A bill to extend the temporary suspension of duty on yarn of carded cashmere of 19.35 metric yarn count or higher.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 40 minutes.

Mr. President, we have learned this morning that the unemployment rate has gone to 7.2 percent. Percentages don't mean much to a household in which one spouse comes home and says: Honey, I lost my job. We have seen now more than 2.5 million people lose their jobs in the last 12 months. We face a very severe and deep financial crisis. There is no question

about that. There has not been a debate in the Senate about whether there is a problem. This is probably the first area of agreement. There is a big problem with this economy.

The question is, What do we do about it? What can give people confidence that we can pull this economy out of the ditch and try to provide for growth and opportunity and expansion once again?

It is interesting. I read in the newspaper yesterday that the New York Yankees offered a pitcher $22 million a year to pitch for the next 8 years. So not all of the economy is in deep trouble, apparently. There is at least one baseball team and one pitcher smiling today. But even as we read those kinds of stories, many American families are worried about losing their jobs and their homes, concerned about what the future holds. I wanted to talk about that today.

All of us understand the economic engine of America has stalled. All of us understand the mechanics of starting an engine. If the engine of the ship of state is stalled, I am all for hooking up jumper cables and trying to start it. That is the discussion we had in our caucus for 2 hours yesterday--about what kind of emergency actions can jump-start the economy, what kind of jumper cables or hand crank or whatever effort one wants to make will help get the economy up and running again. The point I made yesterday was, that is important to do, and I support it. But we ought to focus like a laser if we are going to spend money we don't have to put together an emergency plan for some sort of economic recovery. That means we are going to borrow money. If we are going to borrow money at a time of escalating substantial Federal deficits, I want every single penny to go toward creating a job that will put somebody back on the payroll and give their family hope for the future.

This is all about building confidence. But even as we do that, if we ignore the fundamental requirement to rewire this engine, then we have missed the boat. By rewiring, I mean this financial system has collapsed. The biggest names in finance have collapsed. They have been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal help. We have to rewire the whole thing. If we don't rewire that system and make basic fundamental reforms, we will not restore confidence in the American people about the financial system going forward. That means accountability looking back and accountability looking ahead.

It means making certain we end what we have seen created in recent years--a house of cards. I have the house on top because this starts with an unbelievable scandal in the mortgage industry, subprime lending, and so on. I know we read in the papers about Mr. Madoff having absconded with $50 billion of investor money by building a Ponzi scheme. The tongue and groove of all of the rest of this fits and is no different than the Ponzi scheme of Mr. Madoff. It was brokers, mortgage bankers, investment banks and hedge funds. It was collateralized debt. It was securitized instruments. It was exotic structured financial instruments created for one purpose: to give everybody a lot of money as they all wallowed in the creek. So the fact is, we have to fix it.

Everybody is talking about jump-starting economy, putting people back to work. I am all in favor of doing that, but I want to make certain we rewire this system. I want to talk a little about what needs to be done.

Let me say also that people who created this wreck, the people who steered this country into the ditch, are not going to be the ones who show up with an ambulance. They will not be the ones we will turn to for advice on how to fix it. That is just a fact. My great worry is we have already authorized $700 billion for the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. Isn't it interesting that the title of that program has nothing to do with what is happening? I didn't vote for it because I didn't think those who requested it had the foggiest idea what they were going to do with it. The request came from the Secretary of the Treasury saying: I need $700 billion in emergency money, and I need it in 3 days. Here is a three-page bill to do it. That made no sense. He wanted to relieve financial institutions of troubled assets.

Why did they have all these troubled assets? Because they were greedy and dumb, buying things that now in retrospect had very little value and very big risk. So we ended up with the biggest financial institutions in the country having massive amounts of assets on their balance sheets that have lost value.

So the Treasury Secretary said: Give me $700 billion of taxpayer money so I can go buy those bad assets and relieve those poor companies of these failed assets. So the Congress voted for $700 billion, $350 billion of which was made available right away.

The Treasury Secretary then decided: I really don't want to do that at all. I don't want to buy troubled assets, despite the fact that is in the name of the program. What I would like to do is provide capital for big banking institutions so they can expand lending because that is the circulatory system of our economy. We need to expand lending.

So a rather substantial amount of money was given to the biggest financial institutions, $125 billion in one tranche to nine of the big financial institutions. It was essentially no-strings-attached money. The money was provided to those financial institutions without saying to them: By the way, you have to use this to expand lending in order to deal with the credit freeze. There were no restrictions that said: If you take this money, you can't then give it out in executive bonuses. In fact, we now have a report from December of last year on the Troubled Asset Relief Program by the GAO. It says:

The standard agreement between Treasury and the

participating institutions does not require that these

institutions either track or report how they plan to use or

do use this money.

Isn't that unbelievable? We gave all this money to the biggest banks, and there is no requirement that they track or report on how they plan to use or do use the money? Then when a number of them were asked what they did with the money by the GAO, many executives of those companies said: Well, money is fungible. They don't intend to track or report what they did with that capital.

That is unbelievable to me. This is apparently some sort of no- accountability Government. There is nothing I am aware of, of course, in the U.S. Constitution that decides this is the way that representative Government ought to perform.

But when the Treasury Secretary came to the Congress, along with the Chairman of the Federal Serve Board--talk about secrecy, by the way, that is another institution that has another story attached to it--but they came to the Congress--the two of them; the head of the Fed and the Treasury Secretary--and here are the kinds of things we heard from them: We need oversight. We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.

Well, the administration the Treasury Secretary works for--after he told us that--has failed. This is a Washington Post report: The administration has failed to establish sufficient oversight over its $700 billion program and must move rapidly to guarantee that banks are complying with the limits on conflict of interest, lavish executive compensation. So they say, yes, we agree. Give us the money. There will be oversight. And we discover: Well, there is no oversight at all.

The Federal Reserve Board, they are refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of assistance backed emergency loans from American taxpayers. They refuse to identify the troubled assets they are accepting as collateral. The Federal Reserve opened it window for the first time in history to noninsured banks. They have all kinds of programs now to move money out. I understand there is an urgency here, but I do not understand why the American taxpayers are told: By the way, you are the guarantor of a lot of these debts, you are going to pick up the pieces, and you are going to pay for it, but we are not going to tell you what it is we are doing. Mr. President, $2 trillion of emergency loans for troubled assets and they say: You don't deserve to know. We are not going to tell you.

In fact, Bloomberg, the news organization, had to sue the Federal government to try to get details about the

total has gone out in terms of guarantees and capital which, by the way, is over $8 trillion. It does not mean we are going to lose all that. My point is, why should a news organization have to sue the Government in order to give the American people some information about how much they are on the hook for with all of this emergency activity?

About $8.5 trillion is what we have discovered as a result of Bloomberg and the work of some other enterprising reporters. It certainly is not the work of a Federal agency that has come to the Congress to say: Oh, by the way, here is exactly what you need to know. In fact, just the opposite has happened. The Federal Reserve program has about $5.5 trillion now they have engaged. I understand that is an organization that prints money, but I also understand that organization, in the end stage, is an organization created by the U.S. Congress, and any liabilities existing there are liabilities of the American people. The FDIC program is $1.5 trillion; the Treasury Department, $1.1 trillion; and Federal housing, $300 billion. That is, at this point, a compilation of about $8.5 trillion of liability that exists out there.

Now, I want to make a couple points before I try to describe what has happened and what I think should happen.

This has been a consumer-driven economy. It is not surprising. I brought to the floor of the Congress one day a whole stack of letters. At that point, I had a 12-year-old son, and the Diners Club had written to my son offering him a credit card, preapproved, suggesting perhaps a trip to Europe would be in line. So I brought that and probably a dozen or two dozen other solicitations to my children from credit card companies--from MasterCard and Visa and Diners Club and American Express--all of them writing to my kids. Obviously, they had no idea whose kids they were or how old they were. They were just names in some sort of a name bank. They were writing to them to say: Here is a preapproved credit card for you. Go have a good time.

What has happened all across this country is they are wallpapering college campuses with credit cards. It is unbelievable. On most college campuses, many kids don't have a job. They are going to school. Yet credit card companies understand that is the best place to go find a customer.

So there are credit cards all around, wallpapering the entire country with credit card solicitations. In fact, if you have another card, get rid of it. Bring it to us. We will charge you zero interest for 3 months. We don't tell you, by the way, if you have a little problem one month, we are going to jack your rate up to 25 percent or whatever it is they are doing these days in rates and fees.

The fact is, that dramatic runup in the last couple of decades in credit card debt has been unbelievable, and that is what has been supporting a substantial amount of the consumption.

In addition, about $300 to $350 billion a year has been supporting additional American consumption because of the increase in home values which, of course, represents that huge bubble that was created in home values. That allowed people to believe they had more money because their home was more valuable and they could borrow against the home, and that contributed another $350 billion to the economy. But it was a substantial amount of consumer initiative coming from credit card debt and from home values that they could borrow against which it turns out were illusory increases in home values because those values have now collapsed.

My point is that our consumer-driven economy was driven by, in some cases, fumes that are not going to be around in the future, and we are not going to be able to replicate that to build a new economy with that same kind of debt consumer-driven initiative.

As you know, about at that point, oh, 8, 10 years ago, as the bubble began to develop in home values, there was this issue of thinking that everybody could make a lot of money by developing new and exotic mortgages for homes and putting people into their homes who probably could not buy a home or finding people who were in existing homes and saying to them: You are paying way too much. So what happened was, a huge industry developed in this country. Even as they were securitizing credit card debt and selling it back upstream, they began to develop a new industry to finance homes, and then found a way to securtize those home mortgages and sell those back upstream as well.

This is what we began to see in this country. Everybody saw it. All you had to do was watch your television set and you saw the commercial come across. This was Countrywide, which was the biggest bank: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us.

The biggest mortgage company in the country said: Are you a bad person because you can't pay your bills? Are you a bad credit risk? Do you have lots of trouble? Are you buying things you can't pay for? Hey, I tell you what, we have a deal for you. Come. We will give you a loan. That is Countrywide.

By the way, this company failed and has been purchased by someone else. But the head of this company, Mr. Mozilo, was given the Horatio Alger award as one of the best executives in America, and from what I can tell, he it appears to have walked away with about $200 million. So even though his company is gone and he does not have the job he had, he certainly cannot be weeping, or if he is, he is wiping his tears with $200 million of cold cash.

So it was not just Countrywide. Millenia Mortgage--again, we saw all these. This was not some dark secret: Twelve months no mortgage payment. That's right. We will give you the money to make your first 12 payments on your home. Just call in 7 days. We will pay it for you. Our loan program could reduce your current monthly payment by 50 percent and allow you to make no payments for the first 12 months. Just call us. Pretty enticing, right? You want a home, you want a mortgage, you don't want to make a payment for a year. No problem. Just call us up.

ZoomCredit. ZoomCredit says in their advertisement: Credit approval is seconds away. Get on the fast track at ZoomCredit. At the speed of light, ZoomCredit will preapprove you for a car loan, a home loan, or a credit card. Even if your credit is in the tank, ZoomCredit is like money in the bank. ZoomCredit specializes in credit repair, and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit--who cares?

Can you imagine a company that says: I have a new model. We are so proud of our company, we actually specialize in giving credit to people who don't deserve it?

Now, does one wonder--when companies such as this sprang up all over the country--why our economy is in a wreck, why we have experienced this economy being driven into the ditch by a lot of bad people? Three mortgage companies--and, oh, by the way, just in case you are wondering, is it over? No.

This is from the Internet: Low-doc loans and no-doc loans. What does that mean? It means if you go to the Internet, you can still find a company that says, just as the others did: We have a new financial instrument for you that is really intriguing--no documentation of your income. That is right. We will loan you money without you having to document your income to us. Does that sound ignorant? It does to me. But we will charge you a higher interest rate in exchange for your deciding not to document your income. No-doc loans: no doc, no payments for the first 12 months. And, oh, by the way, when you do first start making payments, you don't have to make any payments on principal, just interest. If that is not good enough, we will give you a no-doc loan, no payments for 12 months, no principal, and you don't have to pay all the interest because we will wrap the principal and some of the interest on the back side. Does anybody wonder why we had a financial wreck?

So we had all these companies put out this sort of Ponzi scheme. Yes, Madoff is apparently a pretty awful guy because he ran a Ponzi scheme of $50 billion, it appears to me. This was all a Ponzi scheme as well, and everybody was involved in it.

So these mortgage companies put people in these mortgages called subprime mortgages, and then the broker made a lot of money because the broker was able to get people into these mortgages. And I did not mention, they put prepayment penalties into the mortgages so you could not pay it off early or you had a big penalty? Then they wrapped it into a big

security. They put all of them together, like you put a snowball together, in a big security--that is called securitization--and then you sell it. So you sell it to perhaps an intermediary or perhaps you sell it to a Wall Street firm that takes a look at it and says: That is pretty good. That has a high rate of return because you have prepayment penalties and all these things, and the interest rates were really low, but they reset in 3 years to be really high. What a good deal. So I am going to buy these securities.

Everybody is buying securities like hogs in a trough. The brokers are making money. The mortgage company is making massive amounts of money. The people who are securitizing it are making money. The big investment banks are making money. In fact, the current Secretary of the Treasury--his firm and four other firms came to the Securities and Exchange Commission one day in 2004 and said: What we need you to provide is some relaxation for us so we can take on more debt to buy more of these kinds of securitized instruments and make more money.

In the basement, deep in the bowels of the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a hearing, by unanimous vote, the SEC, for the company that was headed by the current Treasury Secretary and four other of the largest investment banks, said: It is OK. We will allow you to take some of this money you set aside in the event of failure of your assets--the reserves--and you can take some of those reserves and use them now to make more money by these investments. That meant some of those firms went from 12 times leverage to 30 times leverage.

Isn't that unbelievable? They were all fat and happy, making money left and right. And then the whole thing crashed. That financial scandal, this subprime scandal, took this country right to the edge of a cliff. It was not just this, but it was led by this, and it was especially this.

At the same time all of this carnival of greed was going on in this country--at the same time we were spending, in budget policy--President Bush leading the charge; and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, a part of it--spending in fiscal policy way beyond our means, $600 billion a year. Oh, I know the reported budget deficit was $400 billion last year. It was not $400 billion. What your deficit really is is what you had to borrow for the year. That was over $600 billion. So we were $600 billion out of balance in fiscal policy, and that is going to be over $1 trillion this year.

Then add to that a trade problem of $700-plus billion a year, consuming 3 percent more than you produce every year--year after year after year--and then energy prices on a roller coaster. Oil runs way up to $147 a barrel in day trading, just like that, and then collapses right back down, and now goes back up because of the circumstances in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Then health care is busting everybody's budget--the family budget, the business budget, the Government budget. All of those together is an almost perfect storm.

So the question is, What do we do about all that because this economy is a mess? It is in very serious trouble, and the one thing that unites me and the smartest economist or the most prescient business mind in this country is that neither of us have ever been here before. We are walking in woods that have no maps. We do not know. None of us know exactly how you are going to move people out of this situation, how you move this country. I taught economics in college ever so briefly but I do know this: This is not about charts and bar graphs, and it is not about supply demand curves. It is all about confidence. Will we see the restoration of confidence? Because if people are confident about the future, they do things that manifest that confidence. If they are confident about themselves and their jobs, they buy a suit, they buy a car, buy a home, take a trip; they do the things that expand America's economy. If they are not confident, they do exactly the opposite. They defer the purchase. They decide not to take the trip, not to buy the car. That is the contractional side of the business cycle, but this is much more than a business cycle. Still, confidence is at the root of our opportunity to put this country back on track.

I have great hope for this country, but I wish to say this again. I have described some of the unbelievable circumstances of the carnival of greed that has led us into this economic trap, and if we don't address both sides of this issue--first, to try to jump start this engine of ours and rewire it at the same time--but if we don't at the same time, then, make those in this kind of financial industry accountable for past actions and for future actions, we will not in any way give the American people confidence about the future.

So the question of what do you do in addition to a recovery package or stimulus program--which I will speak about in a moment--the question of what you do in addition to that leads me to the discussion I had with my colleagues last evening. I said we must revisit unbelievably bad decisions and judgments that have been made in the last 10 and 15 years. For example, in 1999, the Financial Modernization Act was passed by this Congress; financial modernization to help create the large financial holding companies, to take away the Glass-Steagall Act-- abolish the very act that was put together following the Great Depression that said: You have to separate banking interests from risk interests. You have to separate securities and you have to separate real estate. That was Glass-Steagall. You have to keep them separate. In 1999, this Congress, in legislation called Gramm-Leach-Bliley, after Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, said: You know what. We have to do something that modernizes our financial system. We have to get rid of Glass-Steagall. We have to create big bank holding companies. We have to allow that to be the case, and we have to allow banks to merge with real estate, with insurance, with securities.

Now, I was one of eight Senators to vote no. On the floor of the Senate, here is what I said in 1999: This bill will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts.

I regret I was right.

It will fuel consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services and it will be done at the expense of the American people.

I said at the same time in that debate: I say to people who own banks--talking about the folks who pushed this--and, by the way, this was pushed because one large bank wanted to merge with one large insurance company and they couldn't do it because the law wouldn't allow it. What is the response? We will go get the law changed. It wasn't just this Congress; it was President Clinton and his advisers-- some of whom, by the way, are going to work in this new administration. They said all of this is good. We are going to modernize the system. I thought it was nuts. Three years before this, I had written a cover story for the Washington Monthly Magazine, talking about derivatives and what I had previously described as securities sold upstream by the big mortgage companies, and the title of my cover story, in 1994, I believe it was, in Washington Monthly Magazine: ``Very Risky Business.'' From that time, I have introduced five pieces of legislation to require the regulation of derivatives and to prohibit banks from trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts but to no avail because there were too many people who believed we need to modernize the system--meaning, they said, take away the restrictions that were put in place after the Great Depression. Take away the restrictions that prohibited banks from engaging with real estate and securities and other things that were risky. Well, they succeeded. I failed in stopping it. The fact is, it is what set up this unbelievable, spectacular financial collapse in this country. The question is: Now what?

I am going to introduce some legislation today, and I wish to talk about, specifically, the requirements of the legislation. I am not willing--as I was not willing last fall on the $700 billion proposal--I am not willing to advance assistance proposals unless the American people are protected. I am going to introduce the Taxpayer Protection Act that does four things that are tough, certain, and require accountability. I don't know whether there is the support or the stomach to pass this kind of legislation, but I will not be advancing support for additional taxpayers' money until and unless we have some assurance that these things are done. First of all, establishing a Financial Market Investigation and Reform Commission.

Back at the end of the Roaring Twenties, which, by the way, the history books will certainly compare the era of the Roaring Twenties with the Gay Nineties and the unbelievable excess and greed--but at the end of the twenties and early thirties, the Congress put together a committee that investigated and subpoenaed and brought people here to find out what happened, who did it, how did it happen, and what do we do to stop it from ever happening again. That needs to be done again. There ought to be a select committee of the Congress doing that right now, and I hope we will do that. Some will say: Well, we have existing authorizing committees in the Congress that can do that. The fact is they are not going to do it. They have never done it and will not do it. If we don't put together those kinds of committees or commissions here and now and issue subpoenas and discover what happened, we will not know how to prevent it from happening again. We need to establish that reform commission to investigate and then propose reforms. That is the rewiring portion of what I described.

Second: I want all emergency economic assistance programs, including the troubled asset relief program--the $700 billion that I didn't vote for, but others did--to have oversight, accountability, and transparency. That needs to be required for all of that. There is no oversight for $7.8 trillion in emergency economic assistance at this point that has been issued by the Federal Reserve Board. No oversight at all. None. The same requirements in the TARP program ought to be applied to every other bailout by the Fed or by the Treasury or others providing similar help.

Third: we should make conditions imposed on one company receiving emergency economic aid applicable to all companies, and that is limits on executive compensation, prohibiting bonuses and golden parachutes, and payment of dividends and private aircraft ownership, and more. We should require those private entities receiving the emergency economic assistance to be subject to audit, provide detailed monthly reports, tell us: What did you do with that money? Is that money advancing the economic interests of this country to put this country back on track?

Finally, we should create a Taxpayer Protection Prosecution Task Force to investigate and prosecute financial fraud cases and other violations of laws that contributed to the collapse of this country's economy.

It is unbelievable to me that a couple things conspired at the same time. One, Congress passes the Financial Modernization Act, which was a complete disaster for this country. Two years later, President Bush came to town and hired a bunch of folks who were supposed to be regulators who, actually, in some cases, boasted: We don't intend to regulate. We want to be willfully blind. That combination has injured this country in a very significant way.

Our country's financial markets--the Wall Street Journal said in an article by Arthur Levitt on October 23--are in their darkest hours in 76 years. We are in this situation because of an adherence to a deregulatory approach. Our regulatory system failed.

I know there are people I serve with who think regulation is a four- letter word. It is essential. The free market must, in certain areas, have proper regulatory authority.

Alan Greenspan, who bears a significant part of this responsibility as then chairman of the Fed, here is what he says now: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations--specifically banks and others--were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity. What he was saying, if I translate this to English, he was saying: I believed in self-regulation, or I believed in no one regulating because they will self-regulate.

I come from a small town and a small school. I graduated in a high school class of nine. That wouldn't pass a laugh test in second grade. Just let them all go and they will do what is in the country's best interests? That is unbelievable to me.

So we have a lot of work to do. The banking system after 1999 evolved so that we had a lot of banks that were considered too big to fail, but they weren't big enough to regulate, apparently. Too big to fail, which means that if they get in trouble, we are the ones who are going to pick up the costs. We bear the burden. We will be responsible. But they are not big enough to regulate, so they get the best of all worlds. They get taxpayer protection with no requirements, no accountability. This is just a few of them.

Let me make an aside. Even as I have described on the floor of the Senate in the past, some of the same firms that, by the way, require bailouts are firms that have been so irresponsible in other areas. Yes, I am upset about the way these mortgages were put out. I am upset about the greed and the avarice and all the money people were making; one guy making $20 million a year and his buddy making $30 million a year, running one of the biggest investment banks into the ground, by the way. One of the biggest bailouts has been of one of the biggest investment banks. To my knowledge, nobody lost their jobs, nobody parked their airplanes.

Wachovia Bank. Wachovia Bank went sour, so they had to be purchased, but it wasn't just because they were involved in toxic assets. Wachovia Bank--it is a culture apparently here. They had bought a German sewer system. You might ask the question: Why would an American bank buy the sewer system of a German city? Because they like sewers? Because they have a sewer department in the bank? Because they have special knowledge of sewers? No. They bought a German city's sewer system and leased it right back to the city because you are not going to dig up the sewer pipes of a German city, right? Why would you want to own it in a German city? Because you can lease it right back. It is a big scam because you can reduce your U.S. tax bill to the U.S. Government by hundreds of million of dollars.

I shouldn't pick on Wachovia because there are plenty of others who did it. This happens to be a convenient case. A big old bank buying a sewer system of a German city so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. By the way, the same company got in trouble with bad assets; part of the whole scam in terms of what happened with the scandal of the subprime system that steered this country into the ditch.

Now, let me say that this issue of President-elect Obama proposing to us a stimulus program or economic recovery program is a very important issue for us to consider. I am a chairman of one of the subcommittees on appropriations. We are working on my portion of this effort to find out what could we invest in, in what some call ``shovel ready jobs'' that will put people to work immediately. There are water programs, highways, bridges, schools, things we can do that will put people to work and do it immediately, put people back on payrolls. At the end of that expenditure, you have better schools, better roads, better bridges, and water projects that will enhance life. So those are the right things to do. But we all know there are plenty of people who have proposals that have nothing to do with putting people back to work. I am very concerned about that.

I am also concerned about the tax side of this. We are talking about 40 percent of this proposal representing the tax side. I think there are some things we can do in the tax system to encourage investment which encourages employment. Here are some of the proposals I have made: $250,000 expensing for small business equipment so we encourage the decisions to make or buy or build equipment right now. That puts people to work. So there are some things on the tax side that I think make some sense, but I worry about 40 percent on the tax cut side. No one is going to have a problem saying: Yes, give us a tax cut. Everybody likes that.

But the proposition on the expenditure side, a whole lot of folks are coming in with projects that have nothing to do with creating jobs. I don't want to be part of that. Money is going to be borrowed in any event. We need to get this right. I am willing to participate, and I am willing to support the kinds of investments that will put people back to work and create an asset for our country--better roads, better bridges, better schools, water projects that we need for the future. I am willing to do all that if it puts people back to work. But we ought to be looking

with a laser at what is it that will put people on payrolls to try to jump-start the economy.

Even if we do that, if we don't rewire this system and do the financial reform I described in the legislation I am introducing today, we are not going to succeed because the people will not be confident about the future.

We have to fix what has helped cause this scandal, and that includes fixing a trade system where we consume 3 percent more per year than we produce, fixing a trade system where we have $700 billion a year trade deficit, fixing a fiscal policy budget situation that is way out of balance. We have to do all those things.

I would not be able to come to work in the morning if I were not hopeful. I still have great hope for this country. I am an optimist. Yes, I want to look back and hold people accountable. I want subpoenas, and I want to prosecute wrongdoing. I want to do all those things with respect to this financial scandal. I think it is big. I think a whole lot of folks took the $30 million, and they are at home and they are wiping their tears with American currency while a lot of other people have lost their homes and their jobs. I want us to investigate. I want accountability looking back, and I want accountability going forward. All of that is very important to me. But I do want to say this: I am somebody inspired by the ability of this country to recover and to ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to come together and do things that will pull up this country, lift this country.

The other day, I was reading a news report of a guy, and I was so inspired by it. It is so typically American of somebody out there--way out there thinking: I can do this. I read about a guy named Ken Mink. I don't know Ken Mink from a cord of wood.

Ken Mink comes into the house one night and says to his wife: Honey, it is back.

She said: What is back?

He is 73 years old.

Honey it is back.

What is back?

My shot.

He had been out shooting baskets in the backyard.

My shot--I am shooting baskets. I am not missing any.

He had been a college basketball player, and because of a prank, he got kicked out of college. At the age of 73, he is shooting baskets in his backyard and says: Honey, it is back.

So he sat down and wrote applications to college. A junior college said: Yes, we will give you a shot; you can come to school here and try out for the basketball team. At the age of 73, Ken Mink played basketball with a junior college team just a month ago and made two free throws. He was the oldest man, I think, by 42 years to ever score a point in a college basketball game. Isn't that wonderful? It is so inspiring that people don't know what they can't do.

As an aside, my Uncle Harold is 88 years old, and he is training for the Senior Olympics because he qualified to go to San Francisco to run in the 100-meter dash. He runs it in under 19 seconds, by the way, at age 88. My aunt thinks he had a stroke, she thinks he has gone crazy because he runs all over the country running races. My uncle is 88 and can run faster than most people his age and has 100 medals. I am inspired by my Uncle Harold and by Ken Mink, and I am inspired by people who don't know what they can't do.

I hope in the coming days when we talk about all the ingredients of all the issues, the proposals that are complicated and difficult, I hope all of us will understand, if we ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves, to help this country recover and put this country back on track. You go back over two centuries of history, and there is not much this country cannot do. There is just not much America cannot do. This is a country that rolls up its sleeves and has great hope for the future.

I know my colleague from Oklahoma is here to speak. I appreciate his forbearance. I will be back Monday to talk some more about these issues.

There is no social program in this country as important as a good job that pays well. The reason I say that is the root of giving people hope about the future is to have opportunities for the American people to find a good-paying job, keep a job that has some benefits, to give them an opportunity to take care of their families. That is where we start.

I hope in the coming days, as we discuss and work on these issues, we will have the opportunity to call on what is the best in this country rather than the worst and come together and do what we can to restore to America the kinds of opportunities we have always felt will exist for our children.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business, the time I might consume not to exceed 1 hour.

Mr. President, let me give some praise to my chairman of one of my committees. He hit right on the nose. Confidence is what the American people need to see. We have great resources in this country, and I am not talking materially. The resource we have that is the most bountiful and most productive and strongest and made of steel is the American people. When we get together, united as a nation, there is not anything we cannot accomplish.

I appreciate his words very much. I also appreciate some of his wisdom and foresight we heard today. I am hopeful that in the months and years to come, we can continue to work and we can draw on that American spirit which he so directly outlined, which is what makes us unique and allows us to come from behind and accomplish the things in front of us. I thank him for his words.

I wish to spend a few minutes--we are going to have several votes between now and next week over the Bingaman lands bill. I thought we ought to spend some time today to do that since I know we won't want to come in early on Sunday. I wish to talk about procedure for a moment so we can understand.

We are going to be here on Sunday not because we have to but because the majority leader has decided that we will. There are other things we can be accomplishing. And goodness knows, the problems in front of this country require extra effort on our part. We are going to have a $10 billion to $12 billion bill in front of us again that will have no amendments available to it and very limited discussion. As a matter of fact, I think I am the only one who has discussed anything on this bill thus far, and we probably will not see a lot of discussion.

There are a lot of issues we need to address, and my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just outlined the most important of them; that is, confidence, how do we reestablish confidence in this country. It is my position that we are not going to reestablish confidence in the country until we reestablish confidence in this institution.

Since July 16, the Republicans have had one amendment allowed on the floor of the Senate. In the last 6 months, one amendment--that was September 10. In 6 months of legislation, we have had one amendment allowed to the minority side to express the views for greater than 50 percent of the American people.

If the Senate is about anything, it is about the ability to debate and amend the interests of the American people. What we have seen over the past 6 months is that the rights of Americans have been taken away in terms of discussion, debate, and amendment of the very large issues that are in front of us.

My position on this bill--which the American people should know is a hodgepodge of a ton of bills; it is not just all lands bills--is about priority. It is about reestablishing confidence. It is about doing the most important things that are of the highest priority for our country and not doing the things that are of the lowest priority even though it may make us look extremely good back home.

Some will contend this is just an authorization bill, that it doesn't spend any money whatsoever, that it will have to be appropriated. I remind them there is mandatory spending in this bill, so there is actual spending involved.

Also--and I won't do this, but I am prepared to do so if I need to--I will

offer into the Record the press releases of everybody talking about all the money that is going to be spent because of this bill. You cannot be on the Senate floor saying this does not spend any money and at the same time send a press release out telling your constituency that you just passed a bill that will spend money that will do something because you are actually creating a false expectation if you don't expect to appropriate the money.

So let's be clear about why we cannot afford to pass this bill. It has to do with a whole lot of things. One is we cannot continue to operate the Senate where there are no amendments for the minority because what it does is it cuts off the voice of over half the American public, by populations that are represented by the minority. But there are other greater reasons.

We have a $10.6 trillion debt at this point. We are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit next year. That is $1.2 trillion as a minimum estimate by CBO, which does not include the $160 billion we will steal from Social Security and will not include half of the money that is coming in a stimulus package. If you take 300 million Americans and divide them by $1.8 trillion, what you get is $6,000 per man, woman, and child that we are going to run in the red next year, real dollars, real loss in the future, and we are going to have to pay that back sometime. The people in this room, the Members of the Senate are not ever going to be attached the cost of the price to pay that back.

Last year, we paid $230 billion in interest alone. That is about $900 per man, woman, and child in this country--$860, actually--that we are paying in interest, which is going to double over the next 4 years. So not only are we going to run a $6,000 deficit, we are going to run another $800 in interest costs that are going to take away the potential of families across this country who are struggling, and that is what we are going to put into their future.

So when my colleague talks about confidence, what I want the American people to see is us working on the real problems that are at hand, not problems that are not real or are not a priority.

We offered several amendments. We were told we were getting no amendments to this bill. I am going to spend some time going through those amendments because I think a lot of them make sense. I am also going to spend the majority of my time talking about the main reason I oppose this bill.

If you will recall, back in the summer we were paying $4 for gasoline. We saw oil at $146 a barrel, which is now around $40. And the assumption of this bill is we will never see high oil and gas prices again. The very time to be fixing our future energy needs is now, not when there is a crisis again.

What this bill does is essentially take 1.3 trillion barrels of oil in this country and say: You can never touch it. That is 1.3 trillion barrels that we will never, ever--regardless of our technology, regardless of whether we can do it totally without any impact whatsoever on the environment, we will never be able to touch it under the auspices of this bill. It takes 9.3 trillion cubic feet of known natural gas that is in proven reserves right now, enough to fuel this country for 2\1/2\ years, and it says: You cannot touch that; you can never touch it. And then another couple hundred trillion cubic feet that are known to exist, with the technology that is here today.

Why would we do that? We just went through a big problem, and because we are in an economic cycle, we are seeing the only benefit of that is lower energy costs. Yet through this bill, we are going to tie the hands of our children for available energy.

This is not about whether you believe in global warming or CO2 as an anthropogenic gas because even if I agreed with that 100 percent, and everybody would agree with it, we are going to take 20 years to transition away from hydrocarbons. Every dollar we send out of this country for the purchase of energy is part of that $700 billion my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just noted as one of our big structural financial problems. So why would we pass a bill that is going to eliminate our ability to achieve some greater level of energy independence?

Another area of why I oppose this bill: property rights are--should be--pristine in this country, and this bill adds 15 new heritage areas, and the Federal Park Service will then fund those who are against the development of the land around it or in it, against the homeowners, the landowners who are actually part of it, through zoning. Even though several of the individual bills in this bill put a prohibition on eminent domain, the vast majority of the bill has no prohibition on eminent domain.

One of the rights fought for, one of the foundational principles of this country, is property, the right to have and hold property and be free, as long as you are not endangering somebody else with that property. Yet we are going to step all over that with this bill. Five separate property rights groups who recognize this is a protected guarantee under the Constitution have come out supporting the defeat of this bill because it tramples on property rights.

Finally, one of the reasons I am opposing the bill is the fiscal nature of what it does. It sets in motion $12 billion ad infinitum over the next 5 years--year by year by year by year--that we are going to spend, and it is going to go into the mix of priorities that are not a priority. Now, there are some things in this bill, I will admit, 20 or 30 items, that should go through here. But the vast majority of the bills in this mega bill are not a priority for this country. They are not a priority whatsoever right now considering the condition in which we find ourselves. So as we contemplate this bill, I believe it demonstrates that we are more interested in looking good at home than fixing the real problems that are facing the country.

So let me for a moment summarize the bill and highlight some of the things that are in it, and then ask the American people to answer this question: Should we add four new National Parks at a time when we have a $9 billion backlog in maintaining the parks we have today? We can't even take care of the parks we have today. We have 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone, in the Grand Tetons, which seeped out because we didn't maintain the pipelines. We have a $700 million backlog on The National Mall; in Lake Mead, NV, a $258 million backlog.

We are not addressing any of the backlogs whatsoever. Yet we are creating greater responsibilities for the National Park Service and the resources they have today. In a declining discretionary budget, because of the fiscal nature in which we find ourselves, we are going to make worse and worse this situation. We are going to create 10 new heritage areas and study 15 others.

Now, remember what happens when we create a new heritage area. We create the inability to ever extract minerals, oil, gas, timber, and other resources. We are saying: Off limits and, by the way, if you like to enjoy the outdoors--maybe you want to go hunting or maybe you want to ride a three-wheeler or four-wheeler or a motorcycle--that may not be available to you. It may be limited.

There are 19 separate provisions in this bill that directly withdraw Federal land from mineral leases, such as oil and gas and geothermal. Nineteen specific. That doesn't have anything to do with the undergirding statutes in terms of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and heritage areas that will eliminate the opportunity for exploration of energy and make us more energy independent.

There are 130-plus bills in this legislation, 1,300 pages, that was introduced two nights ago. I will tell you, other than my staff and probably the committee staff, nobody in this body has looked at it-- 1,300 pages. It is going to get passed out through the body next week, and the vast majority of the Senators and their staffs will have never taken a look at it, at a time when we should be about building confidence not undermining it.

We have 1.2 million acres in one small area of Wyoming that in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s contained the greatest and largest and most powerful pressurized source of natural gas the country had ever seen. As a matter of fact, we didn't have the technology to handle it, so we capped it. It eliminates any additional leasing. It sets it up so those people who have a lease will have a lawsuit filed against them. It will never be developed. It will never be developed because the cost of fighting the

lawsuits will be greater than the benefit of developing the natural gas. The companies that developed that came from Oklahoma. We now have the technology to handle that. It is a proven reserve.

We have 92 new scenic rivers in this bill. Now, I am all for scenic rivers, but we should understand the consequences of a scenic river designation. What does it mean? There will be no power lines across it, there will be no transmission lines, there will be no natural gas pipelines, water pipelines, or slurry lines that can cross a scenic river. What we know, with our desire to use alternative energy, especially in terms of the Southwest for solar and in my part of the country on up through the wind corridor, is that we are going to have to develop transmission lines, probably up to 40,000 miles of transmission lines, and we are going to double the cost of developing those lines because we would not be able to cross a scenic river. There is a prohibition in this bill.

We will eliminate the ability to take the natural gas that is available in abundance in Alaska today, in proven known quantities, and the pipeline that is scheduled to come down to the greater 48 will be tripped up by these designations. Again, another way to shoot ourselves in the foot when energy independence ought to be part of our goal.

The people who want to do the things in these bills are highly motivated for good reasons, but the judgment is suspect at the time in which we find ourselves. We find ourselves dependent on energy and in a financial mess. Yet we are going to make both of those problems worse with this bill.

Today, in this country, we have 108 million acres of developed land. Now, that is cities, that is manufacturing sites, that is towns, and that is highways. That is all of it. We have 109 million acres right now of wilderness designation already, which is twice what was ever thought about being accomplished when the wilderness designation was first started in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then the Government owns another 656 million acres of land. So we are not only robbing the future from our children because we have been fiscally irresponsible, we are robbing their future potential to make decisions about independence and freedom in the future because we are going to be totally indebted in the 20 years that we transition from a carbon-based economy to a noncarbon-based economy. We are going to make that extremely painful, much more difficult, and extremely more expensive.

Let me talk about why the National Park Service is overburdened for a minute and the things we ought to be doing. We have in Hawaii the USS Arizona Memorial. Now, 1,117 Americans died on that ship. The visitors' center--and if you have ever been there, you go out on a boat to the visitors' center--is sinking. The maintenance backlog is about $33 million. What are we going to do? What should we be doing? Creating these new ones or should we take care of the memorial for the USS Arizona? Which one is a priority? Should we maintain what we have or should we do something and say we did it through a press release, even though we are probably not going to have the money to do much of this, and create a false sense of expectation with the American people?

The Gettysburg National Battlefield has a $29 million backlog; the Statue of Liberty Park, a $197 million backlog right now. Remember when Lee Iacocca helped to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty in 1976, and we did all that. That is the last time we have done any regular maintenance. So we have let it fall down. We haven't been responsible. We haven't put the money there. As a matter of fact, today President- elect Obama, in a press conference, asked for ideas as to how to spend money that will actually create jobs and create an investment. Well, I can tell you how I would spend the money. Let's fix up our parks, let's fix up The Mall, let's take care of the $29 million backlog we have on some of the greatest treasures we have in this country before we add to the maintenance headaches of the National Park Service by creating new National Parks. That is a way we could actually create some jobs and invest our money; things we are going to have to invest in someday anyway.

The Grand Canyon National Park has a $299 million backlog. These aren't my numbers, these are National Park Service numbers. And there is the National Mall, as I talked about earlier.

What is in this bill that doesn't make sense just from a commonsense standpoint, maybe something we should do at the right time? How about spending $5 million to compensate ranchers for losses from gray wolves that we reintroduced into the wild? We put them back in there, and now we are going to pay ranchers for the cattle they lost to them. We repopulated a species that is now overgrowing its habitat and coming onto private lands, and our answer to that is, well, we will just pay the losses.

Do we have the money to waste $5 million paying for cattle losses from wild wolves? We might at some point in time. I hardly think we have the money to do that right now. The ranchers aren't going broke. There is no question it is an irritation and a cost to them, but I am not sure the Federal Government ought to be responsible for the cost.

What about the coyotes in Oklahoma that kill our sheep and our chickens? Should we compensate the chicken farmers and the sheep farmers for the coyotes that kill their livestock?

How about $1 billion and counting on the San Joaqin River project to make sure we restore 500 salmon? You heard me right--$1 billion is going to be spent over the next 10 years, and then money after that, to make sure we restore at least 500 salmon. How does that fit with our priorities? It may be something that we ultimately ought to do. How is it that we should do that now? Why should we even be thinking about doing that? How does that fit with any air of common sense?

How about building a road to 800 residents, after we provided a hovercraft to get there? One hundred environmental groups are against building this road through a very pristine area. We do have access another way. Yet we are going to do that, and we are going to spend $2 million per mile over 17 miles, building a one-lane road that many times is not going to be accessible in the winter, through some of the greatest pristine areas that we have. Therefore, 100 environmental groups are adamantly opposed to including this in this bill. You can understand why they think that might not make sense for protecting such pristine land.

This is my favorite: $3.5 million to the city of St. Augustine, FL, to plan--just to plan--for a birthday party 16 years from now for the 450th birthday of St. Augustine, FL. Does that restore confidence in the Senate, that we would say we are going to spend $3.5 million on a city that has been having a birthday party every year? Yet we are going to put another $3.5 million into the kitty to plan for a big one? There is no doubt we should recognize the historic significance of the longest lived settlement in this country at 450 years. But the question is, in today's economic climate, is that something we should be doing? Who out there without a job today would agree that we should do such a thing?

How about spending a quarter of a million dollars to go down to the Virgin Islands to study whether Alexander Hamilton's old home down there ought to be made into a park? Is that a priority now? What would a quarter of a million dollars do for somebody who is unemployed right now? How many mortgages would it get people out from behind who are in arrears? How many people would not default if we could leverage $250,000 to them? We have our priorities messed up.

The reason there is a lack of confidence in the Congress, with an approval rating of 9 percent, is because it is deserved.

There is also $12 million for us to build a new greenhouse for orchids for the Arboretum. We may need to do that. There is no question we should preserve the things that mark our heritage. But is now the time to build a new greenhouse in Maryland to grow orchids? Is it the time? What can we do with that $12 million? Who could we help with that $12 million? Could we use it in a better, more efficient way so that the American people would benefit? If we are going to spend $12 million, couldn't we spend it in a better way?

My State has Route 66 all through it. We have all these tourism things that are in this bill. Now is not the time for

us to be working with grants to promote Route 66 in Oklahoma. Now is the time to be putting that money to work on something that is going to create a job or save a foreclosure or absolutely make a difference in somebody's life, not an aesthetic benefit of the past. We need to start thinking about the benefits of the future.

I talked about the Wyoming range. It will be disputed by the Wyoming Senators, but the fact that the Bureau of Land Management used the latest geologic data and their study uses one that is 2 years old and makes the assumption that all land in Wyoming is the same would refute some of my statistics. But all of the geological engineers in this country and all the oil and gas exploration would remind us of the tremendous loss we are going to achieve by cordoning all that off and not making it available.

I talked about the wilderness designations. I am not against, necessarily, new wilderness designations as long as we limit their impact on property rights. But we do not. As a matter of fact, they directly impact property rights. They directly limit individual property rights. So as we add wilderness areas and zoning requirements within them, we take away the right of the landowner because we fund a specialized group through the National Park Service to change the property rights to the disadvantage of the property owner. People who have no ownership in it will decide what the property's zoning rules will be because they will be funded by the Federal Government. If you are opposed to that, you are disadvantaged because the Government is going to send dollars to your opponent, so we attack property rights at the very basic level. Not only do we challenge them, we take your own money and support your opponent on what you can and cannot do with your own property.

I love scenic rivers. We have the Illinois River in Oklahoma. It is a beautiful, pristine river. It has had some tributary problems, but we actively worked and cleaned it up and it is markedly improving every day. It is a real pleasure.

Should every river in America be a scenic river? And, if it is, how are we going to cross them with utility lines, power transmission lines, natural gas lines, coal slurry lines, bridges, roads? How are we going to do that? We can't. Yet the goal of some is to make everything, every river, a scenic river. Now is not the time for us to do that because it will limit our ability to achieve greater energy independence.

Those are not just threats. A 2001 lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Forest Service for failure to protect wild and scenic rivers in Arizona because a transmission line was coming across a 30-yard segment of it. Guess what happened. We didn't build the transmission line, so power was not made available.

As we think about wind energy and solar energy, especially in the Southwest in the wind corridor, it will do us no good to put windmills out there if we do not have a way to send that energy somewhere else. Yet with this bill there are multiple instances, over 50 instances, where we are going to block our ability to send transmitted power to other areas of the country.

In 2002, on scenic rivers, the lawsuit was won that said within the collection territory of the Los Padres National Forest in California we will not ever permit oil, gas, or mineral development within the river corridor. What happens if we can drill from outside? What if we can send a line 20 miles from the outside? What we are doing is we are saying no matter what the technology you ever develop, no matter how you ever attempt to make us energy independent, it is never going to be OK; we are never going to allow it.

If you look at what this bill does in terms of geothermal--this is the potential geothermal source of energy. It is clean, renewable in this country. We markedly go after some of the most potent areas of geothermal availability in this bill. We say you can't use them. We can use geothermal--clean, alternative energy. But because we want to look good, because we want to say we did something, we changed that.

Just so we might all be informed about how much land the Government actually owns, as you can see in the Western States, in Alaska, the vast majority of the land is owned by the Government. But that is not nearly as significant as what is happening with this bill because large portions of what is not owned by the Government now is very difficult to develop because when we try to get a permit for extraction of minerals, geothermal, gas, coal, or oil, it is hit with lawsuit after lawsuit.

Now, in addition to these high percentages, nearly 50 percent, we are adding all these other things on top of it, the vast majority of which are moving to the west. It makes no common sense, no matter whether you are an avid global warming enthusiast or you are an energy explorer, if we want to stay warm in the winter, it doesn't make sense to anybody.

Mr. President, 29 percent of all the land in this country is owned by the Federal Government. We are markedly increasing that by 2.2 million acres in this bill. We are going to threaten property rights. We are going to use eminent domain. We are going to use very sophisticated and poised sleight-of-hand zoning requirements to change land that is not owned by the Federal Government--to change the ability of the owner of that land to use that land if we pass this bill.

There are about 40 of the bills in this bill that we don't have any problem with. They make sense; they don't cost a lot of money; they accomplish some of the things that are a priority. Let me spend a minute, if I might, just talking about the amendments we were going to offer had we had the ability to offer them. I note again, since July 16 the minority has had the opportunity to offer one amendment in this body, one amendment. In the greatest deliberative body in the world, the minority has had the opportunity to offer one amendment.

One amendment we wanted to offer that I thought made sense: ``No funds can be made available . . . to establish a new unit of the National Park System or National Wilderness Preservation System, a new National Heritage Area . . . new Wild and Scenic Rivers, new wilderness areas . . . until the Secretary of the Interior certifies that the maintenance backlog at the Statue of Liberty National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Gettysburg National Park, Antietam National Battlefield, the National Mall'' in Washington, are up to date.

Why wouldn't we want to take care of what we have now before we add to it?

The Grand Canyon cannot even keep its trails open right now, or employees, due to lack of funding. There are 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone. The Pearl Harbor USS Arizona Memorial is sinking. The manager of the Glacier National Park declared his park bankrupt--the manager. His words: ``We are bankrupt.''

At Gettysburg the number of employees has gone down. Their ability to maintain that significant monument to the history of us coming back together through war, through the results of ending that war and the tremendous number of lives that were lost on that day, General Pickett's charge--the fact is, we are ignoring them. According to some, the National Mall has now become a national disgrace because it is not maintained. We are going to see some of the great difficulties with that when we swear in our next President, with the tremendous burden being placed on it.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the delegate from DC, said we should be ashamed of what the average Mall visitor sees. It is not a priority. We made it politically expedient. We made looking good at home a priority. We have not taken care of our national treasures.

The second amendment we offered, having been through this crush of energy price escalation, what we did was to prohibit new restrictions on American exploration and production--new restrictions; have not changed any of the old ones; we just said: Let's not put any more roadblocks in the way right now until we have a cogent energy policy that does not put us at the mercy of the nations that would like to see us destroyed. That is all we said: Let's not hurt ourselves any worse.

But let me show you what occurs in this bill 19 times. Here is what it says:

Subject to valid existing rights, all Federal land within

this proposed area is withdrawn from all forms of entry,

appropriation or disposal under the public land laws (in

other words, we can never sell it) location, entry

and patent under the mining laws, or disposition under all

laws relating to mineral or geothermal leasing.

It says that 19 times. What we have done is we have completely excluded any ability to get any energy. The ability for us to solve our energy problems over the next 20 years is being tremendously hampered by this bill. That does not include the 2.2 million acres that are added to the wilderness area.

Amendment 3 to strike the Wyoming Range leasing withdrawal provision--if we can extract natural gas and oil and do it in a totally clean, environmentally friendly way and we know we have 300 million barrels of oil and 8.8 trillion cubic feet, probably closer to 15 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves now, why would we take that away? Why would we do that? Tell me how it makes sense to tell OPEC: Keep doing what you have been doing through the years because we know we have some oil, but we are never going to touch it. In the fields around this Wyoming Range, we know there are another 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Locking the resources away is not a partisan issue. My colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, claims this bill is moving us backward, not forward.

Amendment 4 was to strike the $1 billion and counting for 500 salmon.

Amendment 5 was to not spend $3.5 million on a birthday party for St. Augustine, FL, even though it is not directed at--Florida beat Oklahoma last night. It is kind of hard for me to offer that today thinking that is just revenge, but I wrote this long before we lost that game.

Cut the $200,000 for a tropical botanical garden in Hawaii. Should we be spending $200,000 on a tropical botanical garden right now? I mean, does it make sense to anybody in America, when we are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit, that we just throw $200,000 out there for a botanical garden? Is that a priority? I am not suggesting that we abandon everything, but what I am suggesting is that we ought to be about priorities, and I cannot see that as a priority at this time.

How about a cave institute in New Mexico to receive unlimited Federal funding, an authorization that puts no limits on this funding. What happened is this used to be a Federal program, but it could not take private money. So they took it and made it to where it was a private program, hoping to get matching money from Federal grants. Well, they were not successful in getting matching money for Federal grants, so now we are going back and saying it is going to be a Federal program and it gets all the Federal money it wants. Is it a priority for us to have a cave institute right now? I do not think it is a priority.

An amendment to limit Federal employees from using eminent domain to take away the private property rights of American citizens. We either have a right or we do not. But the more we take away property rights, it is not going to be long before we lose other rights. Simple, straightforward amendment, vote it up or down, but at least let the American people see where you stand on property rights for them.

How about an amendment, very straightforward--the Federal Government does not know what it has and what it does not have. How about an annual report detailing the amount of Federal property the Federal Government owns and the cost of Government land ownership to taxpayers. As an aside, we do know the Federal Government is currently holding about $20 billion worth of property that is costing them about $4 billion a year to maintain that they do not want but we can't sell. And last year, property disposal legislation failed to go through this body, even though it costs us $4 billion a year. Common sense.

How about to make sure we can always have a hunting preserve in this country, to limit the restriction on hunting activities as far as the land use on Federal lands with reason, control. We have lots of Federal lands that are overpopulated with species that need to be thinned. Yet we limit the ability of sportsmen to address that.

There were several others. We do not expect to get all of those amendments or the rights for those. As a matter of fact, if the record is right, if you look at what the last 6 months have been, the minority will get one amendment over the next 6 months. We represent over half the population of this country in the greatest deliberative body in the world.

So how are we to rebuild confidence in this country? Is it by packaging 134 bills together and ramming them through because everybody has something in it? Even though some of them may be very much a priority, the rest of them do not have and do not pass the priority test. Is that what we are about? Is that going to build confidence in this country? Is that going to restore the American people's confidence that we are up to the task of attending to the very real and practical, severe needs of this country at this time? Is this something President- elect Obama would say: This is the first thing I want you to pass out of the Senate in terms of a priority. It would not even pass his smell test.

My hope is that we go forward, but that as we go forward, we do it in a way that the American people would like to see us do. The goal is not to delay, the goal is to make the point that we ought to have an option to amend and debate bills. These bills got here because they were trying to be passed without any debate, with no amendment, passed by a procedure called unanimous consent.

It is important that the American people know what that is. Unanimous consent is where a bill comes to both cloakrooms, whether it has gone through committee or not, and it is said, can we pass this bill? Well, the problem is, I read the bills and I put a test on them: Are they a priority? Are they a necessity? Are they something that lessens our debt? Are they within the role that has been granted to us under the enumerated powers of the Constitution as something we ought to be doing? If they are not, I am not trying to stop the bill; all I am saying is, bring it to the floor and let's have some debate and amendments on it. And what we have seen is that there is something wrong if you won't, in the dark of night, let bills go through that the American people never hear anything about. Well, the American people need to hear about it all. This stuff all needs to be online.

There needs to be 30 Senators here today debating this. Instead, we are not. And we are going to let status quo, poor priority, lead us down the path to where we do not have the courage to do what is necessary to fix what is wrong in our country. And this is symbolic of what is wrong, is that we do what is politically expedient rather than what is in the best long-term interests of our country.

I have already readily admitted there are several, maybe 60 bills I have no problem with; I think they are a priority. But when they are packaged together, that takes away property rights, that eliminates our ability to be independent in terms of energy in the future, and that blocks the ability to take alternative forms of energy and create transmission lines so that we can use it somewhere after we produce it. I am going to stand up every time--every time. As a Senator representing 3.8 million people from Oklahoma, that voice is going to be heard; it is not going to be stifled. It may not have an amendment, but it is going to be heard. This country is worth us fighting for. And this is not worth our priority at this time. At the dilatory state we find ourselves in, we ought to be about bigger and better things that really impact people both in the long run and short run and get us out of the problems we are in.

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

Mr. President, I rise to offer some thoughts and observations about the Presidency of George W. Bush as his time in office comes to a close. This is truly a time to thank God for our country, for our system of government, and for our liberty-- unparalleled in the history of the world.

President Bush served at a time of great challenge and even crisis for our country and I wish to focus on him both as a President and a person.

When America's Founders gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, it is said someone asked Benjamin Franklin, the Constitutional Convention's oldest delegate, what form of government was under construction. He famously answered: A republic, if you can keep it. James Madison defined a republic as a government which derives its powers from the people, a principle enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

One way we work to keep our Republic is by the people choosing those who will govern them. In his farewell address in 1837, President Andrew Jackson said:

But you must remember, my fellow citizens, that eternal

vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you

must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.

Elections and transitions of power are part of that vigilance; part of keeping our Republic in order that we might, in the words of the Constitution's preamble, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Every transition goes from something to something and is an occasion to look at what is concluded as well as what is beginning. With the inauguration of President-elect Obama around the corner and the flurry of confirmation activity in the Senate regarding his nominees and the intense focus on economic and other challenges, much of our attention is rightfully focused on the future. But we look to the future from a present shaped by the past. Only by understanding where we have been can we have the ability, perspective, and confidence to act today and plan for tomorrow.

Although a Presidency has a beginning and an end, it is simply part of the flow of events. Presidents inherit situations they did not create and create situations that they then leave to their successors. They may get credit for successes they did not produce and escape blame for failures that do not materialize until after they leave office. That is the nature of political life in America. While we focus on the individual--the President--I think it is more appropriate to speak of an administration--the Presidency.

There are hundreds and hundreds of people who serve at the pleasure of the President to develop and implement his agenda. All this makes very difficult even describing, let alone evaluating, something as multifaceted as the Bush Presidency. Some of President Bush's critics almost reflexively look at opinion polls, noting his approval rating has sunk. I do not have to tell anyone serving in public office about the allure as well as the danger of this particular reflex. Polls are snapshots, they are not motion pictures. The pollster is the photographer. He chooses the subject, the lighting, and the angle. He frames the shot and determines how the final picture turns out.

The Bush Presidency was book-ended by national crises--the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crisis before us today. Not surprisingly, as the Washington Post pointed out a few days ago, President Bush enjoyed the highest approval rating in late 2001 and nearly the lowest in late 2008 in the history of the Post's reporting. Once again, that is the nature of political life in America and comes with the Presidential territory.

While President Bush's approval rating has many ups and downs, one thing has remained absolutely constant: His approval rating has been consistently higher than ours in the Congress. The Web site pollingreport.com shows that dozens of national polls in the last couple years have given Congress an approval rating in the tens, down to a measly 12 percent, while President Bush has never had one that low. We in the Congress have the advantage of getting lost in the crowd when we want to, blaming such dismal public sentiment on the institution, while insisting that as individual Members we are certainly much more popular. The President never has that luxury.

The polls do not ask whether Americans approve of his administration but whether they approve of him. President Bush knows it is tough to lead if you follow the polls. As he said in an interview last month, he did not compromise his soul to be a popular guy. George W. Bush is not leaving the Presidency with chapped fingers from holding them up to the political wind. His critics spin that as stubbornness, saying he wants to go it alone. I fully expect many of those same Bush critics will praise the next President for the very same thing.

One man's principle, I suppose, is another man's inflexibility.

But as President Bush said at Texas A&M University, popularity is fleeting but character and conscience are sturdy.

The only test that matters, he said, is going home at night, looking in the mirror and being satisfied that you have done what is right.

Politics, of course, is about disagreement and competing ideas, priorities, and policies. Conservative leader and thinker Paul Weyrich, who passed away last month, has written about what he called constructive polarization.

That is the idea that clearly defined, and clearly different, choices and alternatives can be constructive for the electoral and political process.

Disagreement and competition help us to focus and refine ideas, to work harder at finding the best solution.

But I regret to say that there is often today more effort at enraging than engaging, and that along with disagreement has come disrespect.

Too often an opponent is treated not simply as wrong but as rotten, and that is when the distinction between an office and the individual who holds it breaks down and political objectives take precedence over institutional principles.

I have seen that destructive trend over the last 8 years and I hope, for the sake of the next president and for our country, it does not continue.

I join President Bush who has said that the tone in Washington got worse rather than better during his presidency and I urge my colleagues, and all others who participate in so many ways in our political process, to do some real soul-searching about this.

In addition to looking at the polls, it is easy when looking back at a presidency to look no further than the most recent events.

The financial and economic situation has deteriorated so fast in the last several months, and the difficulties have spread so quickly and loom so large, that it is difficult to see anything that came before.

The truth is, however, that we experienced a record economic expansion before that downturn occurred, 52 months of uninterrupted job creation.

Another mistake in evaluating a Presidency is a simple one.

We act as if we know everything that can be known, that the jury could possibly have already come back with the verdict.

The jury is still out, and will remain there for a long time, which is why we more properly talk about history judging a President.

As President Bush put it in one interview, folks are still writing books analyzing President George Washington.

President George Bush is not going to worry about it.

President Harry Truman's own party discouraged him from running for re-

election and he left office with an approval rating even lower than President Bush will, yet today is mentioned among the twentieth century's best presidents, and one of my personal favorite Presidents of all time.

The facts of what President Bush has done, not to mention their effects, will not be fully understood or even known by most Americans for many years to come.

In evaluating a Presidency, we should also look not only at individual programs or neatly numerical accomplishments but also at the challenges than cannot be reduced to charts, graphs, or bullet points.

President Bush certainly came into office with goals to achieve, problems to solve, and situations to handle.

He had offered concrete proposals and made campaign promises.

There is a long list of bills he signed, programs he initiated, appointments he made, and other concrete achievements that can be measured and listed.

I will mention some of those in a minute.

But the President-elect has already shown us how quickly those promises get tossed on the cutting-room floor.

The Washington Post just reported that, before Mr. Obama has even taken the oath of office, his proposal for a tax credit for job creation, which he had touted on the campaign trail, has been dumped from the economic stimulus package now under construction.

But in addition to specific programs or proposals, President Bush has worked hard to get us to think differently, to shift paradigms, to re- order our understanding of America, the world, and our relationship to it.

That is more qualitative than quantitative, and perhaps it is harder to measure with numbers or notches on a board somewhere, but it is as much a part of leadership and vigilance that is necessary to keep this Republic as anything else.

We are in the eighth year since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

What a way for a President to begin his first term.

The world changed, and American changed with it.

Previous generations saw the struggle against global communism define much of what America did and how we did it.

Today, it is the struggle against global terrorism.

It may have begun in earnest with President Bush in office, but it will continue long afterward.

And so national security has defined the Bush Presidency.

Not simply the subject of national security, but the reality of national security. From retooling the Department of Justice and FBI, creating the Department of Homeland Security, revamping the intelligence community, to engaging dozens of other nations, and liberating millions in the Middle East, President Bush took bold steps to confront this new international menace.

In short, he led.

President Bush has sought to lead us to think differently about war and terrorism, and to understand both that terrorism is a global threat and that freedom is terrorism's worst enemy.

He has said throughout his Presidency that freedom comes from God and is a universal human right.

Freedom is better than tyranny, liberty is better than oppression.

I am so grateful that President Bush refused to accept this moral- equivalency nonsense that one way of life is just as good or bad as the next.

Not only does that view make no sense on its face, but with it no one would ever see liberation from disease, hunger, slavery, or deprivation.

That is a philosophical perspective, to be sure, and perhaps it is difficult to communicate in the 21st century, perhaps it does not lend itself to a text message or a posting on Facebook.

But where you start determines the road on which you travel and where you eventually arrive, both for individuals and nations.

President Bush told the American Enterprise Institute last month that a President's job is not only to tackle problems but to look over the horizon.

That is real leadership.

Let me move to some of those concrete accomplishments.

Though some may wish to forget it, I remember when so many dismissed President Bush's strategy in Iraq that we have come to call ``the surge.''

Once again, he was thinking outside the box, changing the way we think about dealing with challenges and problems.

The surge was more than simply sending more troops to Iraq, but implemented a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.

It provided for one of the most dramatic comebacks in the history of modern warfare.

In less than 2 years, what some had said was a hopeless situation saw an 80 percent reduction in violence.

Cities and provinces whose names were literal synonyms for violence-- Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad, and others--are now largely free of al- Qaida's operatives.

And let me say at this point that President Bush has reaffirmed our sacred commitment to our veterans.

His administration has more than doubled funding for veterans' medical care, cutting the time to process disability claims almost in half and reducing homelessness among veterans by 40 percent.

It is, of course, much easier, much more natural, to think about what has happened rather than what has not happened.

This is true for many reasons, not the least of which is that we often simply do not know what has not happened. But think about this. We do know that America has not been attacked since September 11, 2001. That is 88 months.

I know that no one listening to me speak is foolish enough to think this is because the terrorists, the terrorist networks, the terrorist movement at work today have simply lost interest.

No one is foolish enough to think the terrorists have just moved on to other things.

No, they want more than ever to attack and destroy this country, if only because their first attack failed to bring us down.

It has not happened in more than 7 years.

President Bush's leadership has helped prevent another attack.

His leadership in creating an international coalition, in working with other individual nations, in transforming and redirecting intelligence and law enforcement agencies, has helped prevent another attack.

We have fought over these issues here in Congress, and I for one agree with President Bush that we must, for example, monitor international communication involving suspected terrorists if we are to protect ourselves.

Doing so is both necessary and constitutional, and I am glad President Bush stood firm on those principles.

President Bush has also helped protect us here at home by reducing the threat of rogue nations or groups launching a missile attack against the United States.

President Bush fielded an operational missile defense system, which will require additional investment and development.

But because of his leadership, we have already developed significant anti-ballistic missile capability both on the ground and at sea.

Also looking abroad, President Bush has led us to rethink how we approach foreign aid with a new model of assistance to other countries.

He signed millennium challenge account agreements with nearly a dozen African nations and put more emphasis on holding governments that receive our aid accountable for how they treat their people and whether they promote economic growth.

This approach actually invites competition, utilizes criteria, and requires progress, and it requires a strong link between our security objectives, accountability, and foreign-assistance funding.

Linking these together serves both American and foreign interests better and it took bold leadership to shift into this new way of approaching foreign assistance.

In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush introduced the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. I happened to have been very interested in that and worked hard to get that done, too, because--along with Senator Kennedy--we are the authors of these three anti-AIDS bills, so I take a great interest in what he has done and he is the first to have really done it.

This program focuses on both prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS and care.

Billions of dollars have already gone to prevent the spread of HIV/ AIDS and opportunistic diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis that often kill people with AIDS.

This program has prevented HIV transmission from mother to child during more than 12 million pregnancies and provided antiretroviral drugs for nearly 2 million people, up from only 50,000 receiving such drugs when the program began.

PEPFAR has helped support care for nearly 7 million children and more than 33 million counseling and testing sessions for men, women, and children.

This program launched by President Bush, which was reauthorized last year with increased funding, is the largest international health initiative in history dedicated to a single disease.

Shifting the focus to right here at home, even though the downturn of the last year has been severe, it was preceded by a record 52 months of job creation.

Productivity in his first term grew at the fastest rate in more than half a century.

Before the recent spike, the average seasonally adjusted unemployment rate during President Bush's tenure was the lowest in 60 years.

President Bush cut taxes for every American who pays taxes, doubled the child tax credit to help American families, provided marriage penalty relief, and began phasing out the estate tax.

The roots of the current financial crisis extend before President Bush took office and his warnings went unheeded.

In April 2001, just 3 months in office, he warned that financial trouble at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could have strong repercussions in financial markets.

In May 2002, he called for disclosure and corporate governance principles to be applied to those agencies.

In February 2003, the Bush administration warned that unexpected problems at Fannie and Freddie could immediately spread beyond the housing market.

Seven months later, the Treasury Secretary called for prudent minimum capital adequacy requirements for Fannie and Freddie.

In February 2004, President Bush called for stronger regulation of Fannie and Freddie because of their low levels of required capital, that is, subprime mortgages.

Warnings continued month after month, year after year.

The notion that the Bush administration sat by while the problem developed or, worse yet, fought increased regulation is simply a lie.

President Bush campaigned on education reform, having the courage to speak of what he called the bigotry of low expectations.

He delivered education reform with the No Child Left Behind Act, and I can tell you what a difference it has made.

One example is Dee Elementary School in Ogden, UT.

Nearly every student in that school is economically disadvantaged, more than 80 percent are minorities, more than 44 percent are learning the English language, and 10 percent are homeless.

Those are challenging demographics no matter where they are found.

At the beginning of the 2003-04 school year, only 13 percent of Dee Elementary third-graders were reading at grade level.

In just 5 years, after Dee Elementary was chosen to participate in the Reading First program, that figure quadrupled to 52 percent.

The school jumped from only the 9th percentile in fifth grade reading to the 43rd percentile.

And I am so proud to say that Dee Elementary has now met Adequate Yearly Progress standards for 3 consecutive years.

Lives are changed, hopes are kindled, and futures are brighter as a result.

Empowering teachers to help students meet higher expectations works, and that has become Federal educational policy under President Bush.

The educational achievement gap between White and minority students narrowed and both fourth and eighth graders achieved their highest reading and math scores on record.

I am hopeful that the new President's Secretary of Education will recognize and build on the reform-oriented approach of the Bush administration through supporting policies such as charter schools and school choice.

President Bush campaigned on Medicare reform, and he delivered with the Medicare Modernization Act, the most significant reform of the Medicare Program since it was created in 1965.

As a result of this law, 40 million Americans have better access to prescriptions and have choices in their health coverage.

It also provided for health savings accounts, which President Bush insisted not be limited solely to Medicare beneficiaries.

These accounts are portable and give people more choices and more ways to improve their lives.

I served on the House-Senate conference committee on this legislation and attribute its success to President Bush's leadership.

President Bush has challenged all Americans, and his own party, to change the way we address real human needs in this country.

This includes increasing the impact of nonprofit organizations, ending discrimination against faith-based groups that can provide services, and promoting volunteerism.

As a result, chronic homelessness has dropped by nearly 30 percent in just the last few years.

President Bush also advanced a culture of life.

Our Declaration of Independence recognizes that we are endowed by our Creator with an inalienable right to life.

That is a foundational principle.

In an interview a year ago, President Bush said that his belief that every human life has dignity has informed his policies and programs.

I do not understand where the compassion and commitment comes from for hundreds of programs and billions of dollars to help millions of people without believing that those people's very lives are worth protecting.

The conviction that life itself is sacred is the best foundation for liberty and prosperity, for human and civil rights.

President Bush shares that conviction and signed into law the ban on the horrific practice of partial birth abortion, which the Supreme Court has upheld.

He also signed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

President Bush also appointed judges who know their proper place in our system of government.

Our liberty depends on limited government, and that means government limited by a written Constitution that actually means something.

The Constitution cannot limit government if government defines the Constitution. President Bush appointed judges who know that this principle applies to them. This is one of the most important, and most long-lasting, results of President Bush's leadership.

Others believe that judges not only apply the law, but make the law they apply.

Others believe that judges should decide cases based on where their personal empathy lies, based on the political interests that can be served.

Others believe that judges should take sides in a case before those sides even appear in court.

That activist, politicized view of judging will destroy our liberty and I am glad that President Bush sided with America's Founders and appointed judges who will interpret and apply the law and leave politics to the people.

President Bush charted a new course for energy security.

This is another area which the recent financial crisis can easily obscure, but President Bush's first order of business was producing a major energy plan and task force.

That plan became the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

It included a proposal I authored called the CLEAR Act, which provided incentives for hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles.

President Bush's advocacy of plug-in hybrid vehicle technology resulted in passage of the FREEDOM Act, which I drafted along with Senators Barack Obama and Maria Cantwell.

And President Bush called for developing our Nation's unconventional fuel resources, including oil shale and tar sand.

Only the most willful denial or ideological distortion will buy the spin from environmental extremists that

President Bush has done nothing to protect the environment or to move us away from our dependence on oil.

At the same time, knowing that our current transportation needs depend on oil, President Bush has led the way to doubling domestic oil and gas production on public lands.

I could go on about issue after issue, listing one accomplishment after another, but my remarks today are intended to be more than just a factual recitation.

Many others are writing and analyzing the Bush presidency and record from many different perspectives.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have an editorial titled ``Bush's Achievements'' from the January 19 issue of the Weekly Standard printed in the Record following my remarks.

Before I close, I have to say a word about our wonderful and gracious First Lady, Laura Bush.

Her strength, dignity, and grace will leave a lasting mark on the role of First Lady.

She was a kind, steady presence, advocating for causes in her own right as the President led the Nation in his.

And in times of great tragedy, she was the voice and personification of comfort and kindness.

She confidently balanced the public and private aspects of life and family. Like her husband, Laura Bush was just what our country needed.

President Bush has been our leader, our chosen leader, for the past 8 years.

He has been a man of principle, conviction, and action.

He has had to tackle challenges, both here and abroad, that are difficult even to describe, let alone comprehend.

There have been many successes, and this has been a time of transition, adjustment, and change.

President Bush, as is his way, takes a very practical view of his contribution to America.

He says he will be remembered as someone who dealt with tough issues head on, helping our country protect itself, and who was unashamed about spreading certain fundamental values such as liberty.

At home, he says, he trusts individual Americans to make the best decisions for themselves and their families.

In his last State of the Union Address, President Bush said that our Nation will prosper, our liberty will be secure, and our union will remain strong if we trust in the ability of free people to make decisions.

Protecting America from outside enemies and strengthening America from within.

That is a legacy to be proud of, and I am so thankful for President Bush's leadership and courage and I pray for God's richest blessings for him, for First Lady Laura Bush, and their family in whatever lies ahead for them.

Let me close with a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt, whom I know President Bush admires.

President Roosevelt said this in Paris in 1910 and it expresses my sentiments about President Bush as his time in office ends.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out

how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could

have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is

actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat

and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short

again and again, because there is no effort without error or

shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great

devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the

best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and

who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while

daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those

cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Exhibit 1

[From the weekly Standard, Jan. 19, 2009]

Bush's Achievements--Ten Things the President Got Right.

(By Fred Barnes)

The postmortems on the presidency of George W. Bush are all

wrong. The liberal line is that Bush dangerously weakened

America's position in the world and rushed to the aid of the

rich and powerful as income inequality worsened. That is

twaddle. Conservatives--okay, not all of them--have only been

a little bit kinder. They give Bush credit for the surge that

saved Iraq, but not for much else.

He deserves better. His presidency was far more successful

than not. And there's an aspect of his decision-making that

merits special recognition: his courage. Time and time again,

Bush did what other presidents, even Ronald Reagan, would not

have done and for which he was vilified and abused. That--

defiantly doing the right thing--is what distinguished his

presidency.

Bush had ten great achievements (and maybe more) in his

eight years in the White House, starting with his decision in

2001 to jettison the Kyoto global warming treaty so loved by

Al Gore, the environmental lobby, elite opinion, and

Europeans. The treaty was a disaster, with India and China

exempted and economic decline the certain result. Everyone

knew it. But only Bush said so and acted accordingly.

He stood athwart mounting global warming hysteria and

yelled, ``Stop!'' He slowed the movement toward a policy

blunder of worldwide impact, providing time for facts to

catch up with the dubious claims of alarmists. Thanks in part

to Bush, the supposed consensus of scientists on global

warming has now collapsed. The skeptics, who point to global

cooling over the past decade, are now heard loud and clear.

And a rational approach to the theory of manmade global

warming is possible.

Second, enhanced interrogation of terrorists. Along with

use of secret prisons and wireless eavesdropping, this saved

American lives. How many thousands of lives? We'll never

know. But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, ``Those are

precisely the elements which kept us safe and which have

prevented a second attack.''

Crucial intelligence was obtained from captured al Qaeda

leaders, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

with the help of waterboarding. Whether this tactic--it

creates a drowning sensation--is torture is a matter of

debate. John McCain and many Democrats say it is. Bush and

Vice President Cheney insist it isn't. In any case, it was

necessary. Lincoln once made a similar point in defending his

suspension of habeas corpus in direct defiance of Chief

Justice Roger Taney. ``Are all the laws but one to go

unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that

one be violated?'' Lincoln asked. Bush understood the answer

in wartime had to be no.

Bush's third achievement was the rebuilding of presidential

authority, badly degraded in the era of Vietnam, Watergate,

and Bill Clinton. He didn't hesitate to conduct wireless

surveillance of terrorists without getting a federal judge's

okay. He decided on his own how to treat terrorists and where

they should be imprisoned. Those were legitimate decisions

for which the president, as commander in chief, should feel

no need to apologize.

Defending, all the way to the Supreme Court, Cheney's

refusal to disclose to Congress the names of people he'd

consulted on energy policy was also enormously important.

Democratic congressman Henry Waxman demanded the names, but

the Court upheld Cheney, 7-2. Last week, Cheney defended his

refusal, waspishly noting that Waxman ``doesn't call me up

and tell me who he's meeting with.''

Achievement number four was Bush's unswerving support for

Israel. Reagan was once deemed Israel's best friend in the

White House. Now Bush can claim the title. He ostracized

Yasser Arafat as an impediment to peace in the Middle East.

This infuriated the anti-Israel forces in Europe, the Third

World, and the United Nations, and was criticized by

champions of the ``peace process'' here at home. Bush was

right.

He was clever in his support. Bush announced that Ariel

Sharon should withdraw the tanks he'd sent into the West Bank

in 2002, then exerted zero pressure on Sharon to do so. And

he backed the wall along Israel's eastern border without

endorsing it as an official boundary, while knowing full well

that it might eventually become exactly that. He was a loyal

friend.

His fifth success was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the

education reform bill cosponsored by America's most prominent

liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy. The teachers'

unions, school boards, the education establishment,

conservatives adamant about local control of schools--they

all loathed the measure and still do. It requires two things

they ardently oppose, mandatory testing and accountability.

Kennedy later turned against NCLB, saying Bush is

shortchanging the program. In truth, federal education

spending is at record levels. Another complaint is that it

forces teachers to ``teach to the test.'' The tests are on

math and reading. They are tests worth teaching to.

Sixth, Bush declared in his second inaugural address in

2005 that American foreign policy (at least his) would

henceforth focus on promoting democracy around the world.

This put him squarely in the Reagan camp, but he was

lambasted as unrealistic, impractical, and a tool of wily

neoconservatives. The new policy gave Bush credibility in

pressing for democracy in the former Soviet republics and

Middle East and in zinging various dictators and kleptocrats.

It will do the same for President Obama, if he's wise enough

to hang onto it.

The seventh achievement is the Medicare prescription drug

benefit, enacted in 2003. It's not only wildly popular; it

has cost less than expected by triggering competition among

drug companies. Conservatives have deep reservations about

the program. But they shouldn't have been surprised. Bush

advocated the drug benefit in the 2000 campaign. And if he

hadn't acted, Democrats

would have, with a much less attractive result.

Then there were John Roberts and Sam Alito. In putting them

on the Supreme Court and naming Roberts chief justice, Bush

achieved what had eluded Richard Nixon, Reagan, and his own

father. Roberts and Alito made the Court indisputably more

conservative. And the good news is Roberts, 53, and Alito,

58, should be justices for decades to come.

Bush's ninth achievement has been widely ignored. He

strengthened relations with east Asian democracies (Japan,

South Korea, Australia) without causing a rift with China. On

top of that, he forged strong ties with India. An important

factor was their common enemy, Islamic jihadists. After 9/11,

Bush made the most of this, and Indian leaders were

receptive. His state dinner for Indian prime minister

Manmohan Singh in 2006 was a lovefest.

Finally, a no-brainer: the surge. Bush prompted nearly

unanimous disapproval in January 2007 when he announced he

was sending more troops to Iraq and adopting a new

counterinsurgency strategy. His opponents initially included

the State Department, the Pentagon, most of Congress, the

media, the foreign policy establishment, indeed the whole

world. This makes his decision a profile in courage. Best of

all, the surge worked. Iraq is now a fragile but functioning

democracy.

How does Bush rank as a president? We won't know until he's

judged from the perspective of two or three decades.

Hindsight forced a sharp upgrading of the presidencies of

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Given his achievements,

it may have the same effect for Bush.

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

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Madam President, I have been pretty outspoken in the last several weeks on the $700 billion bailout. I still believe historians will look back someday and say it was the most outrageous vote ever taken. It is the largest single expenditure in the history of the country.

To make matters worse, it was giving an unelected bureaucrat total power, usurping our powers, to make all decisions over the $700 billion with no oversight whatsoever. It had never been done before. It was unprecedented in American history. Nobody seems to care. It is mind- boggling to me to know that it happened, and now it looks as though we will be voting in the other body as well as here on a motion that would be hostile to the whole idea, but it will not pass. The money is going to be there anyway. The reason is, if the legislation that will be coming before the House and the Senate is passed, it still can be vetoed by the President, and it would be vetoed by the President. So all of a sudden he is going to have the second half of the $700 billion, the $350 billion laid at his doorstep to do with as he wishes.

I wouldn't want that for a Republican President or a Democratic President, for any President. It is not the way we are supposed to function. I believe it is a fait accompli. I don't see any way a resolution of disapproval is going to be effective, because I think it is going to pass the House and very likely could pass here. I am inclined to think it will not. Whatever the case is, it will become a reality.

That is bad for many reasons. It establishes a precedent. People look at large numbers, and it is difficult for the American people and for me to appreciate how much money is $700 billion. What I normally do when we deal with large numbers is, I take the total number of families in America who file tax returns and do the math. This turns out to be $5,000 a family. When I say it in those terms, which I have done quite a bit on talk radio as a wake-up call to the American people, then people do understand.

I have been a little critical of my own President, President Bush, because he has let this happen. This wasn't a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. It was the President's idea, in concert with the Democrats, making this happen. This vote took place on October 10. Ever since October 10, I have had legislation I have tried to get through saying that it is not going to be automatic. Accessing the second $350 billion should not be automatic, and we had legislation to keep it from being so until 2 nights ago when President Bush agreed to a wish list by our new President when he comes into power. It is going to happen. Again, this is unprecedented in American history. It has never happened before.

I have been critical of the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Paulson, for telling us what he was going to do with the money and then turning around and not doing it. He did not tell us the truth. It is disingenuous. Nonetheless, it is something that looks as though it will be happening and it looks as though it will happen this week.

In defense of President Bush, if we take the total amount of deficits of the 8 years of his presidency from his own budget, add them up and divide by 8, it averages $247 billion a year. Compare that with what we are faced with right now with the new administration which has said it is going to be somewhere between $1.2 and $1.8 trillion. I think people will look at this and say that the Bush legacy is not going to be one of deficits, because it is nothing compared to the deficits we are projecting for the coming year, as proposed by the incoming President.

The reason I mention that is because I have somewhat accused President Bush of looking for a legacy. It occurs to me that George W. Bush has a legacy that may be unlike any other President in history. I call this the invisible legacy of President George W. Bush. I will explain in detail how I have come to this conclusion.

President Bush inherited a weaker America militarily. All of a sudden, after he came in, 9/11 occurred. So let's go back in history. When George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, he was already behind the power curve when it came to the war on terror. As the 9/11 Commission confirmed, the United States was not on a wartime footing with al- Qaida, even though they were at war with us. While our country took its peace dividend, our enemies continued to train, plot, and test. It was a peace dividend, a euphoric attitude that the Cold War is over, and we don't need a military anymore. That is what we were living with at the time.

International terrorism took the forefront as bin Laden began his war against freedom and specifically against the United States. Afghanistan was used as a training ground for terrorists, and the Taliban regime allowed al-Qaida unfettered mobility. They took advantage of this in major attacks.

Look at what happened back in the 1990s. This was a predicate leading to 9/11, the worst tragedy in the history of America. On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was planted in an underground parking garage below the World Trade Center. This was the first World Trade Center attack. On June 25, 1996, the Khobar Towers were bombed by Hezbollah, with intelligence pointing to support by al-Qaida. That was 1996. We knew al-Qaida was on the run at that time. We knew of their abilities, the increasing sophistication in their terrorist attacks. On August 7, 1998, we recall what happened in Tanzania and Kenya and Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Our embassies were bombed. Links were at that time established with al-Qaida. In October 2000, suicide bombers used a boat to attack the USS Cole while it was moored in Yemen. It was

one we all remember well, and we remember how it happened. We know the terrorist links that took place at that time. The response of the United States was at best inconsistent.

Operation Infinite Reach included cruise missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, but there was no real change. This inadequate response has been cited as a factor in emboldening al-Qaida's will to undertake more ambitious plans. That was simply kind of small. They had bigger plans. We know that now.

In Operation Restore Hope, we became entangled in Somalia. We remember that very well, with the naked bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and America finally woke up, but we did not do anything. We kind of let it happen. We directed our forces to stop all actions against Adid except for those required for self-defense. Well, that is not a very good message, not a consistent message with our behavior in the past. So we withdrew from the country shortly thereafter.

We also failed to remain vigilant of the Chinese.

Security at our national labs was deliberately destroyed. We did away with--and this happened actually in the first few weeks of the Clinton- Gore administration. They went through the energy labs and they stopped the wiretapping, they stopped the background checks they were conducting at the time. They stopped color-coded badges saying it was demeaning to have a color of a badge that was on a lower scale than somebody else's. So that is what happened. Of course, we know the results of that.

In 1995, we discovered that China had stolen our W-88 warhead plans. That was the crown jewel of our nuclear program, capable of attaching 10 nuclear missiles to a single warhead. But they had it. They got it. They got it because of a lack of security that was the policy of that administration at the time, and I was critical at that time.

I remember Bernard Schwartz of Loral Space and Communications. They were given a green light to improve the precision and reliability of China's satellites and nuclear missiles. To refresh our memories--I remember it very well--it required the President to sign a waiver, a special waiver, so the Chinese missile program would have greater accuracy. That happened during the 1990s.

China also gained the capability of accurately reaching the continental United States with missiles and targeted between 13 and 18 United States cities. I was critical of President Clinton for claiming, at that time--he said: Not one missile is pointed at American children, when in fact missiles were pointed at American children. That was happening during the 1990s.

Simultaneously, weapons of mass destruction proliferation throughout the world reached an unprecedented level. The Chinese Government learned that it could rely on our acquiescence. They transferred prohibited weapons technology to North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other countries, threatened to absorb Taiwan, and intimidated our regional treaty allies, South Korea and Japan.

The vast Soviet Union nuclear stockpile became fair game for entrepreneurs, with over 40 kilograms of Russian-origin uranium and plutonium being seized since 1991.

Then remember Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, who began an international network of clandestine nuclear proliferation to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on March 12, 1993, and refused to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites. And Libya further continued weapons of mass destruction research as a priority.

Now, despite the increase in terrorist activities around the world and the growing signs of a direct threat to this country, we essentially broke our intelligence community through the lack of funding, an inadequate number of linguists, and no interagency cooperation.

I have to say this. My predecessor to this job was former Senator David Boren. David Boren's young son Dan is a very talented young man now serving in the House of Representatives. I was in the House and came to the Senate in 1994. I took his seat.

He at that time was chairman of the Intelligence Committee of the Senate, and he made the statement to me--he called me up, and he said: Inhofe, I want you to try to do something I failed to do during the time I was chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate. He said: We have all these agencies--the FBI, the NSA, all the defense intelligence agencies--and none of them talks to each other. Then I found out later on that was so true. He said: You have to get this done. That has to be a high priority. I told him it would be. We were not able to do anything until George W. Bush came in.

If this was not enough, with the demise of the Soviet Union, our military was essentially neutered to counter a ``perceived'' diminished world threat. I remember so well this euphoric attitude that everybody had: The Cold War is over. We don't need a military anymore.

The Clinton-Gore administration cut the defense budget by 40 percent, reducing it to its lowest percentage of the GNP since prior to World War II. As a result, President Bush inherited a force half the size of the military in 1990.

Now, as our forces decreased in size and capability, deployments and deployment times increased. We have all seen the results. We now have 15-month deployments. They used to be 9-month deployments. We have these because he inherited this military that was undersized for the threat we are facing.

I have a chart in the Chamber I will show as documentation of this fact. During the Clinton years--and I do not say this to denigrate the administration; I am saying we have to understand how we got in the position we are in today and that we have been in since 9/11. If you take the black line on the chart--this is during the Clinton administration--if he had taken the military budget as it was at that time and had the increase for inflation, it would have been this black line going up, shown on the chart. Instead, the red line shows what his budget request was. If you take the difference between the red line and the black line, that is $412 billion reduced from when he took office.

That is how we got into this position. We downgraded our military, and a lot of people believed the threat was not there anymore because the Cold War was over, not looking at the new asymmetric threats, which are much greater.

I sometimes look back wistfully at the Cold War. Things were predictable back then. We knew what the Soviets were going to do--the Soviets, not the Russians--and we knew what their capabilities were. These were known things, known behavioral patterns. It was totally different than what we have today.

So the programs, the modernization efforts, and the equipment replacement costs were literally kicked down the road and left waiting in the wings. This happened to our modernization program. It happened in many areas. This has been very demoralizing to most of us who believe we have to keep America's national defense strong.

We saw countries coming up with better systems than we have. We have, for example, the artillery piece, the best one we have today now that we are modernizing. But we did not have that at that time. We had one called the Paladin. That was World War II technology. You have to get out and swab the breach after every shot.

There were five countries at that time, including South Africa, that made a better piece than we had, and we are still using this today. It was not until a very courageous general, GEN John Jumper, came up and admitted, in 1998, that the best strike vehicles we had--the F-15 and the F-16--were not as good as some of the SU series being developed in Russia and actually were being sold to the Chinese--we know of one sale where they bought 240 SU-30 type of vehicles--again, better than anything we had.

So, again, that is where we were before George W. Bush was elected.

Now enter President George W. Bush.

Starting with his first budget submission after inauguration, he proposed increases in defense spending and focused his Pentagon team on reform. He started with recognizing and revitalizing the military for the post-Cold War world it now faced. He provided the military with the funding required

to develop force structure and modernize its aging force. So he was getting in there and starting to do something about the modernization program.

Then, of course, 9/11 happened. Well, 9/11, we all know about that. We know what a tragedy it was, with the most significant attack in America in our history. It came at a time when we had a downsized military, downsized by about 40 percent. So he was saddled with trying to respond to this situation, and he did.

He asked Congress for new authorities and began to implement sweeping changes in our national security policy. In this new policy he declared a war on terror. This is what he said--I want to read the quote from back at that time:

We will direct every resource at our command--every means

of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of

law enforcement, every financial influence, and every

necessary weapon of war--to the disruption and to the defeat

of the global terror network.

That is what he said at that time. Then he outlined the country's strategy. He said:

First, we're determined to prevent the attacks of terrorist

networks before they occur. . . .

Unlike it was on 9/11.

Second, we're determined to deny weapons of mass

destruction to outlaw regimes and

to their terrorist allies who would use

them. . . .

Third, we're determined to deny radical groups the support

and sanctuary of outlaw regimes. . . .

Fourth, we're determined to deny militants control of any

nation.

And he did. He asked Congress for the PATRIOT Act--listen to the things he did--the PATRIOT Act to break down walls between Government agencies. That is getting back to what David Boren observed many years ago back in 1994 that had to be done.

In October of 2001, he initiated Operation Enduring Freedom to dismantle the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which is harboring al- Qaida. Bombing runs and Tomahawk missile strikes were launched.

In October of 2001, President Bush established the Office of Homeland Security. This was a coordinating effort that corrects the problem that was called to my attention in 1994, so everything would be coordinated and everyone would know what everyone is supposed to be doing.

The 9/11 Commission was formed and he began implementing its recommendations, including intelligence reform, which included establishing the Director of National Intelligence. There you have it. That is the key. One Director over all intelligence: military intelligence, domestic intelligence--and it worked.

On March of 2003, President Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, preemptive attacks against Saddam Hussein, a gathering threat to the United States, who was reportedly developing ties with our enemies and who openly praised the 9/11 attacks.

I remember that very well because in the first gulf war--which we should have gone ahead and taken care of Saddam Hussein at that time; we did not do it, and there are some reasons it could not be done--I happened to be privileged to be with nine other people on the first freedom flight that went into Kuwait after the war was over. Now, it was so close to the time the first Persian Gulf war was over that there was still burning off the fields, and there were a lot of them. The Iraqis did not know the war was over, the ones who were in there.

I remember so well one of the parties who was going over was the Ambassador from Kuwait to the United States and his daughter. I think she was around 7 years old. What they wanted to do was go back and see what was left in Kuwait of their mansion on the Persian Gulf. We got back there, and I remember going back to see their mansion, only to find out Saddam Hussein had used this for one of his headquarters. They took the little girl up to her bedroom--she wanted to see her little animals and all that--to find out it had been used as a torture chamber, with body parts stuck to the walls around there. This is what we were looking at at that time.

Well, President Bush established the National Counterterrorism Center to assist in analyzing and integrating foreign and domestic intelligence acquired from all U.S. Government Departments and agencies--so, again, putting this all together.

He established the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, in the Department of Homeland Security, to provide a single Federal organization to develop and deploy a nuclear detection system to thwart the importation of illegal nuclear or radiological materials.

In order to consolidate terrorist watch lists and provide around-the- clock operational support for Federal and other governmental law enforcement personnel across the country and around the world, President Bush created the Terrorist Screening Center to ensure that Government investigators, screeners, and agents are working with the same unified, comprehensive set of information about terrorists.

He transformed the FBI to focus on preventing terrorism.

He strengthened the Transportation Security Administration through screening and prevention. He improved border screening.

All of these things he did in a very short period of time that had to be done and had never been done before.

He expanded shipping security through container security initiatives. He developed Project Bioshield to increase preparedness against chemical, biological, and radiological, or nuclear attack, potential attack against this country. Finally, he aggressively cracked down on terrorist financing with many international partners. Over 400 individuals and entities have been designated pursuant to Executive order, resulting in nearly $150 million in frozen assets and millions more blocked in transit or seized at the borders.

President Bush also rallied international support to fight terrorism with a coalition of more than 90 countries. We didn't do this alone. He brought in neighboring countries, other countries with the same problems that we had, and the same exposure. This coalition of nations has actively worked to synchronize diplomatic intelligence, law enforcement, economic and financial and military power to attack terrorism globally. One man did this. This is George W. Bush.

The result of all of these efforts is what I refer to as the Bush invisible legacy. Now, why is this an invisible legacy? I am going to show my colleagues things that were out there that could very well have happened to the United States of America--and some would have happened--but since they didn't happen, that legacy is invisible because they never happened. That, to me, is going to go down as one of the great legacies of any President in the history of the United States.

There has not been another attack on this country since 9/11, and do not think this was due to a lack of effort on the part of terrorists. In fact, there have been many attempts. I am going to give my colleagues a partial list of the attacks that were stopped as a result of all of these policies and programs I just outlined that our President--current President George W. Bush--was responsible for.

First, December of 2001: This is the first post-9/11 plot that was thwarted. It was the capture of an al-Qaida operative named Ali Salih Mari in the United States who was targeting water reservoirs and the New York Stock Exchange at that time. Also, he was targeting--he had his programs outlined in documents that we found through all of these efforts to attack our various military academies. He offered himself as a martyr to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Of course, we know he was the mastermind of 9/11. Anyway, all of this was planned, but I believe Bush policies stopped the attacks.

I have to say at this point that I have served on the Intelligence Committee. I served for a number of years--ever since 1994--on the Senate Armed Services Committee. So I have been involved in these issues. We know this had a lot to do with stopping some of these potential attacks.

Remember Jose Padilla. He is the guy who had the dirty bomb plot, an American citizen accused of seeking radioactive-laced dirty bombs to use in attacks against America. Again, this was a Bush program that brought him down.

The 2002 aviation plots: An al-Qaida leader in Southeast Asia known as Humbali recruited several other

operatives of Asian origin. The plot was derailed in early 2002 with international cooperation. The Library Tower is the tallest building west of the Mississippi. It was among the 25 tallest buildings in the world. There was a written program about how to bring this building down, and our policies--the Bush policies, primarily--stopped that from taking place.

In September of 2002, Lackawanna Six: We all remember that. The FBI thwarted the locally recruited terrorist cell, the Lackawanna Six, by the capturing of Juma all-Dosari in Afghanistan and a subsequent interrogation while in prison in Guantanamo Bay. By the way, I disagree with the current attitude toward what is going to happen at Guantanamo Bay. I have had occasion to be there, probably more than any other Member. I can remember so well early on, those who were in prison, incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay actually had better treatment, better living quarters, and better health attention than our own troops did at that time. I think it is going to be imperative that whoever wants to close that down ask: Where are all of these people going to go?

Six American citizens of Yemeni origin were convicted of supporting al-Qaida after attending a Jihadist camp in Pakistan. Five of the six were from Lackawanna, NY. The six were arrested and convicted. They are out now. They performed terrorist attacks. They were very specific. They are gone. I think the new Bush programs at that time were primarily responsible for that.

In May of 2003, we had the Brooklyn Bridge plot: An American citizen was charged with plotting to use blow torches to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge. After being introduced to al-Qaida operatives, New York and Federal authorities intercepted a plan to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting suspension cables, as well as potentially derailing a train en route to Washington, DC. Iyman Faris was arrested, brought to justice, and was successfully stopped.

In June of 2003 in Virginia, a Jihad network that was taking place, 11 men from Alexandria, VA--just south of here--trained for Jihad against American soldiers and were convicted of violating the Neutrality Act, a conspiracy. Eleven Muslim men were charged in the U.S. district court in Alexandria with training with and fighting with a group that was associated with al-Qaida. Several members of the group were found to have trained for future attacks by using paint ball facilities in the Northern Virginia area. It was stopped. The Bush policies were primarily responsible for giving us the resources to stop attacks such as those I am outlining.

In 2004, August of 2004, the financial centers plot: This was the Indian-born leader of a terror cell who plotted the bombing on the financial centers. His name was Barot. He plotted a ``memorable black day of terror'' via a dirty bomb that targeted financial institutions in New York, Washington, DC, and in Newark. Barot was arrested at his home in Pakistan with the cooperation of others, but again, these were the Bush policies and resources that we used to make this happen.

In August of 2004--the same month--a Penn Station plot: This was James Elshafay and two accomplices who sought to plant a bomb at New York's Penn Station near Madison Square Garden during the Republican National Convention. The New York City Police Department's intelligence division helped to conduct an investigation leading to their arrest, again, using the policies that President Bush had put in place.

The same month, the Pakistani diplomat assassination plot: We all remember that. Two leaders of an Albany, NY, mosque, Yassin and Mohammed Hossain, were charged with plotting to purchase a shoulder- fired grenade launcher to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat. An investigation took place by the FBI, and all of these other agencies coordinating under the single leadership of the new system put in place, they stopped it. With the help of an informant, the perpetrators of that plot have been brought to justice. Again, that was stopped.

August of 2005, Orange County, CA, a terror plot: Seven people were involved and were arrested in Los Angeles and charged with conspiracy to attack Los Angeles National Guard facilities and synagogues, several synagogues. The plan was there; it is in writing. We know it was going to happen. Kevin James allegedly founded a radical Islamic prison group and converted Levar Washington and others to the group which was known as the JIS. After Washington and Patterson were arrested for robberies, police and Federal agents began a terrorist investigation where the search of Washington's apartment revealed a suspicious target list.

We had a list of targets in Orange County that were going to be brought down. Again, these policies weren't available to us before the Bush administration, and we were able to stop that.

December of 2005, the gas lines plot: Michael Reynolds was arrested by the FBI in December of 2005 and charged with being involved in a plot to blow up a Wyoming natural gas refinery, the Transcontinental Pipeline. That is a national gas pipeline that goes from the gulf coast to the east coast and into New Jersey. I believe it is owned by the New Jersey Standard Oil refinery. Reynolds was convicted for providing materials for supporting terrorists and soliciting a crime of violence. Again, we used the new resources that were available because of our President, George W. Bush.

In April of 2006, the U.S. Capitol and World Bank plot: Syed Haris Ahmed and another one whose name is Ehsanul Islam Sadequee from Atlanta, GA, were accused of conspiracy, having discussed terrorist targets with alleged terrorist organizations. They met with Islam extremists and received training and instruction on how to gather videotape surveillance of potential targets in the Washington area. Their targets happened to be the U.S. Capitol--right here where we are standing today--and the World Bank headquarters. They were the targets and, again, we were able to intercept this and to bring them to justice under these new policies that were put in place by our current President.

We had Narseal Batiste, and he had six others who were involved in a Sears Tower plot. They were arrested in Miami and in Atlanta in June of 2006 for being in the early stages of a plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago as well as FBI offices and several other buildings. Arrests resulted from an investigation involving an FBI informant and all of the rest of them working together with the new resources they had, and they were brought to justice. Again, this was the new system we had in place.

July of 2006, New York City, the train tunnel plot: It is frightening to think this could have happened. There were eight suspects, including Assem Hammoud, an al-Qaida loyalist living in Lebanon. They were arrested for plotting to bomb the New York City train tunnels. He was a self-proclaimed operative for al-Qaida. He admitted that he was with al-Qaida when we brought him to justice, and he admitted to the plot. He is currently in custody in Lebanon and his case is pending. Two other suspects are in custody in other locations. The bottom line is it didn't happen. It was precluded from happening as a result of the new resources that were put in place and the coordination of all of our intelligence committees.

In March of 2007, a skyscraper plot: This was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was the mastermind of 9/11 and the author of numerous other plots confessed in court. People think of him as only 9/11. He also had plans in writing to destroy skyscrapers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as a plot of an assassination of Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Again, that was stopped.

In May of 2007, the Fort Dix plot: This was another one. I will not go into detail, but this was one where the Fort Dix six were thought to be leaderless. We found that they were a homegrown cell of immigrants from Jordan, Turkey, and Yugoslavia and they had ties to al-Qaida. They were stopped, the plot was stopped, and they were brought to justice. I believe this was due to the new programs that were put together by the Bush administration.

June of 2007, the JFK plot: Suspects planned to hit fuel farms and a 40-mile aviation field supply pipeline. Specifically, they targeted the symbolism of JFK, seeking to invoke an emotional

reaction, saying it is like killing the man twice. We all know and remember that, and we were able to stop it.

I think the bottom line has been that there hasn't been another successful attack on this country since 9/11. It didn't just happen. What this administration has accomplished in the last 5 years is phenomenal. In the aftermath of 9/11, he brought us together as a nation, prevented our enemies from striking again, and captured many who would have tried. President Bush woke the Nation so we could begin to deal aggressively with the threats that were facing us.

Because of President Bush, we no longer treat terrorists like common criminals but as enemy combatants. We no longer turn a blind eye to nuclear proliferation by negotiating without the real threat of military action. We fully funded a readiness-challenged, cold-war- equipped, and organized military that had suffered from a decade of no modernization. We have removed threatening regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, freeing 50 million people. We have weakened the al-Qaida network and its affiliates. We have disrupted terrorist plots and built a coalition of more than 90 nations to fight terrorism. We have transformed our approach to combating terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.

So we ask the question: Would all of these terrorist attacks have been successful? Obviously, no, but I honestly believe--it is my judgment from having the background of years of serving on the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, that some of these-- to me, it is not conceivable that none of these would have occurred. I believe this invisible legacy--keep in mind, it is an invisible legacy of George W. Bush because they didn't happen. If they didn't happen, they are invisible, but nonetheless they were stopped.

The bottom line is this: The New York Stock Exchange was not bombed, the military academies were not bombed, the Brooklyn Bridge was not bombed, New York and DC financial centers were not bombed, Penn Station was not bombed, Los Angeles synagogues were not bombed, and New Jersey Standard Oil refineries were not bombed.

The transcontinental pipeline was not bombed. The World Bank was not bombed. The Chicago Sears Tower was not bombed. New York City train tunnels were not bombed. JFK Airport was not bombed. And our Nation's Capitol Building was not bombed. Clearly, the Bush invisible legacy may go down in history as perhaps the greatest legacy in history. I know people don't want to give credit where credit is due. This is something that took almost all of his energies at a time when otherwise something could very well have happened. It is my honest judgment that had it not been for his changes in our intelligence process, that one or more of these terrorist attacks would have been successful. I believe that in my heart. I think history will treat that as the case. Clearly, the Bush invisible legacy may go down as the greatest legacy in history.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an Oklahoman editorial dated January 13, 2009, and a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2085.

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

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for whatever time I shall consume.

Mr. President, yesterday I spent over an hour on the floor talking about a report that we put together that is pretty incredible, the numbers of scientists coming forth now who were always on the other side, or 10 years ago were on the other side of

this issue and at that time were agreeing with former Vice President Gore in saying that manmade gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2 and such were the major causes of global warming. Now these scientists are coming over in droves, even individuals who are leading riots in the streets throughout the world talking about having to do something or we are all going to die. I spent more time than I should have on it because it deserved the time. But I had to read a lot of the stuff. I know you go to sleep when you think about things like this, and it does get to be heavy lifting. What I am trying to say is, we need to view this with a fresh look because so many things have happened.

It is going to be difficult for many of my colleagues whom I deeply respect who crawled way out on the limb saying it is manmade gases and we will have to have expensive cap-and-trade solutions to the problem; they now are facing a very liberal constituency that is saying: Wait a minute. Now we have the White House, the House, and the Senate. We have everybody lined up on this issue, as if it is a done deal, a fait accompli; we are now expecting you to come forward.

This is totally ignoring the fact that everything has changed from what it was before. Last year we had the Lieberman-Warner bill. Let's go back further than that. Let's go back to the original Kyoto Treaty. Quite frankly, way back 7 years or so ago, when I became chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, all we ever heard was that manmade gases were causing global warming and, therefore, we have to do something about it.

Frankly, when the Kyoto Treaty was first suggested, I was one who thought it must be true because that is all we heard in the media. When I became chairman, I knew that I would have an impact on the decisions that were made that would concern global warming. I thought at that time it was something we should address.

Then the Wharton School of Economics came out with the Wharton Econometric Survey. This was something that was pretty well done, and it is still out there. In fact, I have a Web site, epw.senate.gov. If you access that, you can see this in more detail than you probably really want. If you are not a believer in the cost of this issue, then you would want to do that. The Wharton Econometric Survey asked: What would it cost the United States if we were to ratify the Kyoto Treaty and live by its emission requirements? They came to the conclusion that it would be in the range of between $300 to $330 billion a year. I always hesitate to use figures such as that because it is hard for people to conceive how that affects them. What I normally do is take the number of families in America who file tax returns, and then I do the division. That $330 billion a year it would cost us to comply with the treaty comes out to be almost $3,000 a family. We are talking about something that is big. This is huge.

After looking at that, I thought: If it is going to cost that much, let's be sure the science is real and it is there. After looking at it, we found that the science was not there. Even though you had the appearance of it being there because the National Academy of Sciences and the United Nations all said the science was there, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, something started by the United Nations--I hasten to say I have never been much of a fan of the United Nations to start with. Maybe I am a little bit biased in this analysis. When they put together the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they did so for the purpose of trying to do something to force the whole world to be involved and say: This is a world problem that we will have to correct.

This is just a suspicion I have. Every once in a while the United Nations comes out with something that totally contradicts our interests. My good friend from Alabama and several of us put together resolutions. These resolutions say we will withhold 20 percent of our dues to the United Nations unless they reverse their position. The United Nations doesn't like that. They would like not to have to answer to anyone. Consequently, if they could ever get in a situation of global taxation, which is what they have openly been promoting for many years, they would be in a position not to be accountable to anyone.

This is kind of what happened. So this was the Kyoto Treaty.

Fastforward then to 2003 and 2005 when we had two bills, the first of which was McCain-Lieberman. Those bills were also cap and trade. Cap and trade costs about the same amount of money. This is very interesting. You will hear a lot of people during the next few months say: We want some kind of controls on CO2. But we are not going to do it in a way that will cost a lot of money. We will have offsets. The bottom line is, it is going to cost about the same $300 billion regardless of what scheme we adopt and how we massage it.

I have to say, there has been an awakening in the last few years. In 2005 there were only two Senators who came to the floor and helped me. I was the one, as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who was charged with fighting this issue. It was on the floor of the Senate for 5 days, 10 hours a day. That is 50 hours. We only had about 3 hours of other Senators coming to assist me. Now fastforward to 2008. That was the Warner-Lieberman bill. We had 25 Senators, including the Senator in the Chamber presently from Alabama, who came down to assist in this debate. That is a huge difference. We resoundingly defeated that bill, mostly on the economic arguments, not on the scientific arguments.

When we started the debate, I said: I don't believe the science is there. Evidence is showing that it is not there. But let's assume for purposes of this debate that the science is there, that manmade gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane, are all responsible for climate change and for increasing the temperature or global warming. Let's assume that. So the debate started, and we talked about the economics of the issue. Even assuming the science is there, we defeated that by a huge margin. In fact, Barbara Boxer was handling the Democratic side. They only had 37 Democrats committed for final passage. That is a big change from 2005.

Now we have something where everybody is assuming that it is going to pass because the Democrats have control of everything. They have the White House, the House, and the Senate. I remind them not to get too arrogant because we went through the same thing, or they went through the same thing in 1992, and things turned out pretty well after that.

If you look at where the attitudes of people are right now, that we are going to be passing something, I wouldn't get too far ahead. What we are trying to do and what I did yesterday--and I took far too long in doing it--was talk about the size of the tax and the fact that the tax is going to be a regressive one.

I have to say also that I was one of the few people who actively opposed the $700 billion bailout. Again, when we relate that to each family that files a tax return, it is about $5,000 a family. That was giving an unelected bureaucrat the sole control over $700 billion. One of the things I don't like about that, not only was it the wrong thing to do, but that also got people changing their thinking as to these large numbers. Now that $300 billion a year that it would cost us, if we had a cap-and-trade policy, doesn't seem nearly that big. But it would be, and it would be regressive.

The argument on the other side is, you may be right in the regressive nature of a tax because everybody has to buy energy. Everybody has to buy gasoline and heat their homes, so a larger percentage of the expendable income of someone who is in a lower income is going to be far greater than it would have been otherwise, but we can take care of that by redistribution of wealth toward low-income consumers. They have actually said that. That sounds a little bit un-American to me. Keep in mind, if we are talking about redistributing wealth, somebody has to create wealth before it can be redistributed. Right now--and we are looking at the figures going around now--there will not be a lot of wealth to redistribute, if we get to that point.

Anyway, that was the main argument I was using yesterday and have used up through the last 7 years. I have had occasion to give 13 rather lengthy floor speeches on the science on global warming. What I did yesterday was use this report that we put together of the 650 very top international scientists who refute all the arguments used

heretofore. I would like to concentrate for a moment on some of the left-of-center scientists, environmentalists, and activists we are talking about, the so-called consensus.

The Huffington Post is a left-leaning publication. We all understand that. Harold Ambler was demanding an apology from Al Gore for promoting unfounded global warming fears. The Huffington Post article accused Gore of selling ``the biggest whopper ever sold to the public'' in American history.

We see a former Greenpeace member who was in Finland. His name is Jarl Ahlbeck. He says there has been little or no global warming since 1995. This is interesting. Everyone is talking about global warming. We are in a cooling spell now. It has been that way since the turn of the century. Nobody argues that. I am sure that upset a lot of people, the promoters, because it is kind of hard to be talking about some very expensive scheme to fight global warming when we are going through global cooling.

Nonetheless, we have all types of people, and I cited a long list of them, who say we are in the middle of this cooling period right now.

Going into the liberal side or the left-leaning scientists, one of them is Martin Hertzberg, a meteorologist with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. He said:

As a scientist and life-long liberal Democrat, I find the

constant regurgitation of the anecdotal fear mongering clap-

trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to

science.

You have some of the punishment that has been covered in this report. They talk about how they no longer can get grants from various organizations, whether it is the Heinz Foundation or others, unless they go along with their philosophy.

The other argument that has come up that we want to use and make sure everybody understands is, even if you are a believer that manmade gases cause climate change, global warming, the things we are looking at now and the things we looked at after Kyoto, Kyoto actually made more sense than some of the bills I have been talking about that happened in 2003 and 2005 and 2008 because that would single out the United States and say: This is what we are going to do regardless of what they do in China and Mexico and India and other countries.

So, obviously, if we did it, and we had this punitive tax arrangement, that would drive our manufacturing base overseas to places where they wouldn't have this heavy expense. Consequently, it would be going to countries such as Mexico and China where they have almost no restrictions on their emissions. It would have a net increase on the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere.

As to the manual we have with over 650 scientists, I would like to suggest to you that you compare that to the IPCC reports. The IPCC-- that is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- report is called a Summary for Policymakers. We never saw the report. We just see the summary. That was put together by 52 scientists who are pretty much owned by the politicians who are wanting to come to these conclusions.

So if you canvas the scientists now in Canada who came out with a report just recently--51,000 Canadian scientists--68 percent of them disagree that global warming is a science that is settled. At the same time, you have the same percentage--and this came from the International Geological Congress which just had their meeting in Norway--an overwhelming number of the scientists were skeptical. Two- thirds of the presenters and question askers were hostile and even dismissive of the U.N. IPCC report. So the same two-thirds keeps reappearing in terms of what the scientists are saying about this issue.

Now, yesterday, I did not get into this, but if you look at those scientists who are on the left side, Dr. Robert Giegengack, the former chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, actually was a strong Gore supporter in the 2000 election. He now states that global warming does not even qualify as 1 of the top 10 environmental problems facing the world. This is not me or any other Senator talking. This is one of the far left leaning environmental scientists.

With Alexander Cockburn it is the same situation. He is a maverick journalist who leans left on almost all topics. He lambasted the alleged global warming consensus on a political Web site called counterpunch.org, arguing that there is no evidence that humans are causing the rise in global temperature. This gets to the intimidation factor. He said:

I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual

blasphemy.

Alexander Cockburn stated:

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline

of the left, and the decline of the left's optimistic vision

of altering the economic nature of things through a political

program.

I guess what he is saying is, these intellectuals, any of these scientists who were formerly on the far left side who have come over-- as most of them now have; more than 50 percent of them have--are beat up pretty badly by the scientific community, or at least by the National Academy of Scientists.

Another left-leaning individual is Denis Rancourt, professor of physics and an environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa. He stated that the global warming campaign does a disservice to the environmental movement by beating this drum. He is a big environmentalist. When, obviously, the science is not there, it is doing a great disservice, and I think that is right.

Then you get into the three I like the best. Dr. Claude Allegre is a socialist. He is one of the top French scientists. He is the one who was marching in the streets with Al Gore 10, 15 years ago. Claude Allegre is recognized by everyone. He has now totally reversed his position. He was the top guy in France. With Dr. David Bellamy from the UK, it is the same situation. He was on the far left side of this issue. He has come around.

I have all the quotes by these individuals. There is not enough time to read them. The same thing is true with Nir Shaviv. Nir Shaviv was a scientist in Israel who is now quite outspoken in his opinion that the science just flat is not there.

Ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, he was a founder of Greenpeace and has now joined the ranks of the dissenters. He said:

It is clear the contention that human-induced

CO2 emissions and rising CO2 levels in

the global atmosphere are the cause of the present global

warming trend is a hypothesis that has not yet been elevated

to the level of a proven theory.

So this goes on and on and goes over many of these areas. I think even some of the mainstream media has begun to take notice of this issue. An article in Politico noted the other day--that is a paper we are all familiar with in the Senate--that a ``growing accumulation'' of science is challenging warming fears, and added that the ``science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.''

Canada's National Post, which is always promoting cap and trade, is now saying ``the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly.''

So I leave with three thoughts: First of all, the left is now abandoning the whole global warming fear concept, and we have all the names. I can recall when we had our 2-hour session with former Vice President Al Gore, and I never saw any sweat coming off his forehead until we started talking about people such as Claude Allegre, David Bellamy, and Nir Shaviv, who were always on his side before.

Second is the cost. If you do not want to use my $300 billion-a-year tax increase figure, use the figure that was used in the Boxer- Lieberman-Warner bill last year. It was $6.7 trillion.

The third thing to keep in mind has to do with Kyoto. It would have been bad enough, but for us to do it unilaterally would really be a very bad idea.

I would suggest people go to a Web site. I have the Web site: epw.senate.gov/minority. ``EPW'' stands for Environment and Public Works--epw.senate.gov/minority. I have a lot of documentation there for anyone who might be interested in the truth, not that that always produces a lot of interest around here.

Bailout And Jobs

Lastly, Mr. President, I want to go into one other thing unrelated, and I do not want to use too much time because others want to speak.

I have said--I do not think it is unfair, at least in my mind--that as to

this whole idea of the $700 billion bailout, 75 percent of the House and the Senate supported this legislation. Let's keep in mind that was to give an unelected bureaucrat the power to do with the first half of the $700 billion anything he wanted to do.

In fact, when Secretary Paulson--he actually said at one time: I promise this is going to be used to buy damaged assets. Well, we found out that, obviously, 3 our 4 minutes after he received the money, it did not go to that. I have heard, and just this past Wednesday an economist gave a presentation, that if we had used that for the intended purpose, it might have had an effect. They contend this did not have any effect at all on what has happened.

So with the concern that several of us have, I would only like to say that it has fallen on deaf ears. But I have been trying to get Members of this body to understand--I am talking about Democrats and Republicans; we have some Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders, who do understand this--and that is, the concept of giving the money to an unelected bureaucrat is wrong.

This is something we can do now on the second half of the $350 billion that remains. They spent every cent of the first $350 billion. As to the second $350 billion, if we leave the law like it is today, they can come forward and say this: Well, I want to have the other $350 billion. I am going to spend it on this and this and this--and maybe not even talk about the whole amount. They may be very uncertain as to what he is going to use it for. But then the only way to stop that would be to pass a resolution of disapproval.

Now, it would be very difficult to pass a resolution of disapproval. In fact, for obvious procedural and other reasons, it could not be done. What I have proposed, in S. 64, is to make a modest change in that law, and instead of saying it is going to automatically pass unless a resolution of disapproval, in a 15-day period, is successfully passed, say that you have to come forward and show us what it is going to be, how you are going to spend the money.

I have been trying to get more sponsors on this legislation. As I say, I already have some Democratic sponsors, and I applaud them for having the courage to come out and say: We want accountability. We don't care who it is in the White House, we need to have accountability.

So as we get toward the bailout bill, the last thing I want to mention is something I have very strong feelings about, and that is this: The figures I have heard--and at this point I do not think anyone can intelligently say exactly what the bailout bill is going to be--we have heard figures batted around about $1.2 trillion, huge amounts of money. But the report I got from the President-elect's team, they talked about out of $1.2 trillion, only $25 billion in total investment would be on infrastructure. That is nothing, $25 billion out of $1.2 trillion.

Now, I would say this: My good friend, Jim Oberstar, over in the House of Representatives, with whom I served on the Transportation Committee for 8 years before coming over here, has come up with a much more ambitious portion of it.

Now, if we are going to spend money for a stimulus bill, let's spend money on something that will actually come up with some jobs. I am not saying I want to spend all this money, but if it is going to be spent anyway.

I do not want to play down the whole idea of tax relief. We all know--we have learned from experience--what can happen if tax relief is done in the right way. We all remember what Woodrow Wilson did after World War I. He decided to cut taxes because the war was over. He did not need them anymore, and he expected revenue to drop down. It did not. It increased.

A very smart President of the United States, in the 1960s, John Kennedy, said--this is an exact quote--we need more money for the Great Society programs, and the best way to increase revenue is to decrease marginal rates. So he decreased rates, and it increased revenue.

Remember in 1980, the total amount of money that was raised from marginal rates was $244 billion. In 1990, it was $466 billion. That was during the 10-year period that had the largest tax reductions in the history of this country.

So we know we can stimulate the economy. I fear that is not going to be that type of tax reduction if we just merely have a redistribution of wealth and give money to people who do not pay taxes. That is not going to do it. So I say that because if tax relief were done properly, I would not be standing here and saying we ought to have a larger percentage of this spent on infrastructure. We have huge critical needs in the United States on our infrastructure. We are in a position right now where we had passed the last authorization bill, and it was a $286 billion bill in 2005. That was the transportation reauthorization. We are going to do it again. But if we could get a running start and spend some of the money that is going to be spent anyway on providing jobs immediately, we have $80 billion ready to go right now for jobs, where we could have the spade in the dirt tomorrow.

Then we have the categoric exclusion projects that are out there in addition to this. Those are projects that do not increase capacity, do not increase the footprint, but just maintain some of the crumbling bridges and infrastructure that is out there. So all that can be done. I think Gary Ridley is the best director of highways anywhere in America. He is our highway director in Oklahoma. We have, just in our State, one billion dollars' worth ready to go right now. So this is what we want to do.

On Monday, I am going to elaborate a little more on our opportunities that we have for infrastructure. I have been ranked most of the time as the most conservative Member of the Senate, and yet I am a big spender in some areas. One is in national defense, but another certainly is in infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to be doing.

I think we have an opportunity to do what we are supposed to be doing and at the same time produce jobs, and that will be my intent. I plan to talk about this in more detail on Monday.

With that, I yield the floor.