Madam President, this is a piece of legislation we have reported out of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the Senate. Senator Murkowski, the vice chair, and I have worked hard on these issues. We…
Madam President, this is a piece of legislation we have reported out of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the Senate. Senator Murkowski, the vice chair, and I have worked hard on these issues. We have also made some changes since reporting the bill out of the Committee on Indian Affairs and will offer a substitute that will be cosponsored by both of us. We are now clearing that substitute, and I will, at the appropriate time today, I hope, offer the substitute version.
Some might wonder why there is a separate Indian health care bill, and the answer is relatively simple: because this country has a trust responsibility--a trust responsibility that has grown over a long period of time and has been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, affirmed by treaties with various Indian tribes--a trust responsibility to provide health care for Native Americans.
The last comprehensive reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act was 15 years ago in 1992. The act itself has been expired for the last 7 years, and it is long past the time for this Congress to reauthorize this program. Even though the act has expired, the Indian Health Service continues to provide Indian health care, despite not having a current authorization. But with advances in medicine and in the delivery and in the administration of health care, we need to finally pass this reauthorization and give the Indian population of this country the advantage of the expansions we will do in this reauthorization bill.
This legislation reflects the voices and the visions of Indian Country. It also responds to a number of concerns that have been raised by others, including the administration. The enactment of this reauthorization has been the top priority of myself and the vice chair of the committee, Senator Murkowski. I also wish to say the former vice chair of the committee, the late Senator Craig Thomas from Wyoming, at the start of this Congress, worked very hard on this legislation and cared very deeply about it. We bring this to the floor, remembering the work of Senator Thomas and recognizing his important work.
I wish to describe the need for the legislation as I begin before I describe the legislation itself. I have in the past couple weeks done some listening tours on Indian reservations, particularly in North Dakota, and we heard and saw many examples of deplorable conditions in Indian health care. It is true there are some health care providers in the Indian Health Service that are making very strong efforts to do the best they can, but they are overburdened and understaffed, underfunded. I wish to give some examples of that.
I wish to show a picture--a photograph, rather--of someone I have shown to the Senate before. This is a woman on the reservation in North Dakota, the Three Affiliated Tribes near New Town, ND. Her name is Ardel Hale Baker. Ardel Hale Baker has given me consent to use her image. She had chest pains that wouldn't quit. Her blood pressure was very high. So they went to the Indian health clinic, and she was diagnosed as having a heart attack. The clinic staff determined she needed to be sent immediately to the nearest hospital 80 miles away. She told the staff she didn't want to go in an ambulance because she knew she would end up being billed for the trip, and she didn't have the money. So she
signed a waiver declining the ambulance service, but the Indian Health Service said you have to take it anyway. We have diagnosed a heart attack happening here. You have to take the ambulance.
She arrived at the hospital and Ardel Hale Baker at the hospital was being taken out of the ambulance and transferred to a hospital gurney. As this woman, having a heart attack, was transferred to the hospital gurney, a nurse saw a piece of paper taped to her thigh and the piece of paper taped to her thigh was a piece of paper that was notifying the health care provider there wasn't going to be any money for this patient. The nurse asked this woman who was then having a heart attack what the envelope was. She pulled the envelope that was taped to her leg off her leg and asked: ``Mrs. Baker, is this yours?'' When they looked at the paper, here was the document. The document was from the Department of Health and Human Services, attached by the folks on the Indian reservation, taped to her leg as she left to be put in the ambulance, and it says:
Understand that Priority 1 care cannot be paid for at this
time due to funding issues. A formal denial letter has been
issued. If and when funds become available, the health
service will do everything possible to pay for Priority 1
care.
What this means is this--contract health care, which cannot be delivered on the reservation. This reservation has a clinic. It is open from 9 until 4 every day, 5 days a week. It is not a hospital, it is a clinic. For health care that cannot be delivered at that clinic, you have to refer the patient somewhere else. But that has to be paid for with contract health care funds, and they run out very quickly.
We had one reservation tell us they were out of health care contract money in January, 4 months into the fiscal year. On this reservation, they say don't get sick after June because the contract health care money is gone. This poor woman was loaded onto a hospital gurney with a piece of paper taped to her leg, saying to the hospital that if you admit her, understand that the Indian Health Service will not pay. This woman must pay. Obviously, this woman had no money. It was a way to say to the hospital that if you admit this patient, you are on your own.
Well, I visited a Sioux reservation at Standing Rock, the McLaughlin Indian Health Center, a couple of weeks ago. The Standing Rock Reservation clinic sees 10 patients in the morning and 10 in the afternoon. I believe they only have a physician assistant there. The reason given in the memorandum about the 10 and 10 was the clinic had only one medical provider and patients signed up in the morning. Anybody arriving after the quotas were made were turned away.
Harriet Archambault received her last prescription for serious hypertension and stomach medication on October 25, 2007. As the medicine ran out, she attempted five times to sign up at the clinic, leaving home early in the morning, driving 18 miles to the clinic but arriving too late each time. Her name was not on the top 10. She couldn't wait at the clinic for a possible opening because she provided day care for three of her grandchildren. So her medication ran out.
In a conversation with her sister prior to her death, she said: What do I have to do, die first before I finally get my medication? She tried five times to drive the nearly 20 miles to the clinic, and five times failed and never got her medicine, and she died a month later, November 27, 2007. Her husband told that story because he wants us to understand that delivery of health care is about life and death.
I have shown a photograph to my colleagues. I wish to do so again. It is a photo of a precious young lady who died, Ta'shon Rain Littlelight. I was at the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana when I met the grandmother of Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. This was a beautiful 5-year- old girl. She loved to dance. This was traditional dance regalia, and she loved to go to dance contests. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight died. Here is how she died. Her grandmother and mother and aunt told me she died, with the last 3 months of her life in unmedicated, severe pain. She went back and back and back to the Crow Tribe's Indian Health Service clinic for health problems. They began treating her for depression. Depression. During one of the visits, one of the grandparents of Ta'Shon said: Well, she has a bulbous condition on her fingertips and toes. That suggests there may be a lack of oxygen to the body, or something is going on. Can't you check that? Ta'Shon was treated for depression.
Finally, one day, August 2006, she was rushed from the Crow clinic, where she had gone once again to the St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, MT. The next day she was airlifted to the Denver Children's Hospital and was diagnosed with untreatable, incurable cancer. She lived for 3 more months after the tumor was discovered in what her grandmother said was unmedicated pain. She died in September 2006. Her parents and grandparents asked the question: If Ta'Shon's cancer had been detected sooner, would this child perhaps have lived?
When diagnosed with terminal illness, the one thing Ta'shon Rain Littlelight wanted to do was see Cinderella's castle, so Make-a-Wish sent her to Orlando. But the night before she was to see the castle, in the hotel room in Orlando, she died in her mother's arms.
The question is, for a young girl such as Ta'shon Rain Littlelight, should she have had the same opportunity in health care others have? Is this what we are willing to accept? Not me. This problem has a human face. I could tell a dozen more stories similar to Ardel Hale Baker and Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight.
I sat on Indian reservations for a total of probably 6 hours listening to stories about Indian health care. Let me talk about the statistics, if I might.
For tuberculosis, the mortality rate for American Indians and Alaskan Natives is seven times higher than the American population as a whole.
For alcoholism, the mortality rate is six times higher.
For diabetes, it is not double but triple--three times higher.
Twenty percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives over age 45 have diabetes. There are reservations in my State where they estimate over 50 percent of the adults have diabetes.
American Indians and Alaskan Natives have higher rates of sudden infant death syndrome than the rest of the Nation.
Injuries are the leading cause of death for Native Americans ages 1 to 44. Injuries include pedestrian accidents, vehicular accidents, and suicides.
The cervical cancer rate for Indians and Alaskan Natives is four times higher than the rest of the population.
The suicide rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives between ages 15 and 34 is triple the national average. For Indian teens in the northern Great Plains, it is 10 times the national average.
I have shown my colleagues a photograph of Avis Little Wind. Avis Little Wind is a young teen who died. Avis Little Wind's relatives gave me permission to use her photograph. This is a 14-year-old girl who lay in bed in a fetal position for 90 days and then killed herself. Her sister had taken her life 2 years previous. Her dad had taken his life. For 90 days, somehow, everybody missed little Avis. The school missed wondering what happened. She lay in bed for 90 days and then took her life because she felt there was no hope and no help.
On that reservation, I went and met with the tribal council, school administrators, and her classmates to try to find out how does a kid, age 14, fall out of everyone's memory and everyone's vision? What I have discovered is there are a lot of issues, but there was not any kind of health care treatment available for a young girl, age 14, who had these kinds of problems. Even had there been health care available, there would not have been a car to drive her there. There is a basic lack of transportation. Aside from the fact they don't have the capability to provide the necessary health care treatment that is necessary to intervene, we have to do better. We have a responsibility to do better.
I wish to address the question of why it is our responsibility. Why is the plight of Native Americans a responsibility to the Federal Government? The simple answer is we are bound to follow the law set forth in the Constitution, in treaties, and in the laws of our land.
We are bound to follow the trust responsibility that has been imposed on us by the Constitution, the rulings of the Supreme Court, and by treaties.
Now, our predecessors long ago negotiated treaties with Indian tribes in which we received, as a Nation, hundreds and hundreds of millions of acres of Indian homeland to help build this great Nation of ours. In return for the enormous cessions of land by the Indians, our country promised certain things. We promised to provide things such as health care, education, and the general welfare of Native Americans.
This chart I am going to show you shows a provision from one of those treaties, and there are a lot of them, most of them broken by our country. This is with the northern Cheyenne and Arapaho. It says:
The U.S. hereby agrees to furnish annually to the Indians
who settle upon the reservation a physician.
It says we have your land and we are going to give you a reservation, but we also understand our responsibility, and we will provide health care. We have failed miserably to hold up our end of the bargain.
This bill doesn't provide health care for Native Americans simply because it is the moral and right thing to do. It is, certainly. It is a bill that requires us to keep our word. It is an active step to fulfill our responsibility, our end of the bargain, struck by our predecessors a long time ago.
In addition to the treaty obligations, the U.S. obligations to Indian tribes are set forth in hundreds of U.S. Supreme Court cases and Federal statutes.
I wish to especially refer to the next chart. In 1831, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall, recognized a general trust relationship between the United States and Indian tribes. He held that the United States assumed a trust responsibility toward the tribes and their members. He explained the United States not only has the authority to deal with Indian tribes and their members, but also the responsibility and obligation to look after their well- being.
In describing Indian tribes as ``domestic dependent nations,'' he also established the relationship in that ruling between the United States and tribes as similar to one between ``a ward to his guardian.''
Now, at the time, these Supreme Court decisions were used by the United States to justify our actions toward the Indians, such as forcing Indians from homelands and placing them on reservations. But we cannot now ignore these court decisions merely because we are doing a poor job of fulfilling our obligation.
At the time of the Supreme Court's decision I described, the United States, through the Department of War, was already providing health care services to Indians on reservations. That practice began in 1803 and the United States has been providing such health care for over 200 years.
One of the initial reasons for providing health care on reservations was because we were the ones who were transmitting diseases to Indian nations and forcing them into environments where diseases would prevail. That became evident in 1912 when then-President Taft sent a special message to Congress summarizing a report that documented the deplorable health care conditions on Indian reservations.
In 1913, the Public Health Service reached a similarly distressing conclusion about the health of Native Americans. The Snyder Act was passed in 1921--I am providing the history so people understand what is the context of health care for Indian nations--one of many laws passed by the Congress over the last 100 years to try to address the health disparities between American Indians and the rest of our society: The Snyder Act of 1921, Indian Health Facilities Act of 1957, Indian Self- Determination of 1975, and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976 as it was amended in 1992.
President Nixon, in 1970, said in a message to the Congress:
The special relationship between Indians and the Federal
Government is the result of solemn obligations which have
been entered into by the United States Government. Down
through the years through written treaties . . . our
Government has made specific commitments to the Indian
people. For their part, the Indians have often surrendered
claims to vast tracks of land. . . . In exchange, the
Government has agreed to provide community services such as
health, education and public safety, services which would
presumably allow Indian communities to enjoy a standard of
living comparable to that of other Americans. This goal, of
course, has never been achieved.
That is in 1970 from the President of the United States, describing our responsibility.
Let me talk just for a moment about the proposed legislation, having described the reason for us to bring a piece of legislation to the floor of the Senate.
We know--and it has been like pulling teeth to find this out--we know there is full-scale health care rationing on Indian reservations. It should be front-page headline news in all the biggest newspapers in the country, but it is not. If it was happening elsewhere, it would be front-page headlines, but it is not now.
Forty percent of health care needs of Native Americans are not being met. We meet 60 percent of the health care needs; 40 percent are unmet. So it is rationed, and that is why Ardel Hale Baker, having a heart attack, is wheeled in to a hospital with a piece of paper taped to her leg saying: ``This isn't going to be paid for.'' It is health care rationing, there is no other way to describe it, no soft way to put a shine on it. It is health care rationing. It shouldn't happen, and I think it is an outrage, because it is happening on Indian reservations. It is seldom covered by the 24/7 news hour, but it should be, because it is a scandal. I hope this is the first step to begin addressing it.
This legislation will be described by some who come to the floor of the Senate as not enough. I agree with that assessment. This is a first step, at last, at long last, that should have been done a decade ago. It is a first step in the right direction, but it is a first step as a precursor to real reform because we need reform.
This is a reauthorization 10 years after it should have been done. We are reauthorizing and expanding programs that I will describe, but we need to do much more. When we move this legislation through the Senate, through the House, and it is signed by the President, I intend, with the Indian Affairs Committee, to begin immediately with new and more aggressive reforms, and it is urgent we do so.
This bill expands the types of cancer screenings that are available to American Indians. It expands the types of communicable and infectious diseases that health programs can monitor and prevent beyond tuberculosis, which now is the emphasis, to include any disease. It expands the recruitment and scholarship programs and authorizes nurses currently serving in the Indian Health Service to spend time teaching students in nursing programs. These are critical programs, given that there is a 21-percent vacancy rate for physicians in the Indian Health Service, and the entire Nation faces a shortage of nurses.
There is a new program in this legislation dealing with teen suicide on Indian reservations. I held hearings on this subject. We have worked for legislation that will provide screenings and mental health treatment, and we begin to address those issues with this legislation.
Treatment for diabetes: We held a hearing to examine the threat of diabetes to the health of American Indians. It is an unbelievable threat. Diabetes emerges as the most serious and devastating health problems of our time, and nowhere in this country is it worse than on Indian reservations. It affects the Indian population in a dramatic way.
I ask any of my colleagues, if they wonder about that, go to a reservation and see if they have a dialysis unit, and watch the people in the dialysis unit getting dialysis, some having lost limbs, having one leg cut off, another leg cut off, still trying to stay alive. The ravages of diabetes is an unbelievable scourge in Indian country. It is a serious problem for our entire country, but nowhere is it worse than among American Indians. In some communities, the prevalence reaches 60 percent of adults. In the 14-year period from 1990 to 2004, the diabetes rate among Indian kids 15 to 19 years old increased 128 percent.
We expand and enhance the current diabetes screening program. We direct the Secretary to establish an approach to monitor the disease, provide continuing care among Native Americans,
and authorize the Secretary to establish a dialysis program to treat this threatening disease.
Health service to Native American veterans: It is well documented that there is no population in this country that has participated with greater distinction or in greater numbers per capita serving in this Nation's military than Native Americans--none. Many Indians served in World War I even before our Nation recognized Indians as citizens of our country. Think of that, we had American Indians sign up to fight for this country when they were not yet considered citizens of this country.
I was checking recently, and 1962 was the last time when a State finally passed legislation allowing Indians to vote in the State. Think of that, go back to 1961 and understand, there were places in this country where American Indians were not allowed to vote in State elections. And until the early part of the last century, they were not considered citizens. Yet they were signing up to go to war for this country, to fight for this country.
I attended a ceremony on the Spirit Lake Reservation a few months ago and passed out medals--Silver Stars, a lot of medals--to three soldiers who are now elderly men who served this country in the Second World War with unbelievable valor, had fought all around this world for this country and earned these medals--Silver Star, Purple Heart, and various others. They were enormously proud of their country.
Go to a reservation and find out what percent of the population of eligible adults sign up to serve in the military on an Indian reservation and you will be surprised. There is no group of Americans who signs up in bigger numbers to serve this country in the military.
Senator Murkowski and I have a provision in this bill that deals with health services to Native American veterans. More than 44,000 American Indians out of a total Native American population of less than 350,000 at that point served in World War II. Think of that. Out of a population of 350,000, 44,000 of them served in the Second World War.
We had a ceremony in this Capitol Building, honoring the Code Talkers who played a significant role in intercepting and deciphering the codes used by the Nazis. We gave the Congressional Gold Medal to those Native American Code Talkers.
We direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide for the expenses incurred by any eligible Native American veteran who receives any medical service that is authorized by the Department of Veterans Affairs and administered at an Indian Health Service or tribal facility. We want the Indian Health Service to be able to get the funding to provide that health care.
This bill also provides a provision dealing with domestic violence. My colleague, Senator Murkowski from Alaska, was particularly instrumental in this provision. We held a hearing to examine the causes of and solutions to stopping violence against Native American women.
We received testimony that more than one in three American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped or sexually assaulted during their lifetime. That is pretty unbelievable. We received reports of rapes that were not investigated. We received reports of circumstances where there isn't even the basics, just a rape kit available to take evidence.
We have included in this legislation some approaches that I think will be very helpful: community education programs related to domestic violence and sexual abuse, victim support services and medical treatment, including examinations performed by sexual assault nurse examiners, and a requirement for rape kits. I think we have made significant progress. I thank Senator Murkowski for her special interest in that section of the bill as well.
Finally, we have a section of the bill that deals with convenient care service demonstration projects. The reason for that is I don't want to see the rest of the country move toward convenient care, walk- in clinics with long hours, 7 days a week, only to have Indian reservations be out there with these clinics that serve at times that are not very convenient.
I have a photograph of a clinic I visited last week on the New Town Reservation. They are open, I believe, from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., 5 days a week. Good for them. They take an hour off for the noon hour, by the way, and close it. I think it is 9 a.m., maybe 8. This is the Minne- Tohe Health Center, of the Three Affiliated Tribes. I visited there within the last week or so. They are open 6 or 8 hours a day, take an hour off for lunch and close it down. If at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, you are having a heart attack there, you are in trouble. If it is Saturday and you have a bone fracture, you are in trouble, because you are 80 miles from the hospital in Minot, ND.
My point is, why not develop a model care system of convenient care clinics open long hours, 7 days a week? Let's extend the opportunity for real health care on Indian reservations.
We have done a lot of other things in this legislation, including establishing the framework for the next approach on reforming this system completely, and that is the establishment of a bipartisan commission on Indian health care which will study the delivery of this system and recommend approaches that we will begin working on immediately in the Indian health care area in our committee.
I have described a number of items that are not positive, and I will later today describe some good news, because there are some positive things going on. One of the Indian reservations I visited in the last week has an Indian health care clinic that is dramatically underfunded. The tribal council voted to take $500,000 of the funds that belong to the tribal government and move it to try to support that clinic. That is good news. Good for them. That takes a lot of courage and commitment.
There are good things happening, and I am going to talk about that a little later today.
The fact is, we have a desperate situation with respect to health care in the Indian nation, and it cannot continue. We cannot allow it to continue. In the name of children who should not have died--Avis Little Wind or Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight or others--we cannot allow this to continue to happen. This country is better than that.
I close by quoting Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Tribe, located in what is now Idaho. Chief Joseph, one of the great Indian leaders, was pretty upset about a lot of things. Here is what he said about broken promises:
Good words do not last long unless they amount to
something. Words do not pay for my dead people.
Good words cannot give me back my children. Good words will
not give my people good health and stop them from dying.
I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart
sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken
promises.
This legislation on the floor of the Senate is not just some other bill. This is a step toward the completion of promises that have been made, not ``we hope to help you,'' but promises--promises that have been made in treaties, promises that have to be kept as a result of a trust responsibility that exists with American Indians.
To make the case finally, let me say this: There is a chart that shows how much we spend per person on health care, and that chart describes something I think all need to know about the commitment of Congresses and Presidents for a long period of time.
This chart shows we have a responsibility to provide health care for Federal prisoners. We incarcerate them because they committed a crime, and we stick them in prison. But in their prison cell, we have a responsibility for their health care. That is our job, and we meet that responsibility.
We also have a responsibility for health care for American Indians, because of a trust responsibility and because of treaties we signed after we expropriated massive amounts of their land. We don't meet that responsibility. In fact, this chart shows that we spend almost twice as much per person providing health care for incarcerated Federal prisoners as we do providing health care for American Indians. That is why little 5-year-old Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight dies, because she doesn't have the same access to health care that the rest of us do. It is why when a woman goes to the doctor, the doctor shows up at our committee and testifies, saying: You know, a woman came to me who had been to the Indian Health Service doctor. She had a knee
so bad--it was bone on bone--it was unbelievably painful. He said it was the kind of knee that, if it belonged to somebody in my family or yours, we would get knee replacement surgery. We would have to get knee replacement surgery because we wouldn't be able to live with it that way. You can't live with that kind of pain. But she told me she went to Indian Health Service, and they told her to wrap the knee in cabbage leaves for 4 days and it would be okay. Wrap the knee in cabbage leaves. This is a knee which we would get replaced, yet this Indian woman is told to wrap it in cabbage leaves.
Are we meeting our responsibility? People are dying. Forty percent of the health care need is unmet. I have described the conditions that exist in these health clinics and on reservations. The answer is, we are not meeting our responsibility, and at least from my standpoint, and I believe I speak for the vice chair, though she will speak for herself, it is past time, long past the time when this country should keep its promise.
Chief Joseph is long gone, but that doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility to keep our promise to the first Americans. They were here first. To this point, we have had all kinds of circumstances over many years of pushing them to reservations after we took their land, then pushing them off the reservation and saying they had to go to the city. So they got a one-way bus ticket and were told: By the way, we want you to mainstream, to get you off this reservation. So they got a ticket and were sent to the city, and then we decided that was wrong, and we brought them back.
What has been happening in this country in public policy dealing with American Indians is unbelievable, and it has to stop. Let us meet our responsibility, keep our promises, and provide decent health care to the people who were here first. That is what this bill does.
This bill is just a step in the right direction, and it will be followed by significant reform. When we do that, I will feel that, finally, at long last, this country has kept an important promise to those who were here first.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. President, is the request for a presentation on the bill without amendment?
Mr. President, I will agree to that request with the understanding it is on the bill without an amendment. I would also like to add to the request that Senator Bingaman be recognized to offer an amendment immediately following the presentation by Senator Stevens.
Mr. President, Senator Stevens is to be recognized following Senator Gregg and then Senator Bingaman, both of whom I believe are here. Certainly, if the Senator wishes I would not object, but both I think have been waiting for some period of time on the bill.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico for offering the amendment. I know he offers it on behalf of himself and Senator Thune from South Dakota. I fully support the amendment. This amendment will provide maximum opportunity to stretch the Indian health care dollars. The amendment is a thoughtful amendment that will, in my judgment, strengthen the underlying bill.
I am very interested in supporting it. We are working to see if we can get a vote on this amendment today. I believe the majority leader wishes to begin voting today, and I hope perhaps we can arrange consent to have a vote on this amendment later this afternoon.
I also thank the majority leader for bringing this bill to the floor of the Senate. When I was vice chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee and Senator John McCain was chairman, we worked on this bill. We tried very hard to get it to the floor, but we were not successful. This is the culmination of lot of work and important work, in my judgment, to get it to the floor. I appreciate the cooperation of the majority leader for giving us the opportunity to get it to the floor.
My hope is we will have the cooperation of other Members of the Senate. If there are amendments to be offered, we wish they would come and offer those amendments. We would like to get amendments and time agreements and try to find a way to complete this legislation.
I also failed to mention earlier that the Senate Finance Committee had a referral on this bill. They did some very important work. Senator Baucus, Senator Grassley, and other members of the Senate Finance Committee were very helpful, as has been Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi on the HELP Committee, and Senator Kyl and others.
This bill is bipartisan. We are trying very hard to get this legislation completed. As I indicated earlier, this is long past the time when this should have been done. People are literally dying for lack of decent health care that most of us take for granted, most of us expect and receive. That is not the case with respect to Native Americans. We desperately need to change this situation.
My hope is, if there are those who are intending to offer amendments today, that they come to the floor and offer the amendments. We know of a number of amendments. I appreciate the cooperation of Senator Bingaman in offering his amendment now. If there are others, I hope we can proceed.
Mr. President, I wish to briefly speak about another issue we have been dealing with. My colleague from New Hampshire spoke briefly, and I think in the absence of others being in the Chamber, I wish to speak as in morning business for 5 minutes.
Mr. President, some of my colleagues have spoken today about the difficulty in the economy. I am concerned about it, as are virtually all Americans at this point. The stock market seems to be bouncing around like a yo-yo. The economy is slowing and consumer spending is down. Recently, there was a substantial increase in unemployment in a single month--and a whole series of items that suggest there are real economic problems.
My colleague from New Hampshire said: I am concerned about a stimulus package. So am I, but in my judgment, we need to err on the side of taking action rather than err on the side of doing nothing. The Federal Reserve Board this morning cut interest rates by 75 basis points. That is a blunt instrument of monetary policy to try to address what is seen as a serious weakness in this economy.
I want to say this: No matter what we do--and we almost certainly will produce some sort of stimulus package--I believe a stimulus package should provide some tax rebates to middle and lower income people. It also ought to provide an extension of unemployment benefits. We have done that during previous economic downturns. I think a stimulus package should provide investment tax credits for businesses with an end date and other temporary tax incentives to persuade businesses to make capital investments now when the economy would benefit most from it. So we should do two things: We should put money in the hands of consumers, middle to lower income consumers, and we also should stimulate businesses to make needed capital investments earlier rather than later in order to prime the pump with respect to the economy.
I also think it is important to consider, even as we talk about stimulus, making investments in this country's infrastructure. There is nothing that puts people back to work more quickly than money that goes to building roads and bridges and making other improvements in this country's infrastructure that are so desperately needed. Many of us are working on and talking about that issue. But that ought to be a part of a second phase of a stimulus package. To ignore that, in my judgment, is to ignore significant job-creating opportunities at a time when we desperately need those opportunities.
Having said all of that, I believe we need to act to provide confidence to the American people about the future--after all, that is what the business cycle is about. If people are confident about the future, they manifest that confidence. They take the trip they wanted to take. They buy the car they wanted to buy. They do the things that manifest confidence in the future. That represents expansion.
If they feel as if the future has some troublesome aspects, they say: I am going to defer taking the trip, I am going to defer buying that car or piece of equipment, I am going to defer purchasing that piece of furniture, and then the economy contracts.
There are some in Washington with an overinflated sense of self who think this is a ship of state with an engine room. And you get out of the engine room and you dial the knobs and the switches and the levers--M-1 B, taxes and all of these things--and somehow the ship of state just sails right on forward.
That is not the case at all. This ship of state moves or fails to move based on the people's expectation about the future. If they are optimistic, they do things that express that optimism, and the economy expands.
I wish to talk for a moment about some of the fundamentals. We can genuflect here and even do some dancing in the Senate Chamber about the issue of stimulus packages, but if we don't address the fundamentals, we are not going to get out of this problem.
Every single day, 7 days a week, all year long, we import $2 billion more in goods than we export. So we run up a
bill of $700 billion plus a year in trade deficits. Our trade situation is an abysmal failure. Do you think the rest of the country doesn't know that? Do you think that has no impact on the falling dollar? Of course it does. It is one of the reasons the dollar is falling.
In addition to that, we have a fiscal policy that has been reckless. Last year, we had a $196 billion request from the President in front of us, none of it paid for--add it to the debt, he says--for Iraq and Afghanistan and restoring military accounts. Well, that is $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week, and none of it paid for. That is on top of the yearly deficit, which is understated. It uses all the Social Security money as if it were other revenue in order to show a lower deficit.
The American people know better and so do the financial markets. They see the combination of a reckless fiscal policy and a trade policy that is deeply in debt. They see a country whose fundamentals are out of line. These electronic herds, called the currency buyers or currency traders, when they see these things and they run against the currency, a country is in trouble. We have to get our fundamentals in order. We need to fix our trade policy, stop these hemorrhaging deficits, and we need to fix our fiscal policy.
We can't say yes to a President who says let's fight a war and do tax cuts for wealthy Americans at the same time. Let's fight a war, spend a lot of money doing it--two-thirds of a trillion at this point but heading north--and none of it paid for; all of it borrowed. This from a conservative President. This Congress has to stop saying yes to that. This reckless fiscal policy has helped set the stage and table for part of what we have seen the last couple of weeks, the jitters and concerns about where this country is headed and the economic difficulty we are now in.
Let me talk about something my colleague from New Hampshire talked about, and that is the underlying issue of the so-called subprime loan scandal. That is a fascinating thing. Someday somebody will do a book about that and just about that issue. Here is what happened, and we know better. Everybody knows better.
You wake up in the morning and go to brush your teeth and perhaps you have a television set on. You are sort of getting ready for work and you see a television ad. We see them every morning, and the ads say: Do you have bad credit? Do you have trouble getting a loan? Have you been missing payments on your home loan? Have you filed for bankruptcy? It doesn't matter. Come to us; we will give you a loan.
We have all seen these ads, and you think to yourself: Well, how can they do that? How can they advertise that if you have bad credit you can borrow money from them? The fact is, you can't do that. But that is what we were doing all across this country. Here is what was happening. Mortgage brokers were making a fortune in big fees by selling subprime mortgages. The companies that were writing these mortgages, the largest of which was Countrywide Financial, were saying to people: You know what, take our low-interest mortgage, with a teaser rate at 2 percent. It won't reset for 3 years. By the way, if you have an existing home loan, so you can get rid of that and we will lend you money you can pay back at a 2-percent interest rate, and it will not reset for 3 years, during which time the market is going to go up and you can flip it and sell it. In any event, what we will do is decide that on your home loan you don't have to make any principal payments at this point, just interest. We will add the principal later on.
Or they will say, borrow this money from us, and we will make the first 12 months' payments. For the first year, you make no payments at all.
OK, that practice was totally, completely and thoroughly irresponsible by a bunch of greedy folks. They are talking to people, cold-calling them and saying, we would like to put you in a better mortgage but not telling them, of course, there is a prepayment penalty. They are telling you monthly mortgage payments that didn't include real estate taxes, insurance costs, and so forth. So they were quoting borrowers 2 percent teaser rates with prepayment penalties that didn't include the escrow. So they put these people in these loans.
Now, were the victims partly at fault? Sure. By victims, I am talking about those who took these loans out. But these were high-powered salespeople working for big companies that were putting bad products in the hands of a lot of unsuspecting people.
Then what do they do? They have these subprime loans packaged up with other loans. It is sort of like the old days when they used to put sawdust in sausage in the meat plants and mix it all up as filler. Then they would cut it up and you would never know where the filler was and where the sausage was. Well, similar to that, they would take the good loans and the subprime loans and they would mix them all together and put them in securities--securitize them. Then they would sell the securities to these hedge funds, among others. So hedge funds were buying securities. They didn't have the foggiest idea what they were buying because the rating agency said it looked okay. These agencies were dead from the neck up.
Everybody was greedy, and now the whole tent comes collapsing down. Now, you say, how could that be? Well, it was because people were loaning money to people who were never going to be able to repay it. The CEO of Countrywide, the largest company doing this, made hundreds of millions of dollars selling the stock back. It looks like Countrywide is going to go belly up, so Bank of America comes in and buys Countrywide. No idea why, but the big guys, they all waltz off smiling ear to ear, sparkling teeth and big smiles. Why? Because they made a lot of money--hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, all these folks can't repay their mortgages and are left to try to pick up the pieces and then we wonder what on Earth happened here.
In the midst of all this, this morning I was listening to a TV show with a man named Jim Cramer, who talks about stock prices. He has a TV show. Half the time he is yelling. I don't have the foggiest idea why he thinks that is the approach to use to thoughtfully talk about stock prices, but apparently it is successful. So he says this morning that one of the ways we should deal with the problem in the economy is to start trying to provide some recompense or some money to the insurers of bonds and other things that are going to get hit--derivatives, he said. And I thought, I understand that language. He is talking about credit default swaps.
That sounds like a flatout foreign language, but it can't be because I don't speak a foreign language. Credit default swaps. So what Jim Cramer was talking about on the television this morning is that in order to bail out this country, his approach is we ought to provide about 50 percent of taxpayer money to the losses for those who have credit default swaps. Let me talk a moment about what this means because, as I said, it sounds completely foreign.
Hedge funds in this country are largely unregulated. I, Senator Feinstein, and many others have tried for a long time to say that is dangerous for this country. Hedge funds are somewhere around $1 to $1.5 trillion. Now, that is not so much, considering mutual funds are about $9 trillion. The total of the stocks and bonds in the stock market and bond funds are about $40 billion. So hedge funds are about $1 to $1.5 trillion. But hedge funds represent one-half of all the trades on the stock market. Think of that--$1 trillion plus unregulated--and they comprise half the trades on the stock market.
Now, because of the very heavy use of the leverage, it is a fact that hedge funds can lose much more than they are worth. If somebody goes into a casino in Las Vegas with a pocketful of money and grinning, thinking they are going to win a lot of money but end up losing it all, in most cases the only thing they lose is the money they have. That is not the case with heavily leveraged hedge funds.
That is why the episode with Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that had the smartest people working for them, was so important that over a decade ago the Federal Reserve Board had to try to save Long-Term Capital Management. That hedge fund was unbelievably leveraged, over $1 trillion. Its collapse would have affected the entire American economy.
So here is what we have. We have this language now called credit default
swaps. The credit default swap is a derivative, and it is an insurance policy on a bond or some other instrument. The person who sells the swap is actually writing a policy that collects a premium, and it says if nothing goes wrong with the underlying instrument, the person who sold the swap gets the premium and looks like a genius. If, however, the bond or the underlying instrument collapses, then the swap seller has to make good. The notional amount--understand this--the notional amount, the aggregate of bonds, loans, and other debt called by credit default swaps in the United States, is now $26 trillion.
I have spoken before on the floor of the Senate about creating a house of cards, every child has done it, and then pulled out a card on the bottom. Everyone understands what happens to the house of cards. We now have roughly $1-$1.5 trillion in hedge funds, as I understand it, doing one-half of the stock trades on the stock exchanges. In most cases, hedge funds have a notional value of $26 trillion in credit default swaps, and the question is: Where is all this exposure? How much exposure? We don't know. Most hedge funds are unregulated, and a whole lot of folks in this Chamber have wanted to keep it that way, despite the efforts of some of us who believe it is dangerous to our economy to pretend this kind of risk does not exist.
It is interesting to me that we are in this situation and troubling to me we are in a situation that all of us knew was going to be difficult. You can't run a $2-billion-a-day trade deficit without consequence. Warren Buffett always pointed out with the housing bubble that every bubble bursts. It is one of the immutable laws. The question isn't whether, it is when. He makes the same point about the trade deficit. The trade deficit is unsustainable. The question isn't whether we will see consequences, the question is when will those consequences exist.
The consequences are beginning to exist now, with the declining value of the dollar and the combination of all the other issues--the highest deficits in human history, the trade deficit, a fiscal policy that is completely and thoroughly reckless, combined with the scandal that exists with respect to subprime loans and the massive amount of unregulated hedge fund credit swap defaults. I mean it is staggering to see what we have done. Again, the credit default swap is a notional derivative whose value is dramatic and the consequences of which could be dramatic for the entire economy.
Most regulators were looking the other way and doing so deliberately. If ever one wonders whether thoughtful and effective regulation is necessary, look at all this. If anyone has ever wondered whether you can get by with a trade deficit of $2 billion a day, look at where we find ourselves now. If anyone ever wonders if you can spend money you don't have on things you don't need, look at this country's fiscal policy and its consequences for the country.
Having said that, all of us want the same thing for this country's future. We want a country that grows and provides economic opportunity. We want a country where the fundamentals are fair and put in order. That means a trade deficit that is eliminated, or at least close to eliminated, and a trade policy that works for this country's interest. It means a fiscal policy that pays our bills, and it means effective regulation in areas where you have substantial potential risk for the entire economy, and that means regulation of certain hedge funds' transactions and derivatives now well outside the view of public regulators.
So I think this is going to be a very difficult time for this country. It is one thing for us to take a shower in the morning, put on a suit and drive to work and talk about it, it is another thing for the people who go home tonight and say: Sweetheart, I have lost my job, not because I didn't do a good job, but they are laying people off where I work. That is a consequence for that family in which unemployment is 100 percent.
We face some pretty daunting challenges. My hope with this President and with Republicans and Democrats working together, as the Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate said last week, with all of us working together, combined with the Federal Reserve's monetary policy, that we can develop some thoughtful approaches in fiscal policy that might lead us in a constructive direction to say to the American people we believe you can honestly look at the future and have a positive view. But they won't believe that if they feel we are not serious about the fundamentals. The American people aren't going to be fooled. If we don't fix our trade policies and get rid of these unbelievable deficits, if we don't put our fiscal house in order and stop doing what the administration suggests we do, we are in big trouble.
We had a Treasury Secretary named Paul O'Neill--the first Treasury Secretary under this President. If ever there was a straight shooter in Government, it was Paul O'Neill. He came here as an executive from an aluminum company. He was blunt-spoken, an interesting guy, and I happened to like him a lot. Paul O'Neill got fired. In fact, Dick Cheney is the one who fired him, at the request of the President. When fired, he was told that deficits don't matter. Deficits don't matter.
Well, we now understand they do matter and we have to do something about it. This fiscal policy is out of control. Our trade policy is broken and we have had regulators who looked the other way while we had grand theft in this area of the subprime scandal, and it is time we tell the American people we are serious about addressing these issues and we are going to do it now.
I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. President, I have not had a chance to visit with the Senator from Louisiana. I object.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Madam President, I believe Senator Nelson of Florida is on his way. Before that, the legislation we brought to the floor from the Committee on Indian Affairs has been worked on for a long while. It is long past due to be considered by the Congress. It deals with the urgent need for Indian health care.
I want to especially say we worked with the National Indian Health Board on this legislation and Sally Smith, chair of the board; with the Tribal Leaders Steering Committee on Indian Health, Buford Rollin, cochair, and Rachel Joseph, cochair. We worked closely with the National Congress of American Indians, Joe Garcia, president, and Jackie Johnson, executive director. We held listening sessions at many Indian reservations to talk about the challenges and what we need to do to resolve these issues.
I wish to mention as well today we have from the White House a statement of administration policy in which the White House is talking about a potential veto of this legislation. That is not particularly unusual. The White House has been talking about vetoing almost anything and everything for the last several months. So I am not particularly surprised. My hope is we can work with the White House. This is a bipartisan piece of legislation. We expect to pass it through the Congress, and my hope is the President will sign it.
I wish to address one of the issues the White House is concerned about--the Indian urban health care program. The President has requested we not have any funding for it, that we discontinue the urban Indian health care program. My colleague, Senator Murkowski, and I and many others have disagreed with that. We believe there is a need for the urban Indian health care program.
I wish to describe that need by describing one person, a Native American, the late Lyle Frechette. This is a photograph taken after he finished high school. He was a member of the Menominee Tribe of Indians in Wisconsin. He was a proud veteran, who went into the Marine Corps right after high school, when this picture was taken. After serving his country as a U.S. marine, he came home to the Indian reservation to find life had significantly changed. That was at a time in this country when we were going through what is called ``termination and relocation.'' The policy in this country was to say to American Indians that we want to get you off the reservation and to a city someplace.
In fact, the official policy of the Federal Government was to terminate government-to-government relationships with 109 Indian tribes during that period, the early 1950s. It was suggested, well, let's terminate relationships with tribes and say to these Indians: Go to the city and leave your reservation. So many did, and Lyle Frechette did. The movement from a tribal reservation, where there was some Indian health care, although inadequate, to the major cities meant that Lyle Frechette was leaving an area that had vast forests and timber resources that represented financial stability for the Menominee Tribe. Yet the Federal Government thought this was a great candidate for termination. So they took steps to terminate the tribal status.
That termination had catastrophic effects on the lives of many of the tribal governments and the people who were members of the tribes. It required many of the young tribal members, such as Lyle Frechette, to either stay on the reservation and live in abject poverty, with no further health or any benefits that had long been promised to them, or participate in the Federal urban relocation program. Often, they were given a one-way bus ticket and told good luck; they ended up in cities with substantial limitations on what they could do.
Lyle Frechette had a young wife and a child and they relocated to Milwaukee, WI, 3\1/2\ hours from the reservation. He no longer had access to health care on the Indian reservation. There were very few urban clinics and the relocated Indians only qualified for private sector insurance for 6 months, and that was over. Health care is essential. Many of these folks, including this young man, left the reservation because of the termination and relocation program and discovered they were not able to access health care programs.
Then, over a period of years, urban health care programs were established to try to be helpful to those whom we had literally forced off the reservations. The fact is it has been a lifesaving experience for many urban Indians to be able to access that which was guaranteed them as part of the trust responsibility of the Federal Government to American Indians, even being
able to access that in some of our urban areas. The President has wanted to shut down that program. We have said we don't support that, on a bipartisan basis. Congress has said the urban health care programs for American Indians has worked very well.
I wished to describe that issue because the President indicated that is one of the issues in his letter and the statement of administrative policy today in which he suggests he may well veto this legislation. I hope he will not and that we will work on a bipartisan basis to convince the President doing this is the right thing to do.
I know my colleague from Florida is here ready to speak. At this point, I yield the floor, and my colleague wishes to be recognized.
Madam President, I thank the Senator from Kansas. I am a cosponsor in support of the amendment he has offered.
If one studies the history in this country with respect to Indian tribes, it is a tragedy. It is very hard for someone to study it, understand it, and not wish our country to apologize for it. We entered into treaties with the tribes; agreements, signed treaties, with the tribes. We took tribal homelands and pushed them onto reservations and made agreements, including trust agreements, to provide for their health care and many other things.
Then we decided we wanted to push them off reservations and move them into urban areas. Then we decided we would discontinue a government-to- government relationship with 109 tribes. We terminated the tribal status of 109 tribes, and we told these folks to leave the reservations and here is a one-way ticket. We want you to go to the cities to be assimilated into the cities. So we sent them off to the cities, far away from families and health care facilities. Then we sent them off to boarding schools and terminated their governmental status. We took lands off protected trust status and then turned, once again, and began to revitalize tribal language and culture and governments.
When you understand what this country has done, in terms of abrogating agreements and treaties it has made, one can understand the words of Chief Joseph. Here is what Chief Joseph said:
Good words do not last long unless they amount to
something. Good words do not pay for my dead people. Good
words cannot give me back my children. Good words will not
give my people good health and stop them from dying. I am
tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick
when I remember all of the good words and then all of the
broken promises.
Chief Joseph was an honorable Indian leader. He negotiated face-to- face with the leaders of our country. And while he lived, he saw promise after promise after promise broken. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote:
Great nations, like great men, should keep their word.
That is all Chief Joseph and so many other Indian leaders asked, and it was never granted. We are trying now, in some small and some significant ways, to remedy and address these issues. The Indian Health Care Improvement Act is one step in the right direction to say this country will start to keep its promise, its promise, as a trust responsibility, to provide health care for American Indians.
I say to my colleague from Kansas, I used a chart earlier today to say the American people, the American Government, is responsible, because of treaty obligations and a trust obligation, a trust obligation we have for American Indians, to provide health care to two groups of people. One group is incarcerated Federal prisoners. That is our charge. We put them in prison for crimes, we are required to provide for their health care in Federal prisons. We also have a responsibility for health care for American Indians because of the trust responsibility and treaties by which we made that promise.
Compare the two. We spend twice as much money providing health care for incarcerated prisoners in Federal prisons as we do providing health care to American Indians. And that is why today it is likely somewhere on an Indian reservation someone is dying who shouldn't have to die. Some young child is suffering who shouldn't have to suffer because the health care we expect for our families is not available to them.
If I might, for another minute, say once again that I showed a picture this morning of a young girl named Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. She died at the age of 5. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight didn't get the health care most of us would expect for our children. She was a beautiful young child on the Crow reservation, and she spent the last 3 months of her life in unmedicated pain. Finally, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. And when she was, and I talked about this earlier, she asked to go to see Cinderella's castle, and so the Make-A-Wish Foundation sent her and her mother to Orlando. In the hotel, on the night before she was to see Cinderella's castle, she died in her mother's arms. As she lay in her mother's arms, she said: Mommy, I will try not to be sick. Mommy, I will try to get better.
This young girl, time after time after time, had been taken to the clinic and was diagnosed and treated for depression at the age of 5 when, in fact, she had terminal cancer and she is now dead. A beautiful young girl--Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. This is happening across our country, and we have to stop it. It is our responsibility to stop it.
My colleague from Kansas offers a resolution that talks about past abuses, and they are unbelievable. But some of them continue, and that is the purpose of this bill and the reason I appreciate his support for the underlying bill. But I did wish to say I am a cosponsor of the amendment offered by Senator Brownback. It is the right thing for our country to do. I am proud to cosponsor what he is suggesting to the Senate today. He is offering it now as an amendment. I have previously cosponsored it as a bill when he has introduced it in the Senate.
So my thanks to the Senator from Kansas. And after he speaks, Madam President, I know the Senator from Ohio wishes to be recognized. But I suspect the Senator from Kansas wishes to say a word, at which point I am happy the Senator from Ohio is here and wishes to speak on this bill.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside.
Mr. President, I have a substitute at the desk and ask for its consideration.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendments previously considered be conformed to the substitute I have just offered.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
I withhold that suggestion.
Mr. President, we have had a lot of discussion and debate today about the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. We, on behalf of myself and Senator Murkowski, sent the substitute to the desk. The substitute is something we worked on that amends and changes somewhat what we had originally moved out of the committee. We have refined it, improved it, and changed it a bit. The substitute was agreed to by Senator Murkowski and myself and other Senators with whom we have worked. So we have made some progress by laying down the substitute which perfects this bill. We have a number of amendments pending.
What I would ask--and so would Senator Murkowski--is if there are others who have amendments to this bill, they come to the floor and offer them. We want to finish this piece of legislation. It is not as if we haven't had a lot of discussion and debate. We have pretty much filled the time today. But we do want additional amendments to be offered. What we would like to see is if those Senators who have amendments would contact us, we could schedule them and hopefully we can get some time agreements, so when we finish this evening and come back on this bill, we could get a list of amendments, work through those amendments and finish the bill and send it along to the House. Because there is an urgency here.
There are some things we do that are not particularly urgent. I understand that. If anyone thinks the issue of Indian health care is not urgent, I urge them to go to the nearest Indian reservation and have a visit about what is happening with respect to the Indian Health Service. I know there are a lot of good people working in the Indian Health Service, but I am telling you, go sit and listen for awhile, listen to a discussion about what happens when you ration health care, when health care is not a right and not only not a right but when health care is absolutely rationed. There are people dying. There are people living in pain. There are people who don't have access to any kind of health care facility. There are people who are having emergencies at 5 in the afternoon, when their local clinic closed their doors at 4, and they are 100 miles from the nearest hospital. That is what is happening on Indian reservations across this country.
We have a responsibility, a trust responsibility to provide for that health care. The Congress, this country has not owned up to that responsibility, and we must. That is why we have brought this bill to the floor of the
Senate, and I am hoping very much for the cooperation of my colleagues. Let's complete the amendments, raise them with us, let us work with you on getting them up and getting votes on them so we can at least indicate our support to do what we are required to do as American citizens: honor our treaties, meet our trust responsibilities, and keep the promises we have made to the first Americans.
Unanimous Consent Agreement--H.r. 4986
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 5:30 p.m. today, the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 4986, the Department of Defense authorization, with no amendments in order to the bill; that the bill be read a third time, and without further action, the Senate proceed to vote on passage; that upon passage, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.
