A joint resolution disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to regulating the Internet and broadband industry practices.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment numbered 928.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleague, the Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul, and the Senator from Ohio, Mr. Portman.

Mr. President, I feel it is very important that we spend some time on this issue. I think all Americans realize we are in almost unprecedented difficult economic times, and that despite efforts that have been made over the now nearly 3 years, our economy has not grown and it has not provided the kind of job growth and opportunity many of us had anticipated.

When we look at previous recessions--and this is a near depression by some calculations--the recovery has been amazingly and agonizingly slow as compared to recoveries from other recessionary periods.

In the view of this Senator, the remedies have, in many respects, made the problem worse rather than better. If we look at some objective criteria, I argue that the situation in America today is worse than it was on January 2009, when this administration came to office. We have had the stimulus package, the Health Care Reform Act, increases in spending in numerous areas, and the Dodd-Frank bill, which was going to fix the regulatory system in this country to prevent any financial institution in America from ever again being too big to fail--in other words, no financial institution would ever need taxpayer dollars to the degree that America's economy would be impacted adversely in case that institution failed.

Well, here we are. Here we are, nearly 3 years later, and unemployment is at 9 percent, even though after the stimulus package was passed all the predictions were that maximum unemployment would be 8 percent and headed down. The recovery has been anemic. In my home State of Arizona, still nearly half the homes are under water. In other words, they are worth less than the mortgage payments the homeowners are required to make.

Working together with my colleague from Kentucky, Senator Paul, and Senator Portman of Ohio, we have put together a series of proposals and ideas that have been generated both within this body and outside of this body, and we believe--we believe with the utmost sincerity--there should be areas in this proposal that we and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle could come to agreement on. We wish to see this entire package. We think it is important in its entirety. There is no doubt in our minds that when you look at the 9-percent approval rating Members of Congress have with the American people, they certainly want to see us do something constructive as well.

I guess I would ask my colleague from Kentucky how he thinks we should have put this package together, what we should have included, and what haven't we included. What is the situation in his home State as far as a need for this kind of legislation?

Before going to my friend from Kentucky, let me add that I talk to large and small businesspeople all over this country, and they all tell me the same thing. They all tell me the same thing. They have no certainty as to what the future holds for them, which then causes them not to invest or to create jobs. Overseas, they are sitting on $1 trillion. Here in the United States they are sitting on a $1\1/2\ trillion and not investing because they do not know when the next regulatory act is going to come down. They do not know when the next regulation is going to be issued. They do not know when the next tax increase is going to occur.

I saw on television the other day that the owner and founder of Home Depot, Kenneth Langone--and he also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal--said he couldn't start Home Depot today. He couldn't start it today because of the environment that exists. Intended or not--and I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have the most honorable of intentions--the result of all this regulation has been a climate which has restrained investment, which has then restrained and killed job creation and caused this economy to be mired in the doldrums. Obviously, that has had a terrible impact on every-day Americans.

Before my colleague comments, I first want to thank the Senator from Kentucky for the key role he has played in putting this package together, and I hope this is the beginning of our fight for passage of this legislation.

Maybe my friend from Kentucky and I can talk about many of the various provisions in this legislation. There are a lot of provisions that were based on input from outside and inside this body. Some of this, by the way, closely mirrors legislation which has already passed the House of Representatives as well.

We lead off with a requirement for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I was here many years ago when the balanced budget amendment failed by one vote. When you ask the American people if government, and the Congress, shouldn't live under the same constraints they have, they are in total support of that.

I have seen polls--and I wonder if my friend from Kentucky has--that show 80 to 90 percent of the American people support a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution when informed what it is. At the very least we ought to put that up for a vote in this body.

I want to go back a second to the point the Senator from Kentucky made. Congress cannot bind future Congresses. I was here at the time of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was one of the most strict budgetary requirements ever passed by this body. It required automatic spending cuts in the event that budgets were exceeded and excess spending was, obviously, taking place. But one Congress cannot bind future Congresses. So over time--over a very short period of time--the restraints imposed on spending by Gramm-Rudman- Hollings went into the mist and we went back to business as usual.

I will be very candid with my colleague. There are people who have legitimate concerns about a balanced budget amendment and what it would take to get there and the Draconian measures that may be entailed. But I ask, what is the alternative? What is the alternative? Mortgaging our children and our grandchildren's future? I believe currently that stands at a $44,000 debt for every man, woman and child in America. So why don't we in this body have a debate over a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and find out exactly where people are?

At the same time, we have learned over the years that Congresses cannot bind future Congresses, and so that is the problem with enacting automatic spending cuts, or whatever spending cuts or other measures we achieve here. We cannot bind future Congresses, appropriately. So the only way to address this issue is by amending the Constitution of the United States, which I know the Senator from Kentucky and I do not view as a measure taken lightly. I have been opposed to most changes in the Constitution. I think our Founding Fathers got it pretty well right. But this is an issue that I think has to be addressed.

Isn't it a fact that Americans are not only very unhappy because of the economic condition we find ourselves in but also because they perceive an inequity and an inequality in our economy today? In other words, they see financial institutions on Wall Street making record profits and paying record bonuses. They see large corporations that pay no income taxes--none--zero. They see that and then see themselves paying their taxes, the least of which may be withholding taxes or sales taxes or whatever taxes they are still paying. It seems to me that tax reform would address these inequities.

I note that Senator Portman from Ohio is here, and he knows this better than anybody, having been, in his previous incarnation, the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Over the years, we have carved out loophole after loophole and have provided some with a better or special deal. It is a damning indictment of the Congress and the administration that we let it happen, but it is what it is. So we now have major corporations--I would cite General Electric as an example-- that paid no taxes last year. An average citizen--who doesn't have a lobbyist here in Washington and who can't get a carveout or a special loophole for their small business--is paying these taxes.

So how do we resolve that inequity? It seems to me that is accomplished through tax reform. Give people a simplified Tax Code. The Senator from Ohio has some much better ideas about this: three tax brackets, eliminate all but charitable deductions--even put a ceiling on that--and home mortgage deductions, and then the American people would at least believe they are being treated fairly. Today, they do not believe they are being treated fairly. And I am talking about middle-income Americans.

I think statistics confirm that most Americans believe there is a large disparity between the wealthiest and the less well off in America. I would ask my colleague from Ohio to comment, since he knows more about that than I do.

What is the response to the suggestion of bringing the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent, let's say, because we say corporations are taxed too much in America, yet at the same time we also find corporations paying no taxes?

For just a minute, I would like to discuss with the Senator from Kentucky and the Senator from Ohio that enhanced rescission or what used to be known as line item veto.

The Senator from Ohio once had the misfortune--his reward will be in Heaven, not here on Earth--of being the head of the Office of Management and Budget and saw these appropriations bills come over, and many of them were that thick. Going through line by line, we find these special interests, special deals we call porkbarrel projects which have no justification, which were never debated, which were never discussed, which were never brought to the light of day except maybe occasionally, but certainly it contributed enormously to our debt and deficit.

So he had the option of going to the President of the United States and saying: Veto the whole bill and send it back and it may be overridden or accept these pork-laden, big, thick appropriations bills.

Isn't that a dilemma we should not force the President of the United States to have, that kind of Hobson's choice?

I would say to the Senator from Kentucky, the President probably would veto some items we wouldn't like vetoed because there are some differences in philosophy between ourselves and the President of the United States. But I am willing to take not only that risk but that penalty associated with trying to get elimination of the porkbarrel spending.

We have made some progress, I will admit, in the elimination of some of the ``earmarks,'' but we have a long, long way to go. Frankly, it is a disease I have watched recede a bit over time and then it pops back up. Again, it is something like the balanced budget amendment--it needs to have a permanent fix.

If the scenario takes place as the Senator from Kentucky just pointed out, that all of a sudden everything is decided by members of the Appropriations Committee, then it does deprive the other members of this body of their input into the entire process and takes the authority and responsibility from 100 and puts it in the hands of a few. That seems, to me, a disservice to the people of Arizona whom I represent.

I see the Senator from Washington is here, and I don't want to encroach on her time.

I would just like to say we are going to spend a lot more time today on this issue and this proposal. The American people want change in Washington. They want us to address the concerns and problems they face, and we believe we have a great blueprint for moving forward in that direction. As my friends from Ohio and Kentucky have said, we are eager to sit down with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and discuss at least some of these which we think we can come to agreement on. Maybe our approval rating, if we did so, could climb back up into double digits.

I yield the floor.

Amendment No. 927

Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?

That is the pending business before the Senate?

Is there any unanimous consent on speakers?

Mr. President, I will continue to discuss the pending amendment before the Senate, and I would yield such time, without yielding the floor, as the Senator from Tennessee may use.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Tennessee. As Senator Corker knows, we had an amendment on the Dodd-Frank bill to do away with Fannie and Freddie over a 5-year period. I think it is obvious that the Senator from Tennessee has done a lot of homework and in-depth examination of this issue. But I think the Senator from Tennessee would agree that what went on with Fannie and Freddie is one of the worst crimes inflicted on the American people all during the 1990s and well into 2000 and which was a major contributor to the housing collapse, which then triggered the financial collapse which we still haven't recovered from. I wonder if the Senator from Tennessee wishes to elaborate.

I think the Senator from Tennessee--and I want to get back to the jobs bill--but I think the Senator from Tennessee would agree, as long as Fannie and Freddie are in existence and have the opportunity to behave in a manner that they did in the past, we risk another housing bubble followed by a housing collapse. That is why I think the Senator's proposal is something that deserves our attention and that of the country, so we don't have a repetition of the pain that the people in Tennessee and Arizona are experiencing today.

Nearly half the homes in my home State of Arizona are under water. They are worth less than their mortgage payments. As long as that is the case, it is going to be very difficult to see a way for a strong economic recovery to take place. I think phasing Fannie and Freddie out is probably one of the key elements in bringing about not only beneficial change--and a number of other things have to happen too--but to prevent the kind of catastrophe that was visited on us in 2008.

I thank the Senator from Tennessee, and he also has been one who is more than willing to take on the tough challenges and issues we face, with a commitment to a bipartisanship that I think we all need. I thank the Senator from Tennessee.

(Mrs. HAGAN assumed the chair.)

Madam President, I wish to inform my colleagues that I have a lot to say about this jobs bill. There is no unanimous consent agreement. I believe this is of transcendent importance. I see the Senator from Minnesota here. I apologize ahead of time, but we only have until tomorrow morning to address this issue. This is a compelling issue for this Nation. I intend to talk for a fairly extended period of time.

For the benefit of my colleagues, this amendment is identical to the Jobs Through Growth Act which was introduced on October 17. I am pleased about joining most of my Republican colleagues--and I wish to highlight the hard work done by my colleagues Senators Paul and Portman in putting this legislation together. In fact, I wish to thank all of the Senators, and some of them bipartisan, who put this jobs bill together. It requires a lot of discussion. There are issues of transcendent importance.

I don't have to tell any American how difficult our economic times are, how slow the recovery has been, if at all, the risk of further recession, and it is time we did something different. I would point out to my colleagues that for 2 years the other party had control of this body and had control of the House of Representatives--for 2 years, until the 2010 election. During that period of time, we passed a stimulus bill, we passed health care reform, we passed other big spending bills, all on the promise that the American economy would recover. It didn't. In fact, by any measurement, things are far worse than they were in January of 2009.

As the President has a jobs bill and the majority leader has put forth legislation as part of that jobs bill, we Republicans have a jobs bill. I know my friends on the other side of the Capitol also agree wholeheartedly with the majority of what we are proposing today. The difference between our plan and theirs is that we want to create jobs through growth and they want to create jobs through government spending, through spending and borrowing and taxing. That doesn't work. What they have proposed amounts to nothing more than another stimulus bill, and we saw that movie before. It added to our debt and our deficit, and we lost jobs.

Today, my colleagues and I are putting forth a plan to create jobs through sound policies. Economic growth is a fundamental part of long- term, sustainable job creation, and that is what our plan offers the American people.

I wish to quote from an article in Forbes magazine by Peter Ferrara entitled ``The GOP Jobs Plan Vs. Obama's.''

Senate Republicans have taken the lead in proposing a jobs

plan alternative to President Obama's in the form of the Jobs

Through Growth Act, led by Senators John McCain, Rand Paul of

Kentucky, and Rob Portman of Ohio. Republicans are remarkably

unified behind these economic and jobs growth ideas, with

House Republicans having already long supported or even

passed several components of that plan.

The 28 components of their program add up to exciting

prospects for finally sparking the long overdue economic

recovery, based on proven economic logic, and proven

experience concerning what works in the real world. Most

important are the proposals for both corporate and individual

tax reform, closing loopholes in return for reducing the

rates.

Lower marginal tax rates are the key to providing the

necessary incentives for economic growth and prosperity. The

marginal tax rate is the rate on the next dollar to be earned

from any investment, enterprise, or productive activity. That

is the key because it determines how much the producer is

allowed to keep out of the next unit of what he or she

produces.

At a 50-percent marginal tax rate, the producer can keep

only half of any increased production. If that rate is

reduced to 25 percent, the portion the producer can keep

grows by 50 percent, from one half to three fourths. That

powerfully increases the incentives for more productive

activity, such as savings, investment, starting new

businesses, expanding businesses, creating jobs,

entrepreneurship, and work.

The Republican Jobs Plan involves closing the special

interest loopholes that enable Obama corporate cronies such

as General Electric to get away with paying no taxes on $14

billion in corporate profits, in return for reducing rates to

internationally competitive levels. The U.S. suffers

virtually the highest corporate tax rate in the

industrialized world, nearly 40 percent, with a 35 percent

federal rate, and another nearly 5 percent in state corporate

rates on average.

Even Communist China enjoys a 25% corporate rate. In the

supposedly mostly socialist European Union, the corporate

rate on average is even lower than that. In formerly

socialist Canada, the federal corporate rate is 16.5%, going

down to 15% next year.

The GOP Plan would reduce the federal 35% rate to 25%,

which is the minimum reduction to restore international

competitiveness for American companies. Note that closing

loopholes may well raise the average corporate rate, on which

Democrats and liberals have focused, but it is the marginal

tax rate that drives the economy. . . .

The GOP Jobs Plan also includes reducing the top personal,

individual income tax rate to 25% as well, in return for

closing loopholes. The Ryan budget already passed by the

House would apply that rate to family incomes over $100,000,

with a 10% rate applying to incomes below. Those rate

reductions would powerfully boost incentives as well, as

proven by the dramatic response to the Reagan tax rate

reductions in the 1980s. . . .

Another component of the plan would eliminate the double

taxation of U.S. corporate profits earned abroad by the U.S.

``worldwide'' corporate tax code, which adds U.S. taxes on

top of the taxes on foreign profits by the host country. The

GOP plan calls for adopting the ``territorial'' tax code of

most of our international competitors, which allows profits

to be taxed in the country where they are earned, and not

again when they are brought home. That would unlock for

reinvestment in the U.S. the $1.4 trillion in American

corporate profits earned overseas that remain parked there to

avoid U.S. double taxation.

The GOP Jobs Plan also recognizes the enormous problem of

excessive, runaway regulation, which increases the cost of

production, and so further discourages it. Reducing such

costs would consequently increase production, economic

growth, and jobs.

Step one in the plan to reduce such regulatory burdens is

to repeal Obamacare, with its employer mandate adding to the

cost of each job by requiring employers to buy more

expensive, politically driven health insurance coverage for

every employee. That repeal would also reduce future taxes

and spending by trillions as well.

Further critical relief would result from the GOP Jobs Plan

plank to repeal Dodd-Frank, which is threatening to squelch

credit for businesses and consumers essential to jobs and

recovery. The GOP proposal cites research showing that higher

costs for financial services resulting from Dodd-Frank would

cost the economy nearly 5 million jobs by 2015.

Another critical area of overregulation is energy. The

Republican program would require the Interior Department to

move forward in order to free up leasing and development of

drilling on public lands onshore. It also eliminates EPA foot

dragging on air permits necessary for offshore drilling, and

removes EPA authority for unnecessary and burdensome

greenhouse gas regulation altogether. This deregulation would

ensure a steady supply of low cost energy, essential to

booming economic growth.

Also in the proposal is the REINS (Regulations from the

Executive In Need of Scrutiny) Act, which would require

Congressional approval of all major federal regulations

imposing more than $100 million a year in costs. This will

reestablish the original Congressional check on Executive

power, and democratic accountability for regulatory burdens,

so politicians can no longer hide behind faceless bureaucrats

to evade public scrutiny for regulatory drains on our freedom

and prosperity. This would provide an important solution to

excessive regulatory burdens and costs across the board.

The Tea Party will favor the plan's plank for a Balanced

Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which would include

necessary tax and spending limitations in the Constitution.

Also included is a statutory line item veto, giving the

President more power to cut spending. Reduced government

spending, deficits and debt will reduce the government drain

on resources in the private economy needed to create jobs and

growth.

Finally, the plan even includes a provision for free trade,

giving the President renewed fast track authority to

negotiate further trade agreements eliminating foreign trade

barriers and opening new markets for American goods. For

nearly 3 years, President Obama failed to even send to

Congress free trade agreements President Bush had negotiated

with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. But that didn't stop

him from political rhetoric blaming Congress for failing to

pass them, though Congress did approve them within weeks of

Obama finally submitting them. That abusive rhetorical style

veers into dishonorable.

The GOP program is an exciting, comprehensive strategy for

creating another generation-long economic boom. It includes

all the components of Reaganomics under Congressional

control--lower tax rates, deregulation, and restrained

spending. Besides the economic logic of each of these

components discussed above, the experience with Reaganomics

proves the plan will work within a year or so of adoption to

get the economy booming again.

After Reaganomics was adopted in 1981, the economy took off

on a 25-year economic boom in late 1982, what Art Laffer and

Steve Moore have rightly called the greatest period of wealth

creation in the history of the planet. Twenty million new

jobs were created in the first 7 years alone, even while an

historic inflation was tamed. American economic growth during

the 80s was the equivalent of adding the third largest

economy in the world, West Germany, to the American economy.

By contrast, Obama's Jobs Plan is recycled, brain dead,

Keynesian economics already tried and failed throughout the

Obama Administration, and all around the world for decades

before wherever it has been tried. It is about half the size

of Obama's nearly one trillion dollar 2009 so-called stimulus

plan, but contains otherwise the same policies. That 2009

stimulus didn't stimulate anything except runaway government

spending, deficits and debt.

Part of the jobs plan is devoted to increased government

spending on supposed infrastructure, which only recalls the

laughable ``shovel ready'' jobs of Obama's 2009 stimulus

(even Obama has joked about it). Another part is increased

spending to bail out spendthrift Democrat states, which Obama

calls hiring more teachers, firemen and cops (a state and

local government function, not a federal function).

But economic growth is not based on increased government

spending, a fallacy which Wall Street Journal senior

economics writer Steve Moore has rightly labeled ``tooth

fairy'' economics. That is because the money for

such spending needs to come from somewhere, and so drains

the private sector to the extent of such increased

government spending, leaving no net effect in any event.

What drives economic growth and prosperity is incentives

for increased production, as Reaganomics proved. Obama's

assault on such incentives is why trillions are sitting on

corporate and bank balance sheets, and America is suffering a

capital strike and capital flight. The Occupy Wall Street

protestors in threatening property and profits are just

further undermining incentives and contributing to that

capital strike and capital flight, which only contributes

further to extended and increased unemployment.

The other half of the jobs plan includes temporary payroll

tax cuts, which are a continuation and expansion of temporary

payroll tax cuts Obama convinced the December, 2010 lame duck

Congress to adopt for this year. But such temporary tax

reductions do not stimulate economic growth and jobs either,

as permanent cuts and incentives are necessary for permanent

jobs. That was just proved by the failure of this year's

temporary payroll tax cut to promote the long overdue

recovery.

But even worse than the 2009 stimulus is that this current

half stimulus echo is accompanied by Obama's proposal for

$1.5 trillion in permanent tax increases. That now includes

Obama's support for a 5% millionaire's surtax. Those

permanent increases only further reduce incentives for

production, and only contribute further to economic downturn

and stagnation under any economic theory.

Those tax increases, moreover, would come on top of all the

tax increases Obama has already enacted under current law for

2013, which major media institutions as well as most of the

public are unaware. In that year, the Obamacare tax increases

go into effect, and the Bush tax cuts expire, which Obama has

refused to renew for the nation's job creators, investors,

and more significant small businesses. Under those tax

increases, the top tax rates for every major federal tax,

except the corporate income tax, already virtually the

highest in the industrialized world, with no relief in sight.

. . .

In sharp contrast to Reaganomics, such Keynesian

Obamanomics has already failed miserably to generate a timely

recovery consistent with the history of the American economy.

Before this last recession, since the Great Depression,

recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months,

with the longest previously lasting 16 months. But here we

are 46 months after the last recession started, and still no

real economic recovery, with unemployment still [at] 9%, the

longest period of unemployment that high since the Great

Depression.

Moreover, it cannot be said this is because the recession

was so bad, as the experience in America has been the deeper

the recession the stronger the recovery. Based on these

historical precedents, we should be nearing the end of the

second year of a booming economy right now. In this crisis,

for Obama to now just advocate more of the same, with only

new, warmed over rhetoric, is a complete abdication of

leadership. Moreover, at this point, outdated economists

still peddling hoary Keynesian fallacies should be subject to

civil liability for fraud.

As I explain in my new publication just out this week from

Encounter Books, ``Obama and the Crash of 2013,'' more likely

than recovery is a renewed double dip recession in 2013, with

all the tax rate increases, regulatory burdens building to a

crescendo, rising interest rates by then, etc. resulting from

Obamanomics. Congressional Republicans should just tell Obama

thanks, but no thanks, on his Jobs Plan, and pass their own

plan proven to work. Then they can insist he explain to the

public why he stands in the way.

It is a very interesting article there in Forbes, and it is a fairly long one, but I think it puts in adequately the argument for adoption of this legislation, but it also points out one of the results.

I would point out, in Investors Business Daily, an editorial entitled ``Better in Rwanda.'' It says:

The U.S. has slipped again in world rankings that assess

the ease of starting a new business. If we're to bring down

our stubbornly high unemployment rate, this trend has to be

reversed.

According to the World Bank's ``Doing Business 2012''

report, America is 13th among 183 countries ranked in the

``Starting a Business'' category. In the 2011 report, the

U.S. ranked 11th. The year before, it was No. 8.

In 2009, the U.S. was ranked No. 6. It was fourth in 2008

and third in 2007.

These are not Republican documents. This is not a Republican assessment. This is the assessment according to the World Bank: that doing business in the United States of America has gone from the third best country to do business in, in 2007, to 13th in 2012.

This is ample and adequate proof that we have borrowed too much, we have taxed too much, we have issued so many regulations that we have people such as Mr. Langone, the founder of Home Depot--who I will quote from in a minute--who says that today he could not start Home Depot all over again, one of the great success stories, by the way, in recent years.

In the 2012 ranking, the U.S. trailed such job creators as

Macedonia, Georgia, Rwanda, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Armenia

and Puerto Rico, which are ranked No. 6 through No. 12.

Big companies aren't usually founded as multinational

corporations. Most begin as small businesses. And it's small

businesses--which employ more than half of the domestic

nongovernment workforce--that generate the bulk of new

employment opportunities.

From this article:

Our own research shows that small businesses create more

than 80% of the new jobs in this country. This isn't some

fantasy we've cooked up. It's been confirmed in the New York

Times by reporter Steve Lohr, who wrote in September that

it's an ``irrefutable conclusion that small businesses are

this country's jobs creators. Two-thirds of net new jobs are

created by companies with fewer than 500 employees,'' Lohr

wrote, ``which is the government's definition of a small

business.''

But job creation is more than a function of size. Lohr

cites a National Bureau of Economic Research report that says

the age of a business is the biggest factor. ``Start-ups,''

says John C. Haltiwanger, a coauthor of the study and an

economist at the University of Maryland, ``are where the job

creation really actually occurs.''

Yet it's the small and new businesses that are being choked

by government policy. The capital gains tax rate on

investments held more than a year, Lohr wrote, directly

impacts angel investors' role in providing seed capital for

startups. This is a rate that the administration wants to

hike from 15% to 20% on households earning more than $250,000

a year.

That's just a single instance of poor public policy. There

are many more in the 160,000 pages of federal regulations and

in the web of state and local rules that squeeze small

businesses and start-ups so tightly that they simply cannot

hire. Until this burden is lifted, America's jobs problem is

not going to get any better.

Quite an indictment that the United States of America, the beacon of liberty and hope and freedom, an example to all the world, has gone from the third best place to do business, to start a business in the world, now to No. 13 in just 5 short years.

So what is the result? I would point out to my colleagues that a person such as Mr. Langone, whom I have watched on television on several occasions, certainly an outspoken individual to say the least, says he could not start his business again under the present environment.

I quote from a Wall Street Journal article, October 15, 2010, entitled, ``Stop

Bashing Business, Mr. President,'' by Ken Langone.

The subtitle is, ``If we tried to start The Home Depot today, it's a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground.''

I quote from his article.

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of

onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated--

Mr. Langone is writing to the President in this--

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of

onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it's a

stone cold certainty that our business would never get off

the ground, much less thrive.

It is quite an indictment. He goes on to say:

Rules against providing stock options would have prevented

us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up

phase--never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory

compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still

worse are the ever-

rapacious trial lawyers.

He goes on to say:

I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to

improving our society and especially our health care. It is

worth adding that it makes little sense to send Treasury

checks to high net-worth people in the form of Social

Security. That includes you, me and scores of members of

Congress. Why not cut through that red tape, apply a basic

means test to that program to make sure that money actually

reduces federal national spending and isn't simply shifted

elsewhere.

So it is a very interesting article. He says:

A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur

Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home

Depot. Our dream was to create a new kind of home-

improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept

was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and

the lowest pricing possible. We opened the front door in

1979, also a time of severe economic slowdown. Yet today,

Home Depot is staffed by more than 325,000 dedicated, well-

trained and highly motivated people offering outstanding

service and knowledge to millions of consumers.

Then he goes on to say:

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of

onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it's a

stone cold certainty that our business would never get off

the ground, much less thrive.

A man by the name of Jim McNerney is the CEO of Boeing Company. He writes: ``What Business Wants From Washington.'' Again, I quote from October 31, 2011. Mr. McNerney says:

America works best when American business and government

complement one another: Business plays the vital role in

economic expansion and job creation, while government

oversees the environment in which businesses can innovate

and compete. This approach fueled prosperity for

generations and produced the world's largest and most

powerful economy. We seem far adrift of that ideal today.

The regulatory climate is a perfect example. A tsunami of

new rules and regulations from an alphabet soup of federal

agencies is paralyzing investment and increasing by tens

of billions of dollars the compliance costs for small and

large businesses.

No one wants to discard truly meaningful public safety or

environmental regulations. But what we face is a jobs crisis

and regulators charged with protecting the interests of the

people are making worse the problem that is hurting them

most. Regulatory relief in the energy sector alone could

create up to two million new jobs and we won't have to borrow

a penny to pay for it.

He goes on to talk about the supercommittee. He says the White House and Congress should build on that momentum and ``enact comprehensive pro-growth tax reform that benefits everyone; proceed with regulatory reform; and reform and restructure existing entitlement programs.''

If Washington can once again find the ability to mix

democracy and effective governing, American business will

once again unleash America's economic potential.

So Mr. McNerney, in his article, reflects the views of everybody I talk to, small businesses and large. They want tax relief. They want regulatory relief. In fact, what they want more than anything else is some kind of certainty about the economic future and the playing field in which they will have to compete. Will there be increasing regulatory burden? Will there be a raise in taxes, as is facing us in 2013? Can we have a tax code they can understand and comprehend that is fair to one and all? Can they unleash their savings accounts and the money they have kept in reserve and invest and hire with some confidence that there will be a return on that investment, that they will succeed for themselves and their children?

That is what this jobs bill is all about. That is what we are trying to get done. This is an attempt to look at the problems America faces today, which, by the way, do spill over onto our national security problems, as the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff pointed out.

So it affects all of America. It hurts us in so many ways. Yet we sit here, and apparently the select committee, the supercommittee as it is called, is at some kind of gridlock. We sit here today with one amendment here, one amendment here, back and forth, and then run right out to the media and attack each other for being uncooperative and why are we not more congenial and why are we not willing to compromise.

Well, I will plead guilty for perhaps not being willing to compromise on some issues because some issues are a matter of principle. We do not compromise principle, I have found out. But we do come forth with proposals and try to find those on which we can agree. I do not know why we do not agree on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Every State, every mayor, every city councilman, every county supervisor, every one of them is faced with the first problem of a balanced budget.

Why should we exempt ourselves? Why can't we together work out the details concerning a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution? The overwhelming majority of Americans would heave a sigh of relief if we ever did that because then they would know we would be more careful stewards of their tax dollars. It seems to me we could move forward with that.

Enhanced rescission authority. I believe the President of the United States should have enhanced rescission authority, what we used to know of as the old line-item veto, taking those lines in appropriations bills he objects to and vetoing them--and I will not go through the complications of how it is done--but have them taken out, with certain restrictions as to how many times he could do it. Then, like every Governor--not every Governor but most Governors in America have--to line item out, without having to veto the entire appropriations bill, sometimes maybe even causing damage to our ability to govern.

I am well aware if we voted for an enhanced rescission by the Congress of the United States, signed by the President, the President would probably line-item veto some programs that I would object to him doing so. I am willing--more than willing--to take that pain as opposed to today where we continue to have appropriations bills which in many cases people have not read or truly understand.

Tax reform. Every place I go people talk to me about the need for tax reform. I have yet to meet an American who understands completely the Tax Code. I have yet to meet an American who believes our Tax Code is fair. I have yet to meet an American who says: If you would just give me three tax brackets, a very small number of deductions, and then I could fill out my tax return on a post card or in the case of some of the countries--the Baltic countries that used to be under the Soviet Union--on my computer. Then you would see greater compliance, you would see less of a need for the IRS, and you would see Americans more than willing to pay their fair share if they believed the system was fair.

It is not fair when major corporations and individuals pay no taxes because they have bright lawyers, and they take advantage of all of the loopholes and deductions they have been able to get put into the Tax Code over the years with the help of very powerful lobbyists in this town.

Repatriation and territorial reform. The Presiding Officer, the Senator from North Carolina, and I have proposed a pretty simple proposal; that is, the $1.4 trillion that is now sitting overseas because they will not bring it back because of the tax situation; that we could bring that money home, and we could provide a permanent incentive with that for repatriating these foreign earnings.

I say to my friend from North Carolina, I have been kind of astonished at some of the resistance to this where people say it would not do any good. Help me out. It would not do any good to bring $1.4 trillion back to the United States of America? Do we really believe that would just go in peoples' wallets and purses? Of course not.

The Senator from North Carolina and I have talked to too many people, corporation executives, who have said: Yes, I will not only create jobs and invest that money, but I will give you a plan. I will give a plan that we will implement with that money--that IBM or Boeing or other major corporations that have this money parked overseas.

They are enthusiastic about it. Yet, unbelievably, there are people who argue that it would have no effect whatsoever on our economy. It is hard to understand.

Now we obviously get into ObamaCare. I noticed that the latest polling showed, I believe, that some 54 percent of the American people want the health care law repealed. Thirty-some percent still support it. The fact is that over time, as Americans learn more and more about the health care law we passed, they have become more and more opposed to it. They are angry because the whole purpose of the health care act was to provide all Americans with health care that is affordable but also to bend the curve of the inflation of health care in America because we all know the present inflation of health care is unsustainable. It is unsustainable. Yet what has been the result since the passage? Inflation of health care continues to go up; the cost of health care, whether it be to the men and women serving or average citizens, continues to go up, and it has to stop. We need to look at that and look at medical malpractice reform. In Texas today, they passed medical malpractice reform, and it seems to work, and most people are happy with it.

The Dodd-Frank bill--it still is stunning to me that we passed this regulatory reform bill; they called it a financial takeover that the Dodd-Frank bill is commonly known as--the whole purpose of it was that we would have legislation that would ensure that never again would any institution be too big to fail because the taxpayers never again should have to bail out any financial institution. Is there anybody who believes that these huge institutions on Wall Street haven't grown bigger, that they are not bigger to fail than they used to be? The fact is that they are. What did we get? We got a whole bunch of regulations and different bureaucracies, some of them less accountable than others, and obviously a damper on some of the financial activities.

We need to make sure no financial institution is too big to fail. We need to assure the American people that never again will they suffer the way they have during this period of time because of the malfeasance of others. Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank bill did not achieve that goal.

We need to have a moratorium on regulations. Senator Johnson of Wisconsin has a bill that prohibits any Federal agency from issuing new regulations until the unemployment rate is equal to or less than 7.7 percent. Senators Snowe and Coburn have introduced legislation that is part of this Freedom from Restrictive Excessive Executive Demands and Onerous Mandates Act, which strengthens and streamlines the regulatory act by requiring regulators to include ``indirect economic impacts'' in small business analyses, requiring periodic review and sunset of existing rules, and expanding business review panels as a requirement for all Federal agencies instead of just the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

I notice my colleague, Dr. Barrasso, from Wyoming on the floor, who knows more about programs in the health care reform act. I will try to be polite and refer to it today as the health care reform act.

I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with the Senator from Wyoming.

Does Senator Barrasso believe or could he tell us, perhaps, the effects on the cost of health care since passage of this legislation and perhaps what we need to do to really fix health care in America, which we all agree needs to be fixed?

I ask the Senator this on two other issues. One issue was not included in the health care reform act, which is the issue of medical malpractice, which the Senator, Dr. Barrasso, has had a lot of personal experience with. The other is this--which I think is symptomatic of really the way we cobbled this whole thing together, which is that we have now found a provision in the bill that cannot be and will not be enforced, the so-called CLASS Act.

Would it not also disturb the predictions as far as the fiscal impact of the CLASS Act as well?

Can we return just for a minute to medical malpractice reform because many people, when you talk about that, believe there has to be appropriate compensation when malpractice occurs. We all know malpractice occurs, so we don't want the innocent victims of medical malpractice--however it occurs in the health care scenario--to not be able to get just compensation in the case of malpractice on the part of the caregiver.

I thank the Senator. I appreciate his unique expertise in the health care issues that are still transcendent in this country. I thank him for his enormous contributions.

I want to continue with some of this legislation.

The Unfunded Mandates Accountability Act, which was originally an act of Senator Portman's, requires agencies specifically to address the potential effect of new regulations on job creation and to consider market-based and nongovernmental alternatives to regulation, broadens the scope of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to include rules issued by independent agencies and rules that impose direct or indirect economic costs of $100 million or more, requires agencies to adopt the least burdensome regulatory options and achieves the goal of the statute authorizing the rule and creates a meaningful right to judicial review of an agency's compliance with the law. If there is anything that has grown out of control, in the view of this Member, it is government regulations. First, we had a trickle, but now it is a flood, of government regulations, which then impose additional costs, which then take money away from job creation and, in particular, small business people. This is where accountability of the unfunded mandates is, at the very least, called for.

Senator Barrasso may want to discuss this next provision. The Government Litigation Savings Act reforms the Equal Access to Justice Act by disallowing the reimbursement of attorneys' fees and costs to well-funded special interest groups that repeatedly sue the Federal Government. The bill retains Federal reimbursements for individuals, small businesses, veterans, and others who must fight in court against wrongful government action by eliminating taxpayer-funded reimbursement of attorneys' fees for wealthy special interest groups. The legislation helps eliminate repeated procedural lawsuits that delay permitting exploration and land management.

If the Senator would like to comment.

I thank my friend.

Included in this package is the Employment Protection Act, introduced by Senator Toomey. It requires the EPA to analyze the impact on unemployment levels and economic activity before issuing any regulation, policy statement, guidance document, endangerment finding or denying any permit. Each analysis is required to include a description of estimated job losses and decreased economic activity due to the denial of a permit, including

any permit denied under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

Senator Johanns has contributed the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act, which prevents the EPA from regulating dust in rural America while still maintaining protections to public health under the Clean Air Act.

The National Labor Relations Board reform was introduced by Senator Graham of South Carolina. From backdoor card check, to threatened jobs in South Carolina, the out-of-control National Labor Relations Board is paying back union officials at the expense of worker rights and jobs. To create more jobs, legislation prohibiting the NLRB from stopping new plants and legislation to prevent coercive, quick-snap union elections should be passed.

I am sure my colleagues are very well aware of the unprecedented and incredible action by the NLRB that basically prohibited a major aircraft manufacturing company from locating in the State of South Carolina, where it is a right-to-work State--an unbelievable overreach by a Federal bureaucracy--which still staggers the imagination, but it also shows that elections have consequences.

There is also the Government Neutrality and Contracting Act. It repeals the President's order requiring government-funded construction projects to only use union labor. This would reduce costs of Federal jobs projects by as much as 18 percent. That was Senator Vitter's contribution.

Senator Shelby has introduced the Financial Regulatory Responsibility Act, which requires financial regulators to conduct consistent economic analysis on every new rule they propose, provide clear justification for the rules, and determine the economic impacts of proposed rulemakings, including their effects on job growth and net job creation.

With so many of these pieces of legislation I am talking about, a lot of Americans might say: Don't we do that already? Unfortunately, we don't.

Senator Roberts has the Regulatory Responsibility for our Economy Act, which codifies and strengthens President Obama's January 18 Executive order that directs agencies within to review, modify, streamline, expand or repeal those significant regulatory actions that are duplicative, unnecessary, overly burdensome or would have significant economic impacts on Americans.

Congressman Gibbs, over on the House side, has the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act, which eliminates a new duplicate EPA regulation that will cost millions of dollars to implement without providing additional environmental protection.

On domestic job energy promotion we have, from Senator Vitter, the Domestic Jobs, Domestic Energy, and Deficit Reduction Act that would require the Department of the Interior to move forward with offshore energy exploration and create a timeframe for environmental and judicial review.

Senator Murkowski has included the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act, which eliminates the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the EPA's decisionmaking process for air permits, which is delaying energy exploration in the Alaska and outercontinental shelf. It will create over 50,000 jobs and produce 1 million barrels of oil a day.

There is no one in this body who knows as much about these issues as the distinguished Senator from Alaska.

Senator Barrasso again has brought forward the American Energy and Western Jobs Act. The bill streamlines the preleasing, leasing, and developmental process for drilling on public land and requires the administration to create goals for American oil and gas production.

The Mining Jobs Protection Act by Senators McConnell, Inhofe, and Paul requires the EPA to use or lose their 404 permitting review authority. Under this bill, the EPA will have 60 days to voice concerns about a permit application or the permit moves forward. Any concerns voiced by the EPA would need to be published in the Federal Register within 30 days.

Senator Inhofe has contributed the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases.

The Repeal Restrictions on Government Use of Domestic Alternative Fuels Act would repeal section 526 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which prohibits Federal agencies from contracting for alternative fuels such as coal-to-liquid fuel.

The Public Lands Job Creation Act of Senator Heller eliminates the burdensome and unnecessary delay in approval of projects on Federal lands by allowing the permitting process to move forward unless the Department of the Interior objects within 45 days. This will streamline the permitting process for domestic energy and mineral production on BLM lands without compromising environmental analysis.

Senator McConnell has introduced the renew trade promotion authority, which would provide the President with fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements that will eliminate foreign trade barriers and open new markets for American goods.

We all know trade promotion authority is vital to the eventual enactment of free-trade agreements. I am incredibly depressed that we would not have renewed this trade promotion authority along with the passage of the long overdue free-trade agreements we just passed through this body.

The President and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have become fond of saying Republicans have no plan for creating jobs and putting America back on a path to fiscal prosperity. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I have just laid out in the plan before us today, we have compiled many job-creating measures offered by our colleagues in the Senate.

Furthermore, since January, our colleagues in the House of Representatives have passed at least 22 job-creating bills. Guess how many of the bills that were passed by the House of Representatives have gotten consideration in the Senate. Five.

Similar to our plan, our colleagues in the House have focused a great deal of attention on empowering small businesses and reducing government barriers to job creation. Here are just a few of the commonsense, job-creating measures passed by the House, none of which have been considered by the Senate: review of Federal regulations, reducing regulatory burdens, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act, Consumer Financial Protection and Soundness Improvement Act, Protecting Jobs From Government Interference Act, Transparency and Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act, Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act, and the EPA Regulatory Relief Act.

So the next time we hear the President of the United States say Republicans are blocking or have failed to take up or failed to bring forward a proposal, we have proposals, and we have measures that have been passed by the House. The proposals in this jobs plan bill deserve the consideration of this body.

We need to prove to the American people that we will do everything we can to eliminate the waste of their hard-earned dollars. Enacting an enhanced rescission authority to give the President statutory line-item veto authority to reduce wasteful spending is an issue we have been looking at for years.

Why do we need to grant the President enhanced rescission line-item veto authority? According to a database created by Taxpayers Against Earmarks, washingtonwatch.com, and Taxpayers for Common Sense, for fiscal year 2011, Members requested over 39,000 earmarks totaling over $130 billion. Just last December, we were forced to consider, at the very last minute, an Omnibus appropriations bill that was 1,924 pages long and contained the funding for all 12 of the annual appropriations bills for a grand total of $1.1 trillion. In the short time I had to review that massive piece of legislation before it was brought to the floor, I identified approximately 6,488 earmarks, totaling nearly $8.3 billion.

We need an enhanced rescission act.

Thankfully, the massive omnibus was not enacted. But these earmarks, and the process by which they make their way into spending bills, are evidence that the system is badly broken and in need of reforms.

I have more to say, and I have taken too much time in the eyes of many of my colleagues, perhaps, and I want to apologize to any of my colleagues who had planned to speak on the floor and have been preempted by my long remarks. But I feel that we have an obligation to the American people to address the issues that are of greatest concern and the greatest amount of

pain to them today, and that is jobs and the economy--jobs and the economy.

I care a lot about our national security challenges and I care a lot about what is going in the world. But when I go home and a woman stands up at a townhall meeting with her two children and says, I don't have a job and I am being kicked out of my home next week; when we have people who are being thrown out of their houses, and over half of the homes in my home State of Arizona are under water--in other words, worth less than the mortgage payments they are required to make--when we have chronic unemployment that in some cases, such as down in Yuma, AZ, is well into double digits, then we have to get going on getting some jobs and the economy back on the right track.

I want to repeat--and I don't mean to be confrontational with my colleagues, but we tried for 2 years, when the other side had the majority in the House and the Senate and they had passed major pieces of legislation that were advertised to get our economy back on track-- they didn't--can't we try something different? Can't we try the kinds of things that have brought us out of other recessions? Can't we ask our colleagues in the Senate to create a simplified tax system that the Heritage Foundation says, by lowering the corporate rate to 25 percent, the number of jobs in the United States would grow on an average of 581,000 annually from 2011 to 2020? Can't we look at this regulatory system, which has put such a damper on small businesses and large? Can't we give American people a break from the flood of new regulations that continues to come down and is a major factor in this environment of uncertainty amongst businesses small and large?

The approval rating of the American people of Congress is now, the latest poll I saw, 9 percent. That is something that I joke about, but it is also something that grieves me a great deal because I believe the overwhelming majority of the Members of Congress are here and are dedicated to serving their constituents in the most honorable fashion and in the best possible way they can, according to their values and their principles.

But it is a fact that the American people are very angry and they are very upset. One of the major reasons is, of course, they have not seen progress in the economy. And that is very understandable. We are now seeing these Occupy Wall Street people. The tea partiers will probably be rejuvenated. We are seeing expressions of anger and frustration all over the country, and it is unfortunate. But I believe that a couple of things are going to happen unless we act in a more efficient fashion that addresses the concerns of the American people, and that is I believe you will see the rise of a third party in this country, and I think also you will see greater and greater manifestations of opposition to business as usual here in Washington.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, I am more than eager to sit down with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and come together particularly on some of the issues that clearly we have stated on both sides we are in favor of.

Again, my apologies to my colleagues whose time I may have preempted on the floor. But I think this issue of jobs, which we will be voting on tomorrow, is one that deserved more than passing attention.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, today's debate concerns S.J. Res. 6. In a larger context, though, we have been having this debate for 34 months. The theme is, the Obama administration's relentless imposition of new and destructive regulations has not helped us get into a recovery and, in fact, I think is freezing our economy.

We have seen it with the Environmental Protection Agency when it tried to regulate carbon emissions and greenhouse gases using the Clean Air Act, a purpose for which Congress never intended the law to be used. We have seen it with the National Mediation Board when it overturned nearly a century of precedent and issued a new rulemaking to allow unions to be formed more easily but harder to decertify.

We have seen it with the National Labor Relations Board when it took the shocking step of challenging Boeing's decision to create new jobs by building a new factory in South Carolina, simply because South Carolina is a right-to-work State.

Today's issue involves bureaucratic overreach into a symbol of American innovation and creativity, the Internet, because the Federal Communications Commission has now decided to regulate the Internet. Last December, three FCC Commissioners, on a party-line vote, voted to impose rules that restrict how Internet service providers offer broadband services to consumers. Those rules, known as net neutrality, impose 19th century-style monopoly regulations on the most competitive and important job-creating engine of the 21st century, the Internet.

This marks a stunning reversal from the hands-off approach to the Internet that Federal policymakers have taken for more than a decade. During the last 20 years, the Internet has grown and flourished without burdensome regulations imposed by Washington. Powered by the strength of free market forces, the Internet has been an open platform for innovation, spurring business development and much needed job creation.

The former Democratic FCC Chairman, William Kennard, stated in 1999 ``[t}he fertile fields of innovation across the communications sector and around the country are blooming because from the get-go we have taken a deregulatory, competitive approach to our communications structure--especially the Internet.''

The present FCC is reversing that policy that has been successful beyond our expectations. Broadband Internet networks have powered the information and communications industry, which in 2009 accounted for more than 3.5 million high-paying jobs and about $1 trillion in economic activity.

This industry has been an engine for major economic growth even during these difficult times. Yet the FCC's rules could severely jeopardize this industry's vast potential. Net neutrality is intended to limit how Internet service providers develop and operate their broadband networks. The net neutrality order allows the FCC to tell broadband providers what kind of business practices are reasonable and unreasonable. The FCC, however, did not bother to clearly define in its rules what the agency considers to be reasonable.

This point is vital to understand. With such an arbitrary and yet poorly defined standard, companies will be forced to err on the side of caution. Rather than risk possible punishment from the FCC, many companies will simply decide: Maybe we will not invest right now in new technologies. Maybe it is too risky to develop and deploy new services. At the very least, it will delay such investment.

This kind of regulatory uncertainty will be crippling for companies and particularly small providers. We have heard exactly that from a small wireless Internet provider in Wyoming called LARIAT. This is a provider that is serving remote areas and trying to expand to other unserved years.

LARIAT testified before Congress that these FCC regulations are already harming its ability to attract investors, grow its business, hire more workers, and serve new customers. Forcing broadband companies to ask the government for permission before moving forward is exactly what we should try to avoid when reviving our economy.

This FCC regime will lead to stagnation in Internet innovation in the United States, placing us at a disadvantage against overseas competitors who are not burdened with similar rules. Moveover, Internet providers will end up spending resources on lawyers and lobbyists in order to comply with the FCC's rules, rather than investing those dollars in innovation.

Small companies will find it even more expensive to navigate Washington, DC. This certainly will not help consumers, particularly in rural areas, and will only increase the costs they have to bear. Before any new regulations are forced on American businesses, it is the government's responsibility to clearly show, one, there is an actual problem that needs to be addressed. That should be foremost.

With the FCC taking such a large departure from the agency's previous light-touch approach, one might think the FCC could point to a long list of net neutrality violations and problems that need to be fixed. That is not the case here. In a 134-page regulatory order, the FCC spent only three paragraphs attempting to catalog alleged instances of misconduct.

Within those three short paragraphs, every alleged problem was addressed under the FCC's existing rule or, if not, it was fixed by the provider under pressure from the public or the competitive marketplace, where it should be fixed. As former FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker noted in her statement dissenting from the FCC's net neutrality order, the Commission was ``unable to identify a single ongoing practice of a single broadband provider that it finds problematic upon which to base this action.'' To put it simply, the FCC has issued new rules without even demonstrating that intervention is actually necessary.

Despite protests to the contrary, these net neutrality regulations on broadband providers clearly establish the FCC as the Internet's gatekeeper, a role for which the government is not suited. Innovation does not work on a government timetable nor does it thrive through a maze of roadblocks.

Ironically, supporters of net neutrality insist that providers are the ones who may become gatekeepers of the Internet. These people say the openness of the Internet is far too important to be left unprotected by the government. This is a false premise. In fact, the Internet has been an open platform for innovation since its inception, and it has not needed any sort of net neutrality rules from bureaucrats at the FCC.

To make matters worse, Congress has never given the FCC the explicit authority to regulate how Internet providers manage their networks. That is why the new rules represent an unprecedented power grab by the unelected Commissioners at the FCC. In fact, current law states: ``It is the policy of the United States . . . to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.''

That is the law today. The FCC has lost this fight already in the courts. Last year, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's 2008 attempt to impose net neutrality in the Comcast v. FCC case. The court ruled that the FCC was acting beyond the reach of its congressionally provided authority and cautioned that regulations should be imposed only with explicit congressional direction.

This was validation that regulatory agencies cannot make policy without congressional direction. Rather than back down, however, the FCC doubled down. The current FCC order tries an even more expansive interpretation of the law than was used in the Comcast case. FCC Commissioners inexplicably claimed the agency can impose heavy-handed Internet regulation under section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. This was a section of the law that was intended to remove regulatory barriers to broadband investment, not to raise them.

If the FCC's legal theory is left unchallenged, the FCC will have nearly unbounded authority to regulate almost anything on the Internet. It is Congress's role, not the FCC's to determine the proper policy framework for the Internet. Over time, and aided by the current administration, regulators throughout the government have gradually tried to seize increasing control over so many facets of American life. It is time for the Senate to stop this overreach. We write the laws of this country, not unelected bureaucrats. That is why we are here today.

Thanks to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, former Senator Don Nickles, and the late Senator Ted Stevens, one of the tools Congress has to stop rogue agencies is the Congressional Review Act. The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to review a rule before it takes effect and even to nullify that rule if Congress finds it is inappropriate, or if it overreaches, or if Congress itself hasn't delegated this power to an agency.

As Senators Reid, Nickles, and Stevens said at the time of this bill's passage, ``Congressional review gives the public the opportunity to call the attention of politically accountable, elected officials to concerns about new agency rules. If these concerns are sufficiently serious, Congress can stop the rule.''

We believe the concern about the FCC's net neutrality rules is sufficiently serious to warrant the consideration of Senate Joint Resolution 6, the disapproval resolution Senator McConnell and I introduced to nullify the FCC's net neutrality order under the Congressional Review Act. The House has already passed its version of the resolution, and we need only a majority of Senators to send this bill to the President's desk. Even a net neutrality supporter, Senator Olympia Snowe, who has authored net neutrality legislation, is a cosponsor and supporter of our resolution today.

While Senator Snowe and I don't agree on the need for a net neutrality law, we are in complete agreement--and she stated it beautifully--that Congress, not the FCC, should determine what the proper regulatory framework is for the Internet.

If the Senate does not strike down these regulations soon, they will go into effect on November 20, further jeopardizing jobs in this fragile economy. I guess you could say that it will allow more lawyers to be hired, but

more innovators? Probably not. That is not the mix we need to assure that our economy will get back on track in this country.

Studies indicate that net neutrality rules could significantly affect our economy. If net neutrality reduces capital investment in broadband infrastructure by even 10 percent, it could cost our country hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next decade.

We must preserve the openness of the Internet as a platform for innovation and economic growth. We must keep the competitive advantage that we have in this country for innovation. The last thing we ought to be doing is putting restrictions on our providers, when many countries that are also advanced in this area are not doing the same thing. So when we go to global competitiveness, we are putting our companies at a disadvantage. Why would we do that?

We must stop the job-killing regulatory interference by our government today in so many areas, and we can start right here, right now, by keeping the Internet free, voting for this resolution of disapproval, and saying to the regulatory bodies in this town: Congress must authorize a delegation of authority for your agency to pass rules, and especially when Congress is in disagreement with those rules.

This is a key policy decision for our body. We need to step up to the responsibility that Congress has. Our Constitution divided the powers between three branches of government. If Congress doesn't stand up for its one-third of the powers of this government and lets unelected bureaucrats run over our prerogatives, we will become a weaker branch, and our government will become weaker for it. We need to have three equal branches of government, and that means each branch must fulfill its responsibilities under the Constitution. Congress must delegate its authority explicitly for a rule to be made. That is the way the Constitution intended for Congress to fulfill its job as the elected representatives of the people of our country.

The House has passed this resolution. I hope the Senate will tomorrow. I hope the people will speak and say that even if you disagree on the basic issue of net neutrality, it is not the right of the FCC to pass sweeping regulations that will affect the economy of this country without explicit authority from Congress, which it does not have.

Mr. President, I ask my colleagues to come to the floor if they want to speak on this resolution. There is 4 hours, equally divided, and that time is now running. I say to my Republican colleagues that we have quite a list of those who want to speak. They must know that the time will run out in about 3\1/2\ hours now. I ask them to contact me if they wish to speak.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, on our side I have Senator Wicker and Senator Shelby, who have been here waiting, and I would like to give them 15 minutes from the time on our side. I know there are others here, but these Senators have been waiting for quite a while.

Up to 5 minutes for Senator Wicker and up to 10 minutes for Senator Shelby.

Madam President, I know the Senator from Minnesota has been waiting to speak, and I certainly will yield to him. I would like to be recognized after he speaks to answer some of the concerns that were raised by the Senator from Massachusetts.

Madam President, I yield up to 15 minutes to the Senator from Alaska.

Mr. President, how much time remains on our side?

I yield up to 10 minutes to the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. President, how much time remains on this side?

Sixty?

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, I have been looking for a time when the floor was open to refute some of the comments and concerns raised earlier on the Senate floor. I want to start by taking on a comment that was made by the Senator from Minnesota, Mr. Franken, who said YouTube started above a pizzeria in 2005 and sold for $1.6 billion 2 years later to Google, and that wouldn't have been possible without net neutrality.

Well, Mr. President, I must point out that we didn't have net neutrality in 2005. We haven't had Federal regulation of the Internet in this country such as we have seen during this last year put forward by this administration. In fact, YouTube and Google were both created in a marketplace without net neutrality regulations. Other online successes--Facebook, Hulu, Twitter, and new devices such as the Apple iPhone and Amazon Kindle--all happened without net neutrality regulations. These are innovations that have changed communication patterns not only in our country but around the world as well. So we have had these innovations without the heavy hand of government.

It is very interesting to hear the debate on the Senate floor because we seem to hear that net neutrality is something that will keep the Internet open. The opposite is true. It is beginning to put the clamps on the successes that we have had by having an open Internet. All these companies they are talking about needing net neutrality to come forward and blossom and grow are the companies that have done exactly that without net neutrality regulations.

What we should do is assure that we don't put a blanket over the Internet and start saying to everybody who has a new idea or a new product or a new service provider: You better go to the FCC before you go forward with that or you could be in jeopardy. You could be penalized. You could be thought to have an ``unreasonable'' product on the Internet because we don't know yet what is reasonable. We just know you have to be reasonable because we have a new regulation now that says you must be reasonable, without any definition of what this FCC-- which had no authority to go into this area--is going to determine is a ``reasonable'' product that would not interfere with anything else.

Mr. President, we haven't had net neutrality before. All the successes I hear talked about in this debate have happened without the heavy or the light hand of government stopping the originality and innovation that has marked the success of our country.

Earlier, Mr. Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts, said the Internet made the 1996 Telecommunications Act obsolete 6 months after it was enacted. But if the 1996 act did not sufficiently address the Internet, thus making it obsolete, how can that same law be the genesis and basis of the FCC's assertion it has the power to regulate the Internet? We have to have one or the other, and it is our assertion the FCC did not get specific authority to regulate the Internet that is required for Congress to give it in order to make rules in this area. So Senator Kerry can't have it both ways. He can't say the Telecommunications Act was obsolete but it is also the basis of these new restrictive regulations.

Senator Kerry sent a ``Dear Colleague'' letter to everyone in the Senate asking them to vote against this resolution. What I think Senator Kerry was saying in that letter is that net neutrality is not a regulation of the Internet because it is just a regulation of the onramp. In other words, we are not trying to support the FCC regulating the whole Internet; they are just doing the gateway, they are just doing the onramp.

Well, that was the position the FCC took when they made this regulation. But we can't argue that net neutrality is not regulation of the Internet because the Internet service providers are the only onramps to the Internet. It is a misleading statement to say that just regulating the onramp isn't regulating the Internet. The Internet is the entire global network of millions of computer networks. It uses the Internet protocol standard to interconnect with each other. Internet backbone providers and last-mile Internet service providers serve as the foundation of the Internet. So they are the foundation.

Web sites and services such as e-mail and voice-over IP, or VOIP, allow users to communicate on top of the foundation. The Internet is the whole online ecosystem put together. We can't have the edge without the core and vice versa. The onramp is as much a part of the information superhighway as are the cars traveling on it.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell put it well in his dissent from the open Internet order that we are discussing today. He said:

To say that today's rules don't regulate the Internet is

like saying regulating highway on ramps, off ramps, and

pavement don't equate to regulating the highways themselves.

Mr. President, if we are going to say the FCC can regulate the onramp--and that is the first heavy hand of government that is going to start controlling and making decisions about what is reasonable and what is not--that means businesses are going to have to go to the FCC and say: Mother may I. If they have an innovative product, that is going to cost the consumer more because they will have had to go and hire lawyers to go to the FCC to get prior approval or it will delay the product getting out to consumers, possibly letting a European service provider that doesn't have these kinds of barriers get ahead of us.

Internet technology is the basis of hundreds of thousands of jobs and products in our country. We are in a crisis right now. We all know we have 9 percent unemployment and that our economy is even dead in the water. So we have to do something to jump-start the economy. The last thing we want to do is put a blanket on it to make it harder for it to come back. I don't think anybody in this country with any common sense is going to say we have a thriving economy right now. So it does defy common sense to say we are going to allow regulations Congress has not approved and that Congress has not authorized the regulator to make, knowing it will have the effect of either freezing or delaying the innovation that has been the hallmark of the success of the Internet and technology in our country.

There are several organizations that have banded together to ask that people vote for the resolution today. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from, among others, Americans for Tax Reform, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, Hispanic Leadership Fund, and Americans for Prosperity.

Mr. President, in part, the letter says:

The FCC enacted these Net Neutrality rules despite a

complete lack of Congressional authorization and after being

told by a court that they lack jurisdiction.

Remember, this court, in the Comcast case, basically said to the FCC: You and all the other regulatory agencies that are independent must have specific authority from Congress to regulate in this area.

They found in the Comcast case they did not have such jurisdiction. Once again, citing from the letter in support of passing S.J. Res. 6-- which is signed by Grover Norquist, Phil Kerpen, David Williams, Thomas Schatz, and Mario Lopez--it says:

The FCC's order also runs contrary to the broad and

bipartisan conversation in Washington about how best to grow

the economy and spur job creation. President Obama and

Members in Congress on both sides of the aisle have called to

rein in overbearing regulations that harm economic growth.

Here we have yet another regulation on top of the EPA and the NLRB and the NMB coming forward to put a damper on our economy.

Mr. President, I would like to read from an opinion piece written by Phil Kerpen, who is with the Americans for Prosperity, and I thought this was relevant to the debate.

Network neutrality sounds nice. Originally, it was the idea

that all of the traffic . . . that travel over the networks

that comprise the Internet should be treated exactly the same

way. But engineers cried foul, because the routers that make

the Internet work are highly sophisticated with millions of

lines of code that necessarily prioritize different types of

traffic. Streaming video can't tolerate delays of a few

seconds whereas an e-mail could.

So network neutrality morphed into something even more

dangerous, empowering the FCC bureaucrats to play traffic

cops, micromanaging networks, and deciding which traffic can

or can't be prioritized. The result would be a precipitous

decline in private investment because the companies that

spent billions of dollars building networks could no longer

be certain how the FCC bureaucrats would allow those networks

to be used.

I am reading from this letter, and I will continue. The letter says:

A recent study from New York University found that hundreds

of thousands of jobs would be lost. The tech sector--the

brightest spot in our economy--would be burdened by Federal

regulations the way the rest of the economy has been.

So these are excerpts from Mr. Kerpen's opinion piece that say it is now crunch time to stop the FCC's Internet takeover.

I think these outside groups that are weighing in are showing that just regular consumers--I heard the list of groups that are supporting this rule that has come out. But the citizens who are for free markets and tax reform and for letting our businesses grow and thrive through the American innovation--I like some of the things they have said that I think are very important in this debate.

I urge my colleagues to look at whether we are exercising our responsibility as Members of Congress when we would vote against stopping a Federal agency that has not had a delegation of authority from Congress to regulate in this area. The House of Representatives has already voted in favor of this resolution. We need to send it to the President and say to the President: Congress did not delegate our authority.

It is overstepping its bounds, and furthermore it is going to put a damper on the most thriving part of our economy today, and that is the tech sector. It is where we are, hands down, ahead in the world because we have kept the free markets. Why would we give that up to unelected Federal agencies that have not been asked by Congress to regulate in this area? And if we did, we should be required--because it is our constitutional responsibility to do so--to say exactly what we would ask a policy to be in a new regulation. We have not done that, and we should not allow the Federal agencies, which are appointed but not elected, to take over this area that is so important for our economy.

If we have any guts at all in this Senate, we should stand up for our one-third of the balance of power in the Federal Government and assert ourselves to keep control over runaway Federal agencies that do not answer to anyone.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I Thank the Chair. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I yield up to 5 minutes of our time to the Senator from Oklahoma.

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

I yield up to 7 minutes to the Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. President, I would like to just wrap up, and then I will yield back the rest of our time and we can close this debate because our vote is going to come tomorrow.

I just want to summarize what we have heard today. I just heard the distinguished Senator from Washington State say that without net neutrality we would have more expense to consumers. I really do view this in a different way because I view the potential delay, the regulatory processes, the hurdles that are going to have to be overcome for any kind of preclearance to put a new product on the Internet, gatekeeping for innovation--that is what, in my opinion, is going to increase the cost and cause delays if not freeze many of the innovations that have occurred in our open Internet system.

We now have, because of the FCC's ruling, the requirement for reasonable standards for access to the Internet. There is no definition of ``reasonable.'' I heard the Senator from Minnesota say we need net neutrality in order for Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to be able to grow and prosper. Those entities have grown and prospered-- without net neutrality regulations. They have grown and prospered because we have had free and open access to the Internet. We and our competitors and our businesses that compete overseas have had open and free access. That has been the beauty of the success of the Internet.

Now we see government coming in and saying: You have to be reasonable in what you offer. So if there is a major dump of millions of pages onto the Internet and it is going to slow down, for instance, a hospital network offering rural health care on an emergency basis or some kind of video-streaming that is going out, we have to be able to let the providers have the judgment and let the marketplace work. If there is a problem it was not pointed out by the FCC when they decided to intervene in the Internet among 134 pages of regulations with just 3 paragraphs about possible problems, all of which concluded with the rules that are in place today.

This is clearly a problem that isn't there, which is being manufactured in order to put another government regulation on the books. When the Senator from Massachusetts said this order doesn't regulate the Internet, just the gateways or the on-ramps, that doesn't hold water because if we regulate the on-ramp, we are regulating the Internet. We are causing companies that are providing broadband to not have control of their networks but instead will now have to go before the FCC to justify a new product or service that will give emergency access or quicker access for users who need to have that kind of access.

I hope the Senate will say the FCC has extended beyond any authority Congress has given them, and I hope we will stand for our prerogative in Congress to make the laws and only have regulations come out when we delegate specifically to an agency to put out rules in a particular area, which has not happened in this case.

I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.

I yield the floor.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

This last Sunday I was watching an ABC morning news show, and Christiane Amanpour was interviewing the Speaker of the House, John Boehner of Ohio. Speaker Boehner was asked a number of questions. The one he clearly wanted to focus on is what he called the Republican jobs program. He handed to Ms. Amanpour a laminated card which he said was the Republican jobs program that had passed the House of Representatives and was dying in the Senate. It has never been called for passage. It struck me as odd because I missed that during the course of this last year that there was a Republican jobs program, and I was a little bit worried because we are looking for every opportunity we can to create jobs.

So I came back and said to my staff, can you get a copy of this laminated card? I want to see what is written on it. They produced the card for me, and I took a look at it. As a result, I would have to say the Republican view on how to create jobs and move the economy forward is considerably different than my own and considerably different than the views of most Americans. What Republicans have proposed doing is eliminating rules and regulations. They believe that is what is holding back the growth of the American economy. One of the areas they particularly focused on is known as the Dodd-Frank bill, the Wall Street reform bill.

Some of us are not suffering from political amnesia. We can recall what

happened just a few years ago all across America when at the end of the Bush administration we faced some of the worst choices I have ever heard when we were presented an opportunity by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Paulson, to literally bail out the Wall Street banks and major institutions to the tune of almost $800 billion from the mistakes they had made. So we were given an ultimatum: If we didn't do it, we could see a collapse of our American economy and the global economy. Reluctantly, many of us voted for that, believing that we had no choice. What we did was to send billions of dollars to banks on Wall Street that had made serious mistakes, creating credit default swaps and derivatives, creating offices in London that could skirt the American laws and, literally, hanging the American economy out to dry. The net result of that, of course, is that people suffered all across America. Individuals lost their savings and their retirements. Families were facing hardship when they were laid off and faced unemployment. Businesses closed and restructured and downsized. The whole economy suffered because of what was clearly wrongdoing on the part of our financial communities. As a result of that, President Obama said, We need to change the rules and laws in America so there will be adequate oversight so that we never get in this mess again.

The first amendment on the Dodd-Frank bill in the Senate was offered by Senator Boxer of California, which said this is the end of too big to fail. We are never walking down this path again. So we put the financial institutions and corporations of America on notice that we were not going to bail them out in the future, should they make another colossal mistake, at the expense of workers and families and businesses across America.

Then we went through the entire regulatory law as it related to Wall Street, including the stock exchanges and all of the exchanges across America, and said, What do we need to do to make certain there is transparency, to make certain the banks that were overleveraged and loaning far more than they should are in a position where they are fiscally sound, financially sound, and how do we put cops on the beat on Wall Street through the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to guard against this ever occurring again? We offered that as Wall Street reform, with the support of President Obama, but with the support of only three Republican Senators: Senators Brown, Snowe, and Collins. The majority of Republican Senators and Congressmen would not support us in this effort. We passed it anyway. The President signed it. It is now being implemented, moving forward and, I think, long overdue.

It turns out that is one of the first things the Republicans now want to eliminate in their effort to build the American economy. I can tell my colleagues we would be building the American economy on a foundation of sand if we did that. If we ignored the experience we had a few years ago when we were forced into this bailout situation, sending billions to the biggest bankers in America, and having them turn around and declare bonuses for their top officers and employees--if we ignore that reality and that history and say we were going to follow the Republican lead and eliminate this oversight of Wall Street, it would invite another economic disaster. Yet, that is one of the House Republican plans for rebuilding the American economy.

The financial crisis of 2008 wiped out 8 million jobs in America. Twenty-four million Americans today are still suffering--unemployed or underemployed. Millions of families have lost their homes. A report in the Chicago newspapers this morning was stunning and troubling. Almost 50 percent of the homes in our region in Chicago are under water. What it means is families have borrowed more in their mortgages than their home is currently valued. That is a troubling development, but it is a reality. It reflects what happened when the overanxious and overinflated real estate market got out of hand. We don't want that to happen again. If we are going to avoid it, we have to have appropriate oversight and regulation.

Many families have seen their home values plummet, not just in Chicago but nationwide. Their retirement savings have been cut in half over the last 4 years. In Illinois and across America, solid, well-run companies, many in business for decades, have been shaken to the core for the lack of credit and the lack of customers.

So what do our Republican colleagues offer as a solution? What is the Republican jobs plan? Incredibly, they have responded to America's economic crisis not by rethinking their deregulation dogma, but by doubling down. Let me explain.

In addition to repealing Wall Street reform, Republicans are trying to change the most basic protections we have in America for clean air and pure drinking water. Think about this: The Republican majority in the House has voted 168 times this year--168 times--to undercut clean air and clean water laws and to block efforts to limit global warming, protect public health, protect the public lands we have been left by previous generations, and guard against things such as future oilspills. They voted 168 times just this year, and they are not finished.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have attached more than 50 anti-environmental policy riders so far to spending bills for next year. They are unrelenting. I won't go into all of the environmental and public health protections the Republicans are trying to block. Let me focus on two. Republicans have used the Senate's expedited procedures to place bills blocking these two new rules directly on the Senate calendar rather than going through the regular order.

It is their right to do that. They are saying, in effect, we don't have time for the normal rules. We don't have time to hear from scientists or the American people. We need to bury these rules right now.

The first rule they want to delay is the boiler MACT rule. It is an acronym that stands for maximum achievable controlled technology. The boiler MACT rule would reduce the amount of mercury, dioxins, acid gases, and other toxic pollutants that can be emitted by large industrial boilers and solid waste incinerators. Is that the key to building jobs in America, large industrial boilers spewing more toxic chemicals into the air, solid waste incinerators burning without the regulations to protect the people who happen to live downwind? These chemicals can cause cancer, heart, lung, and kidney disease, damage to eyes and skin, impair brain development in children and babies, and learning ability, and they can kill people. That is a fact.

The other new clean air rule in the crosshairs from the Republicans is the so-called cross-State air pollution rule. It would require significant reductions in two toxic chemicals--sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide--released by electric powerplants. These chemicals not only cause sickness and death, they can spread hundreds of miles downwind and across State lines.

Many States can't develop new jobs and industries because they have reached their air pollution limits under national clean air standards, not because of what they are doing in their States, but rather for the wind that is blowing from other States with pollution. It puts them over the limit for emissions that travel from old coal-burning powerplants in other States. That is not right, and it is not fair.

The cross-State air pollution rule would set new limits on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions and establish an emissions cap- and-trade system for 31 Eastern States and the District of Columbia. It is a reasonable, market-based solution to a serious public health threat. The Republicans would abolish it.

Both the boiler MACT rule and the cross-State air pollution rule replace rules that were developed by the EPA as far back as the Bush administration--rules that were stricken by the DC Circuit Court. In both cases, the court ordered the EPA to come up with a new rule. House Republicans have already passed a bill to delay these new air pollution quality standards for at least 15 months, and here in the Senate, they would delay them for up to 5 years. As for the cross-State air pollution rule, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has introduced a resolution of disapproval to kill it altogether so there will be no standard, so if a person happens to live downwind from a polluting powerplant and that person's

State is trying to do its best to clean up its act, it is to no avail. The air pollution quality will be so bad in that State because of the neighboring State that people will face serious problems and restrictions in their own development.

The House has taken an even more radical approach. They voted almost entirely along party lines, passing a Republican bill called the TRAIN Act, that would delay indefinitely the cross-State air pollution rule, and another lifesaving rule, the mercury and air toxics standard. The TRAIN Act would also overturn the legal requirement that EPA's public health rules be based on the best advice of scientists, not the demands of politicians or their donors. It is the most serious attack on the Clean Air Act since the law was passed 40 years ago under Republican President Richard M. Nixon.

President Obama has already said he is going to veto any bills that would delay the new clean air rules. Our Republican colleagues know they don't have the votes to override his veto, so once again they are forcing the Senate to debate measures they know have no chance--zero chance--of becoming law.

And that is the Republican jobs plan.

Republicans say Federal agencies should analyze the cost of business of every new regulation, whether it is meant to protect against Wall Street recklessness, offshore oil disasters, lead-based toys, or killer cantaloupes. If a regulation hurts the corporate bottom line, the Republicans argue it shouldn't be passed.

I have a counterproposal for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Any politician who proposes deregulating an industry ought to be required to tell the public how much money deregulation would cost, how many jobs might be lost, how many lives may be cut short, how many children and other members of our families may end up in the hospital, and how much of our Nation's natural treasures may be scarred or destroyed. Let's have an honest assessment on both sides of the ledger.

When I travel across my State, much like in the Presiding Officer's State, we have big cities and small towns. I go to schools and talk to kids, and usually they have the common questions--do you have a limousine, how much money do you make--things that kids ask. So I ask questions back to them. One question I have started asking in every school is the following: How many of you know someone who is suffering from asthma? Without fail, more than half the hands will go up. In Mount Sterling, IL, a small farm town down in Brown County in downstate Illinois, half the hands went up. I guarantee that in every classroom in the city of Chicago, more than half of the hands will go up. Asthma has become an epidemic in America and is related to many things, including the quality of the air we breathe. On the South Side of Chicago, it is hard to find a child who doesn't suffer from asthma.

In 2007, the cost of asthma-related hospitalizations in Illinois totaled $280 million. The average stay costs $15,000 for an asthma case, and nearly 60 percent of those hospital costs were paid for by taxpayers through Medicaid and Medicare. Air pollution makes asthma worse. If we reduce air pollution we can reduce asthma attacks, asthma- related deaths, and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year just for the cost of treating that single disease. That is something we never hear when the disciples of deregulation start preaching.

Here are some other facts we won't hear about deregulation from the deregulation devotees. The new boiler MACT rule will create jobs, not eliminate them. It would prevent between 2,500 and 6,500 premature deaths each year, and it would save between $22 billion and $54 billion a year in health care costs.

The cross-State air pollution rule, which they would also abolish, would also net thousands of new jobs, prevent 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 34,000 premature deaths each year, and save $280 billion in health care costs. In my State alone, the cross-State rule will save 1,500 lives a year and provide enough public health benefits to save our State $12 billion. Twelve billion dollars in Illinois--that is more than Illinois spent on health, hospitals, and highways combined in the year 2009.

Deregulation is a costly gamble even for businesses that are deregulated. During the last administration, oil companies were allowed to self-regulate under the Bush administration. How did that work in the Gulf of Mexico with British Petroleum? The gulf oilspill is the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history. Congratulations, self-regulators.

Local businesses suffered $4 billion to $12 billion in lost income because of self-regulation by a major oil company. BP alone is likely to spend $40 billion in claims, fines, and other expenses from this historic, awful spill.

Those who push for deregulation tell us environmental rules are job killers and nothing but a burden on businesses and consumers. They are wrong. Regulations that are well designed are, to borrow a phrase from our Republican friends, job creators. They can spur innovation and create new products, new jobs, even whole new industries. A study published by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst estimates that new air pollution rules for electric powerplants ``will provide long-term economic benefits across much of the United States in the form of highly skilled, well-paid jobs through infrastructure investment.''

Specifically, researchers found that clean air investments could create 1.5 million new jobs in 2015 right here at home. Let me bring this story closer to home. Recently I made a trip in Illinois to a new coal-fired plant. It is a plant that is amazing. It is called the Prairie State Energy Campus and it is owned by a number of electric cooperatives. It has a $1 billion investment in the clean use of coal to produce electricity. They took a look at the law, and instead of hiring lawyers to fight it, they hired engineers to comply with it.

The plant is up and running. It is a marvel to behold. Right across from this plant is a coal mine, and the coal that is drawn from that mine goes into this plant and meets all the specifications required today by the EPA. The people who are running this plant are not whining and crying and begging for relief. They rolled up their sleeves and built a plant much cleaner than anything that existed in the United States, and they are proving it can be profitable.

I wish my Republican friends would come to the Prairie State Energy Campus. They should see and know that 4,000 union jobs were created for the construction of this plant, and they expect to have 500 permanent local jobs to boost the Illinois economy by $785 million a year with our own local coal.

The campus includes two generators that will produce 1,600 megawatts of clean, low-cost energy for more than 2.5 million customers in the Midwest. It is going to go online by the end of this year.

By using the latest technology, the plant's carbon dioxide emissions will be 15 percent lower than what is typically discharged from U.S. coal-fired powerplants.

In addition, the plant is going to save an estimated 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year by using coal from an adjacent mine instead of mining it in some other place and shipping it to the site of the power generation.

One hundred-sixty coal miners are working in the adjacent mine. I went there. It was not my first visit to a coal mine, but it is always an eye-opener to go in and see how they mine coal today. Two weeks ago, Prairie State announced plans to hire even more miners.

In Illinois, incidentally, coal miners make a pretty decent wage, $65,000 a year. So these are good jobs, right here in America, mining coal to be used in a clean coal plant. It can be done. The Republicans ought to acknowledge it can be done, and new jobs are being created in the process, while we are reducing air pollution.

In a recent survey, two out of three Americans say they support new clean air rules and oppose what the Republicans are trying to do in the name of job creation. Nearly 90 percent of all Americans--nearly 60 percent of Republicans and conservatives, I might add--said Congress should not prevent the EPA from enforcing the new rules. I wish my Republican friends, who are so dead set on eliminating these standards for air and water pollution, would listen to the people across America who want cleaner air and purer drinking water and are willing to see reasonable regulations to reach those goals.

The push to kill the new clean air rules is not coming from the American

people. It is part of a huge power grab. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republicans in Congress have launched an unprecedented antiregulation campaign. The Chamber is reportedly spending millions of dollars to push the message that regulations are job killers. Their goal is to roll back existing environmental, health, financial, and other regulatory protections and to block any new protections. They are using the American jobs crisis to try to push through an agenda that will increase our deficit, actually take away jobs in America, and cause thousands of Americans to get sick and some to die.

Just cut taxes on millionaires and billionaires and get rid of government regulation and, they believe, we can get the economy humming again. That is their credo. If that were true, the last administration would have been the most prosperous in our history because that is the message and philosophy and agenda that guided the Bush administration. Instead, in the words of the Wall Street Journal--not exactly a Democratic publication--George Bush's administration produced ``the worst jobs record on record.''

We have tried this. It does not work. We have seen this movie. We know how it ends. This notion of protecting millionaires from any taxes and repealing any laws related to the regulation of our economy did not work under the Bush administration and should not be tried again.

The reason 2 million Americans are out of work has nothing to do with excessive financial or environmental regulation. If anything, our economy is hurting because we do not have the appropriate regulation in place now to avoid the excesses of the past.

To say we cannot create jobs without allowing dangerous levels of toxic chemicals into our air and water is an absolutely false choice. We have to find an approach that protects the health of American families and balances the needs of business and is based on the reality of science.

For 40 years, Democrats and Republicans used to work together on this agenda. We need to do it again. In the meantime, if our Republican colleagues want to create good middle-class jobs here at home, let's pass the President's American Jobs Act. This will not only create jobs, it will fund infrastructure and road repairs. It will cut payroll taxes for working families, saving the average family about $1,500 a year, and extend badly needed unemployment benefits for those out of work. It will keep hundreds of thousands of teachers in the classroom and cops and firefighters on the job in our neighborhoods and communities.

That is the way to create good jobs. America does not need dirty water and dirty air to create good-paying jobs. I hope the Republican agenda, even if it is laminated on a card passed out by Speaker John Boehner, will realize we can do better in this country by not compromising our public health and the great Nation in which we live.

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

Madam President, I appreciate the courtesy of the Senator from Texas. My understanding is that Senator Murkowski from Alaska is on her way down. I am scheduled to sit in the chair at 12, and I don't want to step on the opportunity of the Senator from Alaska to speak.

Madam President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to vote against the motion to proceed to the joint resolution of disapproval of Senator Hutchison, which would repeal the FCC's net neutrality rules.

As many of you know, I have repeatedly said net neutrality is the free speech issue of our time. I still believe that is the case, and I am here to state why we need to do everything we can to stop this partisan resolution in its tracks.

But before I get into the reasons we should oppose this resolution, I think it is important to step back and remember what the American people expect of us. I do not need to tell anyone in this body that the approval rating of Congress is at an all-time low. Why is that? I think it has something to do with the fact that we are using our extremely limited, valuable time to debate partisan proposals like this one rather than working together to create jobs, stimulate our economy, and get Americans back to work.

When this resolution of disapproval passed the House back in April, I hoped that would be the end of it. I hoped my colleagues would recognize we should let agencies do their jobs and not employ an arcane procedure to erase a rule the FCC started thinking about in 2004 under Republican chairman Michael Powell, and again in 2005 when a different Republican chairman, this time Kevin Martin, adopted a unanimous policy statement on net neutrality.

When the White House issued a statement indicating the President would veto this resolution of disapproval if it came to his desk, I thought my colleagues would be sensible and would recognize that this was not only unnecessary and foolhardy, but it was also a pointless exercise and would be just a giant waste of everyone's time. Alas, that is not the case and here we are spending valuable time on two resolutions of disapproval when we should be turning to legislation that will get our economy back up and running again.

I hope the votes we take tomorrow will send a strong message that we need to stop these political stunts and work together to create jobs, jobs, and more jobs.

But let's get to the substance of why I am standing here before you today. I am here today to talk about net neutrality. Net neutrality is a simple concept. It is the idea that all content and applications on the Internet should be treated the same, regardless of who owns the content or the Web site. This is not a radical idea. It certainly is not a new one. We may not realize it, but net neutrality is the foundation and core of how the Internet operates every day and how it has always operated.

When scientists and engineers were creating the basic architecture of the Internet, they decided they needed to establish some basic rules of the road for Internet traffic. One of the fundamental design principles of the Internet was that all data should be treated equally, regardless of what was being sent or who was sending it. That is net neutrality. It is the same principle we rely on every day when we use the Internet, and it is the same principle our phone companies must adhere to when they connect our phone calls.

They did not discriminate based on what we say or whom we call, and the founders of the Internet thought the same should be true about data traveling across networks. Everything and everyone should be treated the same.

This principle of nondiscrimination is baked into the DNA of the Internet. This is not radical or new. This is about having a platform that is free and open to all, regardless of whether one is a big corporation or a single individual and regardless of whether one pays a lot of money to speed up how fast their content gets to their customers. Net neutrality is what we all experience today when we log on to our computers, and it is what we have always experienced since the very beginning of the Internet.

I think it is important to focus on that point for a minute because our opponents are telling us something quite different--and they are wrong. Net neutrality is not about a government takeover of the Internet, and it is not about changing anything. Net neutrality and the rules the FCC passed are about keeping the Internet the way it is today and the way it has always been.

We take for granted that we can access Google's search engine as easily as we can access Yahoo or Bing or that Netflix videos download as easily as the videos our friends uploaded onto YouTube last night. We expect that e-mails arrive at their destinations at the same speed regardless of who is sending them, and we take for granted that the Web site for our local pizzeria loads as fast as the Web site for Dominos or Pizza Hut. That is one of the reasons I care so very much about this issue.

This is not just about freedom of speech, it is also about protecting small businesses and entrepreneurs of all sizes. In my mind, net neutrality is and always has been about protecting the next Bill Gates and the next Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook and Microsoft do not need our help today, but the 20-year-old whiz kid working in his parents' garage to develop the app or software or Web site to revolutionize our lives does need net neutrality, and so does the small bookstore or local hardware store that wants their Web site to load just as fast as Amazon or Home Depot.

I have been on the floor of the Senate talking about the beginnings of YouTube because it is such a powerful example of why we need to protect net neutrality. When YouTube started, it was headquartered in a tiny space over a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, CA. At the time, Google had a competing product, Google Video, that was widely seen as inferior.

If Google had been able to pay AT&T or Verizon or Time Warner large amounts of money to block YouTube or to make Google Video's Web site faster than YouTube's site, guess what would have happened. YouTube would have failed. But, instead, thanks to net neutrality, YouTube became the gold standard for video on the Internet. YouTube was able to sell its business to Google for $1.6 billion just 2 years after its start. I love that story because it is a testament to the power of the Internet to turn people with great ideas into overnight successes, and it happened because we had net neutrality.

The story of the Internet is a story about the triumph of the little guy over the big, slow-moving corporation. The past 20 years are littered with tales of entrepreneurs starting with next to nothing and revolutionizing the world as we know it. From YouTube's humble beginnings over a pizzeria to Facebook's infamous start in a dorm room in Cambridge, the Web-based products we use every day are a great result of a great idea and the drive to make that great idea a reality.

Here is what we will not hear from our opponents: Facebook and YouTube and countless other Web-based products might not have existed today if it were not for net neutrality. Without net neutrality, Myspace or Friendster--remember them--could have partnered with Comcast to gain priority access or to block Facebook altogether. Blockbuster could have paid AT&T to slow down or completely block streaming of Netflix videos. Barnes & Noble could have paid Verizon to block access to amazon.com. Imagine a world where the corporation with the biggest checkbook can control what we see and how fast we access content on the Internet.

Fortunately, that is not the world we live in today and thanks to the FCC that is not the world we are headed for. The FCC's rules will ensure that no matter how much money or power they have, a young kid working in her parents' basement in Duluth can outinnovate the biggest corporation simply because she has the best idea. This is exactly why top Silicon Valley venture capital and angel investment companies support these rules. These companies are the ones funding the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Sergey Brin so he can get his product off the ground. They are the ones funneling millions and millions of dollars to entrepreneurs, which is why I think we should listen to them. The CEOs of eBay, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube have joined in a letter supporting the FCC's rules. They say: ``Common sense baseline rules are critical to ensuring that the Internet remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation and global competitiveness.''

I think we should listen to them and companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, IBM, and Qualcomm. These companies also support the FCC's rules because they recognize they could not have grown to be the tremendously successful companies they are today without a free and open Internet, and that is what we are asking for. That is all we are asking for.

When our opponents get up and tell us these rules will stifle innovation and halt growth, I want everyone to think about what they are saying. I want us to ask ourselves: Why would so many of the leading technology companies over the last two decades support what the FCC is doing if they think it will hurt innovation? It doesn't make any sense because it isn't true. Net neutrality and the FCC rules will protect the innovators and entrepreneurs who have made the Internet what is it today and what it will be tomorrow.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to the experts from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, and Raymond James. These companies have all stated they do not believe the FCC's current rules will hurt investment. Citibank said the FCC's rules were ``balanced,'' and Goldman Sachs said they were ``a light touch'' and created ``a framework with a lot of wiggle room.''

What is even more telling is that investment in networks that support wired and wireless Internet has jumped since the announcement of the FCC's rules. In fact, investment is more than 10 percent higher in the first half of 2011 than in the same period last year. Venture capital firms poured $2.3 billion into Internet-specific companies in the second quarter of 2011. I think these numbers speak for themselves. They tell a story of surging investor confidence following the FCC's vote on these rules and not the doomsday portrayal we will hear from our opponents.

Protecting innovation in this country is particularly important given the state of the telecom industry today. I don't need to tell you that telecom corporations have grown larger and fewer. We know, in part, because we have seen our cable, Internet, and telephone bills rising and rising. What else have we seen? Customer service that has gone straight out the window. When we are angry we wasted another day waiting for a Comcast repairman to come and install a cable Internet line in our house or we have been put on hold by Verizon for the fifth time in a single call and we finally decide to switch companies, we may realize we don't have another choice.

Seventy percent of households in this country have one or two choices for basic broadband Internet service. The majority, 60 percent, of the households only have one choice for high-speed broadband.

This is appalling for many reasons. It affects prices, quality of service, and choices for customers, but it is ultimately why we need net neutrality. We need to make sure companies play by the rules. As control of the Internet has shifted into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of corporations, we need to make sure those companies are able to dictate the speed of traffic based on how much a content provider can pay or prioritize their own content over other companies' content.

Of course, as I said before, there is nothing wrong with maximizing shareholder profit since that is what corporations are obligated to do. Minnesota is home to many great corporations, including 3M, General Mills, and Medtronic. These companies create thousands of jobs and produce fantastic products. Other corporations should not be able to prevent others from competing. Competition is what net neutrality is all about. It is about ensuring that the next breakthrough product has the opportunity to reach consumers through a free and open and equal Internet.

In addition to protecting innovation and small businesses in this country, net neutrality is also about speech. The Internet is not just where we go to shop for local products and services; the Internet is where we go to find political campaign information and read local news stories. The Internet is what helped fuel the Arab Spring, in large part because it has become the soapbox of the 21st century. Organizers and advocates are no longer stapling posters to bulletin boards to get their message out there. They are now posting their message on Twitter and Facebook. The

Internet is not just responsible for an upheaval in how campaigns and advocacy occur; it is also responsible for an upheaval in the print media world because the Internet is also the printing press and library of the 21st century.

This is why it is so important we make sure the corporations providing Internet service play by the rules and are not able to profit by speeding up or slowing down our access to certain news Web sites or other places we go to access information. We would not want the Libyan Government to shut down access to Facebook in the middle of protests in that country for the same reasons we do not want a corporation controlling what information and Web sites we are able to access in order to benefit their bottom line.

You know I have been a proponent of net neutrality for a long time. You have heard me over and over on how net neutrality is about keeping the Internet the way it is. But the truth is, the FCC rules, while a step in the right direction, are very conservative. I wish the FCC had done more, but the FCC wanted to reach a consensus, and they made a concerted effort to address many concerns of telecommunication companies, large and small, when they drafted these rules. For my opponents to now claim the FCC ignored public opinion or failed to consider the impact these rules would have on businesses is not true.

First, I think we could all stand a bit of history on the bipartisan nature of this rule. Net neutrality is something that two Republican chairmen of the FCC, Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, championed in 2004 and 2005. Chairman Powell first articulated a set of net neutrality principles and Chairman Martin, 1 year later, achieved unanimous Commission endorsement of the FCC's open Internet policy statement.

In 2006, 11 House Republicans voted in favor of net neutrality on the floor. The Gun Owners of America, the Christian Coalition, and the Catholic Bishops joined with the ACLU, moveon.org and leading civil rights groups to advocate for the same principles for openness and freedom on the Internet.

This debate started 7 years ago, and only after reviewing more than 100,000 public comments and holding 6 public workshops did the Commission finally issue a rule. To claim this was premature, rushed or not carefully considered is just plain wrong. I also think it is completely inaccurate for my opponents to claim the Commission never analyzed the costs and benefits to this rule.

In fact, there is an entire section of the rule entitled ``The Benefits of Protecting the Internet's Openness Exceed the Costs.'' I urge my colleagues to read this section of the Commission's order. It covers four pages. It contains over 25 lengthy, detailed, analytical footnotes. It is clear the Commission considered the costs and benefits of acting, and they concluded that ``there is no evidence that prior open Internet obligations have discouraged investment,'' and that ``open Internet rules will increase incentives to invest in broadband infrastructure.''

I recognize that a couple companies are challenging the FCC's rules in court, and they have every right to do so. But this resolution of disapproval amounts to little more than political gamesmanship from fringe organizations. I think it is important to know that not a single large telecommunication company supports this resolution of disapproval. They are not wasting their time with an arcane process, and we should not either. That is not to say Congress cannot and should not have a discussion about the merits of net neutrality. We can and we should.

Frankly, I have been disappointed by the quantity of misinformation that has been such a large portion of this debate in the past.

The rhetoric I heard during the House debate last April was disappointing. It is not the type of debate Americans deserve. I encourage a frank and in-depth discussion on net neutrality. I hope one day soon we will consider making a statutory change to the FCC's authority that will clarify that we want the FCC to make sure the Internet stays open and free. That will put the issue to rest for good. It is, frankly, the process we should be relying on. By forcing an up- or-down vote through the Congressional Review Act, we are short- circuiting the normal legislative process and ignoring the FCC's tremendous work on this issue.

This resolution of disapproval is a procedural stunt that wastes limited time which should be used to address the real problems Americans face every day. At the end of the day, the problems of Americans are why we are here. I love hearing from Minnesotans, and I got a great e-mail the other day. The letter was from a group of five self-proclaimed ``highly-credentialed computer geeks,'' including a professor, a startup founder, an ex ``Google-er'' and a ``non-ex- IBMer.'' In their e-mail they wrote:

The free market will drive innovation in the Internet, but

careful regulation is needed to preserve the freedom of the

markets from coalitions of companies that will seek to reduce

competition.

They noted:

History promises that the leading companies will work

together to create a monopoly that they can control so they

can make more money and . . . disrupt innovation.

I am glad they and thousands of Minnesotans have taken the time to write and call to tell me how much preserving net neutrality means to them. These highly credentialed computer geeks are right: The free market will drive Internet innovation as long as that market is truly free and open--free from corporate control and open to all content providers equally.

These constituents and millions of Americans don't want Congress engaged in political sparring matches designed to appease a few vocal critics. Americans, entrepreneurs, and small businesses want a world where the future Twitters, eBays, and Amazons of the world can grow and thrive, without interference from big mega conglomerates.

If passed, this resolution will hurt consumers, stifle innovation, and create uncertainty in one of America's most innovative and productive sectors. We are at a pivotal moment, and I hope my colleagues will recognize this and join me in voting down this resolution of disapproval.

I thank the Senator from Texas for allowing me to speak during this time, and I thank the Presiding Officer for holding the chair while I have been speaking.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to oppose the Senate Joint Resolution 6, which was brought under the Congressional Review Act--about which I wish to talk--to disapprove the FCC's open Internet rules, such as they are.

Americans want the Internet to be free and open to them. They want to go where they want to go, see what they want to see, do what they want to do on the Internet. They don't want to have somebody blocking them or to have gatekeepers. They want it to be a nice, open forum for them. They care about the Internet. Everyone uses it. They want to be able to develop new businesses, and they want to read and watch video. They want to reach out to friends and family and community. And they want to do it online. They want to do all of these things on the Internet-- without having to ask permission from their broadband provider. The FCC has promulgated balanced rules that let Americans do all of these things, and keep the Internet open and keep the Internet free.

Let us be clear from the outset. No matter how S.J. Res. 6 is dressed up in language that suggests it will promote openness and freedom, it will not do that. The resolution is misguided. It will add uncertainty, in fact, into the economy, and it will hinder small businesses dependent upon fair broadband access, where otherwise they might be put in a slower lane. They want to be in a fast lane. They want to be able to compete with other parts of the country. This resolution will, in fact, undermine innovation. It will hamper investment in digital commerce. It will imperil the openness and freedom that has been the hallmark of the Internet from the very start.

The FCC's rules were the product of very hard work, consensus, and compromise. The agency had extensive input from stakeholders from all quarters. They opened up and said send in your comments. In fact, they had written input from more than 100,000 commenters. About 90 percent of those filing supported the adoption of open Internet rules. On top of this, the rules are based on longstanding and widely accepted open Internet principles, which were first articulated during the second Bush administration.

These rules do three basic things. First, they impose a transparency obligation on providers of broadband Internet service. This means that all broadband providers are required to publicly disclose to consumers accurate information regarding the network management practices.

Second, the rules prohibit fixed broadband providers from blocking lawful content, application, services, and devices. This means consumers and innovators will continue to have the right to send and receive lawful Internet traffic, with mobile broadband service providers subjected to a more limited set of prohibitions. I will speak about that in a moment.

Third, the rules aim to ensure that the Internet remains a level playing field by prohibiting fixed broadband providers from unreasonably discriminating in transmitting lawful network traffic-- which they have done.

Finally, the rules are meant to apply with the complementary principle of reasonable network management, which provides broadband providers the flexibility to address congestion or traffic that is harmful to the network. These are principles that I believe everyone can support. I see nothing wrong with them. The word ``reasonable'' somehow doesn't scare me. Maybe it should, but it doesn't.

I ask my colleagues, what is wrong with transparency? Why would we want to promote Internet blocking or discrimination? Why would we want to have some people on the fast lane and some on the slow lane, depending on whether you paid your Internet provider enough money? What is unreasonable about reasonable network management?

I believe that the FCC's effort, along with ongoing oversight and enforcement, will protect consumers, and I believe it will provide companies with the certainty they need to make investments in our growing digital economy.

While many champions of the open Internet would have preferred a stricter decision--and I am one of them; I myself have real reservations about treating wireless broadband differently from wired broadband--I think the FCC's decision was nevertheless a meaningful step forward. In a moment, I will talk about other people who feel the same.

Supporters of the joint resolution fail to acknowledge that the FCC's open Internet rules have received overwhelming support from broadband Internet service providers, consumers, and public groups, labor unions, as well as high-tech companies.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stated earlier this year that while he wanted ``no regulation,'' the FCC's open Internet order ``ended at a place where we have a line of sight and we know and can commit ourselves to investments.''

Time-Warner Cable said at the time of the order's release that the rules adopted ``appear to reflect a workable balance between protecting consumers' interests and preserving incentives for investment and innovation by broadband Internet service providers.''

Numerous analysts from major investment banks have found that the open Internet order removes what they call regulatory overhang and allows telecom and cable companies to focus on investment.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Skype, and other leaders in innovation all urged the FCC to adopt ``commonsense baseline rules . . . critical to ensuring that the Internet remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation, and global competitiveness.''

More than 150 organizations wrote Congress to oppose this joint resolution. I hate reading lists, but I am going to do it anyway: the Communications Workers of America, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Library Association, the American Association of Independent Music, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Organization for Women, and Technet. There are a lot of folks at Technet who have a lot at stake. I have their letters here.

I ask unanimous consent that these letters be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, to be sure, there are those who disagree with the FCC's open Internet rules, and there is an avenue for these complaints. It is called the judicial system. Some are using it. Two companies have filed lawsuit claiming that the FCC went too far. Several public interest groups have filed lawsuits claiming that the FCC did not go far enough. It is their legal right to go to the courts, and when they choose to do that, they can do so.

So let's think for a minute what a world would look like without a free and open Internet.

In a world without a free and open Internet, consumers and entrepreneurs would have no transparency as to how their broadband providers would manage their network--no ability to make informed decisions about their broadband providers.

In a world without a free and open Internet, there would be nothing to prevent their broadband providers from steering them only their to preferred Web sites and services, therefore limiting their choices as consumers.

For rural Americans, broadband Internet access has the power to erase distances and allows them to have the same access to shopping, educational matters, and employment opportunities as those living in urban areas. That is a time-honored principle around here--but not if the Web site they seek to access is blocked by their broadband providers. Consumers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses need the certainty they can access lawful Web sites of their choice when they want, period.

In a world without a free and open Internet, there would be nothing to stop broadband providers from blocking access to Web sites that offer products that compete with those of its affiliates. That happens, Mr. President.

In a world without a free and open Internet, companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their Web sites open more quickly than their competitors.

In a world without a free and open Internet, companies could pay Internet providers to make certain their online sales are processed more quickly than their competitors with lower prices.

Well, that is not the American way. This is particularly disturbing in tough times like these.

In a world without a free and open Internet, there would be nothing to prevent Internet service providers from charging users a premium in order to guarantee operation in the ``fast lane.'' If someone is trying to start a small business, struggling to make ends meet and cannot afford to pay the toll, they run the risk of being left in the ``slow lane''--that is not good--with inferior Internet service--that is not right--unable to compete with larger companies. That is very wrong.

What if an innovator or a start-up company has the next big idea? With broadband, the next big idea does not have to come from a suburban garage or from Silicon Valley, it can come from rural America or from anywhere. A free and open Internet is all that is required to give that big idea a global reach.

In a world without a free and open Internet, the ability of the next revolutionary idea to reach others--to make it to the greater marketplace--would be entirely dependent on a handful of entrenched broadband gatekeepers and toll collectors. True.

I am not totally opposed to the Congressional Review Act, but I have to say it is an extraordinarily blunt instrument. It means all of the rules adopted by the FCC must be overturned at once. This would even mean tossing out commonsense provisions about transparency. Do our opponents know this? It would deny the agency the power to protect consumers. Do our opponents know this? What is the sense in all of that? I don't get it.

There is another part: If they just took these rules out--if S. Res. 6 were to pass--they couldn't come back later and just have the FCC put them in. We would have to go through a whole congressional legislative process to reinsert them into the Public Law, which means many of them would never end up there.

I also want to address the argument of supporters of the joint resolution that the FCC's open rules will somehow stifle innovation in the Internet economy. That is just so wrong I don't know what to say.

Over the past 15 years, the open Internet has been the greatest engine for the U.S. economy. It leaves everything in its dust. It has created more than 3 million jobs, as the Senator from Texas indicated. The open Internet rules will help sustain this growth. People want to know what the rules of the road are. They want to know what the world is bringing to them. If they decide they do not like what is coming, they are going to tell you, and they are not going to invest. Very simple.

According to Hamilton Consultants, the open Internet ecosystem has led to the creation of 1.8 million jobs related to applications in e- commerce, as well as 1.2 million jobs related to infrastructure. Moreover, investment and innovation have continued to increase since the adoption of the FCC's open Internet rules--not decrease, as the supporters of this resolution will tell us.

The facts show that investment in broadband networks increased in the first half of 2011. In fact, investment in networks that support broadband was more than 10 percent higher in the first half of 2011 than in the first half of 2010. More of that investment in Internet companies surged in 2011, and this is after they had sort of adjusted or taken into account what they saw coming in the way of the rules. There was $2.3 billion worth of investment going into 275 companies in the second quarter, and all of them were this Internet type. That is the most investment in Internet companies in a decade.

Plus, shortly after the framework was adopted, America's leading wireless providers announced they were accelerating their deployment of their advanced fourth generation, or 4G networks. It seems the open Internet rules are giving broadband providers and entrepreneurs and investors the certainty they need to invest and to create jobs.

Certainty is the key. They are not going to invest in what they do not know. We see that in so many other areas. They do not know what is going to happen, so they do not invest. People have all this cash, but they do not have certainty. Here they have certainty, they understand that certainty, they understand what is coming, they like it, and they are investing like never before.

The FCC's open Internet rules also protect small businesses. An estimated 20,000 small businesses operate on the Internet. More than 600,000 Americans have part- or full-time businesses on eBay alone. I was not aware of that. The FCC's open Internet rules mean small entrepreneurs will not have to seek permission from broadband providers to reach new markets and consumers with innovative products and services.

This is a very important point. It means small businesses can be located anywhere in this country, including rural America, and through open broadband have the opportunity for their ideas and products and services to have a global reach. That is the point of all of this.

As we all know, small businesses were responsible for nearly 65 percent of new jobs over the past 15 years. Far from preventing investment, the FCC's open Internet rules will foster small businesses because they trust it. They see it, they see what Moody's is saying about it, they see what the Wall Street investment bankers are saying about it, they see it is encouraging investment, and they like and trust that. So they take risks they might not otherwise take because they trust.

It is not the faceless Federal bureaucrat. It is something that is down on paper and they understand it. They have probably seen it and probably commented on it. Maybe some of them didn't like it as much as they should have; maybe some thought it should have been stronger or some thought it should have been weaker, but such is life in America. So, anyway, I think what they conclude is that what is going on is supporting what they are doing.

Finally, I want to note when it comes to education and privacy and intellectual property, global Internet governance, or network security, the government has long provided--and necessarily so--reasonable rules of the road to make possible consumer protection, fair trade, and open markets. The FCC's open Internet rules are no different. They take, as has been quoted by many, a light-touch approach--I like that phrase-- and keep the playing field fair. They keep the Internet open and free for consumers, for businesses, and for everyone in this country who wants access to broadband Internet.

So that is why I support the FCC open Internet rules, and I encourage my colleagues to vote against the joint resolution.

Mr. President, I would like to respond to some things, but I understand we only have 42 minutes remaining.

And both Senator Cantwell and Senator Mark Udall want to speak. I don't want to take their time, so at this point I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, how much time remains on this side?

I would yield it to the distinguished Senator from Washington.

Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator for her remarks and actually fully agree with them in that mobile is kind of left alone, and it should not be because it is everything that is happening in the future. But it is a step, and it was a wonderful speech.

It occurs to me that I do not think we have anybody left to speak on this side. I am not sure about Senator Hutchison, but it may be a good time to yield back our time.

Mr. President, before I yield all time back on our side, I have listened to the entirety of this debate. It seems to me it has been fairly clear that on one side the government regulates and messes things up, and on the other side things are going swimmingly.

I can't help but pay attention to all those people out at TechNet, the AT&T people, Moody's, Hamilton's, and all these people who take a very dour view of government intervention and a very sensitive view as to whether that intervention is in any way going to stop investment. The answer is usually it does. That is why I feel very happy that this was referred to by a number of major players in this field as a very ``light touch'' of regulation, which gave them a sense of where they were going to be, how far down they could look toward their future and therefore allow them to invest the money they wanted to invest.

That is not to say they would not have done it anyway. But there is nothing like encouraging capital investment in something as important as the Internet. I think the net neutrality legislation does that very well. I hope when we vote on it tomorrow, it will not pass.

Having said that, I yield back all time.