To give subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members be given 5 legislative days to enter their remarks into the Record on this topic of the gulf oil spill.

I appreciate the opportunity to anchor this special hour tonight. My name is Congresswoman Laura Richardson, and I represent California's 37th Congressional District which includes the cities of Long

Beach, Compton, Carson, and Signal Hill. It's adjacent to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the largest port complex in the United States and the third-largest in the world.

For starters tonight, I want to take a look at what we're going to talk about in the report that I've prepared to present to the American people. As a Member of Congress, I'm a member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and I'm the subcommittee chair of Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response, and so because of that, I felt it was important to share with the American people the information and the observations of what I'm now calling the people's Congress.

I'm here tonight to present to the United States Congress and the American people my report, my observations, and my recommendations regarding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It includes the responses that have been taken and the recovery that's needed for us to move forward.

So let's start with what happened back on April 20 at 10 p.m. Tragedy struck in the Gulf of Mexico. Just 42 miles from the population of the people in Venice, Louisiana, there was a fire, there was an explosion, and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig began to be engulfed in flames. After trying to quench the flames, people came from all over the country, even Holland, attempting to figure out how to put the fire out on this rig. After spending much time and much energy, 115 crewmembers were rescued and evacuated.

Eleven crewmembers, unfortunately, tragically died. These eleven men lost their lives: Jason Anderson, Dale Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manual, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto and Adam Weise. These 11 gentlemen were men. They were men who were fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles, and on behalf of myself and the House of Representatives and Americans, we express our prayers to their families and friends and commit to study the situation and not to repeat it again in the future.

So, in order for us to do that, we first have to understand what is the magnitude of this problem. Throughout the evening on April 20 and into the next day, gallant efforts were made, as I mentioned, to still save, even into the second and third day, the 11 missing men and to put out the fire that could be seen for miles. The men who were coming to put out this fire, they could see the fire on this rig for 2 hours prior to getting to the actual site. That's how large it was. Some say the fire was as high as 200 feet into the air.

So 2 days later, after they made very many attempts to be able to put the fire out, the heat was just entirely too hot and the metal began to collapse, and the platform and the rig collapsed, 5,000 feet to the floor of the ocean.

As the fire began to subside on April 24, just two short days later, it was reported that oil was flowing into the ocean at a rate of at least 5,000 barrels per day. The United States has over 63,000 Federal onshore oil and gas wells. Having leaks and spills is also not something new to our country, but what is is the size and the magnitude.

Since 1990, there have been a total of 5,601 major pipeline incidences reported. That represents over $4 billion in damage. Previously reported, the worst spill was in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez in Bligh Reef, in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The flow rate technical group of the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Exxon Valdez spilled approximately 750,000 barrels of oil. Now, let's put that in perspective.

The oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon has continued for over 80 days, although it has passed at this point, and it is believed that the Deepwater Horizon will supersede the Valdez by several times. How could that be? If the Deepwater Horizon is leaking at anywhere between 10,000, as has been reported, and as high as 65,000 barrels a day, and if you multiply that by a minimum of 80 days, you're talking about a range of 800,000 to 4.8 million barrels of oil.

Now, the Deepwater spill took place 42 miles from Venice, Louisiana, which has 572 miles affected out of 7,721 miles. Those are shoreline miles, and so what that's saying is the impacted area is approximately 7.4 percent. In Mississippi, they have over 108 miles that are affected out of 359 total tidal shoreline miles, which brings it at approximately 30 percent. Alabama has over 67 miles of coastline affected out of 607 total tidal shoreline miles, approximately 11 percent. And Florida has over 69 miles affected out of 5,095 total tidal shoreline miles, approximately 1 percent.

So when we consider the damages that have happened so far with this Deepwater Horizon spill, some of the damages that are caused are to the beaches that we will talk about tonight, to fish, to birds, the environment, other wildlife, the ecosystem, tourism and the economy, marine life, livelihoods, jobs, lost productivity, and let's not forget public health.

In light of the loss of life, the unusual depth of drilling, and the immediate disaster implication, responses from all levels were immediately activated. President Obama and the administration, through working with the U.S. Coast Guard, is historically the primary responder to U.S. coastal waters. The U.S. Coast Guard responded to the BP oil spill within hours. The Coast Guard began immediately operating an emergency search-and-rescue mission.

Leadership was established on April 21, less than 1 day later. On April 21, a day after the explosion, pursuant to the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan, Rear Admiral Mary Landry was made Federal on-scene coordinator.

On April 22, less than 2 days later, after the explosion, the national response team, led by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, was activated along with additional regional response teams. These regional response teams are formed for many reasons. The teams typically include a United States Coast Guard representative, someone from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior and State and local representatives. The purpose of these regional response teams is to coordinate, to partner, to communicate, and to respond.

The regional response teams began developing plans, providing technical assistance and access to resources and equipment from its member agencies, as well as overseeing BP's response. Some workers, like Jay Harper from the Department of Homeland Security, have been working since day one, which is now 91 days straight, in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill. In this picture you see Jay and I viewing the source site, and he's pointing out information to me of where the actual source is, where the burns are taking place, and the whole aspect of what we could view from the plane.

On April 23, an incident command system stood up and was in accordance with the national response framework and the NCP. The purpose of the incident command system is to provide a common method for developing and implementing tactical plans to efficiently and effectively manage a multiagency response, and certainly this was it. The ICS organization for this response included incident command posts and unified commands at the local level, as well as a unified command at the regional level.

The next step was on April 29, just 9 days from the explosion, Secretary Napolitano designated the oil spill as a spill of national significance. This designation enabled Secretary Napolitano to appoint then U.S. Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen to serve as the National Incident Commander, the lead national coordinator in charge of Federal efforts.

On May 21, 2010, President Obama issued an Executive order creating the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling to respond to this spill. Further, President Barack Obama simultaneously has made four trips to the gulf to oversee the spill and to supervise the cleanup efforts.

On June 9, The New York Times reported that Rear Admiral James A. Watson, the on-scene coordinator of the Unified Command overseeing the response effort, wrote to British Petroleum, giving the company 3 days to provide plans. Among the requirements are that any new method, most importantly, that would contain the leak would be devised to reduce disruptions from a potential hurricane, which we are now approaching that season.

The letter came amid continuing questions about how much of the leaking oil was being captured by BP's latest containment effort, what we now know to be called the top hat. Also, there were questions of whether the company could be collecting more and what other processes could be used.

Finally, there were concerns about whether BP had failed to provide enough surface equipment. So when I had an opportunity to go to the gulf, and having read all of this, these were the things that I wanted to see. When you look at the source site of the Deepwater Horizon spill, what you will notice is there are multiple platforms, multiple vessels that are used to all coordinate in one sync to eliminate the gushing of oil that was coming into the gulf. And this was the scene that I saw just 1 week ago.

So when Rear Admiral Watson directed his letter, the things that he wanted to make sure that we were considering is incorporating the hurricanes, because the gulf is very much an area--as you can see, the waters are very calm here, but given very high winds and higher seas, these platforms and these vessels could easily be submerged as well.

When we talk about some of the things that have been done and when we look at the cleanup, 5.4 billion barrels were spilled into the gulf it is potentially believed; 2.6 million barrels were either evaporated or degraded; 823,000 barrels have been siphoned, and these are some of the various devices that helped to do this; and 262,000 barrels have been burned off, which is what you see of this flame. This is not the rig on fire. The rig had already collapsed into the ocean. This is to be able to pull the oil and to be able to burn the excess area, and 100,000 barrels have been skimmed.

Now, when we go to June 15, 2010, President Obama used his first Oval Office speech to address the Nation for 18 minutes and to talk about the oil spill that was carried on prime-time television to many TV networks. President Obama emphasized that we will fight the spill with everything we have got for as long as it takes.

When I participated in a hearing just a couple weeks ago, that was the question that the mayor asked us, Will you be here for as long as it takes? President Obama also said that he wanted to make sure that BP paid for the damages that had been caused, and he also stated that whatever was necessary to help the gulf coast and its people recover from this tragedy, we would do.

On June 16, 2010, BP agreed to create an independent $20 billion fund to pay the claims arising from the oil spill. The company also said it would suspend paying dividends to its shareholders for the rest of the year and would compensate workers for their lost wages.

Now, let's talk about the congressional action and the things we have done in this House in relation to the Deepwater oil spill. In relation to the administration's response, Mr. Speaker, Congress has taken significant actions since the oil spill to respond to this crisis.

Over the last 93 days, the U.S. Congress and the Senate have conducted over 24 Washington, D.C. hearings. We have conducted two field hearings, 75 on-site Member of Congress or Senate visits. H.R. 5503, the SPILL Act, last month was passed by the House, and it was passed in order to reform maritime liability laws.

Those laws were impacted by the Death on High Seas Act, the Jones Act, which we have heard much discussion about, and the Limitation on Liability Act. This bill is intended to ensure that the families of those who were killed or injured in the BP spill and other such tragedies are justly compensated for their losses.

On July 1, this House passed the 2010 supplemental appropriations bill, which includes aid measures requested by the Obama administration in response to this disaster. Included in this bill was funding for agencies that are working in the gulf to monitor the water, the air quality, the seafood safety, and worker health.

The bill also extends the time that the Secretary of the Interior would have to review an offshore drilling application. Current law only allows the Secretary 30 days to review the process, which is way too short of a time to complete a full review of increasingly complex drilling plans associated with deepwater drilling.

Then, H.R. 5481 was passed by this House to give subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. This is a bipartisan commission that our President formed. It's chaired by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida and former EPA Administrator William Reilly, and it was established on May 22. Its task is providing recommendations on how we can prevent future spills from originating from offshore drilling and mitigate any impact.

Then we have gone to S. 3473, which is access to the trust fund, and it impacts the liability trust fund. The purpose of this bill is to ensure that we have the tools necessary to respond to the BP oil spill. Last month, Congress passed S. 3473 to permit the Coast Guard to obtain one or more advances from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to underwrite Federal responses and activities related to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Under the law, the Coast Guard can only withdraw up to $100 million from the fund to finance emergency response efforts. After an accident and that money has run out, that can become a problem.

The trust fund was created by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and is funded by an 8-cent fee that is paid by all of the oil companies on each barrel of oil. This legislation has been signed by the President.

Finally, the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. That act was passed and the House enabled it so that it would protect the coastal economies by ensuring that oil companies would pay to strengthen the solvency of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund instead of passing the buck onto the taxpayers. That measure will raise the fee of oil companies that they will pay per barrel and increase the current $1 billion cap on individual claims against the fund to $5 billion, and increase the $500 million cap on natural resource damages assessment to $2.5 billion. Currently the trust fund has a balance of roughly $1.6 billion.

Now, let's talk about my observations. We have talked about the tragedy that happened. We have talked about what the administration has done, and we have talked about what Congress has done in terms of legislation.

So now let's talk about some of the things that I've seen.

I've made two trips to the gulf. Both trips were with the jurisdiction of the Homeland Security Committee of Government Oversight and Emergency Preparedness and Response. After viewing the news updates, I'll be honest, I anticipated seeing thousands and thousands of miles of oiled water. I expected to see every marsh covered in oil. I expected to see birds everywhere covered in oil. I expected to see sandy beaches covered in oil. And I expected to see no fishermen allowed to fish, and certainly no New Orleans businesses.

Indeed, it is true, over 500 miles of oil has gone onto the beaches in the gulf. This is a picture that shows the work that was done on the beaches. Now, you can actually see the work area in that far right section. You can see the booms that have been laid out. You can even see the restroom for the workers to be able to use as they clean the beaches. So you can see the booms, the nets, and even on this farther picture, you can see where the previous oil had gone across on the beaches. There are 3,617 birds have been rescued, 2,333 birds died, thousands of fishermen have been without work. And an 83,927 mile area has been disallowed for fishing.

The destruction has been immense, and the final estimates are far from being in. However, many of the challenges involved in reporting and responding have been overcome in the last 40 days. That's why I wanted to speak today, because I've been watching the news on a regular basis, hearing every single night of the individual incidents that have occurred, but we've heard very little about what our government and our representatives and the people who have been working every day have been doing.

Typically what happens on a daily basis is the planes go out, they survey the area, and they look at their various radar to see where the oil spill locations are. Once they observe them from

the air, they send the boats out, which then move forward and put the various booms out to either do burning or skimming. And then you also have some of the things that many of the elected officials in the local area had asked for, and that was the dropping of the sandbags. You can see this area where the sandbags were put in to prevent the oil from coming into the marsh area. Also, if you look very closely here, you will see the booms that were set in order to prevent the oil from coming into this marsh area.

Men and women are working around the clock. The administration has authorized and deployed 17,500 National Guard troops of which 1,580 have been activated. Approximately 45,000 personnel are currently responding to protect the shoreline and the wildlife and cleanup of our vital coastlines. And while there have been delays in equipment supply, the Coast Guard and Federal Government have been diligent in working to get the equipment that we need.

More than 6,800 vessels have responded on site, including skimmers, tubs, barges, and recovery vessels, all set to assist in the containment and the cleanup effort. In addition, hundreds of aircraft make the trip daily, as I said, remotely operated vehicles, and multiple mobile offshore drilling units to be able to clean up the disparate oil that has hit our shores.

Currently, approximately 572 miles of the gulf coast shoreline has been affected directly by the oil spill; approximately 328 miles in Louisiana, 108 miles in Mississippi, 67 miles in Alabama, and 69 miles in Florida. What many hardworking people have done is to set up 17 staging areas to protect many of our sensitive shoreline areas. This is an area where you can see actual workers where they go out; they actually go into the marsh area. You can see the pattern of where the oil has come in and where they're working to actually remove the oil. You also can see at this point some of the different--this is a boom that they're using in this area, and you can see inside in the marsh area where there is a tremendous amount of oil that had been spilled, but on the inner part it is still green and we hope will still survive.

Approximately 83,927 square miles of Gulf of Mexico Federal waters remain closed to fishing in order to balance the economic and public health concerns. We hope that soon those areas will be open once we can validate that in fact the fish that are living there that would be fished will be safe for consumption for people to eat.

Now, what was interesting to me is that when I was watching all the news about the oil spill, I just simply didn't understand why they didn't just put a boom around the entire source site. It seemed to me it wasn't that big and it would have prevented the oil from going to all these other States that we've talked about. Well, this is why--and I had no idea, and this is why I wanted to be here tonight so we could educate the American public because we're not seeing this on the news of why just having more boom is not fixing the problem.

When you look at the boom here, you can see that just by a simple small wave of not even one foot actually goes over and covers the boom area. So that's why whether you have six miles of boom or 10 miles of boom, it can only cover so much. Now, here you have workers who were actually collecting the boom that has collected some of the oil, and we can see how it has worked. But unfortunately it takes a lot of boom, and it takes completely replacing it.

More than 3.2 million feet of containment boom and 6.6 million feet absorbent boom have been deployed to contain the spill, and approximately 875,000 feet of containment boom remain. So as they watch where the oil is moving, they will have boom to move to that section.

One of the things I heard a lot about was something called ``the whale.'' They said it's large, it's from Taiwan, and it would be able to pick up all of the oil. This is a picture of the whale, as they call it. And as you can see here, here is some of the oil that the whale is picking up. Now, this whale is 1,150 feet long. It's quite an amazing site, but it's only one indication of the 20-plus international partners that we have had that the administration has been able to leverage with assets and skills from numerous foreign countries and international organizations as a part of this historic all-hands-on- deck response. Some of those countries are Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Qatar, Russia, Spain, Tanzania, United Kingdom, United Nations International, and then some.

So let's talk a little bit more about some of the particular sites. You're seeing kind of the aerial view, but we had an opportunity to actually go to some of the parishes and to see some of the impacted areas in addition to the marsh area. One of the places we went to was St. Tammany Parish. I visited this area, and they already had an operating emergency operation center, and there I met Commander Dan Precourt. Commander Precourt is the parish liaison officer for St. Tammany Parish. His position is important because what we learned from Hurricane Katrina, one of those most important lessons, was that there simply was not enough communication between local officials and the public during that disaster. But at the St. Tammany Parish Emergency Operation Center, there is a Coast Guard liaison, there is Commander Precourt, as well as a representative from BP, and many other people who are working there, working together to talk about how the agencies can solve this problem.

The public liaisons are meeting with someone face to face so that they can respond to their problem or can direct them to someone who can. Support is coming from California, Alaska, Massachusetts, and many other States. What I found interesting that we don't hear so much about with this whole spill situation is that these people are working 7 days a week, oftentimes coming in at 6 a.m., leaving anywhere between 9 and 10 p.m., and many of them actually worked on Father's Day.

I was there on Sunday evening at about 8 o'clock, and there were still over 10 people there, working.

Tammany Parish is not one of the centers of the oil spill. In fact, it was particularly alarming to me, because I have friends and know people from Louisiana, when I heard that oil was found at Lake Pontchartrain. I thought, ``Oh, no.'' Most people know and enjoy the area of Lake Pontchartrain, but fortunately and actually--and what wasn't told and why we wanted to talk about this tonight--oil was discovered at the initial pass, which is called Rigolets Pass. At this time, the lake is fishable. We want people to know that. They are fishing in Lake Pontchartrain, and no oil has been found west of the I- 10 bridge.

Thousands of men and women depend upon fishing for their livelihoods. As was said in one of the local shows this morning, we have to make sure that people know that people are still fishing, that people are still living, that people are still eating, and that they are still vacationing on the coast. The Coast Guard is trying every feasible option available to stop this spill.

Next slide, please.

Now, before I visited and when I looked at some of the things that had been said, one of the things we heard people talking about were the impacts on wildlife and the environment. I had an opportunity to go to the wildlife fisheries with representatives both from the State of Louisiana and the United States, and we got a chance to see where they had taken many of the birds so they could be cleaned and could get extra help.

This picture is of a very dedicated veterinarian who had worked very long hours to help aid and assist the birds. This is the team that actually put up this system, which was pretty much out of wire and 2 by 4s. I mean it really was a very, what I would say, kind of archaic system, but it was working to help with the birds.

You see me there. We are talking about the pelicans that have been cleaned, how they are recovering and how soon we expect them to be returned to the wild.

Next slide, please.

Some of the beauties of the Gulf of Mexico are the marshes, the wildlife, and all the incredible things that you see. This is one of the dedicated gentlemen whom I mentioned who works for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Jack Bohannon. He is on the water boat, and this is what they do. They survey the marsh

area to see if oil has gone into that section so they know where to put the boom or where to make replacements.

Here you see the Coast Guard commander of this particular area. It was the protected area, the marsh section called Pass a Loutre. This is Commander Claudia Gelzer, and she has been working very hard to keep the oil out and to minimize the damage to this much protected area.

Next slide, please.

It is somewhat hard to imagine, when you think of the oil coming in, how you would possibly stop it, or as I would kind of say, ``corral it,'' to be able to put it into a section where it could be safely burned and evaporated. This is an example of where you see a marsh area where the boom has been laid. They went out, and they found out there was an area where oil existed. They corralled it, brought it into the section. Then this is how they were able to safely set it afire.

This is another example of what I wanted to show of how you have the boom area protecting the local coast section. Very low down here, you can see where some of the oil had initially come, and that is why they have the boom area protecting this section, which is to keep the oil out.

Next slide, please.

Now, to talk about Pass a Loutre, not only is it an incredible area in terms of marshland, of over 115,000 acres of marshland, what is also particularly important about this is that it is a preserve area as well. Unfortunately, it was right in the eye of the storm of the Deepwater Horizon, and for the oil that came out, this was one of the first spots that it came to.

What we are showing you here are the first initial marsh areas. What I want the people to see is that not all of the marsh areas, not all of the 115,000 acres, are filled with oil. That is something that I didn't particularly understand as I was watching some of the news results. You look at our going out to the boat area. You see some of the low areas where some of the oil has come. Here you see it a little bit higher. Then, in this area, you see where oil very severely came in and impacted the marsh area.

Next slide, please.

This area is characterized by river channels with attendant channel banks, natural bayous, and manmade canals, which are interspersed with intermediate fresh marshes. Hurricane damage and subsidence have contributed to a major part of the vegetation and the marshes not being as strong as they had been in the past.

So, in this area here, I found this interesting. I rode on a helicopter for about 45 minutes and then on a boat for about 30 minutes to be able to finally get to the spot where the worst amount of the oil impacting the marshes had taken place.

So the message of what I want to say tonight is, yes, a horrible thing has happened, yes, to many areas that we love, have gone to for generations, and have cherished. But the important thing to remember is that it is not in a position where we cannot fix it with the work and the commitment to do so.

So what you see here is I'm reaching in and touching some of the oil that has accumulated here in this section. Then, on this portion here, is the actual entrance into one of the marsh canals. You can see literally where the oil just kind of traveled inside, came in and basically accumulated in this section here of what you see.

Next slide, please.

So we look at these marsh areas and what we can do to fix them. Some of the complaints that were made were: Why didn't we have enough boom? How come we couldn't get the boom out there quickly enough? This is what is very important for people to see.

Here you can see the boom is normally a yellow color. This is where oil has come over, and you can see it only takes about half of a foot of a wave or a foot of a wave to be able to go in. Here is where they are replacing it and putting new ones out and trying to keep it out, and then, of course, they are using the booms farther out in the area.

Next slide, please.

This, I think, was important to show in that, as the booms are collecting oil, they become filled with it. Then you have to go back out and remove them and place more in their place. So here you can see a tremendous amount of oil that had accumulated. It has been absorbed in these booms, and then they will be going out to these areas to place new ones.

Then one of the things that is also important to understand as to why the booms alone are not the answer is that, with the wind and with the waves, it begins to move them into the marsh areas, so it actually moves them out from protecting the outer area. So that's why the booms are not the permanent solution to this problem.

Next slide, please.

As I prepared this report, what I call ``the people's Congress,'' I would be wrong not to acknowledge the efforts of Secretary Napolitano and Chairman Thompson for providing the access, for demonstrating transparency, and for showing a willingness to consider all of the options on the table for the betterment of America and for the American people.

In order to improve even further, here are some of the lessons that I learned from some of the things that I've shown you tonight:

Elected officials in the local area talked about the fact that we have had past exercises. We have had national exercises in the gulf regions, and so you would ask the question: Why were there some of the problems we experienced?

Some of the things they talked about were their still not being connected on the calls, the daily calls, until a couple of weeks into the situation, and the impact on the local economy, when many of the areas really were not having an extensive amount of oil. You also had people sounding the alarm, expressing their concerns of how were we going to pay for all of the recovery that was going to be required. You had others who said we weren't moving fast enough and that we needed to do more. Still others said the teams should be changed.

Though I want to talk about another area that also became very clear to me, a lesson learned.

One of the recommendations I made when we had our hearing was to say to the Coast Guard and to the Department of Homeland Security that we need to also have our own message, which is why I am here tonight. We need to make sure that we are showing the American people, as they also have an opportunity to watch, that, yes, many marsh areas have been damaged. Yes, beaches have had oil come upon them. But yes, there are many other areas where they can still come, where they can enjoy, and where we hope that our marshes will survive.

When you look at some of the reports and when you look at the current state of the situation--and even in the hearing they acknowledged-- things have gotten better. A lot of that is due to now being included in those calls, it is due to the transparency of what has been happening, and to the daily updates from Rear Admiral Allen. One of the key things they talked about was having a message that was understandable and in layman's terms.

So that is why I came here tonight, because what the public had been asking for and what some of the elected officials had been asking for is just to show us what you are seeing and what we are doing in just regular terms. It is something very simple, but it basically conveys the message of what has happened.

When you also look at some of the improvements and what we've learned and with being the subcommittee chair of Emergency Communications, Preparedness, and Response, and it's very important to look at these things. How soon was the 1-800 number up? How many claims have been filled? You look at where did the boom come from? How long did it take it to get there? How much did we already have? How many skimmers did we have? How many do we still need?

These are all the things that we have now learned and we've learned in previous spills, as well, that we need to do to be prepared for a spill, unfortunately, of this size.

Now, when we talk about layman's terms, one of the key things that I think is important to acknowledge is the Gulf of Mexico. This is a picture of a very sensitive area. You can see that the marsh is not very deep, but it's pretty much covered all the way around with boom. It's green. The

water is blue. But we are fighting on a daily basis to keep it that way, and we have 45,000 personnel who are working to fix the problem.

So when we talk about the clear lessons, some of the other things that I think that should be considered are: one, we need to make sure that as we consider how we respond to a spill, that we're prepared to make the adjustments in a hurricane season as well.

I showed you pictures of the bird estuary and where they were cleaning up the birds. They are actually in the process of moving from that area because it's not stable enough. So if, in fact, a hurricane were to come, we would lose many birds as well from that experience. So we have to be including different agencies in that emergency process and to ensure that those places are set up throughout the region so that they're ready if something like this crisis does, in fact, occur.

Another thing that we also have learned is that when we talk about communication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an active to extremely active hurricane season for 2010, with a chance, 70 percent chance for 14 to 23 named storms. So the clock is ticking, and that's why people are working so hard to be ready.

Another key point that is very important to consider has to do with legislation. Now, I mentioned earlier some of the legislation that the House has already passed, but there are other suggestions that should be considered as well.

One of the things that we found, in terms of response and who's in charge, is that when you looked at the marsh area, the Louisiana Wildlife individual felt that if you had oil in the marsh, that you should leave it there and allow it to eventually work its way out. The United States, at the Federal level, said it's better to go in to cut it open, to flush some water to go through to remove the oil and to get it out from just sitting there. So they were having to make those decisions.

And I would venture to say that we should actually have those kinds of plans in advance. We should know that for certain parts of our country, we have marsh areas and that if, in the event there are oil spills, and I already mentioned to you that there's been 6,000 in our period of time here in the United States, that we should already have an adopted policy that we agree to of how we get the oil out of the marsh. Do we leave the oil in or do we open it up to be able to flush clear water through? That was one of the things that I asked at the hearing that we had.

Another important thing to consider with legislation is to make sure that it would have proper mitigation, and that's what I'm talking about with the marsh. We should already determine what the potential costs are. We shouldn't be waiting until something unfortunately happens and then we're trying to guesstimate.

We should also make sure that mitigation includes natural resource restoration. When you look at mitigation, it's loss of life, loss of limb, loss of property. But it's also, we have grown to know, it's a loss of our natural ecosystem as well. So when we consider funding that's available for mitigation, we need to make sure enough is there for that restoration as well.

We also need to make sure that we have adequate information that's prepared independently, not of a particular independent private source, that will actually provide us the information and say what would be required to restore our ecosystem to its natural level.

Sensitive natural resource areas can be identified early, and they can be done so to adequately protect them from an oil spill and also help with associated cleanup operations. The damage impact assessment should be thorough and it should be accurate and it doesn't have to be late. Habitat restoration is the preferred method to mitigate for impacts of natural resources from an oil spill and associated cleanup activities. A detailed mitigation plan should be prepared.

These are the things that I saw and that I learned that I plan on bringing forward with my colleagues to consider on this very floor.

When you talk about adequate funding for restoration activities, it should be provided based upon the actual cost and not what we think it might be. We should have to have time lines. There should be strict penalties, feasible objectives. There should be separate oversight from the initiators and the implementers, and, certainly, there should be periodic updates.

So when you look at the Oil and Fuel Spill Readiness Act, another piece of legislation that I think this House should consider, we shouldn't have to, when we have a spill, scramble for a couple of weeks and try and get enough boom and try and get enough skimmers and try and get enough of everything to deal with an incredible disaster. These are things based upon the depth and the amount of oil that's being pulled from the ocean floor that we should be able to consider what would be needed if, in the event, a disaster were to occur.

A readiness act would be able to have lessons learned from this Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It should include objective academic minds and expertise. It should include standards and require all emergency planning. And it should also include, as I've said, environment and wildlife as well.

Now, as we talk about what I call the people's Congress, this House is one where we have an opportunity to represent approximately 650,000 Americans, and I happen to be fortunate enough to be one of those people. And so, as I rise today and I talk about this Special Order, one of the things you find quickly being a Member of Congress is that it's your area that you represent, but you also represent--you're a United States Representative, which means you're not only looking for your district but for other districts as well.

And so when this incident happened and it fell within the committee of jurisdiction of my particular area, I felt, really, it was a responsibility because we have oil wells and pipelines in my area as well. And what happened in Louisiana could happen in any coastline in this country, and so it behooves us to be prepared and to learn our lessons.

As I've explained tonight, we can start looking forward in a constructive way. We can work together with Federal, State, and local elected officials and agencies and private partners on solving these problems. Millions of people depend upon the gulf for their livelihood, for family history, and it is home to valuable animals as a part of their families, plants, and environments.

I am optimistic. And while this is certainly one of the biggest challenges this Nation has ever faced, one thing we know for sure about the United States is that we're always ready to rebound. We don't see things as insurmountable, and we do believe that they can be made right.

The last slide I am showing you tonight is not the marsh area before the oil spill. In fact, it's after. What you see in this marsh area is that it is in its full and beautiful state. It's perfectly green. You see the canals that are there supporting it. As we continue to work to respond to this oil spill and we put the recovery things in place, we can ensure that the rest of the 115,000 acres can look again like this particular section does as well.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to be able to share my thoughts, kind of a testimony of what I saw in the gulf, painting a picture for the American people of what is really happening and what so many incredible people are doing to really restore and to fix something that was originally a disaster that I think can come back to look like this particular slide does.

With that, I am appreciative for all of the efforts, as I said, of Chairman Thompson on our committee, Secretary Napolitano, of her working with all the Members of Congress and Senate to visit the gulf. We look forward to continuing to work, to do our lessons learned, and to put better systems in place so that we won't repeat the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

If I may, before my colleague speaks--I will yield to him right away.

Before my neighbor from Massachusetts leaves the floor, let me commend him for his comments here without getting into details of the bill he has offered but, more importantly, the general thrust of what he has expressed. As he is a newly arriving Member of this body and may be here for many years, I am wrapping up three decades of service. But I hope people will listen to what he has to say.

People come to the Chamber and to this institution with the idea of getting things done for our country. That is so critically important. What he has suggested, what I have heard others talk about today, is making this institution functional so we can actually come to terms. It is not easy. We represent different constituencies and different interests. But if the spirit expressed by Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts in these brief remarks he has made this morning can carry forward in all the debates and discussions we have, we will find a lot more solutions. I want to say thank you.

Madam President, I should have noted, I will be leaving with my friend and colleague from Illinois as well. He has been a wonderful addition to this institution. He has done a very fine job representing the people of Illinois. I regret we didn't get to serve more years together, that he didn't get a chance to come here earlier. He made a good contribution in the short time we have been here. Had the Senator been here longer, I think he would have made a significant contribution over the years. I thank the Senator for the time he has served and the manner in which he served as well.

Wall Street Reform

I rise this afternoon to spend a few minutes to talk about a most important piece of legislation facing this body and, more importantly, our country, and that is the Wall Street reform bill. In fact, the Presiding Officer has had a deep interest in the subject matter and in her previous life actually worked in the area of financial services. She not only brings an interest from the State of North Carolina, one of the fine States that has a significant involvement in the financial services of our country, but has also a knowledge about these institutions, how they work, and how the financial system works. I am very grateful to her for her thoughts and suggestions as we have been through this rather long journey over the last couple of years in the wake of the financial crisis that befell our Nation most dramatically in the fall of 2008.

I think all of our colleagues here know what is at stake. We do not need to spend a lot of time talking about the circumstances over the last couple of years. We know it, and more importantly, and more poignantly, our constituents know it, because they are living it.

All of us have jobs here. We are fairly well compensated, to put it mildly, by any standard. We have good health care. We own our homes or are not worried about whether we can afford the rent in the places we live--whatever the circumstances. We are in some ways insulated from the day-to-day agonies our fellow citizens go through and have gone through over these last couple of years.

But I also have a deep appreciation of the fact that my colleagues, despite not personally going through these terrible times as their constituents are, understand the importance of this issue. I am deeply grateful to each and every Member of this Chamber over the last 2 years and almost everyone in this Chamber has been involved in this debate or discussion to one degree or another. The fact is we have come as far as we have in this bill because there is that interest and because there is that concern that we need to address the architecture, the financial structures of our Nation so as to avoid the kind of problems we have seen our Nation go through over these last several years.

Again, the numbers have been repeated so often I am almost hesitant to repeat them this afternoon. Certainly we will know better tomorrow. I guess the unemployment numbers will come out again.

But well over 8\1/2\ million jobs have been lost. Frankly, I think that number is an underestimation of what has happened. Some people have found part-time work, falling back in and out of it. But the number, 8.4 million, is used. It is certainly no less than that and, I suspect, as I said, far more than that.

Seven million of our fellow citizens have had their homes fall into foreclosure. Every time I say that sentence it seems it is so brief to cite the number. But imagine, as we must, that moment when, despite all of your efforts, that dream house you have acquired for your family, because of a lost job, the lost retirement, the closed business, all of a sudden that which you had hoped and dreamed for that has brought stability to your family, a great sense of joy and hope, dreams fulfilled, is all of a sudden closed, foreclosed, lost.

Imagine coming home that night when all of the efforts to hold on to that home are gone and facing your family and telling them the house you have lived in--where you have played, you have eaten, you have dreamt, you have laughed, you have cried, you have done all of the things that building enshrines in the American family--is no longer yours. For 7 million of our fellow citizens that night has happened. Many more face the prospect of that occurring in the months ahead, despite the efforts to get our economy moving again. Retirement incomes, of course, have vanished in a flash, watching the markets decline. Literally years of building security for those retirement years, to contribute to a child's higher education costs, to blunt the costs of a health tragedy to hit your family, all of those rainy days that retirement or savings account can provide to weather those storms have been eliminated.

So there has been a shocking loss of wealth in our Nation as well. Trillions of dollars are gone, incomes that will never be made up. As I mentioned, lost home values, even if you have been able to hold on to your home, home values, on average, have declined about 30 percent. So that equity you might have built up in that dream house, where you have raised your family over the last 10, 15, 20 years, you paid one price for it maybe 20 years ago and had the full expectation that property value, while it may not skyrocket, would increase in value over the years.

So as you became that empty nester as your kids went on to college or marriage or jobs on their own, the hope that you would be able to sell that home to another hopeful buyer and come out of it with some equity that would then provide for that security that you needed to contribute to your family's well being has been totally gone in many cases, even if you have held on to your home.

Well, the bill I briefly want to talk about does not do anything about what has happened. I would love to tell you if we passed this bill that you could get your job back; that passing this financial reform bill would give you your job back. I would love to be able to tell you that when we pass this bill you would get your home back or that somehow you would be able to magically replenish that retirement account or savings account.

This bill does not do any of those things. All this bill does is to say that when the next crisis comes--and surely it will as night follows dawn, as tomorrow follows today we will have another economic crisis. I never suggested this bill was going to stop that. What I hope we are able to do with this bill is minimize the effects of that crisis when it occurs so that it does not metastasize. That may be the best word to use in this case, much as a cancer does.

When an economic crisis hits, if you are able to handle it when it happens, much as you are able to handle a cancer when you discover it before it contaminates your entire body--the crisis that will happen if we can control it, identify it early enough, begin to address the problems that it poses, then we might avoid the kind of catastrophic effect this present economic catastrophe has caused, the most significant in almost 100 years, since the Great Depression more than 80 years ago.

So I want to briefly talk about not only the process we have gone through over the past year and a half, but also what this bill is trying to do. Let me be the first to acknowledge and admit that it does not do everything I would like it to do. I am not overly enthusiastic about every provision in this bill. There are measures that I objected to that are in the bill.

But we serve in a body of our fellow colleagues, the 100 of us who serve here, who work with those who work down the hall from this Chamber where 435 of our colleagues serve, with an administration and regulators, not to mention financial institutions and their employees and all that are involved in the financial network of our Nation, all are impacted and affected by this bill. So it is difficult to try to fashion a piece of legislation that accommodates the various interests and allows us to move forward. But that is what we have tried to do.

Process is important. I will not dwell on this point, but as someone who has spent three decades of my life at this very desk--and it is the only desk I have ever sat at since the day I arrived. This desk was planted over in that far corner as the 100th Senator in the body up until I--some 20 years ago when, through seniority, you get to move your desk around. I ended up in this seat, this spot about 20 years ago, next to this remarkable man whose life we are going to celebrate and are celebrating those days, Robert C. Byrd. He has been my seatmate for the last two decades.

As I said the other day, I was an 8-year-old child sitting in the galleries of the other body watching my father, on January 3, 1953, and a 35-year-old new Congressman from West Virginia be sworn in as newly minted Members of Congress. Some 6 years later, I sat in that gallery up here, in the family gallery, watching my father be sworn in as a Senator from Connecticut, along with a new Senator from West Virginia named Robert C. Byrd, never imagining, as a 7- or 8-year-old or as a 14-year-old, that I would spend 20 years of my life at a desk next to the man who has served longer than any other human being in the history of our Nation.

Process meant a lot to Robert C. Byrd. The Constitution meant a great deal. I carry with me, and every day I have for 20 years, the Constitution that Robert C. Byrd gave me and autographed to me. It is rather threadbare and worn today, but he revered this document. He could absolutely quote it verbatim. He gave me a copy, as he did to all new Members when they arrive, and the importance of understanding the role of this body in our constitutional framework.

He was such a great advocate of the civility and the respect for each other as we try to fashion answers to our Nation's problems. We have been through two major bills in the last Congress. There have been a lot of other bills to consider, but the health care debate and the financial reform debate, I would argue, are the two largest in this Congress, and they are two models of how an institution can operate.

Even though I am glad we prevailed with the health care debate and are going to finally end up dealing with cost and access to our health care system and making it more available to people as a result of our actions taken, it was not a pretty process. Anyone who watched it, let alone those of us who were involved in it, certainly would have preferred that we arrive at the conclusion in a manner differently than what we went through. Maybe not everyone would agree with that. I feel that way.

The second model, if you will, is the one we just went through on financial reform, which was about as open a process as you could ever have. We went through literally months of listening in our committee, the Banking Committee which I chair, to hundreds--and I am not exaggerating--hundreds of experts who came and briefed us either formally or informally, literally dozens and dozens of formal hearings to dissect what had happened, how we got into this mess, who caused it, how was it caused, and what steps we should be taking to see to it this problem, another economic crisis, would not explode as broadly as this one has.

I invited my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to be involved in all of those meetings, to see to it that they would be present, even at White House meetings, to talk about what we needed to do. We laid out our first ideas together a year and a half ago, even before marking up anything close to a bill.

I presented our first discussion draft of this legislation in November of last year, and it was a discussion draft. After that draft was put forward, I assigned bipartisan working groups to attack the major issues in the bill. In March of this year, I unveiled a new bill that incorporated many of the bipartisan ideas that the working groups

had produced. In fact, what I asked to be done in our committee, in the Banking Committee, was divide up the labor between Democrats and Republicans on certain large, complicated subject matters. And to their credit, they worked very hard. It did not always come up with a final answer in various areas, but they contributed significantly to the product we now have before us in the form of a conference committee report coming to this body, coming to the Senate.

So I am grateful to Richard Shelby, who is not supportive of the bill, but was my ranking member and was the chairman of the Banking Committee for 4 years before I took over the chairmanship in January of 2007.

I will not go down the list and mention all of the members, but the committee members worked very hard. Even though we ended up disagreeing with what we finally produced, I am grateful to them for the efforts they put into the legislation. Beyond that, I have worked every day to keep my colleagues informed every step of the process, at least I have tried to, and if not them directly, their staffs, so there was that sense of inclusion, the model that everyone ought to be able to have a role and participate in the debate of a significant bill.

So the point I am making is, this bill was the product of collaboration of many of my colleagues before the debate even began on the floor of the Senate. On this floor, the debate lasted almost a month, one of the longest debates in many years in the Congress of the United States. Nearly 50 votes were cast by Democrats and Republicans over a 4-week period.

One of the many that passed was the very second one, I think. Senator Boxer of California offered the first amendment that said taxpayers should never again be asked to pay for a bailout of a financial institution. I think that passed unanimously. Then Senator Shelby and I offered an amendment where we reached a bipartisan agreement on measures to end all bailouts of financial institutions once and for all, one of the most contentious areas of the bill.

From that point forward, over the next 4 weeks, with almost 60 amendments back and forth, we ended up passing the legislation by the thinnest of margins, overcoming the procedural votes we needed to in order to reach financial passage of the bill.

The last time the Banking Committee held a conference on any legislation was 7 years ago. So I took my committee product, the Senate product, and we went to what is called a conference. The House had passed its bill in December. We had passed our bill in May. So what normally has happened in the past is they never meet, or if they do meet they met in closed-door sessions to work out the differences. Then they would come back with a product.

The last time the Banking Committee had been to a conference with the House of Representatives on any bill was more than 7 years ago. Those meetings were held mostly in private; the public was never even invited into the room, let alone the press, to observe and to cover the event. We changed all of that. Our conference committee, the 42 members of both Chambers who met, again, for a 2-week period, almost 70 hours that we met, we considered 180 amendments in 70 hours. And 54 amendments were offered by Senators, 34 of which were offered by my Republican colleagues in the conference, 20 by the Democrats.

So combined, between the number of amendments we debated on the floor of the Senate and the number of amendments we debated in conference as Senators--forget the House Members and their amendments--there were over 100 amendments by Democrats and Republicans to the financial reform bill. C-SPAN and the press sat there and watched every minute of the conference and covered every second, gavel to gavel, of the proceedings that went on for almost 70 hours over a 2-week period. My point is, this model of conducting our business, listening to each other, debating and deciding what ought to be in this bill, stands in stark contrast to how we went through the health care debate.

What is the point I am trying to make? If at the end of this process it appears as though we still face a procedural objection to going forward, what difference did it make, then, which course we followed if at the end of the process it did not make any difference?

The motion to invoke cloture is a strange phrase that I suspect most Americans do not have the vaguest idea of its meaning, or very few do. It sounds like something a doctor may do if you are ill, to get a cloture or something. That is what I thought it was when I first arrived here.

Briefly, cloture is a method by which you end a filibuster. In this Chamber, under our rules, we respect the rights of the minority, including a minority of one.

Members can talk as long as they can stand up, under most circumstances, and continue. Robert C. Byrd, in fact, held one of the records. It wasn't the record--Strom Thurmond holds the record, a former Senator I served with from South Carolina--but Robert C. Byrd conducted a filibuster for more than 14 hours. We can do that in this Chamber. But if we want to end the filibuster, we have to invoke cloture. That takes 60 votes--more than a simple majority--to say: We have had enough debate. The process has been fair. It is now time to vote. So we invoke cloture. If we don't think the process has been fair, that we haven't been given a chance to express ourselves, that we have been denied the opportunity to offer amendments or contribute to the debate, then we vote against invoking cloture.

There have certainly been many circumstances when that has been warranted, but I don't know how anyone could make a case that a filibuster on procedural grounds is warranted on this financial reform bill such as we have been through. I don't know what else I could have done to make every Member of this Chamber feel more included in the debate on the reform of Wall Street. If there is something else I could have done to say to a Member: You would have had additional rights or opportunities, I would like to hear it. I don't think I could have. You can't spend 4 weeks in this Chamber through almost 60 amendments, 54 more in a conference, virtually allowing unlimited debate on almost anything that came up, and tell me you think you have been denied the opportunity to fully vent your feelings, to be heard, to offer your ideas and thoughts.

As a departing suggestion of one about to leave in 5 or 6 months, there ought to be some value to the process we have gone through. I have heard this morning already concerns expressed because the institution, in the minds of some, is dysfunctional. I don't want to believe that. I want to believe it is still a functional institution. But if, at the end, this process of what I have tried to lead on the banking bill causes people to believe that it doesn't make any difference, we are still going to vote for procedural roadblocks to this bill because we don't like some of the provisions in it or don't like the bill, then I do despair in some ways for whether this institution can ever function. If, at the end of all of that, we end up with the same kinds of procedural roadblocks as we had on the health care debate, where I would argue there was more legitimacy to invoking those procedural roadblocks, then I think the institution is in a lot more trouble than I would like to believe. I mention the process because it ought to be important to people, seeing to it that we have a chance to go forward.

At the end of that conference, we came up not only with the compromises necessary for a bill but also how to offset the cost of this bill. The House rules require that we demonstrate that the cost of the bill to the overall Treasury of the United States is not going to leave it in deeper debt than would otherwise be the case. We had to come up with offsetting costs for the bill.

The first proposal was not met warmly. It was assessments on large institutions primarily. But there were strong objections expressed, and two or three of our colleagues, who have been very helpful on this bill in offering ideas that would strengthen the bill and made significant contributions, expressed their concerns to me that this was an unacceptable offset, in their minds. So I took the extraordinary step of reconvening the conference. We met yesterday to change the offsets. We did so by two things. One we kept the same, and that was by making permanent the insurance fund in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,

making it permanent at $250,000. That requires an assessment increase in order to meet those obligations. That was already in the bill. The Congressional Budget Office scores that as providing about $8.5 billion in revenues over the next 10 years. That was there.

The second piece we did is end TARP. That is something all of us have wanted to see since the inception of the program. Can we bring this thing to a close? Under our alternative offset, we end TARP immediately, except for its current obligations. The Congressional Budget Office--and I will provide letters from the CBO confirming these numbers--scored that at about $11 billion over 10 years in savings. That money goes into deficit reduction. This is an offset; it is not a pay-for. What do I mean by that? If the budget of our Nation was $100 and the cost of a program was $10, you would have to make up that $10. It doesn't go directly to pay for those programs, but it provides the offset for the cost of those programs.

The third piece of this to make up the difference was by increasing the reserve ratio at the FDIC, which was supported by the chairperson of the FDIC, to go from 1.15 percent to 1.35 percent but to hold harmless all financial institutions or banks that have assets under $10 billion and to do that not over 4 or 5 years but over the next 10 years until 2020. That provides an additional $5.7 billion.

The CBO has thus scored the entire bill as providing an additional $3.2 billion in deficit reduction because the amounts we will be bringing in exceed the cost of the bill.

So, for my colleagues, ending TARP and complying with what the Chairman of the FDIC has said is a far better suggestion.

I would be remiss at this juncture if I did not specifically thank my colleagues from Maine, Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe. It was Ms. Collins who said this is a better idea to look at as an offset. I am grateful to her, as I am to her colleague from Maine and my colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Brown, who expressed his concerns about the assessment approach. Again, I will let them speak for themselves on these matters.

But it is important that colleagues know that, going back to a few moments ago talking about process, it was at the suggestion of Democrats and Republicans that changes were made to the bill, including the extraordinary step yesterday of opening the conference. There are those who wanted me to go forward anyway with it. Why would I do that if, in fact, Members have said: I can't be supportive under the present circumstances. The opportunity to make a correction in the bill and therefore come up with a better idea that was more acceptable to more of our colleagues seemed the appropriate step to take. That is exactly what we did. That is how we have offset the cost of this bill.

I will provide additional data. If I have misspoken on the numbers, I will correct my own statement for the record. But I believe I am approximately correct.

Again, none of this is easy. I know there is a temptation at times like this for emotions to rise, passions to find expression. I have great respect for all of my colleagues in the efforts they made. There are moments of frustration when you are trying to pass a major bill, seeking cooperation from your colleagues to get the job done. But this is a complicated piece of legislation. More than 2,000 pages are included in the bill. There are provisions that are not ones I would write myself, but this is the legislative process.

I introduced a bill last November, the one I would have preferred, but in the months since, many Members have had their opportunities to make changes. Some changes I liked; some I didn't. But it should not be that because you don't like one or two or several provisions of a bill, that ought to become more important than the total impact of what you are trying to achieve. There are those who don't like the bill, any part of it at all or very few parts of it. Again, I understand that. Those people are going to vote no. But when someone tells me there is one provision or two they don't like and as a result they are going to vote against everything, that I don't understand, candidly.

We have had our debate. We voted on hundreds of individual provisions between the House and this body. There will be procedural votes. I have made my case that at some point, a process that is as open as this one has been, as inclusive as this one has been, as hospitable as I could possibly make it, as civil as I could possibly make it--if the procedural roadblocks are no different than the legislation that was conducted without any civility, without any of the cooperation and inclusiveness of this, then what is the lesson? What is the lesson for the next major bill if, in fact, going through all of that gets you no further in the process than what we have been through?

This bill doesn't bring back your home, your job, your retirement income. What it does do is to try to see to it that the next crisis will not cause the deep problems this one has.

Let me briefly identify the two or three or four things that are major in the bill. In the absence of these, if we defeat the bill, all of this is gone and we are right back to September of 2008, right back where we were when this body voted, with less than 40 days to go before a national election, to ask the American taxpayer to write a $700 billion check to bail out and stabilize financial institutions. If you reject this effort we have been involved in for almost 2 years in the week when we come back, then we are exactly where we were in the fall of 2008, with all of the vulnerabilities we saw our country experience as a result of not reforming the structures to our financial system.

This bill will end taxpayer bailouts by making it tough for companies to engage in the kind of irresponsible behavior that threatened the economy. It sets up a way to shut down the giant, dangerous companies that failed, through bankruptcy or through a resolution mechanism that lays all of the cost and pain on them, not on the American taxpayer. That is a major achievement.

We also include for the first time institutions that are financial institutions that have operated in the shadow economy of the Nation--no regulation, no one moderating their behavior. This bill brings them all in. They will now be regulated and controlled, so they can't engage in the kind of wildcat behavior that brought our Nation to the point we have been.

The bill creates a consumer financial services protection bureau. I get people acting as if this was the most radical idea in America. If you buy a faulty product--a toaster, a car, a television set--and it is a crummy product, you have a place to go to get some sort of redress. In fact, they are required to recall the products under the Consumer Product Safety Commission and others. If you get a crummy mortgage, a crummy insurance policy, you get a crummy piece of stock because someone lied about it, where do you go? Whom do you call? You get a lawyer--I guess that is the answer--if you have the resources. This bill sets up, for the first time in our history, a place where the average consumer of financial services might be able to get a redress of their grievances.

I know people are acting as if this is some wild socialistic idea, some crazy leftwing notion, after what the country has been through, that we could end up having a place where the average American citizen, who wants to have faith and trust in our economic system, can go to get some relief. God forbid they are treated as they have been in too many instances in the past. That is part of this bill.

This bill will create an advanced warning system. Instead of one set of eyes that, frankly, were closed most of the time, we now have what we call sort of a risk assessment council made up of the various Federal agencies that have prudential responsibility over financial institutions to be meeting and looking at what is going on in the economy, not only here in our Nation but abroad as well. Are there things occurring within companies, within interconnected companies, within countries that could pose a financial risk to our Nation? Spotting them early enough to put a stop to them, to break them up, as a last resort, or to insist that certain things be done to avoid these metastasizing events that have contaminated every aspect of our life because no one stood up early enough to stop them when they first spotted them.

The bill further brings transparency and accountability to the derivatives

market, a $600 trillion--that is not misspeaking; that is not a million, not a billion--a $600 trillion market. It is a phenomenal market. Basically, it has been unregulated and out of control.

We have central clearing exchange trading with new margin and capital requirements for large bank dealers and major swap participants. These safeguards will ensure taxpayers are not left on the hook for Wall Street's bets, particularly with depositors' money, as we saw happen, or an AIG circumstance.

The bill has the so-called Volcker rule to prohibit banking organizations from engaging in proprietary trading and strictly limiting their sponsorship and investment in hedge funds and private equity funds. Again, if they want to risk their own money, that is one thing. Risking your money ought to be something else. We have expanded the Volcker rule, with balance to it. We don't totally eliminate the ability of a bank to hedge on things that are critically important for them. We believe it is an important rule. Without it, we are right back where we were before.

The bill brings transparency to the Federal Reserve. I thank Bernie Sanders of Vermont and others who have insisted on greater auditing and accountability out of the Federal Reserve System which under our bill will bring transparency to it with audits of the so-called 13(3) emergency lending that took place during the financial crisis, and a requirement that the Fed disclose who these so-called counterparties are and information about the amounts they are putting at risk and, in turn, for the American taxpayer, setting conditions on how that money can be used, putting real limitations on it, and giving this body, the Congress of the United States, a chance to respond if, in fact, they exceed their authority.

Further, the bill limits the emergency Fed lending through 13(3) so it can no longer be used to prop up an individual company, as they did with AIG.

The bill requires people to have skin in the game, requiring companies that sell products like asset-backed securities to retain at least 5 percent of the credit risk, so there is no longer an incentive to sell garbage and junk loans to people who could never pay them back thus exposing our economy and our country to further abuse.

These are all things in the bill. If we scrap it, we are right back without any of these protections. I will tell you, it will be a generation before the Congress comes back to deal with these issues again because in the absence of the crisis we have been in, we would not have gotten to this. The crisis gave us an opportunity to respond. These were not new issues. These issues had been lingering around. But the financial resources behind many of these operations are totally resistant to the changes we are talking about because there is too much money to be made for them and too much risk for the American consumer to absorb, and it was not going to have the same kind of concerns and interests brought to the bargaining table when these issues and this legislation was drafted.

The bill gives shareholders, the owners of public companies, a say on executive pay and so-called golden parachutes. We require public companies to take back compensation awarded based on phony financial statements. Shouldn't the owners of public companies have some say in these matters?

Further, the bill encourages whistleblowers with a new program at the Securities and Exchange Commission to encourage people to report securities violations. Ask the victims of Bernie Madoff whether that kind of provision might have made a difference, when we had the whistleblowers writing and begging the Securities and Exchange Commission to take note of what was happening with the Madoff scam. No one was willing to do a darn thing about it. Literally thousands of people were wiped out because no one bothered to listen to a whistleblower who identified the problem.

This bill changes that. It is not to say there will not be additional scam artists. I promise you, there will. But instead of denying the existence of a whistleblower standing up and telling a regulatory body their responsibilities, this bill requires them to take note and to act.

Additionally, because of the size and the complexity of this bill, it is almost certain there will have to be a bill with technical corrections in the future.

So when we take the sum total--obviously, I am describing five or six provisions in a 2,000-page bill--we have a product that I think restores financial security and trust. Let me mention just this point on trust because there is no financial number I could put on trust. But it may be the most important element of all. Put aside all of those individual provisions and titles of the bill, the one thing that has been so severely damaged that is the most important to restore is the trust of the American people in our financial system. Today that trust has been shattered by what has happened.

In the absence of people trusting that the financial system is fair and equitable, then I think we are in deeper trouble than any fix I can write into a bill. People understand when they deposit a paycheck in a bank, there is an assumption of risk that ought to be very little. When they buy an insurance policy, it is a different assumption of risk. When they buy a stock, there is an even further assumption of risk. There are no guarantees it is going to give a great return. In fact, it may fail.

But we ought to be able to trust the system; that it is not going to deceive us and defraud us; that it is not going to send people out to lure us into situations they know we cannot afford and they know they can sell off quickly and make a fast buck on. That trust in our financial structure, which was so important for so long, has been severely damaged over what has occurred in these last several years.

More than any other provision of this bill, more than anything else any of us can write into a piece of legislation, is whether we are going to regain the confidence and the optimism and the trust of that hard-working American family to believe that when they deposit that paycheck, there is not going to be someone investing in a hedge fund or some risky venture with their money--that is prohibited in this bill-- or when they buy a stock there is not going to be someone out there who is actually scamming them in a kiting system which ruins them forever and their families, or when they get a mortgage on a home there is someone not sitting across the table promising to be their financial adviser when they are anything but in the process.

That trust has been so severely hurt that our hope is, more than anything else I have written into this bill, we will be able to bring us back to where Americans feel confidence and trust in our country's financial systems again. So nothing less than that is at stake.

This is a fundamental overhaul of the way our financial system is regulated. It is the greatest change to occur since the reforms which were invoked after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Beyond that, of course, it is important that what we have done could be harmonized with other nations. The American President, Barack Obama, went to Toronto a few days ago to a meeting of the G20. The conservative Prime Minister of Canada pointed to this legislation and said: This is an opportunity for America to lead in helping the rest of the world to harmonize its rules on financial services. Defeat this bill and someone else will set the ground rules, and we will have to harmonize with them.

If my colleagues think that is a better result, to let the European Union or someone else write what the standards are going to be, then have it and defeat the bill. But if my colleagues believe it is better for the United States to lead and provide the guidelines and the structures that the rest of the world can rally around, then get behind us and support this effort because nothing less than that is at risk, as well, in this legislation.

So no one is going to get everything they want in this bill. I certainly did not. No one ever does. I have never seen a bill in 30 years that ended up becoming the prerogative of one small group. This has been a collective effort--a truly inclusive, collective effort. Over 100 amendments have been offered and considered by my fellow colleagues to this bill in this Chamber in the most open process in decades. It is the only time I have ever seen a conference conducted with the public viewing every single second of it, with 42 Members from the House and Senate

participating almost 70 hours in a 2-week period, not to mention the month we spent on the floor of this Chamber.

So I have done everything I know how to do in trying to accommodate my colleagues to make this as fair and as balanced and as thoughtful as we possibly could. But now is the time to act.

I wanted to take a few minutes today before we, tomorrow, participate in the solemn ceremony of celebrating the life of Robert C. Byrd in this Chamber. It will be a historic moment. I know it was a desire of his when he was alive that at the time of his passing he be recognized in this Chamber. Then, on Friday, many of us will travel to his home State of West Virginia, which he served so remarkably well over the 58 years of his service, to participate at his funeral services. Then we will be gone for a week over the Fourth of July break. Shortly after we come back, based on the schedule set by the majority leader and the minority leader, we will vote on the financial reform package and bill.

So today I wanted to take a few closing minutes to say to my colleagues, I do not know what else I could have done to make this more inclusive, to provide more balance and sense to all of this, to respond to the concerns my colleagues have raised in what we have done.

I urge you, I plead with you to give us the vote on this bill and to understand the process we have gone through and to set a template to say that a process followed by which everyone gets a chance to participate ought to be the model of how the Senate conducts its business. I hope my colleagues will not underestimate the value and importance of that approach we have taken with this bill.

I have taken a long time, and I apologize to my colleagues. But I wanted to explain the process of what we have done in conference. Again, I thank the majority leader. The majority leader does not get thanked enough. He is the captain of our Senate, as the majority leader was under Howard Baker and Bob Dole and Bill Frist and Tom Daschle and George Mitchell and Robert C. Byrd. Without his willingness to make sure we are here to conduct that debate, it would not happen.

So I would be terribly remiss, at the conclusion of these remarks, if I did not express a special thank-you to Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, for making it possible and being supportive of this open process we have been through. Without his willingness to allow that to happen, it would not have happened. I am deeply grateful to him and his staff and others for making it possible for us to come to the moment we are in; that is, to vote for this important piece of legislation.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to talk about the underlying bill that we are actually on today, which is the extenders package.

The Democrats negotiated in very good faith with the Republican Party to try to figure out a way to get tax credits, tax cuts to businesses that we all need to make sure continue in terms of research and development. These are credits they have relied on to keep not only their businesses open but keep them hiring. There is a long list. They have been well explained on the floor. They are all very popular with both sides of the aisle. They have been negotiated over and over.

The Democrats have, in good faith, argued or debated with the Republicans that we need to get these extended for the purpose of stimulating our economic growth. But we have said there is one that we are not going to pay for because, A, we don't have to pay for it; and, B, because it is an emergency. So everything in the extenders package is paid for. Every single item is paid for. Although some people don't like the pay-fors, every single item to extend a tax credit--not new spending on the part of the Federal Government through bureaucracy but tax credits--is paid for except for the unemployment benefits because it is an emergency.

With 15 million people out of work, it is an emergency. For anyone on that side to come to the floor and say Democrats are big spenders and we can't pay for anything and we don't know how to run the government, we

have put a great package together. But there is one thing that is not paid for, and that is unemployment because it is an emergency. That is what this debate is about, whether they are going to vote for it. If they don't want to vote for it, it is completely at their feet that people in America today, who have no benefits, will not get them for the Fourth of July. They will not get them as we celebrate the birthday of our country. If they are not going to get them, it will be because the Republican Party decided that we, as a Congress, are going to have to find a way to pay for unemployment benefits, when they never paid for even 1 year of any war they helped lead us into when their party was in charge.

So I hope the leadership over here holds the line. We are going to pass the extenders package the way it was presented. They can continue to vote no on it. That is their choice. But everything in this bill-- many things very important to the State of Louisiana, such as flood insurance--is paid for and is now being held up; for example, the placed-in-service date which keeps four or five of our major housing projects from being built. When I say housing, I mean neighborhoods, really, being rebuilt. That is being held up because this side is trying to make an issue of finding a way to pay for unemployment benefits when it is clearly an emergency, clearly qualifies as an emergency, and in the past was always clarified that way. That is what part of this argument is about.

As one of the managers of the small business bill, which we are moving to, I am very hopeful and will make sure that the extenders debate stays separate from the small business debate. Now that the extenders bill has been set aside, we have another bill we believe we can move forward with more bipartisan support for, and I want to thank the Republican Senators who helped to move this bill to the floor: Senators Grassley, Voinovich, Snowe, Collins, LeMieux, Lugar, Bond, and Brown of Massachusetts. These eight Senators have negotiated in extremely good faith with both the Finance Committee and the Small Business Committee to bring a package to the floor that will actually help create, we hope, millions of jobs in our country.

I want to make one editorial comment before I speak about the small businesses, and as a Senator from Louisiana, I feel compelled to do so.

I have helped to manage and craft, along with my committee members-- and I am very proud of the small business piece of this bill. There are three pieces. There is the finance piece, there is a small business package, and then there is a treasury piece. I will discuss all of them briefly in just a moment.

We have worked hard over this year trying to come up with some things that the government could do that wouldn't cost that much money but could spur growth in small business. As the Presiding Officer knows, it is not the big businesses that are creating jobs. They are still laying off people or are putting in efficiencies, which means holding the line. Even as they get more contracts, they are not hiring because it is not what big business does. They have enough cushion to hold what they have, but small businesses are affected immediately by contractions and expansions. They can't afford to hold three or four people on their payroll without a contract, so they let them go. But the minute they get a new contract, they will hire them back. They are immediately tied to the daily, weekly, and monthly jolts in this economy.

That is why we see that 65 percent of all new jobs created since 1993 have been by small business. When we want to look out from 2009 to the year we are in, 2010, and to 2011 and 2012, which the country is depending on us to do, we should focus our attention where the jobs can be created. Mr. President, that is in small business. So that is what we are here this week and next week to do, and these eight Senators have said yes, basically, to small business in America. The package isn't going to be what all ten of these Senators would write if they could write it themselves, but they understand this is a good package. It is a worthy package to pass--the small business, the finance, and the treasury package--to get small business moving again.

I feel compelled to comment, before explaining some of the pieces of this bill, that it is concerning to me that while we are on the Senate floor talking about a small business package, back home in Louisiana and in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, because of events almost beyond the control of any of us here, we are facing a real economic challenge with the oilspill in the gulf and the subsequent moratorium that was laid down by the administration on deepwater drilling. I have to say right now there are, in fact, about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs immediately at risk while that issue is being worked out. So while I am here on the Senate floor to help create millions of new jobs--and I believe this bill will do that--we also want to be mindful of not losing the jobs we have in trying to come up with some very quick, appropriate responses to the BP spill--the Deepwater Horizon spill--and the call for safety in the gulf. We need to be getting our people back to work.

I spent all morning in the Energy Committee on that subject, and I am proud to be leading and helping with some suggestions in that regard. But I have to say I want all the Members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, to understand there is an economic calamity brewing in the gulf that needs our immediate attention. We can do more than one thing at a time here, so we are going to continue to move forward on the small business bill because small business in Louisiana will be helped, as well as those in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and small businesses all over this country.

There are a couple of important components in this overall bill. Again, I thank the members of my committee who voted these items out 17 to 1 and 18 to 0. Senator Snowe, the ranking member, did a magnificent job of working with the Republicans on our committee. We had many hearings and several markups. In the underlying bill, one of the most important provisions is the Small Business Jobs Creation Access to Capital Act. It increases 7(a) loans from $2 million to $5 million, 504 loans from $1.5 million to $5 million, and microloans from $35,000 to $50,000. If I had my way, I would like to see that go up to $100,000. Why? Because small businesses need access to capital. They must have access to grow.

If we want small businesses to be able to grow, they have to be able to expand by borrowing more money at relatively low interest rates on favorable terms, and then they can start hiring people to get the jobs necessary to, A, end the recession; and, B, as Senator Stabenow has said so beautifully all week, to start paying the deficit down.

What the Republican Party doesn't understand is that one way to pay the deficit down--not the only way but one way to chip away at it--is to get more people working so they can pay the taxes to the local, State, and Federal Government and we can then take that tax money and apply it to deficit reduction. Yes, we have to cut spending. Yes, we have to stop giving out tax cuts we cannot afford. They never want to do the tax cut piece, and they do not do the cutting piece well either most of the time. But what they need to understand is that creating jobs, both private sector and public sector jobs, where it is appropriate, generates taxes to the local, State, and Federal governments. Then we can begin chipping away at the deficit--a deficit they left, by the way.

When the last administration came in--when President Bush came into office--he was handed a surplus. We handed him a surplus of $5.1 trillion and said: Mr. President, here is a world at peace and here is $5.1 trillion in surplus; the economy is creating jobs.

When he left office 8 years later, he handed the next President a deficit twice that big, with Wall Street in collapse, two wars that hadn't been paid for, and a mess here at home--and they want to ask why we haven't fixed all that in a year and a half? It is quite humorous to me. I know President Obama is smart and good--though I don't agree with him on everything--but I don't think any human being could fix the mess they left in just a year and a half.

We have been plodding along trying to fix different pieces of it, but it hasn't been pretty. All of it isn't working, but we are trying. Most of it is working. That is what the American people expect of us. They do not expect

us to get it 100 percent right every day, but they do expect us to move forward; to say, yes, we will try not to say no and not to lecture Democrats about deficits they created.

Having gotten that off my chest, I want to say here we are in our small business package. I am very proud that eight of these Republican Senators joined us to get on the discussion on the small business bill. This is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people in many places, let me say, not just New York and not just Wall Street. This is a Main Street bill. This is about creating jobs in little towns in Oregon as well as little towns in Louisiana, small towns in Washington State and Maine. That is what this is about.

The second piece is the export piece. This is a very exciting chart to me. I am maybe not as good as Kent Conrad is with charts, Senator Conrad, but I like this one very much. This chart shows the potential of small business in America. Just think about this. We have so many, millions and millions of small businesses, but less than 1 percent of them today are exporting. This is tragic, if you think about it. If we can get a few percentage points, up to 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent of small businesses in America exporting their products, using the Internet, using favorable tax provisions that will help--that are in this underlying bill--using new support and technological support from the Small Business Administration, from volunteer organizations such as SCORE, university-based technical support programs that can go to our small businesses and say: You sold 50,000 pairs of shoes last year but you sold them all down the road. We can help you sell them to China or sell them to India. Think about the possibility of that. And it is real.

That is what this bill does. Senator Snowe has done a tremendous amount of work. I am extremely proud of her work on the export portion of this bill. Again, large businesses, percent of firms that do not export, 58 percent. This number could be increased. But the exciting opportunity is small business. But sometimes they are intimidated, as you can imagine. They don't know how to negotiate with foreign governments. Some of the things we are going to do in this bill will help them move that number up and they are going to be able to grow.

Third, the contracting piece. I know some people on both sides of the aisle believe government is too big. Sometimes I agree with that and think it is too. We have to shape it, make sure it is efficient and effective and muscular, not flabby and big but bold and muscular, so it can do things it needs to do that the private sector can't do. But one of the things all governments do is spend a lot of money, and it is not just money to hire their own employees, it is spending money for the private sector. We contract out a lot of our work. When the Government has a job to do, we do not always do it with government employees; we contract it out. I do not have the exact numbers in front of me but it is billions and billions of dollars. We are the largest--if you put us in terms of a corporation--the largest corporation, potentially, maybe in the world. So the contracting provision we have in this bill says: OK, Federal Government, if you were a business, if you could contract with more small businesses, meet your small business contracting goals, then we could create a lot of jobs in America because it is, again, the small businesses that are creating these jobs.

If you give a big company a government contract, they might absorb it into their infrastructure. They are so big, they have millions of employees, or hundreds of thousands. But you give a contract to a small business, you know what happens? They might have five employees. If they get a very nice size contract from the government, they will hire 10 people to implement that contract and they will do it right away. So we have some contracting provisions in this bill that I am, again, very proud of. They have broad bipartisan support.

In addition, in this bill, which is paid for, is an additional $50 million for the Small Business Community Partnership Relief Act which gives $50 million in addition to women business centers, microloan intermediaries. It weighs or reduces the non-Federal share of funding so that for 1 year States all over this country can start enhancing and improving their Women Business Owners' Center, their Minority Business Centers, the centers that are in universities all over the country. I am sorry I do not have a map to show what the Secretary or Administrator of the SBA fondly calls our bone structure, because it is a great structure in the country. It is not just isolated little offices of the SBA.

If you can imagine, so many of our universities have small business development centers and SCORE chapters, which is retired business executives, senior executives who volunteer to help younger businesses. There are hundreds of these chapters around the country.

If you could imagine a map of the United States, you could see, if I could show where these centers are, there are centers at universities and SCORE chapters and community banks, almost within a few miles of any citizen. Any citizen could find a SCORE chapter or a university or a local bank. This bill is sending funding and help to all of those places. Again, not just on K Street here. There are lots of jobs on K Street. In fact, there are so many buildings going up on K Street, I am amazed how many. It never stops. There are lots of buildings going up, maybe, on Wall Street--lots of office space. But where I represent, there are empty spaces. There are lots of vacancy signs.

This bill is trying to push out money, not to the Federal Government but to our universities, to our private sector partners to help them tweak--help support small businesses to help small businesses grow. I am very proud of that piece. The job impact analysis was something Senator Snowe wanted. We worked with her. On everything we do, this is going to be a way to say, in this bill, how many jobs will actually be created, to record them so we can be accountable to the American people for that. I am happy she put that in the bill.

Going back to the 7(a) loan program, this is the major loan program of the SBA. As you can see, it has been sort of a happy and sad situation here over the last couple of years since 2008.

When Congress acts and puts money in this program, loans to small business go way up. When we dilly-dally and cannot agree and the program expires, loans go way down. When we get our act together again, it goes up. I wish this chart did not look like this. I wish it looked straight up, like this. Right now it is down beneath where it was before the stimulus act was passed. It has fallen below the ARRA average of $172 million. It is down to $154 million.

We need to get it back up. When we initially announced that the Small Business Administration was expanding the amount you could borrow, reducing the fees so you did not have to pay as much, and giving you a 95-percent guarantee rate, those loans are good loans. Small businesses need them, particularly because credit card companies are not lending the way they used to or charging you too much for the money they do give you. Credit lines are drying up. This is the core of the small business bill. I hope we will see this number go straight up.

Banks all over our country want this program. Many of them--not every bank participates, but I would say about 1,000 or 1,200 out of the 5,000 banks participate in this program, and they are very excited about getting this funding back in place so they can begin to loan money again to small business.

There are many other things we can do and should do. One of the amendments I have filed--I wish I could have gotten this in the base bill, but even as the chairman of the committee you can't get everything you want in the base bill. So I have agreed to offer one of these as an amendment.

I am very proud to have Senator Cochran's support, Senator Wicker's support, Senator Vitter's support. It is a bipartisan amendment. What it would do is provide in the small business bill interest loan relief for the gulf coast outstanding disaster loans from Katrina and Wilma, Gustav and Ike, from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

There are 13,207 loans. I will take a moment to try to explain it. I will try to wrap up in about 5 minutes.

There are currently today 13,207 small business loans that were taken out by businesses all along the gulf

coast. Some of these loans are to fishermen whose boats were destroyed and they had just bought the new boat or fixed their net from some of these hurricanes. They were just getting back into the water. The water was coming back, the marsh was coming back after Katrina and Rita, and then all of a sudden the Horizon BP disaster happened.

The same people who were affected by these hurricanes and who may be affected by hurricanes in this season--which unfortunately promises to be a very difficult one--these are the businesses that are struggling to pay these loans on top of the economic disaster they are experiencing. So I am asking the Senate to please give some forgiveness--in the loan forgiveness, but give some special help to this group of loans. What we are asking in the amendment is 3 years of an interest rate reduction; not loan forgiveness, so the taxpayers will be paid back the full principal amount of all the loans these individuals and businesses have made. But if we could give them a little interest relief--let me give a specific example.

I actually took Karen Mills, our Administrator of the SBA, to Louisiana on several occasions to impress upon her the seriousness of this situation. I took her to see the Bergerons, who run a gas station in Lakeview. This entire neighborhood was destroyed, 8,000 families. Three of my brothers and sisters lived in this neighborhood, with four children each. They lost everything, their homes, their clothes, everything was completely destroyed. That was true of their 8,000 other neighbors. This gas station--the Bergerons came back. They operated one of the most successful gas stations in this neighborhood. In order for people to be able to rebuild their house, because they had fled to higher ground hundreds of miles away, families would drive long distances after work to come and gut their homes in Lakeview and try to rebuild their homes. But when they went to go back, there was no gas station for them to fill up their car so they could get back to where they were living until they could get home.

So the Bergerons, like a lot of what I call the pioneer businesses-- the hardware stores, the gas stations--said you know, I have been here 40 years. Mr. Bergeron is in his 70s, still very active, but he said I am going to go back and open my gas station. So he went to the SBA and got a loan. The problem was, he did a great thing, but his business came back so slowly. But without his business no one in the neighborhood could come back because there was no place to get gasoline. He is paying on his loan $1,000 a month. If this passes, his note will go down to about $400 a month. It will give him a little bit of relief because right now in his same neighborhood he has a lot of people who work in the fishery industry or the seafood industry or the oil and gas industry, so some of his customers cannot come and get as much gas as they want to because they are being affected now by this Deepwater Horizon.

I am begging the Members of the Senate to please help this particular group. I wish we could afford to do for everyone in America but not everybody in America right now is on the gulf coast. But these 13,207 people are and we need to give them a little breathing room. That is one of my amendments.

I am going to yield the floor after I make a comment on a nominee. But that is one of the amendments I am going to ask the Senate, when we get an opportunity to offer amendments, to please give us a chance to help these small businesses. It is a temporary relief for them, but I think it is something they deserve and will help this region that has now been hit again.

Nomination of Winslow Sargeant

Mr. President, at this time I want to talk for a minute about Winslow Sargeant.

He is a gentleman who has been recommended by the President to serve at the SBA, in the advocacy position at the SBA. He comes highly regarded and highly recommended. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in electrical engineering and a background as a very successful small business owner. He is managing director of Venture Investors, a Midwest venture capital country with a concentration in starting up health care technology companies.

Dr. Sargeant has a great deal of support from a wide variety of individuals and businesses that I will submit for the Record.

With more than 80 percent of job losses coming from small firms, I believe this is someone who should be in the Office of Advocacy. For some reason, he is being held up by the other side.

I understand there are nominations being held up on both sides of the aisle, but I wanted to ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider--I am going to wait and ask for unanimous consent. I am not going to wait long, but I will continue talking for a few minutes. I will wait for a few minutes, but at some point I am going to ask for unanimous consent that he be moved ahead because here we are on a small business bill, and here is the man whom the President has nominated, who obviously is well credentialed, has tremendous support, who is being held up. We do not really understand why he is being held up, so I would like to know, and in just a few minutes, I am going to ask for him to go by unanimous consent.

In the meantime, I will speak about one other potential amendment to the underlying bill. This amendment is coming from Senator Boxer, and I am so excited that she came up with this idea and this amendment. I think it has a lot of potential, and I think many Members might support it.

Senator Boxer called to my attention that there are many small businesses that operate out of their homes, and if you think about it, there are many people who operate their business out of their homes but particularly women who are trying to raise children, they are still the primary caregiver--not the only caregiver, but in most homes the women are trying to balance being a good wife and a good mother and also contributing to the bottom line of their family income. So a lot of them might be running small businesses out of their homes.

Well, it has come to our attention that in order to take the tax deduction that is rightfully there for anyone, man or woman, who works out of their home--it has come to my attention through Senator Boxer that it is not really very easy to take that deduction. In fact, it is so complicated, to my knowledge, that many people don't take it. Think about that.

If we are really supportive of family values, of people being flexible; if we don't like spending a lot of gasoline traveling back and forth to work and we are kind of trying to encourage people to stay at home and work if they can--many women who are very well credentialed because the government spent a lot of money on our universities getting them the degrees they need, are home raising three, four, five kids, and they can't travel a long time to work, so they set up a business in their home. Senator Boxer's amendment would help them by simplifying this deduction.

I am hoping Senator Boxer will come at some time to the floor over the next couple of days--I am sure she will--and explain the details of this, but I think it would be an excellent provision to add to the small business bill because again, remember, this underlying bill is cutting taxes for small businesses, specifically cutting taxes for small businesses; it is supporting the small business programs to create more of them, both in our country and their export potential; and then it is giving--the third leg of the stool--$30 billion to banks in America, voluntarily. It is not TARP-like, nothing about TARP; it is $30 billion to small banks in Oregon, Louisiana, and other places to be able to then take that money and lend it to small businesses. That is the essence of this bill.

I am very hopeful we can add a couple of amendments to an already very good small business package. So I am hoping Senator Boxer will come at some point and explain this amendment.

My colleagues are here to speak, I guess, on either the extenders package or the small business package. I see the Senator from Ohio, who has been very supportive of small business. Of course, Ohio is one of the States that has been hardest hit, and Michigan has been very hard hit in the underlying economy. So I am very happy to have, hopefully, their support on the underlying bill.

But one more comment about the moratorium. And I started off by saying I am proud to be the chair of the Small Business Committee advocating for small businesses in the country. I think the small business package, the finance and treasury package that we have on the floor will deliver to the American people how to, in a very fiscally responsible way, help us create the jobs we need. But one of the points--and I am going to be very brief because I see the minority leader here, but at the same time I want to say again that the moratorium on the gulf coast--and the Senator from Kentucky will, I believe, agree with me on this point--the moratorium on the gulf coast is really hurting many small businesses now.

I know we have to get this drilling safer and it has to be very safe. The people of my State want that. The people of the gulf coast want that. But we hope sometime in the next few weeks to clarify or fix or modify this. The Federal judge, as you know, has ruled that the moratorium is lifted, because the Federal judge did not agree with the actions taken by this administration, nor do I. So while we are debating a small business bill, I am very hopeful that as soon as this small business package can pass, we can get on to getting more people back to work along the gulf coast who have been affected by both the moratorium and this bill.

Unanimous consent Request--Executive Calendar

I ask unanimous consent for Winslow Sargeant to be Chief Counsel for Advocacy, Small Business Administration; that the nomination be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the nominee be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume its regular legislative session.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley.) Is there objection?

Mr. President, I begin by complimenting the senior Senator from Massachusetts for a remarkable tribute to the late Senator Robert Byrd. It was beautifully delivered, beautifully written. It captured the spirit of this wonderful Senator and highlighted just a few of the extraordinary accomplishments in his life. I was privileged to be on the floor to hear it delivered by the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I was here earlier today, following Senator Baucus's handling of a portion of the small business bill. I am pleased to share in that responsibility on a small business bill that is not immediately before the Senate because, remember, we came off it temporarily to talk about the unemployment measure that is pending about which Senator Harkin just spoke.

I want to return to the small business bill because at some point, after a vote on the unemployment measure before the Senate, we will get back to a very important bill for you, Mr. President, and you have been a leader in this area, as well as many of us.

I want to speak for a moment about a couple of provisions of the small business bill. The bill itself has three major pieces to it. There is a piece that came out of the Small Business Committee about which I spent some time this morning talking, the elements of strengthening the SBA lending programs, expanding the limits for the amount of money that businesses can borrow. There is a piece that is coming out of the Finance Committee that is broadly supported. Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley have done a great job. Basically, it is tax cuts relative to small businesses that can help them with tax provisions. Then there is a piece that has come from the Treasury, the White House, the leadership team, about small business lending.

I want to talk for a few minutes about a piece of the small business package, and then I want to talk about the bank investment program, the $30 billion program.

First of all, one of the most important aspects of the small business bill is the extension and the expansion of 7(a) loans. To put this in plain English, these are the loans that the Small Business Administration partners with banks to make what we call floor plan lending. It is any business that has inventory--maybe it is a tractor company or a manufactured home company or a boat, marine industry with a small business owner--and you have some of these in Illinois, I know, Mr. President, and I have many of them in Louisiana--that has to buy inventory and put it in their showrooms for when people come by and they look at the product.

Madam President, I object.

Madam President, might I inquire of the Senator, we have been trying to move a 30-day extension of existing authorities for the FAA, which is essential and very necessary. Is the Senator holding that up? We have had objection from his side, and my information is that the objection was the Senator's. Is that accurate?

Madam President, I think this will be extended 30 days. Failure to extend the current authority for the FAA for the next 30 days while we finish the conference report will mean that 4,000 people at FAA will be furloughed, laid off. Don't tell me that promotes aviation safety. That is the worst possible thing we can do--to decide that we are not going to extend current authorities, and after July 4, 4,000 people will be furloughed at FAA.

With respect to what my colleague has just done, without consultation with anybody else, he decided to come to the floor of the Senate and talk about ``special deals'' and ``new taxes'' and so on.

Let me describe where we are. We have tried to keep the Senator's staff and him involved so that he understands where we are. In the event there is missing information, let me explain where we are.

No. 1, we passed an FAA reauthorization bill that includes modernization of the air traffic control system, very substantial safety provisions, far more than what the Senator suggests we adopt today.

As the Senator knows because he is ranking member on the subcommittee, we held a good number of hearings on the subject of the Colgan crash and the safety provisions that need to be done as a result of it. The things the Senator raises on the floor today include most of what I have suggested, among other things. I appreciate the cooperation the Senator offered when he was at the hearings we held on these safety issues.

But following the passage of this bill by the Commerce Committee, we have not been able to appoint conferees in this Chamber. That is symbolic of how dysfunctional the Chamber is these days because we have objections even to appointing conferees. Notwithstanding the objections, Senator Rockefeller and I have been working with the House, and we have kept the Senator involved, trying to narrow down most of the provisions that differ between the House and Senate. There are 6 or 8 or perhaps 10 significant differences we are working on now, and the Senator mentioned a couple: the issue of the perimeter rule, slots at Washington National Airport, a FedEx issue, passenger facilities charge, and other issues.

I believe there is almost no dispute at all about the majority of the safety provisions that both the House and the Senate will include in the bill when it is complete. We had hoped it would be complete this week. That is not going to be the case.

Shortly after we return, I fully expect to have a conference report on the floor of the Senate that will include all of these safety provisions and more, I should say--many more--because, as the Senator knows, I chaired the hearings that helped develop these very procedures.

It would have been nice to have gotten some notice about what the Senator chose to do today. I do not think it is appropriate to try to leverage an extension for 30 days for the current authorization of FAA, which, if not extended, will result in 4,000 people being furloughed at the FAA. To try to leverage passing a portion of the FAA reauthorization bill that we are now negotiating with the House and we are very close to concluding does not make any sense to me.

No one cares more about these safety issues than I do. I can speak at length--and perhaps I will--about the Colgan crash. I understand what happened in that cockpit. I read all the transcription. I read all the information available about it. I sat for hour after hour in hearings. What happened there is an enormous tragedy. Some of the things that caused it, in my judgment, will be remedied and can be remedied and some of it is already remedied as a result of the action by the new FAA Administrator.

I simply want to say to the Senator from South Carolina that I think it is very important that we extend for 30 days the current authority of the FAA and avoid the furloughs his objections would entail. If there is any way to quickly and immediately and dramatically injure safety in the skies in this country, it would be to decide to have that kind of furlough.

I did ask unanimous consent for a 30-day extension. I will do so again this afternoon and hope that my colleague will not object to it. I have worked with my colleague all along the way on these safety issues. I wish perhaps he would have consulted us in terms of coming to the floor today at 12:45 p.m. as a ranking member of a subcommittee and saying: I am going to take this on myself and do this, for whatever reasons he described.

I will be happy to yield without losing the floor, if the Senator has a question.

Why don't we stop this sort of thing? It is unbelievable to me how dysfunctional this place is. I say to my colleague, we have worked on this issue for months and months. I wish it had been done in January, but it was not. But we are very close to getting this done the right way. We have a couple things we have to do together, and I hope we would not be debating this. We need to extend the authorities for the FAA--and do it now--for 30 days. I expect--and the Senator knows me because I have had conversations with Senator Kyl, the No. 2 person on his side. We all had conversations with the Senator from South Carolina and his staff. He knows we have been involved in finalizing at long last just the few remaining issues in order to get a conference report to the floor of the Senate.

I have talked with and met with the families of the victims on the Colgan flight many times. I do not know that anybody here has done much more than I have done to reach out to them, to hold hearings, to listen to them, to compliment them, to say to them: Because of what you are doing as families of victims, other people are going to have their lives saved because of aviation safety. I do not take a backseat to anybody in my interest and concern about that and what I have done about that.

I have not had the families of the victims come to me to say: Let's decide to object to extending for 30 days the FAA reauthorization or, by the way, let's decide to take this legislation apart and pull part of it out and leave some of the safety provisions outside the Senator's amendment.

What the Senator is suggesting is that we should pass legislation that came to us from the Senate with an amendment of his that takes a portion of the bill out that he decided he wants out.

This bill, by the way, passed the Senate 93 to 0. The Senator was not there that day, so he did not vote. But 93 Senators voted, and no Senators voted against it. We can get this done, but we are not going to get this done by coming to the floor without consulting anybody; let's take a portion of it and add it to a House provision and threaten to have the FAA not have their authority extended and they can furlough 4,000 people in the coming weeks--that is not, in my judgment, a thoughtful way to proceed.

My hope is that perhaps we, in a rational moment, can just decide: Let's do the right thing. We are in conference with the House--not a formal conference but a substantial number of meetings have gone on. We have another one at 5 o'clock this afternoon. My hope would be that the Senator from South Carolina would agree that there is the right way and the wrong way to do this business. We will get all those safety provisions done and more--much, much more--and we will not leave any safety provisions behind that were in the legislation that passed the Senate 93 to 0. It is going to take another week or so beyond July 4, and we will have this done.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3371 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Let me say that this is the 30-day extension of the FAA reauthorization bill.

Let me withdraw that request.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I just told my colleague that the unanimous consent request I intend to read is a unanimous consent request that will extend for 30 days the existing authorities of the FAA. The House has passed it, has sent it to us, and is now awaiting action by the Senate. I personally do not intend to support amending it and sending it back to the House. I believe we ought to do what we should always do; that is, try to make things work, and the way to make things work is to give the FAA the extended authority they need while we finish the negotiations with the House.

I indicated that we have a meeting this afternoon. Senator Rockefeller and I have a meeting with the House counterparts this afternoon on these issues. We have had staff working for a long period of time. We are down to very narrow, in my judgment, or at least a few narrow differences that I believe we can resolve. It would be a shame, in my judgment, if we do not, just as a matter of courtesy, decide, yes, this is the right thing to do while we try to negotiate these final areas in that legislation.

This issue of safety, I indicated to my colleague--I guess the Senator was absent when the Senate voted on the bill itself. It passed 93 to 0. The Senator from South Carolina has been at the hearings. My colleagues have been at the hearings I have called on safety. The crafting of the provisions on safety are provisions I largely crafted in consultation with my colleague.

It seems to me to be Byzantine to be standing here and having my colleague come to the floor offering this without consultation with anybody. It does not make sense to do it this way. Let's finish this the way Congress should finish its work: negotiate with the House. We can do that in the next week or two, get a conference report, bring it here, and have a vote on it, and it will include all the safety provisions my colleague wants, which I helped create, and many more. That is the right way to legislate.

The wrong way to legislate would be for us to decide we are going to threaten to not extend the reauthorization of the FAA and have about 4,000 people laid off sometime over the Fourth of July weekend. These are people who work at the airports division, engineering facilities, and equipment division. It makes no sense to do this.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent--this is H.R. 5611, the FAA extension bill for 30 days--I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5611, which was received from the House.

Madam President, let me make a point very clearly. A number of the provisions dealing with safety that relate to the Colgan air crash are being implemented already by the FAA. Let me make that point, No. 1.

No. 2, in order to successfully do what we really need to do to promote aviation safety, we need to get the bill passed that promotes modernization of the air traffic control system. That is critically important. We are losing ground on those issues. We need to be able to move airplanes around this country and the world with GPS capability. It allows them to fly more direct routes, with a much greater margin of safety for passengers. The modernization of the system is critically important. We worked long and hard on that issue.

This comprehensive bill includes air traffic control modernization, safety provisions, and so many other provisions that are important.

My colleague, who is the ranking member on the subcommittee that helped produce this bill, knows and I know that we have to have a 30- day extension. That has to be done and will be done this week. I cannot believe my colleague would go home and decide: I don't care who is laid off. I will tell my colleagues how to quickly diminish safety in the skies, and that is to do that, to behave like that. That is a nonstarter, in my judgment.

It is also the case that we are not going to have somebody come to the floor without consultation and pull this provision, that provision, or the next provision out of the bill and say: By the way, I want unanimous consent to get this done. That is not serious legislating. It just is not. Everybody knows that.

It is time for us to start working together. This place is pretty dysfunctional these days. This is exhibit A as to why it is dysfunctional. My hope is that in the next couple of days, we can reach an understanding to fix some of the issues that affect the Senator.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I support the comments of and the legislation by the Senator from Louisiana. I think it makes a great deal of sense to strengthen small businesses. They are, after all, the job generators in this country. So I appreciated her comments. We don't always agree on every issue around here, but I am a strong supporter of her work as chairman of the Small Business Committee and of the legislation she has described.

Mr. President, I wanted to come to the Senate floor briefly today because we are talking about extending unemployment compensation, unemployment benefits, to people who are out of work, and we are having a very difficult time doing that. These benefits are for people who worked on payrolls. They actually paid a little of their money in taxes to support an unemployment fund so if they lost their jobs they would be able to get some unemployment help. But in order to do that, this has to be extended by the Senate, and it has become increasingly difficult to extend unemployment compensation to those who are out of work.

I find that kind of inexplicable because for the folks at the top of the economic ladder, there is no problem in their getting what they want out of this Chamber. I noticed in the last 24 hours or so that one of my colleagues objected to something that was in the financial reform bill. He said: Well, you are going to impose a fee on the biggest banks. He said: I won't accept that. He said: If you do that, I won't vote for the bill. The biggest banks in the country shouldn't have to pay this fee.

I was thinking to myself: Why not? They drove the country into the ditch. They are the ones involved in the cesspool of greed, many of them, trading things on things they will get from people who never had it and making money on both sides, which created an

unbelievable orgy of speculation that ran the country right into the ditch. There is nothing wrong, it seems to me, with their having to pay a fee here or there.

But one of our colleagues said: I won't support that. All of a sudden, the conference committee got back together and said: How can we fluff up your pillow, big guy? Can we give you an aspirin, put you to sleep?

If you are at the top of this economic ladder in this Chamber, you can do just fine because somebody will make you comfortable. But what about the people at the bottom? What about the person who came home from work after 18 years on the job and said: Honey, I lost my job today. And they can't find another job? What about that family and that person? What about extending unemployment help for that person?

Things never change. Here is what Will Rogers said many years ago. He said:

The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we will get

around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK.

Boy, if there was ever a description of the way things work these days, this is it. Old Will Rogers. And this description is as old as eight or nine decades, isn't it? The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we don't have time yet. We will get to them after everybody else gets taken care of. And who gets taken care of first? The folks at the top of the economic ladder.

I wonder, I just wonder what would happen with a bill to extend unemployment benefits if the only Americans who were unemployed were investment bankers? Do you think that wouldn't have been passed in a nanosecond, just like that? But, no, the unemployed are people named Smith and Jones and Adams and Johnson. They are the ones somehow at the bottom of the economic ladder who don't seem to matter to some people.

My hope is this Congress will have the good sense to do the right thing. During tough times, we have something called a safety net--that is the unemployment compensation--that helps people when they are laid off, when they are out of work and are having trouble and can't find another job. It is our responsibility to extend that. That is what we should be doing.

As Will Rogers said: Everybody else gets help. In the last 24 hours, the folks at the top of the economic ladder got help--the biggest banks in the country. Why? Because somebody said they needed some comfort--a bedtime story, a fluffed pillow, an aspirin, some comfort. They got their comfort. But we are still waiting to see if the people who lost their jobs and who are at the bottom of the economic ladder will get the help they were promised. I hope so. We will have a vote on that and we will soon see.

Energy Policy

Mr. President, I wanted to mention that yesterday a group of us went down to meet with the President on the subject of energy, and following that meeting a number of my colleagues spoke to the press. I did not. But because there were stories today about the representation of that meeting with the President, I thought I would at least offer my notion of what that meeting meant and what the consequences of it will or should be.

The meeting with the President, calling a number of Republicans and Democrats--about 10 or 12 of us--down to the White House, was to talk about energy and to simply try to evaluate what is achievable, what should be done with respect to energy. We know two things are making this country vulnerable: No. 1, we are way too dependent on foreign oil. We use one-fourth of the oil that is pulled out of this planet every morning. Every day we use one-fourth in this little place called the United States. Yet over 60 percent of that which we use comes from other countries. That leaves us far too vulnerable to others, and, by the way, some of whom are in very troubled parts of the world. We are far too vulnerable to others for our energy supplies. That is a fact.

The second something that is happening to this planet is called climate change. We don't necessarily know exactly what that is, but the wide consensus of scientists tells us we need to be concerned about it and we need to be taking actions to deal with it.

I appreciate the President's leadership on these issues and saying we need to move. We need to do some things here. But the discussion was, What is achievable?

What is achievable, in my judgment, from listening and participating in that meeting, is what I have always believed was achievable. The only thing achievable is that which will get 60 votes to come from the calendar of the Senate to the floor because it takes 60 votes on a motion to proceed to consider anything. I believe the only thing that can get 60 votes, based on not only the meeting yesterday but other discussions I have had, would be to bring the bill passed by the Energy Committee, which was bipartisan, to the floor of the Senate. That does not exclude anything else. That does not exclude anybody from offering climate change amendments, comprehensive climate change amendments. But we will never get to the floor unless we get to the floor with something that can get 60 votes, and I am convinced the only thing that can achieve that is the bipartisan Energy bill out of the committee.

The Energy bill itself is a bill that does reduce carbon. It does all the things I think it should do. Yes, it says we are going to continue to use the fossil energy--coal, oil, natural gas--but we are going to use that in a different way. We are going to decarbonize and take great pains to protect the planet as we do. We are going to build some nuclear. We are going to maximize renewables--solar and wind energy. We are going to do the biofuels, including biodiesel, ethanol, and geothermal. All of these sources of energy are important to our country's future.

All of these areas--conservation, including retrofitting buildings; the first ever renewable electric standard; building an interstate highway of transmission capability; high-voltage transmission so you can collect energy where the wind blows and the Sun shines and put it on a wire and send it to where it is needed in the load centers--all of that was part of the bill that was passed out of the Energy Committee 1 year ago this month. That is, in my judgment, what is achievable to get to the floor of the Senate, and then it is open for amendments. That does not exclude, by the way, any other amendments people wish to offer that can achieve the 60 votes, once it is on the floor, that can address climate change.

As I said before, there is something to climate change, as far as I am concerned. We would be fools not to recognize and fools not to address it. The question is not whether; it is when and how.

I said before that I would support capping carbon and I would support pricing carbon. I also said I will not support what is called cap and trade because I do not intend to give Wall Street a trillion-dollar carbon securities market to trade so they can tell us what the cost of our energy is going to be. But that aside, I really think it is important that we not end this year without doing an energy bill that advances this country's energy and national security.

Let me mention one additional item very quickly; that is, yesterday there was a hearing in the Armed Services Committee with respect to the nomination of General Petraeus to assume command in Afghanistan. I am not going to speak at length about this. I fully support General Petraeus and this nomination. I think the President has made an excellent choice. By the way, I don't think he had much choice but to replace General McChrystal, and replacing him with General Petraeus makes a great deal of sense to me.

I wish to say with respect to Afghanistan that I think it is long past the time for us to have a very significant discussion about Afghanistan. The President has indicated the potential withdrawal date beginning on July 1 of next year, 2011. But I think that even before that, we need to have a discussion in this country about what our role is in Afghanistan. What, in fact, is victory in Afghanistan? Are we fighting al-Qaida? Are we fighting terrorists in Afghanistan or are we fighting insurgents in Afghanistan? What about the Afghanistan Government and President Karzai? What is achievable?

Every day, we are sending young men and women to fight in a war, and many--I should not say ``many''--a number of them will lose their lives. We go on almost ``out of sight out of

mind,'' not thinking about it, not debating it nearly enough. What is it we are achieving? We have been at war for nearly 8 years, spending a great deal of money--lost treasure and lost lives. By the way, with respect to treasure, not a penny of it has been paid for.

I think it is time for us to have a good discussion in this country about what are we doing? How long will we do it? What is victory? What is achievable? Should we, in fact, be engaged in a long-term war against insurgents in that country? Where is al-Qaida? We know where it is in part: northern Pakistan. Where is al-Qaida? What is this--a war against terror or is it a war against insurgents?

My own view is that I think it is highly unlikely, no matter how long this country is in Afghanistan, that we will ever be successful in the rural tribal lands of Afghanistan. But my hope and my desire is to want the best for this country. I think the best will be achieved if we have a thoughtful, good, full, complete discussion as a nation about what our objectives are, how we achieve those objectives, and when, at last, at long, long last, we can bring troops home and be in a position where we are not saying America at this point is at war. We need to be addressing the terrorist threat across this planet, and that will take us a long while, but I think that is a very different circumstance than being engaged in the fight in Afghanistan as it currently exists.

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

Mr. President, I am sorry I was not here on the floor-- but I was watching in my office--when my colleague from Ohio, Senator Brown, made his recent statement on the Senate floor. I think Senator Brown pointed out very poignantly what is happening to so many people in our country today who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. I would like to follow up on the comments made by Senator Brown to reinforce what he said just a few minutes ago on the Senate floor and the dire straits that so many people find themselves in going into the Fourth of July holiday.

Recently, a national group of business economists released its 2010 economic outlook, predicting that America's economy is ``on track'' toward recovery. Well, this is encouraging news. It indicates we are moving in the right direction under President Obama's leadership. But we also know the recovery is very fragile.

For example, last week, we learned that sales of new homes plummeted 33 percent in May, to the least level in 40 years. Let me repeat that. Home sales in May fell to the least level in 40 years. Banks are still reluctant to lend to small businesses. It is not that they do not have money. According to a new Federal Reserve report, U.S. companies are hoarding an all-time high sum of $1.84 trillion in cash, but they remain largely unwilling to invest, hire, and expand.

U.S. companies are hoarding an all-time high sum--$1.84 trillion in cash--but they are not investing, they are not hiring, and they are not expanding. So the threat of this double-dip recession is very real.

These economic warning signs are not just abstract facts and figures. They have very real consequences for families across the country. That is what my friend from Ohio was talking about earlier. The unemployment report for May was very disappointing. By the official numbers, there are 15 million hard-working people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and they are struggling to find work. Those are the official numbers--the official numbers. Many experts in this field agree that the real numbers are far higher.

So when you count the people who have become so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work, or who are working part time involuntarily because they cannot get full time work, the number of unemployed workers is far higher, like about 30 million people.

So as shown on this chart, here is sort of the official figure of 15 million. But that is just people who are right now on the unemployment rolls who are actively looking for work. We have enough data to show that people have been out of work for so long--they have hunted for so long, and they are discouraged; they are not looking right now actively--they are not counted as

unemployed. The young people who have not had jobs for the first time, who are out of school but have not had jobs for the first time, they are not counted as unemployed. People who are working makeshift jobs for bits and pieces here and there, part-time, who one time had a full- time job, they are not counted either. When we add all those up, our real unemployment in this country is right around 30 million people.

The official figures will say there are five unemployed workers for every available job. That is not true. It is more like 10 workers. Job openings in America: 2.69 million. That is how many jobs are in America right now that are open--at least last month anyway. There are 30 million people out there after those 2.69 million jobs; not 1 in 5, but 1 in 10, a little over 1 in 10. It is little wonder that the average spell of unemployment in this country has skyrocketed to 34 weeks, far higher than in previous recessions. This chart shows that--here is the recession of 1980, 10 weeks; in July of 1981, 14 weeks; in July of 1990, 12 weeks; March of 2001, the recession, 13 weeks. These are the unemployment spells we had during those recessions. We are now up to 34 weeks and counting. Compare that to the recessions of the past. It is a small wonder that a lot of people say this is not a recession, this is a depression. People don't want to say it, but in many ways, we are on the edge of a depression.

As a result, a record number of Americans is facing long-term unemployment; 6.8 million Americans out of work for more than half a year, by official numbers alone. That is the highest number of long- term unemployed we have had since we started keeping track in 1948. Let me repeat that. The number of Americans out of work for more than half a year is the highest--the highest--since we have kept track of this since 1948. The families of these long-term unemployed are hanging on by a thread. Their savings are gone. Unemployment benefits are the only lifeline they have to pay the rent and put food on the table.

Again, I know I am not the only Member of this body whose office has been flooded with heartbreaking stories of families back home struggling to make ends meet. We heard a number of those stories from Senator Brown from Ohio. These are people trying their hardest, doing everything they can to find work, but the jobs aren't there.

I heard from a community college professor from Sioux City who was laid off due to budget cuts. She has applied for dozens of jobs, many far below her skill level. She is often told she is overqualified. She has exhausted her unemployment benefits. She and her sons, one of whom is a special needs child, are on Medicaid and they have applied for food stamps.

I heard from a worker in Des Moines who has been in the insurance industry for many years. She was laid off almost a year ago and has struggled to find work. Her benefits were cut off last week. Here is what she writes. She says:

My concern is that my family cannot survive without the

unemployment benefits. We have depleted our savings just to

save the house and not get behind on the bills. I know there

are others far worse off. Please help pass the emergency

unemployment insurance extension.

I heard from a schoolteacher in northern Iowa who was laid off in October of 2008. She recently ran out of unemployment benefits and had to apply for welfare. She writes:

I have not felt so humiliated in 20 years. I have been a

productive and hard-working woman since I was 13, but now I

feel insignificant. Please do not misunderstand. I have been

trying to find full-time employment, but to no avail.

Again, these are hard-working people trying their best, who never imagined they would be in need of Federal assistance. They paid into the unemployment insurance system while they were working. Their employers paid in. They ought to be able to count on it when times get tough. To me, it is a matter of fundamental fairness and human decency.

Yet, in the face of so many families in crisis, an extension--a short-term extension--of unemployment insurance is being needlessly, and I would even say cruelly, obstructed here in the Senate. Time and again we have tried to pass an extension of unemployment benefits and time and time again that effort has been blocked by Members on the other side of this aisle. As a result of this political gamesmanship, as of the end of last week--at the end of last week--1,350,000 Americans exhausted their unemployment benefits because of the lapse in this program. By the end of this week, that will go up to 1,720,000 who will be cut off because we won't extend it here. By July 10, 2.14 million--2,140,000 Americans will have their unemployment benefits cut off.

Blocking this bill may be a political game for some over here in the minority party, but it is not a game to millions of Americans who have lost their lifeline. For them, the obstruction of this bill is a personal and family crisis of the first magnitude.

Imagine: We are about to go out of here in a couple of days for 10 days, 12 days, something like that, to celebrate our Nation's birthday, the Fourth of July weekend. I am sure Senators will be with their families; Congress men and women will be with their families, and all of our staffs. We all have jobs. We have good jobs that pay us well. We have good benefits--health benefits, retirement benefits--as does our staff, Republican staff and Democratic staff. Republican Senators and Democratic Senators, we have good pay. We will have a good Fourth of July with our families. We will watch the fireworks and have hot dogs and hamburgers, listen to patriotic speeches, maybe make a few ourselves. How about all these people? How about these people? How about these families? What are they thinking about on the Fourth of July? They have lost their benefits. They don't know where to turn. What are they going to be celebrating? What are they going to think about their country? What are they going to think about this Congress, that turns its back on these people?

There is no reason why we can't extend the unemployment insurance benefits, none whatsoever. I think that is what we have to be thinking about.

Another thing that I think hits pretty hard, I have heard political candidates out on the stump who want to take a place in the Senate, or maybe in the House of Representatives, out there talking about how we shouldn't extend these benefits because this encourages people not to go to work; it sort of encourages laziness. Well, I think that is insulting and illogical. As I said, there are 30 million people out of work looking for 2 million jobs. They say, Well, but if you give them these unemployment benefits, it makes them lazy. They won't go to work.

The numbers vary from State to State, but the unemployment benefit nationwide is about $300 a week, below the poverty line. So here is the average income for a family of four on unemployment benefits: It is about $15,600. It is more in some States, less in other States. That is an average. So what is the poverty line for a family of four? It is $22,000. That is below the poverty line. They are telling me people don't want to go to work? These are people who had work. They are not out of work because they walked off the job; they are out of work because they were cut off of work. In some States, benefits are smaller. For example, in Mississippi, the weekly maximum benefit is $235 a week. Again, that is thousands of dollars less than the annual salary of a full-time minimum wage worker. Again, I can't imagine anyone who had the alternative to make more money and to have a full- time job would say, No, I want to stay on unemployment benefits. That is insulting. It is insulting.

I have also heard my colleagues object to this benefit extension on the grounds that providing these benefits is too expensive. It will add to the deficit. I understand the concern, and we are all concerned about the deficit of this country. But, it doesn't hold water when we are sitting in the midst of an economic crisis. We are about to pass a supplemental appropriations bill here sometime soon, probably after we get back from the Fourth of July break. It has about $37 billion in there in military aid to Iraq and Afghanistan. We are building infrastructure projects over there. We are putting people to work there. We are continuing to lose a lot of American lives, young Americans getting injured and killed, and that is adding to the deficit. Yet we are not paying for that. That is adding to the deficit.

It seems to me if we are trying to look ahead and trying to protect the people of this country, we want to get people back to work. We want to get the economy going again. We need to get the recovery up and running. Unemployment benefits cost money, yes, but think about it this way. That money is spent here in America. It is not spent overseas and it is not spent someplace else. It is spent here.

What do people do when they get unemployment insurance benefits? What do they do with that money? Do they put it in a shoe box? Do they bury it in a hole in the ground? No. They go out and they spend it. They spend it on food and clothes and the necessities of life: housing, rent, utilities. That money spins around in the economy. That is why the economists all agree that one of the--this is from moodyseconomy.com. The biggest boost for the economy in terms of benefits from the government, the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, are food stamps. That is because poor people who get food stamps spend it right away on food. Not all, but most of the food is grown in this country and processed; not all of it, but most of it. So you get a big bang for the buck. For every dollar in food stamps, you get $1.73 in economic activity in this country--$1.73 for every dollar invested. Unemployment benefits, $1.63. Right next to food stamps, unemployment benefits. Infrastructure investments that so many of us talk about, very close on their heels: $1.59. If we want to put people to work, let's start doing infrastructure rebuilding in America. Rebuild our sewer and water systems, our highways, roads, bridges, rails, high speed. That is a great investment, plus it will put a lot of people to work too.

A whole lot of people say, Well, we have to extend the Bush tax cuts to get the economy going. Extending the Bush tax cuts is a 49-cent return on the dollar--not a very good investment, folks. Not very good.

So unemployment benefits, yes, they cost money. Yes, they do add to the deficit, but they provide for a lot of economic activity in this country--a lot more than extending a tax cut. For example, in Iowa alone, more than 3,700 jobs were saved or created in my State in 2009 thanks to the benefits of unemployment insurance. That is 3,700 jobs in my State alone because of unemployment benefits.

Again, under these circumstances, obstruction of an extension of unemployment benefits is inexplicable. How do you explain it? How do you explain something such as that to someone who is on their lifeline, has lost their benefits, or is on the verge of losing their benefits right now? It is like a person who is in the hospital with a serious infection. The doctor says, OK, here is a 15-day course of antibiotics. The patient goes home and says OK, 15 days, I have to take the antibiotics every day. But day 8 comes, day 9 comes, the patient feels better, they stop taking their antibiotics. The infection reasserts itself, the patient is right back in the hospital.

That is where we are in this economic recovery. We made the mistake once before; history shows this. In 1937, we were getting out of a depression, the public works projects and things President Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress put in place were getting us out of the recession. But then the so-called deficit hawks took over and began then to tighten down on the benefits and these programs. What happened? The Federal Reserve started tightening up the money, Congress slashed spending, the Fed tightened its policy, and the economy plunged back down into a depression.

That is why I used the analogy of someone in the hospital with a serious infection and they are prescribed 15 days of antibiotics, but after 5 to 7 days, they feel better and they stop, the infection then reasserts itself, and they are right back in the hospital. That is where we are now.

Well, quite frankly, there is an infection in our country. The infection is called a recession, a deep recession, a depression. Thirty million people are out of work. That is an infection. There is one thing that will help relieve that infection right now: the medicine of unemployment benefits.

I am delighted to yield to the Senator.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator, who has been a champion of working people and families for all the many years I have known him, and that is many years now. I thank him for telling us about what the CBO said in the deficit commission.

I pointed out a couple of things earlier. The Senator is right on the mark in terms of economic activity, and that is why it is so important right now to get the economy moving again, to keep it moving. The biggest bang for the buck we get is food stamps. People spend those right away on food.

Second to that, for every dollar we put into unemployment benefits, it causes $1.63 of economic activity. That is not a bad return on the dollar. Well, down here on the chart, extending the Bush tax cuts, you only get 49 cents back. That is what my Republican friends say you need to do--more of these Bush tax cuts. That is dismal. Yet an infrastructure investment brings $1.59 cents. If you invest more in infrastructure--sewer and water, plants and highways, roads, bridges, high-speed rail--not only do you get a great return, you get a lot of people employed at the same time.

How can we leave here tomorrow or Friday, when we leave for 10 or 12 days, when we know this is what is happening? At the end of last week, 1,350,000 Americans lost their unemployment benefits. At the end of this week, it jumps up to 1,720,000. By July 10, before we come back, it will be 2,140,000 Americans who will lose their benefits. How can we go home and celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks--the birthday of our Republic--and give patriotic speeches about how great we are, what a good country this is, when we are going to leave all these people out in the cold? What does that say about this body, about the Congress?

I will tell you, I say to all those families who have written me letters, contacted me by e-mail, and have come into my offices, telling me of your joblessness and your struggles: You are not forgotten. We are here fighting to try to get this done.

My Republican colleagues refuse to let us extend unemployment benefits--even for less than half a year, a short period of time. Well, we will do everything we can to get this done. For the sake of these families, our country, and for the sake of, yes, our economy, we can't leave here without extending these unemployment benefits.

I ask my Republican colleagues who have been blocking this to have a sense of humanity on this, a sense of compassion, of caring for these families. We all make good money around here. We get good pay and benefits, good retirement benefits. All our staffs are employed. Everybody here in this Chamber is employed. How about these people who are unemployed? You have to think about them before we close up shop and leave here this week.

With that, I yield the floor.