Military Retiree Survivor Comfort Act

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am sorry I couldn't be down here this afternoon, and I apologize to my colleagues that we will have a delay on this bill, probably with cloture, until tomorrow morning. My statement is in no way meant to reflect any ill will on Senator Akaka or Senator Collins or Senator Voinovich or Senator Lieberman, but we have before us in this amendment something that is intolerable to the unemployed people in this country today, or should be intolerable to everybody.

In fact, what we are going to do is take $3.1 billion and give it to Federal employees in their retirement systems and adjustments to retirement systems when we have 9.5 percent unemployment and we have six States with over 15 percent. What we should be doing is taking that $3 billion and making sure we are creating jobs so people have jobs in this country rather than paying Federal workers.

I want to enter into the Record what the average pay and benefits are for Federal employees because most Americans are unaware.

The average Federal pay and benefit for an employee of the Postal Service is $80,353 a year. If you work at the Pentagon, but you are not a soldier, your average pay and benefit is $89,000 a year. If you are a soldier, it is about $25,000 less than that. The guy taking the bullets is making $25,000 less than the civilians working in the Pentagon. Then you have all the rest of the Federal employees, and their average is $113,000. That is twice what the average wage in this country is, and we have attached this amendment to this bill--an amendment which has nothing to do with the Defense Department, it has to do with adjusting pension benefits for Federal employees outside of the Defense Department.

I think our Federal employees are valuable, and I do not mind paying them. But I do mind spending more money at that level now when we have a large number of people who are unemployed. If we count people who are not looking for work anymore because they are so discouraged, we have over 15 percent unemployment. The very idea that we would take $3.2 billion from our grandkids to add to a program, when we have millions and millions of Americans not collecting a paycheck at all, to me, is inappropriate. We can't afford it because we are going to charge it to the next two generations. We don't have the money.

That reminds me. If we go back and talk about where we are in this country, we have the first $4 trillion budget ever, this year. That is what is going to be spent--$4 trillion in 1 year. We are spending $1 trillion more this year in the last 7 months than we did last year in this country. We have passed bill after bill after bill after bill that we can't afford to buy things that we don't need with money we don't have.

Let me, for my colleagues, read the unemployment rates throughout the country: Alabama, 10.1 percent; Alaska, 8.4; Arizona, 8.7; Arkansas, 7.2; California, 11.6; Colorado, 7.6; Connecticut, 8 percent; Delaware, 8.4 percent; Washington, DC, 10.9 percent; Florida, 10.6 percent; Georgia, 10.1; Hawaii, 7.4 percent; Idaho, 8.4 percent; Illinois, 10.3 percent; Indiana, 10.7 percent; Iowa, 6.2; Kansas, 7 percent; Kentucky, 10.9 percent unemployment; Louisiana, 6.8; Maine, 8.5 percent; Maryland, 7.3 percent; Massachusetts, 8.6 percent; Michigan, 15.2 percent.

What would the people of Michigan do with $3 billion to invest in jobs in Michigan right now?

Minnesota, 8.4 percent; Mississippi, 9 percent; Missouri, 9.3 percent; Montana 6.4 percent; Nebraska, 5 percent; Nevada, 12 percent; New Hampshire, 6.8 percent; New Jersey, 9.2 percent; New Mexico 6.8 percent; New York, 8.7 percent; New York, 11 percent; North Dakota, 4.2 percent; Ohio, 11.1 percent; Oklahoma, 6.3 percent; Oregon 12.2 percent; Pennsylvania, 8.3 percent; Puerto Rico, 14.5 percent; Rhode Island, 12.4 percent; South Carolina, 12.1 percent; Tennessee, 10.8. If I missed South Dakota, it is 5.1; Tennessee, 10.8 percent; Texas, 7.5 percent; Utah, 5.7 percent; Vermont, 7.1 percent; Virginia, 7.2 percent; Washington State, 9.3 percent; West Virginia, 9.2 percent; Wisconsin, 9 percent; and Wyoming 5.9 percent.

Those are just percentages. But you know what they represent? They represent real hard-core pain for American families today. The fact that we would have the gumption to come and take another $3 billion from them to increase the benefit structure of Federal employees at a time when what we should be doing is seeing how we can become more efficient in the Federal Government and spend less money in the Federal Government flies in the face of the difficulties that these individuals find themselves faced with.

If you look at what is actually happening to our country and take the 75-year projections, this year we are going to spend under $200 billion in interest. Eight years from now we are going to spend $806 billion in interest just on the interest rates we have today.

How many people believe we will have a Fed discount rate of a quarter of 1 percent 8 years from now and that we will be able to borrow money on a 10-year T-bill at 3.6 percent? It isn't going to happen. We are going down the road to destruction, and we are clueless about how to solve it.

So if we add up the 75-year projected unfunded liabilities for Medicare and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Medicaid and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Social Security and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Federal employee retirement and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for military retirement and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for every other trust fund this Congress and Congresses before have robbed the money from to spend now--which should have been endowed-- what we come to is $100 trillion.

If we look at what our population is expected to be then, and the percentage that would not be working in the workforce--in other words, the very young children and the very large 40 percent of that population that is going to be retired--what we end up having is an unfunded obligation for every one of those people who are going to be the taxpayers of $500,000 apiece. That doesn't include the debt we have now, which is $11.4 trillion--which is going to double to $22 trillion over the next 10 years--and the internal debt of that will triple. So now we have $122 trillion worth of liabilities. Yet we are saying, now is the time to increase the benefits for Federal employees.

I don't deny that the Federal employees do great work. But when you look at what the average pay plus benefit is for Federal employees versus everybody else in the country, now is not the time to do it. Not only because, No. 1, we can't afford it; but, No. 2, it is patently unfair to everybody else in this country based on the average salaries.

So the fact that we would add an amendment onto the Defense bill-- because it is a bill that is going to move; there is no question it would not survive cloture--that doesn't bother me. I have done that a lot. What bothers me is that we lack the perspective of what is happening. We passed a $787 billion stimulus bill, of which only $80 billion has gone out the door. The unemployment rate is still rising-- and I am not critical. This body passed it. But it is not going to be highly stimulative because most of it was not meant to be stimulative. It was meant to be transfer payments. But we have spent that, and that is all borrowed money. We passed an omnibus. We passed a supplemental. None of that was paid for. Not a penny of it was paid for. That is all borrowed.

So what we have done is we are going to add $2.2 trillion to our debt this year, and now we have something that, well, it just adds a measly little $3.2 billion. But think about what $3.2 billion would do to help people who don't have a job in this country today. Instead, we are going to enhance the benefits of Federal employees. To me, it is an insult to every other worker who is out there who is either struggling to keep their job--and, by the way, we are going to add 100,000 Federal employees this year. So these numbers are underestimating what the real cost is.

Here is the amendment. It is 49 pages long. It has six major titles in it--adjusting. We allow people who left the government to come back and put their money back in, and we will say: Oh, you didn't leave, so you didn't lose any of your retirement. You still get it compounded.

We have institutionalized sick pay and we have made it an entitlement. We have said everybody who has ever worked for the DC government, they can work for the Federal Government and all of their retirement years will transfer to the Federal Government. But we don't do that for anybody else who works for any other State government. We certainly don't do that for people who have retirement plans from any other company. We don't add that retirement to the Federal Government's. So why are we doing things that are patently unfair to the rest of the American workforce in this country?

I plan on speaking on this bill until cloture ripens, which means we are going to be here all night. Until this amendment is withdrawn, I will stay here, or I will have a colleague stay here, and we will talk about how this country is out of control in its spending. We will talk about how we have failed the American people by not being good stewards; how we have not done oversight on the $350 billion worth of waste every year. Not one amendment has passed that has gotten rid of any of the waste that this government wastes every year. Not one has gotten through this Congress. Not one.

We are getting ready to work on a health care bill. We have been working on it. We have spent a ton of time on it. We have $120 billion worth of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, but we haven't addressed that at all. It is not being addressed. We are twiddling our thumbs as Medicare goes bankrupt, while Medicare doesn't offer the services that are promised, and we are going to create another $1.6 trillion worth of cost for the American people. The only thing I can figure is that Washington thinks we can spend more money to save money in a significant way. We have been trying to do that since 1965 and it hasn't worked once, and it isn't going to work this time.

Let me mention, for a minute, just some of the things that we have been doing that do not fit with the priorities

of American citizens. It does not come anywhere close to matching what every family in this country is doing today. Here is what they are doing.

First of all, they are scared and they are fearful and they are worried. Do you know what they are doing? We see it in the economic statistics. When consumer spending drives normally 70 percent of our economy, we have the highest savings rate we have had in 40 years because they are afraid to spend. One of the reasons they are afraid to spend is because they don't trust what we are doing up here. They think things might get worse. I think things are going to get better, but they are certainly not going to get better by spending another $3.2 billion in this way.

What they do is they sit down as a family and they say here is what is coming in and here is the auto payment and here is the house payment and here is what we have to have for groceries and here is the utility bills. What is left? In other words, they make a list of priorities. They decide what has to be done, what must be done, but what they want to do comes last because we are in tough times. That applies to almost every family in this country. It implies heartaches because it means a father is not doing something he would like to do for his son or a mother is not buying a new dress for a daughter to help her own self- esteem in comparison with other children. It has real-world factors on families.

They make those hard decisions every day, absolutely every day. The reason they make those hard decisions is they do not lack the courage to face reality, such as we do. They also do not have the other option we have, and that is charging our lack of courage to the next two generations.

Most Americans are not cowards. They look at the real world, they look at what is responsible of them, what decision is going to have to be made. They dig in their heels, they work and work to solve the problem, and they will go through tough times doing the very best they can to make good of a bad situation.

That is opposite the behavior this place has been displaying. We have ignored the fact that we have $11.4 trillion worth of debt. We passed a stimulus spending bill, of which less than $150 billion was true stimulus. We have created dependencies of, now, the States. Anytime they are in tough times, they have now been infected with our illness: Don't worry about it, we will just charge it to the next generation. Because every State we helped through the stimulus we did charge it to the next generation. We have now instituted lack of discipline by every State legislature in the country because now they no longer have to worry about it. The Senate will just borrow from their grandkids and send it to them and now they don't have to worry about it, they don't have to have any courage to make the tough decisions.

What all have we done that would secure the honor of the American people, that we are working for them? What symbol have we given them, in terms of limiting our excesses in Washington, that might give them hope?

The Akaka amendment is the opposite of that. It is saying: You don't get it, your priorities are not right. You think you can forget what has happened to us. You think you can charge it to our grandchildren and our children. You think you can steal their opportunity and nobody is ever going to know it.

I have barked up this tree a lot in the last 5 years in this body, and I am not ever going to stop barking up this tree because it is morally wrong to steal the future from your grandchildren. It is morally wrong. It is not just ethically wrong, it is not just conveniently wrong, it is morally wrong to take the great attributes of this country away from your children and grandchildren. It is time for some grownups to start making hard decisions that may cost us reelection but are in the best long-term interests of this country.

So this issue is not going to go away. I may ultimately get defeated on it, but those families out there who do not have a job, those families out there making those hard choices every day--every night worrying where is the money to buy the food that is going on the table the next day, who still have a job--they are going to know somebody is going to fight for some common sense in the Senate.

There is no question, I lost this amendment in committee. I was mortified at the lack of sensitivity to the rest of this country, placing Federal employees' very good benefits--enhancing those above the negatives that are occurring to every family in this country based on our economic situation. Even if we were not having a tough economic time, it would still be wrong to do this. It would still be incorrect to do this.

If you think for a minute about what it costs to fund the interest costs on $500,000--if it is 6 percent, it is $30,000 a year. If I were a schoolteacher here and we had a blackboard, I would be making everybody write home that I am sorry I am stealing $30,000 a year from each of your children. That is what I would be doing--I am sorry I am stealing $30,000 a year just to pay the interest, never mind paying the principal off, on what we have accumulated.

Take a young child 6 years of age today and extrapolate that out to right before their retirement. What you have done is you have stolen their opportunity to have the American dream because it is not just going to be the $30,000, because all the years they can't work it is going to build that they will have to pay and all the years in their retirement are going to be less because they will not have the benefits.

By the way, if you are a Federal employee and unhappy with me trying to defeat this amendment, you should pay attention to something. There is no guarantee to your Federal pension based on the economics we face today in this country. If you think it is guaranteed, you have another thought coming because the world economic system is going to determine whether we can honor that pension. That is what is coming. We are very close.

It was not long ago that Alan Greenspan was asked a question: What is the maximum limit which we can borrow? There is a lot of question about whether people want to loan us money anymore. What he said is, I don't know what it is, but I can tell you we are getting very close.

What happens to us when we tap out? You know, he is not an unrespected thinker in materials of economics and banking.

Here is what happens to us. Interest rates that are 3.6 percent for a 10-year government note go to 7 percent, 8 percent, 9 percent, 10 percent. All of a sudden, the cost of funding our debt becomes $2 or $3 trillion a year, 20 years from now. What is the option? The option is there not be any government pensions, there will not be any Medicare. We will barely have money to defend our country. All these wonderful Federal programs that we have, most of which have a duplicate somewhere in the Federal Government that they defend, that we cannot get rid of because they have a constituency that somebody might be afraid, if we eliminate some of the $350 billion in waste, fraud, and duplication, they are not going to be there.

So what it comes down to and what we are facing is, can our Republic survive our excesses? Can we survive this tremendous direction that we have stepped away from reality, saying economic forces do not apply to us? The answer to that is no. There will not be a Federal pension when interest is at 10 or 12 percent and we have $35 or $40 trillion worth of debt.

Certainly.

Over the first 10 years, $3.3 billion.

It is another trick and game. There is an assumption it will be paid back, but it will never be paid back. What it will do is increase the obligations of the Federal taxpayer--that is myself and you and all your families and everybody we represent--the liabilities of the people who are going to get the benefit from this amendment.

There is no connection between this amendment and the Defense authorization bill.

Mr. President, I wish to finish my line of thought because what I sense is the American people get it and we do not. The American people are worried we do not get it. They are worried we think we can continue spending money, not reform things, not make things more efficient, not eliminate duplication. What they know is this is not monopoly money. They know this is not ``not real money.'' They know this issue about us having common sense, about us being fiscally responsible--they know the future of their children and their grandchildren depends on whether we start acting the same way every other family in this country has to act. That is in the real world. It is not in the world of Washington that: Don't worry, we will put it off because the next election is much more important than I addressing this and taking the next tough vote. We are going to put it off.

I say to my colleagues, I have plenty of topics. I am going to spend the next couple hours going through waste so the American people can actually see how well we have done with their money--waste and earmarks and things that benefit the well-heeled and the well-connected but hurt your children and hurt your grandchildren.

Before I do that, I wish to spend a moment talking about what the heritage of our country is. How did American exceptionalism come into being? How is it that this became the greatest country in the world, that had more technological advances than anybody else in the world? That created the highest standard of living of any society ever known in the world? What was the glue, what was the key, what was the characteristic that allowed that to happen?

I will tell you what it was. It was called sacrifice. If you think back four or five generations in your family and you try to find out what was going on, no matter what your racial background is or what your lineage is, what you saw was people willing, absolutely willing to sacrifice the short term to make sure the long term was better for their children, their family, and their grandchildren. That is what I call a heritage of sacrifice. It is what made us great. It is what created this vast, great country.

I am sorry to say that, since I entered the area of public service-- and one of the reasons I entered it was because I didn't see this trait--is that, since 1994 I have not seen any change. Actually, it is worse.

When you take the oath to be a Senator, what it says is you will do what the Constitution says. You will uphold it, you will make sure it is protected, that you will follow it.

I have a bill, it is called the Enumerated Powers Act. It has a lot of cosponsors, but none of the big spenders here want to cosponsor it. Do you know why? Because it creates a challenge for wasteful spending. What it says is what our Founders thought was pretty important. They very clearly, in article I, section 8 of our Constitution, listed out what the responsibilities of the Federal Government are. They listed them out. What Madison and Jefferson wrote about when they wrote in article I, section 8, they said people are going to try to say it is something different than this. They are trying to say the general welfare clause is we can do anything we want. The commerce clause is-- don't believe them. That is not what we intended. Yet that happens every day in this body. We abandon the intent.

We just had a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee and one of the questions she was asked by a lot of us was: Are you going to uphold the Constitution?

Well, my thoughts and prayers would be that she will do a better job than we do, because we get an F. And the American people know it. They know we cannot tolerate this spending. They know we cannot tolerate this debt. They know we cannot tolerate raising taxes on the American people if we are going to hope to get out of this. Their wisdom needs to be brought here. And the way you bring your wisdom here is to let us know. Hold us accountable. Call, e-mail, go to the offices, write to our homes, make sure that people who are representing you uphold that oath of fulfilling the Constitution, honoring the tenth amendment.

You know, our Founders in the Bill of Rights put in the tenth amendment, and it is a very important amendment, because it says: Whatever is not spelled out specifically under article I, section 8-- here is the limited things the Federal Government is supposed to do--is explicitly reserved for the States and for the people.

So how is it that we are going to have a $2 trillion deficit this year? I can tell you how it is. It is because we have ignored the Constitution. We have done things that are totally outside the realm our Founders thought we would ever do. We have taken over things that are truly the responsibilities of the States and the communities and individuals. We have created dependency by the States, created dependency in all sorts of others.

I got a letter last week asking me to sponsor money for fire engines for Oklahoma. When did buying firetrucks for Oklahoma become a part of the U.S. Constitution? Am I supposed to steal money from people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York so Oklahoma can have fire engines, which is an Oklahoma responsibility? It is not even an Oklahoma responsibility; it is a community responsibility.

As we create this dependency, we create something that is worse after it. If you cannot get it, you all of a sudden are a victim. That is why earmarks are so bad, because what they do is keep us from making the great and hard decisions we should make because we benefit from it politically.

That is why several of us have fought since we have been here to change the earmarking process so that the American people can see what it is about. And what you will see, you watch on this bill, on the appropriations bills that follow, is if somebody has an earmark in this bill, they will never vote against it. Because what they will be told by the chairman or ranking member of the committee the next time they go to request something is: Oh, you requested something. I put it in the bill, but you did not vote for the bill, so I am not going to give it to you.

What happens is, instead of looking at the content of a bill and the best long-term interests of the country, we look at the content of the earmark and how we look back home to the well-heeled and the well- connected few, the source of campaign, the source of political empowerment, instead of looking at our oath that says: You will follow the Constitution.

There is no question we have the right to say where money goes. And there is no question we should be able to have earmarks if they are authorized, which means that a committee of your peers, through the Appropriations Committee, says: This is something we as a country ought to do. But you will not see that. What you see are not authorized earmarks. They do not go through a committee of your peers. So it becomes the very foul stink that ends up corrupting the whole system of following that Constitution and being loyal to that oath.

In 2016, every American is going to pay $13,000 on the national debt--think about that--for interest. I said that wrong. Every American family is going to be responsible for $13,000 worth of interest on the national debt. That is if it does not grow a penny from now. And we know we are going to have trillion-dollar deficits from now for as long as we can see under the budget that has passed this body.

The average American family, do you have $13,000? Do you have $13,000 for us to continue the excess of uncontrolled spending in Washington, the excess of failing to do our job to eliminate waste and fraud and duplication? Do you have it? Maybe you ought to call us and borrow it from the Senators. Maybe you ought to ask us for it since we are the ones labeling you with it.

So as you hear what we are saying today when we talk about what is going on, these are not just words; they are real facts that affect real lives, that limit opportunity, that steal this wonderful country from us and our kids. Because what is happening is we are slowly putting handcuffs on ourselves. We are slowly diminishing our ability to be creative. We are slowly taking away the opportunity and the freedom with which we have excelled.

If, in fact, the government said more about how you live your life than you say how you live your life, you have lost freedom. You have lost it. As we encounter this mountain, this truly high mountain of debt, what is going to happen is those handcuffs are going to get tighter and tighter--they are not going to get tighter, they are going to get closer and closer together before we have little ability to get out of them, little opportunity to change.

We are close to being on an irreversible course. What we do and how we do it over the next 2 years in this country is going to determine whether your children live in freedom. And I do not mean controlled by a dictator, I am talking about having the freedom to have the opportunity to work hard, to develop your skills, to take risks, and to hopefully reward yourself and your family so that, in fact, you can be benevolent to someone else who may not be able to do that. That is what America is all about.

We are losing. It is going away. And it goes away every week in this body. Every week that we create another new government program that limits your freedom and puts a bureaucrat between you and your choice, it goes away. Quite frankly, we have gotten pretty good at stealing your freedom.

For me and the people I represent, we have had enough. We have had enough of the government deciding everything for us. We have had enough of judges not following the Constitution. We have had enough of Federal bureaucrats limiting our property rights, and what we can do on our own property. We have had enough of people telling us what our freedoms are and what they are not. We have had enough of the Federal bureaucracy in education ruining our schools rather than giving us the freedom to educate the children the way we want; taking our taxes, absorbing 20 percent and sending 80 percent back and saying: You can have this money if you do this, this, this, and this. It is interesting, in the Constitution, there is no role for Federal education, no role for the Federal Government to be involved in education. None. Zero. Where did we get the idea that 80 percent of the people who work in the Department of Education, who do not know how to teach a child, should be telling the teachers in this country what to teach, and what to do, and what they can get paid for and what they cannot.

That is a loss of freedom, folks. You have a bureaucracy in Washington that determines the outcome of what your children's education is going to be, rather than you determining what that outcome will be.

I will yield for a question.

I would answer the Senator, yes, but it is even worse in another way, and it is this: You know, we are not going to get killed by one big punch. It is going to be the little pinpricks. This is another pinprick. The fact is, I would love for our Federal employees to get this benefit. But we cannot afford it, one.

No. 2, it is highly unfair to everybody else out there trying to struggle right now to pay the taxes that pay those salaries. No. 3 is, we do not even have the money to fund the pensions for the Federal employees that we have promised right now. So it is about us getting it wrong. Our priorities are wrong. That is my whole point. There is no common sense to what we are doing.

Sure, it is nice, you can be lauded by all of the Federal employees: You did this. You did this. You can get their vote. But what about the future of our Republic? What is going to happen to us?

I have a granddaughter who is going to be born in the next 2 weeks, and I am wondering if she will even recognize what I knew to be what we were like in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, because the freedom, the diminution of our freedom in this country has been massive. It is in direct correlation with the size of the growth of the Federal Government, directly correlated.

The bigger the Federal Government is, the less freedom we have. As it gets smaller, we can possibly get back some of our freedom. But we are talking about growing the Federal Government, we are talking about making it bigger. We are talking about having it more involved in every aspect of our life and taking away the ability of you and your family to make critical decisions about your family.

Are we totally dependent on the Federal Government? If that is where we are, our freedom is lost. If we have decided we do not need the States any more, get rid of all of the State legislatures; the Federal Government is doing it all anyway. And we do it so efficiently and so well, you can interact with your bureaucrat so well. They always make sense, they are always 100 percent responsible. That is garbage.

The fact is, the farther away your government is from you, the less control you have over it. There is no need, if we continue the direction we are in, to have a city council. We are directing what you have got to do on street lights now. We are going to tell you what car you can drive.

I thank the Senator from Alabama for his question. I appreciate his help on a lot of these issues.

This is not anything other than a departure point for our country. So let me spend a little time--first, let me tell you how good of a job we do. We passed a $787 billion stimulus bill of which $70 billion is out the door. So not even 10 percent, maybe 10 percent by this week; I have not checked the Web site this week to see.

Let's talk about what has gone out the door. What has gone out the door in my home State in Perkins, OK, that to get the money for a new water sewage system that the Federal Government said they had to have-- State government did not say it, the Federal Government did--they had to spend an extra $2 million to build a water disposal and sewage plant that originally was going to cost $4 million. Now it costs $6.2 million. Guess what they got from the Federal Government--$1.5 million.

Think about that for a minute. Here is the stimulus. There is no question some jobs are being created from that. There is no question the citizens of that town will have to pay higher water rates and sewage rates to get a new plant. But what we did in the meantime of having the Federal Government involved in it is we raised the net cost of it by $500,000 so that the people who are going to benefit from it are going to end up paying water rates, sewage rates, at elevated levels for a longer period of time because the Federal Government got involved in it.

It doesn't mean we didn't need the sewage plant. We did. It didn't mean the city fathers didn't do the best thing they could for the city. They had to get a bond. So when somebody comes up and says, I am the Federal Government, here is $1.5 million, take it; and you say, maybe I can help my city out and get this thing done--except the net result of that is, it will actually end up costing $2 million more--ask yourself a question: If you were to build a garage onto the back of your house and the Federal Government says: We will give you a grant to help you do that, but when you finish up, the net cost to you is going to be about 8 to 20 percent more than what it would have cost if you did it yourself, are you going to take that deal? No, you are not.

This is money that is already out the door on the stimulus. It is an example of what happens when we lose common

sense and when we lose economic parameters with which to make decisions.

No. 2, in the stimulus was, heretofore, before we got to the health care bill that we just passed out, was the largest earmark in history, $2 billion. Here we have FutureGen. Let me tell you what we know about FutureGen. The idea behind it is pretty good. Let's figure out if we can take coal and make it absolutely clean and take the carbon dioxide out of it and sequester the carbon dioxide and use this resource we have and have a totally nonpolluting coal plant for generating electricity. Good idea, right? It got canceled in late 2007 because the Department of Energy, relying on a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: We don't have the technology to do it. You shouldn't spend the money. The technology isn't there.

Isn't it funny, in 4\1/2\ months that report gets ignored and we put a $2 billion earmark in to build a coal plant that we don't have the technology for? Let me explain what will happen. We will spend that $2 billion, but when the $2 billion is gone, they are going to come back and say: We almost got it. How about $2 billion more? We will get another $2 billion earmark and another $2 billion earmark, and 5 to 10 years from now, we will have $24 billion in it. Then they will either do one or two things. They will say: We finally figured it out, which means had we waited to build on it a small prototype plant and perfected the technology, we could have done it for 5 percent of that, or they will say: It just didn't work. We can't do it. But we did it on the basis of parochialism and the enhanced interest of some power companies that were well-heeled and well connected to this body. So now we have $2 billion of your money going to a project that MIT says the technology isn't finished yet, and we should not be spending any money to build a final plant. Yet we did it. Yet the claim was that there weren't any earmarks in the stimulus bill.

Here is another fact that a lot of people don't know. Every fact I will give you I can absolutely document, either from the Department of Transportation or somewhere else. We have over 230,000 major bridges in disrepair. Remember Minneapolis. We have tons of those bridges. I am not saying they will collapse, but structurally they have been deemed to need repair.

The stimulus bill spent $24 billion on roads, highways, and bridges. We should have spent $100 billion because we really would have created four times as many jobs. We would have bought things we know we will have to buy anyhow, and we would have fixed problems we know we have today. If we are going to borrow money against our kids' future, it ought to be on high-priority items that will truly benefit us and our kids rather than that which is not going to benefit us.

Here we have Wisconsin, which has 1,256 structurally deficient bridges--more than Florida, Colorado, Arizona, and Alaska combined. Instead of fixing those, they put $58 million into bridge repair to repair 37 rural bridges that people hardly ever use. Why? How? How did it happen? We have interstate highway bridges that need to be repaired that have tens of thousands of cars going over them every day, and instead we repair a bridge to a bar. I guess that Rusty's Backwater Saloon is more important than the safety of kids on the highway.

Then we have a Florida project. When we build highways today, especially interstates, we put these eco-passages underneath them so that wild animals--sometimes cattle, if they are connected lands--can have transportation underneath the highway without going around. Good idea. In Florida, we have a highway sitting there, and less than a couple miles down the road we have an eco-passage, and a couple miles up the road we have one. We are going to spend $3.4 million to put another one in because too many turtles are crossing the road and getting hit. Maybe that is OK. But when we have a $11.4 trillion debt, we are going to run a $2 trillion deficit this year, when everything we are spending this year--50 cents out of every dollar we spend, we are borrowing on the backs of our children--should we be spending this kind of money on turtles? There are plenty of turtles in Florida. It is probably not going to have an ecological impact. But is that a priority? Is that something we should be doing? I think not.

We have a nonprofit that got fired for doing weatherization contracts in one of our States, for poor performance and noncompliance. We get the stimulus, and guess who gets the contract--somebody who has already cheated the taxpayers. Nevada. Somebody has already been fired for noncompliance and not doing appropriate work, and the first thing we do is we hire them back. Do you think there might not have been a political connection with the person who got that contract? Think it is strange?

Here is my favorite. This is Oklahoma. In the wonderful wisdom of the Corps of Engineers, back in the late 1940s and 1950s in western Oklahoma--fairly arid land, good for raising cattle, and where you can get irrigation, it is great for growing wheat--we built a dam and a spillway and generation and everything. Only one problem: There never was any water that came to the lake.

So we have this little road that runs along the edge of it, and they replaced the guardrails 2 years ago. Less than 10 cars a day in the regular summer season go across this, 3 average in the winter. The Corps of Engineers decides, since we have all this money, we need to replace the guardrails. The reason they wanted to replace the guardrails is they are an inch and a half too short for the 10 cars that go by there. But if you run off the road, you run into something down there that is dry as a bone. You don't run into a lake. But because the Corps has the code that you have to have guardrails on anything around a lake, even if you don't have a lake there, we are going to spend millions of dollars putting guardrails around a nonexistent lake because the bureaucratic code is: Never do what is best when you can do what is good for you. Here goes millions of dollars to build guardrails. I pretty well have gotten this one stopped by having my staff out there with the Corps, but had I not done it, we would have spent the money.

What are we doing? Do you like the fact that the Federal Government is involved in all this? Do you think they are exhibiting wisdom and prudence?

We can take Elizabethtown, PA. They have had an old train station that hasn't been used in 30 years. Granted, they could maybe use a train station, but they have been getting along pretty well without one for 30 years in this particular location. We are going to spend millions of dollars to renovate an old train station, not because we have a need but because we have money to spend and it will create a job.

There is nothing wrong with having deficit spending, in terms of Keynesian economics, to try to stimulate the economy, but there ought to be a priority that what we spend the money on actually, in fact, is a long-term benefit that we would have spent the money on anyway. When we throw the money out there and we roll the dice, what happens is, yes, we get a benefit. We get the millions of dollars spent on our behalf. It gets spent on our behalf. But was it the best way to spend the money? Was there another priority that would have been better, that would have created more jobs, that was something we truly have to have, that would have created a permanent job, that would have helped truly stimulate the economy? Those questions are not getting asked.

Here is another one of my favorites. Part of the stimulus was that we give seniors a check. I don't understand that, but we did. But the IRS sent checks to 10,000 dead people. It can happen. I could see how that could happen, but 10,000? So if we are sending checks to 10,000 dead people on a stimulus, what else are we not doing right at the IRS and every other agency? I think it totaled $25 million.

Here is another one of my favorites: Union, NY. The town of Union was surprised when it was notified that it would be receiving a $578,661 stimulus grant to prevent homelessness for several reasons. Here is another interesting point: They never applied for the grant. Second, they don't have a homeless problem. ``Union did not request the money and does not currently have any homeless programs in place in the town to administer such funds,'' said the town supervisor, John Bernardo. ``We were surprised. We were never a recipient before.'' He is not aware of

any homeless issue in the largely suburban town. Where did that one come from? Where is the connection? The people at the Department of Housing and Urban Development just sent them a check. It is not their money. Get the money out the door. Send it to somebody who doesn't need it. When asked about it, HUD just sent the money to every town based on its population, whether it had a homeless problem or not.

When did it become, under the Constitution, a Federal responsibility rather than a community responsibility to take care of homeless people? As we shift that responsibility to the Federal Government, what happens to the freedom of your hometown to care for homeless people? When you get the money from the Federal Government come the rules and regulations on what you will do and how you will do it. Rather than a community-based or a church-based homeless shelter, now you will follow these regs and do these things if you want our help.

What is our help? Our help is taking money from you, filtering it through Washington, wasting 20 percent of it, and then sending it back to you to tell you what you already know how to do, except now they will tell you how to do it and give you 35 pieces of paper and forms to fill out as you tell them how you spent your money that they took 20 percent of to care of your homeless that you should have never sent the money to Washington for in the first place.

Let me spend time--I will pick and choose through a few of these. The Federal Government gives weatherization grants to help people weatherproof their homes. We have been doing this for over 25 years, and we continue to spend more and more money on it every year. Either we are not doing a good job or we have weatherized every home in the country and we are starting to do it a second time.

But here is one from Illinois, where they took the weatherization grant and bought eight pickup trucks for the county--under a weatherization grant.

In Wisconsin, a nursing home got $2.8 million in stimulus money it did not need or request. Prior to the stimulus funding, the Knapp Haven Nursing Home was on track for a loan from the USDA. In other words, they had the finances set up to get a loan to where they could repay it. When the stimulus money came available, the funding source was shifted to a new source of Federal assistance. Carmen Newman, the city clerk-treasurer said:

It's kind of a joke as far as I'm concerned. I don't

understand how they can say this is stimulus.

They were going to do it anyway. The mayor of that city said:

I don't see how the project benefited.

Well, somebody benefited. But somebody also lost, and that was our kids and our grandkids.

Here is a good one: Iowa State legislators are using money freed up by the Federal stimulus cash to buy $11 million in new cars the State does not need. About four dozen brandnew cars owned by the State are already sitting unused in a parking lot near the capitol. According to State Representative Christopher Rants:

Some of them [still] have the [sales] stickers on them.

None of them have license plates. Some of them still have

their seats wrapped in plastic.

But we are going to buy the cars because we got the money. So see what is happening here? There is no priority. Because the money comes in, spend it. Even though you have excess cars sitting in the parking lot, you buy it. Spend it or lose it.

Michigan is going to spend $500,000 to renovate an old freight house for a yoga class. There is no question if you renovate an old warehouse and you employ people to do that, you will stimulate the economy. The criticism here is, are there not other things more important in Michigan that we could spend $500,000 on that would create more permanent jobs, long-lasting jobs, and be of stronger benefit to the community?

The only reason I question this is because it came through the Federal Government down there. If that money came through the statehouse or the city, I would have no business questioning it at all. But in light of where we find ourselves as a country, it is difficult for me to see the priorities that are expressed.

In Macomb, IL, $643,945 was spent on a Prairieview public housing parking lot that nobody wants. Many of the residents whom the parking lot was supposed to benefit have protested it. Explaining his concern, a local resident said: The kids love the grass. We have enough pavement already for all the cars here. We need a playground.

But we are going to pour concrete over it because we have the money to do it--another wasted priority.

In Chicago, rather than help welfare recipients obtain jobs and escape poverty, $1 million will be used to study whether 300 people in Chicago are healthier when living in a ``green'' public housing facility. The study will evaluate whether green housing is healthier for people and will focus on 300 residents at a Chicago public housing facility. Researchers expect to find that residents living in these more energy-efficient facilities will have much lower health care costs. The study will create jobs because it will get two or three people to interview the residents.

Oh, here is another priority that came out of the stimulus. The National Institutes of Health has given an Indiana University professor a grant of $356,000. Maybe this is OK but not now. It is not OK where we find ourselves. But here is what they are going to do with it. They are going to ``test how children perceive foreign-accented speech compared to native-accented speech.'' It will also determine how such accents might influence speech development in children.

I do not doubt that might, in fact, be something we want to study. But we still have a lot of women in this country with a lot of disease and we have a lot of men in this country with a lot of disease. I am not sure accents are as important as studying ways to lower health care costs or funding a professor to do research on one of the cancers that are plaguing our country. How about buying H1N1 flu vaccine? Might that not be a better expenditure of that money? In other words, priorities get lost.

Detroit Public Schools will reap massive benefits from the stimulus despite a $150 million deficit. According to the Intelligencer--that is, evidently, a newspaper in the area--financial management problems became ``so tangled the state recently appointed a manager to take the financial reins.'' The Detroit Public School System stands to get $530 million, which $355 million would have ``no strings attached.''

So we have a school system that has been totally irresponsible with their financing and the management of their money, and what do we do with the stimulus? We reward the incompetence and then give them twice that amount to pull them out of a hole rather than fix the real problem.

Consequences to our behavior are a great learning episode for all of us, no matter how old we are. If we are very young and we touch the hot stove, we learn it is hot. When we are adolescents and we do some of the stupid things we do as adolescents, we learn from them. Do you know what. Governments do not learn, and that is because governments do not have compassion. Only people have compassion. And when you bail out a school system that has been irresponsible, without them suffering the consequences--and I know the answer is: Well, the kids suffer the consequences. That is right. We all suffer the consequence. You do not think kids are suffering the consequences right now in our economy?

So this one is just cute. You will love it. Yale University and the University of Connecticut are going to get $850,000--they have already gotten it, by the way--in stimulus money for research ``to study how paying attention improves performance of difficult tasks.''

Did you ever hit your thumb with a hammer? Studying that paying attention helps you with difficult tasks? I do not know who thinks these things up. But, more importantly, it does not matter who thinks them up. Who would give a grant for that? I am not opposed to giving grants for sound scientific study. But do you know what. We already know the answer this thing is going to give us--a statistically significant answer: You do better if you pay attention; and you do not do as well if you do not. It is pretty straightforward.

Hanscom Field, MA, where we are going to put excess money for additional runways, has received criticism

from local representatives, including a State representative from Lexington. The State legislative leaders did not want us to do it. But do you know what. We did it anyway. The people who represent the area, the political leaders, did not want it to happen because they thought it promoted irresponsible corporate behavior. Do you know what we did? We did it anyway. It goes back to that point we were talking about: freedom. When you give it to us, you lose it. We are supposed to be the bastion that protects your freedom, and what we have become, through this myriad number of Federal programs and spending, is we have been the ones who are taking away your freedom.

In Oklahoma, I trap armadillos in my yard. They come in and they will ruin a good yard because they like grub worms. So all you have to do is to lay a few marshmallows out and then put a marshmallow or two in the trap cage and you will catch those suckers.

Well, that is what Washington is doing to the American liberty. We bite the first little bite off the marshmallow and say: Oh, that tastes good. I got a little benefit here. There is no connection between what I have done and me receiving this benefit. And then we take another little bite off the marshmallow or the next one in. And all of a sudden, before you know it, this armadillo--that runs at night mainly that my dogs chase into the woods every time they see one of them-- pretty soon that armadillo fellow is in my cage. I got him. The reason I got him is he kept thinking he could get something for nothing. He kept thinking: Man, that is a sweet marshmallow.

So what happens is, here he comes down the road, like us--us promising more, promising more--but, remember, whatever we are promising to give you, we have already taken from you. And when we take it from you, we lessen your liberty, to a great extent. We steal your liberty. We steal your choice. We steal your freedom. We steal your ability to be whom you want to be. We steal your ability to be the parent you want to be because we are interjecting us in the education system between you and your child. We are interjecting and planting the seeds of a lack of responsibility and accountability, as we bite the marshmallow, as we walk into the trap, and the cage closes.

There are two things I do with those armadillos--one of two things. I either put them in the back of my pickup and take them 10 or 15 miles away from my property or I shoot them. That is exactly what is going to happen to us. We are either going to be carried far away from what we know, we trust, and believe in to be right or we are going to be extinct as a nation. We are going to lose the wonderful flavor of the greatest Nation that has ever been on this Earth. We are going to lose--and we are doing that--we are losing it, a little bit at a time because we are similar to the frog that climbed into this wonderful pot of water that slowly and slowly heated up, and he never thought to jump out because, before he knew it, he could not.

So I have just listed about 30 of the first 1,000 projects that went out on the stimulus so you can get a flavor as to what kind of judgment is being made with the money we stole from our grandchildren. I would say we are not doing great. I voted for a stimulus bill that would have spent almost $500 billion--I didn't vote for this one, but it was real stimulus. It was real roads, it was real bridges, it was real sewage plants. It included things we were going to have to do. It was really resetting the military because we are going to buy a whole bunch more military. We are going to be forced to do it. To buy it now will create job after job after job, and it will save us money because we are going to buy it now at a cheaper price than what we will pay 5 years from now.

So I am not critical of having stimulus. I am critical of how we manage it, what we are doing about it, and the severe lack of oversight that Members of this body daily fail to do. They do not do the job demanded of them. It is not enough for us to say where the money is spent. What is required of us is to say where the money is spent and then make sure it is spent wisely, prudently, and in the best interests of everybody in this country, not in the best interests of our next election cycle.

I quoted earlier $350 billion worth of pure waste, fraud, and abuse every year in this country. It is not fair for me to quote that without going through it for you so you can actually see where it is. I did this last year, so I am sure it is worse this year since we have not had the courage to do anything about fixing the problems that cause this. But let me go through it. These are either department agency numbers, CBO numbers, inspector general numbers, or General Accounting Office numbers. They are not Tom Coburn's numbers. Every one of them can be backed up.

Medicare fraud: At a minimum, $80 billion a year. We are contemplating a health care bill. We have Medicare that is upside down, both Part A and Part B, running in the red, and is projected to run into the trillions of dollars. Name something that has been done on that in the last 2 years, 3 years, by us. Medicare improper payments, net loss--in other words, we paid out more than we should or we paid out less than we should--the net difference is $10 billion, so now we are at $10 billion a year.

Medicaid fraud at a minimum--and the reason we say it is at a minimum is because Medicaid can't even tell us what their fraud is. They can't even report it--$30 billion. Improper payments, net loss, $15 billion.

So now we are at $135 billion and we have just gone through two programs.

Social Security disability fraud: I hear every day in my office from people in my State about people who are getting disability who are absolutely not disabled, but they get the check. They are living off us, but they can actually go to work and do something. At a minimum, it is estimated to be--I think this is a very low number, and it doesn't mean I don't want to help people with disability if they are truly disabled. But everybody out in the country will know somebody who is collecting a check who can still ride their horse, still run their rotor tiller, still lay brick, or still do anything else they want, but they can't work: $2.5 billion.

Government-wide improper payments in all of the other agencies, but seven of them we still don't have any reporting on, even though the law says they have to report. It is a Federal law you have to report your improper payments every year, but they don't do it. Of the ones that do report, another $15 billion net loss of paying out more than they should. That is just on the agencies that report.

Maintenance of buildings by the Defense Department that they will not use in the future nor do they use now, but we can't sell them because we have all of these laws in Congress that create an impossibility for us to get them to the market. We have created a bureaucratic nightmare that takes about 10 years to put a building up for sale. We are spending in the Defense Department $3 billion that could go for soldier pay, health care for our veterans, health care for our soldiers; $3 billion to maintain buildings that are sitting empty and to maintain security for them.

We have contracting problems. The bill before us, the Defense authorization--everybody recognizes we have a significant problem with contracting in this country. This data comes not from last year but from the year before last. The Department of Defense paid out $8 billion for performance awards to contractors who did not earn the awards. In other words, they had a contract. Here are the requirements to meet the contract. They didn't meet the requirements of the contract. The Department of Defense paid them anyway. It hasn't stopped, folks. Where is the connection?

It is estimated by GAO that at a minimum, if we eliminated no-bid contracts everywhere in the Federal Government--most earmarks, by the way, are no-bid contracts; it is a sweetheart deal--we would save, at a minimum, $5 billion a year--at a minimum--probably closer to $7 billion or $8 billion. Just to eliminate no-bid contracts pays for the entire budget of the State of Oklahoma for 1 year. Every expense we have, just 1 year of eliminating no-bid contracts would have that kind of savings.

Then we have the wonderful trick: we send bills through here that are supposedly emergency supplementals, and we add all of these things of extra spending onto them that aren't emergencies. It is kind of like an earmark process, except the difference is they

don't have to be within the budget numbers, so they just go straight to the bottom line against our kids. So it doesn't pull back any spending anywhere else, but we spend this money anyhow, and that is another $15 billion a year that the Members of Congress do outside of the budget.

So let's see here. We are at $184 billion. We have a crop insurance program that benefits the crop insurance industry but not the farmers, but we refuse to modernize it. We can save $4 billion if we modernize it, but we don't modernize it because the effect and power of the well- heeled and well-connected keeps us from doing what is right.

Then we send $5.9 billion to the U.N. every year. We know--and this is a report we finally got forced to get out of there; it got leaked out and we finally got ahold of it--that our entire contribution to peacekeeping, which amounts to about 40 percent of our contributions-- $2 billion a year--is totally wasted in fraud. In other words, it doesn't help us do peacekeeping anywhere in the world because there is only one agency and one government that is more inefficient than us, and it is the United Nations. Yet we can't have transparency.

Every year I put on the foreign appropriations bill a requirement that for the U.N. dues to be paid, they have to give us transparency about where they are spending our money. It passes 99 to 0, and as soon as it goes to the conference, guess what happens. It gets pulled out because we don't have the courage to confront the U.N. and say: We are giving you $5.9 billion. Tell us how it is being spent. So there is another one.

One of the greatest areas of worry the inspectors general have across all the agencies of government is investment in IT. Last year, we contracted $64 billion of IT contracts through the Federal Government-- $64 billion. What we know is at least 20 percent of that ends up totally getting mismanaged and wasted. It gets wasted because they don't know what they want when they sign the contract. They continue to change what they want as the contract goes through, and when we get to what was going to be a $200 million contract, it ends up being an $800 million contract because we have changed what the contract did.

By the way, the contract isn't no-bid; the contract is cost plus, so whoever is doing the contract has every inclination to give them new ideas to make it better and change it. So what happens is we fall way behind, we don't get it, we pay four times as much. What is estimated is that we lose almost $11 billion a year on that kind of poor management. What is being done about it? Nothing in this body. Nothing in this body.

The National Flood Insurance Program is another $17.5 billion of waste and duplication. If we reformed the Tax Code--by the way, we are now right at $218 billion. If we reformed the Tax Code--if we just made it either straight line or simple, straight, fill it in on a postcard, or went to the fair tax, what we know is the Federal Government, just everything else being equal this year, would have $100 billion more collected because there would be $100 billion less in fraud. Just $100 billion. Just $100 billion. But we have a Tax Code that is this thick that no IRS department will give you the same answer to the same question anywhere else in the country, and neither will any of the big auditing firms because the code is so complex that nobody knows what the truth is. So we spend over $200 billion a year in this country paying our taxes.

I am not talking about the taxes we pay, paying our taxes. Either paying somebody else to figure it out or paying the interest because we couldn't figure it out or paying the penalty because we couldn't get it done on time, but most of it comes from paying people to pay our taxes for us.

Then there is a miscellaneous, another $18 billion. I said $350 billion. The total I have given is $385 billion. The reason I said $385 billion, I don't want to exaggerate, so I cut 10 percent off of it. So nobody can say we have exaggerated the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government that occurs every year.

What would it be like right now if we weren't wasting that? What would happen to Medicare if we didn't have this high number, billions and billions of dollars of fraud in Medicare every year? What would happen? What would happen is Medicare would last a lot longer. No. 2, we would actually get more resources directed to the people who actually need it.

The one story Dr. John Barrasso, the other physician in the Senate tells, is that Medicare is so well designed to be defrauded that people who deal in drugs stop that and start doing Medicare fraud because it is easier to hit a home run, No. 1; No. 2, if you get caught, the penalties are less. No. 3 is you can make a whole lot more money with a whole lot lower jail sentence. So we have this system that is designed to get defrauded that has $80 billion in it.

So let me make that point and say, if in fact you take--even if you only take half of what I say--$175 billion--but even if you only take half of what I say, here are the things we know: This country is absolutely on an unsustainable course. We cannot sustain what we are doing. We cannot have another year such as this year. We cannot have another year that comes anywhere close to this year.

We can't have another year that moves forward in the direction we are moving in terms of the government taking more of your freedom away and building itself up and building the bureaucracies in this town.

I understand my colleague from Hawaii is here.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wanted to say that as the overnight proceeded, there are a number of people who want to come down and speak on our side, so I wish to ask that on our amendment we have at least an hour and a half, perhaps two. I hope not to use it, but I think this is going to be a significant debate.

Madam President, 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 have consulted with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Levin, and the ranking member, Senator McCain, and they have urged me to go forward and call up my amendment on the alternate engine and begin debating it to expedite matters while we are awaiting Senator Bayh to come over. I call it up at this time.

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

This amendment I am introducing with Senator McCain as my lead cosponsor, and with a strong bipartisan group of cosponsors, including Senator Reed of Rhode Island, and Senators Snowe, Schumer, Inhofe, Dodd, Hutchison, Collins, Kyl, and Cornyn. I am very grateful for that support.

To state it briefly, and then to go into some detail, this amendment would remove funding from this bill that was added by way of amendment in the Armed Services Committee for $439 million to build a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter plane.

I will argue, on behalf of the amendment I have introduced with Senator McCain and others, that it is a waste of $439 million to build for a plane a second engine, which we don't need. In fact, estimates are that continuing acquisition of this second engine will cost over $6 billion of taxpayer money that we don't need to spend because there has been a competition for the engine to be used in the Joint Strike Fighter, which is now the heart and soul of America's hopes for the future when it

comes to tactical aviation--particularly after the Senate terminated the F-22 program the other day.

So there was a competition to build the engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. General Electric, in its proposal, lost that competition. Pratt & Whitney won that competition.

Now, by way of legislation, the proponents of the second engine for this plane are trying to achieve, by legislation, what they could not achieve by competition. It is not only that it is an unnecessary expenditure of $439 million in the coming year, and more than $6 billion, for a second engine that we don't need for that plane, but it has consequences. It is not just that we are spending taxpayer money, but I will go into this in some detail in a moment.

Regarding putting that money to use on that second engine, a general from the Air Force overseeing this Joint Strike Fighter program told our committee it would delay the Joint Strike Fighter, which our services are desperately waiting for. They need this tactical fighter. So it would delay the program and, in fact, this Air Force general testified to our committee that putting money into the bill for the second engine, and continuing to fund it, would result, over the next 5 years, in a reduced capacity to build Joint Strike Fighters by 53 planes.

So to spend the money to build a second engine for a plane, when we don't need a second engine--because the first one won the competition and is performing very well--we are going to reduce the buy of this tactical fighter that our military needs by 53 planes over the next 5 years.

How do my friends who support the second engine pay for it? Well, in the Armed Services Committee bill, which is before us, which Senator McCain, I, and others are trying to remove, they defund the acquisition of helicopters, which are desperately needed by our marines, particularly those fighting in Afghanistan.

There will be an alternative proposal made this morning in the amendment Senator Bayh will introduce, I presume, because there has been so much protest to defunding this acquisition of helicopters that the marines need in battle in Afghanistan, in order to pay for a second engine, which is unnecessary, for the Joint Strike Fighter. Instead, the amendment will defund the acquisition of C-130s, which are specially fitted for our special operations forces. Again, they are carrying out extremely dangerous and critical missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places, where they are courageously taking on particularly the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

That is the essence of the argument. This second engine is a program President Obama has described as ``an unnecessary defense program that does nothing to keep us safe, but rather prevents us from spending money on what does keep us safe.''

That warning from President Obama about the consequences of funding the second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter is realized already in the part of the bill Senator McCain and I and others are trying to withdraw and in the amendment my friend from Indiana will introduce because it takes money from the Marines and the Air Force special operations community in areas they and we desperately need.

I wish to add that, this morning, I was grateful and honored to receive a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in which the Secretary of Defense strongly and clearly expresses his opposition to the alternate engine, the second engine, an unnecessary engine--the $6 billion unnecessary engine for the Joint Strike Fighter--and his support for the amendment that Senator McCain and I and others have introduced.

I ask unanimous consent that the letter from Secretary Gates be printed in the Record.

I will read from the letter. It is three paragraphs:

The Department of Defense supports striking from

legislation any provision that would require the development

or procurement of an alternate propulsion system for the F-35

Joint Strike Fighter.

The current engine is performing well with more than 11,000

test hours. In addition, the risks associated with a single

engine provider are manageable as evidenced by the

performance of the F-22 and F/A-18/F, both Air Force and Navy

programs supplied by a single engine provider. The Air Force

currently has several fleets that operate on a single engine

source.

I draw back from the letter. What is unusual is to have a second engine. Logically, if we want to buy a car, it would be nice to have a second engine in the garage but would we pay the extra money for it if we had a perfectly good engine in the car? Back to the letter:

Thus, further expenditures on a second engine are

unnecessary and will likely impede the progress of the

overall F-35 program.

It is my belief that the JSF program presented in the

President's budget request is in the best interests of

national security. If a final bill is presented to the

President containing provisions that would seriously disrupt

the F-35 program, the President's senior advisors will

recommend that the President veto the bill.

I intend to show in my argument this morning that, in fact, this Armed Services Committee bill--if the amendment Senator McCain and I are proposing is not adopted--will seriously disrupt the F-35 program, the Joint Strike Fighter program and, therefore, will be occasion for the President's advisers to recommend he veto this entire and critically necessary bill.

I thank Secretary Gates for expressing support for the amendment Senator McCain and I and others--Senator Schumer, Senator Dodd, Senator Kyl--have offered to strip this unnecessary expenditure of money from the bill.

Our amendment, as I have said, would restore funding that was taken from the U.S. Marine Corps helicopter, the Huey, when the committee voted to fund the alternate engine. The vote to cut 10 Marine Corps helicopters comes at a time the Marines are conducting a major offensive in the mountains of Afghanistan where the high altitudes and hot weather require the best capabilities Congress can provide them, including these Hueys.

In fact, in recent statements from the Joint Staff and Marine Corps leadership, it is clear how urgently the Marines need the enhanced capabilities of the UH-1 Huey on the battlefield. Speaking before the Armed Services Committee of the Senate on Thursday, July 9, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Cartwright, said to the members of the committee:

Those helicopters are, in fact, critical.

He continued:

The helicopter for the Marines is one of their most lethal

weapons. They are the most effective in the battlefield,

particularly in the counterinsurgency arena.

They are effective in built-up urban areas and in compounds because they can be discreet, so the value of those helicopters is significant.

The day after General Cartwright appeared, I received a letter from the Commandant of the Marine Corps, GEN James Conway.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter from General Conway.

Madam President, in his letter, General Conway writes:

Procurement of less than the optimum ramp up of 28 H-1s in

fiscal year 2010 will lead to continued reliance on aging

helicopters that should have been retired from the inventory

years ago. As we focus on operations in Afghanistan,

sustaining the introduction of the H-1 is vital for our

future success.

He continues:

Because of the severe operational limitations of the Corps'

legacy helicopters, the Marines are transitioning toward the

significantly improved capabilities of the UH-1Y.

General Conway points out that the Corps has already sent three UH-1Y to Afghanistan and will deploy its full squadron of them this November. This is a plane the Marines desperately need in combat today.

I also want to read from a letter I received from Major General Bockel, retired, Army Reserve, now acting director of the Reserve Officers Association. General Bockel says in his letter to me:

The Reserve Officers Association, representing 65,000

Reserve Component members, supports the Lieberman-McCain

Alternate Engine Amendment. This amendment restores critical

funding to procure helicopters that the United States Marine

Corps urgently needs in Afghanistan.

I suspect the Reserve Officers Association will no more support an effort to ask our special operations forces, as the second-degree or side-by-side amendment Senator Bayh will offer, to pay the bill for an unnecessary second engine than he was to see our Marines foot the bill.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record Major General Bockel's letter.

Madam President, let me talk now about what this amendment would do. It would essentially remove the funding for the second engine, but it does it in a way that I think is thoughtful. It requires that there be no obligation of any funds on the development of a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter unless and until the Secretary of Defense certifies to Congress that the development and procurement of such an engine will reduce the total life-cycle costs of the program, improve the operational readiness of the F-35 fleet, and avoid either disrupting the Joint Strike Fighter Program or resulting in procurement of fewer Joint Strike Fighter aircraft during the life cycle of the program.

Why do we propose these conditions? Because they are the benefits the proponents of the second engine claim it will deliver. So we ask that the second engine be judged on its alleged merits. And I hope my colleagues will agree that this is a fair way to go at this.

I have spoken already at the outset about the fact that there was a competition for the engine for the Joint Strike Fighter that took place in 1996. Ultimately, one engine won the competition while the other lost. Understandably, but not acceptably, the makers of the engine that lost have come back to achieve by legislation--or attempt to--what they could not achieve by competition.

The proponents of the second engine have also claimed that it would lower costs on the Joint Strike Fighter Program overall. I have cited numbers that come from the Pentagon and elsewhere arguing on the other hand that this program will cost over $6 billion of taxpayer money without any showing, really, that it will save money. Developing a second engine, quite logically and following common sense, would require the Department of Defense to maintain two logistics operations to support it--tails, as it is called in the military, two tails, two sets of training manuals, two sets of tooling component improvement parts. These additional and unnecessary expenses would raise operations and sustainment costs for the Joint Strike Fighter throughout the life cycle of the program.

I want to get to the impact funding a second engine--an unnecessary engine, a costly engine--would have on the Joint Strike Fighter Program.

On June 9, the Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Air and Land, which I have the honor of chairing, heard testimony from LTG Mark Shackelford, Military Deputy Officer to the Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. He is in charge of acquisition. I asked General Shackelford whether development of a second engine would disrupt the Joint Strike Fighter Program. His explanation is detailed but important to hear. It has a very strong message:

The fiscal year 2010 production quantity for the joint

strike fighter is 30 aircraft, split between three variants.

That means with three different services.

If forced to pay for the alternate engine, we would have to

reduce that to two to four, depending on which of the

variants. That has a negative effect on the unit cost of the

remaining aircraft if you are buying fewer. It also ripples

into next year's quantities, and then as we take that 2010

increment of dollars and extend that out through the future

year defense program--

Which is the 5-year so-called fit up that the Pentagon does planning on--

there are equal decrements in terms of the numbers of

aircraft that we can buy with the remaining dollars.

After hearing that--decrements, decreases, reduction in the number of aircraft we can buy--I asked General Shackelford how many fewer Joint Strike Fighters would be purchased over that 5-year period if we went ahead with the second engine. He responded:

Over the 5-year period, it would be 53.

I cannot emphasize that enough--53 fewer aircraft that we otherwise would have purchased for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps that are desperately in need of them over the next 5 years; 53 fewer planes because we are going to spend that money buying a second engine we do not need. That really would be a major disruption to the Joint Strike Fighter Program. But it is avoidable, and it is avoidable by adopting the amendment Senator McCain and I, Senator Schumer, Senator Dodd, Senator Kyl, Senator Hutchison, Senator Collins, and Senator Snowe--a very broad bipartisan group--have offered.

I close this opening statement in support of our amendment and in opposition to the amendment my friend from Indiana will offer with this quote from President Obama when he sent the defense budget to us on May 15. Here is the quote from the President:

We're going to save money by eliminating unnecessary

defense programs that do nothing to keep us safe but rather

prevent us from spending money on what does keep us safe. One

example is a $465 million program to build an alternate

engine for the joint strike fighter. The Defense Department

is already pleased with the engine it has. The engine it has

works. The Pentagon does not want and does not plan to use

the alternate version.

President Obama concludes:

That is why the Pentagon stopped requesting this funding 2

years ago.

That is why I respectfully ask my colleagues, in the interest of the taxpayers, in the interest of the Joint Strike Fighter Program, to protect funding for the Marines, for the Hueys, the special operations forces of the Air Force, for the C-130s, to protect the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, who are waiting for the Joint Strike Fighter. I ask you to vote against the amendment offered by my friend from Indiana and for the amendment I have the honor to offer.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

I wanted to speak very briefly because I note the presence on the floor of the Senator from Ohio. I want to speak simply to thank Senator McCain for his very strong and thoughtful statement. I am honored that he is the cosponsor of the amendment.

Senator McCain has enormous credibility in two areas that have come together in this amendment. The first is his support of the men and women of our military. The second is his opposition to wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars. And the two come together here.

Of course, as he has argued so compellingly, there are a lot of times when the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars for military acquisitions is not only harmful in itself because it is wasteful, but it takes money away from things we need more.

That is the case here. The money that will be spent, $5, $6, $8 billion over the next 6 years by various estimates, will result in 50 to 80 fewer Joint Strike Fighters produced in that time. The Navy, Air Force, and Marines are waiting with anxiety for these tactical fighters.

In addition to that, the folks who want to fund this second engine have to find the money somewhere. They find it not only by delays in the Joint Strike Fighter Program, but by either, as the amendments today give the alternative--the first one was to take it from the Marine Corps for helicopters that are needed in Afghanistan.

The one that Senator Bayh has before us will take the money from the Air Force special operations community for C-130s that they need for Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the world. It is not worth it.

I thank Senator McCain for his strong statement and for his cosponsorship.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I yield myself such time as I need from the time allotted.

Let me respond to a few points made in this debate.

First, as was clear, the original place that proponents of this second engine, which I believe is an unnecessary engine or unnecessary expenditure of taxpayer money, the place from which they would take the money originally for the Huey helicopters for the marines, I think there was a lot of upset about that. So the choice that Senator Bayh has put before us today would cut the HC-130 and MC-130 aircraft which would seriously impact both the Air Force's air combat command and the special operations command. This is a late-breaking development this morning, the change of source of the funding, but we asked for a response from the office of the Secretary of Defense and it was this, that this ``take'' from these two variants of the C-130s that the Air Force special operations command is using in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, wherever they are needed in the world, the Secretary of Defense says this would slow down the rate at which the aircraft would be delivered.

The argument Senator Bayh made is that in the supplemental we adopted earlier, three additional MC-130s and four HC-130s were included, seven planes. But the Air Force says to us this morning: Based on the JROC validation requirements--that is the joint operating committee that determines acquisition--the Air Force has validated requirements for 37 MC-130s and 78 HC-130s.

The Air Force, including the Air Force special operations command and air combat command, is grateful for the seven the supplemental gave them, but they need many more. They need 115 total, and so far we have given them 7. Removing the nine planes that were in the President's budget for the Air Force to fund the unnecessary second engine is not a costless move. It would do damage to the Air Force and its program.

I know Senator Reed is here and wants to speak on the amendment before us.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank my friend from Rhode Island, Senator Reed, for taking the time to come over to the Chamber. I know the schedule changed. We had to adjust things. His presence and the strength of his statement--he is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee--and his support mean a lot to this cause.

Madam President, I yield to the Senator from Georgia, Mr. Chambliss, such time as he requires.

Madam President, I wish to respond to a few of the statements that have been made by the proponents of the second engine which I feel very strongly is a costly waste of taxpayer money and is unnecessary.

The argument has been made: why stop competition? I can't say it often enough that there has been competition. There was a competition in the 1990s between these two great engine manufacturers: Pratt & Whitney and General Electric. Pratt & Whitney won the competition fair and square. They did it, as Senator Chambliss said, with an engine that has now had an enormous amount of experience. The Air Force has had experience with it in the F-22, and it has worked extraordinarily well.

Secretary Gates, in his letter to us today, says the current engine is performing well with more than 11,000 test hours. So there has been a competition. General Electric, which manufactures the second engine which lost the competition, is trying, in my opinion--I love this company. I respect them. They are headquartered in Connecticut, but they are trying to achieve through legislation what they could not achieve through competition, and it is costly.

It is costly. It delays the Joint Strike Fighter Program. Earlier this week, we terminated the F-22 technical air fighter program. That means we are all in the Joint Strike Fighter Program. This is our single hope and the specific program to take us to the future for American tactical air war combat.

This second engine--the money for it--according to testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee will cost the Air Force between 50 and 83 fewer Joint Strike Fighters for the Air Force, Army, and Navy over the next 5 years. That is a lot to pay for.

There has been competition and it is over. This engine that has been selected is a good one, and it will continue to perform well and not delay the program.

I want to say a few other things about what has been said. There has been some citing of a GAO report issued in May of this year that suggested that, in the long term, a second engine might result in savings. I think it is important to say that the opinion of the GAO is not documented in their report on that matter, and it is not shared by other authorities who have done independent analyses.

The Institute for Defense Analyses says flat out that GAO underestimated the required government investment to develop an alternative engine by nearly $4 billion. One of the supporters of the second engine earlier said that we have already spent over $2 billion on it, and there is only a need to spend another $1.5 billion or $1.8 billion. Of course, any dollar we spend on an engine that I believe we don't need should go to other programs in the Department of Defense. It is a waste of dollars.

In the GAO report itself, which is cited by proponents of the second engine, it is quite clear that they say an additional investment of $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion in development and production costs may be required for this program.

That means an additional $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion, in the coming years totaling over $6 billion--some say even more--for a second engine, which would be nice to have, like it would be nice to have a lot of things, but we cannot afford it.

The fact that we cannot afford it is demonstrated by the amendments introduced by the proponents of the second engine. We will have to cannibalize, or take from the Marine Huey helicopters and from the Air Force C-130s being used by the special operations and Air Force combat command in battle today.

Let me go to this GAO argument. My friend from Massachusetts cited an Institute of Defense Analyses statement offered in testimony before the House in March of this year. There is another line in that that makes a very powerful point on the question of savings from the second engine. To break even financially, according to the Institute of Defense Analyses--I am quoting from that:

To offset fully the estimated $8.8 billion investment to

establish the alternative JSF engine would require a savings

rate, during the production phase, of 40 percent on a net

present value basis.

That is a little complicated. Here is the key from the independent Institute of Defense Analyses:

Savings of this magnitude are implausible, considering the

11 to 18 percent savings realized in other competition.

So it is way beyond what we have seen before. I want to quote from testimony received in our committee, a very interesting exchange between Senator Begich, a member of our subcommittee, and the representative of the Navy and the Air Force. Senator Begich, in reference to the GAO report cited, indicated that the F-136, the second engine, had better efficiency and opportunity, ``but you seem to disagree with that,'' the Senator says to the witnesses, and I believe that the current Joint Strike Fighter engine is the course you are taking. Vice Admiral Architzel of the Navy says:

While we generally support competition, the cost of

continuing to develop a second engine versus being able to

use that in procurement dollars for aircraft or in the cost

also to maintain the 2 engines, the Navy supports the

Department of Defense in just having this one F-35 engine.

Lieutenant General Shackleford, from the Office of Acquisition of the Air Force, says a very important quote regarding the GAO report that has been cited by proponents of the second engine:

In this particular case, the analysis that the Office of

the Secretary of Defense did to look at the costs associated

with a second engine yielded a different result from what the

GAO reported, which basically says the costs associated with

development of a second engine would be something that we

would consider unaffordable in the current timeframe, while

we would be doing the development. That benefit down the

road, in terms of comparative costs, would be more of a wash

than the more optimistic version of what the GAO report said.

So when we look at balancing the risk of having one engine versus the costs of paying for the second--be it costs within the program, which would be taken out of production aircraft with a negative effect in terms of unit

costs, or even having to source these dollars someplace else within the Air Force--we don't consider the purchase of a second engine to be an affordable solution.

Again, competition has occurred. It is over. We have to really go forward with the Joint Strike Fighter Program, not delay it, or waste money on it or take money from other programs to fund this one.

I will introduce this for the Record. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record two letters, one from Military Families United, and another from the Vets for Freedom.

This is from Bryan Wise, executive director of Military Families United:

. . . I am writing today in support of funding to the

FY2010 National Defense Authorization Act to procure

additional UH-1s and HC-130s.

. . . Providing the necessary funds for the procurement and

recapitalization of both the UH-1 and the HC-130 will afford

our Armed Forces the ability to successfully execute our

military engagements overseas.

. . . Military Families United aggressively supports this

effort to restore funding for the procurement and

recapitalization of these vital weapons systems. We must

never forget the sacrifices the brave men and women of our

Armed Forces make every day in the service of our Nation and

for the cause of freedom.

The second letter, from the Vets of Freedom, is signed by Pete Hegseth, a distinguished and decorated veteran, who is chairman of Vets for Freedom. He says:

Vets for Freedom has always fought for the success of the

mission and fielding the needs of war-fighters serving our

country in harm's way. Recently, we've seen attempts made in

Congress to strip funding from the Marine Corps H-1Y Huey

helicopter program and from the Special Operations Command's

C-130 fleet.

Both pieces of equipment play a key role in making our

troops more effective and lethal on the battlefield: by both

transporting Marines into the fight and allowing our Special

Operations Forces to take the fight to the Taliban and al-

Qaida around the country. Both of [these programs] are

mission critical assets for the fight we are in today and

tomorrow--and the Secretary of Defense and Commandant of the

U.S. Marine Corps agree.

I appreciate these letters. They speak volumes, and I hope they will lead my colleagues to oppose the Bayh amendment and support the amendment we have introduced.

I yield the floor.

Might I ask my friend from Oklahoma how much time he needs?

I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma up to 5 minutes of my time.

Madam President, first, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New Hampshire, Mrs. Shaheen, be added as a cosponsor to the amendment Senator McCain and I and others have offered.

Madam President, I thank my friend from New Hampshire for joining us on this amendment. We have a dispute about whether there was competition. I guess it depends on what you describe as competition.

There clearly was competition for the Joint Strike Fighter plane engine in the 1990s. In 1996, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric each submitted engine proposals to the three airframe manufacturers that were competing for the Joint Strike Fighter contract: Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas. Two of the three selected the Pratt & Whitney engine, and it happened that those two airframe manufacturers were down-selected for the final competition. Ultimately, in 2001, Lockheed was selected to start the design and development with the Pratt & Whitney engine.

I believe there was a competition. General Electric lost. It has gone the other way on other occasions. And this is a legislative attempt to achieve by legislation what could not be achieved through competition.

Secondly, my dear friend Senator Levin, the chairman, and I may have an effectual disagreement on how much more going for the second engine will cost. He believes it will be $1.8 billion. I cited earlier in this debate statistics that show it will be between $4.5 and $5.5 billion. That is not the main point. Madam President, $1.8 billion is a lot more to spend on an engine I have submitted to my colleagues we do not need. Not only do we not need it, the Air Force testified before our committee that if we spend this money on a second engine, we are going to get, by General Shackelford's testimony to us, 53 fewer Joint Strike Fighters in the next 5 years. We will not be able to afford them. That is a serious consequence.

What about this engine that has been selected? The F-135 engine has flown over 11,000 test hours and delivered 12 flight test engines. The F-135 uses a core that has been delivered and is being used in the F- 22. It will have close to 1 million flight hours by the time this selected engine, the Pratt & Whitney F-135, enters operational service in 2012. That is quite a remarkable record and one that justifies what Secretary Gates said to us in a letter he sent to us this morning: ``The current engine is performing well with more than 11,000 test hours.'' I think the record is a clear one.

I, again, respectfully thank my friend from Indiana. Senator McCain said he has argued well. He is a dear friend. We would rather be on the same side on issues. We both feel strongly about this issue. Therefore, I respectfully urge my colleagues to vote against the Bayh amendment and for our amendment which would end funding for a second unnecessary engine.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

I ask my friend from Arizona if there is anything more he would like to say.

Madam President, I will say very briefly, to wind up, the Bayh amendment does remove the 130s from the Air Force. It is true they got money in the supplemental, but statements we got this morning from the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the 130s they got in the supplemental, which are critically needed, leave open-- in other words, they are nowhere near their requirements for that plane which is critically important to the Air Force and particularly to our special operations forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and throughout the world in the war on terrorism.

I would just close by reading a statement from President Obama, when he introduced his defense budget on May 15.

We are going to save money by eliminating unnecessary

Defense programs that do nothing to keep us safe but rather

prevent us from spending money on what does keep us safe. One

example is a $465 million program to build an alternate

engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. The Defense Department

is already pleased with the engine it has. The engine it has

works. The Pentagon does not want and does not plan to use

the alternate version. That is why the Pentagon stopped

requesting this program funding 2 years ago.

And then from Secretary Gates, just today:

It is my belief the Joint Strike Fighter program presented

in the President's budget request is in the best interest of

national security. If a final bill is presented to the

President containing provisions that would seriously disrupt

the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the President's senior

advisers will recommend that the President veto the bill.

That is from Secretary Gates' letter.

So I submit to my colleagues, I believe we have shown today that the second engine funding will seriously disrupt the Joint Strike Fighter Program. Again, I respectfully ask my colleagues to oppose the amendment from our good friend from Indiana and support the amendment we have offered.

I thank the Chair, and if there is no one else who wants to speak, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 1744.

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

I thank the Chair, and I thank the chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, I rise to offer this amendment, along with the Senator from Alabama, Mr. Sessions, and a broad bipartisan group of cosponsors. This amendment concerns the deployment of missile defenses in Europe.

I am very pleased to say, as Chairman Levin suggested, that there has been a lot of work done on this issue by a lot of people, including Chairman Levin, Ranking Member McCain, their staff, and our staff. I think we have reached a very important agreement here which holds up some standards of what is most important to our national security regarding the deployment of missile defenses to Europe.

If I may, the administration, as we know, is now evaluating alternatives to the planned European deployment of a Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, system to Poland and the Czech Republic. In the context of that policy review, this amendment states that any alternative to the GMD deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic must be as effective and affordable as the current plan. We think this is a reasonable standard by which to judge any alternative and I am hopeful and grateful my colleagues seem to agree.

Let me now go forward to explain why Senator Sessions and I and others think it is so important to set a standard for the alternatives that are now under consideration, and why the growing Iranian threat requires us to deploy an effective missile defense in Europe.

Last year the United States reached a pair of groundbreaking agreements with two of our closest European allies on the deployment of elements of a Ground-based Midcourse Defense, GMD, system to protect Europe and the United States from Iran's growing ballistic missile threat.

When I say ``and the United States,'' they don't have the ability now, or the ballistic missile, to reach the United States, but they are clearly investing in a ballistic missile program whose range they hope will grow and grow to a point where they will be able to reach the United States.

Specifically, on July 8, 2008, the United States and the Czech Republic agreed on establishing an American ballistic missile defense radar site on Czech territory. Two months later, on August 20, the United States and the Government of Poland reached a similar agreement under which we would deploy 10 ground-based interceptors to Poland. Just less than a year after these agreements, at a June 16 hearing at our Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Lynn told the members of the committee:

We think there are a number of ways to address [the

Iranian] threat and one of the options is to deploy the

missiles in Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic, and

we are certainly evaluating that option as well as other

possible options.

We heard other testimony before our committee, including from the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Cartwright, along the same lines, that though the agreements were entered into with Poland and the Czech Republic, the administration is evaluating other options.

To help place the other options that are under consideration into perspective, and to explain why Senator Sessions and I and the others who have joined us as cosponsors introduce this amendment today, I want to go to a Congressional Budget Office study that was released earlier this year, in February. It is titled ``Options for Deploying Missile Defenses in Europe.'' This study was requested by then-Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, in her capacity as Chair of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. It examined the potential cost and defense capability of the European ground-based defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as alternatives to it.

What are the alternatives? These include deployment of sea-based interceptors on Navy ships around Europe, or using mobile land-based interceptors in Europe. The study also considered the possible benefits of closer cooperation on missile defense with the Russian Federation.

The findings of this report clearly demonstrate that the Ground-based Midcourse Deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic is the most effective and affordable option that is before us today. I am particularly struck by the report's conclusion that the alternatives to the GMD system in Poland and the Czech Republic would significantly reduce America's ability to provide a layered defense for our American homeland against the eventual threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles launched by Iran or anyone else in that region against the United States of America.

I want to be clear about this and what it means. Whereas the GMD deployment to Poland and the Czech Republic would provide, according to the report, a so-called shoot-look-shoot capability for the defense of the entire continental United States, the alternatives that the Congressional Budget Office considered would leave most of our country without such a layered defense.

Let me explain. Shoot-look-shoot is an operational concept that is actually the cornerstone of our increasingly successful missile defense program. It is the idea that we should be able to shoot at an incoming missile, assess whether that shot was successful, and then shoot again. This shoot-look-shoot capability dramatically increases the effectiveness of our missile defense system.

You might say it is redundant. Most of our military systems are redundant because of what is on the line. I cannot think of a place where I would rather have redundancy than the situation we are dealing with, with an incoming ballistic missile, presumably containing a nuclear weapon, perhaps chemical or biological. I know people watching this debate may think this is far off and unrealistic, but these are the realities we do have to deal with in our world because we know a country such as Iran, whose leaders regularly lead tens of thousands of their citizens in shouting ``death to America'' is in fact investing in a growing intercontinental ballistic missile system.

What does shoot-look-shoot mean with regard to this amendment? If you have a GMD system in Europe and a missile that is fired from Iran, we have

a first opportunity to take a shot at that missile. We then obviously have a chance to look and see whether we hit it. If we did not, we have a second opportunity utilizing the ground-based missile defense system that we have now installed in California and Alaska. That is an important redundancy in the God-awful circumstance that a rogue nation, an anti-American nation, is actually firing missiles at the United States.

I want to draw the attention of my colleagues to a pair of maps that I think indicate the differences as CBO found them between the planned GMD system in Poland and the Czech Republic and the proposed land-based SM-3 block IIA system that I think is a favored alternative--a possible alternative--I don't mean it is selected, but one looked at with great interest by the Defense Department.

Incidentally, these maps were prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and included in the study I just mentioned, which I would commend to my colleagues to read in full.

On the first map here we can see the planned GMD system in Poland and the Czech Republic would provide a layered defense for the entire continental United States. In other words, this is the area that would be defended. Most of Europe, if a missile were fired from Iran, and all of the United States would be covered. That means the concept of shoot- look-and-shoot would be in effect a defense for our entire population.

The second map shows the capabilities of a prospective land-based SM- 3 IIA block system, which is quite different. You can see that this one, as the CBO estimated, only covers a portion of the United States. I note it does cover Connecticut, but there is a lot of the rest of the United States--even though there are those of us who love this small State--a lot of the rest of the United States we do not want to leave unprotected by this redundancy.

In fact, on a population basis, because there is a concentration of population, of course, on the east coast, almost 80 percent of the population would be left uncovered by this redundant defense. All States west of the Mississippi, for example, would not be defended by this system.

In terms of operational capability, it is also important to note that the components of the proposed GMD system for Europe are much farther along in their development and purchase closer to being proven to work than the proposed SM-3 Block IIA interceptor, which may not be available until close to 2020. So the consequences of pulling away from the Poland and Czech Republic system are serious in the near term.

As for the question of cost, the Congressional Budget Office in this study estimates that the two alternate systems would cost nearly the same to develop, deploy, and operate. In other words, if we opt for an alternative to ground missile defense, CBO will be telling us we will be paying the same amount of money but for a less capable defense and a dramatically less comprehensive coverage of the population and territory of the United States.

Another question under consideration, I know by the administration, is the possibility--and was with the last administration, too--the possibility of partnership between the United States and Russia through the joint use of two Russian radar stations, as well as the sharing of information and data. I support very much the exploration of this opportunity of cooperating with Russians on missile defense, but I believe we have to have a clear understanding of its potential benefits and limitations.

Let me begin with some of the benefits. Obviously, closer cooperation with Russia on missile defense could increase our early warning detection capability for missile launches from the Middle East, based on their radar. With this capability we could send a clear message to Iran that not just the United States but the world, including Russia, is opposed to its weapons of mass destruction and intercontinental or continental ballistic missile systems. So I support the objective of negotiating and discussing this with the Russians.

But I want to say there are also limitations that are in this proposal. The Russian radar stations that are most discussed as part of a joint United States-Russian ballistic missile system as a technical matter cannot be a substitute for a European-based GMD system. Although these radars would give us additional early warning capabilities, as I indicated, they would not provide any additional targeting capability which, of course, is a critical component to reducing threats. Radar helps to target, sends the message to the interceptors in Poland and to the other system, and that facilitates an accurate shoot-down.

As the CBO pointed out in its February report, the radars face south and any missiles facing south and any missiles targeted toward Europe and the United States would, according to the report, ``tend to fly through and out of the Russian radar's field of regard very early in their trajectories.'' Though this system would provide us with early warning, it is also very important, really critical, to have targeting capability.

The amendment Senator Sessions and I and the others have proposed would not in any way prohibit the possibility of cooperation, or even deter the possibility of cooperation with the Russian Federation-- certainly not with regard to sharing radar data, and I hope we can all agree we should not seek an agreement with Moscow that leaves the United States more vulnerable to the threat from Iran.

Very briefly, what about that threat? Some may ask, Why do we still need to be investing so much in missile defense? The answer, simply put, is because our most unpredictable and irresponsible adversaries, in particular rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, are investing very aggressively in ballistic missiles. That is why we need ballistic missile defense. The investments we make in missile defense will quite literally provide greater personal security to the coming generations of Americans, our children and their grandchildren and beyond. As LTG Mike Maples, then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before our Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year:

The threat posed by ballistic missile delivery systems is

likely to increase over the next decade. Ballistic missile

defenses with advanced liquid or solid propellant propulsion

systems are becoming more mobile, survivable, reliable,

accurate, and possess greater range.

That is the end of the quote from the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the last few months we have seen graphic reminders of the progress our enemies are making toward fielding intercontinental ballistic missiles. In February, Iran launched its first satellite into orbit using the same technologies that Tehran can draw upon to develop the capacity to build an intercontinental ballistic missile that could strike the continental United States.

In May, Iran carried out its first successful test flight of a two- stage solid fuel ballistic missile, a development that the White House Coordinator for Arms Control and WMD Terrorism, Gary Seymour, warned was ``a significant step forward in terms of Iran's capability to develop weapons.''

Iran's growing ballistic capabilities are made, of course, even more threatening when coupled with its nuclear weapons development program. Of course, we all hope the United States and the rest of the international community can persuade Iran, through diplomacy and economic sanctions, to abandon both its nuclear and ballistic ambitions and programs.

Missile defense is an important component of that effort on the premise that we may be able to convince Iran it is not worth spending those countless millions of dollars on perfecting these weapons if its leaders come to realize that we in the West are determined to stay one step ahead of them in neutralizing their strategic impact with a missile defense system.

As the Department of Defense now undertakes its review of the planned GMD deployment to Europe and possible alternatives, this amendment would express the Senate's opinion of what we expect our missile defenses in Europe to deliver, generally.

It would state that the United States expects those missile defenses to be the most capable and affordable and give a defense in the short term, not just to our allies in Europe but to our fellow citizens throughout the United States of America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, very briefly, I want to thank Senator Levin and Senator McCain for their very thoughtful statements in support of this amendment. I thank their staffs for the work that has been done with all of my staff, Senator Sessions, and others to reach this agreement. It is an important statement of policy about our national security in the years ahead. I appreciate all that has been done by everyone here in the spirit of unity.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we set aside consideration of the Burr amendment and that I be able to call up amendment No. 1657.

Mr. President, I understand the difficulties Senator Levin has, but we are moving to final passage. Cloture has been filed. It is important that this amendment be considered. I get a little nervous when things are not moving along in a way that I think they should or at least in a way that could cause this amendment not to be considered. I wish to speak briefly about it so it will be clear what it is we are talking about.

The amendment I sought to bring up would preempt any Federal Executive, that is Presidential, requirement that our troops in the field, in Afghanistan and Iraq, read Miranda warnings to al-Qaida terrorists whom they capture.

The amendment would also clarify that nothing in Federal law requires that our soldiers read Miranda warnings or give any other kind of warning to captured terrorists, and it preempts any efforts to enforce such a requirement through an exclusionary rule. That is, denying admissibility of evidence if it does not occur.

Miranda is the warning, as most watchers of television detective programs know, in which an individual who is detained by a police officer in the United States on suspicion of some crime is told they have a right to remain silent and they have a right to have a lawyer, or have one appointed for them.

The question is, How did we get to the point that we are now having soldiers in the field being asked to give Miranda warnings?

One person, I think, who would agree with me--although recent activities cause me concern--is our Commander in Chief, President Obama. In a recent interview on the TV show ``60 Minutes,'' he was asked about the terrorist detainees, and this is what President Obama said:

Do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to

be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.

``Of course not.'' I couldn't have said that with more clarity myself. Of course, we should not be giving Miranda warnings to captured terrorists on the battlefield. Unfortunately, not all of the subordinates in the current administration seem to understand this message.

A recent article in the magazine the Weekly Standard describes why the amendment is necessary. As this article explains, the current administration appears to be requiring our soldiers to read Miranda warnings to terrorists whom they capture in the field in Afghanistan. And the article further notes, according to former CIA Director George Tenet, who was appointed originally by President Clinton and served under President Bush, that we would not have obtained the valuable information we did from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, if he had been given his Miranda rights--or been given Miranda rights, not his, because we have never given Miranda rights to captured soldiers in any kind of conflict in the history of the Republic.

The following is from the Weekly Standard:

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured on

March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. ``I'll talk to you

guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,'' he said,

according to CIA Director George Tenet. Of course, Khalid

Shaikh Mohammed did not get a lawyer until months later,

after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that

the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and

saved lives. ``I believe none of these successes would have

happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar

criminal--read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer,

who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut

up.

That was Mr. Tenet's view as stated in his memoirs just a couple of years ago.

If Mr. Tenet is right, it is a good thing KSM was captured before President Obama became President, for the Justice Department has quietly ordered the FBI to read Miranda rights to high-value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan.

According to a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee:

The administration has decided to change the focus to law

enforcement. Here's the problem. You have foreign fighters

who are targeting U.S. troops today--foreign fighters who go

to another country to kill Americans. We capture them, and

they're reading them their rights--Mirandizing these foreign

fighters.

That was a quote from Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with the military and intelligence and law enforcement officials on a factfinding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and a U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. He is quoted as saying:

I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I

showed up because we hadn't been briefed on it. I didn't know

about it. We're still trying to get to the bottom of it, but

it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.

Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said this:

When they Mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is

warn them that they have the right to remain silent. It would

seem the last thing we want is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or any

other al-Qaida terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should

be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical

jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation--lawyering up.

According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are now advising detainees to do. He says:

The International Red Cross, when they go into these

detention facilities, has now started telling people--``Take

the option. You want a lawyer.''

And Rogers adds:

The problem is you take that guy at 3 in the morning off of

a compound right outside of Kabul, where he's building bomb

materials to kill U.S. soldiers, and read him his rights by

4, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer, you have now

created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the

United States military. And confusion is the last thing you

want in a combat zone.

This is from Congressman Rogers, a former FBI agent and a former Army officer.

So one thing is clear: A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had a lawyer, Tenet wrote in his book, `` . . . I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about the eminent threat against the American people.''

Mr. President, one thing we have to get straight in our minds is that we are in a state of war against al-Qaida types and others around the world, and that calls for an entirely different approach to dealing with the people you capture. In fact, before you capture them, you have the authority to shoot them and kill them. We have the ability to drop bombs on them, which results in death. You don't do that in law enforcement situations against drug dealers or against white-collar criminals. These are not criminals, they are unlawful enemy combatants. They are not lawful because they do not operate according to the rules of war.

The Geneva Conventions require that a lawful combatant, an enemy soldier, or any kind of soldier from any country wear their uniform so that you can identify them by their uniform and do not target civilian personnel gratuitously. Among other requirements, these are some of the rules of war. But they have never been given the rights of a common criminal.

So I feel strongly about this issue. And I would note parenthetically that the Supreme Court has not held that Miranda is even a constitutional requirement. They passed it as a prophylactic policy to help police officers do a better job, the Court thought, in doing their work. It is not a requirement. So

it is a big mistake. I believe it is a road we should not go down, requiring these warnings, and if we do, it is an absolutely clear signal that we are confused about the nature of the deadly enterprise in which we are engaged, which is defending this country and our allies from attack by a violent, determined enemy.

I thought after 9/11 there was a consensus in this body that terrorists and enemy combatants were different from criminals. I thought the 9/11 Commission went into that, and I thought there was a bipartisan consensus on that. So I am concerned about it. It suggests to me that we are confused about the nature of this life-and-death struggle we are in. We are confused about the risk our soldiers are being subjected to every day on the battlefield. And they ought not to be placed in a situation where an additional burden is put on them that is not justified by law or common sense.

So I hope we get a vote on this, and I hope we are able to send the message that this is not the right policy and we need to make sure we stop it and nip it in the bud.

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

Mr. President, I wish to join my colleague, Senator Lieberman, in introducing amendment No. 1744, concerning the deployment of missile defenses in Europe, and also thank him for his leadership on this issue over many years. He is clearly one of the most effective spokesmen for clear and strategic thinking and has helped us for many years to establish good defense policy for our Nation.

As Senator Lieberman has explained, this amendment would state it is the sense of the Congress that the administration should continue to develop the planned missile defense deployment through Poland and the Czech Republic, even as it considers other alternatives.

Further, it would state that any alternative to the current plan must be as effective and affordable, and, most important, must be able to defend the United States as well as Europe against long-range ballistic missiles.

This amendment is important at this time because the administration is now considering alternatives to the plan long pursued by the Bush administration to station ground-based interceptors in Poland, a missile-tracking radar system in the Czech Republic. Both Poland and the Czech Republic have signed agreements to host these missile defense assets after being told by the United States that we believed the plan is important to protect Europe and the United States from rogue states, more specifically, Iran's developing missile capability.

After much effort and political capital has been expended, both in the United States and by our Polish and Czech Republic allies and friends, now the project has been put in somewhat of a limbo, I am afraid.

Russia and the domestic left opposed this plan from the beginning. They lobbied the people and members of Congress in Poland and the Czech Republic to not do it. But they have gone forward with it today. If the objections of the United States to this system arise from Czech reasons, then I would refer my colleagues to a February 2009 CBO study Senator Lieberman cited, ``Options for Deploying Missile Defense in Europe,'' which came to the conclusion that a ground-based interceptor deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic is the most effective and affordable option available for the foreseeable future.

The CBO concluded: ``This is the most effective and affordable option for the foreseeable future.''

Other options apparently now under consideration include the deployment of a land- or sea-based version of the Standard Missile 3, SM-3 which is now deployed on Aegis ships of the United States.

The CBO found that this option, the SM-3, will not available until late in the next decade, is no less expensive than the GBI option and does not provide protection for the United States against long-range Iranian missiles. In other words, while the deployment of a land- or sea-based version of SM-3 may be suitable to protect Europe against medium- and intermediate-range missile threats, it would not contribute to the defense of the United States which could occur from the launch of an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile, which would travel at a much higher altitude.

Likewise, Admiral Stavridis, the new commander of the U.S. European Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing last month:

Sea-based and transportable land-based assets are integral

components of a comprehensive ballistic missile defense

system but cannot defeat the entire range of threats by

themselves. Sophisticated sensors are required for early

acquisition and target determination, and ground-based

interceptors are needed to defeat longer-range missiles.

The missile Iran seeks to develop, and is moving forward to develop, would be capable of hitting the United States. Now they are seeking to develop ICBMs, and they are actively pursuing nuclear weapons, as we all know.

Why, I would ask my colleagues, would we want to consider alternatives to the proposed GBI deployment in Europe that would not save any money and would not provide additional protection for the United States?

I would recall the comments former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a few years ago about missile defense and whether we should deploy. His comment was: I have never heard of a nation whose policy it is to keep itself vulnerable to attack.

Well, we do not need to be kept vulnerable to attack. We have the capability to defend ourselves and protect against incoming missiles. Some have suggested that such additional protection is not needed, that current ground-based interceptors deployed at our missile defense site in Fort Greely, AK, can provide complete protection for the United States against Iranian threats.

But that argument does not tell the complete story. The truth is, deploying GBIs in Europe would provide an early opportunity to intercept Iranian missiles headed to the east coast, which could then be followed by an intercept attempt by Alaska, providing the United States an extra layer of protection. Just 10 missiles could provide a great additional protection for the United States. That is what is needed, an integrated, layered, ballistic missile defense shield that effectively protects America and her allies from rogue attack.

Most Americans think we are adequately protected. I do remember a townhall meeting I held, and I asked the people there: What would happen if a missile was launched at the United States? They said: We would shoot it down. Well, that was before our system was up and running in Alaska, and it was not accurate. People think we do have a fully operational system, but we only have a few of those missiles up in Alaska, and we need this additional shield in Europe.

Without the site in Poland, the United States would have only one opportunity to engage Iranian missiles headed for certain portions of our country. Why should we take that risk?

Although the search for alternatives may please the Russians, it would perversely send the wrong message to our NATO allies and, in particular, to our friends in Poland and the Czech Republic who, despite pressure and threats from Russia, have agreed and stood firm and expressed their willingness to host these missile defense assets on their territory.

I would remind my colleague that NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the most successful defense treaty in the history of the world, endorsed the current plan at the April 2008 Bucharest Summit and noted in their declaration:

We therefore recognize the substantial contribution to the

protection of Allies from long-range ballistic missiles to be

provided by the planned deployment of European-based United

States missile defense assets.

I also understand the Polish and Czech Parliaments have yet to ratify the agreements, and the ambivalence presented by the Obama Administration now regarding what was a firm policy of the United States, means, frankly, it is unlikely they will do so until our administration completes its consideration of alternatives. This has placed our situation in limbo. I am not happy with that. I think it was a mistake.

After all, why should those parliaments take up an agreement that the United States may pull off the table? This unfortunate event was obvious from the beginning when we backed away from our plan and started showing uncertainty. It is obvious the political support in Central Europe may erode.

I am left to conclude that the reason the administration is pursuing alternatives in this current plan is its hopes it will address Russian objections about the proposed deployment as part of a grand strategy to reset relations with Russia and conclude a follow-on to the START nuclear reduction agreement. I am not confident in this effort. In fact, it seems to, instead of moving our relations forward, have moved them backward.

Let me make note of some recent events. Just days after the United States and Russia reached a broader agreement on arms reductions and missile defense cooperation at the July 6 Moscow summit, Reuters News Agency reported, on July 10, 4 days later, that Russian President Medvedev threatened the United States that if it did not reach agreement with Russia on our joint NATO/Polish/Czech plans for

missile defense systems, Moscow would deploy rockets in an enclave near Poland.

Typical Russian bluster, threat. Likewise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has threatened to end arms control talks with the United States if we pursue cooperation with our allies on missile defense, a system that in no way threatens Russia's massive nuclear capability, and they know it.

Ten interceptors of the United States in Europe are going to somehow have a capability to stop the thousands of Russian missiles and nuclear weapons that they have? Russia knows that our defenses would be no match.

As reported by the Associated Press, just 1 day after the summit, Lavrov stated:

If our partners make a decision to create an American

missile defense system with global reach, then that will

doubtless place a big question mark over the prospects for

further reduction in strategic offensive weapons.

Again, this is, unfortunately, a regressive approach by Russia on issues that I do not think is justified. It seems we are falling back into a darker approach to world affairs with threats instead of working together to build a more peaceful and prosperous, harmonious world.

If, in fact, there were technical arguments in favor of alternative deployments, which there are not, Russian belligerence would now indeed be an argument for proceeding, nevertheless.

The former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Mirek Topolanek, put the issue in its proper perspective when he stated:

The moral challenge is clear and simple: If we are not

willing to accept in the interests of the defense of the

Euro-Atlantic area such a trifle as the elements of a missile

defense system, then how shall we be able to face more

difficult challenges that may come?

That is an important statement. Are we losing confidence in ourselves? He is not alone in that view. Just last week, 22 prominent Eastern European political figures of important historic importance, including Poland's Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel, published an open letter to President Obama expressing their uneasiness over U.S. maneuvers with Russia. This letter was sent to address their concerns in light of what appears to them to be Russia's attempt to reassert its influence over Russia's former Eastern European satellites. These are independent nations. They have been freed from Soviet domination. It is not their desire to kowtow to Russia and to have to seek Russia's permission over whether to put a radar site in their country. They are sovereign nations.

These leaders noted in their letter that America's planned missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic have become ``a symbol of America's credibility and commitment in the region.'' They further warned that:

The Alliance should not allow the issue to be determined by

unfounded Russian opposition. Abandoning the program entirely

or involving Russia too deeply in it without consulting

Poland or the Czech Republic can undermine the credibility of

the United States across the whole region.

I don't think that is no small matter. These are historic figures in Eastern Europe who suffered under the Communist boot. They do not want to go back. They are sending us a message. They are great American allies. They believe in freedom and democracy. This is not an academic matter to them, it is very real.

I ask unanimous consent to have this letter printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

On March 5, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ``applaud[ed] the decision by the people of the Czech Republic and their government--as well as the people and Government of Poland--for proceeding with missile defense on their soil.'' That was just in March of this year. The United States should honor this commitment by proceeding with the missile defense deployment as planned and not be affected by Russia's unfounded objections. I remain baffled by their objections, other than, perhaps, this is a way they think they can extract concessions from the United States as a bargaining chip.

As the CBO study referenced above makes clear:

Only the Polish and Czech deployments can protect the

United States and Europe. Any other option costs more and

defends the U.S. less, if at all.

I ask my colleagues to support this message. It will be good for our country to be clear on this question and for Congress to speak up.

I express a concern about what has happened in this budget to national missile defense. It represents a major reduction in spending for missile defense. We intend to deploy 44 missiles in Alaska. The budget proposes, I believe, now just 30. It was proposed and part of the agenda for the last number of years to place a multikill vehicle on top of these interceptors so it could take out dummies and decoys and multiple missiles. That was zeroed out, ended in this budget. For a number of years, we have been funding research and development of the kinetic energy interceptor. That is a high-speed system that can take out missiles in the launch phase, which is the best phase to do so. That was zeroed out. There was the airborne laser which has the capability of shooting down missiles in their launch phase when they have so much heat coming out of them. It is funded for 1 more year, and it will be ended, apparently. Of course, now the 10 interceptors in Europe are in question.

We need to be sure we understand how seriously we are impacting the long-term strategy of the United States. We have spent $20 billion to develop a system that will actually work at incredible rates of speed, with hit-to-kill technology to knock down an incoming missile. After all of these investments and all these years, for $1 billion we could complete the program. We are saving about $150, $200 million this year that would have kept us on track. Maybe we can keep the system going forward. I hope so with this resolution and some other things.

But the American people need to know that we are not talking about a minor retrenchment of national missile defense in the budget that has come forward out of our committee. It represents the biggest reduction of missile defense funding during my time in the Senate, over 12 years.

I hope that as the months go along we will be able to reevaluate what we are doing and make sure we don't abandon the progress we have made and take full advantage of decades of research and development that has produced a system that will work to protect us.

I yield the floor.

[July 15, 2009]

Exhibit 1

An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern

Europe

(By Valdas Adamkus, Martin Butora, Emil Constantinescu, Pavol Demes, Lubos Dobrovsky, Matyas Eorsi, Istvan Gyarmati, Vaclav Havel, Rastislav

Kacer, Sandra Kalniete, Karel Schwarzenberg, Michal Kovac, Ivan Krastev, Alexander Kwasniewski, Mart Laar, Kadri Liik, Janos Martonyi,

Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Adam Rotfeld, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Alexandr

Vondra, Lech Walesa)

We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern

European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers, we care

deeply about the future of the transatlantic relationship as

well as the future quality of relations between the United

States and the countries of our region. We write in our

personal capacity as individuals who are friends and allies

of the United States as well as committed Europeans.

Our nations are deeply indebted to the United States. Many

of us know firsthand how important your support for our

freedom and independence was during the dark Cold War years.

U.S. engagement and support was essential for the success of

our democratic transitions after the Iron Curtain fell twenty

years ago. Without Washington's vision and leadership, it is

doubtful that we would be in NATO and even the EU today.

We have worked to reciprocate and make this relationship a

two-way street. We are Atlanticist voices within NATO and the

EU. Our nations have been engaged alongside the United States

in the Balkans, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan. While our

contribution may at times seem modest compared to your own,

it is significant when measured as a percentage of our

population and GDP. Having benefited from your support for

liberal democracy and liberal values in the past, we have

been among your strongest supporters when it comes to

promoting democracy and human rights around the world.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, however, we see

that Central and Eastern European countries are no longer at

the heart of American foreign policy. As the new Obama

Administration sets its foreign-policy priorities, our region

is one part of the

world that Americans have largely stopped worrying about.

Indeed, at times we have the impression that U.S. policy was

so successful that many American officials have now concluded

that our region is fixed once and for all and that they could

``check the box'' and move on to other more pressing

strategic issues. Relations have been so close that many on

both sides assume that the region's transatlantic

orientation, as well as its stability and prosperity, would

last forever.

That view is premature. All is not well either in our

region or in the transatlantic relationship. Central and

Eastern Europe are at a political crossroads and today there

is a growing sense of nervousness in the region. The global

economic crisis is impacting on our region and, as elsewhere,

runs the risk that our societies will look inward and be less

engaged with the outside world. At the same time, storm

clouds are starting to gather on the foreign policy horizon.

Like you, we await the results of the EU Commission's

investigation on the origins of the Russo-Georgian war. But

the political impact of that war on the region has already

been felt. Many countries were deeply disturbed to see the

Atlantic alliance stand by as Russia violated the core

principles of the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris,

and the territorial integrity of a country that was a member

of NATO's Partnership for Peace and the Euroatlantic

Partnership Council--all in the name of defending a sphere of

influence on its borders.

Despite the efforts and significant contribution of the new

members, NATO today seems weaker than when we joined. In many

of our countries it is perceived as less and less relevant--

and we feel it. Although we are full members, people question

whether NATO would be willing and able to come to our defense

in some future crises. Europe's dependence on Russian energy

also creates concern about the cohesion of the Alliance.

President Obama's remark at the recent NATO summit on the

need to provide credible defense plans for all Alliance

members was welcome, but not sufficient to allay fears about

the Alliance's defense readiness. Our ability to continue to

sustain public support at home for our contributions to

Alliance missions abroad also depends on us being able to

show that our own security concerns are being addressed in

NATO and close cooperation with the United States.

We must also recognize that America's popularity and

influence have fallen in many of our countries as well.

Public opinions polls, including the German Marshall Fund's

own Transatlantic Trends survey, show that our region has not

been immune to the wave of criticism and anti-Americanism

that has swept Europe in recent years and which led to a

collapse in sympathy and support for the United States during

the Bush years. Some leaders in the region have paid a

political price for their support of the unpopular war in

Iraq. In the future they may be more careful in taking

political risks to support the United States. We believe that

the onset of a new Administration has created a new opening

to reverse this trend but it will take time and work on both

sides to make up for what we have lost.

In many ways the EU has become the major factor and

institution in our lives. To many people it seems more

relevant and important today than the link to the United

States. To some degree it is a logical outcome of the

integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU. Our

leaders and officials spend much more time in EU meetings

than in consultations with Washington, where they often

struggle to attract attention or make our voices heard. The

region's deeper integration in the EU is of course welcome

and should not necessarily lead to a weakening of the

transatlantic relationship. The hope was that integration of

Central and Eastern Europe into the EU would actually

strengthen the strategic cooperation between Europe and

America.

However, there is a danger that instead of being a pro-

Atlantic voice in the EU, support for a more global

partnership with Washington in the region might wane over

time. The region does not have the tradition of assuming a

more global role. Some items on the transatlantic agenda,

such as climate change, do not resonate in the Central and

Eastern European publics to the same extent as they do in

Western Europe.

Leadership change is also coming in Central and Eastern

Europe. Next to those, there are fewer and fewer leaders who

emerged from the revolutions of 1989 who experienced

Washington's key role in securing our democratic transition

and anchoring our countries in NATO and EU. A new generation

of leaders is emerging who do not have these memories and

follow a more ``realistic'' policy. At the same time, the

former Communist elites, whose insistence on political and

economic power significantly contributed to the crises in

many CEE countries, gradually disappear from the political

scene. The current political and economic turmoil and the

fallout from the global economic crisis provide additional

opportunities for the forces of nationalism, extremism,

populism, and anti-Semitism across the continent but also in

some of our countries.

This means that the United States is likely to lose many of

its traditional interlocutors in the region. The new elites

replacing them may not share the idealism--or have the same

relationship to the United States--as the generation who led

the democratic transition. They may be more calculating in

their support of the United States as well as more parochial

in their world view. And in Washington a similar transition

is taking place as many of the leaders and personalities we

have worked with and relied on are also leaving politics.

And then there is the issue of how to deal with Russia. Our

hopes that relations with Russia would improve and that

Moscow would finally fully accept our complete sovereignty

and independence after joining NATO and the EU have not been

fulfilled. Instead, Russia is back as a revisionist power

pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and

methods. At a global level, Russia has become, on most

issues, a status-quo power. But at a regional level and vis-

a-vis our nations, it increasingly acts as a revisionist one.

It challenges our claims to our own historical experiences.

It asserts a privileged position in determining our security

choices. It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare,

ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated

investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to

advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic

orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.

We welcome the ``reset'' of the American-Russian relations.

As the countries living closest to Russia, obviously nobody

has a greater interest in the development of the democracy in

Russia and better relations between Moscow and the West than

we do. But there is also nervousness in our capitals. We want

to ensure that too narrow an understanding of Western

interests does not lead to the wrong concessions to Russia.

Today the concern is, for example, that the United States and

the major European powers might embrace the Medvedev plan for

a ``Concert of Powers'' to replace the continent's existing,

value-based security structure. The danger is that Russia's

creeping intimidation and influence-peddling in the region

could over time lead to a de facto neutralization of the

region. There are differing views within the region when it

comes to Moscow's new policies. But there is a shared view

that the full engagement of the United States is needed.

Many in the region are looking with hope to the Obama

Administration to restore the Atlantic relationship as a

moral compass for their domestic as well as foreign policies.

A strong commitment to common liberal democratic values is

essential to our countries. We know from our own historical

experience the difference between when the United States

stood up for its liberal democratic values and when it did

not. Our region suffered when the United States succumbed to

``realism'' at Yalta. And it benefited when the United

States used its power to fight for principle. That was

critical during the Cold War and in opening the doors of

NATO. Had a ``realist'' view prevailed in the early 1990s,

we would not be in NATO today and the idea of a Europe

whole, free, and at peace would be a distant dream.

We understand the heavy demands on your Administration and

on U.S. foreign policy. It is not our intent to add to the

list of problems you face. Rather, we want to help by being

strong Atlanticist allies in a U.S.-European partnership that

is a powerful force for good around the world. But we are not

certain where our region will be in five or ten years time

given the domestic and foreign policy uncertainties we face.

We need to take the right steps now to ensure the strong

relationship between the United States and Central and

Eastern Europe over the past twenty years will endure.

We believe this is a time both the United States and Europe

need to reinvest in the transatlantic relationship. We also

believe this is a time when the United States and Central and

Eastern Europe must reconnect around a new and forward-

looking agenda. While recognizing what has been achieved in

the twenty years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is

time to set a new agenda for close cooperation for the next

twenty years across the Atlantic.

Therefore, we propose the following steps:

First, we are convinced that America needs Europe and that

Europe needs the United States as much today as in the past.

The United States should reaffirm its vocation as a European

power and make clear that it plans to stay fully engaged on

the continent even while it faces the pressing challenges in

Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wider Middle East, and Asia.

For our part we must work at home in our own countries and in

Europe more generally to convince our leaders and societies

to adopt a more global perspective and be prepared to

shoulder more responsibility in partnership with the United

States.

Second, we need a renaissance of NATO as the most important

security link between the United States and Europe. It is the

only credible hard power security guarantee we have. NATO

must reconfirm its core function of collective defense even

while we adapt to the new threats of the 21st century. A key

factor in our ability to participate in NATO's expeditionary

missions overseas is the belief that we are secure at home.

We must therefore correct some self-inflicted wounds from the

past. It was a mistake not to commence with proper Article 5

defense planning for new members after NATO was enlarged.

NATO needs to make the Alliance's commitments credible and

provide strategic reassurance to all members. This should

include contingency planning, prepositioning of forces,

equipment, and supplies for reinforcement in our region in

case of crisis as originally envisioned in the NATO-Russia

Founding Act.

We should also re-think the working of the NATO-Russia

Council and return to the practice where NATO member

countries enter

into dialogue with Moscow with a coordinated position. When

it comes to Russia, our experience has been that a more

determined and principled policy toward Moscow will not only

strengthen the West's security but will ultimately lead

Moscow to follow a more cooperative policy as well.

Furthermore, the more secure we feel inside NATO, the easier

it will also be for our countries to reach out to engage

Moscow on issues of common interest. That is the dual track

approach we need and which should be reflected in the new

NATO strategic concept.

Third, the thorniest issue may well be America's planned

missile-defense installations. Here too, there are different

views in the region, including among our publics which are

divided. Regardless of the military merits of this scheme and

what Washington eventually decides to do, the issue has

nevertheless also become--at least in some countries--a

symbol of America's credibility and commitment to the region.

How it is handled could have a significant impact on their

future transatlantic orientation. The small number of

missiles involved cannot be a threat to Russia's strategic

capabilities, and the Kremlin knows this. We should decide

the future of the program as allies and based on the

strategic plusses and minuses of the different technical and

political configurations. The Alliance should not allow the

issue to be determined by unfounded Russian opposition.

Abandoning the program entirely or involving Russia too

deeply in it without consulting Poland or the Czech Republic

can undermine the credibility of the United States across the

whole region.

Fourth, we know that NATO alone is not enough. We also want

and need more Europe and a better and more strategic U.S.-EU

relationship as well. Increasingly our foreign policies are

carried out through the European Union--and we support that.

We also want a common European foreign and defense policy

that is open to close cooperation with the United States. We

are the advocates of such a line in the EU. But we need the

United States to rethink its attitude toward the EU and

engage it much more seriously as a strategic partner. We need

to bring NATO and the EU closer together and make them work

in tandem. We need common NATO and EU strategies not only

toward Russia but on a range of other new strategic

challenges.

Fifth is energy security. The threat to energy supplies can

exert an immediate influence on our nations' political

sovereignty also as allies contributing to common decisions

in NATO. That is why it must also become a transatlantic

priority. Although most of the responsibility for energy

security lies within the realm of the EU, the United States

also has a role to play. Absent American support, the Baku-

Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline would never have been built. Energy

security must become an integral part of U.S.-European

strategic cooperation. Central and Eastern European countries

should lobby harder (and with more unity) inside Europe for

diversification of the energy mix, suppliers, and transit

routes, as well as for tough legal scrutiny of Russia's abuse

of its monopoly and cartel-like power inside the EU. But

American political support on this will play a crucial role.

Similarly, the United States can play an important role in

solidifying further its support for the Nabucco pipeline,

particularly in using its security relationship with the main

transit country, Turkey, as well as the North-South

interconnector of Central Europe and LNG terminals in our

region.

Sixth, we must not neglect the human factor. Our next

generations need to get to know each other, too. We have to

cherish and protect the multitude of educational,

professional, and other networks and friendships that

underpin our friendship and alliance. The U.S. visa regime

remains an obstacle in this regard. It is absurd that Poland

and Romania--arguably the two biggest and most pro-American

states in the CEE region, which are making substantial

contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan--have not yet been

brought into the visa waiver program. It is incomprehensible

that a critic like the French anti-globalization activist

Jose Bove does not require a visa for the United States but

former Solidarity activist and Nobel Peace prizewinner Lech

Walesa does. This issue will be resolved only if it is made a

political priority by the President of the United States.

The steps we made together since 1989 are not minor in

history. The common successes are the proper foundation for

the transatlantic renaissance we need today. This is why we

believe that we should also consider the creation of a Legacy

Fellowship for young leaders. Twenty years have passed since

the revolutions of 1989. That is a whole generation. We need

a new generation to renew the transatlantic partnership. A

new program should be launched to identify those young

leaders on both sides of the Atlantic who can carry forward

the transatlantic project we have spent the last two decades

building in Central and Eastern Europe.

In conclusion, the onset of a new Administration in the

United States has raised great hopes in our countries for a

transatlantic renewal. It is an opportunity we dare not miss.

We, the authors of this letter, know firsthand how important

the relationship with the United States has been. In the

1990s, a large part of getting Europe right was about getting

Central and Eastern Europe right. The engagement of the

United States was critical to locking in peace and stability

from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Today the goal must be to

keep Central and Eastern Europe right as a stable, activist,

and Atlanticist part of our broader community.

That is the key to our success in bringing about the

renaissance in the Alliance the Obama Administration has

committed itself to work for and which we support. That will

require both sides recommitting to and investing in this

relationship. But if we do it right, the pay off down the

road can be very real. By taking the right steps now, we can

put it on new and solid footing for the future.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I know my colleague has given more time and effort to studying the sickness that is affecting our Congress with regard to how we spend money than anyone in this body, and he has taken a lot of heat for standing up and raising these issues. I salute him for it.

But the amendment that is before us, it seems to me, is absolutely typical of how out of step Congress is. This may be a swell amendment for whoever benefits from it, but the people who are paying for it are not aware that the money they have earned from the sweat of their brow is now going to somebody who got a better health care plan, a better retirement plan and higher pay than they get, and more job security than they get.

In my home county, the unemployment rate is over 20 percent. Then we have people with so much better jobs wanting more money. This is what, a $2 billion amendment? I would ask you, is this not sort of a pretty egregious example of the tendency we have to try to reward one group and ignore the cost that everybody else is going to have to pay?

Madam President, let me just say to my friend, the distinguished chairman, all of our Members have very busy schedules. The Senator from Arizona, whose amendment it is, happens to be the second ranking Republican and has heavy responsibilities. I would point out that we waited for a couple hours yesterday for the same Senator yesterday afternoon to be able to come to the floor to address another amendment. At the same time, the clock is running because the majority leader has filed cloture on the bill.

So are we going to run the proceedings here, consideration of the authorization bill, based on the priorities of one Senator or are we going to carry out what we all agreed to last night in the unanimous consent agreement? There was no objection last night from the Senator from Massachusetts. He could have objected. So now we want to turn everybody else's schedules on their heads because one Senator has some other priorities.

Obviously, we are going to finish the bill because the majority leader filed cloture, and we have to close out the bill, after spending nearly a week on two issues, hate crimes and guns, neither of which had a single thing to do with the Defense authorization bill--because, unprecedented in the 20-some years I have been a member of the Armed Services Committee, the majority leader of the Senate came to the floor and proposed a hate crimes bill that had not been through the committee of jurisdiction and was, obviously, very controversial on this side.

So after getting bollixed up for a week and a half--or at least a week--on those two issues, we enter into a unanimous consent agreement when the majority leader files cloture to close off debate on this side. That is the reason it is done. So now we are supposed to overturn, some 10 hours later, a unanimous consent agreement because one Senator cannot fit it into his schedule, when the sponsor of the amendment is the No. 2 ranking member on this side? There is something wrong with that process.

I will be glad to discuss it with the distinguished chairman and we will try and see if we can adjust to it. In the meantime, the clock continues to run and we have fewer and fewer amendments that will be germane and be allowed to be discussed, because we find out this morning, after a unanimous consent agreement which could have been objected to last night, one Senator has a schedule that dictates we turn the unanimous consent agreement on its head.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I withhold my request.

Madam President, I would ask the distinguished chairman, then, in the spirit of compromise, can we arrange a time agreement on the Lieberman amendment that is reasonable so that perhaps we could take up the Kyl amendment later in the morning so that at least that might not upset his schedule, since we are making accommodation for the sponsor of a second-degree amendment, which seems to be our priority.

Madam President, let me say we can have 1 hour for each side on the Lieberman amendment and then move directly to the Kyl amendment, if that is agreeable.

Maybe we need a quorum call for a moment.

Madam President, I rise in support of the amendment which has been described by the proponent and opponent. Obviously, it would strip from the Defense authorization bill a provision that authorizes funding for an alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Underscoring Senator Lieberman's point and as was the case with the provision this body addressed in the F-22 program, funding for an alternate engine for the JSF at this time is something the Department of Defense has not asked for and does not want. It is not reflected in either the President's budget request or any of the Services' unfunded priorities list.

I believe there is good reason why neither the Department nor any of the services at this time want an alternate engine for the JSF. That reason is perhaps best expressed in a letter that Senator Lieberman has already quoted from and had printed in the Record, from Secretary Gates. He concludes by saying:

It is my belief that the Joint Strike Fighter Program

presented in the President's budget request is in the best

interests of national security. If a final bill is presented

to the President concerning provisions that would seriously

disrupt the F-35 program, the President's senior advisers

will recommend that the President veto the bill.

Before I go much further, I would like to apologize to all Members who had planned to speak on this very important amendment and had arranged their schedules to do so. We have obviously changed the timing, despite the unanimous consent agreement to the contrary, apparently to accommodate one Senator's schedule.

I hope, because this is a very important issue, that Senators both in support of Senator Bayh's position and in support of this amendment would seize the opportunity to come down and address this issue.

Some have cited the benefits of competition as a reason to pursue a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, but a competition for this engine was already conducted. It was already conducted as a part of the original flyoff competition for the Joint Strike Fighter itself. The current airframe manufacturer and engine team won.

In 1996, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas originally competed for the two Joint Strike Technology Concept Demonstration Awards. In connection with that, each of those airframe manufacturers solicited engine proposals from Pratt & Whitney and General Electric. Pratt & Whitney won the competition as to Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and General Electric won separately as to McDonnell Douglas. Lockheed Martin and Boeing were selected to proceed to concept demonstration-- where Lockheed Martin ultimately won in 2001.

That is exactly how most military aircraft engines are selected--as a team, combining an airframe with a powerplant. That makes sense, I might say. Obviously, we do not want them being developed separately. So with regard to a second engine, we are not talking about competition, we are actually talking about another bite at the apple.

I hope the great engine war is over. I know of no data or analysis that supports that taxpayers will see any net savings from subjecting the engine for the JSF to any further competition.

I do not believe there is anybody who believes more in competition than the Senator from Connecticut and me, including the chairman. We need to have competition. But there comes a point where you have to make a decision in the development of both the aircraft and the engine and move forward. At some point you have to abandon the alternate engine or, in some cases, there have been advocates of an alternate aircraft itself, to perform the same mission, as in the case of the tanker, and to move forward in order to proceed in a fashion which is in the best interests of the taxpayers and the defense of the country.

That is why the Secretary of Defense feels so strongly on this issue that he says the President's senior advisers will recommend that the President veto the bill if the Lieberman amendment is not adopted.

The fact is also funding an alternate engine over the next 6 years has been estimated to cost the program about $5 billion, the equivalent of 50 to 80 aircraft, according to the program manager.

Also, given that continuing development of a second engine would require in excess of $600 million in fiscal year 2010 alone, according to the Military Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisitions, GEN Mark Shackelford. Paying for the engines in just that year would require cutting production of at least two Joint Strike Fighters this year alone.

There may be some nonfinancial benefits to subjecting the engine program for the Joint Strike Fighter to additional competition-- improved contractor performance at the margins, for example.

Like Senator Lieberman, I am not persuaded those benefits are worth an additional cost of $5 billion to the Joint Strike Fighter's bottom line over the next 6 years. Certainly there are more cost-effective ways of ensuring contractor performance.

In my view, the possibility of a fleetwide grounding due to a single engine--that is another argument that is made by proponents of a second engine--is overstated. In fact, the only other U.S. military aircraft with an alternative engine is the F-16. All other aircraft have single- engine sources and have worked well.

There is no doubt the cost growth of the engine has been a huge problem. From fiscal year 2007 to 2008, the engine costs have grown specifically to meet the needs of the Marine Corps for a version capable of short takeoff and vertical landing. But I suggest the challenge there is to ensure that development costs leading to production remain stable, not to introduce a new engine to the program that will most assuredly add more uncertain testing requirements, complexity, and ultimately cost to the program.

So I believe the provision currently in the bill would be seriously disruptive because one of the offsets it uses to fund developing and buying a second engine derives from research, development, and testing and evaluation efforts supporting the program itself.

Also, it is my understanding the offset is of the C-130, which obviously is very much required in our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember, Secretary Gates restructured the Joint Strike Fighter Program this year precisely to provide for more robust developmental testing over the next 5 years to ensure that the program stays on its planned budget. Taking money out of the program's research, development, and testing and evaluation effort will, in my view, most assuredly disrupt the program.

One of the lessons of history on this program is its stability in funding is absolutely vital to executing that program soundly, the instability in funding--the disruption that the provision introduces into the bill--brings the bill within the scope of a veto threat.

For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to support the amendment under consideration and prohibit any additional funding for an alternate engine program for the Joint Strike Fighter.

Let me also point out to my colleagues, I think this Secretary of Defense has decided, in an incredible act of courage, to take on certain institutions and the way we do business. I think this Secretary of Defense has decided to take on--and I know he has--the military- industrial-congressional complex which lards on porkbarrel projects and unnecessary spending which, in many respects, places parochial interests over the national interests. Obviously, he feels so strongly about it that he would recommend a veto by the President of the United States. That would be regrettable, obviously, because we have so many important provisions in this bill for the

men and women who are serving this country, from the wounded warriors, to a pay raise, for so many things--to the amendment of Senator Lieberman's that we adopted yesterday that we would provide an additional 30,000 members of the U.S. Army so we can better pursue the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, obviously, as of yesterday, the Secretary of Defense feels so strongly on this issue that he would recommend that the President veto the entire bill. Does that mean it would kill a bill? No. But it does mean there would be a significant period of delay in passing this legislation and therefore delay the ability of the Pentagon and the military to implement some of the very important provisions of this legislation.

So I would urge my colleagues to examine this issue carefully, as I am sure they do all of the issues before this body. Also I would hope they would take into consideration the views of our distinguished Secretary of Defense.

I do not agree on every issue with the Secretary of Defense, and neither does my colleague, Senator Lieberman. But I think he is on the right track. I think he can bring about change, at least on how we acquire weapons and how we spend money, and end these atrocious, outrageous cost overruns we have experienced in literally every single weapon system in recent years, which have cost the taxpayers incredible amounts of money, and end this earmarking and porkbarrel process that I will talk more on today.

Every day just about we pick up a paper and hear about, or go on line and hear about, some organization that got an earmark and their waste, mismanagement, and in some cases criminal behavior as far as use of the taxpayers' dollars are concerned. We have to do the big things and the small things. This is a big thing.

I respect, enormously, the Senator from Indiana. There has been no more valuable member of the Armed Services Committee than Senator Bayh. I respect his views. I understand where he is coming from in the name and sake of competition.

Senator Lieberman's and my argument is that the time for competition is over, and it is time to move forward with a tested engine that will, one, accelerate the development and operational entrance by the F-22, and also save some $5 billion of the taxpayers' money.

So I hope my colleagues will examine this issue very carefully and support the Lieberman amendment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, what is the time situation?

Madam President, I want to add some additional comments about the $438 million that would be taken from the HC/MC 130s recapitalization program to fund development of the alternate engine.

I don't think there is any doubt that given the conflict in Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, but particularly now in Afghanistan, as we move into the southern part of the country, the HC/MC 130s are critical weapons systems. Their platforms are designed to specifically support our special operations warriors, which is the kind of fight we are in. It is an irregular fight, and it puts increasing demands on our special forces.

As we know, these aircraft are specialized C-130s that are specifically designed for that fight. They have capabilities, such as aerial refueling and gunship weaponry, that meet the requirements of the special operations command.

I would be very reluctant and strongly opposed to taking funding away from special operations and using it to fund the second motor for the Joint Strike Fighter. It is a time, obviously, when we are fighting two irregular wars, and it is not a time to take this funding away.

According to the Defense Department, the current military requirement for the HC/MC 130s aircraft is 60. The Department recently recognized that the need to modernize the aging, worn-out special operations and combat search and rescue fleets is urgent.

According to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, ``the cut to these aircraft would slow down deliveries to the warfighter of the HC- 130 and the MC-130 impacting both the Air Force's Air Combat Command and Special Operations Command.''

According to the Air Force ``based on the JROC validated requirements for 37 MC-130s and 78 HC-130s, the Air Force, including the Air Force Special Operations Command and Air Combat Command, would benefit from an even greater acceleration of the recapitalization rate of all 9 aircraft that remain in the President's budget.

Taking that money out of this program would delay the delivery of new aircraft to the warfighter. I think that if General McChrystal were here, and our other leaders, they would make it very clear that in the very difficult situation we face in Afghanistan--large areas of geography that need to be traveled and controlled--these aircraft are very much needed. I hope my colleagues will also take that into consideration as we consider this vote.

I congratulate the Senator from Indiana for a very eloquent argument on behalf of his position. Again, I state

my appreciation for the very important role he plays as a member of the Armed Services Committee. This is one of the few times we disagree, but I think he has presented his side of the argument with eloquence.

I yield the floor.

I think we are prepared to vote.

I move to lay that motion upon the table.

The motion to lay upon the table was agreed to.

Reserving the right to object, if the chairman would agree, the Senator from Montana wants to take some time to talk about his amendment which is germane, but he wants to talk about it. We have not had a chance to examine it. Then we could go back to the Kyl amendment, pending hopefully an agreement.

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

Mr. President, I wish to ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy for a minute with the distinguished chairman.

Mr. President, I understand we are hopefully close to an agreement on the Kyl amendment and then we could set up, following that agreement, the Burr amendment, followed by an Akaka amendment, and our staffs will be working on further amendments so our colleagues will know.

I thank the chairman. For the benefit of our colleagues I still think it is possible--and I think the chairman would agree--to finish up by tonight, if we could have expeditious handling of the amendments but which may require us to finish by tomorrow, I hope.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business while we are waiting for the outcome of the negotiations that I had a colloquy with the chairman about.

Mr. President, I have long spoken about the broken appropriations process and the corruption it breeds. I remain deeply concerned over the damage done to our country and, indeed, this institution by their continued abuse. I ask my colleagues: How many more pay-to-play scandals will it take before we enact comprehensive and meaningful earmark reform?

Look at the scandals over the last 5 years alone: Former U.S. Representative Randy Cunningham sits in a Federal prison today for selling earmarks. Among the many bribes Cunningham admitted receiving was the sale of his house at an inflated price; the use of a yacht, free; a used Rolls Royce; antique furniture; Persian rugs; jewelry; and a $2,000 contribution for his daughter's college graduation party. In return, he earmarked untold millions of dollars and pressured the Department of Defense to award contracts to his coconspirators.

Of course, Senator Dorgan and I spent nearly 2 years investigating the Indian lobbying practices of Jack

Abramoff, who reportedly dubbed appropriations committees ``a favor factory.'' One former Senate staffer pled guilty to accepting gifts in exchange for helping Mr. Abramoff's team on appropriations matters. An ex-official in the Department of Justice pled guilty to accepting bribes for helping Mr. Abramoff's client secure millions of dollars to build a jail. In all, over 20 people--including an ex-Congressman, administration officials, congressional staffers, and lobbyists--have been indicted, convicted or pled guilty.

The Department of Justice investigation into this matter still continues to this day.

We have today multiple pay-to-play scandals unfolding before our eyes. We read weekly, almost daily, news article after news article about numerous criminal investigations revolving around earmarks. Take, for example, the ongoing criminal investigation into the PMA Group. Most Americans have probably never heard of the PMA Group. The PMA Group was a DC lobbying firm with deep ties to Capitol Hill and a reputation for securing lucrative earmarks for its clients, especially defense earmarks. As I have said many times, it is the ``Willie Sutton Syndrome,'' because when he was asked why he robbed banks, he said: ``That's where the money is.'' The reason why a lot of these corrupting earmarks came out of defense is because that is where the money is.

The PMA Group boasted more than $15 million in revenue last year. The PMA Group clients reportedly received $300 million in defense earmarks for fiscal year 2008 and $317 million for fiscal year 2009. The PMA Group and its clients spread around a lot of campaign contributions in an attempt to curry favor with lawmakers.

Last November, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided PMA's offices and the home of its founder, Paul Magliocchetti. According to news reports, prosecutors were initially focused on whether Mr. Magliocchetti used a Florida wine steward and a golf club executive as a front to funnel illegal donations to lawmakers. The Washington Post examined campaign contributions reportedly given by employees of the PMA Group and found listed in donor records ``several people who were not registered lobbyists and did not work for the lobbying firm,'' including a 75-year-old California man who had never even heard of the firm.

Since then, the Department of Justice has raided the offices of a number of PMA clients and their business partners. A Federal grand jury reportedly subpoenaed records from one U.S. Representative's congressional and campaign offices and the FBI is interviewing his staffers.

Last week, we read about yet another scandal involving people and firms in PMA's orbit. According to a July 15 Associated Press news article, the former head of the defense contractor, Coherent Systems International, pled guilty in Federal court to defrauding the U.S. Government and accepting kickbacks. Two former PMA clients are reportedly caught up in the scandal.

According to court documents, in October of 2005, the Air Force Research Lab awarded Coherent an $8.1 million contract to deliver four Ground Mobile Gateway Systems. An $8.2 million earmark contained in a tsunami relief bill funded the contract. Get that: It was for a Ground Mobile Gateway System included in a tsunami relief bill. Not surprisingly, Coherent had lobbied for that earmark. At the time, Coherent was represented by a firm called KSA Consulting.

Coherent submitted to the government at least $1.8 million in purchase orders outside the scope of the Air Force contract. What did the government get for its $1.8 million? Coherent paid two subcontractors, which were also represented by KSA Consulting, almost $600,000 for software that was not called for under the Air Force contract. What did Coherent do with the software? It literally threw the software in a closet where it sat collecting dust.

Coherent paid another subcontractor $650,000 for the delivery of five prototypes, also not part of the prime contract. Some reports suggest that this is the same subcontractor that allegedly bribed Coherent's president and whose offices the FBI raided earlier this year.

Coherent also paid Schaller Engineering, a former PMA client, $200,000 for technology that was never delivered. We now know where the money went. On July 21, 2009, Roll Call reported that the former Air Force contracting official, on the Mobile Common Data Link Gateway program, pled guilty to ``skimming money from an earmark that was provided to a Pennsylvania defense contractor.'' In his plea agreement, the official admits to approving invoices that were not part of the contract and then taking the kickback from the defense contractor.

This is outrageous, but I also believe it is only the tip of the iceberg. We will undoubtedly see the continued march of news reports about further indictments and guilty pleas.

Earmarks breed corruption, purely and simply. The current earmarking process doesn't stop it or adequately guard against it. So I ask my colleagues: How many more scandals must we suffer before we enact meaningful earmark reform? How low must Congress's approval rating sink before we act to repair this institution's reputation? How many more lawmakers, staffers, government officials, and contractors have to go to jail before we actually fix this process?

Unfortunately, Congress's earmarking practices have grown worse, not better, just about every year I have served in the Senate. This year promises to be the worst. We began the year by passing a $400 billion Omnibus appropriations bill with almost 9,000 earmarks in it. Contrary to his promise to the American people to stem the tide of earmarks, the President refused to veto that pork-laden bill. In fact, he signed it in a quiet room far from the public eye, I might add, using the rationale it was ``last year's business,'' even though it was passed this year.

Two weeks ago, the Senate approved a $44 billion Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. It was over $200 million more than last year's bill and almost $100 million more than the President's budget request. It, too, was laden with numerous unrequested, unauthorized earmarks added at the direction of members of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate. Rest assured, we will see more earmarks in the other appropriations bills that come to the floor later this year. Even the pending fiscal year 2010 national defense authorization bill is not insulated from the practice.

Americans all over the country are hurting. People are losing their jobs, their savings, and their homes. So what do we do? We continue this disgraceful earmarking process, elevating parochialism and patronage politics over the true needs and welfare of this Nation. The President pledged during his campaign he would work to eliminate earmarks. The Speaker of the House promised to drain the swamp. Given the abysmal state of our economy, Americans can no longer wait for them to make good on their promises. Earmark reform is needed and it is needed now.

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

July 21, 2009: ``Ex-Air Force Employee Pleads Guilty in Case Tied to Murtha Earmark.''

The Hill, July 21, 2009: ``Second Contractor Pleads Guilty in Earmark Probe.''

July 21, 2009: ``Inquiries Focus on Subcommittee Ties.''

July 15, 2009: ``Ex-Defense Contractor CEO Enters Fraud Guilty Plea.''

Washington Post, February 14, 2009: ``Despite Listing, Donors Don't Work For Firm Being Probed.''

So I wish to tell my colleagues, I will be coming to the floor a lot and talking about this, sometimes with charts. This practice has to stop. We cannot afford not only the earmarking because of the costs, but we can't afford to have the continued corruption that is associated with this.

I know some of my colleagues are offended when I use the word ``corruption,'' but when former Members of Congress are residing in Federal prison and their aides and former staffers and others are indicted and convicted in Federal court, I don't know how you can describe it as anything else.

So we will be talking a lot more in the days and weeks ahead. The American people are sick and tired of it and so am I.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, this amendment by Senator Akaka, the distinguished chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, I would imagine has some very good and helpful provisions associated with it. It also applies to Federal employees and perhaps some Department of Defense employees are included in that. But it is a very large amendment. It is composed of six retirement-related provisions and some expenditure of funds.

As I understand the bill, there is not provision for paying for it. I may be wrong. Let me point out that the Chair and ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee have looked at these issues as well. I am wondering why it was not included then on Homeland Security. We just finished doing the Homeland Security appropriations.

It would reduce mandatory spending by $36 billion over 10 years. It has significant costs that will have to be appropriated, at least $2.5 billion over the next 10 years. Because they would be added on this bill, it would add to the cost of the National Defense Authorization Act and would exceed our budget allocation. Properly, it would be subject to a budget point of order which the Senate would then speak on whether it is an appropriate budget point of order.

There has been no strong opposition from the administration, and these costs were not included in the administration's budget request.

I understand that a lot of these provisions, because of the large number of employees, fall under the Department of Defense. I don't think it is a good idea to have a bill of this magnitude, although certainly the amendment is in order--but I am not sure it is appropriate that a bill of this magnitude should be tacked on to the Defense authorization bill.

I say that fully aware that we are tacking on a hate crimes bill which has even a lot less to do with the Department of Defense.

I say to my friend, I will be glad to have a vote on this amendment. Perhaps there is going to be a budget point of order raised on this amendment. But hopefully we can alert our colleagues and give them the opportunity in the next few minutes to raise a budget point of order or ask for a recorded vote. If there is no objection, then we would have a voice vote.

I wish to point out to my colleagues, this is fairly large legislation which does fall under the proper authority of the Homeland Security Committee.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in support of the Lieberman amendment expressing the sense of the Senate that the U.S. Government should continue developing and planning for the proposed deployments of elements of a

ground-based midcourse defense system. I thank the Senator from Connecticut for this amendment and his willingness to work with all parties, which will then allow us to voice vote this very important amendment.

Obviously, there are a lot of strong feelings on the issue of missile defense in Europe. I believe this amendment addresses and expresses our concerns and our goals, including a midcourse radar in the Czech Republic and ground-based interceptors in Poland, as well as the reservation of funds for the development and deployment of missile defense systems in Europe.

As rogue nations, including North Korea and Iran, push the nuclear envelope and work tirelessly to develop delivery vehicles capable of reaching America and its allies, we must aggressively develop the systems necessary to counter such belligerent efforts. Enhancing missile defense capabilities in Europe is an essential component to addressing rogue state and in-theater threats we face and expect to face in the future.

As Iran works to develop ballistic missile capabilities of all ranges, the United States must reaffirm its commitments to its allies and develop and deploy effective missile defense systems. The Iranian ballistic missile threat is real and growing. During the NATO summit in Bucharest in April of 2008, the allies cited the threat of ballistic missile proliferation as one of great concern to their forces, territory, and populations. Missile defense in Europe, according to NATO ``forms part of a broader response to counter this threat . . . [a] substantial contribution to the protection of Allies from long- range ballistic missiles to be provided by the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defense assets.''

Uncertainty about the future of missile defense in Europe, some stemming from perceptions, whether wanted or not, that Russia will have a say or veto power over the disposition of our missile defense architecture, has caused concerns both here in the Senate and among some of our closest European allies. I urge the administration to provide some clarity on how it plans to honor the commitments the United States has made to Poland and the Czech Republic.

The last administration recognized the importance and need for a European component to our missile defense system, reached out to the Governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, and asked that they make what many at the time perceived as an unpopular agreement. Despite unwanted threats from Russia, both governments recognized the importance such a capability would provide to their citizens and to Europe as a whole and agreed to allow the United States to place ground-based interceptors in Poland and a midcourse radar site in the Czech Republic.

Given the perception, one that has been strengthened by the testimony of administration officials before the Armed Services Committee, that the United States is preparing to back away from its commitments to our Polish and Czech allies, this amendment comes at an important moment. It was only a year ago, after all, that the United States and the Czech Republic affirmed that:

Within the context of, and consistent with, both the North

Atlantic Treaty and the Czech Republic . . . the United

States is committed to the security of the Czech Republic.

[And that] the Czech Republic and the United States will work

together to counter emerging military or non-military threats

posed by third parties or to minimize the effects of such

threats.

Similarly, on August 20, 2008, the United States signed an agreement with Poland stating that the:

United States is committed to the security of Poland and of

any U.S. facilities located on the territory of the Republic

of Poland. . . .The United States and Poland intend to expand

air and missile defense cooperation. In this regard, we have

agreed on an important new area of such cooperation involving

the deployment of a U.S. Army Patriot air and missile defense

battery in Poland.

Our Polish friends are clearly uneasy and have been quite vocal. During a forum earlier this year in Brussels, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said:

We hope we don't regret our trust in the United States.

I urge the administration and my colleagues in the Senate to join me in reiterating our commitment to the security and freedom of these nations as well as deterring and defending them against any threats to their security.

With respect to Russia and the ongoing START negotiations, I urge the President to continue to reject any Russian attempt to link reductions in offensive strategic nuclear weapons with defensive capabilities such as missile defense. Russia, too, must recognize that the current Iranian path is unsettling to the global interests of all peace-seeking nations. Missile defense in Europe is not and should not be viewed in Moscow as some new form of post-Cold War aggression. It is, rather, a reasonable and prudent response to the very real threats the Iranian regime continues to pose to the United States, Europe, and the world.

Again, I thank my good friend from Connecticut for offering this amendment, and I urge my colleagues to support its adoption.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in reluctant opposition to the amendment offered by my friend from North Carolina. He and the other Senator, the junior Senator from North Carolina, argued passionately and, to some degree, persuasively in the markup of this legislation.

I think it is very appropriate that they are reacting to local concerns and perhaps even the fact that I think, in straight talk, perhaps the Department of the Navy has not approached some of these communities in a way that would gain the cooperation of the communities.

I agree also with Senator Burr that the people of North Carolina are among the most patriotic that we have in our Nation. But facts are facts, and the Navy needs a field to train carrier pilots stationed on the east coast within the range of both Naval Air Station Oceana and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina. The Navy needs to field trained pilots in order for us to have the best qualified pilots in the world. Part of that training, of course, is to learn landing on aircraft carriers, among other types of training.

Again, a lot of local communities in North Carolina and Virginia have expressed concern about noise, about hours, and about the impact it will have on their communities. During the markup we adopted an amendment by the Senator from Virginia, Mr. Webb, that basically requires the Navy to do extensive consultation with local communities, to consider assistance to local communities in case there is substantial economic impact, and to do everything they can to reach an agreement with the local communities as they go through this siting procedure.

Madam President, I cannot change geography. I think this committee can do a lot of things, but we cannot change the map. The map is that two of our major air stations, Oceana and Cherry Point, are where our pilots and air wings are stationed. They have to have the ability to train, and they have to train someplace within a reasonable range.

So I believe after a spirited discussion in committee, the Senator from Virginia came up with a very excellent amendment that basically requires a lot more participation in the local communities, a lot more consideration and consultation, and even--I have never seen this before--some economic assistance to the local communities, if necessary. Nobody likes to be awakened at 1 or 2 a.m. by the sound of jet engines. I understand that. But I also understand--and I hope our colleagues do--that on the entire east coast, because of population and the location of these two major bases--Cherry Point and Oceana--we don't have much choice but to look in Virginia and North Carolina. We cannot let, over time, that requirement be overridden forever. We can try to accommodate and understand, and we can try to do whatever is necessary to ease the burden. But the fact is, our pilots have to train.

I appreciate the fact that both Senators from North Carolina were eloquent in stating the concerns their local communities have, which may be under consideration for the location of an airfield--just as the Senator from Virginia was concerned; but the Senator from Virginia, I think, in his amendment, laid out some parameters that I think will lead to a fair process, which will take into consideration the very understandable concerns of the local communities.

With reluctance but concern for the ability of our Navy and Marine Corps pilots to train and be adequately prepared to fight, I oppose this amendment.

Madam President, I would like to, once again, thank Chairman Levin for the work he has done in this bill on the structure of military commissions. I appreciate his working closely with me and with Senator Graham, and I believe that the changes in this bill put our military commissions framework on a solid footing so that our nation will be ready to proceed with the trials of terrorist detainees by military commission.

In the same vein, I am pleased to cosponsor Senator Levin's amendment No. 1710, which deals with the protection of classified information used in military commissions. This amendment is based on extensive meetings between our staffs and the professional prosecutors who wish to ensure that classified information receives the fullest possible protection in the course of these trials.

The amendment is based in large part on the Classified Information Procedures Act, CIPA, which includes protections for the use of classified information in trials. Based on 20 years of experience with CIPA, and with 3 years of experience with the Military Commissions Act, the protections contained in this amendment are what the professional prosecutors believe they need to ensure that classified information is not improperly disclosed and to allow trials to proceed more efficiently by providing military judges with an extensive body of law based on CIPA upon which to base their decisions. Avoiding the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a key to ensuring the protection of our national interests, and so I am pleased to advocate the adoption of this amendment. I note that the Departments of Defense and Justice concur with the language contained in this amendment. I urge my colleagues to support its adoption.

Will the Senator yield?

Does the Senator have an estimate how much this will cost the taxpayers?

I understand from the amendment there is a provision that all the money is paid back.

Could the Senator tell me the connection between this amendment and the Defense authorization bill?

May I say to the Senator from Oklahoma, I am in agreement. We do strange things around here, particularly late in consideration of the bill. I thank him for at least bringing it to the attention of the American taxpayer.

Madam President, we are now back on the bill, as the clerk has indicated, and as the Acting President pro tempore has indicated. It was agreed to last night in our unanimous consent request that I offered and was accepted that the next order of business would be to take up the Kyl amendment, and there would be protected either a second-degree or a side-by-side amendment to that amendment; and then we would move, after that, to an amendment by the Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Lieberman, and a side-by-side or second-degree amendment could then be offered by the Senator from Indiana, Mr. Bayh.

Madam President, I see my friend from Arizona is here. In a moment, I am going to suggest we reverse the order of that because of Senator Kerry's requirements this morning. I have no objection at some point to entering into a time agreement on Kyl, by the way, at all. That is not the purpose, to delay that to a cloture moment. But I think the minority would want to see the language of any side-by-side before there was an agreement to a time agreement. If not, I am happy to enter into a time agreement on Senator Kyl's and any second degree or side- by-side at any time my good friend from Arizona wants to do that.

But in order for the convenience of the parties, if Senator Lieberman and Senator Bayh could come down now--if they can do that--I would like to inquire about that and dispose of their amendments first and then take up the Kyl amendment with a time agreement--just to reverse the order of those two because of the Finance Committee's meetings this morning, which Senator Kerry needs to attend.

I have not had a chance to talk to my friend from Arizona about this just because of the way the morning goes. That is what I would like to suggest. If that can be done, it would simplify things.

There are also a number of other things we need to do. We have--and I think the Senator from Arizona is familiar with this--an amendment on voting rights for the troops which I think has been cleared. It is a bipartisan amendment which is going to need about 15 minutes of debate, I understand. That could be done as well, hopefully.

But my goal, if it is agreeable to the Republican manager, would be to basically flip the two, with time agreements for both, going first to the Lieberman and Bayh amendments, if they are able to do it.

Madam President, if the Senator would withhold that request for a moment so I may comment.

Madam President, I was not suggesting that we not proceed this morning; I was suggesting that we reverse the order to accommodate a Senator who is going to be offering a second-degree amendment. If that is not acceptable, we do not need to do that. I was simply trying to accommodate the Senator so that the second-degree or side-by-side amendment that was in the unanimous consent proposal last night could be offered by him. If that is not agreeable to the Republican side, then I obviously am not going to make the suggestion. But it would not delay anything; all it would do would be to change the order of events to accommodate us. If that is not acceptable to the minority, then I will obviously not make that unanimous consent proposal.

Madam President, of course, that is exactly what I was proposing. I appreciate the willingness of the Senator from Arizona to try to work that out.

There is no problem with the time agreement on the Lieberman-Bayh matters because the reason we couldn't do that is that the Bayh language was not available in time for the minority side to consider a time agreement. We would be happy to have a time agreement of 1 hour on the Lieberman amendment, 1 hour on the Bayh amendment; 2 hours together, in other words. We are happy to have a time agreement on Senator Kyl's amendment, but we were only suggesting that we reverse the order to accommodate things here. It would not result in any additional use of time; it would not delay anything; it would simply reverse the order for the accommodation of the Senator who needs to be here to offer a second-degree amendment, if we are going to do it, or a side-by-side to Senator Kyl's first-degree amendment.

Madam President, what we need to do along that line is to see if we can get an agreement from Senator Lieberman and from Senator Bayh on a time agreement on those two amendments. I would suggest, as the Senator from Arizona did, that there be an hour equally divided on each, which will be a total of 2 hours, and then if the majority leader is agreeable to this----

I suggest the absence----

Mr. LIEBERMAN addressed the Chair.

Madam President, I suggest that we seek an agreement that there be 2 hours on the two amendments together, one equally divided between the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Indiana.

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 ask unanimous consent that the order for consideration of amendments this morning be switched and that the Senate now consider the Lieberman amendment No. 1627 and the Bayh amendment No. 1767; that the amendments be debated concurrently for a total of 150 minutes, with 90 minutes under the control of Senator Lieberman and 60 minutes under the control of Senator Bayh; that no amendments be in order to either amendment; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the vote in relation to the amendments occur at a time to be determined, with the first vote in relation to the Bayh amendment, to be followed by a vote in relation to the Lieberman amendment, with 2 minutes of debate prior to the second vote.

I thank the Presiding Officer and I thank my colleagues for working this out to try to accommodate all of us the best we can.

I yield the floor.

I yield myself 10 minutes of the time of Senator Bayh.

Madam President, I oppose the Lieberman amendment that would eliminate funding for the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine. The committee voted 12 to 10 to keep this competition going. I emphasize, this is not a new engine that is being introduced. This effort is to have a competitive engine. This effort has been supported by Congress for many years. Indeed, our Armed Services Committee had a vote on this 2 years ago where we determined to maintain the competition. This year's vote was 12 to 10.

A fundamental tenet for reforming the Defense Department's acquisition system is ensuring competition throughout the development and production cycle of major acquisition systems, whenever and wherever that makes sense. In the case of the Joint Strike Fighter Program, Congress has concluded repeatedly that competition makes sense because of the size of this buy.

The JSF program is planned to be one of the largest acquisition programs ever undertaken by the Defense Department. The Defense Department intends to buy more than 2,400 JSF aircraft, with our foreign partners slated to buy at least another 600. That means we are talking about a program of more than 3,000 aircraft. That means more than 3,000 engines. The cost of the engines alone will exceed $50 billion over the life of the program. This is not an issue such as whether we add F-22s. This is a matter of whether we are going to have competition in a program everybody supports and where we intend to purchase about 3,000 planes.

A number of studies have been done trying to estimate the economic costs and benefits of developing a second engine. The analysis of our Government Accountability Office, which Congress directed to review this, came out a few years ago. Michael Sullivan, GAO Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management, testified as follows in March 2006 before the House Armed Services Committee:

The current estimated remaining life cycle cost for the JSF

engine under the sole-source scenario is $53.4 billion. To

ensure competition by continuing the JSF alternate engine

program, an additional investment of $3.6 billion to $4.5

billion may be required.

This was back in 2007. It is a lot less than that now to complete this program.

Continuing from the testimony:

However, the associated competitive pressures from this

strategy could result in savings equal to or exceeding that

amount across the life cycle of the engine. The cost analysis

that we performed suggests that a savings of 10.3 to 12.3

percent would recoup that investment, and actual experience

from past engine competitions suggests that it is reasonable

to assume that competition on the JSF engine program could

yield savings of at least that much. These results are

dependent on how the government decides to run the

competition, the number of aircraft that are ultimately

purchased, and the exact ratio of engines awarded to each

contract. In addition, DOD-commissioned reports and other

officials have said that non financial benefits in terms of

better engine performance and reliability, improved

industrial base stability, and more responsive contractors

are more likely outcomes under a competitive environment than

under a sole-source strategy. [Department of Defense]

experience with other aircraft engine programs, including

that for the F-16 fighter, has shown competitive pressures

can generate financial benefits of up to 20 percent during

the life cycle of an engine program and/or the other benefits

mentioned. The potential for cost savings and performance

improvements, along with the impact the engine program could

have on the industrial base, underscores the importance and

long-term implications of [Department of Defense] decision

making with regard to the final acquisition strategy.

A few months ago, before the Armed Services Committee, in May of 2009, that same Mr. Sullivan of the GAO said that his study of 2007 is still relevant and the same conclusions can be drawn.

This is not a new engine which is being introduced. This is an engine development program to provide competition which has been long underway. The Department of Defense and Congress have approved, authorized, and appropriated spending so far of $2.5 billion for this alternate engine. The most important point I think I can make is this is not $4 billion or $5 billion or $6 billion additional funds we are talking about. In order to complete the development of this competitive engine, it will require $1.8 billion. So that $2.5 billion is already sunk into this engine development program. That is probably two-thirds of its cost already sunk into it. The question is, do we complete the development of this alternative engine at a cost of about $1.8 billion? That would conclude the cost for the engine contractor and other government costs for that program, for testing activities and for oversight. So again, the issue is not whether to introduce a new engine. The question is, do we complete the development of a second engine which is already two-thirds paid for?

We received a letter this morning--I received a letter this morning-- from the Secretary of Defense, and the letter concludes that if the final bill presented to the President contains provisions that would seriously disrupt the F-35 program, the President's senior advisers will recommend that the President veto the bill.

If the final bill presented to the President contained provisions that would seriously disrupt the F-35 program, I would recommend to the President that he veto the bill. There is no serious disruption to the F-35 program that would occur whether or not the Bayh amendment is adopted. The Bayh amendment makes triply sure there will be no disruption at all, even a minute disruption, in the F-35 program. It is not going to be disrupted at all.

The funding for this alternate engine in the bill which the committee approved came from a Marine helicopter program, a part of which could not be produced this year. So the committee determined that it could safely take funds that were requested for that program, which could not be spent this year. A question has been raised about that. There is no one on this committee, there is no one in this Senate, who wants to slow down a Marine helicopter program. None of us will permit that to happen. That program is a vital program. We have spent a lot of money on it. It is critically necessary.

The decision, which was made by the Armed Services Committee, was to simply take funds which could not be spent for that program, because of development delays, and to spend that, instead, for the second engine. However, what the Bayh amendment does is to make triply sure, to reassure everybody there cannot possibly be any impact on a Marine helicopter program, by finding a separate, a different, a distinct source, an alternate source, for this second engine.

So the Bayh amendment removes any question about Marine helicopters. If adopted, that will be off the table. It was off the table in any event. But everybody wants to assure the Marines, assure our people that there is not going to be any impact on a Marine helicopter program for any reason, much less a second engine.

There is another question which some have raised about whether two engines--

I thank the Acting President pro tempore.

Madam President, how much time is left for Senator Bayh?

I would, in that case, conclude my statement. If there is additional time for Senator Bayh, I will then ask at a later point for some of that time. But for those reasons, and more, which I have not yet been able to reach, I very much support the Bayh amendment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, if I could ask the Senator from Georgia, about how much time does he believe he would be using?

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that after that 10-minute time is used Senator Kerry be recognized for a period of up to 10 minutes on Senator Bayh's time.

Madam President, will the Senator from Indiana yield me 3 minutes?

Madam President, let me confirm what the Senator from Indiana said. This issue does not involve 130s. Congress has put all the money in for 130s that the President requested. The reason this money for 130s was in our committee report is because we did not know at the time that the supplemental appropriations bill would put money in for the 130s. So we do not need this money for the 130s to fully finance the request of the President of the United States for 130s.

I wish to reiterate one point I made earlier. This is not an issue of whether we insert a new engine, whether we start down the road with a second engine. That issue was resolved years ago by Congress when we started to fund a second engine for the purpose of competition. We have already put $2.5 billion into this second engine. Roughly $1.8 billion more is needed. So our sunk costs are approximately two-thirds of the cost of this second engine.

We have consistently supported it in the Armed Services Committee. This is not new. We feel the value of competition will more than make up for all of the costs and surely far more than make up for the final costs which we need in order to complete the development of this second engine.

I do support the Bayh amendment. I think it makes sense in terms of the fundamental point of competition, it makes sense fiscally, and it makes good sense in terms of the quantity we are buying. There is a huge buy, 2,500 planes, engines, and perhaps 500 more in terms of the export market. It is a huge buy. With this size buy and given the precedent of other planes--at least three that have had two engines available for them--with that precedent and with these savings, I hope the Bayh amendment is accepted.

Madam President, has all the time been yielded back?

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that at 12:35 p.m., all time remaining for debate with respect to these amendments, Nos. 1627 and 1767, having been yielded back, the Senate then proceed to vote in relation to the amendments in the order previously entered, with the second vote 10 minutes in duration and all other provisions of the previous order remaining in effect.

Madam President, I modify that unanimous consent request and ask that the vote begin immediately at 12:34 and a half p.m.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1627

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent, with the concurrence of the proponents and the opponents, that the 2 minutes be yielded back and that this be voice voted.

Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Madam President, let me thank my friend from Arizona. First of all, we are trying to work out an approach which would be satisfactory to the issue and will save a lot of time if we can work it out. If we cannot, we can go to a vote on his amendment. The regular order would be to go back to the Kyl amendment as I understand it at this point. We are going to ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New York be recognized to introduce an amendment, that it be in order for him to do so, and that after 15 minutes we vote.

I ask unanimous consent that after 15 minutes of debate, with no amendments being in order to the amendment, we then proceed to a vote, understanding it would be a voice, and then the regular order would be restored, which is the Kyl amendment.

I would modify my unanimous consent request that after the disposition of the Schumer amendment, then Senator Tester be recognized for 10 minutes to talk about his amendment, without the consent to offer it.

Fifteen minutes is what I reserved.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Our goal is precisely that. We are trying to work out an agreement with Senator Kyl. Staffs are trying to work out a time agreement. The order, though, hopefully will be Senator Burr and then Senator Akaka. But we have to make sure the proper committees are notified that are involved in those amendments, and then we could, I think, have a unanimous consent agreement. That is our goal.

I am very pleased to hear the optimistic assessment. I can't honestly say I share that optimism, but I will be delighted to be surprised.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Burr be recognized next to offer an amendment. I understand there is not going to be opposition on this side and that he will accept a voice vote on it. Then I ask unanimous consent that Senator Akaka be recognized to offer his amendment, which he talked about last night.

Mr. President, I understand under the previous order, the Senator from Hawaii is now to be recognized to call up his amendment.

Reserving the right to object--and I will need to object-- we are working through unanimous consent agreements and amendments are lined up on both sides. We have not reached that point yet. There are other amendments that have to come first from the Senator's side, and that would be up to Senator McCain. I have to object at this time. Obviously, we will try to accommodate the Senator getting his amendment up, but Senator McCain would need to consider the Senator's proposal. I have to object.

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

Mr. President, if I could just have Senator McCain's attention for a minute, I think we have a unanimous consent agreement.

Mr. President, has the Akaka amendment been disposed of?

I ask unanimous consent that the Akaka amendment be temporarily set aside, that we then move to an amendment on European missile defense, which is a Lieberman amendment with many cosponsors, which we have worked very hard on and which is ready to be propounded.

There is at least one additional speaker on it. Senator Sessions wants to speak on it as well. But I ask unanimous consent that Senator Lieberman be recognized now to introduce that amendment; that after he speaks, Senator Sessions be recognized; that I will then be recognized, and then Senator McCain, if he wishes to be recognized.

I believe the intention here is that we may be able to adopt this by a voice vote; is that correct? That is the hope, anyway. Well, I will leave that part alone.

Mr. President, may I ask Senator Lieberman to yield for a moment?

First of all, I ask unanimous consent that no second-degree amendments be in order to this amendment.

Mr. President, I very much support the pending amendment. It is the product of a lot of work by a lot of people. Senator Lieberman, in particular, was considering offering an amendment during our markup in the committee. He agreed that he would hold off until we got to the floor to try to get broad bipartisan agreement on a very important subject. He did that. We are grateful to him for doing so.

This amendment is consistent with the administration's policies for missile defense in Europe, including its consideration of a variety of options and architectures for defending Europe, including the so-called third site in Poland and the Czech Republic. The main purpose of these efforts in Europe is to act against an Iranian missile threat should it materialize. It is very important that we do so.

Earlier this month, General Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified before the Armed Services Committee that the Department of Defense is considering a number of missile defense options in Europe.

This amendment is also consistent with the administration's efforts to pursue missile defense cooperation with Russia as part of our efforts to address the Iranian missile threat. Those missiles, of course, potentially could be armed with nuclear warheads. This potential Iranian missile threat is a threat that confronts not just Europe as NATO but also Russia as well, obviously, and a number of other countries. It is a real threat. Everything we can do to deter that, everything we can do to defend, should it ever materialize, is something we must do. It is a major threat.

In one of its findings, NATO recognizes this Iranian threat. This is the way NATO recognized this Iranian threat and the importance of trying to work together to deter, to try to prevent it from happening, and then, should it happen, to defend against it, to make it useless. Here is what NATO said in April:

We support increased missile defense cooperation between

Russia and NATO, including maximum transparency and

reciprocal confidence-building measures to allay any

concerns. We reaffirm our readiness to explore the potential

for linking United States, NATO and Russian missile defense

systems at an appropriate time and we encourage the Russian

Federation to take advantage of [U.S.] missile defense

cooperation proposals.

Back in April, I led a delegation, with Senators Collins and Bill Nelson, to visit Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic to discuss missile defense and the potential for a cooperative approach. What we found is that there appears to be real potential for a cooperative approach and for having missile defense be a uniting issue against a common threat instead of a dividing issue. If we can find a way to cooperate with Russia on missile defense, it would send an extraordinarily powerful message to Iran that we are united against their continued development of nuclear technology and long-range ballistic missiles.

That is the point of missile defense in Europe, to address the Iranian missile and nuclear program in order to enhance their security and our security. This amendment will authorize prior year's funds for a variety of cost-effective and operationally effective missile defense options that could protect Europe and the United States from Iranian missiles of all ranges, current and future. The amendment is designed to command and hopefully attract strong bipartisan support. I hope it does just that.

I believe a voice vote may be possible after Senator McCain speaks. I hope that is the case, given the schedule.

Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that Senator Dorgan be recognized for up to 15 minutes and then we return to regular order.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object. I will not object--of course--this would be the next amendment which would be in a line of amendments that Senator McCain and I are trying to work out alternating between the two sides.

Madam President, I also reluctantly oppose this amendment. Senator Burr and Senator Hagan have both been very eloquent in their positions, and it is understandable how they and their States feel in this matter. The Navy has not done a particularly good job.

Senator Webb, in committee, suggested some important language that will, hopefully, be helpful. Senator Webb was equally eloquent in his position. We adopted that report language. I think we should stand with it. It is simply not good public policy for Congress to prematurely limit training locations--particularly when those sites have not been fully considered by the military.

So it is, hopefully, going to prod the Navy to do a lot better in terms of its consultation and communications with our communities in North Carolina, Virginia, and around the country. I also must oppose this amendment.

Madam President, I move to reconsider that vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Madam President, I see the Senator from Oklahoma here.

I object.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be laid aside temporarily and that it be in order for me to offer an amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Graham, and Senator McCain.

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

Madam President, the amendment I now offer, along with Senators Graham and McCain, would modify the procedures for the handling of classified evidence by military commissions. This is language that was requested by the administration witnesses at our hearing on military commissions procedures a few weeks ago.

We have worked closely together, and we have worked closely with the administration on the language. It is our

understanding that this amendment will fully address the administration's concerns. It has the support of the Justice Department and the Department of Defense.

Section 1031 of the bill, which addresses military commissions, is based on the standard established by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case that military commissions should be conducted in a manner consistent with the procedures applicable in trials by courts-martial, and that any deviation from those procedures be justified by ``evident practical need.'' For this reason, the procedures now in the bill for the handling of classified information are based on the procedures established in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

However, the witnesses at our July 7 hearing on military commissions made a persuasive case that the procedures for the handling of classified information in Federal court--the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA--would provide a better model for handling classified information. The reason is, the Federal courts have far more experience handling classified information and far more precedent applicable to the difficult issues raised by classified information in detainee cases. DOD general counsel Jeh Johnson explained the issue as follows:

[W]e note that the legislation incorporates certain of the

classified evidence procedures currently applicable in

courts-martial, where there is relatively little precedent

and practice regarding classified information.

Mr. Johnson continues:

We in the administration believe that further work could be

done to codify the protections of classified evidence, in a

manner consistent with the protections that now exist in

Federal civilian courts. We believe that those protections--

--

Referring to the Federal civilian court protections----

would work better to protect classified information, while

continuing to ensure fairness and providing a stable body of

precedent and practice for doing so.

VADM Bruce McDonald, the Judge Advocate General of the Navy, testified in a very similar way. He said:

Section 949d provides for the use of rules of evidence in

trials by general courts-martial in the handling of

classified evidence. This is consistent with our overall

desire to use those procedures found within the UCMJ . . .

whenever possible. However, experience has shown that

practitioners struggle with a very complex and unclear rule

within the Military Rules of Evidence. The military rules do

not have a robust source of informative or persuasive case

law. Frankly, prosecutions using Military Rule of Evidence

505 are rare. In developing the rules for the handling of

classified material during a military commission, it would be

more prudent to rely upon the Classified Information

Procedures Act (CIPA) used in Article III courts as a

starting point.

Since the time of the hearing, we have been working on a bipartisan basis with the administration to produce new language on the handling of classified information, consistent with the recommendations of our witnesses. In accordance with those recommendations, and our own thinking and discussion, the language in the amendment we are considering today tracks very closely with CIPA. In a few areas, we have chosen to codify standards that are applicable case law under CIPA to provide additional clarity.

The amendment is consistent with the intention of the bill to apply established procedures to military commissions and to deviate from those established procedures, where justified, by evident practical need. There is an evident practical need here. We have a good experience under CIPA, and we decided that is the better model to follow.

We also believe the procedures in this amendment will facilitate the handling of classified information in trials by military commissions in a way that is fair to both sides.

I have a letter from the Department of Justice on this matter which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.

Again, I thank Senator Graham and Senator McCain. Senator Graham is an expert we all look to in matters such as this. He has not only personal experience but he has a vast amount of personal knowledge from study, as well as his own experience in this area, and it is invaluable to us. It does help make possible the conclusion we offer the body.

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

Mr. President, there is now pending an amendment that I have offered on behalf of myself, Senator Graham, and Senator McCain relative to the protection of classified information; is that correct?

Mr. President, I think we are now ready to vote on this amendment.

The pending matter now would be to return to the Akaka amendment; is that correct?

Mr. President, I yield the floor.