Empowering States' Right To Protect Consumers Act of 2009

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, since there is some time, I ask unanimous consent that I be acknowledged as in morning business for whatever time I shall consume.

Mr. President, there are several things toward the end of the week that I was wanting to elaborate a little bit on. They are kind of unrelated subjects, but we do not get this opportunity very often.

The whole idea of Guantanamo Bay is something that I know a lot of people have talked about. I was very proud at the inauguration when our new President, President Obama, gave a lot of statements that were, I thought, logical, and, frankly, a speech that I could very well have made--not as eloquently as he but from a content perspective.

He said, in relationship to the problem of Gitmo, or Guantanamo Bay, that, yes, we want to close that. However, we first must figure out what we are going to do with the detainees, recognizing that there are 245 detainees, recognizing further that there will be more as there is an escalation in activity in Afghanistan and that there is no place else to put these people.

I felt pretty satisfied at that time that this great American resource we have called Guantanamo Bay is something we need to keep. It is one of the few good deals the Government has. We have had it since 1903. It is a resource unlike anything else, not only in our holdings but anyplace in the world. It is a place where we have actually built a courtroom that will handle tribunals, that will handle cases with rules of evidence that would fit tribunals as opposed to our court system. I felt pretty comfortable knowing there is nothing that can be done with the 245 detainees. Many are very dangerous terrorists.

Since that time, he has changed his position. Now he is saying we will close it regardless. He has already closed the courtroom. This facility took 12 months to build. It cost $12 million. There is nothing else quite like it. If we are going to ever adjudicate these individuals, bring them to trial, we have to put them someplace. One of the alternatives would be our court system. Obviously, that is not a good idea. Most thinking people realize it is not a good idea because, the rules of evidence being different from what they are in a normal criminal case, most likely we would not get convictions. What happens when you don't get convictions? You turn people loose. If there is anything we don't want, it is terrorists being turned loose. The politics of that is such that people who want to close Guantanamo Bay are backing away from that issue, but they are still talking about closing it.

I have had occasion to be down there several times. The last time I was there, I used a new technology that I didn't understand too well: YouTube. I did a program down there from Guantanamo. I commented at that time: Here we are with about six levels of security for six levels of detainees. There is no place else like it where we can do something like this.

In terms of how they are treated, I have had them say, with a translator, that it is probably the best food they have ever had in their lives. There is one medical practitioner--in most cases, a doctor--for each two detainees. Where else will you find that? There are procedures that are offered to the detainees that they would never have offered anywhere else. For instance, when they offered a colonoscopy, which was described to the detainees in terms of what it entailed, they decided they didn't want it. Nonetheless, these were things that were offered in the way of health care.

In the case of torture, there has never been a documented case of waterboarding or any severe torture taking place there. I can remember the week after 9/11, when we had immediately a few people in there. I went down and found that our own troops who were stationed down there were not treated as well as the detainees.

Even if that were not true, there is no other place that we can put them. There has been a proposal that there are some 17 detention installations in the United States that would be suitable for these people. One of them happens to be Fort Sill, which happens to be in Oklahoma. I went to Fort Sill and talked to a young lady there who is a sergeant major. This is in Lawton, OK. I talked to her about this. She said: Senator, I have to ask you a question. Why is it that everyone is so concerned about closing Guantanamo Bay? This facility here is not nearly as suitable for detainees.

Then she went on to explain why this separation of people and of classes of security problems. She said: Besides that, I spent 2 years-- this is Sergeant Major Carter, stationed at Fort Sill--at Guantanamo Bay. That facility is better than any Federal facility we have.

Why is it we are so bent, just because of some ugly rumors that are not true about treatment of detainees, on closing a resource we have had and we are still paying $4,000 a year for, as we have been ever since 1903? You don't get many bargains like that in government. Anyway, they seem to be concerned about doing that.

I believe public pressure is going to come around on our side and common sense will prevail and we will not close that resource. We will need it in the future. We need it today. We have needed it in the past. It has served us well.

As this moves along, I hope the public knows there are several of us who are going to make sure we do not do anything that is going to allow some of these detainees to be floating around in the continental United States. If we are inclined to do this program where we put them in some 17 installations, we will have 17 magnets for terrorism in the United States. That is not going to happen.

The First One Hundred Days

I also wish to talk about the striking similarities between what is happening today and what happened back in 1993.

The first 100 days of President Obama's administration will be remembered for its unprecedented level of new Federal spending--no question about that; no Democrat or Republican can deny that--and the return to big government. This, together with his advocacy of far-left, liberal causes--everything from abortion rights, to gun control, to universal health care--will put him on a track to repeat the performance of 1993, when a very attractive, young Bill Clinton entered the Oval Office under the banner of change. After Americans realized that his so-called change was simply an extremely leftwing position, the American people revolted and put Republicans back in charge of Congress. If President Obama continues down this path, I would not be surprised to see that happen again in 2010.

Nothing is more indicative of the stark contrast between conservatives and liberals than the massive Government spending spree now underway in Washington. In his first year in office, Bill Clinton put forward what was then the largest budget to date in our history. It was $1.5 trillion. It included domestic spending of some $123 billion.

Now in this 100th day of President Obama's administration, the Senate is poised to vote on what would become the largest budget to date. This budget, which highlights his priorities, is the most radical and partisan budget we have ever seen. It includes $4.4 trillion in additional deficits and $3.5 trillion in total spending. Let's compare that to 1993. I was down on the floor complaining about a $1.5 trillion budget. This is a $3.5 trillion budget.

When I go back to Oklahoma, sometimes I come to the conclusion that there aren't any normal people in Washington, because they ask the question: Senator, how can we afford all this spending when we had a stimulus bill of $789 billion, increasing debt by $1.8 trillion in the first year, and a $3.5 trillion budget? Where is the money going to come from?

Here I am, the senior Senator from Oklahoma, and I can't answer the question. We do have choices. We can borrow. We can print it. It will have to be a combination of the above. We know all of the very damaging effects: $1 trillion in taxes on individuals and businesses, a $634 billion downpayment for government-run health insurance. There is another similarity. Remember, in 1993 it was called Hillary health care. The concept was the Government can run a health care system better than people can. I always invite people who believe that to go spend some time in some of the hospitals up north; the Mayo Clinic and some others come to mind. See the number of people who are there who came over from Canada because they couldn't get treatment. Maybe their age was right above the federal guideline for a particular type of procedure, and they could no longer do it. Again, the similarities are so similar, 1993 and what is happening today. Then, of course, we had the Wall Street bailout and all of that.

I am very concerned about the direction this administration has proposed to take us. Anyone who works hard, plays by the rules, pays taxes, drives a car, turns on the lights, saves, invests, donates to charity, or plans to be successful should also be concerned.

Defense cuts--I probably am more concerned about this than most Members. I am the second ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. I have watched what is going on. To me, it is deplorable.

I happened to be in Afghanistan when Secretary Gates came out with Obama's defense cuts. They tried to claim they are not defense cuts. They are. It is just that they are talking about the DOD appropriations bill versus all the other funding sources that have been used before.

The best evidence that they are cuts is what has happened to our platforms. Right now, the F-22 is the only platform we have that is fifth-generation maturity. This is something he is stopping right now. We were originally supposed to have 750 F-22s. Now we will stop at 187. At the same time, you have China with its J-12, Russia with its SU series, a fifth-generation airplane. That is going to put us in a position where it will hurt and hurt bad.

The same thing is true with the Future Combat Systems. We have been working on that for 8 years now since Shinseki helped to start it. It is the first transition in ground capability in at least 50 years. This is something we have been working on so that we don't send our kids into battle against countries that might have a better artillery piece and better equipment than we. He axed that program.

How long has it been since we started working with the Parliament of Poland and the Czech Republic to get them to let us put a radar system in the Czech Republic and interceptor capability in Poland so that when Iran gets the capability of sending a nuclear missile over to western Europe or the eastern United States, we would have the ability to shoot it down? It didn't happen. The Parliaments that had to be politically pretty strong to agree to do that. Now they are sitting back and finding out that they are talking about axing that program too.

The airborne laser is the closest thing we have to knocking down a missile in the boost phase. We were coming along with that program. They axed that program too.

I am very concerned about what happens and what has happened in this budget to our capability of defending ourselves. Then I go back to 1993. That is exactly what happened back then. If we look at the 8 years of the Clinton administration, we cut military spending from what would be just a straight line by $412 billion in that period. Of course, we ended up cutting our military by about 40 percent over that period.

The bottom line is, all these programs were cut. I happened to be in Afghanistan when that happened. We did a report from over there. We could see the Bradleys driving by and the helicopters taking off, the bad weather, soldiers coming back from patrols and turning on the tube and finding out President Obama is going to gut the military. It is totally unacceptable. But that is the same thing that happened in 1993. It is deja vu all over again.

Gun control is the same. We see now that they are going to try to get us to sign on to a treaty that is called CIFTA, a treaty in the Western Hemisphere where we will all get together and we will allow Central America and Mexico and South America and Canada to determine what gun manufacturers can do. It is the first major step to gun control, in violation of second amendment rights. People care about that. It is exactly what happened with Bill Clinton in 1993.

Energy taxes--back when Bill Clinton was doing it, it was called the Btu tax. That stands for British thermal unit. It was a massive tax increase on energy and very similar to what they are trying to do right now--which, incidentally, I have no doubt we will stop them from being able to do--the cap-and-trade tax. One thing about the cap-and-trade tax, that is something that is not just a one-shot deal like the stimulus bill. That is every year. It would be somewhere around $350 billion a year in taxes on the American people, a regressive tax because it is a tax on energy. People with lower incomes spend a larger percentage of their expendable income on that kind of energy than rich people do.

We are not going to let that happen. I tell all my friends, we have been fighting that battle now for 8 years,

and it is over. We are not going to let that happen in America. But that is what Bill Clinton tried to do in 1993. It is the same thing all over again.

We went through the same thing on abortion. I think personally there is no mission more important than standing up for the sanctity of human life. Here again, President Obama, like President Clinton, quickly moved to appease pro-abortion advocates.

Just a few days ago, the Senate confirmed Kathleen Sebelius for Secretary of Health and Human Services. As Governor of Kansas since 2002, she has a clear record of supporting abortion and policies that I believe impact the health and safety of women and parental rights. Again, it is abortion. Either you are for it or against it. But this is one of the strong pro-abortion positions in 1993 that now we are getting again out of this administration.

So when you look at this, I cannot help but think that all the signs are there, that we are seeing the same thing now that we saw back in 1993. I believe we are going to be positioned to keep a lot of these things from happening, No. 1, and No. 2, let's remember what happened in 1993. Young, attractive Bill Clinton went in as President of the United States, and he had the House and he had the Senate, and he had it all just as President Obama has it all. He has the House and the Senate. Therefore, it is not someone else's fault for all these programs. Consequently, we had a major turnover in the 1994 election. Republicans took over the House and the Senate. So I just warn my liberal friends from the other side of the aisle, be real careful. Watch what you are doing because it could very well happen again.

EPA'S Endangerment Finding

Mr. President, I do have something that is a little heavier lifting subject. I am the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. When the Republicans were in the majority, I was chairman of it.

Something is happening right now, and something happened Tuesday morning. I want to make sure everybody understands, as this week is coming to an end, that on April 17, the administration set in motion a ticking timebomb with its release of a proposed endangerment finding for carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases. This proposal finds--this, incidentally, is what all the scientists do not agree with--this proposal finds that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

This is interesting because they first tried to pass cap and trade. They know there are not the votes for it. There are in the House. Speaker Pelosi pretty much gets anything she wants through. It is a simple majority vote over there. Over here, it would take 60 votes to pass that massive tax increase, and we are not going to do it because they do not have more than 34, maybe 35 votes, and it takes 60 votes. But, nonetheless, since they cannot do it, they decided to do it under the Clean Air Act and do it through regulation so it could be done from the White House. This so-called endangerment finding sets the clock ticking on a vast array of regulations and taxes, with little or no political debate or congressional control.

On May 12, we learned of a White House document. This is significant. We did not know it was there. I want to credit our committee, the Environment and Public Works Committee--the minority side--for finding this document. It is a White House document marked ``privileged and confidential.'' It was buried deep within the docket of the proposed rule. It outlines some of the very same concerns shared by me and many of my colleagues, including Senator Barrasso. I could not be here for that Tuesday morning meeting, and he was good enough to take this memo and expose it and did an excellent job of it.

Keep in mind, we are talking about their proposal for new taxes, new regulations--all these things they want to go through with because they cannot legislatively pass a cap-and-trade--or cap-and-tax, as some call it--proposal.

The document we found--allegedly a compilation of concerns from unnamed officials within the White House, or the administration, as part of an interagency review of the proposed regulation--raises some questions, very serious criticisms of the endangerment proposal. Chief among them are questions raised about the link between the EPA's scientific argument for endangerment and its political summary.

I am going to quote from it. I have three quotes. Keep in mind, this came from the administration. This report says:

The finding rests heavily on the precautionary principle,

but the amount of acknowledged lack of understanding about

basic facts surrounding greenhouse gases seems to stretch the

precautionary principle to providing for regulation in the

face of unprecedented uncertainty.

In other words, what they are saying there is that the science is not there; we do not know yet; we know there are a lot of problems with this, and we should not be rushing into it. This came from the White House. I am glad we found it.

Here is a further quote. Additionally, it says:

There is a concern that EPA is making a finding based on

``harm'' from substances that have no demonstrated direct

health effects, such as respiratory or toxic effects, and

that available scientific data that purports to conclusively

establish the nature and the extent of the adverse public

health and welfare effects are almost exclusively from non-

EPA sources.

Again, this is not me talking, this is a quote from the White House in a buried document we fortunately--but surprisingly--did find.

You can ask: What source is the EPA relying on if it is going to go through all this? That source is the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is where it all started. It was the United Nations that started this whole issue of greenhouse gases, of CO2, anthropogenic gases, and methane causing global warming. When you look at their ``Fourth Assessment Report'', which, as I have documented before many times in speeches on this Senate floor, is a political and not a science-based body, it has no accountability here in the United States.

You keep hearing people say: What about the NAS, the National Academy of Sciences? What about them? They are scientists.

The reports they give are not from the NAS, they are from the political review or the summary for policymakers, which is a political document, not another document.

In addition, this White House memo also warns of a cascade of unintended regulatory consequences if the endangerment finding is finalized. It states--and again, I am quoting from this report:

Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the

Clean Air Act--

That is what they want to do, regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act--

for the first time is likely to have serious economic

consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S.

economy, including small business and small communities.

This report talks about the small businesses, the small communities, churches, other groups that are going to be adversely affected by this. Again, this is a document that came out of the White House.

Now, for one thing, I am glad to know we are not alone with our concerns and that several in the Obama administration share views similar to ours on the endangerment finding. I am hopeful more will come forward.

So what was the administration's official response to the release of this memo? Well, it depended on whom you asked. One source in the Obama administration chose to again blame it on the Bush administration, stating it was written by a holdover appointed by George W. Bush. However, earlier in the day, Peter Orszag, who heads the White House budget office, where the memo apparently came from, stated that the quotations circulating in the press are from a document in which the OMB simply ``collated and collected disparate comments from various agencies during the interagency review process of the proposed finding. These collected comments were not necessarily internally consistent, since they came from multiple sources, and they do not necessarily represent the views of either OMB or the Administration.'' Well, it is fine to say this, but that is where it came from. It came from the administration. It is very fortunate we found it.

It begs the question: Does this document reflect one rogue leftover Bush appointee, who, based on followup news

reports, actually appears to be a Democrat or does it reflect a more systematic summary of comments from various agencies that have serious concerns with the proposed finding, as Orszag suggested? I am hoping someone from the administration will come forth with a consistent response.

In either case, I welcome the comments as an open and honest discussion of the potential costs, benefits, and legal justifications for such a finding.

Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, the EPA has the discretion to carefully weight the science and the causes and effects in its determination of endangerment, and, despite recent claims by administration officials, it is under no court order to find in the affirmative that such greenhouse gases endanger public health or welfare or cause or contribute to air pollution.

If we are going to have a debate on this issue, let's have it here in Congress, where the American people deserve an open and honest discussion about the costs and alleged benefits, about the effectiveness of such policies and what it will mean to the consumers who ultimately pay the bill. As I said before, it is going to be the poorer Americans who pay the larger percentage of their incomes who are going to be punished.

By the way, we had the debate here. In the House, they have never had the debate because it has never come up as an issue. Here we had the debate during the ratification debate on the Kyoto treaty. And we had the McCain-Lieberman bill, the Warner-Lieberman bill, the Boxer--there is another bill that came up just in the last year. So we have had the debate, a full and open debate, and we are going to have to debate this issue because there is an effort to try to do through regulation what they cannot do through open debate in the process on the floor.

The administration, and this EPA in particular, has claimed they will usher in a new era of transparency. In April, Administrator Jackson issued a sweeping memo to all EPA employees committing the agency to an unprecedented level of transparency. I applaud her for it. She told me this in my office. We also found that she made this statement in a private memo to Members. So she is being very honest in what her effort is. I have a feeling a lot of this stuff is happening, and she is not even aware of it.

She says--and this is a quote; this is beautiful:

The success of our environmental efforts depends on earning

and maintaining the trust of the public we serve. The

American people will not trust us to protect their health or

their environment if they do not trust us to be transparent

and inclusive in our decision-making. To earn this trust, we

must conduct business with the public openly and fairly.

Again, this is Lisa Jackson, the new Administrator of the EPA. I applaud her for saying this.

This requires not only that EPA remain open and accessible

to those representing all points of view, but also that EPA

offices responsible for decisions take affirmative steps to

solicit the views of those who will be affected by these

decisions.

She went on to say at her confirmation hearing--not only did she reaffirm this statement, but she said she would be responsive to us on the minority side, the same as she would be to the majority, and I believe that.

Certainly, the allegations in this White House memo make one question whether the EPA is open and accessible to all points of view. For one thing, it was marked ``privileged and confidential,'' which tells me that perhaps they knew about it, but then they did not want to use it and they did not want people to find out about it. Nonetheless, the document speaks for itself.

My colleagues may criticize the Bush administration for how it handled the endangerment finding, but at least they did not try to bury or hide these types of comments when it proposed its advance notice of proposed rulemaking last summer. I know a lot of this sounds a little confusing. This is a process you go through, an advance notice of proposed rulemaking. In fact, the previous administration; that is, the Bush administration, went so far as to lay all of these comments out in public view so all sides could be represented. If this latest action is any indication of how the EPA has begun to operate, then the American public should have serious reason to be concerned.

On this CO2 endangerment issue--potentially the largest and most sweeping regulatory effort ever to be proposed--transparency should be a cornerstone of every agency action. Opinions from all sides, pro and con--and certainly from all other agencies--should be weighed equally and fairly and, just as important, openly, in full view of the American people. The American people deserve to know all sides, all costs, and all benefits. This thing is so costly, and with the questionable benefits, this is that much more important.

Because of these issues, I am hopeful the Administrator will commit to a determination on endangerment that would be based on the record of the scientific data and empirical evidence rather than political or other nonscientific considerations. It is of the utmost importance that regulatory matters of this scope and magnitude be based on the most objective, balanced scientific and empirical data.

While I am still hopeful that ultimately Congress or the agency will decide to take this option off the table, a full on-the-record examination during any endangerment rulemaking should be a minimum requirement of transparency.

But the administration has essentially politicized the issue by presenting policymakers with a false choice. The choice is to use an outdated, ill-equipped, and economically disastrous option under the Clean Air Act or pick another bad option--cap and trade--that commits us to requirements for unaffordable technology and would certainly be the largest consistent annual tax increase in the history of America. This isn't going to happen.

I would repeat we are fortunate in that we have had this debate, and each time we have the debate, there are more and more people who come down and say: Well, I didn't know it was going to cost that much money. Back in the original Kyoto days, it appeared that a majority of the people, in fact, in the Senate would support that type of an approach.

By the way, I have to say this: The Kyoto treaty was one thing. That is a treaty that affects the whole world, a lot of developed nations and some undeveloped nations. It was something you signed onto and everyone signs onto and everyone agrees to. Since that didn't happen-- and even if you are one of those individuals who believes that anthropogenic gases, CO2, and methane are causing global warming--if you believe it, which isn't true, but if you did believe it--then does it make sense for us to pass something unilaterally in the Senate, making us less competitive than the rest of the world? What is going to happen to our manufacturing base? What is left of it is going to end up in places such as China, India, and Mexico, where they don't have these emission requirements. What is going to happen then? There will be a net increase in CO2.

Back to the memo, and I will conclude with this. I have to repeat what the memo says. This was a memo that was advice to the process from the White House.

The finding rests heavily on the precautionary principle,

but the amount of acknowledged lack of understanding about

basic facts surrounding greenhouse gases would seem to

stretch the precautionary principle to providing for

regulation in the face of unprecedented uncertainty.

In other words, it is uncertain.

Further, it states:

There is a concern that EPA is making a finding based on

harm from substances that have no demonstrated direct health

effects such as respiratory or toxic effects, and that

available scientific data that purports to conclusively

establish the nature and extent of the adverse public health

and welfare effects are almost exclusively from non-EPA

sources.

That is an admission.

Finally:

Making the decision--

Which I hope we will not make the decision to do, but we will oppose that decision--

to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act for the

first time is likely to have serious economic consequences

for regulated entities throughout the United States economy,

including small businesses and small communities.

In other words, nobody wins. Nobody wins.

So with that, I would say there is this effort that what they cannot do

legislatively they want to do through regulations, and we are not going to allow that to happen.

With that, I yield the floor.

I ask unanimous consent that the Landrieu-Snowe amendment No. 1079 be modified as it is presently at the desk.

Madam President, I would like to speak for 3 or 4 minutes. I see my colleague from Iowa is here to speak, so I will not take any more time.

I spoke briefly about this amendment when I introduced it on behalf of Senator Snowe and others who joined us, from both sides of the aisle. I have spoken at some length with the chairman and ranking member as well. I am hoping we could have a positive outcome on this amendment because it is so important to our small businesses in America.

We have been trying with some degree of success to actually help small businesses on Main Street in our communities. I say ``with some success,'' because we all go home on the weekends and we continue to hear very serious complaints from our grocery stores and our hardware stores and our shoe repair shops and our cleaners and our business owners saying: Senator when is any help coming our way? You are giving all of these billions of dollars to Wall Street and to these big banks. Yet we are here really struggling. Is anyone listening to us in Washington?

Olympia Snowe and I, as chair and ranking member of the Small Business Committee, are doing what we can, saying: Yes, we are listening, and we want to be of some help. Every bill that comes to the floor, we try to put a lens on it: How is this helping small business?

This bill is a good step to help consumers, individuals, persons, who have a credit card. Unfortunately, the way the bill is currently drafted, it leaves out small businesses.

My amendment with Senator Snowe will simply put them in this bill so when this bill passes, we can have a real celebration about helping, not just individual cardholders but small businesses that are struggling to keep their doors open.

Madam President, you serve on the Small Business Committee. You have heard the testimony, immediate past testimony, of, really, businesses that have 500 employees that are struggling, to businesses that have 2 employees; from a conservative perspective, from a liberal perspective, that have come before our committee. That is how this amendment came to be.

As I reviewed the underlying bill and thought there were some terrific things in this bill that will help credit card users, let me just quickly say, it bans at any time, for any reason, increases in rates. No more can credit card companies just raise your rate any time for any reason. That is eliminated in this bill.

No longer can credit card companies charge you for a balance that you paid. If you owe $1,000, you send them a check for $900, they can still, under current law, charge you interest on the entire $1,000.

That is not fair. It is not fair to individuals. It is not fair to small businesses. That will be corrected in this bill.

It simplifies disclosures. Yes, I believe in the free market, but I believe in order to have a free market you need to be able to read the print. Sometimes not only is the print small, but it is almost difficult to understand. So it is more simple disclosures.

I think small business owners need that opportunity as well. It prohibits credit card companies from charging interest on transaction fees that they add to monthly bills. So small business will get that benefit.

This is, in conclusion, not going to solve every challenge that small businesses have, but at least they will know there are Members of the Congress, Senators and House Members, who hear them, who are trying to do what we can to respond, and this amendment will actually cover 26 million small businesses in America, in addition to the millions of other credit cardholders, perhaps over 50 million, maybe more. This will include small businesses with less than 50 employees.

I would like to help every business in America. I will continue to work on that. But for this bill, because it was directed to individuals, we thought by keeping it to relatively small businesses, it would fit in the overall scope and framework of this bill.

Senator Snowe and I are going to continue to work to expand credit opportunities for businesses with your help. This bill also is supported by Senator Shaheen, as an original cosponsor, and Senator Cardin. I wish to thank them very much for their support and help.

I see my colleague from Iowa and will reserve the remainder of my remarks for Tuesday, when I hope we can vote on this amendment.

Madam President, I come to the floor to speak about one of the pending amendments, No. 1079. In a few minutes, I am going to make a motion on that amendment.

I did not get to hear all of what the wonderful Senator and colleague from

Missouri said, but I take it that she, like I, supports the underlying bill. I can appreciate the need for this consumer protection. As chairman of the Small Business Committee, I have been hearing literally for months, as has the occupant of the chair, who has sat through hearings with me--we have heard the tragic stories of small businesses that have done everything right--businesses that had excellent business models, people who have been in business for four decades or longer, businesses that have never missed a credit card payment. You have heard their pleas to us to give them some relief.

The consumers generally have said the same. The wonderful thing is that this underlying bill gives some relief to consumers, to personal credit cardholders. I commend Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby for bringing this bill to the floor. It only got out of this Banking Committee, which is tough to get any pro-consumer legislation out of, unfortunately, by only one vote, I understand. But they got it to the floor. It is a very important bill. People cannot have their interest rates raised without notice. They cannot have their balances double charged. In other words, right now, today, if you owed $5,000 on your credit card and you cashed in your savings bonds and everything else and paid $4,500 on that balance to get it down, under the current law, credit card companies can still charge you the full interest on $5,000. That is wrong. These same companies are receiving billions and billions of taxpayer dollars so they can turn around and fleece the people who are sending them the tax dollars to bail them out. It is unconscionable, truly. So the committee acted. They did the right thing. They extended these protections to consumers.

But there were some potential jurisdictional questions, or perhaps an oversight, that the bill does not protect holders of business credit cards. Twenty-five years ago, this wouldn't have been an issue, because most people who were building a business, or financing one, had other avenues of capital.

You can see on this chart the trend in credit card use. In 1993, 16 years ago, 16 percent of business owners said they used credit cards to finance their operations. In that 16 years, it has gone to 60 percent-- from 16 percent to 60 percent. It has become a source of capital and cashflow, a tool, for small business.

Here again is another chart. We have learned this in our hearings we have had. Sources of small business financing in 2009: Credit cards, 59 percent, just about 60 percent; bank loans, 45 percent; vendor credit, 30 percent; used no financing--cash or savings--19 percent; private loans through a friend or family, 19 percent; and SBA loans, 5 percent. That is an important part, although it is small, which helps to finance. It is long term, I might say; our loans are 20, 25, 30 years. Some of these others are only 30- or 60-day loans. It is small, but it is important. We hope with your leadership, Madam President, and that of the Senator from Maine, we can get this number up.

The point of this discussion is this number--60 percent: Small businesses in Louisiana, from New Orleans, to Alexandria, to Shreveport--small business people I see when I am shopping at Costco or at Sam's Club, standing in line, and I know it is not a family because they have four dozen oranges. No family eats that many oranges in a week, so you know they are buying for their small business or restaurant or for their corner store. So we know that these small businesses are relying more and more on credit cards.

In this bill we are voting on, there is no protection for them--zero. This bill only protects personal credit cards, not business credit cards. So the Landrieu-Snowe amendment, cosponsored by the occupant of the chair--and I will get the list of others in a moment--it was cosponsored by several Members of the Senate, and they are Senators Cardin, Shaheen, Brown, Cantwell, Inouye, Klobuchar, Snowe, Collins, and I think others will be joining in support of this amendment. We have decided to offer an amendment that simply says the underlying safeguards for holders of personal credit cards should simply extend to businesses of 50 employees or less, up to $25,000 on their business card, because there are many people who carry a personal card for personal business. Of course, they may carry a business card for business-related business.

I know we have to give consumers relief, but I am here to say, as the chairman of the Small Business Committee, if we don't give our small businesses some relief, we are not going to have an economy to depend on because if we are looking for people to create jobs--which I think is what the President is calling on us to do--those jobs are going to be created by the small businesses of America. That is why in this debate the National Federation of Independent Businesses--not a bastion of liberalism by any means--is supporting this bill, and the American Society of Travel Agents, the American Beverage Licensees, the Consumer Federation of America, the Food Marketing Institute, the National Association for the Self-Employed, representing tens of millions of self-employed individuals--and they find it ironic that we say we are trying to get help to the little guy and we say we are trying to get help from Wall Street to Main Street. Yet every time there are amendments on the floor to actually do that, they never seem to be able to pass.

I know there are arguments that say: Well, we don't know what the effect of this amendment will be. I can tell you what the effect will be. The small businesses in America, the 20 million that will be affected by this, will say: Thank you for not allowing my rates to go up without notice. Thank you for not allowing them to double-charge me if I am paying down $20,000 on my $25,000 balance. Thank you, because I didn't get a penny from the TARP money, but at least I am getting some help through this consumer relief bill.

As I said, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Small Business Association, the Petroleum Marketers Association of America, the Service Employees International Union, the Small Business Majority, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Women's Chamber of Commerce, and the Black Chamber of Commerce have all endorsed this bill. We haven't heard yet from the U.S. Chamber, but I am hoping they will step forward--at least the small business section of the U.S. Chamber. I understand they represent large banks, credit card-issuing companies, so it is tough for them. But somebody has to speak up for small business, and I hope that right now my colleagues will consider this amendment.

Again, I am going to have to call it up for action now and actually move to table it, and when I do that, we will not be able to have any discussion on this because that motion is not debatable. That is why I am speaking about it now. But at least we will get on the record how people feel about this, and I am hoping we can get a substantial vote.

I have decided that even if it is just my vote, and the cosponsors and Senator Snowe, at least the small business people in America will know there are some people here who understand they deserve the minimal protections this bill provides, particularly at this time, and that in the next year or two, or three, four, or five--until we get on safe ground--we need to be doing everything we can to help small businesses because without them, there will be no recovery. It is not the large businesses that are going to create these jobs. They are going to contract. They are going to redesign themselves. They are going to contract until things are safe. They are going to poke their head out of that shell when the way is clear. The people who are going to run out in the line of fire are the small businesses these people represent. They are the ones who are going to say: No, I am not going down. I am going to hire. I am going to keep moving forward because I know my idea is good or because I know when we come out of this recession, I will be able to make it. These are the people on whom we will build this recovery, and these are the people who need help today. We don't need to study it for 10 years or look at it for 5 years. These organizations represent the millions of businesses that need help today. So on behalf of this coalition, I think the facts are on our side.

This is not an anti-credit card company amendment, this is a pro- small business amendment. I know people have to make money. Everybody has to make money. And everybody is trying

to do what they can. But there is no excuse right now, when small businesses have to rely--as I said, 60 percent of our small businesses--and this is an average. In some States, it probably could be up to 70 percent of small businesses. In some States, maybe it is below 50 or 45. But it is still a significant number of businesses using credit cards to help finance their business. Let's give them a little help today.

So I move to call up and I ask for the yeas and nays on amendment No. 1079. I further move to table the amendment.

Madam President, I withdraw the request, and I ask for regular order on amendment No. 1079.

Madam President, in order for me to get a vote on this amendment, I am going to have to ask for the amendment to be tabled. I would like to ask for the amendment to be tabled. Of course, I will be voting not to table it and will be asking for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, at this time I would like to remove my motion to table amendment No. 1079, but I would like it to remain pending.

I understand the amendment will still be pending. But when cloture is invoked, unfortunately, this amendment is going to fall because it is not germane to the bill so we will not be able to have a vote on this amendment, which was my hope. But because of time constraints and because of the difficulty of getting Members to the floor for the procedures that we would have to go through to have a vote, I am happy to report that the chairman of the committee has agreed to allow our committee, Small Business, to have jurisdiction over this matter.

We will, in the next few weeks, be putting together a bill on the Small Business Administration Reauthorization, which we have to do by matter of course and responsibility. I appreciate Senator Dodd agreeing to acquiesce to allow our committee to have jurisdiction over this narrow matter. I intend, with the help of my ranking member, Senator Snowe, and the help of, I hope, the vast majority of the members of our committee, both Democrats and Republicans--I hope we will stand together to present at that time legislation that can provide real relief to small businesses that need all the help they can get.

We are not asking for artificially low rates to be set. We are not asking to tie credit card companies' hands in the event that small businesses renege on their payment plans or are late paying. We are just saying, if you are a business operating out there and you have paid your bills on time, you are paying your credit cards, you are meeting your obligations, that your rates cannot arbitrarily be raised.

We understand transactions and contracts between business people. This is not the Government stepping in to try to negotiate. This is simply a level playing field between consumers and small businesses.

Again, because 69 percent of businesses in America today depend on credit cards to finance their operations, I am here to say, and our committee will be back saying to the Members of the Senate, we must get our eyes on small business, on their access to credit, on their ability to survive so this recovery can take root, and we can create the kinds of jobs that will be necessary.

I am sorry because of the time constraints and the unwillingness of some here to be cooperative. But I thank the chair of the committee, Senator Dodd, for allowing our committee to have jurisdiction. I can promise, as the chair of that committee, this amendment will be on the bill when our bill comes to the floor for consideration and we will get a vote. If people want to vote against our amendment--something may not be exact--fine. Let them vote against it. But I want the record to be clear that there are a number of Members of the Senate, hopefully a majority, who believe the same protections extended to consumers for their credit cards would be extended to businesses in America, small businesses--those with 50 employees or less--with at least a $25,000 limit on their credit card. It is not going to be every business in America that will get covered, but it is the small businesses that are having the most difficult time.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oklahoma for yielding. There are two issues I wish to address. The first will be this bill, in particular, the gift card title in the Credit Card Act. Secondly, I wish to speak a little bit about the NTSB hearings on flight 3407 which, as my colleagues know, crashed outside Buffalo and Clarence with a tragic result.

First, before I get into the substance on gift cards, I wish to commend Senator Dodd, Senator Shelby, and all the members of the Banking Committee for doing an excellent job on this bill. The bottom line is we need good, strong, tough regulation on credit cards. The days when disclosure was enough are over. I happened to believe that once and worked hard for disclosure measures. There is something called the ``Schumer box'' that is on all credit card solicitations applications because it puts in large letters the interest rates. Back in the old days, that worked. Every credit card, even though interest rates were 6, 7, 8 percent, was at 19.8 percent, but you couldn't find that out. So when people signed up for a credit card, they had no idea what interest rate they were paying. Once the box got on the solicitations, on the applications, interest rates came down. Good old- fashioned American competition began to work.

But in recent years--maybe they just got smarter or maybe they got more desperate for profits--credit card companies have found a way around disclosure. A person believes they are signing up for one rate, but then in the fine print, basically, if you wake up out of bed, the rate goes higher--much higher. We have gotten letters and heard stories from people who were on a 7-percent fixed rate and it went up to 23 percent overnight.

If it is on a future balance, that is fine. You can get another credit card. But it isn't. These rates go up on existing balances. Let's say you have a $4,000 balance, which is the average for American families with credit cards. Calculate it. You go from 7 percent a month on $4,000 to 23 percent on $4,000, and that is a difference of hundreds of dollars a month. These days, with the economy the way it is, with families struggling to make ends meet, a couple hundred dollars a month is the difference between being able to survive and perhaps going bankrupt; being able to survive and not being able to provide some of the basic necessities.

The legislation before us stops all those practices. The frustration, I must say, on both sides of the aisle, with the practices of the credit card industry is mounting. I would say to those in the credit card industry: Unless you get your act together, there may be other amendments and bills you will not find to your liking. It is about time to be responsible. I understand the banking industry is in tough times, and we all hope they will recover, but to recover by taking advantage of consumers is unfair, unwise, wrong, and we aim to stop it with this legislation.

The provision I wish to address specifically is one that I worked on with the Presiding Officer. We are both sponsors. The Senator from Colorado has done great work on this legislation, and I wish to thank him for his assistance as we move it forward. I also wish to thank, on this particular issue, both Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby, who walked the extra mile. I think it shows that if you work hard at legislating, and you are willing to compromise, it pays off. The original bill the Presiding Officer and I put in was tougher than the proposal here, but the proposal here is good and strong. It makes a huge difference between what exists now--which is virtually nothing--and what will become law, and it is something I think everyone can be proud of.

I also wish to thank those in the consumer industry. As do I, as well as the Presiding Officer, they wanted a stronger bill, but they understood that when you legislate, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Getting something strong is better than getting nothing, even if you would have preferred something stronger.

Well, we are all familiar with gift cards. In many ways, they are the perfect present. You get the opportunity to choose whatever you want the most. When you get a gift card, it is great. You can think of 15 different things you want and decide which one you want to buy. You can go to the store, pick out what you want, and get it without spending a dime of your own money.

We have all opened that gift from Aunt Edna and wished she had spent the money on a gift card instead of that sweater you are never going to wear. I, for one, am not very good at picking out gifts. So gift cards are a boon to me, not only as a recipient but as somebody who gives gifts because I can buy the gift card, and I can breathe a sigh of relief that my family member or friend will have something they want instead of something I have chosen that they might not want at all, which often happens when I choose gifts. I guess I am a little like Aunt Edna.

Gift cards are a very good thing, and we don't want to snuff them out or limit their extent.

But what most people do not realize is that these gift cards often come with hidden fees and short expiration dates. After a period of time that can be as short as 6 months, the issuer begins charging value off the cards, reducing their value and depriving recipients of their gifts. That means if your mom or aunt or friend did their holiday shopping early, by the time April or May rolled around, you could be slowly but surely giving your gift card back to the bank piece by piece by piece.

Consumers usually pay a high fee when you buy the card, sometimes as much as 20 percent of the value. Well, on top of that, the recipient of the cards faces other charges such as monthly maintenance fees, dormancy fees or even a separate fee for each time the card is used. That is not fair. It is not fair when you get a gift card, say, at Christmastime and you say: I will save it until June to buy something I can use in the summer, and you go to the store and the gift card doesn't have the whole value on the card. That is not right. It is not fair. Frankly, it is not what the giver signed up for when he or she bought that card and gave it to you in a gesture of friendship or love.

For years, issuers of these cards have used fees to make hefty profits, largely on the backs of consumers, but with this legislation we are going to ensure that recipients are protected and can use their cards free of these duplicitous fees for a reasonable period of time.

First, the bill ensures that no fee can be charged unless there is no activity on the card for 12 consecutive months from the date on which the last charge is imposed. Let me explain. If you purchased the card the week before Christmas and give it to your child, parent, spouse on Christmas Day, for a whole year, until next Christmas, that card doesn't decline in value one penny. That is a very good thing and very much needed. During that year, if you use the card once but don't use the whole value--let's say it is a $50 card and you buy something for $22--the 12-month period starts again so you have plenty of time to use the card.

Second, the bill will require the Federal Reserve to determine a fair amount for the fees and set a minimum balance above which fees can't be charged. So the issuers aren't charging people exorbitant rates to use their cards and aren't taking up the entire value of the cards with these fees. If, for instance, the gift card is for $50 and they charge you $5 a month, within 10 months, the gift card is useless. It is my view the fee will not be more than $1 or $1.50 when the regulator sets it, and it will give the gift card a much longer life. Of course, we are leaving it up to the Federal Reserve.

We are also letting them set a minimum balance. My guess is it will be $15 or so, above which the fee doesn't bite in, so the gift card will last a lot longer.

Fourth, the bill ensures that gift cards have expiration dates of at least 5 years from the time they are issued. It is simply unfair to cancel the gift totally after 6 months or even a year. So now the gift card stays in existence for 5 years.

I believe this legislation makes gift cards fairer, better, and even happier gifts to give during the holiday season, for birthdays or an anniversary. I encourage people to use the gift card.

One other point I think is very important. This legislation, for the first time, will make sure that so-called open loop cards--the kind which can be used anywhere and that you get as a holiday present--will be regulated at all. There has been no regulation before. Consumers Union, U.S. PIRG, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Consumer Federation of America all support the actions we are taking on this issue. We have heard from one of the biggest gift card issuers that they, too, are comfortable with this bill because we are making commonsense changes to this business to ensure that consumers can get a fair deal and that issuers can continue to offer these valuable products. The bottom line: You get a gift card, you know it is going to have its full value for at least a year, with no expiration date, no monthly fee that takes a chunk off the gift card. It means what you are giving the recipient is getting, nothing less.

At the end of the day, the reason this bill has been so important to me and to the Senator from Colorado, who worked so hard on it with me and others, is we want to protect consumers who purchase these products as gifts for their friends and loved ones. Consumers who purchase or receive a $50 gift card should get $50 in value without having to pay excessive fees.

Continental Connection Flight 3407

Mr. President, I want to speak a little bit about the conclusion of the NTSB hearings that occurred this week in reference to Continental Connection Flight 3407.

We all know what happened on that flight. On February 12, 2009, the lives of family members, many of whom live in western New York, changed in a tragic and dramatic way when they lost their loved ones on a Buffalo-bound flight from Newark Airport.

I met with some of these family members on Tuesday--nine family members who lost loved ones on that flight. First, I have to express my respect and admiration for these family members. It was a little less than 3 months ago that they lost a husband, a wife, a child, a parent, or a fiance, and there is a huge hole in their hearts. Yet they were down in Washington making sure that a thorough investigation was done to determine why flight 3407 crashed, and then to continue working to see that corrective measures were taken on all other flights, so that what befell their loved ones would not happen to others. It was an act of bravery, courage, strength, fortitude, generosity, and compassion. The people in that room--and we had some heartfelt moments together-- were saintly. They were trying to light a candle amidst the darkness that enveloped their lives. I felt for them when we met, as I feel for them today.

The crash of flight 3407 in Clarence, NY, claimed 50 lives and serves as a tragic reminder that our Nation's aviation industry is not immune to tragic incidents.

The 3-day-long hearings at NTSB have revealed some very disturbing suggestions into what may have caused the crash of the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 airplane.

First, I am troubled by the reports that the Colgan pilots of the Dash 8 were not adequately trained in the operation of the ``stick- pusher''--the instrument installed in aircraft like the Dash 8 that prevents an aircraft from stalling. The stick-pusher is not demonstrated in pilot flight training simulators, and experts believe that the pilots are missing out on important hands-on training.

Suffice it to say that when the flight flew over Clarence, just before it crashed, the pilots may not have been adequately trained to deal with what was happening.

Colgan maintains that the FAA does not require this kind of simulator training. Today, I have written to Secretary Ray LaHood and asked that he reevaluate FAA's approval of airline training curricula.

We have also learned that the pilots of flight 3407 were not properly rested before their flights. It is obvious why. The young copilot of the flight lived in a suburb of Seattle, and her salary was $16,000 a year. She flew across country, tired, sleeping in an empty pilot seat, if she could--no stop, no rest, and then boarded the flight to Newark that she was copilot of on its way to Buffalo. It seems that it may be--I hope not, but it seems like it--that some commuter airlines both underpay and overwork their pilots to save costs. There is an unfortunate possibility that they could put safety second, with cost cutting first. That just cannot be. That has to change.

The second thing I am doing is urging the FAA not only to look at the number of hours that a pilot can fly--they have regulations for that-- but the conditions which a pilot who begins a flight has endured previous to the flight, so that they are alert and rested as their tenure for that day or that few days begins.

The airline industry is evolving. What we are seeing is more and more smaller commuter airlines, and the FAA is not keeping up. The FAA needs to crack down on issues of pilot rest, compensation, and training, especially with these young airlines that seem to be prioritizing issues of saving money. They should be making priority No. 1 the issue of safety.

For the last 8 years, the FAA has had ineffective leadership with one goal: to cut costs. The head of the FAA--I met her and had arguments with her--seemed to take direction almost all the time from the OMB. All of us believe we should cut costs in this Government--I certainly do--but not when it comes to safety. I believe that the FAA, which requires the small commuter airlines to observe the same regulations as the larger airlines, hasn't kept up enforcing the rules with so many of the commuter airlines out there.

The crash investigation also initially suggested that icing conditions may have affected the aircraft. A bright light was shed on the fact that the NTSB and the FAA have differing recommendations as to how a pilot should handle an icing situation, and that the NTSB first asked the FAA to adopt the NTSB's recommendations 12 years ago--to no avail.

For this reason, I, along with my colleagues Senator Rockefeller and Senator Dorgan, called for an official GAO investigation into what specific roles the NTSB and the FAA should be playing in aircraft icing prevention, and why such a lag exists between the time the NTSB makes a recommendation and the FAA formally adopts it. It seems to me--these are just my observations--that the NTSB does put safety first, and I sometimes wonder if the FAA is always doing that.

The GAO has informed us that they are in the process of forming an investigatory team for our request and will begin to pursue answers soon.

In conclusion, I cannot say enough how humbled I am by the work of all of flight 3407's family members. It is a tribute to their loved ones' lives that they are in Washington to advocate for aviation safety. I assured them, as we talked and prayed together, that I would do everything I could to make sure we get to the bottom of what happened on flight 3407, and then take whatever corrective action needs to be taken to prevent future flights such as 3407 from crashing.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I have been on the floor often talking about the subprime loan scandal that led to the financial crisis we are involved in, in this country. I have held up charts on the floor that describe the solicitations from the mortgage companies and others that say: Come to us. If you have bad credit, if you have been bankrupt, come to us. We want to give you a home loan.

I have shown all of those--from Zoom Credit, from Millennium Mortgage, from the largest mortgage company in the country, Countrywide--all of them saying to people: You know what, if you have bad credit come to us. We want to loan you some money.

That subprime loan scandal was a tipping point for a significant difficult time for this country's economy and that time includes right now. I have talked about that at great length. But today we are talking about credit cards. The same influence exists with respect to credit cards. We have companies that just wallpaper this country with credit cards. Go to a college campus and try to find out how many credit cards they stick on those college campuses preapproved, saying to these kids: Get our credit card, please. Walk through the concourse of an airport and see how often you are accosted by someone who wants you to take their credit card. It is all over.

Last year the economy tipped over, and we went right into a financial crisis. But in that year, 2008, 4.2 billion credit card solicitations were mailed to consumers. Let me say that again. In the middle of an economic crisis, at a time when there was so much unbelievable leverage and debt out there, companies in this country sent 4.2 billion credit card solicitations to people.

Yes, some of them went to kids. The fact is, I spoke on the floor years ago about my 10-year-old son getting a Diners Club card saying it is preapproved, we want you to consider going to Paris, France. My son wasn't going to France. As a matter of fact, he was 10 years old, for God's sake. He had no money. He wasn't going to get a credit card. Was it a mistake that they sent him a credit card solicitation? Probably. But I went to the floor one day with a whole pile of them, saying you are preapproved, please take this piece of plastic, spend it where you want, as much as you want. Madam President, 4.2 billion new credit card solicitations went out last year alone. They don't seem to care who gets them, as I said with home mortgages, which are much larger than most of the limits on credit cards. For home mortgages they solicited people with bad credit. You have been bankrupt? Come to us. You do not pay your bills? Come to us. That is a business model I never learned about, by the way, but it is what happened. They created the house of cards and the whole thing collapsed.

With credit cards, the big companies out there--and by the way it is heavily concentrated--wallpaper this country with preapproved credit card solicitations: Come to us, load up; come on, spend what you don't have on things you don't need; come on, you can load up on my card.

Then when they got everybody with all these cards and substantial balances on the cards, here is what happened. This is a person from Minot.

My wife and I both have credit scores greater than 800 and

have never been late on any of our payments so it is odd that

Capital One just sent us a notice that our interest rate on

our credit card will almost triple.

There they are, using a plastic credit card, paying their bills on time, and they are told we are going to triple your interest rate. At least they know it. That is not an excuse, but a whole lot of folks don't even know it.

Here is another constituent who wrote to me.

I just wanted to let you know how upset I am with my credit

card company--Citibank. They have decided to raise my

interest rate to 27 percent. I have always paid my bill on

time and have a good credit rating--820. Why would a company

who was bailed out by taxpayers because of bad practices then

decide to stick it to us by raising the interest rate so high

that it is competitive with the local Mafia rate?

There is no Mafia rate in Fairmont, I might say, but I get the point.

Williston, in my State:

Enough is enough. We shored up these banks with our hard

earned tax dollars just to have them raise the interest rates

on their credit cards to 28 percent and 26.3 percent--that's

Bank of America and Capital One--for absolutely no reason.

Something must be done.

One more:

I received a letter from my credit card company--

This person from North Dakota writes--

the Bank of America, that they are upping my interest rate

from 7.99 to 18.4 on my credit card and we have not been late

with a payment. We have been with them for 15 years. I want

you to know I am really angry over this. Billions have been

going to these banks and this is what we get for it.

Here is a solicitation for a bank debit card, Visa. You might look at that and say what are they trying to solicit? Some 70-year-old codgers who are retired, sitting around worrying about their teeth? No, they are trying to solicit kids. That is the purpose of the bow. It is a little like Joe Camel and cigarettes, except this is much more obvious, a credit card for kids. It is pink with a beautiful little bow.

Here is a statement from Bruce Giuliano, a senior vice president with a company that owned the Hello Kitty brand.

We think our target age group will be from 10 to 14

although it could certainly be younger.

How much younger than 10 years old can you get people to start using credit cards? That is unbelievable.

We think our target age group will be 10 to 14.

Here, by the way, is the Hello Kitty brand I was describing. Does it seem to you like they are targeting that 10-year-old to 14-year-old? It is a nice little pink thing with a kitty, new Platinum Plus Visa credit card with world

point rewards. If they could couple this with an airline and get 10- year-old kids flying to France, they would have what my son experienced, plus a pink credit card. It is unbelievable to me. We wonder why people are upset. You have a bunch of companies out there going after your kids to see if they can put plastic in their pockets, kids who never had a job and will never get a job--at least not when they are 10 years old--saying: Load up on debt.

Here, First Premium Card says:

Get our platinum credit card. We have a platinum card. Even

if your credit is less than perfect.

Once again, a solicitation to say if you don't do so well paying your bills, we have a credit card for you.

Has anybody thought through that maybe this is what steered the country into the ditch? Has anybody thought about that? By the way, some of these financial companies are the ones that have gotten very large bailouts from the Federal Government.

This is interesting. This is a credit card, presumably, for somebody who does not pay their bills so well. So it is hard for them to get a credit card. Here is what they are going to do. It looks pretty good. It is actually a gold card with a $250 total credit limit. The problem is the annual fee is $48, the setup fee is $29, the program fee is $95, and the monthly servicing fee is $7. So if you pay all these fees to that bank, you get to have a piece of plastic in your purse or your wallet that allows you to charge up to $250. What an unbelievable opportunity for people who are not thinking or do not know or at least have been cheated by a company that suggests these terms.

This chart simply describes a college credit card. Everybody makes money on credit cards. That is why they accost you when you are going through the concourses at an airport--the airline is actually pushing credit cards. They are all making money on credit cards--including some colleges, by the way.

They wallpaper all of those college hallways with credit cards because if you can get someone at that age to start using credit cards with your company, then you have got them for a long period of time.

Now, 84 percent of undergraduates in college had at least one credit card, up from 76 percent in 2004. Midwestern students continue to carry the highest average number of credit cards, with more than half of the students--think of this--more than half of these college students have four or more credit cards. Again, a cultural lesson about debt? I don't think that is a lesson we want college students to understand. I am not suggesting college students should not have a credit card. I understand the value of that. But they ought to have a limit.

By the way, here is the other thing that happens with credit cards and college students. You cosign a credit card as a parent for the college student who does not have a job, and it is not very long before the credit card company ups the limit to the college student without telling the cosigner. I know that is an interesting business practice, to be pushing additional credit toward those who do not have income, but it is part of the culture of this country, I guess.

Undergraduates are carrying record-high credit card balances. The average balance grew to $3,100--the highest in the years the study has been conducted--and 21 percent of undergraduates had balances between $3,000 and $7,000.

My point is simple: This is some of the same culture and some of the same difficulty that has tipped this country's economy over, beginning with the subprime loan scandal in housing but very quickly going into credit cards.

Someone said to me a while back: You know something, nobody spends money like the Federal Government. I am talking about debt. The Federal Government has run up all of this debt. Shame on the Federal Government.

I said: I agree with you. This Government has to decide it can only deliver Government to the American people that the American people are willing to pay for. We cannot continue with these deficits.

But, I said, understand this: It is not just the Government. This culture has had a dramatic runup in household debt, a dramatic runup in corporate debt, you name it, all across the board, including trade debt.

But we are here today because Senator Dodd has brought a bill to the floor with his colleague, Senator Shelby, and they deserve great credit. They deserve a lot of credit from the American people for doing this. It is a piece of legislation that begins to put the brakes on, puts a bridle on those who are engaged in practices I have just described: aiming credit card solicitations at 10-, 12-, 14-year-old kids, wallpapering college campuses so that kids came up with four or more credit cards. The fact is many of these companies got involved in all of these unbelievable instruments--credit default swaps, CDOs, and shame on them. Shame on WaMu, shame on Wachovia, shame on the companies that did it. They are supposed to be banks. Banking is supposed to be reasonably conservative. Instead, they loaded up with unbelievable debt.

Now some of the same companies, by the way, that are putting credit cards out all over this country are saying to credit card customers: You know, I understand you have never been late, never missed a payment, been a customer for 20 years, but you know what, your 7.9 interest rate has now gone to 26 percent, and you are lucky we told you because some people are not going to know it. By the way, we are going to add some additional fees, and we do not care what you think about this.

This legislation says: No more. You cannot do that. It says: If you are going to go in this direction--way overboard, in many cases cheating customers--then we are going to put the brakes on.

Some people say: Well, of what business is it of the Government?

Well, you know what, we have a responsibility, it seems to me, to stand up for consumers. In this case, you have some very large companies that have engaged in this business and now, in recent years, have decided to impose very substantial fees and very high interest rates, in a way that I believe takes advantage of the people. These people are good citizens, pay their bills on time, are conscientious about it, and now discover that the company they have had a relationship with for a very long time has imposed all kinds of dramatic penalties and fees that customer does not deserve.

So this legislation is legislation that I believe will pass the Senate with a very wide margin. Why? Because I think those companies that have done this have invited this today. They asked for it. This Congress has a responsibility to stand up for the interests of the American people.

I come from a State in which Teddy Roosevelt lived for a while, and he always said: Had it not been for my time in North Dakota, I never would have been President. He was a rugged guy, and he went out there and ranched in North Dakota.

By the way, he was in the depths of despair because both his mother and his wife died in his home on the same day in New York. Think of it, losing your mother and your wife the same day on different floors of the same home. He went out to try to renew his spirit in the Badlands of North Dakota. He became a rancher and later became President of the United States.

One of the things I remember him for and the country remembers him for is as a ``trust buster,'' willing to take on the big interests, willing to stand up to the big interests when they rip into the interests of the American consumer, the American people. Thank God for what Teddy Roosevelt did in so many areas in trust busting.

In many ways, this is a smaller piece of that larger issue, taking on the bigger interests when they are taking on the American citizens in a way we believe is unfair and untoward.

So I came today simply to say to my colleagues, Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby, that I appreciate the work they have done. I am a strong supporter of this legislation, and I know we have some amendments back and forth. At some point, I am going to be proud to cast a ``yes'' vote.

I am not suggesting credit cards are bad--far from it. Credit cards are very helpful to the American people. I am suggesting there are some practices that have occurred that go way beyond that which is reasonable, and we are going to try to rein that in with this legislation.

Madam President, I rise to speak for several minutes on the

legislation that is before us today dealing with credit cards, something that most of us have a personal experience with--we use them; we have had good experiences and bad experiences. In some respects, those experiences guide our views with respect to how we should legislate. That is understandable. It is true with me too.

Earlier today, I had a chance to participate in a number of call-in radio shows, some specific to Delaware, one to the Delmarva Peninsula, and one a national call-in show. People raised a variety of different issues about the legislation we are debating. What I did with some of the listeners, I took them back to the beginning and said: The reason why this legislation is before us actually grew out of the work of the Federal Reserve, which was begun over 2 years ago. The Federal Reserve sought to use their authority under the--I think it was the Federal Trade Commission law that says they have a responsibility to protect consumers. That includes protecting consumers as they use credit cards.

For roughly 2 years the Federal Reserve held hearings, received input from consumer groups, from individuals, from the industry, from other regulators, as to how we might better protect consumers.

In the end, the Federal Reserve sought to strike a balance. They sought to strike a balance that was fair to consumers and better protected their interests, which need to be better protected, and at the same time not to further disadvantage our financial institutions in this country, many of which are struggling literally to survive. That was the balance the Federal Reserve sought to strike. The Federal Reserve promulgated regulations last December after literally receiving tens of thousands of pages of comments on the draft regulations they promulgated earlier, last year.

What we are doing now is, rather than simply waiting on the Federal Reserve regulations to be implemented between now and July 1 of 2010, Congress is seeking to codify, to literally turn into law those regulations and in some cases to move the effective date of those regulations up earlier and in some cases to add some provisions that were not covered by the regulations.

One of the changes that is affected in this regulation was not raised in the regulation. It deals with credit cards and kids. It is really credit cards and people under the age of 21. My boys are 19 and 20. They are in college. They have been receiving preapproved credit card applications for a number of years, including when they were in high school. I think Senator Dodd has talked about one of his girls, who I think is 7 or 8 years old, having received a preapproved credit card application at the tender age of 7 or 8.

The question is, do we need to do something differently? It is interesting that the Federal Reserve, in their regulations, did not think so. The legislation which comes out of the committee and comes to us for consideration says, no; we should do something. What the legislation calls for, for us to do differently in this country, is if a young person, under the age of 21, wants to sign up for a credit card, either, No. 1, their parent or guardian has to cosign for them, with them, for that credit card, or, No. 2, the young person has to demonstrate the ability to pay their debts.

For the most part it means have a job, have a source of income to pay their debts. That is something that is in addition to the Federal Reserve. I agree with that. I think it is a good change, and I think most of my colleagues do, too.

In terms of being guided by your own personal experiences, I don't know about the rest of you, but one person who called in today on a call-in show said: Why don't we just let the marketplace make the decisions for us? We are smart. We get these credit card solicitations in the mail. There are a lot of choices. Let the marketplace work, and let people choose what card they want.

As it turns out, we have a lot of smart people in the Senate, maybe staff who are even smarter. There are a lot of people in this country who, frankly, have not had the opportunity for an education that some of us have had, and they lack, as do some of us, the financial literacy that will enable them to make the right decision on a multitude of options, choices; to understand them, read the fine print and understand how it will impact them.

As a result, we are not going to just let the marketplace work as it worked in the past because it didn't work perfectly. What we are trying to do is correct some of the bad behavior, clean up some of the behavior on the part of the credit card issuers, and that will get to a point where the marketplace can work, and the market will actually work on behalf of consumers. That is really what we want to see happen.

I will use a couple of examples from my own personal life. I have three credit cards that I use. One of the credit cards I use is for my personal use. Another credit card I use is for government-related expenses, official business. A third is for campaign-related expenses. The Presiding Officer may have a similar kind of arrangement. It helps keep everything straight for me. That is a benefit, a real advantage, and I believe it is an example of how our credit cards can be used for our advantage.

I had a credit card several years ago for campaign-related expenses. I lived in Wilmington, DE. The credit card bill had to be paid in New Jersey. I was getting the bill about 10 days before it was due, and in one instance I remember sending a check for that bill and it took 5 days for my check to actually get to the credit card company and be credited as a payment--5 days, Wilmington, DE, to New Jersey. I could have driven it in less than 5 hours, but it took 5 days to credit.

The other thing I noticed about the credit card company, the due dates for my bill were always Saturdays or Sundays. They didn't process on Saturdays or Sundays. I finally realized what was happening, and I said we will not use that credit card again. I tore it up, paid it off, and got another credit card that did not have that problem. That is an example of letting market forces work.

Hopefully, a lot of us are smart enough to be able to do that sort of thing, but honest to God, not everybody is as sophisticated as they need to be to be able to lay that out for themselves.

Another issue that has come before us is the issue of caps, our credit card limits. If Senator Grassley over here has a credit card limit, and I am his credit card issuer, he has a limit on the credit card he has from us, from our company, say, a $1,000 limit. Currently, if he exceeds the $1,000 limit, we let him. My credit card company lets him exceed it and he starts paying fees. If he continuously goes over the limit, he pays more and more fees.

I don't think that is the way the system should work. The Presiding Officer doesn't think that is the way the system should work. The legislation before us says that is not the way this system should work.

Going forward, when a person signs up for a credit card, if there is a limit--we will say there is a $1,000 limit--unless the cardholder objects, that will be a limit. It will be a hard cap. If the cardholders want to exceed that limit, they may do that, but they fully acknowledge that they will accept fees in doing so. I think that is a reasonable way to approach this.

There is another major issue that has been before us, the issue of whether the credit card companies should be able to assess risk and charge for that risk, the perceived higher risk on the part of the cardholder. We worked with Senator Shelby, who is here today, to try to strike a reasonable balance that says, again, I am a credit card company, he is the credit card holder, and we send him his statement. He doesn't pay within 30 days. What the Federal Reserve said is after 30 days, credit card companies should have to charge a higher interest rate. We changed that a little bit, and we say we will give the cardholder 60 days. If the cardholder has not paid a minimum payment within that 60 days of it being due, the credit card company can raise the interest rate; however, we give the holder of the card 6 months on- time payments, minimum payments for 6 months, to earn back the lower interest rate. To me, that seems like a fair balance, looking out for the consumer, looking out for the company in addition.

I want to mention, yesterday we had the opportunity to debate the question of a usury ceiling. The question was 15 percent--shouldn't we have a 15-percent uniform usury ceiling on credit card rates. Maybe 33, 35 people voted

for it. I did not. I said to my colleagues wondering how they should vote, there are actually two or three problems with the amendment before us, or any usury ceiling rate.

If it is a 15-percent ceiling rate, the idea was we should limit banks to charging 15 percent because credit unions are limited to 15 percent. As it turns out, credit unions do not operate under the same rules of the road as banks. The banks complained the credit unions get a break and the banks do not enjoy that in a number of ways. To simply say because the credit unions are capping at 15 percent we ought to cap the banks at 15 percent, frankly, it is not a logical argument in my mind.

One thing I know is, if there were a limit of 15 percent, everybody here, all the Senators, would be able to get credit. Most of our staff would be able to get credit. The folks who would not be able to get credit are lower income people. They wouldn't be able to get a credit card because they may have a high risk, and if they do have a high risk and it is proven by their payments scheduled over time, those people are going to be cut off. That is not an intended consequence, it is an unintended consequence, but by virtue of not adopting yesterday's amendment we allow credit card companies to charge eventually for risk, but at the same time to offer the credit card holder the opportunity to earn back a lower rate of interest.

I compliment Senator Dodd. I commend Senator Shelby and their staffs. They have worked very hard to get us to a point where all of us, whether we happen to come from States where we have a lot of credit card companies or we happen to come from States where we have a lot of credit card holders, to try to get a right balance. I think you came really close to doing that. I understand we may have one amendment offered later today dealing with fees that are paid by, in some cases, the merchants--the interchange fees. I understand there is language in the underlying bill that says--this is not something on which we have had hearings, I understand, in the Banking Committee. I understand maybe other committees have had hearings on it years ago. We have not had hearings on this in the Banking Committee. It is a lot more complex than people would lead us to believe.

Why don't we give the appropriate agency, and I think in this case the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, a year to come back to us, study this, vet it, and tell us: This is what we think you should do. To me, this makes a lot more sense on the Senate floor, without having had the benefit of hearings, informed hearings from the Banking Committee, to tell us what we should do. Let's take our time and let's do this right.

I commend my colleagues. I thank them for giving my staff and me, other Members who have had an interest, whether on the committee or not, the opportunity to weigh in, express our concerns, and have the opportunity to shape in a small way the outcome of this legislation.