A bill to redesignate the Federal building located at 167 North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee, as the "Clifford Davis and Odell Horton Federal Building".

Mr. President, I believe this morning President Bush is in Brazil. A week ago today, I and a number of Senators met with the President at the White House. The issue of the Brazil trip came up. He no doubt will talk to the Brazilians about trade this morning. As he discusses the issue of trade, I wanted to make a couple of comments.

Today we had a new trade deficit figure released, about 3 hours ago. It shows our merchandise trade deficit in the past month was $66 billion--in 1 month. I wanted to come to the floor to show what is happening to this country's trade. The reason I want to show the results of our trade policy is we now have proposals in front of us for free trade agreements. We have Colombia, Peru, negotiations with South Korea, Thailand, and others. We have been through a period when there has been this mantra, this chant, as it is, about free trade.

This chart shows what is happening to trade. In 1995, 12 years ago, we had a $174 billion trade deficit. Now it is $836 billion. Think of that: Every single day we wake up in this country, we import over $2 billion more in goods from overseas than we are able to sell abroad. It doesn't matter what the good is, much, and it doesn't matter what the country is.

I have been here with charts that show, for example, to cite one, last year we had automobiles put on ships in South Korea. Mr. President, over 700,000 automobiles were put on ships in South Korea and sent to America and sold in the United States--700,000 South Korean automobiles. How many American automobiles do you think we sold in Korea, Mr. President, 700,000? No, no--about 4,000. Fair trade? Hardly. Ninety-nine percent of the cars on the streets of South Korea are South Korean cars. Why? Because they don't want foreign cars sold in South Korea. They want to produce cars with jobs in South Korea and ship them to the United States.

Should we allow that kind of one-way trade--700,000 going one way, 4,000 plus going the other way--to continue? I don't think so.

Let me talk a little about the general area of trade. I want to put up a picture of a young girl named Halima. This is a beautiful 11-year- old girl. When I showed the chart of the $836 billion trade deficit last year, over $2 billion a day--well over $2 billion a day--the result of that statistic is American jobs being shipped overseas, products being produced overseas, in many cases with dirt-cheap labor, sent to a big box retailer in this country to be sold at a lower price. That is true, a lower price, so the American consumer gets a better price on a 12-pack of underwear or a gallon of mustard someplace. But what is the consequence of that to our economy, to our jobs? What ultimately is the consequence for our country? I frame all this in the context of the President saying: Let's do more, let's do more of this.

It seems to me if we do much more of that, we won't have much of an economy left. At what point do we think a trade deficit matters? This isn't money we owe to ourselves. One can make that case in fiscal policy with the budget deficit. This is money we owe to other countries, over $1 trillion of which we now owe to the Japanese and the Chinese. But what are the consequences?

I mentioned lost American jobs. Where do these jobs go? Who is producing what is sent to our country?

This beautiful young lady is named Halima. She worked at a factory in Bangladesh at age 11, and she made Hanes underwear. She worked long hours, very low pay, in sweatshop conditions.

One would think if this is a world market in which we care about the circumstances of people working in sweatshop conditions, we would take a look at something such as this and say: Wait a second, we don't want to buy Hanes underwear made with the hands of an 11-year-old working in sweatshop conditions.

Let me show my colleagues a certification of this plant in which Halima worked. ``Certificate of Compliance, February 21, 2007.'' It is hereby awarded to Harvest Rich Ltd., worldwide responsible apparel production. So they certified this company was doing just fine with international standards. An 11-year-old producing in sweatshop conditions, sending underwear to Americans? That is fine? I don't think so. So is this just an aberration? This just happens on the very unusual case, and I just happened to find the picture of Halima?

Let me tell you how this picture came about. This picture came from a woman named Sheik Nazma. She was a former child laborer in Bangladesh. She was forced to start working in the textile mills at age 12--a sweatshop--and she described the conditions. She organized her coworkers for better conditions, saying: Let us, as a group of workers, organize to see if we can get better conditions. For that, she was beaten and threatened to death for organizing workers.

Is that an aberration? No, not really. I can give you the names today of people sitting in prisons in China. Their transgression? Their crime? They tried to organize workers for better conditions, tried to organize workers to insist on backpay they were owed. For that, they are sitting in prison cells in China because you can't organize workers in China.

What is happening with respect to these trade issues is we are sinking deep into this abyss of worsening trade debt. I know what the papers will say tomorrow--that $66 billion, the last monthly merchandise trade deficit, is about a billion dollars or so less than the previous month, and the newspapers will say: Nirvana. What a wonderful thing--our trade deficit is shrinking. These, of course, are the same newspapers that beat to death this chant of free trade. There is not enough of this free trade for them; the more the merrier. My only question about all of this is, When do you suggest that this represents failure? Is

there never an opportunity to suggest that we need a change in trade strategy, a change that stands up for what we have built in a century in this country?

Let me describe what it is we have built in this century. A man name James Fyler was shot in 1914. The previous accounts of his death say he died of lead poisoning actually, but he was shot 54 times. Do you know why he was shot and lost his life? Because he believed that people who went underground to dig in the coal mines ought to be entitled to two things: No. 1, a safe workplace, and No. 2, a fair wage. For that, he was murdered.

In a century, from James Fyler forward, we had people who gave their lives and risked their lives to improve standards in this country, to insist on the right to organize, to insist on safe workplaces, to insist on a fair wage, and to insist on fair labor standards. It was tough. There were people beaten in the streets for it. There were people shot for insisting that we develop and lift those standards. But we did. We did. We expanded and created a middle class almost unparalleled in the world, which became the economic strength of this country. Working people understood they could get a good job, get some training, have a job that had a career ladder, an opportunity for a decent wage, an opportunity for benefits, and an opportunity to take care of their families. There is no social program in this Chamber that is as important as a good job that pays well for able-bodied workers. It is what allows everything else to work.

So we did that for a century, and we expanded opportunities. Now, all of a sudden, we are told it is a new day because of the global economy. In fact, Tom Friedman wrote a book saying that not only is it a new day, but the world is flat. I have yet to see the globe that represents that. When you go to most offices or libraries and you see a globe of the Earth, it appears round to me. Of course, I only graduated from a high school senior class of nine students, so maybe I missed a part of the lesson. So now we have books that say the world is flat, which, of course, is nonsense because it is not flat.

It is a global economy. What does that mean? What is the definition of what a global economy means for us and for our future? It means, according to some, that we ought to be able to understand that comparative advantage means you produce products where you can produce them at the least cost and then purchase them here and it is good for the consumer. The result is corporate executives flying around the world deciding where they can produce for the least cost.

How many of my colleagues remember Radio Flyer's little red wagon, which was an American product for 110 years, a Chicago company--the little red wagon we have all ridden in? It was named ``Radio Flyer'' because the inventor loved Marconi and he loved to fly, so he named his product ``Radio Flyer,'' and his company built it in Chicago for 110 years. Not anymore. It is just gone. It is now built in China. Do you think that is because the Chinese build better little red wagons? No, not at all. It is because you can find somebody who will work for 30 cents an hour, and you can work them 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, and you can build a cheaper little red wagon.

Similarly, you can do the same with Huffy bicycles and then eliminate all their jobs. You can do the same with Pennsylvania House furniture. In fact, with Pennsylvania House furniture, you can send the Pennsylvania wood to China. You can get rid of all the workers in Pennsylvania, send the Pennsylvania wood to China, and have them put it together and ship it back here, and that is exactly what has happened.

About 3\1/2\ to 4 million jobs have now migrated to where you can pay pennies an hour and then ship the product back to our country. That is about enhancing corporate profits, but I think it is at the expense of our economic future.

The former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Blinder, a mainstream economist, said this: There are 42 to 56 million American jobs that are tradeable, meaning outsourceable. Not all of them will leave our country, but even those that stay are competing with others in the world who will work for lower wages. Therefore, there will be downward pressure on American wages for working Americans.

We see it every day. Open the newspaper and see how many people are losing their health care benefits, their retirement benefits, and the downward pressure on income. We see it every day. It is part of a strategy that says free trade, a global economy, produce where it is cheap, and sell to a marketplace like this.

My point is that it doesn't add up in the long run. I am for trade. I am in favor of trade, and plenty of it, but I insist and demand that it be fair trade for this country that attempts to lift, not depress standards. I am very interested in engaging with the rest of the world. I am not an isolationist, I am not a protectionist, as they define it, although I want to plead guilty quickly to wanting to protect our country's economic interests. If that is being a protectionist, then just sign me up. I want to protect our country's economic interests. We will only do that, and we will do it well, if we understand the need to retain a broad middle class, a middle class that sees jobs here that pay well, with benefits and opportunities in the future.

So how do we reconcile all of this? What will happen in the coming several months is--and I believe Senator Sherrod Brown spoke about this earlier today--what will happen in the coming months is we will be requested to debate an extension of something called fast-track authority. Fast-track authority. They are going to want to run through fast-track authority trade agreements with, yes, South Korea and Thailand and Peru and Colombia and many others. The same people who have given us this want to give us more of it, a deep canyon of red ink, downward pressure on American incomes, and substantial pressure on the movement of American jobs.

Interestingly enough, we not only move American jobs overseas, we actually decide, for those who do it, that we will give them a big fat tax break. One of the most pernicious, ignorant pieces of public policy I can conceive of is when we said: Fire your American workers, close your American plants, move your jobs to China, sell your products back in America, run your income through the Cayman Islands, and we will give you a big fat tax break for it.

Four times we have voted on eliminating that tax break, four times I have offered amendments to shut it down, and four times I have lost. Mark my words--we will be voting again and again on that proposition. The very last thing we ought to do as a country is decide we want to subsidize the flight of American jobs.

We just introduced a piece of legislation that would deal with the issue of sweatshop labor in other countries. What are the standards of this so-called global trade in a flat world? Well, at least there is one standard. The one standard is that you can't sell tube socks from a prison in China at a big-box retailer in America. Why is that? Because it is presumed that if you make tube socks or shorts or whatever you make in a prison setting, then that truly is the ultimate sweatshop labor, I guess. So you can't send prison labor products to our marketplace.

Well, if we all agree with that, and we do, because we already have a provision on that, what about the next step up? What about the product of an 11-year-old girl? What about the product of a company that hires an 11-year-old girl named Halima and works her in sweatshop conditions?

Should we decide as a country that you cannot produce products in sweatshop conditions that abuse workers abroad and send the products here--which, by the way, then asks American workers working in plants in the United States to compete with that sweatshop labor. It not only abuses foreign workers, it also abuses domestic workers because we are saying: Compete with something that is completely unsavory. If this happened in our country, we would march down the street with law enforcement and say: Shut this down.

We have heard the stories. I think my colleague, Senator Harkin, had hearings some several years ago about this with the international labor organizations--young kids in carpet factories having their fingertips burned with sulfur. They put sulfur on the fingertips, then light them on fire. Do you know why? They create scars on the

fingertips so that as they use needles to sew the rugs, two things occur: They don't hurt themselves because they have scars from having had their fingertips burned and, second, they won't get blood on the carpets. Is this something we should accept? No, I don't think so. Is it something we should care about? You are darn right we should. But almost nothing--almost nothing--is acceptable to discuss in this mantra of free trade without being called a protectionist.

Here is what I think is going to happen. In the last election here in this country, I think there were 6 or 8 or 10 Senate races in which the winning candidate said: You know what, we are on the wrong track here. It is not that we shouldn't trade. We should trade. The origin of this great country was the shrewd Yankee trader. We were the traders, good traders, and so we should trade. But we shouldn't decide that this kind of a trade deficit can continue. It simply cannot.

Let me pull up the chart with China. The largest trade deficit we have is with the country of China, with $232 billion last year alone. That is unbelievable.

I have mentioned before that part of our problem is just incompetent trade agreements, just fundamentally incompetent, and I will give an example of one.

I have threatened from time to time that trade negotiators should wear uniforms, like the jerseys they wear in the Olympics, so they can look down from time to time and, in a sober moment, they can see for whom they are working. It would say ``U.S.A.''

China. We did a bilateral agreement with China, a country with which we have a very large trade deficit--a very large deficit and growing. It is a country that is also developing a new automobile export industry, and they want to export automobiles aggressively to the United States. Here is what we said: If you export Chinese automobiles to the United States, we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on your cars, but if we export American automobiles to be sold in China, China can impose a 25-percent tariff. We negotiated with China a deal that said: On a bilateral automobile trade, you ship a car to us and we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff, and if we ship a car to you, you can impose a tariff that is 10 times higher, and that is just fine. I am saying that is ignorant. That is ignorant of our economic interest.

One little piece of information. Most people don't know it, but you can rip open the intestines of these trade agreements and find case after case where we have traded away our own economic interests.

We are going to be confronting now, in the next 4 or 5 months, some very tough choices--not so tough for me but perhaps for some--choices about what do we do about fast-track trade authority. That is a mechanism by which the Senate decides in advance that when a trade agreement comes here that has been negotiated in secret, behind closed doors, with no participation of any of us, it comes here under an expedited procedure with no opportunity for anyone to make any change of any type. I don't support that.

What has happened with China and the world is the deepening abyss of red ink, and what has resulted from the strategy that comes from fast track is expedited procedures and a straightjacket for the Senate. It has come from incompetent agreements. It has come from lack of enforcement. In fact, our trade authorities cannot even find some of the agreements they have previously negotiated. They can't even find them, let alone enforce them.

I haven't talked here about the number of people who are working in our Government to enforce our trade agreements with China. It is fewer than 20. Enforcement is just the backwater of trade. Nobody wants to enforce anything. It doesn't matter. Yet, in my judgment, it does matter to this country's economic future.

What are we going to do about fast track and the extension for fast track that President Bush is requesting? I did not support fast-track trade authority for President Clinton, and I do not support it for President Bush, although President Bush has had it now for some while. But I think there is a new group of Senators who will have to sink their teeth into this discussion. What does this mean? What does this expedited procedure, fast-track straitjacket, mean? What does it mean when we do bilateral negotiations, so-called free-trade negotiations, with the countries I previously described, and how do we resolve them? How do we deal with them?

Many of my colleagues, myself included, believe when we negotiate trade agreements we should do so with an eye on what we have created and built in this country, lifting up standards for almost a century now. We should have labor provisions in the trade agreements. We should have environmental provisions in the trade agreements. We should have a shock absorber for currency fluctuation in the trade agreements. Some say that is radical. It is not radical. I will show you what is radical. It is the sheet that shows the combined trade deficit with the world. When you talk about what is radical, this is radical: the trade strategy that gives us this is radical. The trade strategy that gives us this morning's merchandise trade deficit of $66 billion, that is what is radical.

There is an old saying: If you don't care where you are, you are never going to be lost. You know, we have gone on here for some long while with people apparently not caring, but it is time for our country to care. There is only one United States on this planet. If you spin this globe and try to find another equivalent place, with democracy and a market system that have come together to create opportunity for so many--there is only one place. But we are quickly losing it with this ``the world is flat'' approach, with free-trade agreements that tend to put downward pressure on wages in this country and strip away benefits and decide in this new market system that comparative advantage is not just who has the best natural resources to produce what product, but who has decided to have rules in their country that prohibit workers from organizing, that allow sweatshops to operate, that allows 11-year- old kids in carpet factories.

That is not comparative advantage. Ricardo would roll over in his grave. It has nothing to do with comparative advantage. We have to confront these issues, the sooner the better, and there is no question we will begin to confront them in this year, perhaps in the next 4 or 5 months. The way we confront them and the decisions we make will have a profound impact on what kind of a country we have and what kind of economy we have in the coming years. That is why it is so important.

I wanted to make a couple of comments today by pointing out that we are now confronted with choices, and those choices, I assume, will be imposed upon us in a very short period of time. I look forward to new voices in the Senate weighing in on these important issues. Not in a way that suggests we are not a part of the world economy, we are a significant part of the world economy; not in a way that suggests the world has not gotten smaller, it has. The world is not flat, but the world certainly is smaller.

We are engaged in this information technology revolution. If something happens almost anywhere in the world, I will know about it 5 minutes later, and we will see pictures of it in a half hour or less. So things have changed. But what has not changed is our need and desire as Americans to look after the well-being of our economy and the opportunities that can exist for our citizens.

That is not being selfish. That is our responsibility. We are stewards of this country's future, and that stewardship, in my judgment, is vastly compromised by this chart and what has happened with the shipping of American jobs overseas, with the decision that cheaper prices at home for products produced elsewhere for pennies an hour represent fair competition for American workers. It is not fair competition, and we do desperately need, now, a new trade strategy, one that reflects the economic interests of this country but one that still insists on being a significant part of the world economy even as we try to lift others up without pushing our standards down.

Amendment No. 286

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

Mr. President, I make a point of order, en bloc, that the pending amendments are not germane under the provisions of rule XXII, with the exception of the following: Reid No. 275, Landrieu No. 321, Schumer No. 336, Coburn No. 325, Coburn No. 294, Kyl No. 357, Biden No. 383, Schumer No. 367, Stevens No. 299, Schumer No. 337, Bond No. 389.

Mr. President, I make that point of order on behalf of Senator Lieberman. I believe it has been cleared on both sides.

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

Mr. President, I was pleased to join Senator Specter and Senator Dodd in offering an amendment to restore the Great Writ of habeas corpus, a cornerstone of American liberty since the founding of this Nation. Senator Specter and I introduced

this legislation late last year and reintroduced it on the first day of this new Congress. This amendment continues our efforts to amend last year's Military Commissions Act, to right a wrong and to restore a basic protection to American law. This is an issue on which we continue to work together and urge Senators on both sides of the aisle to join with us.

As Justice Scalia wrote in the Hamdi case: ``The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.'' The remedy that secures that most basic of freedoms is habeas corpus. It provides a check against arbitrary detentions and constitutional violations. It guarantees an opportunity to go to court, with the aid of a lawyer, to prove one's innocence. This fundamental protection was rolled back in an unprecedented and unnecessary way in the run up to last fall's election by passage of the Military Commissions Act.

The Military Commissions Act eliminated that right, permanently, for any noncitizen determined to be an enemy combatant, or even ``awaiting'' such a determination. That includes the approximately 12 million lawful permanent residents in the United States today, people who work and pay taxes in America and are lawful residents. This new law means that any of these people can be detained, forever, without any ability to challenge their detention in Federal court--or anywhere else--simply on the Government's say-so that they are awaiting determination whether they are enemy combatants.

I deeply regret that Senator Specter and I were unsuccessful in our efforts to stop this injustice when the President and the Republican leadership insisted on rushing the Military Commissions Act through Congress in the weeks before the recent elections. We proposed an amendment that would have removed the habeas-stripping provision from the Military Commissions Act. We fell just three votes short in those politically charged days. It is my hope that the new Senate and new Congress will reconsider this matter, restore this fundamental protection and revitalize our tradition of checks and balances.

This amendment to the 9/11 Commission bill provides the right time and the place for the Senate to make this stand. The 9/11 Commission bill seeks to make us stronger and to protect us from the threat of terrorism. Protecting our values and the safeguards that make us a strong democracy is key to that effort. Restoring our place as an example to the world of liberty and the rule of law will only increase our security and undermine those who would seek to recruit terrorists.

Giving the Government such raw, unfettered power as the Military Commissions Act did should concern every American. Last fall, I spelled out a nightmare scenario about a hard-working legal permanent resident who makes an innocent donation to, among other charities, a Muslim charity that the Government secretly suspects might be a source of funding for critics of the United States Government. I suggested that, on the basis of this donation and perhaps a report of ``suspicious behavior'' from an overzealous neighbor, the permanent resident could be brought in for questioning, denied a lawyer, confined, and even tortured. Such a person would have no recourse in the courts for years, for decades, forever.

Many people viewed this kind of nightmare scenario as fanciful, just the rhetoric of a politician. It was not. It is all spelled out clearly in the language of the law that this body passed. In November, the scenario I spelled out was confirmed by the Department of Justice itself in a legal brief submitted in a Federal court in Virginia. The Justice Department, in a brief to dismiss a detainee's habeas case, said that the Military Commissions Act allows the Government to detain any non-citizen designated an enemy combatant without giving that person any ability to challenge his detention in court. This is true, the Justice Department said, even for someone arrested and imprisoned in the United States. The Washington Post wrote that the brief ``raises the possibility that any of the millions of immigrants living in the United States could be subject to indefinite detention if they are accused of ties to terrorist groups.''

In fact, the situation is even more stark than The Washington Post story suggested. The Justice Department's brief says that the Government can detain any noncitizen declared to be an enemy combatant. But the law this Congress passed says the Government need not even make that declaration: They can hold people indefinitely who are awaiting determination whether or not they are enemy combatants.

It gets worse. Republican leaders in the Senate followed the White House's lead and greatly expanded the definition of ``enemy combatants'' in the dark of night in the final days before the bill's passage, so that enemy combatants need not be soldiers on any battlefield. They can be people who donate small amounts of money, or people that any group of decision-makers selected by the President decides to call enemy combatants. The possibilities are chilling.

We have eliminated basic legal and human rights for the 12 million lawful permanent residents who live and work among us, to say nothing of the millions of other legal immigrants and visitors who we welcome to our shores each year. We have removed a vital check that our legal system provides against the Government arbitrarily detaining people for life without charge. We may well have also made many of our remaining limits against torture and cruel and inhuman treatment obsolete because they are unenforceable. We have removed the mechanism the Constitution provides to check Government overreaching and lawlessness.

This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure that the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The conservative Supreme Court, with seven of its nine members appointed by Republican Presidents, has been the only check on this administration's lawlessness. Certainly the last Congress did not do it. With passage of the Military Commissions Act, the Republican Congress completed the job of eviscerating its role as a check and balance on the administration.

Some Senators uneasy about the Military Commissions Act's disastrous habeas provision took solace in the thought that it would be struck down by the courts. Instead, the first court to consider that provision, a Federal court in the District of Columbia, upheld the provision. The DC Circuit, in a sharply divided 2-1 decision, upheld that ruling, holding that at least the hundreds of detainees held in Guantanamo Bay cannot go to court to challenge their detention. We should not outsource our moral, legal and constitutional responsibility to the courts. We cannot count on the courts to fix our mistakes. Congress must be accountable for its actions, and we should act to right this wrong.

Following the DC Circuit's decision, newspapers and experts from across the country and across the political spectrum have called on Congress to take action. Editorial boards from the Washington Post and the New York Times to the Evansville Courier & Press in Indiana, and the Columbia Tribune in Missouri have called for reversing the MCA's habeas provision. Prominent conservatives like Bob Barr and Bruce Fein, along with Aberto Mora, former Navy General Counsel in the Bush Administration, have echoed this call. I ask that a selection of these editorials be placed in the record.

A group of four distinguished admirals and generals who have served as senior military lawyers argued passionately for fixing this problem in a letter they sent to me earlier this week. They wrote, ``In discarding habeas corpus, we are jettisoning one of the core principles of our Nation precisely when we should be showcasing to the world our respect for the rule of law and basic rights. These are the characteristics that make our nation great. These are the values our men and women in uniform are fighting to preserve.''

Abolishing habeas corpus for anyone who the Government thinks might have assisted enemies of the United States is unnecessary and morally wrong. It is a betrayal of the most basic values of freedom for which America stands. It makes a mockery of the administration's lofty rhetoric about exporting freedom across the globe.

We should take steps to ensure that our enemies can be brought to justice efficiently and quickly. I introduced a bill to do that back in 2002, as did Senator Specter, when we each proposed a set of laws to establish military commissions. The Bush-Cheney administration rejected our efforts and designed a regime the U.S. Supreme Court determined to be unlawful. Establishing appropriate military commissions is not the question. We all agree to do that. What we need to revisit is the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus for millions of legal immigrants and others, denying their right to challenge indefinite detainment on the Government's say-so.

It is from strength that America should defend our values and our Constitution. It takes commitment to those values to demand accountability from the Government. We should not be legislating from fear. In standing up for American values and security, I will keep working on this issue until we restore the checks and balances that are fundamental to preserving the liberties that define us as a nation. We can ensure our security without giving up our liberty. That is what the 9/11 Commission bill aims to do, and that is what this amendment will help to achieve.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following editorials be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, though I am not sure if that motion has gone through, I wanted to ask the leaders, who have managed this bill so well, if they are familiar with amendment Nos. 295 and 296, relative to very urgent requests by the Gulf Coast States, one for loan forgiveness and one for the 10-percent waiver? Are the two leaders willing to say they are both supportive of these amendments and will continue to try over the weekend to get both these amendments up by unanimous consent?

I thank the Senator for his support.

I yield.

I thank the Senator.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I thank the majority leader for those words and for him restating publicly and unequivocally his commitment to getting this job done, not just for the people of Louisiana but for the people of the gulf coast. We have spent a lot of time on the floor, as the majority leader knows, talking about rebuilding other places in the world. The leader is correct, and the Democratic caucus is

leading to try to redirect some of that attention to right here at home.

We have over 30 million people who live on the gulf coast right now, today, this Friday. The work of rebuilding is being thwarted, is being hampered, is being delayed by outmoded, unrealistic Federal regulations and bureaucratic redtape that is choking this recovery.

Now, normally this redtape is a nuisance. We work through it. It is inconvenient. It is a nuisance. But we just sort of move through the redtape of Government. But in this case, it is literally a noose that is around the necks of people, of business owners, large and small, family members--strangling their efforts to recover their communities that were devastated.

Just to put some pieces in the picture I am trying to paint, I would like to just share some details about Cameron Parish. You do not hear much about Cameron Parish because there are only 9,658 people who live there. We hear a lot about New Orleans. We hear a lot about Jefferson Parish. We hear a lot about even St. Bernard Parish. But little Cameron Parish, down on the southwest border, that was directly hit by Rita, the ``forgotten storm.'' We have not. The legislative delegation from Louisiana has not forgotten it, but many others fail to remember it.

Cameron Parish lost five fire stations, four community recreation centers, four public libraries, three maintenance barns, two parish multipurpose buildings, Courthouse Circle; Cameron Parish Police Jury Annex Building--destroyed; Cameron Parish Sheriff's Department Investigative Office--destroyed. The health unit was destroyed. The school board office was destroyed. The mosquito control barn was destroyed. And the waterworks district No. 10 office was destroyed. Virtually every public building was destroyed, except the courthouse, which was built in the early part of the century. It is several stories high, and it sort of shines white on the coast. If you flew over it, you could actually see it. It is quite large, and many people's lives have actually been saved by going to the courthouse during storms, where they have been kept from the high water. But everything else in the parish is gone. This little parish can no more put up a 10-percent match to rebuild four libraries, all their schools, than the man in the moon.

Now, normally, if the hurricane was not so bad, the State of Louisiana, which is a big State--not huge, but we are not small, we are medium-sized--would be strong enough to step up, give Cameron Parish the 10 percent of each of these very important public works for the 10,000 people or so who live there. But the problem is, Katrina and Rita were so devastating to the whole State that our State is not strong enough.

That is why we have a Federal Government. When the State is not strong enough, because of the storms, the Nation steps up. I am asking the President of the United States to step up and use his authority to waive this 10-percent match so the people of Cameron and the people right next door to them on the Texas line who were equally hard hit and the people to the right of them on the map--the good people of Mississippi--there are towns in Mississippi that lost every school, every library. The State of Mississippi will have a difficult time as well. But the State of Louisiana is having an unusually difficult time because of the devastation.

I want to say again--because I think numbers can paint a picture or tell a story better than even words can--the per capita damage to Florida from Hurricane Andrew was $139. The per capita damage to the State of New York was $390 from the attacks on the World Trade Center. These two events were unprecedented and unheard of. Most storms are like $20 per capita, $50 per capita. They hardly ever go over $50 per capita.

When Hurricane Andrew came through, it really woke us up to the poor people of Florida. It wrecked Homestead, FL, and was a great weight for the State of Florida. But we all pitched in and helped, and this match was waived.

When 9/11 hit, it shook the foundations of this Nation. It also shook the great city of New York. But it was waived, and we all pitched in and helped.

Here we have Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and we sit here wondering: Where is the Government? Where is the President? Where is the minority's thinking on this subject? Our per capita damage is $6,700. It defies anything we have ever seen.

Our State has been asking for this 10 percent reduction for 18 months. Do we have to keep asking for it? Do we have to keep supplying data like this? What is it going to take to get them to understand if there was ever a situation where the 10 percent should be waived, if there was ever an example like Cameron Parish, this is it.

So this amendment is pending. It is being opposed by an undisclosed person. But the minority is opposing it. I will meet the minority more than halfway. I am asking the administration, please, over the weekend, to reconsider. Let us get this done on this bill. Every day, every week counts. If we cannot, the majority leader has said--and I, of course, will support the effort, and many of the members of this caucus are supporting it--we will do it on the supplemental. The problem is, it will take us weeks. Perhaps the supplemental will run into a veto threat. Who knows? Because there are lots of issues that are going to come up on that supplemental. But this issue is clear. It could be easily fixed on this bill. I am going to work through the weekend to see if we can find any kind of compromise that could give a green light to the people of Cameron Parish. Let me say that even without that light, we visited Cameron Parish several times. Their little girls' softball team that was in contention when the storm hit went on to win the championship. Without a cafeteria, without a school, without a gym to practice, with most of their teachers' homes underwater and their own homes underwater, and most of them living in trailers or in tents, this team went on to win the championship. So when people say that people in Louisiana don't have resilience, we are being as resilient as we possibly can be under these circumstances. All we are asking is to please look at the data, please consider our case and allow us to get this 10 percent waiver so that the public works can move forward on fire stations, police stations, libraries, and infrastructure, most certainly essential to communities rebuilding. As we rebuild, we are rebuilding on higher ground. We are rebuilding with better building materials. We are mitigating against future storms. We are not building in the old-fashioned ways. But if this 10 percent doesn't get waived, we are not going to be building new or old or otherwise. We won't be building.

As I said, we may not be a fancy coast, but we are America's energy coast. We are proud of the fish that we bring in right off of Cameron Parish. We are proud of the shipping industry. We are proud of the ship channel that brings liquefied natural gas to keep the lights on in this Chamber and sends gas to New York and Philadelphia and California every day.

This is Cameron Parish. They are not sunbathing down in Cameron Parish. Yet we can't find it out of the goodwill of our hearts--we are spending all of this money to rebuild Iraq, and I have 10,000 people down on the coast. Does anybody remember they are Americans, taxpaying Americans with no libraries, no schools, and no possible way to put up their 10 percent match because they lost everything? I would think that somewhere in this trillion-dollar budget and maybe in the heart of the minority they could find some room for the people of Cameron Parish. Please consider our request over this weekend to get this 10 percent waived.

I thank the Chair.

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

Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Competitiveness Through Education, Technology, and Enterprise Act otherwise known as the COMPETE Act. The bill I introduce today is similar to legislation I have introduced in the 109th Congress. I am very pleased to be joined by my very good friend and colleague, Senator Mark Pryor, who shares my commitment to keeping the U. S. competitive not just for today but for tomorrow as well.

Earlier this week Microsoft's Bill Gates came before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to talk about keeping our country competitive. He said that ``the U.S. cannot maintain its economic leadership unless our workforce consists of people who have the knowledge and skills needed to drive innovation.'' Moreover he said that ``we simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science and engineering.''

My bill is inspired by the same line of thinking. The COMPETE Act is based on three simple, fundamental ideas: 1. The U.S. needs to remain a leader when it comes to technology and innovation; 2. We must prepare our future workforce and ``up-skill'' our current workforce for our increasingly global and information technology driven economy; and 3. We must better utilize existing private-public partnerships to achieve these goals.

The challenges we face are stark especially when it comes to the future competitiveness of our workforce. Today, China graduates four times as many engineers as the U.S. while the small nation of South Korea graduates just as many as we do. In three short years, Asia will be home to more than 90 percent of the world's scientists and engineers.

According to a recent poll, 84 percent of middle school students preferred to eat their vegetables than do their math homework. As Tom Friedman wrote in his book the World is Flat when he was growing up as a kid his mother used to tell him to eat all his vegetables because kids in China were starving. Today, his mother would say do your homework because the kids in China are starving for our jobs.

As if this were not enough, we also need to concern ourselves with the coming retirement wave of high-skilled workers in the fields of engineering, science, technology and math. According to the National Science Foundation, about a third of American scientists and engineers are over 50 years old.

To encourage and promote our students to seek out these types of careers we need to improve the performance of students in science and math. Several reports have indicated that U.S. students do not perform at the level of their international counterparts in math and science. Our fourth graders compare fairly well internationally, but by high school American students slip to 24th place out of 29 developing nations in math literacy and problem solving.

We must make sure that our educational system is up to the task in preparing our future workforce. To reward elementary and secondary schools for a job well done, COMPETE provides bonus grants to high performing elementary and secondary schools that show the greatest improvement in their State assessments in math and science. COMPETE also increases the alternative percentage limitation for corporate charitable contributions to the mathematics and science partnership program in order to encourage greater support from the corporate world.

To help ensure that more students receive a higher education and have the skills necessary to compete in today's global economy COMPETE puts the Senate on record in support of raising the maximum Pell Grant to $5,400.

In addition to undergraduate education, COMPETE also establishes a matching grant program where Federal and private resources will be used to help graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics meet the cost of getting a graduate degree. This grant program will also support outreach and mentoring activities to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in these fields at every level of education.

To keep today's workforce competitive and prepare our future workforce, COMPETE creates a tax credit to help ``up-skill'' America's workers so that

they can compete in today's increasingly information and technology- driven global economy. COMPETE also creates a workforce development grant pilot program to encourage leading innovative small businesses to provide short-term workforce training opportunities for college students who major in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Our employers need more than just raw materials. They need a highly skilled workforce that provides extra value to their products and services.

Finally in order to ensure our leadership in innovation, COMPETE makes the research and development credit permanent. We must look at ways to ensure the ability of American companies to stay at the forefront of the technological revolution. Temporarily extending the R&D tax credit makes it difficult for our businesses to undertake research and development activities necessary for our continued long- term competitiveness in the global economy.

Earlier this week, bipartisan comprehensive competitiveness legislation known as the America Competes Act was introduced. I am a proud original cosponsor of this bill which seeks to respond to the recommendations made by the National Academies' ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report and the Council on Competitiveness'' ``Innovate America'' report.

In an effort to contribute to this important discussion I am introducing COMPETE, which complements the America Competes Act through its emphasis on innovation and workforce development and public-private education partnership in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math.

We must realize the fact that our competitiveness relative to the global economy is in real danger. This situation is smoldering--it's not a five-alarm fire yet--I just hope we don't act too late. If you throw a frog into boiling water, it jumps out. If you throw a frog into warm water, it will sit there comfortably until its internal organs overheat and it dies. Let's not let ourselves wake up in a few years to see that our global competitiveness has slipped away.

I am committed to working on this issue now. While the challenges to our leadership in the global economy are indeed significant, I am confident and optimistic that we will successfully address challenges to our leadership in the global economy.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise to introduce legislation that would correct a property trespass question involving a 25-acre parcel of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Garfield County, UT. The parcel is part of the Turnabout Ranch, which hosts a successful and popular program to rehabilitate troubled youth.

The trespass conflict is the result of an erroneous survey in January 1999, at the time the Congress approved a major land exchange, P.L. 105-335, between the State of Utah and the BLM and erroneously included a part of the Turnabout Ranch. The land is located along the border of the Grand Staircase Escalante (GSE) Monument. My bill makes a slight boundary change to resolve the trespass question. This would grant the owners of the ranch the opportunity to purchase the erroneously surveyed land at fair market value so that this very important program for at-risk youth can continue unhindered.

Since 1995, Turn-About Ranch has graduated some 500 troubled and at- risk teenagers through an intense program of training and rehabilitation. The ranch employs about 35 Garfield County residents. The Turn-About Ranch program has strong support from the local community and the Garfield Country Commission.

Historically used for agriculture and grazing purposes, the ranch was purchased by the Townsend Family who leased the land to Turn-About Ranch, Inc., for the exclusive purpose of restoring dignity and self- esteem to wayward teenagers. Because government-owned land administered by the BLM surrounds the private land, the only way to resolve the trespass is for the Congress to pass legislation.

This legislation offers a simple and fair solution to a fairly technical problem on our public lands. I hope Congress can use this legislation to resolve this problem in the very near future.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill that would take a small but significant step toward identifying and repairing some of the regulatory problems currently found in our country's financial markets.

In 2002, our financial markets were in serious trouble. In the wake of Enron and other prominent accounting scandals, the public's confidence in the markets was low. Investors expressed their lack of confidence by taking their money out of the stock market, and the market indices plummeted. In response to this crisis--and that is exactly what it was, a crisis--Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

The law did what it was designed to do--re-establish faith in our financial markets--but it came at a cost. Complying with several of the bill's provisions has increased significantly the costs of doing business as a public corporation. Many large corporations continue to spend millions of dollars every year in order to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley law. This, they can afford. However, many smaller firms have found the costs of compliance with the Act to be crushing, burdensome, and negatively affecting their ability to compete in a global marketplace.

The result of this problem is twofold. First, a good number of smaller, publicly traded firms have been taken private by investors, with others expected to meet this same fate. Second, we have seen fewer companies going public, at least in the United States. During the year 2000, 50 percent of all new Initial Public Offerings, IPOs, were done in the United States. By 2006 that number had fallen below 10 percent. In 2006, Hong Kong supplanted New York as the number one market for stock offerings world-wide.

A number of my colleagues have pointed out that the dearth of IPOs threatens our standing as the premier financial market in the world. In the short term, we worry about this costing us prestige and jobs, but the real costs are much, much greater. Businesses that want to keep growing eventually need to become publicly-traded corporations in order to raise sufficient capital. With the costs of crossing that threshold greatly higher than they were a few years ago, many companies either delay or forego becoming a publicly traded corporation. Companies that become or remain privately-held firms eventually run into capital constraints of some sort that limit their growth.

The resulting cost to our economy is a financial market where it is more difficult for corporations to raise sufficient capital to expand capacity or increase productivity, ultimately resulting in slower economic growth. Given the truly awesome problems we face in the upcoming years with regard to our unfunded entitlement obligations, we are going to need every bit of economic growth we can muster to satisfy them. Even those who are ambivalent about the benefits of economic growth on the standard of living of all Americans should appreciate its importance in meeting our future obligations.

The bill I am introducing today would help us to identify and, I hope, ultimately address, many of the regulatory problems facing our financial markets. Specifically, it requires the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the Chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to annually testify to the relevant Senate and House committees on their efforts to reduce complexity in financial reporting and to provide more accurate and clear financial information to investors. I expect that this requirement would result in more awareness of these problems by policymakers in the Legislative and Executive Branches, as well as in the private sector, along with suggested solutions to these challenges.

While this bill would be a relatively small step, I believe it can help us understand exactly what must be done to address what ails our financial markets and help us achieve a consensus on how to fix these problems.

Mr. President, a nearly identical bill was passed by the House of Representatives recently with no opposition. I urge the leadership of the Senate on both sides of the aisle, along with the members of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs to support this bill, and join the House in making this important step toward increasing the efficiency of our financial markets.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.