pain on the other side. The major integrated oil companies have all of the gain. Who has all the pain? All the American people who are trying to pay for the price of a tankful of gas or trying to figure out how they are going to heat their home in the winter or trying to figure out, if they are a farmer, how on Earth they can order that next load of fuel so they will be able to go into the field in the spring. How do they pay for all that? That is where all the pain is. You have all the gain on one side, and all the pain on the other side.

Now, we are told this is just a free market. In fact, I had kind of a mini-lecture about that from the president of Exxon, the CEO of Exxon. He came to the Commerce-Energy Committee hearing we had, the joint hearing, and he kind of gave me a short little mini-lecture about the marketplace: This is the marketplace. Interestingly, he did not say: The free market. He said: The world market.

Well, let's think about this for a moment: the world market. For ExxonMobil, $9.9 billion in profits they made just in the last quarter. The world market, he says. Well, let me tell you about the world market. The world market, first, is the OPEC ministers sitting around a table someplace in a closed room talking about production and, therefore, the impact on price. Second, it is the major integrated oil companies that are larger by far than they have ever been because of blockbuster mergers. They all have two names now. It used to be Exxon and Mobil. Now it is ExxonMobil. It used to Chevron and Texaco. Now it is ChevronTexaco. We didn't know they were dating, and they got married. Now, pretty soon, it is going to be ``ChevronTexacoShellExxonMobil.'' It will be all one name. They don't seem to drop any names; they just get bigger and bigger.

So the second part--after the OPEC ministers talk about production and price--is these folks, the major integrated oil companies, that are bigger because of blockbuster mergers and have more raw muscle in the marketplace than they have ever had before.

Third, and finally, we have what are called futures markets. The futures markets are supposed to provide liquidity for trading. Instead, it has become a speculative bazaar, a grand bazaar of speculation. And that then gives us what is called the world price--not a free market price. This has no relationship to either freedom or the marketplace. This is not a free market. What we have is all of this gain and all of the pain on the part of the consumers.

Let me describe a little about what is happening here. Last year, we had the highest profits in our history for the major integrated oil companies. BusinessWeek wrote an article. BusinessWeek is not some liberal rag someplace. We are not talking about some progressive magazine. BusinessWeek is a solid, conservative business magazine. Here is what they say: Why isn't big oil drilling more? Rather than developing new fields of oil, giants have preferred to buy rivals, drilling for oil on Wall Street.

All right. They were talking about last year. Last year, ExxonMobil made $25 billion in net income. They spent almost $10 billion to buy back their stock. Does anybody think that expands the supply of oil? No. No. No. That is an approach that certainly makes the stock options of the CEOs much more valuable. It enhances and enriches the corporation. It does nothing at all with respect to expanding America's energy supply and thereby bringing down prices.

So BusinessWeek says: Why are they drilling for oil on Wall Street? Oil has been over $20 a barrel since mid-1999. That should have been ample incentive for companies to open new fields since projects are designed to be profitable with prices as low as the mid-teens. Nevertheless, drilling has lagged. Far from raising money to pursue opportunities, oil companies are paying down debt, buying back shares, and hoarding cash.

That, from BusinessWeek. Question: If this was the case at $40 a barrel, and oil goes to $60, $65, and $70 a barrel, and consumers bear all of this pain--an increased pain from high prices that in many cases they cannot afford--for a product they must have to drive to work, to heat their homes, to prepare for spring planting, is that fair?

The answer clearly is no.

Will somebody do something about it? Will somebody stand up and say it is time to do something about it? I hope the answer to that is yes.

Just a few headlines. This is from last month: High energy prices lift profits of ConocoPhillips by 89 percent. Its third-quarter profits almost doubled, the first big American company to report earnings for the third quarter. Net income jumped 89 percent.

ExxonMobil, from October 27: $9.9 billion in one quarter, up 75 percent.

From earlier this year: Big Oil's Burden of Too Much Cash. The world's ten biggest oil companies earned more than $100 billion in the year 2004, a windfall greater than the economic output of Malaysia. Their sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the year 2004, more than Canada's gross domestic product.

It goes on to say: ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded company, earned more than $25 billion last year and spent $9.95 billion to buy back its own stock.

I mentioned that earlier, but that, in fact, is the case. At the hearing with the major CEOs of the big oil companies, I asked that question of the CEO of ExxonMobil. These were people that run ExxonMobil gas stations in the Washington, DC-Virginia-Maryland region. September 9, this is titled, ``Finger Pointing Begins As Gas Prices Jump 24 Cents in 24 Hours; Exxon Dealers Say They Are Chafing Under Higher Prices Decreed From Atop; Station Owners Accuse Big Oil Company of Profiting From Impact of Hurricane Katrina.''

That is very important to point out. Hurricane Katrina hurt these oil companies. Oil was well over $60 a barrel before the first hurricane started circulating in the gulf. That is not what got us $60-plus-per- barrel oil. You have gasoline station dealers saying that Exxon was the one that said, through wholesale prices, you must charge 24 cents more in a 24-hour period. They said: What is going on here?

So I asked Mr. Raymond. Well, he wasn't sure that happened. I said: This was a public charge about your company. Didn't you investigate it?

No. We didn't. We might have. I don't know. He wasn't sure.

Let me back up a step to talk about the slightly larger picture and then come back to this question of fairness. We have a serious problem with energy, there is no question about it. This old planet of ours hosts the U.S. citizens in this little part of the planet. There are

about 6.4 billion people who live on this planet as we spin around the Sun. We have a prodigious demand, a huge demand for oil in this little spot called the United States. We suck up--when I say ``we,'' the royal ``we''--everybody sucks up about 84 million barrels of oil every day from this earth. Eighty-four million barrels a day are produced from underneath this earth. We also use 84 million barrels a day on this planet. It turns out that 21 million of that 84 is used right here in this country. This country uses one-fourth of all of the oil that is pulled out of the ground.

Is that going to change? Sure. China now has 20 million cars on the road. By the year 2020, 15 years from now, it will have 120 million cars. Add 100 million cars to the mix and the demand to run something through those carburetors or fuel injectors, probably gasoline, ask yourself, in a planet where you are pulling up 84 million barrels a day and this country is using 21 million, one-fourth of it, and we have a demand that now comes from other countries saying, We want some of that, and by the way, we want to have more vehicles on the road--China, as an example--where does the additional oil come from? We have serious issues and significant long-term problems that we have to deal with.

I have my own feelings about that. I largely helped write the hydrogen fuel cell title in the Energy bill. I have ideas about what we need to do. We need to grow energy in our fields with renewable fuels, ethanol, biodiesel. There are so many other things we need to do, including encourage the transition of hybrid cars as we move toward a hydrogen fuel cell future. All of those things I will discuss at greater length at some other time. But at the moment, we live now. We can talk about the longer run. John Kenneth Galbraith used to say, in the long run, we are all dead. But we go into this winter, as consumers in this country, confronting a fuel bill that has dramatically increased over last year, and then reading in the newspaper in the morning, wearing a sweater in a home that you have to keep a couple of degrees cooler in order to afford to heat your home, that ExxonMobil has a 75-percent or 89-percent profit or all the majors are showing massive profit increases. So while they sit there fat and happy, racking up the profits, everybody else is trying to figure out how they pay the price. How do you scrape up the money to heat the home, to fill the car, to fill the tanks so that your tractor and farm equipment is ready in the spring?

People say: Well, if that is a problem for you, that is tough luck. There are a couple of economists writing in recent days--I won't name them--who can tell us everything about the future but can't remember their home phone number. You know the type. They are telling us what will happen here is if people can't afford to pay the cost of energy, it will force them to conserve more. Easy to say for one of these economists who drive around town in their Volvo or Mercedes cogitating about the future. What about the people who have to use a car to drive to work, have to fill the tank with gas but don't have the money to do so, or the people who understand they live in the northern part of this country where we have tough winters and they have to pay the heating bill and it costs a lot of money and they don't have it? What about that?

Senator Dodd and I have offered a proposal. It is widely reviled by the major oil companies. I understand that. For them, it is the hog rule: Give us what we want, we want everything, and what you don't get doesn't matter to us. After all, energy is not something that is like every other commodity.

I did an interview with a radio person the other day, and he said: If you are going to have a windfall profits tax with respect to oil profits above $40, what about a windfall profits tax on the shares of Google? I said: Do you drive up to your gas station and say, Fill it up with Google? Gasoline is different. Gassing up your car, providing natural gas or home heating fuel for your home is different. It is a necessity. Everybody needs to do it. It is part of what we are as Americans. It is the way we live. In the long term, we have to make some changes, maybe so. But in the short term, we live now at a time when the major oil companies are exhibiting the highest profits in their history, and everybody else is trying to figure out how on earth to pay the bills.

Senator Dodd and I put together the simplest possible plan. We have said: If oil continues at this level, understanding that last year, at $40 a barrel, they had the highest profits in their history for the major integrated companies, we say, for the major integrated oil companies, if the price of oil is over $40 a barrel, we believe that is a windfall profit having nothing to do with fairness or the free market. If the oil companies, however, use that extra money to sink back into the ground for exploration and drilling or to build refineries above ground, to do the things that would expand the supply of energy and thereby reduce energy prices, our proposal will not impact them at all. They will not be taxed. We still don't like the prices, but it won't affect them. They are doing the right thing to expand the supply of energy, which will ultimately bring down the price of energy. But if they do not do that--and they are not; they are buying back their stock, hoarding cash, drilling for oil on Wall Street; they are not doing the right thing--then they would be subject to a 50-percent excise tax on those windfall profits above $40.

Senator Dodd and I, unlike others, would not suggest we bring that money into the Federal Government and let it rest here. We suggest that money be brought here and sent out immediately in its entirety as a rebate to the consumers of this country who are paying the bills. They are the ones who are hurt. They are the ones from whom these profits came. They are the ones entitled to have the rebate, if the oil companies are not going to use those profits to expand the supply of our country's energy and oil.

This is a hard proposal to misunderstand. Let me just say, there are many who have deliberately done so. Yesterday, a study came across my desk that appeared to have been paid for by an entity called Investors- Shareholders Alliance. Actually, I Googled them on my computer to find out who on Earth this is. But they have been able not to leave traces, even with a Google search. But I don't need to know who they are without understanding who funded that study. That study purported to evaluate a windfall profits tax by number, which was our bill, and the two authors of the study had not bothered to read it, misdescribed it, and analyzed it in a way that was dishonest.

So the press people called me and asked for my reaction. I said: It is a complete joke, perhaps a Ph.D. joke. These people have really big degrees and tiny glasses and think they are pretty smart. It is just that they forgot to read our legislation because they evaluated something else and attached our number to it. I am assuming that was paid for by the big oil companies. God bless them. They have plenty of money. They will have lots of money to defend themselves against this proposal that we offer today.

I wish no ill will toward the oil companies. I don't. That is not the purpose of this. We produce oil in my State, and I have done plenty of things to be supportive of those who really want to expand America's energy supply and drill for oil. But when I see $65-a-barrel oil and I see people who can't afford to pay the price struggling to figure out how to live day to day, putting gas in the car and heating homes, and then I see record profits announced every single day in the newspapers, I say something is wrong, something is disconnected. It seems to me it falls on the shoulders of this Congress to stand up and do something about it.

On this vote, the question is, Who do you stand with and who do you stand for? We have separate interests, the interests of the largest oil companies who would like even higher profits. When one person said to me, Well, why is it a windfall at $65 a barrel, I said, Let me ask you a question. What if it were $165 a barrel? Would you think that was too much, or doesn't that matter to you?

At $40 a barrel, I would say, finally, last year the major integrated oil companies, larger by far than they have ever been because of blockbuster mergers, made the highest profits in their history. Now they have dramatically expanded those profits at the expense

of American consumers. I believe it is unfair. Our amendment would at least begin down the road to try to do something about it. I am pleased to have offered the amendment with my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd.

I yield the floor so he may amplify on my comments.

Mr. President, will the Senator from Utah yield for a question?

Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator from Utah will yield on that point.

I say to the Senator from Utah, I have 20 minutes left, and I will use them after the Senator from Utah is completed. It may take all the 20 minutes to correct the errors of his presentation.

Almost all of it was wrong.

I asked if he would yield for a question. I will ask one simple question.

I wonder if the Senator from Utah has seen the chart I used on the floor that comes from BusinessWeek, not a progressive rag or a conservative business journal, that says this about the major oil companies which the Senator defended so aggressively at the moment:

Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have

preferred to buy rivals, drilling for oil on Wall Street.

While that makes financial sense, it is no substitute for new

oil.

They are the ones saying the oil companies are not using these profits to drill and build refineries. They are the ones saying it, not us.

Yes. How do you justify what you said with what is in the BusinessWeek article, and virtually everyone else knows that they are buying back stock, hoarding cash, and drilling on Wall Street?

Mr. President, I object. We are on an amendment on the reconciliation bill.

I ask the Senator to make his unanimous consent request.

Did he not just ask for time in morning business?

Mr. President, this has been entertaining, if not enlightening, to see my colleague get a full tank of indignation in almost a nanosecond, on two subjects in fact. Let me cover the first at least.

My colleague is a good-natured fellow--I like him--my colleague from Utah. In fact, he didn't get angry at me one day some years ago in a full-scale debate when I said to him, if there were an Olympic event for sidestepping, he would win the Gold Medal by far. In fact, he demonstrated that agility again today by sidestepping this point. The center of our colleague's agitation was he said: You cannot produce any more oil because those leftwingers, those environmentalists, will not let you do it.

So I ask, well, how does one explain this then? The Wall Street Journal says the major oil companies are drilling for oil on Wall Street. They are paying down their debt, buying back their shares, and hoarding cash. That is what they are doing with their money. How does one explain that? Did not hear anything, did we? No explanation.

My colleague said he was sick--he said three times he was sick. It is interesting, I suppose I have felt sick about some debate on the Senate floor over these years. I do not think I have ever admitted that, but I would much prefer to see a colleague of mine agitated about the price of energy in a full-scale agitation about what this is doing to consumers, agitated about what it is going to do when somebody on a fixed income cannot figure out a way to heat their home this winter. I would much sooner see a colleague agitated about that than having just come fresh yesterday from, as he described, a meeting with a major oil company, come to make the case for the major oil companies on the Senate floor, and say: You know what the problem is in this country? It is those populists dripping with venom--that word ``populists''--those leftwingers, those environmentalists on this side of the Chamber, they are what is wrong with this country.

Let us see if we can peel back a little bit and expose the truth, if I might. My colleague says those environmentalists and those leftwingers have shut down all of these refineries. Oh, really?

No, that is not true. Take it from me, that is not true. By the way, if my colleague would like to come back to the floor of the Chamber at some point, I would love to have a wide-open debate. Let us just talk back and forth and figure out where the facts are.

Let me give a few facts about refineries. I will not read them all, but I could. Do my colleagues want to know the names of the refineries that were shut down in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000? Do my colleagues want the names of the refineries? I will give names of refineries, and when I tell the names of the refineries I will say who shut them down. The oil companies shut them down.

Now, they did not do that so somebody could come to the Senate floor and blame somebody else. They did it because they were approved for big mergers. They became bigger and bigger, and they decided to shut down refineries. Why? They wanted to tighten

the refining capacity and therefore increase margins. And they have done it.

I will not say I get sick about somebody coming to the Senate floor to blame others for the oil companies shutting down refineries. But do I think it is fair, and do I think it is truthful? Absolutely not. The evidence is exactly the opposite of what my friend from Utah said. He has a right to say it, and he even has a right to say it with a full tank of indignation. That does not make it right. The American people need to know the truth about these issues.

Shutting down refineries has, in fact, occurred in this country. Why? Because as the oil companies merged and merged and became bigger, they were shutting down refineries. And I will read the names if anyone would like me to. But my colleague has gone and will not be interested in these names, I guess. I would be happy to yield.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. These record profits, the highest profits in history, are accompanied, by the way, in most cases--let me give an example. Exxon reports a 75-percent increase in net profits to $9.9 billion and they produced 5 percent less oil and gas at the same time.

Part of that was due to the hurricane. But the company admits that even without the hurricane, they would have produced less oil and gas at the same time they had the highest profits in history. How does that square with what our colleague from Utah said? What our colleague from Utah said is not accurate. It is not. He said it with great conviction, he said it with great agitation, and it is wrong. Flat wrong.

There are plenty of other things to talk about with respect to this issue. Our colleague raises the suggestion that we can't drill anyplace. You can't drill anyplace.

Look, I support drilling in Lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico. The only place he was accurate about was the issue of ANWR. Do I think we should drill in ANWR as a first resort? The answer is no. I think it ought to be the last resort if we ever drill there. We have people on the floor who want to open up all these pristine places, especially ANWR, that we have set aside and let's drill. Katie bar the door, drill anywhere. We have set ANWR aside, but there are plenty of places I think we ought to drill.

This was one of the most partisan rants I have heard for some while on the floor of the Senate. We are used to it. The minute you offer an amendment that does anything to a particularly large industry, I am telling you we have people coming through these doors saying, Who do I stand for? Let me stand for the big interests here.

My colleague said he met with a major oil company executive yesterday. Good for him. As I said before, I don't bear ill will toward the major oil companies. But I wish he were as agitated about the impact of these prices on America's consumers. He is not. He has raised a lot of questions about why the oil companies are not producing more oil, why prices are where they are. The fact is, point after point after point has been inaccurate.

I say to my colleague with respect to Exxon, let's take Exxon. He says the problem is these Senators and all the environmentalists and all the others prevent them from drilling.

What did Exxon do last year? They made $25 billion and used $9.9 or $10 billion to buy back their stock. How does he square that with what he said to the Senate? He is flat wrong.

Sigmund Freud had a grandson named Clement. I was thinking about it, as my colleague was supporting the major oil industries' profits tonight. Clement, Sigmund's grandson, said this: ``When you hit someone over the head with a book and get a hollow sound, it doesn't mean the book is empty.''

We have offered a proposal here in the Senate that has great merit. It has been misdescribed by the oil industry for reasons I understand-- I am talking about the major integrated companies--misdescribed by our colleague from Utah tonight as something that would reduce the supply of oil. In fact, the single largest incentive that would exist for expanding the supply of energy in this country would be our proposal because the major integrated oil companies would have a choice. They can either use these windfall profits above $40 a barrel to sink back into the ground, exploring for oil, or building refineries. They can either do that, and therefore be exempt from the windfall profits tax we propose, or they can choose to pay a 50-percent excise tax on the windfall profits--one of the two. Which would you choose? There is no question what you would choose. You would choose to expand the supply of energy and reduce energy prices as a result. That is the incentive in our piece of legislation. That is why it makes so much sense and it is why I was sitting here gritting my teeth, listening to the caricature of this legislation offered by my colleague from Utah and the spirited defense of the highest prices in history by the major integrated oil companies and the disparaging comments about the efforts to see if we can give some relief and give some help and stand on the side of consumers.

I chaired the hearings on the Enron scandal several years ago in the Commerce Committee. I had a lot of people there under subpoena, understanding what they did on the west coast with price manipulation.

I must say this issue of pricing, pricing of energy is critically important because this is not some luxury item. This is a necessity for every family, for their daily needs. We need to get this right. The question is, when we vote on this: Who do you stand with and who do you stand for?

Let me yield some time to my colleague. How much time remains on our side?

Let me yield 8 minutes to my colleague from Connecticut.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Let me yield myself 4 minutes. I want to reserve 4 minutes. But let me make a comment. I agree with my colleague from Connecticut. Spirited debate is fine on this floor. I didn't like the representation that was made by our other colleague that somehow what we were proposing here is not only unworthy but part of some cabal that is trying to injure this country and, second, using information that is simply not accurate.

The refineries have been closed by the oil companies, not environmentalists. That is a fact. What has happened is when they merged, they closed refineries in order to restrict supply and boost the yields of the refineries. The fact is, we had experts come in. I am talking about experts, I am not talking about politicians. The so- called experts came to the committee. We said, Why are refineries closing? One reason, because their yields are too low and the major oil companies are closing them. That is exactly the case.

My colleague from Utah talked about tax breaks he had sponsored for the oil industry. He talked about yesterday he was visiting with an executive of the big oil industry--which is fine. He talked about the price they pay in Europe, $3 or $4 a gallon. The interesting thing is in Europe the money between the cost of oil and the $3 or $4 a gallon doesn't go into the pockets of the oil companies, it goes to build infrastructure in Europe. They collect it in taxes and use it to invest in the infrastructure of Europe.

But I think it is important to point out what happens here on this floor. When you offer a proposal such as we offered, it doesn't matter if it is the tobacco industry or pharmaceutical industry or oil industry, we will have people trot through these doors of the Senate and rise to the defense of the pricing policy of the pharmaceutical industry or rise to the defense of the pricing policy of the oil industry. I will ask this. If you are going to get agitated in this Chamber, get agitated about something worthwhile. The agitation ought to be on behalf of some families who are trying to figure out how on Earth will I pay the bill? As I read in tomorrow's paper of the largest profits in the history of this country coming into the treasury of the oil companies, how am I going to pay a 50-percent increase in the bill to heat my home? You want to get agitated, get agitated on behalf of those folks and help us do something.

This notion of partisan blame, coming to the Chamber and ignoring the substance of a proposal and then casting partisan blame, in my judgment is a little tired and a little old. This proposal stands on it own merits. If you don't like it, that is fine. I understand that. Vote against it. But don't suggest somehow you are on the side of the consumer if your interest here on the floor of the Senate is to come and stand with the big oil companies, and to believe that profits above $40 a barrel is fine. It is not. It is not fair.

We believe one of two things should happen: Either it all ought to be sunk back into the ground or above ground for exploring for oil and building refineries and expanding America's supply of energy and bring down prices, or it ought to be recaptured and sent back as a rebate to the people in this country who are having trouble paying their bills, as a rebate to every American using energy.

That is our proposal. Controversial for some? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do for the American people? I believe it is, and I hope this Congress, I hope this Senate will as well.

I yield the floor and I reserve the remainder of my time.

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 commend my colleagues from New York and South Carolina. This is an appropriate way to handle this issue. Clearly China pegging their yuan to the dollar has caused immense dislocations. It is also fairly clear that a 27-percent tariff on Chinese products coming to the United States is an untenable position and it would not be the right action for the United States Congress to enact legislation which would enact a 27-percent tariff on Chinese goods coming into the United States that, in effect, is a 27-percent tax on products that American consumers would otherwise be purchasing.

Having said that, it is a problem--that is, the Chinese failure to let their currency float. They did let it float a little bit by a couple percentage points not long ago, but most all observers agree that is not enough. To some degree, this issue is tied to Chinese banking reform. Chinese financial institutions have asked the United States and other countries for advice on how to reform their system. There are too many nonperforming loans in the Chinese banking system, which is related to China's inability thus far to let its currency valuate totally freely. There will come a time--and the time is probably sooner rather than later--when this will become an issue and it will come to a head.

Right now is not the time. The Finance Committee clearly takes this issue very seriously. We in the Finance Committee will pay great attention to the degree to which this measure, the Schumer-Graham amendment, should be taken up and passed or modified before reporting it to the floor. Waiting until the end of March of next year certainly is appropriate.

I say to everyone concerned with this issue, we will act in time, and hopefully it is a time when it is an accommodation rather than a confrontation. It is up to both sides of the Pacific, frankly--China and the States--to recognize that we have to get a resolution here. We are two great countries. It is by far better for each country to gauge each other appropriately with eyes wide open. It is not appropriate for either country to sort of stiff-arm each other.

We are here. We are on the world scene. China is on the world scene. China has a huge interest, of course, in China's development but also a huge interest in the stability of the U.S. economy. And vice versa; we do, too, in China.

I urge real leadership in both countries to try to find a solid resolution so we can avoid confrontation. I again thank my friends from New York and South Carolina for their statesmanlike approach to this; namely, not pressing the issue abruptly but rather agreeing to postpone, until March 31, the next deadline.

Mr. President, I would like to turn to the bill before us. The Book of Proverbs counsels: ``Do not quarrel with a

man for no cause.'' One might rephrase that for modern times: ``Know when to take `yes' for an answer.'' That is how I feel about this tax bill before us today.

Last Tuesday, when the chairman of the Finance Committee gave notice of his intention to hold a markup on the tax reconciliation bill, I thought that we were going to have a knock-down, drug-out fight over capital gains, dividends, and the budget deficit. Now it appears that we are going to have an entirely different debate.

When Chairman Grassley first raised the issues of this tax bill with me, I told him: If you take capital gains and dividends out of the bill, I can support it. And the chairman and now the Finance Committee have taken capital gains and dividends out of the bill. And now I do support it. I am willing to take ``yes'' for an answer.

I am gratified that the chairman and the committee have chosen to forgo the capital gains and dividend provisions that they once contemplated. That is a fundamental change. And from this side of the aisle, that is a welcome change.

The job of a committee chairman is a large part of brokerage job. A committee chairman tries to do the most that he can with the votes that he has. I compliment the chairman of the Finance committee for being among the best at counting the votes. And I think that the bill that the Finance Committee brings before us today represents the moderate consensus of the Senate.

For many reasons, the bill before us today is not all that I would have preferred. It is not always the case, as with any Senator. I would have preferred that we had handled this tax cut legislation outside of the reconciliation straightjacket. I would have preferred that we had done more to address the immediate needs of the people affected by the hurricanes that ravaged the gulf States. I would have preferred that we had done more to address active financing, the provision that we have to help our companies be competitive with companies overseas. And I would have preferred that the committee would have paid for the tax cut in this bill. It is not appropriate by any stretch of the imagination that we add to the deficit rather than not adding to the deficit.

But I know that the chairman and the majority leader would have preferred that the votes had added up a little differently in other ways. That would have been their preference. I gave my preference. They, their preference. Neither of us prevailed.

There are many good things in this mark. Extension of the R&D credit is crucial for American businesses to remain competitive. The devastated Gulf States desperately need the help to rebuild that is in the mark. And I appreciate the work that was done to extend the tax provisions that we all know need to be extended. This is the business of the Finance Committee, to make sure that these extensions are extended so there is no cutoff date which causes a lot of problems for people trying to plan, trying to determine what the future is. That is also the business of the Senate.

The bill before the Senate today thus advances what we have in common. It avoids a massive quarrel.

Later, we will need to resist the fiscally irresponsible road down which the House of Representative seems headed. If the conference reports comes back to the Senate with capital gains and dividends it is, we will be back to a different bill. And will be back to the knock- down, drag-out fight we have thus far avoided.

I am pleased that we have a bill before us without capital gains and divided tax cuts it in. I am pleased that we received ``Yes'' for an answer. ``Proverbs'' is something I think we should listen to from time to time. And as a result, I look forward to fewer quarrels on this bill over the balance of the week.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. I will ask the quorum call be equally charged to both sides.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent it be charged to both sides.

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from North Dakota for purposes of offering an amendment.

Parliamentary inquiry to the Chair.

Mr. President, I would just like to know how much time has been yielded to the Senator from Utah, as well as how much time is remaining on the amendment offered by the Senator from North Dakota.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Hatch are printed in today's Record under ``Morning Business.'')

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum be rescinded.

Mr. President, in 1882, an Irish immigrant named Marcus Daly set off an explosion that shook the world. It happened 300 feet under the ground, near Warm Springs Creek, 26 miles west of Butte, MT. When the dust settled, Daly saw before him the shiny ore of the largest copper deposit ever known.

The rich copper vein transformed the American economy. It made America the world's largest copper exporter. And it inaugurated an economic boom for my home State that lasted for decades. It also enriched many parts of America.

Thousands of immigrants made the boom happen. They came from Ireland and Italy, Canada and Scandinavia, Serbia and Croatia, Greece and Syria. They came to America to find work in the new mining town, christened Anaconda. By 1900, immigrants made up 40 percent of Anaconda's population.

These new Americans formed the backbone of the mining economy. And their descendants have woven the colorful fabric of Montana.

Immigrants helped build the American economy. In the 1850s, hundreds of

thousands of young Chinese men helped construct the Transcontinental Railroad. At the beginning in the 1870s, Basque shepherd immigrants helped shape the western ranching economy. Beginning in the 1890s, hundreds of thousands of Norwegian farmers lay the foundations of a competitive farming economy in Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakota territories. And in the first decades of the 20th century, more than 100,000 Jewish immigrants created New York City's famous garment industry.

Immigrant entrepreneurs and innovators revolutionized the American economy. Scotsman industrialist Andrew Carnegie transformed the American steel industry and consolidated the Nation's railroads. Hungarian Joseph Pulitzer produced a legacy in newsprint. Polish-born producer Samuel Goldwyn left his mark on film.

Once-foreign names became American household brands. Russian-born Max Factor made makeup. Bavarian-born Levi Strauss manufactured clothes. Hessian-born Adolphus Busch brewed beer.

And today, immigrant innovators still populate the cutting edge. Moscow-born Sergey Brin helped found Google. Taiwan-born Jerry Yang founded Yahoo. French-born Pierre Omidyar founded eBay. And Hungarian- born Andy Grove founded Intel.

America remains a nation of immigrants. More than 33 million people living in America were born abroad. More than 9 million came to our shores just between 1990 and 2000.

Since colonial times, immigrants have been vital to the American economy. Their skills and their labor have made our companies, our industries, and our economy more competitive.

Some immigrants come with little more than their strength and ambition. They become our economy's machine operators, factory workers, farm laborers, and service workers.

But many come with master's and doctorate degrees. They work in research laboratories and universities. They sharpen our economy's cutting edge.

This is my seventh address to the Senate on economic competitiveness. Since summer, I have highlighted the importance to competitiveness of education, international trade, healthcare, national savings, and energy, all components we must focus on to make our country more competitive so we have better high-paying jobs and more paying jobs for more Americans. Today, I speak about immigration and economic competitiveness.

Immigrants make our economy more competitive in at least four ways.

First, immigrants provide labor. Marcus Daly needed workers to dig his Montana copper mine. Similarly, today's booming industries require global talent.

Without foreign-born workers, the largest economic expansion in our Nation's history would not have been possible. In the boom years of the 1990s, the labor force grew by nearly 17 million workers. Nearly 40 percent of them were born abroad. Most of these immigrants came when unemployment was at record lows. They filled 4 out of 10 job vacancies, often in regions short on workers, and often in jobs that natives had no desire to fill. Had these immigrants not lent us their strength, our economy would surely have faltered.

Second, immigrants help balance the budget. Tally up taxpayer-funded benefits to immigrants--education, healthcare, social security--and match those costs against what immigrants pay in State, local, Federal taxes. On balance, each immigrant provides a net benefit to the American economy of about $90,000 in taxes over a lifetime. Overall, immigrants contribute $15 billion to our economy every year.

And immigrants will make an important fiscal contribution as the baby boom generation retires. In just 5 years, the number of Americans approaching retirement will increase by nearly half. Most new foreign- born immigrants, on the other hand, are between 10 and 39 years old. And immigrants are likely to have more children than the U.S.-born population.

These younger workers will help fund the coming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefit payments. Immigrants bolster the deteriorating ratio of workers to retirees. Immigrants provide a shiny vein of ore in a graying economy.

Third, immigrants push the envelope of innovation. Foreign students earn more than a quarter of the Nation's science and engineering degrees. They earn more than a third of science and engineering doctorates. Most of those are in computer sciences and electrical engineering. Foreign students account for as many as four out of five doctoral students in a number of highly-ranked universities. And foreign students bring $13 billion a year to our economy in tuition and fees.

Foreign students' minds help sharpen our economy's cutting edge. Foreign student researchers support work on new medicines, software, and other innovations. Universities patent this research. A 10 percent increase in the number of foreign graduate students would increase patents granted by more than 7 percent.

Patents mean new inventions. Inventions mean new products. And new products mean new profits and new jobs.

Just as important, nearly three-quarters of highly-skilled students stay in America. Instead of taking their skills home and using them to compete with us, they join highly specialized professions in research and academia. They contribute their knowledge to our economy.

At IBM Research and Intel, for example, foreign nationals make up about a third of high-level researchers. At the National Institutes of Health, foreign-born workers make up about half of researchers. In America's top immigration States, foreign-born workers account for 40 percent of teachers and more than a quarter of physicians, chemists, and economists.

Fourth, immigrants drive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the irreplaceable genius that sparks economic growth. For every famous immigrant entrepreneur like Hungarian financier George Soros or Belgian designer Liz Claiborne, legions of other immigrants push the limits of the economy, or simply provide a neighborhood service.

For more than a century, immigrants have been more likely than native-born Americans to be self-employed entrepreneurs. Since the 1970s, immigrants have helped reverse a national decline in self- employment. Immigrant-run businesses create jobs, tax revenues, and growth. Even small neighborhood businesses can revitalize entire neighborhoods. And small businesses are the primary driver of new jobs.

Immigrants also swell the ranks of high-technology entrepreneurs. Most of the foreign-born scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley have helped found or run a start-up company. Sixty percent of Indian scientists there have participated in start-ups. And fully three- quarters of Indians and most of the Chinese scientists there have plans to start a business. These entrepreneurs are thinking about tomorrow's economy today.

Immigrants devote their labor. They boost our balance sheets. They drive innovation. And they energize entrepreneurship. Immigrants are vital to our economic competitiveness.

Unfortunately, America is not welcoming global talent and labor. In some cases, we have pulled in welcome mat.

State Department visa procedures and security checks intended to keep out terrorists are instead keeping out talent. In the post-September 11 world, America must vigilantly protect its borders. But we must also strike a balance between this vigilance and economic health.

Look at the case of foreign students who want to study at American universities. In 2003, foreign applications to American engineering doctoral programs fell by more than a third--with Chinese applications dropping nearly in half. Despite considerable efforts to reverse this trend, total foreign graduate school applications declined further last year, by double digits in some cases. This year, the number of international students entering American graduate schools finally held steady, despite a 5 percent drop in applications from foreign students.

The decline in applications is not an anomaly. It is a clear trend. At the same time, our economic rivals are actively attracting the world's brightest. Canada doubled its foreign student enrollment last year. And South Korea will triple its foreign student enrollment by 2010.

We unfortunately have also closed the door on talented workers who drive

our companies' competitiveness. Our leading high-tech companies-- companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard--are imploring Congress to raise the cap for visas for highly-skilled workers--known as H-1B visas. These visas are capped at 65,000. That limit is so out of line with demand that we reached the 2005 cap months before 2005 began.

Today's visa and immigration restrictions also make it difficult for major American companies to employ and train their workforce.

Take this example: A global American entertainment company with headquarters in New York hired Indian managers to run its Bangalore office. The company wanted to train these new hires to company standards, as it does with all employees. The company wanted to send the new hires to New York to receive this training, as it does with all management. The company applied for visas on behalf of its soon-to-be Indian office managers.

What happened? The company filed the paperwork. Months came. Months went. It took 3 months just to get an appointment at the U.S. Embassy. Delays continued. Patience wore thin. Costs mounted, with untrained managers on the payroll. And the company finally gave up.

The company applied for visas to Ireland, where the company had its European branch. The visas came in 4 days. The company trained these new managers at the company's facilities in Ireland, and then sent them back to India to work. This created jobs in Ireland, because the company set up a training program there, instead of using existing trainers in America.

This is no way to do business. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.

We must lift the cap on H-1B visas. We do not have a centrally planned economy. The American Government does not tell companies how many workers they need each year. But the cap has that effect, the effect of a centrally planned economy. That is wrong. Let us listen to business leaders and help them maintain and improve their competitiveness. When our premier global companies implore us to lift the H-1B visa cap or risk hampering their growth, the time for politics is over.

We must simplify temporary entry for foreign workers who need to come to America to help our companies succeed. If we wish to remain a cutting-edge economy, we can no longer obstruct companies from training their overseas employees, participating in meetings and conferences, or traveling to trade shows. Our companies have global markets, global supply chains, and global strategies. We need a global workforce.

Our current commitment of 65,000 H-1B visas each year is outdated. It is outmoded and out of touch with today's needs. We should make a bold commitment to expand that cap. Such a commitment would allow us to lock in similar commitments from our trading partners and enhance exports and American services.

We must actively encourage talented foreign students to study, do research, and innovate at American universities and American research institutions. Visa renewals during multiyear studies need to be routine. These renewals should not require all students to first return to their home countries.

For the most exceptional of these students, who have earned advanced science degrees at American universities, we need a simpler process to obtain permanent residence. These are talented, highly educated individuals, who are in a position to keep our economy competitive. If we do not welcome them into our economy--guess what--then China, India, Europe, or Japan will welcome them into theirs.

Three weeks ago, the National Park Service designated the old mining town of Anaconda, MT, as a national historic landmark. Anaconda's mining boom times are now preserved as part of our Nation's history. But Marcus Daly's explosion--when he found all that copper ore-- continues to reverberate through the American economy today.

Let us not stamp out the spark of future booms. Let us, rather, welcome the labor, the innovation, and the entrepreneurship of our new immigrants. Let us ensure for ourselves and for our children the shining ore of boom times to come.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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.