Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 Technical Corrections Act

Mr. President, first, let me say to my two good friends, Senators Rockefeller and Bond, I appreciate the job they do serving as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I commend them for their efforts in this matter.

Having said that, I reluctantly rise to urge my colleagues to vote against cloture on S. 2248, the FISA Amendment Act, and I will explain why.

Opposing cloture is essential, because there is no unanimous consent agreement in place providing for the immediate adoption of the Judiciary Committee substitute amendment.

As you know, the Judiciary substitute amendment, among other things, strikes title II of the Intelligence Committee bill--the title which seeks to provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who are alleged to have violated their customers' privacy rights by turning over information to the government without warrants.

I am fully aware that the majority leader has various parliamentary options at his disposal to move this legislation forward. It is his right to attempt to invoke cloture.

But I regret that decision, and I hope that my colleagues will join me in stopping this legislation.

Mr. President, why do I feel so strongly about this matter?

For the last 6 years, our largest telecommunications companies have been spying on their own American customers.

Secretly and without a warrant, they delivered to the Federal Government the private, domestic communications records of millions of Americans--records this administration has compiled into a database of enormous scale and scope.

That decision betrayed millions of customers' trust. It was unwarranted--literally.

But was it illegal?

That, Mr. President, I don't know. And if this bill passes in its current form, we will never know. The President's favored corporations will be immune.

Their arguments will never be heard in a court of law. The details of their actions will stay hidden. The truth behind this unprecedented domestic spying will never see light. And the book on our Government's actions will be closed, and sealed, and locked, and handed over to the safekeeping of those few whom George Bush trusts to keep a secret.

The bill that the majority leader will seek to make the pending business of the Senate later today--the FISA Amendments Act of 2007-- has a long and twisted history behind it. Its origins lie in President Bush's years of warrantless spying on Americans.

That abuse of power was exposed by the press in late 2005. The New York Times revealed that:

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the [National

Security Agency] has monitored the international telephone

calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps

thousands, of people inside the United States without

warrants over the past three years.

In fact, we later learned that the President's warrantless spying was authorized as early as 2001.

Disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in a 2006 white paper, attempted to justify that spying; his argument rested on the specious claim that, in authorizing the President to go to war in Afghanistan, Congress had also somehow authorized him to listen in on phone calls in America.

But many of those who voted on the original authorization of force found this claim to new executive powers to be a laughable invention. Here's what former Majority Leader Tom Daschle wrote:

As Senate majority leader . . . I helped negotiate that law

with the White House counsel's office over two harried days.

I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless

wiretaps of American citizens never came up . . . I am also

confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of

authorization of force against al-Qaida did not believe that

they

were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.

Such claims to expanded executive power based on the authorization for military force have since been struck down by the courts.

In recent months, the administration has changed its argument, now grounding its warrantless surveillance power in the extremely nebulous ``authority of the President to defend the country'' that they find in the Constitution.

Of course, that begs the question: Exactly what doesn't fit under ``defending the country''? If we take the President at his word, we would concede to him nearly unlimited power, as long as he finds a lawyer willing to stuff his actions into that boundless category.

Rather than concede such power, Congress has worked to bring the President's surveillance program back where it belongs--under the rule of law.

At the same time, we have worked to modernize FISA and ease restrictions on terrorist surveillance. The Protect America Act, a bill attempting to respond to that two-pronged challenge, passed in August; but it is set to expire in February.

The bill now before us would create a legal regime for surveillance under reworked and more reasonable rules. But crucially, President Bush has demanded that this bill include full retroactive immunity for corporations complicit in domestic spying. In a speech on September 19, he stated that ``it's particularly important for Congress to provide meaningful liability protection to those companies.''

In October, he stiffened his demand, vowing to veto any bill that did not shield the telecom corporations. And this month, he resorted to shameful, misleading scare tactics, accusing Congress of failing ``to keep the American people safe.''

That month, the FISA Amendments Act came before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Per the President's demand, it included full retroactive immunity for the telecom corporations. Senator Nelson introduced an amendment to strip that immunity, and instead allow the matter to be settled in the courts. It failed by a vote of 3 to 12.

But as it passed out of the Intelligence Committee, by a vote of 13 to 2, the bill still put corporations literally above the law and ensured that the extent of the President's invasions of privacy would remain a secret. I found retroactive immunity far beyond the pale, and I made my objections strongly and publicly.

But the bill also had to pass through the Judiciary Committee. There, Chairman Pat Leahy succeeded in reporting out a bill without the egregious immunity provision. Over the years, Pat Leahy has cemented his reputation as a champion of the rule of law; and I believe the stand he took last month will be honored for a long time to come.

However, I am still concerned that when Senator Feingold proposed an amendment to strip immunity for good, it failed by a vote of 7 to 12.

So here we are--facing a final decision on whether the telecommunications companies will get off the hook for good. The President's allies are as intent as they ever were on making that happen. They want immunity back in this bill at all costs.

But what they are truly offering is secrecy in place of openness. Fiat in place of law.

And in place of the forthright argument and judicial deliberation that ought to be this country's pride, two simple words from our President's mouth: ``Trust me.''

I cannot speak for my colleagues--but I would never take that offer, not even in the best of times, not even from a perfect President. I would never take that offer because our Constitution tells us that the President's word is subject to the oversight of the Congress and the deliberation of the courts; and because I took an oath to defend the Constitution; and because I stand by my oath.

``Trust me.'' It is the offer to hide ourselves in the waiting arms of the rule of men. And in these threatened times, that offer has never seemed more seductive. The rule of law has rarely been so fragile.

``It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger . . . from abroad.'' James Madison, the father of our Constitution, made that prediction more than two centuries ago. With the passage of this bill, his words would be one step closer to coming true. So it has never been more essential that we lend our voices to the law, and speak on its behalf.

On its behalf, we say to President Bush that a Nation of truly free men and women would never take ``trust me'' for an answer, not even from a perfect President--and certainly not from this one.

In these times--under a President who seems every more day intent on acting as if he is the law, who grants himself the right to ignore legislation, who claims the power to spy without a warrant, to imprison without a hearing, to torture without a scruple--in these times, I would be a fool to take his offer.

But ``trust me,'' says President Bush. He means it literally. When he first asked Congress to make the telecoms' actions legally disappear, Congress had a reasonable question for him: Can we at least know exactly what we'd be immunizing? Can you at least tell us what we'd be cleaning up?

And the President refused to answer. Only he, his close advisors, and a handful of telecom executives know all of the facts. Congress is only asked to give token oversight. But if we are to do our constitutionally mandated job, we need more than token oversight; we need full hearings on the terrorist surveillance program before the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.

Without that, we remain in the dark--and in the dark we're expected to grant the President's wish, because he knows best.

Does that sound familiar to any of my colleagues?

In 2002, we took the President's word and voted to go to war on faulty intelligence. What if we took his word again--and found, next year or the year after, that we had blindly legalized grave crimes?

If this disastrous war has taught us anything, it is that the Senate must never again stack such a momentous decision on such a weak foundation of fact. The decision we're asked to make today is not, of course, as immense. But between fact and decision, the disproportion is just as huge.

So I rise in determined opposition to this unprecedented immunity and all that it represents. I have served in this body for more than a quarter century. I have spoken from this desk hundreds and hundreds of times. I have rarely come to the floor with such anger.

But since I came to Washington, I have seen six Presidents sit in the White House--and I have never seen a contempt for the rule of law equal to this. Today, I have reached a breaking point. Today my disgust has found its limit.

I don't expect every one of my colleagues to share that disgust, or that limit. I wish they did--but had that been the case, we would never have come to this point.

I only ask them to believe me when I say if I did not speak today, my conscience would not let me rest.

The right to conscience is one of the Senate's most treasured allowances. It is perhaps this body's defining feature. The President has his dominating bully pulpit. Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote that ``in drama, magnitude and finality [the President's] decisions so far overshadow any others that almost alone he fills the public eye and ear. No other personality in public life can begin to compete with him in access to the public mind.''

But in this Chamber, a minority--even an impassioned minority of one--has the right to stand against all the combined weight and machinery of government and plead: ``Stop!'' Or at least: ``Wait.'' A minority can't stand forever, as surely as I can't speak forever. Ultimately, a minority has only one recourse--to make itself a majority. And I have faith that when the American people understand the full extent of this President's contempt for the law, they will share my outrage. This is a trusting and patient nation--and with more than two centuries of democratic tradition, rightly so. But that trust is not infinite; that patience is not endless; and after 7 years of this President, they are worn down to the nub.

If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be standing here today. If the rule of law

were not my ruling passion, I wouldn't be standing here today. But I do, and it is.

``Law'' is a word we barely hear from the President and his allies. They offer neither a deliberation about America's difficult choices in the age of terrorism, nor a shared attempt to set for our times the excruciating balance between security and liberty.

They merely promise a false debate on a false choice: security or liberty, but never, ever both.

It speaks volumes about the President's estimation of the American people that he expects them to accept that choice. I think differently. I think that America's founding truth is unambiguous: security and liberty, one and inseparable, and never one without the other.

Secure in that truth, I offer a challenge to the President's allies: You want to put the President's favored corporations above the law. Could you please explain how your immunity makes any one of us any safer by an iota?

If security were truly the issue, this debate wouldn't be happening. An excellent balance between security and liberty has already been struck by FISA, a balance that has stood for three decades. In fact, FISA was written just to prevent a situation like ours from occurring: to protect Americans without countenancing executive lawbreaking.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the U.S. Senate convened the Church Committee, a panel of distinguished senators determined to shine light on executive abuses of power. The facts it uncovered were shocking:

Army spying on the civilian population; Federal dossiers on citizens' political activities; a CIA and FBI program that had opened hundreds of thousands of Americans' letters without warning or warrant.

The collective force of these revelations was undeniable: In their oversight duties, Congress and the courts had failed; they had unquestioningly accepted the executive's ``trust me''; and as a result, Americans had sustained a severe blow to their fourth amendment rights ``to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.''

The Senate could have panicked; it could have ended or drastically curtailed those searches altogether. But in its wisdom, the Senate understood that protecting the American people was not the problem; the problem was simply the Nixonian attitude that ``if the President does it, it's not illegal.''

The solution was to bring the executive's efforts to protect America under the watchful eye of Congress and the courts--to restore checks and balances to surveillance, and to give it the legitimacy it demands and deserves. America would not be America if such power remained concentrated in the hands of one man, or one branch of Government.

The Church Committee's final report, ``Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,'' put the case eloquently:

The critical question before the Committee was to determine

how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained

in the course of the Government's effort to protect their

security. The delicate balance between these basic goals of

our system of government is often difficult to strike, but it

can, and must, be achieved.

We reject the view that the traditional American principles

of justice and fair play have no place in our struggle

against the enemies of freedom. Moreover, our investigation

has established that the targets of intelligence activity

have ranged far beyond persons who could properly be

characterized as enemies of freedom. . . .

We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes

and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and

occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian

regimes.

We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs

initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal

violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what

witnesses characterized as ``vacuum cleaners,'' sweeping in

information about lawful activities of American citizens.

The Senators of the Church Commission concluded:

Unless new and tighter controls are established by

legislation, domestic intelligence activities threaten to

undermine our democratic society and fundamentally alter its

nature.

What a strange echo we hear in those words. They could have been written yesterday. Three decades ago, our predecessors in this Chamber understood that when domestic spying goes too far, it threatens to kill just what it promises to protect--an America secure in its liberty. That lesson was crystal clear 30 years ago. Why is it so clouded now?

And before we entertain the argument that ``everything has changed'' since those words were written, remember: The men who wrote them had witnessed world war and Cold War, had seen Nazi and Soviet spying, and were living every day under the cloud of nuclear holocaust. How short some memories are.

The threats have multiplied and grown in complexity, but the lesson has been immutable: Warrantless spying threatens to undermine our democratic society, unless legislation brings it under control. In other words, the power to invade privacy must be used sparingly, guarded jealously, and shared equally between the branches of Government.

Or the case can be made pragmatically. As my friend Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, recently argued:

The engagement of all three branches tends to yield not

just more thoughtful law, but a more broadly supported public

policy.

Three decades ago, that broadly supported public policy--a prime outcome of the Church Committee--was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. FISA confirmed the President's power to conduct surveillance of international conversations involving anyone in the United States, provided that the Federal FISA court issued a warrant--ensuring that wiretapping was aimed at safeguarding our security, and nothing else. To further protect intelligence gathering, that court was to work in secret.

Ironically, none other than the President's own Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, explained the rationale in an interview this summer: The United States ``did not want to allow [the intelligence community] to conduct . . . electronic surveillance of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required.''

As originally written in 1978, and as amended nine times since, FISA has accomplished its mission; it has been a valuable tool for conducting surveillance of terrorists and those who would harm America. And every time Presidents have come to Congress openly to ask for more leeway under FISA, Congress has worked with them; Congress has compromised; and together, Congress and the President have struck a balance that safeguards America while doing its utmost to protect privacy.

This summer, Congress made a technical correction to FISA, enabling the President to wiretap, without a warrant, conversations between two foreign targets, even if those conversations are routed through American computers. Personally, I felt that this summer's legislation went too far, and I opposed it. But the point is that Congress once again proved its willingness to work with the President on FISA. Isn't that enough?

Just this October and November, as we have seen, the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees worked with the President to further refine FISA and ensure that, in a true emergency, the FISA court would do nothing to slow down intelligence gathering. Isn't that enough?

And as for the FISA court, it has approved the President's wiretapping requests with impeccable consistency.

Between 1978 and 2004, according to the Washington Post, the FISA court approved 18,748 warrants and rejected five. The FISA court has sided with the executive 99.9 percent of the time. Isn't that enough?

Is anything lacking? Isn't the framework already in place? Isn't all of this enough to keep us safe?

We all know the President's answer. Given this complex, fine-tuned machinery, crafted over three decades by all three branches, what did he do? He ignored it.

Given a system primed to bless nearly any eavesdropping he could conceive--he conducted his own, illegally.

If the shock of that decision has yet to sink in, think of it this way: President Bush ignored not just a Federal court, but a secret Federal court; not just a secret Federal court, but a secret Federal court prepared to sign off on his actions 99.9 percent of the time. A

more compliant court has never been conceived. And still that wasn't good enough for our President.

So I will ask the Senate candidly, and candidly it already knows the answer: Is this about our security or is it about his power?

I ask that question not to change the subject, but because it is the key to understanding why this administration is pushing so hard for telecom immunity--that is, for secrecy. Richard Nixon, the same man who declared that ``if the president does it, it's not illegal,'' raised secrecy to an art form--because he understood that the surest way to amass power is to conceal its true extent.

Secrecy can spring from the best motives; but as it grows it begins to exist only for itself, only for its own sake, only to cover its own abuses.

The Senators of the Church Committee expressed succinctly the deep flaw in that form of Government: ``Abuse thrives on secrecy.''

Today, we have seen the executive branch pass to a new master of secrecy. Vice President Cheney practices a secrecy so baroque that it could, in a less threatened time, be an object for laughter, instead of fear.

His unclassified papers? Stamped ``treat as TSSCI,'' one of the highest levels of state secret. The list of papers he has declassified? Classified. The members of his energy task force? None of your business. His location? Undisclosed. The names of his staff? Confidential. And tellingly, of course, the visitor log for his office? Shredded by the Secret Service.

When secrecy becomes this divorced from practicality, we are left with only one conclusion: For this executive branch, secrecy is power.

Of course, I don't mean any offense against our Vice President--as he reminds us, he is not part of the executive branch.

We see a pattern of secrecy stretching back to the first months of this administration. Its push for immunity is no different--secrecy is at its center.

And tellingly, the administration's original immunity proposal protected not just the telecoms, but everyone involved in the wiretapping program. In their original proposal, that is, they wanted to immunize themselves.

Think about that. It speaks to their fear and, perhaps, their guilt: their guilt that they had broken the law, and their fear that in the years to come, they would be found liable or convicted. They knew better than anyone else what they had done--they must have had good reason to be afraid!

Thankfully, executive immunity is not part of the bill before us. I am grateful for that. But the origin of immunity tells us a great deal about what's at stake here: This is, and always has been, a self- preservation bill.

Otherwise, why not have the trial and get it over with? If the President's allies believe what they say, the corporations would win in a walk.

After all, look at things from their perspective: In their telling, when our biggest telecom corporations helped the President spy without a warrant, they were doing their patriotic duty. When they listened to the executive branch and turned over private information, they were doing their patriotic duty.

When one company gave the NSA a secret eavesdropping room at its own corporate headquarters, it was simply doing its patriotic duty. The President asked, the telecoms answered.

Shouldn't that be an easy case to prove, Mr. President? The corporations only need to show a judge the authority and the assurances they were given, and they will be in and out of court in 5 minutes. If the telecoms are as defensible as the President says, why doesn't the President let them defend themselves? If the case is so easy to make, why doesn't he let them make it? Why is he standing in the way?

Our Federal court system has dealt for decades with the most delicate national security matters, building up expertise in protecting classified information behind closed doors--ex parte, in camera. We can expect no less in these cases. If we're worried about national security being threatened as a result, we can simply get the principals a security clearance.

No intelligence sources need be compromised. No state secrets need be exposed. And we can say so with increasing confidence, because after the extensive litigation that has already taken place at both the district court and circuit court level, no sensitive information has leaked out.

In fact, Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, a Republican appointee, has already ruled that the issue can go to trial without putting state secrets in jeopardy. He reasonably pointed out that the existence of the President's surveillance program is hardly a secret at all: The government has already disclosed the general contours of the ``terrorist surveillance program,'' which requires the assistance of a telecommunications provider.

George Bush wouldn't be the first president to hide righteously behind the state secrets privilege. In fact, the privilege was tainted at its birth by a President of my own party, Harry Truman. In 1952, he successfully invoked the new privilege to prevent public exposure of a report on a plane crash that killed three Air Force contractors.

When the report was finally declassified--some 50 years later, decades after anyone in the Truman administration was within its reach--it contained no state secrets at all. Only facts about repeated maintenance failures that would have seriously embarrassed some important people. And so the state secrets privilege began its career not to protect our nation--but to protect the powerful.

In his opinion, Judge Walker argued that, even when it is reasonably grounded:

The state secrets privilege [still] has its limits. While

the court recognizes and respects the executive's

constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the

court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to

adjudicate the disputes that come before it. To defer to a

blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that

duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this

litigation has been so publicly aired.

The compromise between liberty and security remains a

difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would

sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.

And that ought to be the epitaph for this Presidency: ``sacrificing liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.'' Worse than selling our soul--giving it away for free!

The President is equally wrong to claim that failing to grant this retroactive immunity will make the telecoms less likely to cooperate with surveillance in the future.

The truth is that, since the 1970s, FISA has compelled telecommunications companies to cooperate with surveillance, when it is warranted--and what's more, it immunizes them. It is done that for more than 25 years.

So cooperation in warranted wiretapping is not at stake today. Collusion in warrantless wiretapping is--and the warrant makes all the difference, because it is precisely the court's blessing that brings Presidential power under the rule of law.

In sum, we know that giving the telecoms their day in court--giving the American people their day in court--would not jeopardize an ounce of our security. And it could only expose one secret: the extent of our president's lawbreaking, and the extent of his corporations' complicity. That, our President will go to the mat to defend. That, he will keep from the light of a courtroom at all costs. That, his supporters would amend the law to protect.

And that is the choice at stake today: Will George Bush's secrets die with this Presidency? Or will they be open to the generations to come, to our successors in this Chamber, so that they can prepare themselves to defend against future outrages of power and usurpations of law from future Presidents, of either party?

I am here because I will not see those secrets go quietly into the good night with Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney and George Bush. I am here because the truth is not their private property--it belongs to every one of us, and it demands to be heard.

``State secrets,'' ``patriotic duty''--those, as weak as they are, are the arguments the president's allies use when they're feeling high- minded! When their thoughts turn baser, they make their arguments in dollar signs.

Here's how Mike McConnell put it:

If you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it

would bankrupt these companies. So . . . we have to provide

liability protection to these private sector entities.

Mike McConnell is quickly becoming an accidental truth-teller! Notice how

the President's own Director of National Intelligence concedes that if the cases went to trial, the telecoms would lose. I don't know if that's true, Mr. President--but we can thank Admiral McConnell for telling us how he really feels.

Of course, it is an exaggeration to claim that these companies would surely go bankrupt, even if they did lose.

We are talking about some of the wealthiest, most successful companies in America. Let me quote an article from Dow Jones MarketWatch. The date is October 23, 2007. The headline reads: ``AT&T's third-quarter profit rises 41.5 percent.''

AT&T Inc. on Tuesday said third-quarter earnings rose 41.5

percent, boosted by the acquisition of BellSouth and the

addition of 2 million net wireless customers . . . Net income

totaled $3.06 billion . . . compared with $2.17 billion . . .

a year ago.

Note that AT&T has posted these record profits at a time of very public litigation.

A company with more than $3 billion in profits one quarter--only the most exorbitant and unlikely judgment could completely wipe it out. To assume that the telecoms would lose, and that their judges would then hand down such backbreaking penalties, is already to take several leaps.

The point, after all, has never been to financially cripple our telecommunications industry. The point is to bring checks and balances back to domestic spying. Setting that precedent would hardly require a crippling judgment.

It is much more troubling, though, that the Director of National Intelligence even feels the need to pronounce on ``liability protection for private sector entities.'' Since when were our spies in the business of economics? Since when did they put protecting AT&T or Verizon ahead of protecting the American people? Since when did the amount a defendant stands to lose have any bearing on whether a suit should go forward? I learned in law school that guilty was guilty--no matter how rich or how poor.

Lean on this logic, and you'll sink to its venal core: Certain corporations are too rich to be sued. Forget what they owe; forget what's just; forget judges setting the penalty. If there's even a chance of the judgment being high, throw the suit out--it endangers the Republic!

This administration has equated corporations' bottom lines with our Nation's security. Follow that reasoning honestly to its end, and you come to the conclusion: The larger the corporation, the more lawless it can be. If we accept Mr. McConnell's premises, we could conceive of a corporation so wealthy, so integral to our economy, that its riches place it outside the law altogether. And if the administration's thinking even admits that possibility, we know instinctively how flawed it is.

The truth is exactly the opposite: The larger the corporation, the greater the potential for abuse, and the more carefully it must be watched. Not that success should make a company suspect; companies grow large, and essential to our economy, because they are excellent at what they do. I simply mean that size and wealth open the realm of possibilities for abuse far beyond the scope of the individual.

Consider this. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence

[states] . . . that for year on end every e-mail, every text

message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-

optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through

AT&T's Internet hub in San Francisco--hundreds of millions of

private, domestic communications--have been . . . copied in

their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by

means of multiple ``splitters'' into a secret room controlled

exclusively by the NSA.

If true, that constitutes one of the most massive violations of privacy in American history. And it would be inconceivable without the size and resources of an AT&T behind it--the same size that makes Mike McConnell fear the corporations' day in court.

If reasonable search and seizure means opening a drug dealer's apartment, the telecoms' alleged actions would be the equivalent of strip-searching everyone in the building, ransacking their bedrooms, and prying up all the floorboards. That is the massive scale we are talking about--and that massive scale is precisely why no corporation must be above the law.

On that scale, it is impossible to plead ignorance. As Judge Walker ruled:

AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in

its position could have believed that the alleged domestic

dragnet was legal.

But the arguments of the President's allies sink even lower. Listen to the words a House Republican leader spoke on Fox News. They are shameful:

I believe that they deserve immunity from lawsuits out

there from typical trial lawyers trying to find a way to get

into the pockets of American companies.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 more minute.

Cindy Cohn is one of those ``trial lawyers.'' She is lead counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a small public-interest law firm bringing suit against the telecom corporations. And when she heard that Fox News claim about typical greedy trial lawyers, she laughed.

If he still thinks that we're rich plaintiffs' attorneys

after he's visited our little tiny Mission Street offices,

[she said,] then I have a bridge to sell him. Most of the EFF

lawyers worked in those big fancy firms for big fancy

salaries, and took big pay cuts to join us . . .

Young lawyers come to me and say, ``I really want to work

for EFF--you have such great lawyers.''

I say: ``Take your current paycheck, rip it in three

pieces, take any third, and that's about what you'll get

working for EFF.'' The lawyers who work for EFF . . . are

making far less than they could on the open market in

exchange for being able to work in things they believe in

every day.

Consider the hundreds of lawyers retained by the corporations in question, and their multimillion-dollar legal budgets, and the attempt to portray them as pitiable Davids is ludicrous. Sprint's lawyers recently settled an unrelated class-action lawsuit for $30 million. Three years ago, AT&T handled a settlement with shareholders for $100 million.

With those resources, I think they can give EFF's nine nonprofit lawyers in their little office on Mission Street a fair fight.

Mr. President, I don't presume to know how that fight will end. I don't presume to hand out innocence and guilt--that's not my job. Judges and juries do that. And in their search for the truth, the only job of this body is to get out of the way.

I am not invested in one verdict or another--only that a verdict is reached. I don't care who the truth favors--only that it comes out at all.

State secrets; future cooperation; economic harms; reputational damage; legal burdens--as we've seen, not a single one of the President's arguments for this immunity stands. Nothing tells us to halt the legal process, to bar the courthouse door. Everything tells us to open it.

Mr. President, perhaps when I leave this floor today, someone will ask me, ``Why are you so agitated about some telephone records? There's so much else to be worked up about!''

And I'll only be able to respond: ``Exactly.''

We have seen this administration chip away at the rule of law at a dozen points. Its relentlessness may be its greatest strength--the assault becomes numbing, and our healthy outrage grows dull. It was an outrage when this President set up secret courts outside the law. It was an outrage when he ignored the courts and tapped our phones. It was an outrage when he sanctioned torture. But outrage upon outrage upon outrage--and we wind up in a stupor. We have allowed each abuse with nothing more than a promise to resist the next one--and the next one, and the next one.

I am here, in the end, because the line has to be drawn somewhere. Why not here? Why not today?

So, Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to reject the motion on cloture. Let them come back, strip this language out on immunity, and give us a clean FISA bill. That is the only right thing to do. The law is here to protect all of us. We can have security and liberty.

As Benjamin Franklin said some 200 years ago:

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve

neither security nor liberty.

So I urge my colleagues to reject cloture, and then we can send the bill forward without that immunity provision.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, is there a rule in the Senate that requires this?

Let me say this, further reserving the right to object, I will respectfully object at this time, and I will talk with the leader about that necessity. I don't want to set the precedent of insisting on 60 votes on a germane amendment. I will object at this point, and following that, the leader can make the request again.

Mr. President, I understand the 60-vote majority, but I have a germane amendment that strikes a provision in the bill. I understand the rules. When something is nongermane or violative of the rules of the Senate and you want to waive the rule, you have a supermajority requirement, but not on an amendment pertaining directly to the bill that strikes a section of it. I understand there is opposition to it, but having to reach a supermajority on an amendment that strikes something in the bill that is of significant disagreement seems to be excessive at this point.

This is an important piece of legislation, and the Judiciary Committee voted differently than the Intelligence Committee on this matter. We feel strongly about this. If I were offering something that is violative of the Senate rules, I would accept a supermajority. But to establish the precedent here that any amendment to be offered to this bill will be subjected to a supermajority vote I think is too excessive. That is my concern. Tell me I am wrong about that, that I am violating the rules of the Senate, and I will accept that. But if we are establishing that simply on any amendment that is different, I think that is a direction in which we should not go.

I have an amendment I would like to offer that strikes title II of the legislation. I am prepared to offer that. I know Senator Leahy talked about going first. I am prepared to follow whatever the Senate would like us to in order. I would like an opportunity to offer my amendment at some point. I told the leader that we can work out a time agreement. I wasn't quite ready to do it. I want to know how many people want to be heard. I will limit myself, but I want to get a vote. I am not looking for extended debate on my amendment.

Madam President, may I ask that I be notified when I have 5 minutes remaining?

First, I would like to congratulate the Senator from New Hampshire for his, as usual, eloquent remarks, but I would like to congratulate him especially.

I believe I am recognized for up to 30 minutes?

Madam President, I congratulate the Senator from New Hampshire. He is usually eloquent, and he was again today. But the subject matter is not just eloquent, it is critical in the State of Tennessee.

There is a medical liability crisis, especially for women who live in rural areas. The fact is, as the Senator from New Hampshire has said, women who live in rural areas do not have access to doctors for prenatal health care. They do not have access to doctors to deliver their babies.

According to data from the Health Services and Resources Administration, in 2004, in 45 of Tennessee's 95 counties, pregnant mothers had to drive for miles to get prenatal care or to deliver their babies. In 15 of those counties, pregnant mothers have no access whatsoever to any prenatal health care within their counties.

The Tennessean newspaper, on July 20, 2004, reported that only 1 of 104 medical students graduating from Vanderbilt University Medical School chose OB/GYN.

Dr. Frank Boehm said that:

We must not lose sight of the fact that one of the side

effects of our current medical malpractice crisis in OB/GYN

is the steady loss of medical students who are choosing not

to practice one of our most important medical specialties. If

the decline continues, patients having babies or needing

high-risk care will be faced with access problems this

country has not yet seen. The same story is true at the

University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis.

On any given day, there are more than 125,000 medical liability suits in progress against America's 700,000 doctors.

There is a way to fix this. The State of Texas has shown us how, and it is similar to the way Senator Gregg has suggested. Put a reasonable cap on punitive damages, but let there be unlimited liability for any real damages. That was done in Texas in the year 2005, and in the following year, last year, more than 4,000 doctors applied for licenses to practice in Texas. OB/GYNs and other doctors are pouring back into Texas--up 34 percent from the previous year--because of a change just like the one the Senator from New Hampshire has suggested.

I am happy for Texas, but I would like Tennessee and the rest of the country to experience the same thing. Senator Gregg is exactly right to point out the medical crisis that is caused when women who live in rural counties cannot have access to prenatal health care and care for their pregnancy and for their babies.

Amendments Nos. 3551 And 3553

Madam President, I rise to speak in support of amendments Nos. 3551 and 3553, which were previously offered on my behalf.

The first amendment is No. 3551. This is an amendment which would add $74 million to the last 3 years of the farm bill for agricultural research at land grant colleges or universities. Specifically, it would provide mandatory funding for the Initiative for Future Agricultural and Food Systems as follows: $24 million in fiscal year 2010, $25 million in 2011, and $25 million in 2012. It would be fully offset by striking section 12302 of the tax title in the Harkin substitute amendment to the farm bill, which basically says that taxpayers in Georgia and in Tennessee, for example, will pay for transmission lines for ratepayers in North Dakota and South Dakota and in other States who want to build transmission lines through rural areas, primarily for wind energy.

I am here today to talk primarily about farm incomes, and I am talking about America's secret weapons for farm incomes in the day in which we live, which are the land grant universities of America. Iowa State is a great

land grant university. I imagine the University of Minnesota is a great land grant university in Minnesota. I know I was president of the University of Tennessee, which is our land grant university, and I confess to some bias because I think I am the only former president of a land grant university in the Senate.

Why is that so important? Earlier this year, we unanimously passed, after 2 years of work, a bill we called the America COMPETES Act. What it did was recognize America's brainpower advantage is what has given us our incredibly high standard of living.

In this last year, our country, the United States of America, produced about 30 percent of all the wealth in the world for about 5 percent of the people in the world--that is, our population. How did we do that? There are a variety of reasons, but primarily, since World War II, we have taken our brainpower advantage to create new jobs that have given us that great high standard of living. This amendment is about making sure we take advantage of that in the agriculture community. It will provide more competitive grants to our land grant universities so they can create value-added agricultural products, of which I have an example right back here.

Congress recognized the importance of this brainpower advantage our land grant universities have when it authorized the 1998 farm bill. It created something called the Initiative for Future Agricultural and Food Systems. In addition to farm income, this research was to be for future food production for environmental quality, for natural resource management, as well as, as I said, farm income.

Here is a specific example of the value-added opportunity I am talking about. There is a weed, I guess people would call it, called the guayule weed that grows out in the Southwest. Research that was done at the University of Arizona led to the development of a non- allergenic rubber product that is made from that plant that is as useful as latex rubber, for example, for gloves that we use with which to work. But it does not cause allergic reactions, as latex does, in 10 percent of our Nation's health care workforce. That is an example of the brain power advantage.

The University of New Mexico and the University of Tennessee are taking opportunities to use manure as sources of energy and as ways to create nursery crop containers. At Texas Tech University, the research that has come directly from the program I described that was started in 1998 has led to the development of a less toxic version of the castor seed created by using genetic modifications. This means we can grow more castor oil in this country instead of having to import it.

Now, one might say: Well, what is the big deal about castor oil? It tastes bad. It is what you take when you are sick. Not anymore. On the Defense Department's Critical Needs List there are multiple uses of castor oil for military purposes, including lubricants, adhesives, pharmaceuticals, waxes and polishes and inks.

The Senator from Georgia and from Iowa will know very well the value- added advantage to our country of all the products that have come from soybeans. Our great land grant universities have led the way to create these extra farm incomes, these new jobs for our country.

There are 76 land grant universities in America. During the 2 years where this program that was passed in 1998 worked well, 2001 and 2002, this grant program I am describing awarded 183 different grants, one grant at least in every State and in the District of Columbia.

So these land grant universities, created in Abraham Lincoln's administration, have been at the forefront of our agriculture in America for a long time. If we want to keep high farm income, they are a major part of our ability to do that.

We have had some experience now since 1998 with this grant program I am describing, which has a long name, called the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems. First, when it was appropriated, and the Senator from Georgia mentioned this to me, the appropriators got to the money and they canceled the appropriation and then increased another account and earmarked the money for their favorite university.

That practice stopped in 2001 and 2002. Basically, we went through a period where the research grants were awarded in the way they are supposed to be, the way most of our research grants are awarded. One reason our great higher education system works so well is because it is a large marketplace; students may choose their school, Government money follows them to the institution of their choice, public, private, nonprofit, and the billions of dollars we spend on research to create jobs, giving us the brain-power advantage, is competitively awarded, usually peer reviewed.

So in a couple years, that worked for this program. But then, the authorizers looked at what the appropriators had done and they said, in effect: We are going to earmark some of this money to our favorite universities. That happened for a while.

Then, in 2005, we got into a budget crunch, and those trying to balance the budget said: Here is a place to get some money. They took the money that was dedicated for agriculture research and used it for the 2005 budget reconciliation. So only in 2 years since 1998 has this excellent competitive grant program worked very well, 2001 and 2002.

Now, in the current House version of the farm bill we are debating today, they try to put it back on track. In the first 2 years of the bill, they appropriate the money to deal with the budget deficit that was dealt with in 2005. But in the last 3 years, they authorize money for this kind of research, $200 million in each of 2010, 2011, 2012, $600 million, amounts to about two-tenths of 1 percent of the total cost of the House version of the farm bill.

The Senate version, unfortunately, well, fortunately in the first 2 years, does pay the money to deal with the budget problem. The decision was made a few years ago. But in the last 3 years, during the time when the House put in 600 million, the Senate puts in zero.

So my amendment would restore $74 million of the $600 million, and in conference, hopefully, the conferees could decide this is an important provision. Since both Houses had provided money, we can put the program back on track.

How do we pay for it? Well, by striking section 12302 from the tax title. Now, section 12302 of the tax title provides new tax breaks for large transmission towers that transmit electricity, primarily from wind farms, in remote and rural areas.

In my part of the country, Tennessee, for example, wind farms barely work at all because the wind does not blow. But where they do work a little bit is up on top of some of our most scenic mountains. So what the effect of this provision would be is to say: We are going to give people who own the land an ability not to pay income tax on the income they get from running these big transmission towers from the top of our scenic mountains all the way down to where the electric grid is.

That is unnecessary in the first place because the provision, as written, is retroactive. In addition to applying to future deals that will be made with landowners, it seems to apply to current and existing deals.

No. 2, it provides tens of millions of dollars, about $55 million, in my computation, of new subsidy for wind. Wind already is, in my judgment and in the judgment of many others, over-subsidized in terms of an energy source.

Third, and perhaps the largest objection, is transmission towers should be paid for by the utilities that build the transmission towers. If the Tennessee Valley Authority builds a transmission tower for whatever purpose, those of us who buy our electricity from TVA ought to pay the bill. We should not send the bill to the Colorado taxpayer or to someone who lives in southern Georgia or someone who lives in Iowa or New York, and neither should they send their bills to us.

So I think it is inappropriate for all those reasons, to subsidize further the ability to build transmission lines, primarily from wind farms to the grid. What it tends to do is to create such extravagant subsidies for wind that investors see an opportunity to make a lot of money, and they build wind farms in places where the wind does not blow.

That might sound to some like a ridiculous statement. But we have one of those in the Southeastern United States. It happens to be in east Tennessee. It is a TVA experimental farm.

It is up on top of Buffalo Mountain, 3,500 feet up. It ought to be a particularly good place for it. You can see the big white towers and flashing lights, instead of seeing the mountain tops, which we prefer to see.

What does it do? Not much. It cost $60 million over 20 years to TVA ratepayers to pay somebody to provide this energy. But during August, when we were in a drought and we needed to turn our air-conditioning on, it was operating 10 or 15 percent of the time.

So there is a much better solution to the need for new electricity in our part of the world and in many parts of America than to encourage investors through extravagant subsidies to build huge transmission lines through rural areas to connect wind farms with grids that are a long distance away.

If the market supports that sort of electricity investment, let it support it. That will usually mean, if you are going to build big wind farms, you will build them fairly close to the electric grid so you will not have to spend a million dollars a mile on the transmission line.

That is the first amendment. We would take the $74 million from this unnecessary expenditure that causes people to pay, in one part of the country, for what should be an electric ratepayer's bill in another part of the country; gives an unnecessary amount of money to wind developers. It, in fact, takes an example of wasteful Washington spending and uses it for higher farm incomes.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter to Chairman Harkin from organizations stating their support for increased funding for research at land-grant universities.

Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Please let me know when there are 5 minutes remaining.

Amendment No. 3553

Here is my second amendment. It is amendment No. 3553. I say it with all due respect to the Senator from Colorado because he and I discussed this. I am sure he will have more to say about this. But here is what this amendment is about.

The question is whether every Member of this body--I hope a lot of Senators are watching or their staffs are watching, because you do want to help your Senator if you are a staff member go home and explain, wherever you may live in America, why you took $4,000 of their tax money and gave it to their neighbor to build a 12-story tower in that neighbor's front yard with a flashing red light on top.

That is the question. The farm bill tax title, as reported by the Senate Finance Committee, says it is called a small wind tax credit. Now, I would ask those who can see this picture whether they would consider this tower an example of a small wind turbine? I think you can see the large crane next to it. You can see the telephone pole by it. Imagine if that is in your neighborhood, in the front yard of your neighbor. What the proposal in the tax title as reported says, that a small wind tax credit would give you up to $4,000 toward building a turbine of up to 100 kilowatts. That is a 100-kilowatt wind turbine.

Now, you might build a smaller one, and the cost would vary--a 0.5 kilowatt turbine might cost about $1,900 and receive a $570 tax credit, which is 30 percent of the total cost. A 1 kilowatt turbine might cost about $4,000 and receive a $1,200 credit, which is also 30 percent of this turbine's cost. A 2.5 kilowatt turbine costs about $15,000 and would receive a $4,000 credit, which is 27 percent of the turbine's cost. But you could build one as big as the 100 kilowatt turbine depicted here with taxpayer funds under the provisions of this bill.

I would like to ask my colleagues to think about whether they think that is an appropriate use of tax money. My view is the puny amount of electricity produced by these wind turbines is not worth ruining the character of our neighborhoods.

So what my amendment would do is simply say: This is a farm bill. If the Members of this body and this Congress want to subsidize the building of 12-story white towers in rural areas for farms and businesses, then do that in the farm bill. But do not allow that to go into residential neighborhoods across America, which the bill, as presently written, does.

Now, when I say a puny amount of electricity, what do I mean by that? Well, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, which has examined this provision of the proposed farm bill, it would encourage the installation of 12 megawatts of electricity.

Electrical generators have something called rated capacity. The rated capacity is the power that an electrical plant generates when operating at its full capacity. A nuclear power plant, for example, in Tennessee on average operates at 90 to 95 percent of rated capacity. That is why so many Americans are beginning to understand that nuclear power is the way you deal with climate change, if you are serious about it, because they produce 1,100 or 1,200 megawatts of power 92 percent percent of the time, and that is clean power. That has no nitrogen, no sulfur, no mercury. It has no carbon. Nuclear power produces 20 percent of our electricity and 80 percent of our carbon-free electricity.

The idea here is that by putting 12-story towers or up to 12-story towers in our neighbor's front yard or in our front yard, we could produce under this proposal an estimated 12 Megawatts of electricity. Probably turbines like that would operate 20, 25, 30 percent of the time. So it wouldn't be 12 megawatts of electricity, it would be 3 or 4 mega- watts on average. This is equivalent to two-tenths of 1 percent of the energy from a nuclear reactor or six-tenths of 1 percent of the energy from a single coal plant.

My appeal is that we respectfully use our common sense as we think about how to deal with the various challenges we have with clean air, with climate change, with our need for energy. Common sense does not say we ought to subsidize the building of 12-story towers or up to 12- story towers in our front yards. For example, we would get a much better bang for the buck--$5 million is what is estimated to be spent-- if we simply bought energy-efficient light bulbs and gave them to our neighbors. Spending $5 million on $2 energy-efficient light bulbs would save eight times the electricity generated by these ``small wind turbines.'' So why should we ruin the character of our neighborhoods when we could do eight times as much good with the same amount of money by changing our light bulbs? That would be common sense.

I am very much aware of the concern about climate change. Ever since I have been a Member of this body, I have had legislation in the Senate--first with Senator Carper, then with Senator Lieberman--to establish caps on utilities which produce a third of all the carbon in the country. That legislation, which I introduced with those two Senators over the last 5 years, also would establish more aggressive standards for nitrogen, mercury, and sulfur than the administration does. In addition, last week when we were debating climate change, the Environment Committee adopted my proposal for a low-carbon fuel standard which would be one of the most effective ways, probably the most effective way, to reduce quickly the amount of carbon in the fuel we use. In the last Congress, I was the principal sponsor of the solar energy tax credit. So I, like most Americans, am looking for ways for us to continue to power our huge economy but to do it in a clean way. I make a plea for common sense while we do this.

I suppose it would be possible for us to give $4,000 to a homeowner and say: Build a big bonfire in your backyard, and then we will give you more money to sequester the carbon and bury it under the ground. That would be possible. But would it make common sense? No, it wouldn't make common sense. There are better ways to use the money. Why would we destroy the environment to save the environment, which is precisely what we are doing in residential neighborhoods with this proposal. I regret not that it allows farm families and farm businesses a small subsidy to build large wind turbines. I regret that we would extend that to residential neighborhoods at the same time.

Let me say something else about the number of subsidies for wind power that exist today in our country. Sometimes the need for wind has become nearly a religion. Instead of looking carefully at whether we should use more efficient light bulbs or smart meters on utilities or solar panels or efficient appliances or green buildings, a whole variety of things we can do as a country to be green--instead of doing that, I think we have gone overboard on the idea of wind.

Let me give a couple of examples of that, if I may. There are a great many subsidies already in existence for wind. The biggest, of course, is the renewable electricity production tax credit. Through that renewable production tax credit, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the United States taxpayer will spend $11.5 billion on wind energy over the next 10 years. Let me say that again. The United States taxpayer is committed, through the existing renewable electricity production tax credit, to spend $11.5 billion on wind energy over the next 10 years. That doesn't count the value of various other Federal, State, and local subsidies for wind. There are the clean renewable energy bonds to help build the wind turbines. There are Department of Energy grants and incentive programs. There are Department of Agriculture renewable energy and energy efficiency grants and loans. There are various State subsidies for wind.

Texas is appropriating billions of dollars for transmission lines for wind. That is their decision. It is not as if this were a form of energy which lacked support. I am afraid the result is that the extravagant subsidies for wind are causing people to build wind farms and to use wind where they otherwise would not. In testimony before the Environmental and Public Works Committee recently, one utility manager from Oklahoma said he is tripling the amount of wind they are using.

I said: Why are you doing that? Can you use it as baseload power; that is, can you use it as reliable power all day long?

He said: We can only use it when the wind blows.

I said: Can you use it for peaking power?

He said: No, we can't use it for that because the peaking power, the busiest time of the day or year, might come when the wind is not blowing.

I said: Why are you doing it then?

He said: To make the legislators happy.

So we are not letting the market decide. We have become obsessed with the idea that this needs to be done. How big is that obsession? I think most Senators would be surprised to learn that by fiscal year 2009, the renewable electricity production tax credit will be the single largest tax expenditure for energy: $1.9 billion of that in 2009 would go for all renewable sources, but $1.3 billion would be for wind. We hear a lot about oil and gas and the subsidies for oil and gas. One might think that would be true since we have this massive economy. We use about 25 percent of all the oil and gas in the world. But according to figures from the Joint Tax Committee--and perhaps somebody will point out that the Joint Tax Committee is wrong, but this is what they say in the year 2009, the subsidies for oil and gas tax expenditures will be $2.7 billion from the taxpayers. The production tax credit for wind will be $1.3 billion. Wind, $1.3 billion; oil and gas, $2.7 billion. The reason I mention that is because of the disproportionate relationship between the value of oil and gas to an economy that uses 25 percent of all of it in the world and the amount of electricity produced by wind.

In 2006, wind energy produced seven-tenths of 1 percent of the electricity we consumed in the United States, yet it is the largest single energy tax expenditure by the taxpayer. Something is wrong there. The Energy Information Administration estimates that by the year 2020, after we have spent presumably tens of billions of dollars of subsidies for large wind turbines in your front yard and backyard and side yard and our national forests, along our beaches, our most scenic mountaintops, after we have done all of that, according to the Energy Information Administration, wind is projected to produce about 1 percent of our electricity needs.

I am skeptical of that figure. I think the Energy Information Administration is too conservative. It might be 2 percent. It might be 3 percent. Maybe it is 4 percent. But should the largest energy expenditure be to encourage the building of such towers, or should we be spending our money in different ways?

We have other ways to produce electricity: 49 percent of our electricity is produced by coal. Would it be wise to spend money in finding a way to sequester that coal, perhaps through algae, perhaps through enzymes, so we can use it to reduce our dependence on foreign oil? I think it would. But the largest single energy tax expenditure is for wind. Twenty percent of our electricity is produced by nuclear power, 80 percent of our clean power. In my view, if we are serious about climate change in this generation, climate change is an inconvenient truth, the inconvenient solution is nuclear power and conservation. But the largest single energy tax expenditure is for large wind turbines. Hydropower is clean as well. It is only about 7 percent of the electricity in the United States. It will drop a little by 2020. But wouldn't there be ways to encourage that as well?

It may be said that this is only a small matter. It is only $5 million. But

it won't be a small matter in residential neighborhoods in Knoxville and Denver and Los Angeles, all across the country, when a neighbor comes in and says: I just got $4,000 of your tax money, and I am going to put up a 12-story white tower with a blinking red light on top because I want to do what I can for climate change.

I think the proper answer is to say that is not the most commonsense thing we can do. There are many ways we can conserve. Efficient light bulbs would save eight times as much as this proposal would generate. Why don't we do that instead?

If you think this is not going to happen in your neighborhood, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record following my remarks a story from CNN.com about neighbors in Atlanta who are already squabbling about someone who has built a wind turbine in their front yard in a historic neighborhood. It makes no difference that the wind doesn't blow very much in Atlanta. The neighbor is just making a statement. That is the kind of thing that this will encourage.

It would be my hope that this amendment would be accepted by the Senate. The effect of it would be to leave in place up to $4,000 support for building a tower that could be as large as that one, a 100 kilowatt turbine, in rural areas or for rural business. That would still be in place under my amendment. What would not be in place is the ability to use that in residential neighborhoods. The amendment would also make clear that nothing we are doing in this legislation preempts any local decision about the kind of decisions people will make. I am for caps on utilities. I am the sponsor of the solar credit. I am for cleaner air, more aggressively than the administration has been. I am ready to use smart meters. I am ready to try geothermal, almost anything, the low-carbon fuel standard. But I hope we will use common sense.

Common sense says to me, with all due respect, that we should not encourage using other people's tax money for your neighbor to build up to a 12-story white tower in his front yard as a solution to the current concern about climate change. There are other, better ways to do it, starting with energy efficiency, other ways that make much more common sense.

I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

Neighbors Fight, States Scramble Over Clean Power

(By Thom Patterson)

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN).--Curt Mann's neighbors are livid,

accusing him of erecting an ugly wind turbine among their

historic homes for no other reason than to show off his

environmental ``bling.''

The 49-year-old residential developer is remodeling his

1920's house to be more environmentally friendly, including

installation of a 45-foot-tall wind turbine in his front

yard. ``It's really none of their business how I spend my

money,'' Mann said.

The towering turbine, which overlooks majestic trees and

Victorian rooftops, pits preservationists in Atlanta's Grant

Park Historic District against a property owner and his

individual rights.

``It's unattractive and it's a nuisance,'' said Scott

Herzinger, whose home is three doors down. Mann ``invaded the

public view . . . when he put that tower up.''

In blustery regions, home turbines can cut power bills by

up to 80 percent. But opponents claim Mann's wind turbine

needlessly threatens neighborhood property values because

Atlanta's low winds don't produce enough speed to make the

device worthwhile.

At a cost of $15,000, Mann said the turbine will shave at

least $20 per month off his power bill--hardly a windfall. A

proposed federal tax credit would bring Mann $3,000.

Acknowledging it could be decades before his investment pays

off, Mann said, ``even if it was a 50-year payback, at least

we've done something to reduce our dependency on fossil

fuels.''

Herzinger blames Atlanta, which ``let us down miserably''

when zoning officials sided with Mann.

Said Mann, ``If regulations for historic preservation don't

address modern-day issues, then they're not very sound.''

But Herzinger, 48, who shares Mann's support for wind

power, said Mann could have considered many alternatives

which would have helped the environment more than the

turbine. ``After looking at the facts, it doesn't seem

unreasonable to think of Mann's wind turbine as eco-bling.''

Although opponents filed a lawsuit in Fulton County

Superior Court against both Atlanta and Mann, the squabble

poses larger, far-reaching questions about how communities,

states and the nation as a whole should tackle the ongoing

shift toward cleaner energy.

``I don't think we're going to revolutionize the utility

industry through wind turbines in the front yard,'' said

longtime California energy consultant Nancy Rader, ``To

really make a dent in the power sector we've got to have the

big, central, bulk-generating facilities.''

At least 21 states and the District of Columbia have set

deadlines or goals for utilities to obtain electricity from

clean renewable sources instead of fossil-fuel burning

plants.

The scramble has triggered construction of large-scale wind

farms throughout much of the nation, including proposals for

the first U.S. offshore facilities.

Delaware and Galveston, Texas, have offshore projects in

the works, although a farm proposed off New York's Long

Island was shelved this year due to high projected

construction costs.

Top New York energy official Paul Tonko said the push

toward renewable energy became more urgent as oil prices hit

a record $80 a barrel September 13.

``We have precious little time to adjust,'' said Tonko,

president of New York State Energy Research and Development

Authority. ``We are behind the curve of several leading

nations who have moved forward with very aggressive

outcomes.''

In Massachusetts, where utilities are under the gun to

obtain four percent of electricity from renewables by 2009,

builders await federal approval of a hugely controversial

wind farm off historic Cape Cod.

The Cape Wind project envisions 130 wind turbines each

rising 440 feet above Nantucket Sound by 2011. State

officials said the farm will eliminate pollution equal to

175,000 gas-burning cars.

Like Mann's neighbors, Cape Wind opponents are rallying to

protect historic properties. The Massachusetts historical

commission said the wind farm's ``visual elements'' would be

``out of character'' and would have an ``adverse effect'' on

more than a dozen historic sites, including the Kennedy

family residential compound in Hyannis Port.

James E. Liedell, director of Clean Power Now, a grass-

roots group that supports the project, said he once asked

Sen. Edward Kennedy, during a random encounter in 2003, what

he thought of Cape Wind. ``It's the sight of wind turbines

that bothers me,'' Liedell said Kennedy said, reminding

Liedell that, ``that's where I sail, and I don't want to see

them when I sail either.''

According to polling in northern Europe where wind farms

are flourishing, residents eventually have come to accept

turbine towers dotting the landscape, said Dr. Mike

Pasqualetti, who has done much research on the topic.

Communities near many California wind farms, which were built

in the 1980s, have largely come to accept the turbines, said

the Arizona State University professor.

As the nation's fastest growing form of new power

generation, wind-born electricity may soon fuel commutes for

millions of Americans.

``If we power electric hybrid cars with electricity that

comes from wind farms, it means you aren't polluting on

either end of the equation,'' said Dr. Robert Lang, director

of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. ``It doesn't

make sense to power electric cars with electricity from

fossil fuel burning plants.''

Governments should consider offering property owners

reduced energy rates or other incentives to win their support

for green energy projects, suggested Lang.

Washington state utilities are racing to obtain 15 percent

renewable energy by 2020--much of that from wind. When the

Kittitas County Commission unanimously rejected placing a 65-

turbine facility near residential property, Gov. Chris

Gregoire overruled the commissioners in a move that Chairman

Alan Crankovich called disappointing and unprecedented.

``To have a land-use decision overturned by the governor,

that scares me,'' Crankovich said. ``I'm concerned about it

because this is the first step in weakening local authority

and I hope she understands that.''

Bertha Morrison, 89, a lifelong resident whose property

abuts the proposed site applauded the governor's decision.

``There'll be money coming from it to the county and that

will keep our taxes down a little bit.''

Individuals such as Morrison, Mann and Herzinger can

influence public energy policy, said energy consultant Rader,

by participating in local government and casting votes on

statewide initiatives.

``We're going to have to bite the bullet,'' said Rader. ``I

think we need to do every damn thing we can to save this

planet and everybody on it.''

Mr. President, I seek recognition under the unanimous consent agreement.

Mr. President, I come today to speak in general about the farm bill, which we are debating, more correctly called the Food and Energy Security Act of 2007, and also to speak about some of the amendments proposed to it.

This is an essential piece of legislation. I am proud to have been part of both committees that have brought separate parts of this legislation forward and to have been able to work together in a bipartisan fashion to craft a bill in the Senate I believe very effectively addresses the food and fiber needs of our Nation as we move forward.

This legislation impacts the lives of families across this Nation and around the world through providing food security, enabling global competitiveness, and ensuring a better environment. I have been pleased to work with my colleagues on the Senate Agriculture Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and others in Congress to craft a bill that builds upon previous farm bills for a stronger Federal farm policy.

The legislation includes essential provisions, such as the new specialty crops subtitle that strengthens the specialty crop block grant and other important programs. I thank Senator Stabenow, Senator Craig, and others for working with me on this effort. I also thank the committee for its commitment to helping us be sure that these new specialty crop provisions have been included in the legislation. There has been confusion because, although we have included specialty crops in the legislation this year, they have not been included as a commodity crop, in those crops that are covered by the commodity programs. Instead, they are included in ways that will help them to obtain better technical assistance and grant programs so they can facilitate and enhance their development, the growing of these crops, and the marketing of them; but they don't technically, under this bill or in any way, participate in the commodity programs.

I also thank Chairman Baucus and Ranking Member Grassley on the Finance Committee for helping to craft a tax title for the farm bill that, in addition to its many other strong provisions, includes improvements to the Endangered Species Act, through tax incentives for landowners, to help them with species recovery. This is a piece of legislation Senators Baucus and Grassley have agreed to cosponsor with me, as well as many other Senators, both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. It is one we have worked on for years to try to find a bipartisan path forward, where those who are concerned about the preservation and recovery of species, as well as those who are concerned about the impacts of our efforts on private property owners, can come together with a proposal that will help us to facilitate the recovery of endangered species.

One little-known fact is approximately 80 percent of the threatened or endangered species in the United States are located on private property. It is critical we bring forward the assistance of private property owners and incentivize their involvement in the recovery of these threatened and endangered species. That is what this legislation will do.

I wish to take some time to talk more about other important aspects of the farm bill and some changes being proposed. In order to do so, I wish to explain what many people don't understand when we talk about the farm bill. We discuss the farm bill as though it were a bill that focused on production agriculture, and certainly it does.

The commodity title I referenced and the conservation title I will reference in a minute both focus closely on production agriculture but not solely on it. What goes unnoticed in these debates is the farm bill is a very broad bill that deals with a multitude of critical issues in our Nation relating to the production of food and fiber. It has 11 titles--titles on commodities and conservation, as I have indicated; titles on trade, nutrition, rural development, credit, research, forestry, energy, livestock, and other miscellaneous provisions.

One other little known or little focused on fact relating to the farm bill is the commodity title, which we most often talk about, represents only 14 percent of the funding allocated in the bill. The conservation title, which is another one of those we talk about a lot, only represents about 9 percent of the funding in the bill. The nutrition portion of the farm bill includes almost two-thirds--in fact, a little over two-thirds of the funding in the bill, 67.2 percent, is allocated to the nutrition program. I will talk about those as well as I go forward.

My point is this is a very broad-based bill. It is one that impacts rural and urban areas. It deals with the importance of food and fiber in many different contexts, from feeding a nation and clothing a nation to engaging in international trade, to our security as a nation, and to many other aspects of our lives. As I said earlier, it literally impacts people not only throughout this country but throughout the world.

Let me move on and talk about a couple of those titles. The first one I will go to is the commodity program and the commodity title.

I am concerned with efforts that have been introduced in some amendments to the bill on the floor that would lower selected loan rates, including the rates for barley, wheat, oats, wool, and honey loan rates--reduce them back down to the 2002 farm bill levels and then divert the funding saved by that reduction into the nutrition title and other titles of the bill.

I certainly understand and don't question the importance of our nutrition programs and other programs being targeted for this diverted funding. But it is important to note that under this farm bill, nutrition funding already accounts for over two-thirds of the funding in the bill, with only 14 percent allocated to commodities.

Much work has been done in this bill to try to provide adequate support for farm families across our Nation, while carefully balancing the limited funding available to each title of the bill.

Additionally, adjustments or corrections have been made to loan rates to better ensure the loan rates don't distort planting decisions. That is very critical in our World Trade Organization negotiations. Under the 2007 farm bill, we have the rates established in a way that will assist us in our global trade negotiations. Specifically, the

adjustments in the Senate bill increase the loan rates for wheat, barley, oats, and minor oilseeds to 85 percent of the Olympic average for prices between 2002 and 2006. For those who don't pay attention to what all that means, the bottom line is it is important, as we move forward in the commodity program, that we not establish programs that distort planting decisions by farmers; otherwise, we will be accused of improper subsidy or improper trade-impacting decisions and policies that will be challenged in world trade negotiation arenas.

Loan rates for crops that compete for acres must be set at similar percentages of recent market prices or they can affect production decisions when prices are expected to be near or below loan levels.

Farmers and their lenders take price support from the loan program into consideration in making planting decisions. Current loan rates under the 2002 farm bill were heavily skewed in favor of and against different crops, ranging from 69 percent to 111 percent of the Olympic average during the years 2002 through 2006. It is these variations that create planting decision distortions we need to avoid.

Efforts to strike the changes we have made and divert the funding will prolong the existing disparity in the current farm bill, a policy which has been a factor of loss of wheat, barley, oats, and minor oilseeds to increased production in other commodities.

Our producers work to feed our country and people of nations across the world, while also dealing with high levels of regulation and taxation, labor shortages, droughts, and other natural disasters and ever-increasing input costs, substantial foreign market barriers, and other factors that put them at a disadvantage in a very competitive world market.

We have to ensure our farm families have the necessary support as they continue to work to remain successful, while factoring in and facing these increased challenges.

I ask other Senators in the Chamber to stand with me in supporting this careful balance we have reached in the bill and to vote against amendments or other efforts to eliminate the loan rate rebalancing and other commodity program support.

I also wish to talk about, in the commodity title, the importance of pulse crop support.

As amendments are being considered to strike portions of the farm bill, I wish to discuss the history and importance of support for pulse crops in this farm bill.

Pulse crops are cool season legumes that can withstand the cool temperatures of the northern tier of the United States. Pulse crops are such things as dry peas, lentils, small chickpeas, and large chickpeas. These cool season, nitrogen-fixing legumes are grown across the northern tier of the United States in rotation with wheat, barley, and other minor oilseeds.

In the late 1990s, when agriculture prices for commodities struggled, bankers steered growers away from raising pulse crops because they did not have the farm program safety net provided to other crops in their rotation.

In 1999, dry pea acres dropped by 55 percent. The pulse industry responded by requesting full program crop status for pulse crops as a way to keep the nitrogen-fixing legumes in the crop rotation with other program crops. Again, as we worked with issues in the previous farm bill, this was an area that needed adjustment and attention.

In 2002, I worked with the industry and other Members of Congress to include dry peas, lentils, and small chickpeas in the 2002 farm bill. Specifically, the industry was granted a marketing assistance loan program for dry peas, lentils, and small chickpeas.

Pulse crops are very good for the environment and for the overall soil health. The citizens of our country demand that our farm programs protect the long-term sustainability of our agricultural production. These legumes generate their own nitrogen and require no processed fertilizer to produce a crop.

Pulses fix nitrogen in the soil, which supplies a 40-pound-per-acre nitrogen credit to the following crop in the rotation, such as wheat, barley, and other minor oilseeds. Pulse crops and soybeans are the only farm program crops that do not require nitrogen fertilizer.

The carbon footprint of pulses and soybeans is lower than any other farm program crop because of their ability to generate their own nitrogen.

The farm bill provides us with the opportunity to encourage our Nation's farmers to protect the long-term sustainability of our soils. Including pulse crops in farm programs provides a safety net to other program crops and, therefore, encourages crop diversity and sustainability. Once again, it is an issue of favoring one crop over another with the unintended impact on the soils of our Nation.

Stripping pulse crops out of the farm programs, as some are proposing, would encourage farmers in the northern tier to shift production to those crops with a safety net in periods of low prices. This shift in production would upset the delicate environmental balance that pulse crops provide to overall soil health and sustainability and would result in acreage loss.

I encourage my fellow Senators to oppose amendments that would strip pulse crops and support for them from the farm bill.

Let me shift for a moment to the conservation title. As the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Rural Revitalization, Conservation, and Forestry, I wish to take a few minutes to evaluate and discuss the critical importance of the conservation title.

The programs authorized through the conservation title of the farm bill provide landowners with both financial and technical assistance necessary to bring real environmental results. In fact, I have said many times that of all the legislation we consider in these Chambers year in and year out, it is the farm bill that provides the most significant protection and support of our environment than any other legislation we consider. Conservation programs are the backbone of the Federal conservation and environmental policy.

The farm bill before us provides $4.4 billion in new conservation spending. The legislation builds on current successful conservation programs and needed enhancements to make them work better for our producers. It provides $1.28 billion in new spending for a program named the Conservation Stewardship Program. Funding is provided for continuation of the Wetlands Reserve Program and the Grasslands Reserve Program.

The Wetlands Reserve Program would be provided with funds to enroll 250,000 new acres per year through 2012, and the Grasslands Reserve Program would have sufficient resources to work in a similar fashion from 2008 through 2012.

As of fiscal year 2006, more than 9,000 wetland reserve sites have been enrolled and improved on more than 1 million acres of land in the United States. There are more than 900,000 acres enrolled in the Grasslands Reserve Program, providing habitat for more than 300 migratory birds species that rely on this prairie habitat.

The Conservation Reserve Program would be maintained at its 39.2 million acres. This program has reduced cropland soil loss by about 450 million tons. It has restored 2 million acres of wetlands, protected 170,000 miles of streams, and sequestered 48 million tons of carbon dioxide through 2006.

The Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program would be continued with $85 million per year through the year 2012.

The Farmland and Ranchlands Protection Program would also be authorized at $97 million per year. Easements on nearly 2,000 farms and ranches have been enabled through this program. It is estimated that almost 384,000 acres of prime, unique, and important farmland soil on the urban fringe have been or will be permanently protected from conversion to nonagricultural uses with these easements.

These are just some of the programs that are included in the conservation title of the farm bill. I understand and share the interest of many who want to increase funding for conservation programs, and as a strong supporter and proponent of these programs, I believe we will all benefit from these investments in conservation. However, I think we should be very careful where we look to obtain these funding increases. A strong farm bill is one that carefully balances each of the items, as I have indicated before.

I have indicated that the nutrition title represents almost or little more

than two-thirds of the funding in the bill. Nutrition in our schools remains an issue of critical importance for all Americans. As a father, I understand the positive effects that good nutrition has in helping a child develop and learn throughout the course of a schoolday.

In addition, I am troubled by the fact that the percentage of overweight young Americans has more than doubled in the past 30 years. I have been a strong proponent of programs that increase access to healthy foods for our children in schools. One example is the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. The farm bill would expand this existing limited program to every State in the United States and the District of Columbia and would require that at least 100 of the chosen participating schools be located on Indian reservations.

I applaud the members of the Senate Agriculture Committee for working toward these commonsense solutions and programs to support positive steps in nutrition for our children and others across our Nation. But as I said earlier, I also must express my concerns with proposals that seek to regulate food and beverage choices in schools from the Federal level.

I am wary of Federal policies that interfere with the local autonomy of State and local schools in this matter. In addition, studies have shown that parents and educators need to work with our youth to educate them about the right choices they can make for dietary health. The best way to get a child to do something different is to tell them they cannot do it sometimes. Instead of dictating to our children, we have a responsibility to teach them about their choices and encourage them to make the right choices for themselves.

The rural development title also has much assistance for America. Throughout the farm bill debate, there has been much discussion regarding investing in rural communities across our Nation, and I am pleased to have had the opportunity today to highlight just a few of the ways in which this farm bill helps us to further invest in rural America.

One of the things we have noticed, as we have seen economic decline in rural America, is that we must build the infrastructure in our rural communities so they can have access to the increasing markets overseas and nationally. It has become apparent to me that the effect of our Federal environmental rules and regulations is also felt most heavily in small and rural communities. These communities do not have the economies of scale because of the small population for very expensive updating required for their water and wastewater systems that they must do in order to comply with Federal law. Something a large urban community could handle can literally bankrupt a smaller community seeking to comply with our clean water and safe drinking water standards. Because of that, I have fought for years to promote a program called Project Search which we established in the 2002 farm bill to provide small rural communities with financial assistance to help them comply with these regulations.

Through the changes made to Project Search's model, small, financially distressed communities in Idaho and across the Nation will now have increased and more streamlined access to Federal assistance in the early stages of water, wastewater, and waste disposal projects. This will help them keep their water clean and help them do so in a way that allows the community to avoid financial ruin.

This farm bill has also made critical reforms to the Rural Broadband Loan Program ensuring that broadband access is provided to those communities with the greatest need.

The Connect the Nation matching grant program will be added to benchmark current broadband access programs and build GIS service maps to promote greater accuracy and understanding of our Nation's broadband networks.

I am also pleased that this farm bill will reauthorize the National Rural Development Partnership.

There are many other important programs included within the rural development title that will have a major impact on our rural communities. Again, I thank my colleagues for working with us to make this part of the title effective.

There are only two more titles about which I want to talk. One is the energy title. The largest energy reserves in our Nation reside in the farmland and forests across this country. Let me say that again. The largest energy reserves in our Nation reside in our farmland and forests across this country.

In order to provide for national energy security, it has become clear that agriculture is a part of the solution. For far too long we have been dependent almost entirely on petroleum as our major source of energy in this Nation. We are far too dependent not only on petroleum but on foreign sources of petroleum. And as anyone working with a portfolio would say, we must diversify. That is why I have supported many of the provisions in this farm bill to move our Nation into more diverse forms of alternative and renewable fuels.

Let's take, for example, biomass. The stored energy in biomass worldwide amounts to approximately 50 billion tons of crude oil equivalent units every year, over five times our current energy needs.

Using 17 million tons of biomass a year for energy could produce up to 7,000 new primary jobs, displace 6.8 million tons of CO2 from natural gas-fired powerplants, and generate renewable carbon credits that might eventually be worth more than $200 million.

Through research, we can expand and harness a good part of that astronomical potential, and that is why we included biomass provisions in this bill, provisions such as the Crop Transition Program, that will stimulate production and ease transition toward perennial biomass crops. Mr. President, $172 million would be provided over 5 years for this program.

There would be competitive research grants of $75 million for biomass to bioenergy programs, focusing on increasing process efficiency and utilization of byproducts, and providing for a regional bioenergy program that is awarded competitively to land grant universities.

I also support a strong focus in this bill on biofuels. We have long recognized the value in providing homegrown fuel in the form of ethanol. It is cleaner, it is renewable, and it reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

As we move forward, it is also clear that as we approach the maximum production limits of our starch ethanol, we also need to move into cellulosic ethanol which must be a primary component of our Nation's ethanol portfolio. America's energy demand will increase 30 percent over the next 22 years, and biofuels are critical to that increase.

Finally, I wish to talk about the trade portion of our bill. As Congress moves forward in a farm bill debate, we often wonder what is the future of American agriculture. I wish to discuss one very important piece of it because it is very clear to all of us that a major part of our future in American agriculture lies beyond our borders. Agriculture production in the State of Idaho is a great example.

According to statistics from the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, if Idahoans had to consume all the farm products produced within the State, every day each resident would have to eat 52 potatoes, 240 slices of bread, 38 glasses of milk or 1.9 pounds of cheese, two quarter-pound hamburgers, two onions, and the list goes on and on. The point being, we depend on other markets for our successful agricultural programs, and trade support must be a critical part of our agricultural programs in this farm bill.

This farm bill contains a number of programs such as the Market Access Program, the Foreign Market Development Program, and the Technical Assistance Program for Specialty Crops, which I talked about earlier, to name a few.

One final point. Senator Baucus and I have offered an amendment with regard to trade with Cuba. The future success of our agricultural programs and the ability of this Nation to remain globally competitive depend on our ability to have access to markets beyond our borders. There is a huge debate in this country about whether we should continue to refuse or to limit our trade with Cuba or whether to open trade with Cuba, and I am one of those who believes we should open it.

I recognize we face in Cuba and in the Castro Government a brutal dictatorship, one in which human rights and

civil rights are not recognized or honored in any way realistically. But for us to refuse to trade with them, in my opinion, does nothing to solve that problem and does everything to reduce the opportunities of the United States to influence Cuba, both on economic levels, as well as political levels.

If we look at the economic impact on the United States, our refusal to sell our agricultural products to Cuba does not mean that Cubans cannot eat or they cannot gain these agricultural products. They simply buy them from somewhere else--Canada, Europe, or other places.

Yet if we were to open our trade with Cuba and allow more aggressive U.S. marketing of agricultural products there, a recent study by the trade commission says that exports of fresh fruits and vegetables would likely increase by $37 million to $68 million in exports; milk powder exports would more than double; processed food exports would see a $26 million increase; wheat exports would be doubled to $34 million; and exports of dry beans would increase by $9 million, up to $22 million, to give a few examples.

The point is, there are markets in Cuba for our goods which our producers need to be able to take advantage of, and we will do nothing but increase our ability to work with the people of Cuba to address the political issues they face by doing so.

If we want to have a positive impact on the people of Cuba and the pressures they face under the regime in which they live, then we should open trade, open travel, and open communication so we can take to them an opportunity to see the freedom we experience here and to experience the power of open and free markets.

That is why Senator Baucus and I have introduced this legislation, and I hope the Senators here will support this amendment to this critical bill to help the United States in this one area move forward.

When we have significant trade with a nation such as China across the Pacific Ocean, yet we will not open significant trade with a neighbor such as Cuba, 90 miles off our shore, we need to reevaluate the effectiveness of our foreign policy, not only in terms of its impact on U.S. producers but in terms of its impact on our ability to truly reach out and cause the kind of positive change in Cuba that will help them achieve the kind of political freedom and avoid the kinds of oppression and human rights pressures they now face.

I have talked about a number of the portions of the farm bill. There are other very critical portions as well. The bottom line is we have an opportunity in the Senate this month, if we will deal with the amendments that are pending, to move forward on a very critical piece of legislation, a piece of legislation that, as I indicated, deals with the food and fiber of our Nation and the ability of our people and of people globally to have a better diet, to have a better opportunity to participate in global markets, and a stronger and cleaner environment.

I hope that as we move through this process, we will not make changes to the bill that will make it worse, that instead we will simply adopt those improving proposals and then hopefully soon send on to the House this very significant and important piece of legislation.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I have no objection. I want to make sure we are working off the same page on amendments to be offered. I will reserve the right to object to make sure we are on the same page.

Madam President, I would be happy to do that approach. In talking to the Senator from Michigan, who has an interest in the asparagus program, if this is not a convenient time for her, I will substitute the amendment on the emergency funding, which is No. 3822, for the asparagus one, No. 3672, unless the Senator is ready to go.

Reserving the right to object, I suggest I be recognized to offer those three amendments and set a time limit at the convenience of the managers. I am agreeable to a time limit. I can proceed to offer them and my colleagues can work out the time agreements.

Reserving the right to object, I am wondering, does this mean we are not going to have votes on the amendments I am offering?

No, but is it the understanding that at some point, we are going to get to votes on the 5 amendments that are part of the original 20 amendments that were agreed to?

Madam President, I rise to speak about amendments which I have pending to the agriculture bill. I hoped they would be voted on today. I guess there is a fundraiser this evening on the Democratic side of the aisle which allows us to not have any more

votes. Certainly, I hope most will be voted on tomorrow.

There are five amendments which I have proposed to the bill to try to make it a better bill, although it is a bill that has very serious problems. Let me talk about that quickly.

This agriculture bill comes forward every 5 years. It is a reauthorization of the farm programs. The practical effect is every year consumers get sort of taken to the woodshed behind the barn and get fleeced. This is no change from that historic activity under the farm bill. Only this time the fleecing is happening by the use of jiggling numbers and gamesmanship of numbers.

There is $34 billion of spending in this bill which is done through gimmicks--gimmicks to avoid what is euphemistically called pay-go around here, gimmicks to avoid budget points of order, gimmicks to make this bill cost less than it actually costs--$34 billion, with date changes and things such as that.

Then there is another game that is played, which is money which has historically been spent by direct mandatory spending is taken from the mandatory spending accounts and moved over to the tax accounts. Basically, in the conservation area, where we used to have, I think, $5 billion or $3 billion of mandatory accounts spending, we now have $5 billion or $3 billion of what is known as tax credits.

What is the practical effect of that? What it does by moving that spending over to the tax side is you free up that amount of money on the spending side, on the mandatory side to be spent, with the practical implication that the bill jumps in its cost by that amount of money. So you have a fairly significant increase by doing that. In the end, that adds to the deficit, of course, because you have ended up increasing spending by that amount of money.

In addition, the bill adds a large number of new programmatic activities through the subsidy realm. We already subsidize a lot of farm products around here in a questionable way. Sugar is a good example of that. We basically subsidize sugar so that the price of sugar in this country is about 75 percent higher than it is on the world market. That has an effect not only on the cost of sugar but it also has an effect on things such as the production of ethanol, because ethanol can be produced from sugarcane.

In addition, we subsidize all sorts of different commodities. As we know, the farm bill is the classic example of what you learned in school called log rolling. That is where you say, if you will vote for my subsidy, I will vote for yours, and down the road we go. You vote for wheat, I will vote for corn, corn will vote for soybeans, soybeans will vote for peanuts, peanuts will vote for cotton, and so forth and so on. So although none of these subsidies could stand on their own, when they get in this sequential support effort, they build a very solid wall of support for a lot of programs which are of questionable need, and certainly of questionable value when you look at a market economy, and we are supposedly a market economy. Of course, in the farm area we are not a market economy, we are a throwback to a commissar economy.

Well, in this bill they add a number of new programs. They add an asparagus payment, they add a chickpea payment, they add a camellia subsidy, and they create new programs in the area of a national sheep and goat industry. They create a new program to look at the stress farmers are under. So they add a panoply of new programmatic activity in this bill, most of which is of questionable value, but it obviously has some interest group which promoted it and, therefore, it gets put in the bill.

What I have done is I have lined up five amendments here which I think are fairly reasonable and address a number of issues--policywise big issues, and from a farm standpoint some of them address fairly narrow and concise issues.

The first amendment which I have offered--which has been offered on my behalf by Senator Thune, but which I will call up and ask for a vote on as soon as we can get to it, as soon as we can get people to give us votes around here--is the mortgage forgiveness amendment. What we are seeing in America today, whether it is in farm America, rural America, or in urban America, is obviously a huge meltdown in the subprime lending markets. The effect of that meltdown is that many people are finding their mortgages foreclosed on, which is obviously an extremely traumatic event, to have your house taken in a mortgage foreclosure. I can't think of too many more traumatic physical events than that. Obviously, there are more traumatic health events, but not too many more physical events or economic events.

Well, when you have a mortgage foreclosed on, you have a second totally incomprehensible event. The IRS assesses you a tax on the amount of the money which you owed to the bank, or to the lender, which you couldn't repay and which was wiped out in the foreclosure.

For example, if you have an obligation to a bank of $150,000 and your home is foreclosed on, and it is sold for something that recovers $100,000 of that, then that $50,000 difference becomes personal income to you and the IRS sends you a tax bill for it, even though you got foreclosed on. Well, can you think of anything worse than that? I can't, from the standpoint of economics happening on a daily basis--a person loses their home and then the IRS collection agents come by and say you owe us X number of dollars because your home was foreclosed on.

Well, this amendment would put an end to that. It would say that will not be deemed income to the taxpayer, so that a taxpayer whose home is foreclosed on does not receive the double whammy of having a tax bill sent to them. It seems pretty reasonable to me. I can't imagine anybody is going to oppose this amendment. I would hope it would get a very large vote. It is not subject to a point of order, because the cost of it is within what is left on the pay-go scorecard, to the extent there is anything left on the pay-go scorecard, it having been shredded. But Senator Conrad said last week there was $670 million left on the pay-go scorecard, which my staff confirms, as ranking member of the Budget Committee, and this amendment costs less than that. So it is in order, and I hope it will be supported. I think it is only the fair and right thing to do. I mean, this is a quirk of tax policy which, unfortunately, if you are caught in it as a citizen of America it is not a quirk, it is a devastation, and it is not right. Nobody, because their home gets foreclosed on, should suddenly get a tax bill for the amount the bank didn't recover from the home they sold.

The second amendment I am going to call up, and hope I can call it up very soon and get a vote on it, is already pending, and it is what I call the ``baby doctors for farm families'' amendment. Today, in rural America, there is a crisis in the area of health care. There are a lot of problems in health care across this country, but especially in rural America there is a significant crisis. The crisis is this: If you are a woman of childbearing age, or a woman, period, you are going to have a lot of trouble finding an OB-GYN. Why is that? Because baby doctors are being sued out of existence in rural America. As a result of the avariciousness of the trial lawyers in this country, and their constant attack especially on the practice of obstetrics and delivering babies, it is virtually impossible, it is extremely difficult for OB-GYNs to practice in rural communities, whether they are farm communities or rural communities.

Why is that? Because the base of practice, the number of people they can see, the number of babies they deliver never creates enough revenue to simply pay the cost of their malpractice insurance. And it is a crisis.

If you are a woman in a farm community and you have to drive 2, 3, 4 hours to see a doctor when you are having a baby, that can be a serious problem, obviously. It can be a serious problem on the face of it, but it is especially a serious problem in a place such as New Hampshire, where you are probably driving in a snowstorm or sleet or something else that is not very easy to drive in, and you shouldn't have to go that sort of distance.

We have suggested that simply in the area of baby doctors in rural America that we put in place something to support the women in those communities and make sure they have proper access to those doctors. Essentially, we are following the Texas and the California

proposal, where we limit pain and suffering liability in a manner which allows these doctors to have affordable malpractice premiums. It doesn't mean somebody who gets injured doesn't get recovery. They do. They get full and total recovery in the area of economics. They get significant recovery in the area of pain and suffering. But what we do not have are these explosively large verdicts which essentially make it impossible for someone to pay the cost of the premium to support an obstetrics practice in a rural area.

This proposal, which is very narrow and very reasonable, will serve a very large need in our country. It is to make sure that women get proper health care, and especially during their childbearing years, in rural America. Again, I can't imagine this being opposed, but actually this one is being opposed aggressively by the trial lawyer lobby. They are opposed to anything that limits their income in any way, even when it is something as reasonable as saying in an area where we have a clearly underserved population, which is rural America and doctors serving women in rural America, doctors who deliver babies. They are going to stop any sort of reform that tries to make it possible to improve that situation.

We know this reform works. Why do we know it works? Because Texas has tried it. The language here mirrors Texas. Texas tried it, and what Texas has seen during this period when they put in this law is a huge influx of doctors who deliver children, who are baby doctors. So there is a track record. This isn't some sort of theoretical exercise. We know in practice that this works. I know if it were in place, it would give a lot of women in this country the comfort of knowing they were going to have a decent doctor, or any doctor--it would be a decent doctor, obviously--to care for them as they decide to have children.

I hope we can get to this amendment. But again, I am interested in the fact that this amendment is being stonewalled by the other side of the aisle. They are telling me, well, we can't vote on this amendment. Why? Because we have a fundraiser tonight. I wonder who is at that fundraiser, by the way? There wouldn't be any trial lawyers there. We can't vote on this amendment because we don't have our people here. Well, there ought to be enough votes to take care of women in this country so you wouldn't have to have extra people here to defeat a proposal which is fairly reasonable and which tracks a major State's decision and which has been proven to work when it comes to caring for women who want to have children. It is very narrow. Again, it only applies to rural communities, only applies to doctors who deliver babies in rural communities, only gives women an opportunity to get decent health care.

I have another amendment which I hope to call up, which I would like to have voted on fairly soon. And by the way, I am agreeable to voting on all these tonight. I am agreeable to a half-hour timeframe. I am agreeable to voting them all tomorrow. So I am not holding this bill up. I am offering these amendments. They are pending and they are ready to go.

Another amendment I have says this new program of creating a farmers stress network should not be created. This is more of a statement. I mean how many new programs can we create in this bill? This is an unauthorized program. It is not funded. But I suspect it will be appropriated before we get too far down the road. But why do we need a stress program for farmers? Granted, farmers are under stress. I used to work on a farm, so I understand that farming is a stressful activity. But running a shoe store during an economic downturn is a stressful activity, running a restaurant is a stressful activity, running a garage is a stressful activity. There are a lot of activities in America that involve stress. Are we going to set up a stress network for every activity in America that has stress? And are we going to expect the Federal Government to fund it? Yeah.

My goodness, think of what we would have to do for our wonderful staff here. My goodness, we would have to have such a program it would be incredible, because we really give them a lot of stress. The simple fact is, you can't keep throwing these programs out there because they make good press releases. There are 51 new programs in this bill. Let us at least pick one of them that is so far off the ranch when it comes to being anything rational that the American taxpayer should have to pay for and say, no, we are not going to go this way. That would be a nice gesture. A gesture to the American taxpayer, I would call it. Kill the stress network.

Then I have an amendment which says the money in here for the asparagus program shouldn't be in here. I like asparagus. I have been accused of not liking asparagus, and that is why I am being bringing this forward. That is not true. I actually like asparagus. In fact, I have even grown asparagus. It is very easy to grow, after you get it cultivated. It takes 2 or 3 years to get a good asparagus bed, and you can grow a lot of asparagus, as long as you don't rototill over it. Then you kill it, which is what I did to my asparagus. But as a practical matter, there is no reason we should set up a new program for asparagus. This is going too far.

A lot is going too far in this bill, but this is another example of going too far. Now, granted, it is only $15 million, but, again, I like to think of it as a statement on behalf of the American taxpayer that we are not going to spend that money on a brandnew asparagus program.

There are some others we should also throw out. The camellia program we should throw out, the chickpea program--these are all new programs. They should go out too. But I was only allowed five amendments, and so I picked out the ones I think are most egregious and the ones I think we should make a little attempt to try to put some fiscal discipline into this bill.

Then there is one that is fairly big, which is my last amendment. There is $5 billion in this bill which is the ultimate earmark. It is $5 billion alleged to be an emergency fund for when emergencies strike farm communities. You have to understand how this works. Essentially this is a slush fund. It is a ``walking around money'' fund for about five States. It is, purely and simply, an earmark and a classic porkbarrel initiative.

We know that when we have an emergency in this country we will fund it, especially if the emergency is in farm country. We do it every year, and I believe historically it has averaged about $3.5 billion. I think that is the number. It is off the top of my head as a budgeter. I think that is the number we usually spend on emergencies in farm communities. If it is bigger than that, we spend more than that; if it is less than that, we spend less. But when you put in place a program which exists before the emergency occurs, all you are saying is: Here is a bunch of money folks, come and get it. For every big windstorm that occurs in North Dakota, somebody is going to declare an emergency and try to get reimbursed for their mailbox that got blown over because the money is sitting there. It is that simple. It really is terrible policy to put this forward. You have absolutely set a floor. You know you are going to spend every year in this account, and you know it is going to go to four or five States because that is where the claims are made.

Much better is the approach we presently use, although not perfect, I admit to that. Much better is to identify it when the emergency occurs, know what the costs were when the emergency occurred, and then pay those costs in order to reimburse the farm community which has been impacted, which is what we do. And we do it in a fairly prompt and efficient way around here whenever there is such an event.

There is one emergency out there today, and that is the price of oil. The price of oil has jumped radically. As a result, the cost of heating in this country has jumped radically. People who are of low income, in States from the northern tier especially--places such as Minnesota, New Hampshire--people of low income are in dire need of additional funds in order to meet their heating bills or else, literally, they are going to be in the cold. They are going to spend this winter, as we head into February, in serious straits. In New Hampshire, we have already seen a significant increase in the number of people applying for low-income home energy assistance. This is not going to wealthy people. This doesn't even go to middle-income people. It just marginally goes to low-income people. It really goes to people in the lowest of low

incomes, people who really need that in order to make ends meet and keep their heat on in the winter.

What I am suggesting is if we are going to declare emergencies around here and spend money, let's use the money on a real emergency, something that actually exists where people are actually feeling the pain right now, today--in the area of paying for heating for low-income families.

In addition, I have suggested that we reduce the deficit because that is a pretty big emergency, in my humble opinion, getting this deficit down. So this amendment essentially says let's take $1 billion and add it to the low-income heating assistance program and let's take the other $4 billion and reduce the deficit with it. That is a pretty practical approach. That is addressing a need that exists today and a need that is going to exist tomorrow, which is to reduce the deficit, rather than adding to the deficit and creating an emergency spending account which basically ends up being a slush fund and walking-around money for folks in four or five States that traditionally declare emergencies.

Those are the five amendments. I regret quite honestly that we cannot get an agreement to vote on all of them right now. I would be willing to say: OK, let's debate all of them for half an hour and then go to a vote, in seriatim vote them--bang, bang, bang, bang. Obviously, I have serious reservations about this bill. I think it is very bad policy in a lot of areas. But I recognize that the votes are there to pass the bill, so I am not trying to delay it in some tactical or procedural way. I am suggesting just the opposite, that we proceed to vote on issues which are important, which include making sure people whose homes are foreclosed on do not end up with the tax man showing up the next day and saying they owe money on money they didn't ever see as a result of their home being foreclosed on; making sure that women who are having children can see a doctor in a rural community, that farm families have adequate access to baby doctors; making sure that people who are very low income have enough to be able to meet the heating costs of this winter, which we know are going to be 30 percent to 40 percent higher than they were last winter; making sure that we reduce the deficit; suggesting we eliminate a couple of programs which are not that big but which are sort of examples of an underlying problem, which is that there is a lot of new programmatic activity here that probably should not be here and there are a lot of new subsidies in here that should not be in here--the asparagus program and the farmers stress network program.

Amendment No. 3673

Madam President, at this time I would like to call up amendment No. 3673. I am not calling it up for a vote because I understand it is not agreed to, but I do want to call it up and send a motion to the desk.

I am calling up the medical malpractice amendment, not for a vote but because I want to second-degree it.

Madam President, I ask for the regular order relative to amendment No. 3673.

I send an amendment to the desk.

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

Madam President, at this point I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to acknowledge the importance of the arguments that have been forwarded by my colleagues, especially those comments most recently by the distinguished ranking member of the Agriculture Committee and earlier by Senator Conrad, the Chairman of the Budget Committee and also a very valued member for a long time of the Agriculture Committee.

I think it is important in response, as the Senator from North Dakota pointed out, as he described the situation, that we have to take his common sense that farms that produce much more are likely, under the current farm legislation, to receive more in subsidy and payments of various sorts.

There have been certainly comments made on our side of the question that a disproportionate amount of money goes to a very few farmers. Senator Conrad attempted to rebut that by pointing out that these very few farmers may very well produce, in some States, the bulk of all that is produced.

So as a matter of common sense, if payments are being made, they would receive a very large share of those payments. Certainly, that logic is impeccable. The point the Lugar-Lautenberg amendment tries to bring to the floor is that leaving aside specific farmers, we are talking about the interests of all the American people, all the taxpayers who make these payments, in fact, to a very few.

We are making the point that farmers who do produce a lot of corn or wheat or soybeans or cotton are very likely to be more successful. I pointed out in my opening statement how farms have grown, how successful farmers have purchased the farms of those who were elderly or from the estates or from young people who have moved away from the States or from young people who do not have the wherewithal to buy property.

In short, what I describe is the consolidation of agriculture in America, which is a pretty strong trend and which I believe the underlying farm bill we are discussing today would accelerate. I think that would be regrettable. Therefore, the point I am making with our amendment is not to discuss whether, proportionately, subsidies go to those who are most successful and produce the most but, rather, to say we should not have these payments at all.

What we should have is a safety net for all farmers, including large and the wealthy as well as those who are not very wealthy and not very large, an underlying safety net of crop insurance based upon each county in America, so it is not a broad-gauge situation, it is a very locally specific situation, taking into consideration presumably the soil, the weather pattern, the history of crops in that particular county in America, or the farmer could choose to take the last 5 years of net farm income and have crop insurance based upon that farm history, a whole farm history, not simply of a specific crop, although the farmer would have the option under our plan of choosing a specific crop.

The farmer could choose whole farm income across the board, including a great number of items that are not now covered in these specific crop situations. The bill we are talking about now provides that insurance. It literally pays the premiums for all farmers, so in the event that in any particular area of America, by county, by State or by region, there is difficulty created by the weather or conceivably by world trade distortions, elements that are well beyond the ability of any one individual farmer's management to control, that farmer is going to receive compensation that will keep that farmer in business.

Now, furthermore, the farmer would have the option of buying additional crop insurance, as each of us as farmers now do, to cover the other 15 or 20 percent, depending upon the plan chosen, so that, in fact, you could ensure you were going to at least receive the same income as you have received over the

last 5 years, on average, or receive at least the computed predictions of what the price ought to be for soybeans or for corn.

Let me say, as a practical example, that I take our own experience on the Lugar farm indicative of how this might work. We have had a profit on our farm for the last 50 years. Every year. Now, one reason we have had those profits is because we have had crop insurance and we have bought the highest level of crop insurance that was possible. We paid premiums for it. It was not given to us. We paid money for it.

A good many farmers who are neighbors said: I do not want to put that expense into insurance. I will let the Lord provide, sort of hope it will all work out. But it does not always work out, given the weather patterns.

On our farm, in this soybean season, we had very adverse weather. We had drought during many of the weeks of the summer coming up toward harvest. Fortunately, it did not injure the crop totally. We had at least a 41-bushel yield, and we could have anticipated normally more like 51, about a 20-percent deficiency. But that is the way things move in this world. We understand that.

The antidote has been crop insurance. So if you have a productive farm operation, you are not penalized because of acts of God, literally, through the weather.

Now, that is what we are proposing for all farmers in America and covering all the crops that are associated with our amendment. I think this is a very important discrepancy.

The distinguished ranking member of the Ag Committee, Senator Chambliss, has described the current three-legged stool proposition I discussed earlier today. Direct payments. Direct payments historically on my farm, once again, we receive now under the bill that is being produced, the underlying bill, direct payments whether we have the same number of acres or even the same crops. It is a historical record from which these payments come.

Furthermore, we could, under the so-called marketing loan situation, try to game the system, trying to borrow money from the Federal Government and pay it back in lesser amounts, depending upon the crop moving upward, moving downward. We do not lose.

I would say this is not a fair system with regard either to agricultural competition or with regard to the rest of the public. The public, as a whole, wants to make certain farmers stay in business, wants to make certain small farmers have a shot at it, wants to pay at least for the insurance premiums so if there is an adverse situation, it could not be controlled, the income will come in and the farm stays alive. This is what the argument is about.

Now, let me simply indicate, as the distinguished ranking member has pointed out, 26 farm groups have endorsed the underlying bill. I have no doubt that is true. I would say there are a good number of agricultural interests deeply involved in this bill, and that has usually been the extent of the argument. Those are the groups that are heard in the hearings, are heard sometimes by Senators.

But this time we have had a different situation. I have cited that over 40 major newspapers in the United States of America have taken time in their editorial policies, and furthermore in supporting articles, to point out the deficiencies of farm legislation as it has evolved.

But this represents, I would submit, a much larger group than 26 agricultural groups or even members of our committees who believe they are advocates for specific groups in American agriculture. This time a very broad number of Americans have spoken out in a humanitarian way, as people who respect the Federal budget, as people who respect general fairness, in terms of group and Federal support for those situations.

I think that is very healthy. I hope that will be reflected in the vote we are about to have. I am convinced a large majority of constituents in every State of our Union would favor the Lugar- Lautenberg FRESH amendment if they had any idea of the argument that is being presented today. Thank goodness through our newspapers and editorials, a lot more people do have such an idea, and they are expressing themselves.

Let me make a technical point, and that is that an argument has been made that if we are so reliant, as I have pointed out, on crop insurance, that the Lugar-Lautenberg amendment will hurt crop insurance. I want to recite some specifics about the technicalities of crop insurance. For the moment, crop insurance companies are reimbursed by the Federal Government as a percentage of the cost of the policy. So as commodity prices have increased, so has the reimbursement of private companies, even though the workload has not changed. If, in fact, there is huge demand now for corn, huge demand for soybeans, the prices have gone up, in the case of soybeans, to record levels, exceeded only last in 1973. The compensation to the crop insurance people moves right along with it, without any of the risk involved changing. The GAO described this as ``a kind of windfall.'' Our amendment reduces the reimbursement to a rate that is still well above historical averages and, furthermore, we create a safety net through crop insurance programs dramatically increasing business opportunities for private crop insurance companies.

As has been cited by the distinguished Senator from Georgia, many crop insurance policies may not be available in certain counties in his State and in others, but under our amendment, crop insurance is available everywhere, every county, every State. That is a very important consideration in terms of a national safety net as opposed to a crop-specific or State-specific safety net.

The GAO has reported crop insurance underwriting profits of $2.8 billion over the last decade, three times the insurance industry average. The amendment I am offering today with Senator Lautenberg also reduces underwriting profits by requiring companies to share 30 percent of their accumulative underwriting gain back with the taxpayers, back with the Federal Government, so there is not an undisguised windfall. We have estimated this will save taxpayers more than $1.4 billion and reduce the outlays in the 10 years this bill covers.

I point this out because I think it is important to say our amendment is going to be a remarkable boon for crop insurance. It is going to be virtually universal. A lot of money is going to be made. But before we get into that, we had better change the terms of reference with regard to what taxpayers are paying for and the underwriting risks that are involved.

I point out one further argument; that is, that we have been talking about the relative merits of our amendment when it comes to conservation. We have not discussed differences with regard to research. We might have talked more about development in rural areas. I tried to make the point in an earlier statement that only about 14 percent of the people now living in rural America live on farms. Only about 1 out of 750 individuals actually does farm. The need for development in our rural counties is obvious. The population flight from so many counties is very apparent. If we are talking about rural America, we have to be talking about ways in which new jobs will come to counties in America, and that is not going to come through a normal farm bill situation, rewarding specific farmers and specific crops and not all of those. I point out that our amendment tries to focus on rural America, on the opportunities for jobs for people in county seats all over our country.

I also point out that we have tried to think through the problems of the young. We have tried to talk about resisting the trend toward consolidation of agriculture by truly providing support for the small farmers who do not receive much support. And, as has been pointed out, they don't produce as much, and they never will under the circumstances currently in American agriculture. We think it is very important that young people coming out of college have this choice and, furthermore, that families who do have a tradition of farming not be entrapped by current circumstances that are driving clearly toward much more concentrated management and ownership of American agriculture.

I would say that the reason why a farm such as we have in the Lugar family in Marion County, IN has great hopes for the future is that some great things have occurred in agricultural research. It is a small point in all of this

debate, but I touched upon this a moment ago in describing the soybean price. I could have discussed the evolution of prices of corn in the last 3 or 4 years. The fact is corn and soybeans are now being utilized for energy. The demand for these grains for energy is controversial all by itself. There are some outside of this Chamber as well as inside this body who would say there is a danger that food supplies are going to be converted into energy. Some have even theologically said this is not what God suggested. It should not be energy, it should be food. Others have suggested that the price of corn, because it is going up abnormally, some would say, to provide ethanol is driving the rest of American food costs up. Ditto for soybeans. Some even make the case that it is driving world food prices upward, that residents of very poor countries are now forced to pay more for food because of our policies of using food for fuel.

I appreciate this is an argument that will go on in many circles well beyond this one for a long time. But I also point out that the President of the United States and the leaders of both of our major political parties have for some time said this Nation is now two-thirds dependent upon foreign oil in terms of our petroleum needs. That percentage is increasing. Those sources of supply are more and more precarious and sometimes very unfriendly. The fact is, despite all of our conservation efforts, we are still using more oil each year. If we do not have a policy that even moves toward a slight bit of energy independence--not total, which I would agree is not within the cards as we now see life in our country--if we don't move at least to eliminate a portion of that vulnerability, we are going to have very severe consequences in terms of our own jobs, our competitive ability in the world, quite apart from the ability to drive our cars and heat our homes. We understand that.

I point out that the agricultural research that got ahead of the curve here has made possible huge changes in agricultural income in this year as well as in the last year, and will continue to do so, if we continue our research on cellulosic ethanol, if we continue our research on all of the ways in which agricultural food and fiber might play a role in this and then how we increase the yields. To believe that somehow because we have increased the acreage of corn this year and we are running out of land, that that is the end of the story, is to deny a fact I remember from boyhood onward. My dad was receiving about one-third as much yield out of our cornfields as we are getting now. I have seen that in the last 60 years of time. There are many who would point out that on our farm we could do a whole lot better. I am all ears for that, as are most productive farmers. In short, we are at the threshold of potential for income. Therefore, to have a debate mired in the thought that we must maintain all the subsidies and the programs that as a matter of fact have been so expensive, have brought about concentration, have led even to a loss of jobs in rural America makes no sense at all, in my judgment. We have to talk about the future.

I would say furthermore that, speaking about those abroad, 10 bishops from a church in Africa came to visit with me and I suppose with others in this body. They pointed out specifically that the cotton programs we support debilitate their hopes of coming into self-support in many very tough situations in their countries. They suggest, leaving aside the World Trade Organization criticism of the cotton program specifically and perhaps the opportunities Brazil may have to extract $4 billion out of somewhere in our economy that may be hitting other crops under the order they may receive, that we need to have reform, that the specific policies that are now a part of that program for cotton, they could apply it likewise to corn or to beans, are simply not going to work in a world that also has a humanitarian focus on feeding people, on humane results, on foreign policy that has at least some public diplomacy that works.

I agree with them. I would say to cotton farmers or to soybean farmers or corn farmers, let's make sure we do have an underlying safety net. Let's make certain there cannot be catastrophe to hit any of our groups. Let's do it by State, by county, by local circumstances, by history. Let's do it right. But it is another thing to demand, as a cotton farmer or a corn farmer or a soybean farmer, payments upfront, regardless of what happens, and likewise the ability to game the Government with regard to these marketing loans. I would say on the face of it, taxpayers generally, persons of humane quality in our country, are not going to like the looks of that kind of program. That has been the nature of our program in the farm bill that we have been experiencing and in the one that is about to continue.

I add finally the situation this year in this debate. I agree it is always oversimplified, but let me try to tell it as I saw it. In the House of Representatives, the farm groups, whether it was the 26 Senator Chambliss referenced or others, came in. They saw their Members, and they said: We want every penny, every penny of what we got in the past and more. We want those farm programs and we don't want them touched. However, the Members also began to hear from humanitarian groups, groups that wanted to feed Americans, interested in Food Stamps. Oxfam came in. People in conservation came in in numbers. People in energy research came in. And so pragmatically, the House committee said: Fine, we will do more for each one of you, a whole lot more, as a matter of fact. We are going to add to programs. And they did. So they took the whole block of the farm subsidies as they were and added on all of these additional programs. Then at the end of the trail, they said: We have a pay-go system, and so they added a tax bill offered by Representative Doggett who was outside the farm community but at the same time had an idea over in Finance as to how some money might be raised with regard to certain commercial foreign interests he saw. So you pay for it that way and ship the whole thing along, hoping that many constituencies will be pleased now and that the basic farm subsidies will not be touched, might even be enhanced.

In our situation in this body, we had an even more curious situation. The distinguished Senator from North Dakota who spoke earlier was a proponent, along with others, of a disaster relief program, a huge one. That went over to the Finance Committee, had the Finance Committee discussing the farm bill; as a matter of fact, making a huge contribution to the farm bill.

That particular disaster relief, as I can best fathom, would be run by some bureaucrats in the Treasury Department, that somehow would be signalled when there is a disaster and would send the money over by electronic means.

It is an unusual situation in which we have no idea how much this might cost, and actuarially I think the assumptions are not very sound. But it was an interesting way of meeting at least one particular objective and trying at least to find some other way of paying for it through an unusual clause in tax law.

I mention all of this because this kind of legislation is not good, is not necessary. I hope Members will, in fact, know there is a strong alternative--the FRESH Act, the Lugar-Lautenberg amendment--that they will vote for that, and they will make a sizable difference in the history of farm legislation.

I thank the Chair.

I request the yeas and nays.