A resolution to provide for expedited Senate consideration of certain nominations subject to advice and consent.

Madam President, I thank the majority leader and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, for the way they worked on this legislation. Not just on this bill, but when they were the respective whips of their parties several years ago, each of them working on trying to help improve the Senate's ability to do its oversight by doing a better job with our advice-and-consent responsibility. That is one of our better known responsibilities. It is a constitutional responsibility. It is in Article II, Section 2. But as a part of that advice-and-consent responsibility, the Senate has the opportunity to define which other positions the President may appoint. That is what this is about.

Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman have also worked for many years, and they will be here in a few minutes to open the debate. Senator Schumer and I will come to the floor about at 2:40 and make our statements on behalf of the Rules Committee.

I thank the majority leader and Republican leader for doing this because this is not the most glamorous piece of legislation. What I am about to say is not so glamorous either. But this bill has come to the floor by unanimous consent. That means there were 100 Members of this body who could have objected, and none have.

I thank the Senators--many of whom have very different views on this bill--for agreeing to this agreement by which we are proceeding. We are not proceeding under a cloture vote; we are proceeding the way the Senate really ought to work day-in and day-out. Members have the opportunity to offer relevant amendments. I am sure many will. I thank the Republican leader and the majority leader for their forbearance in that way. We have to have an element of trust for each other.

I am going to do my best to make sure the relevant amendments that come before us, Democratic or Republican, are voted on.

I thank all those involved. I hope Senators will be preparing their relevant amendments if they are not already filed and were not already enumerated in the agreement.

I will refrain from making my remarks until my colleague, Senator Schumer, the chairman of the Rules Committee, comes to the floor at 2:40. We will await the arrival of Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman, who are the chairman and ranking member of the committee that reported the bill to the Senate.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senators from Maine and Connecticut not just for their comments today but for their work for nearly a decade on this issue. This is hard, slogging work in the Senate. It is not easy to do. As I mentioned earlier, it is not one bit glamorous, but it helps make the Senate a more effective institution. If we are more effective, then we can deal better with our debt, then we can deal better with Libya, then we can deal better with creating jobs, then we can earn more respect from the people who elect us. So I thank them for their leadership.

I thank Senator McConnell and Senator Reid for creating the environment in which this can happen.

I thank all my colleagues, many of whom did not exercise all their rights, and allowed the bill to come to the floor in this agreement by unanimous consent. We have not had this privilege very often in the Senate. It is a good way for the Senate to work. It is the right way for the Senate to work. What it means is, over the next day or two, however long it takes, Senators may bring their relevant amendments to the floor and they may call them up without asking unanimous consent to set aside a pending amendment.

Then we will have a debate, and then we will vote on them. When we are through voting, we will vote on the bill. I would encourage my colleagues to prepare to bring their amendments to the floor. I am going to defer my remarks until this afternoon, when Senator Schumer, the chairman of the Rules Committee, will come to the floor at 2:40. I will speak following him. We will talk about the resolution, which is the other half of the bill.

But this is legislation about making Senate oversight, as Senator Lieberman said, more effective, not less effective. It is about putting a stop to the trivializing of our constitutional duty for advice and consent. It is about ending the phenomenon of innocent until nominated, which is what happens to distinguished citizens of this country who are asked to serve in the Federal Government and, to their great horror, discover they are heading through a maze of conflicting forms and questionnaires, until finally they are dragged before a tribunal in the Senate and caught in an inadvertent error and made out to be a criminal, when they thought they were an upstanding citizen, having served in their hometowns for a long time.

We should stop that business, and every administration in recent years has asked us to do it. So this is the right thing to do. It is a modest step but an important step. It is a signal that we can do our business well, that we can treat American citizens with respect, that we can focus our attention where it needs to be focused and not focus our attention where it is not.

Senator Collins mentioned there are several thousand public health officers and others who are now confirmed by the Senate. That is the rough equivalent of confirming forest rangers or staff members of the Senate or agricultural extension officers. I mean, they are all valuable positions, but did our Founders expect that we would be sending the FBI to ask whether they lived beyond their means before they took their job and then conduct diligent inquiries there and before some committee of the Senate?

Well, of course not. So we are going to end up with about 1,200 nominations from the President, to whom we need to devote advice and consent. One indication of why it is so necessary to do this is, nobody can tell us how many Presidential appointments there are that need advice and consent. The Congressional Research Service at first said 1,200, and then when our staffs began looking at it, it is more like 1,400.

In the last Congress, how many of these important advice-and-consent positions actually deserved a rollcall vote? Three percent. So we only had time to give a rollcall vote to 3 percent of the men and women whom we have decided need the extraordinary constitutional process of advice and consent. We need to elevate the advice-and-consent process back to where it ought to be, do our jobs correctly, treat people who are nominated by the President with dignity and hope the President can staff his government appropriately so we do not have to. As Senator Collins said, it has been 6 months while we wait to get the President's defense team in place.

That is partly the President's own fault, but it is partly our fault, and we need to work together. We have a process in this bill where we will work together to try to speed that up. So I am glad I had the opportunity to hear Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins. This is not the first time they have tried to do this. But they will succeed in doing this because they have broad bipartisan support and an era of cooperation within the Senate.

We will have some debate. We still have some disagreements about which positions should be in and which positions should be out. That is why we have relevant amendments. That is why we bring them up. That is why we vote on them. That is why we will eventually come to a final result on the bill.

I thank them for their leadership, for their eloquence, and for their public spiritedness.

Mr. President, I congratulate Senator Schumer for his diligent work on this effort to help the Senate do a better job with its responsibilities of advice and consent.

As the chairman of the Rules Committee, he and I have been working together at the direction of Senator Reid and Senator McConnell to come up with a consensus about how to do this. Our colleagues, all 100, have agreed that we can move on to the bill and debate any relevant amendment, which has not happened very often around here, and is exactly the way the Senate ought to work.

So I thank Senator Schumer for taking on this difficult task. It is not a glamorous task, but it is one that hopefully will make the Senate more effective. If we are more effective, we can do a better job of dealing with the debt, of helping to make it easier and cheaper to create private sector jobs, of

coming up with an energy policy that helps us find more American energy and use less, and regain respect from the American people who have given us the privilege of serving here.

I start this discussion with our Constitution, which, as the late Senator Byrd used to suggest, we should all carry around with us. Perhaps the most celebrated constitutional duty of the United States Senate is our responsibility to provide advice and consent. It is in article II, section 2, of the Constitution. It talks about the President there, but it says: ``He shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate'' and among other things--to appoint a number of people. But it also says:

. . . the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such

inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President

alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

So this discussion is about that part of our constitutional responsibility, deciding what inferior officers should be vested--the appointment of which should be vested in the President alone or in heads of departments. I will talk more about that in a moment. But there are really three major goals of this legislation.

One is to stop the trivializing of the constitutional duty of advice and consent. We are providing our advice and consent on so many Presidential nominations that the President is not able to spend as much time as he should on getting them to us rapidly.

It is slowing down the organization of government. We, in turn, are not able to spend as much time as we should reviewing the qualifications of the important officers of the government that the President needs to appoint, and we are not serving ourselves well. We are trivializing the constitutional duty of advice and consent.

The second thing we are doing--and in this, the Executive, the President and the Congress, are equally to blame--is creating an environment that I would describe as being ``innocent until nominated'' in which we take some self-respecting U.S. citizen, and the President invites them to come take a position in the Federal Government of honor and dignity, and suddenly they find themselves immersed in a series of duplicative interrogations from all directions in which they must fill out forms that define words such as ``income'' in different ways, all of which is designed to lead them before a committee, not to really assess their qualifications but to see if they can be trapped and turned into an apparent criminal. In other words, they are innocent until nominated.

Every former administration's officials in recent memory have come to us and said we need to work together. No. 1, we need to stop the trivializing of the Senate's advice and consent responsibility; No. 2, we need to do something about this environment of innocent until nominated.

Finally, this legislation--which, as I said, has been moved to the floor for debate with the consent of all 100 Members of the Senate--is really the third step in the discussion that began in January about what steps we can take to make the Senate a more effective place. One step was to get rid of secret holds. Another step was to limit the reading of the minutes as a dilatory tactic.

This is the third step, appointed by the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell. They asked Senator Schumer and I to form a working group. We have come forward with a bill and a resolution, which we will debate today and tomorrow--until we finish--and it will streamline executive nominations and hopefully give us a chance to do more oversight on the positions that need the oversight and not waste our time with positions that don't. At the same time, it will make it easier for the next President to staff his or her government promptly so that they can deal with questions of war and the economy as they come up and not have to wait 6 months or 9 months after they have taken office to deal with those questions. And it will make it more inviting for good citizens of this country to accept a President's invitation to come serve in the Federal Government.

As I mentioned, this came about earlier this year when we were about to have a showdown over the filibuster. The Senator from Oregon was part of that debate. I hope he feels some credit for moving this discussion to where it is today. This is not all that the Senator from Oregon or the Senator from New Mexico or others want, but I think what we quickly learn in the Senate is that a few small steps in the right direction is one good way to get where you want to go. This will be a third step.

Basically, this is what we will be doing. We are affecting about 451 Presidential appointments. This represents about one-third of all Senate-confirmed positions. That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. Let me qualify it in this way. Here is what has happened over the last several years.

In 1960, President Kennedy had to fill 286 positions in the ranks of Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, Assistant Secretary, and Administrator.

By the time President Clinton came into office, there were 914 positions with those titles. That is according to the Volcker Commission Report, which recommended the kinds of things we are considering today.

Since then, CRS has counted more than 1,200 Presidential appointments requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, and our staffs on the Rules Committee and the Homeland Security Committee found more than 1,400. So we are in the embarrassing position of having to answer the question--if somebody were to say: Here is this enormously important position of the Senate, this constitutional duty to provide advice and consent, and how many Presidential appointments are subject to advice and consent? The answer would be that we don't know. CRS says it is 1,200. Our staffs say it is 1,410.

Another indication that we are not giving them sufficient attention-- at least to the ones we should--is the number of rollcall votes on Presidential appointments requiring advice and consent. You would think that if a Presidential appointment were important enough to require a full FBI check, which is very expensive, time consuming, and takes several months; and then a nomination by the President and all of the vetting that goes with that; and then the work of the White House personnel office and all the time spent with that; and then it comes to the Senate and goes to our committees, and our committees have their own questionnaire and their own investigator and their own schedule for hearings and their own schedule for voting, and then they report it to the floor--you would think if it were important enough to go through all of that in order to get our advice and consent, we would take time to vote on it, would you not? Well, in the last Congress, this Senate voted on 3 percent of the nominations that require advice and consent. That is one indication that we are doing too many--we are trivializing the duty. So not only do we not know how many there are--we think, now that our staffs have worked through this, there are about 1,410--97 percent of them are not important enough to vote on; we just pass them by unanimous consent.

As Senator Enzi said earlier today in another setting, and I don't think he minds my bringing this up, sometimes we approve these nominations in blocks--280 at a time--without knowing anything about them. So we are pretending we are giving advice and consent when we are not.

An example of that would be the positions of the several thousand members of the Public Health Service Officer Corps and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Officer Corps. They are all subject to advice and consent. They come through in the box loads. They are all very valuable public servants, I am sure, but to subject the Public Health Service Officer Corps and the National Oceanic Administration Officer Corps to a full Senate advice and consent would be the approximate equivalent of requiring advice and consent of agricultural extension officers or forest rangers or members of the Senate staff. They all have important jobs, but they are not supposed to rise to the level of advice and consent, which is why the U.S. Constitution specifically said that we should select ``inferior officers,'' in its words, whom the President himself--the President alone--or heads of departments may appoint.

Now, what is an ``inferior officer''? Well, words have meaning, and Justice

Scalia gave a definition to the words ``inferior officer'' in the case of Edmund v. United States in 1997. Justice Scalia said:

We think it is evident that inferior officers are officers

whose work is directed and supervised at some level by others

who were appointed by the Presidential nomination with the

advice and consent of the Senate.

That makes pretty good sense. If you are working for someone who is appointed by the President and subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, then you are accountable to the Senate and the people of the United States through your superior. That makes you an inferior officer. You may be important, but you are subordinate to someone else whose appointment was subject to advice and consent.

Here is what we have done in the legislation.

First, we have a bill from the Homeland Security Committee, and then we have a resolution that comes from our Rules Committee. Of the 451 positions that are affected, in addition to the thousands of members of the officer corps I mentioned, 248 are part-time board and commission positions that could be expedited and would keep their advice and consent rolls and remain Senate-confirmed. I will talk more about that in a minute. Then 118 other part-time board and commission positions will no longer require Senate confirmation. And then 85 positions that are full-time would not require advice and consent for confirmation.

After all is said and done, when you include the fact that 248 positions we affected are merely expedited and still subject to advice and consent if a single U.S. Senator says it is necessary--they are still subject to it under any event and to the full investigation if a single Senator says it is necessary--we will still have more than 1,200 Senate-confirmed executive branch nominations. So, as Senator Collins said on the floor today, after this is done, if our bill and resolution are passed, more than 90 percent of the full-time positions that now are subject to advice and consent will still be subject to it, as will more than 85 percent of the part-time positions.

Why is it important that we have so many positions that are subject to advice and consent? One could argue, why don't you narrow it simply to the Cabinet members or the Cabinet members and their deputies? Why slow the President down in his work by requiring so many to come over, because even after we are through this, after everything Senators Schumer, Collins, Lieberman, and I recommended to the Senate was adopted, the Senate will have 1,200 persons it could put through this gauntlet of advice and consent and make its point.

Many Senators choose to use these confirmation proceedings to exercise our prerogative as elected Members of Congress to get information, to assert our views or to influence the direction of government. For example, Senator McConnell has been holding President Obama's trade nominees until President Obama sends his free-trade agreements to Congress. Senator Grassley and Senator Chambliss held up the Solicitor General's nomination because it had been 2 years and their request for documents from the Department of Justice had not been forthcoming. After they held up the Solicitor General's nomination in the advice and consent process, they got their documents.

I suggest that having 1,200 opportunities to hold a Presidential nominee hostage is enough for any Senator to work his or her will in order to make a point and that to go beyond that is to begin to trivialize the whole process.

As I mentioned earlier, our legislation has two parts. In the first part--the part we are debating now, the bill--there are approximately 200 positions that now are subject to Presidential confirmation that would not be subject to Presidential confirmation. These would be 85 full-time positions, including legislative affairs and public affairs positions, chief financial officers, information technology positions, and others. These are all important positions, but let's think of it this way:

I was once a Cabinet member. It took me about 3 months--well, 4 or 5, from December through March--after I was announced and confirmed by the Senate, and then I had the opportunity to ask the President to send to the Senate all of the subordinate officials who required Senate confirmation. That means the President had to vet those people. That means the Senate had to go through its whole process, once information got here, and vet those people. It had to schedule a hearing. It had to report out the name. That had to come to the Senate. That had to be voted on on the floor.

So there I was, sitting--confirmed in March or April, after I had been announced in December as the President's Education Secretary--but it took me until toward the end of the year to get most of the President's team in place in the Department of Education. Who does that serve? Who does that serve well? Wouldn't it be better if I could appoint my own legislative affairs officer who could then come up and deal with Congress from April on instead of having to wait until later?

This is important for citizens to know. If you are in a position subject to advice and consent, you are not to go to the Department until you are confirmed or you will not be confirmed because it would be considered to be an insult to the Senate. So you have Cabinet members, particularly at the beginning of an administration, sitting there almost alone, without any new members of the President's team to help them implement policy.

That affects the voters in a bad way. Let's say all the voters in a country get upset with President Obama and elect a Republican President whose job it is to bring the deficit down. Let us pose a hypothetical. In comes the new Republican President and it takes 2 or 3 months to confirm the Secretaries of the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and then with other key people it might take 6 or 8 months. The people of this country are saying: Wait, I voted in November and here we are coming into the next summer and the government still isn't formed and the deficit is still bad. I am very frustrated with my government.

This legislation is set to deal with that. The bill itself takes about 200 positions and removes advice and consent, with 118 of those being part-time advisory commission members.

The second part of the bill we will be discussing takes 248 nominations and expedites them. These are all part time. This might be the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation or the National Council on the Arts. What it does is create a new procedure in the Senate, where the President's nomination simply comes to the desk--the President has already vetted this person; the person has to answer the questions of the relevant committee in the Senate--and unless some Senator objects, once that is done, the vote can come to the floor within 10 days. Yet, if one Senator objects, all 248 of those nominations can go through the full process. So with those we believe we are, at least, speeding up things.

To summarize, for 451 nominations in this bill, we take about 118 part-time positions and remove them from advice and consent. These include, for example, 15 members of the National Board of Education Sciences, 20 members of the National Museum and Library Services Board, and 7 Commissioners of the Mississippi River Commission.

I am sure the National Museum and Library Services part-time advisory board does good work for us and for this country, but is it necessary for the Senate to spend its time providing advice and consent on these part-time advisory members of the National Museum and Library Services Board when we ought to be reducing the debt, inquiring into the policies of a Cabinet member or working on some other legislation?

Then, in the resolution, 248 part-time positions are expedited. As I mentioned earlier, nearly 3,000 members of the Public Health Service Corps are taken out of the process of advice and consent.

Let me speak for just a moment about the other part of the legislation. I talked about how the bill and the resolution will take 451 of approximately 1,410 Presidential nominees subject to advice and consent and take about half of those and expedite them and take the other half and take away the advice and consent requirement, leaving 1,200 persons whose nominations actually require advice and consent. What happens to those persons? Let me give an example, and it is a personal example I have repeated on the Senate floor before.

In December of 1990, President Bush announced in the White House that he was going to nominate me to be the U.S. Education Secretary. I was excited about that. I was then the President of the University of Tennessee. I sold my house, my wife and I packed up, and we moved our children to schools in Washington. I came up here prepared to serve and help the President be the education President, but I forgot about Senate confirmation. I should have known. I should have known because I used to work in the Senate years ago. But I forgot about the Senate confirmation and all its splendor. So when I got up here, I was, after a while, summoned before the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--on which I now serve--and with my family sitting there, the Senator from Ohio, the late Senator Metzenbaum, said: Well, Governor Alexander, I have heard some very disturbing things about you, but I don't think I will bring them up here.

Well, Senator Kassebaum from Kansas turned around and said: Howard, you did just bring it up so why don't you go ahead and talk about it. I said: Senator, if you have heard any disturbing things, I would like to know about them because I would like to answer the question. But he decided not to do that, and in his wisdom--and it was his right-- Senator Metzenbaum held my nomination up for 3\1/2\ months. I didn't know what to do about that so I went around and finally saw Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and told him the story of what had happened. I said: What is your advice? He said: Keep your mouth shut. You have no cards to play. I said: What do you mean? He said: Let me tell you my story. He said President Ford had nominated him to be on--I think it was the Federal Trade Commission in the 1970s. Warren Rudman was then the attorney general of New Hampshire, a well-respected citizen. The Senator from New Hampshire put a secret hold on Warren Rudman's nomination and so days and weeks went by and no action was taken in the Senate on the attorney general of New Hampshire. He was greatly embarrassed by the whole thing. I said: Well, what did you finally do? He said: Well, I asked the President to withdraw my name. I said: Is that the end of the story? He said: No. I then ran against the so-and-so in the next election and beat him, and that is how I got in the Senate.

Well, not every citizen can run for the Senate and defeat the Senator who they think doesn't treat them fairly in the confirmation process. But there is a lot about the confirmation process that can be fixed and still leave all of us with the right to hold up, to vote against, and to defeat 1,200 different nominations by the President.

Take, for example, what happened in President Obama's first year. According to news accounts, in March of 2009, there were key vacant positions at the Treasury Department--an Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax, Trade and Tariff Policy, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs. The first choice for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury withdrew her name from consideration 4 months after the President's selection in the biggest economic crisis we had had since the Great Depression.

According to one news source, the list of vacancies on the Treasury Department Web site showed:

The Main Treasury building is a lonely place, conjuring up

visions of Geithner signing dollar bills one by one . . .

watering the plants, and answering the phones when he is not

crafting a bank rescue plan.

Of course, there are other career employees available--at least one holdover Assistant Secretary and various Czars in the White House. This kind of delay actually encourages the unhealthy appointment of Czars in the White House because the President can just do that, but even one of the Czars expressed concern about the slow filling up of the Treasury Department.

Of course, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat and voted for President Obama or not, you certainly don't want a President whose Treasury Secretary isn't equipped to deal with the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The President brought some of this difficulty on himself, and our legislation recognizes that--not just this President but previous Presidents and the next President. Part of the President's difficulty in filling jobs--and this is one that has afflicted every President since Watergate--is the maze of investigations and forms that prospective senior officials must complete and the risk they run of then being trapped and humiliated and disqualified by an unintentional and harmless mistake.

I voted against Secretary Geithner's nomination because I thought it was a bad example for the man in charge of collecting taxes not to have paid them, and I didn't think his excuse for not paying them was plausible. But that doesn't mean I think that every minor tax discrepancy in our Byzantine Tax Code--that reaches 3.7 million words and is badly in need of reform--should disqualify any citizen for public office. I think very few Americans with complex tax forms can make their way through our maze of investigations and come out without a single change in what they did.

Take the case of the former mayor of Dallas, Ron Kirk. He was President Obama's nominee to be the U.S. Trade Representative. Headlines in the newspaper said Kirk paid back taxes. Why? Primarily because he had failed to list his income and then take a charitable deduction on speaking fees he gave away to charity. Let me say that again. He failed to list his income and then take a charitable deduction on speaking fees he gave away to charity.

Common sense suggests Mr. Kirk and his tax adviser did what was appropriate. After all, he didn't keep the money. The IRS apparently has a more convoluted rule for dealing with such things. In any event, the matter is so trivial as to be irrelevant to his suitability to be the Trade Representative.

Tax audits are only the beginning. There is an FBI full field investigation. Should we be having FBI field investigations for part- time advisory board members on the Museum Library Corporation? Instead of investigating terrorists or catching bank robbers, should we be paying FBI agents to go out and ask your neighbors: Does he or she live beyond their means--all this in order to serve on a part-time advisory board for the Federal Government?

Then there is the Federal financial disclosures, the White House questionnaire, and of course the questions from the confirming Senate committee. All these are different, and the definitions they ask for are different. An unsuspecting nominee, as I mentioned earlier, might actually fill out a form that says what is your income in the same way each time, but the question might have been different each time. It is easy to make a mistake. Then, when you finally appear before the confirming committee, you are innocent until nominated.

Washington, DC, has become the only place where you should hire a lawyer, an accountant and an ethics officer before you find a house and put your child in school. The motto around here has become ``innocent until nominated.'' Every legal counsel in the White House since President Nixon agrees with what I have just said.

In the name of effective government, this process ought to be changed. There are some limits as to what we can do in the Senate. We have to respect separation of powers. In the end, the President has to conduct his own vetting process and, in the end, the Senate must conduct its own investigations. But we might work together to look at possible ways of reducing burdens and delays in the appointment process, and that is what the executive branch working group provided for in our legislation says. It will be chaired by the Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel, and members would include representatives from the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Government Ethics, the FBI, individuals appointed by the chair who have experience and expertise, individuals from other agencies, and other individuals from previous administrations, and they would report to us in 90 days on a smart form. A smart form would simply be a single form that would make it possible for a nominee to answer duplicative vetting questions one time.

That makes pretty good common sense. Why can't the government do that? It would submit those findings within 90 days to the President for his

consideration and to our relevant Senate committees for our consideration.

In addition, Senator Collins has asked the working group within the next 270 days to take a look at the background investigations. A big part of the delay in forming a government is the President's own background investigations.

We wish to know if somebody used to be a member of al-Qaida or has some other serious problem before they come into a government, but there are gradations of that. Whether you are Secretary of the Treasury or a member of the part-time advisory board might have a little different level of vetting, I would think. But in any event, Senator Collins wants the working group to report back to the President and to us the feasibility, in appropriate circumstances, of using non-FBI personnel to conduct background investigations for Senate-confirmed positions.

These will simply be reports, an effort between the Senate and the Executive to take a look at streamlining the process so that we can staff the government more quickly, so we can stop wasting so much time here in duplicative ways, so we can stop the expense of that wasted time, and so we can treat with respect the men and women any President invites to become a member of the administration.

Since our bill was first drafted, we have made a number of changes in response to suggestions by our colleagues both on the Democrat and Republican sides of the aisle. I suspect that is one reason why all 100 Senators have agreed to allow this bill to come to the floor and to be debated with any relevant amendment, because we are open to that. We have made some changes.

For example, I mentioned the 248 expedited part-time appointments. The concern was that while there is a Democratic President, there is a requirement in the law that a minority of those appointees be Republican members of the part-time advisory board. Well, what if a Democratic President said, I am going to appoint Republican members who I define as Republicans? We Republicans didn't like that very much. The Democrats wouldn't like it very much if they were on the other side of the fence in another administration. So the solution was this expedited process whereby we can send those 248 nominations through the Senate much more quickly; and if a single Senator thinks the President is playing games with minority nominations, he or she can insist that the nominee go through the whole advice and consent process. In fact, for any reason a single Senator can do that.

Another change we have made is to say all relevant amendments are open for debate and for voting. I am hopeful my colleagues will bring some of those to the floor this afternoon and we will begin to debate them, perhaps to vote on them today; if not vote on them today, start voting on them tomorrow.

We have also agreed that Senator DeMint, Senator Vitter, and Senator Coburn can each offer a specific amendment. I know Senator Schumer has been meeting with Democratic Senators, just as I have been meeting with Republican Senators, to see if there are any other changes. We will have the amendments. I may oppose them all, I may support them all, but at least we will be doing what the Senate ought to do, which is to bring them up. If they are good amendments and the majority of us agree or 60 of us agree, then we will change the bill and eventually vote on them.

Senator Collins mentioned earlier the amount of support we have gotten from outside groups who worked on this, and especially from those who once served in the Senate or once served in the White House in positions that had to do with personnel. My work with the White House goes back a long time. I was a young staff aide in the Nixon administration and I was a Cabinet member in the first Bush administration. So I know a lot of the men and women who have been the general counsels to Presidents, who have been the personnel directors who watched the process closely.

I think it was Boyden Gray who was counsel of the first President Bush who gave me the phrase ``innocent until nominated.'' But every single one of those men and women--I don't know of one, without exception, who doesn't think the system is broken, who doesn't think we are trivializing the advice and consent process of the Senate, who doesn't think we are doing a great disservice to our country and to individuals when we allow this ``innocent until nominated'' syndrome to persevere, and they have watched over the last 10 years as very good Senators have tried to change this without success.

Senator Reid and Senator McConnell, when they were whips, tried to do it, and they didn't succeed. Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins tried a few years ago. They didn't succeed. Senator Thompson tried to do it when he was chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and he got a few changes made but not very many. It is only this year in response to our general discussion about how to make the Senate a more effective place, and because of the strong support of Senator Reid and Senator McConnell, and because of the battle scars Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins have, having tried before and their willingness to try again, that we have gotten to this place. I think we will get to where we need to go, but I want to make sure that in this debate we don't succumb to the desire to say, oh, well, my committee wants to have this person go through the process of advice and consent for the prestige of it.

I think it is more important for a new Cabinet member to have an appointee who can serve the President and serve the country and do his or her job, and then let the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary and the Under Secretary be the ones who are accountable to the President. At least that is the recommendation of former Senator Fred Thompson who was chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. That is the recommendation of a task force formed by the Aspen Institute, which included Senator Bill Frist, our former majority leader, Chuck Robb, a Democratic Senator, Clay Johnson, who was George W. Bush's Director of Presidential Personnel, Mack McLarty, who was the White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton. They all said this urgently needs to be done.

Frank Carlucci, the former Secretary of Defense, weighed in with his support. The Bipartisan Policy Center, including former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, a Democrat, Trent Lott, our former whip and majority leader, Pete Domenici, our former Senator, and Dirk Kempthorne, former Governor, Cabinet member, and Senator, all urged us to do this.

Senator Collins asked that all these letters of support be placed in the Record, and so I will not.

I would simply conclude by saying there has been a little information around that somehow this is legislation to reduce oversight. This is legislation to make oversight more effective. If we were to propose using advice and consent for every Senate staff member, for every agricultural extension servicemember, and every forest ranger, that would be less oversight because we wouldn't have time to do anything. That, in effect, is what we are doing now with advice and consent by the bucketload of officer corps members and of part-time advisory commission members whom the President can vet and appoint, and all of whom report to somebody over whom we do have advice and consent control.

I look forward to this discussion and this debate. I am very grateful to my Republican colleagues, some of whom have questions about the bill, who have allowed the bill to come forward in the way the Senate should operate. Senators can bring their relevant amendments to the floor as long as they and the Parliamentarian agree they are relevant. They can call it up, we will debate it, and we will either vote on it then or set a time for a vote in the near future.

I expect there to be several amendments. I would urge Senators to come to the floor, and hope at the end of the day that we complete these modest but important steps toward making the Senate more effective by reducing the trivializing of advice and consent, our constitutional duty, and by reducing the syndrome that Presidential nominees are innocent until nominated.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair.

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

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

Mr. President, we heard an announcement today that the so-called ``Biden talks'' have broken down. It is not something that surprises me terribly. I have always said that I didn't think this was the right approach--to negotiate in secret some of the most important decisions this Nation has to make.

In truth, we have never been in a more severe financial condition than we are today. Many remember the government shutdown in the 1990s and the fact the Nation ended up, out of that difficult contentious time, balancing the budget in 3 years. Well, I serve on the Budget Committee--the Presiding Officer is an able member of the Budget Committee--and we know it is not going to be easy. It is going to be very difficult to get this country on the right financial course. So I think the decision of the House majority leader and Senator Kyl to withdraw from the negotiations over the debt ceiling underscores the inherent problems with this kind of nonpublic meetings, designed to come up with some global, comprehensive settlement of apparently all our financial difficulties. It is just not easy.

I think it underscores additionally a very important fact: that a President cannot lead from behind in dealing with the most pressing crisis our Nation faces--our exploding debt and the increasing damage that the debt is doing to the American economy right now. It is taking too long for a proposal to be presented to the Congress, and it is clear now that optimistic statements about progress have been too generous. It will be unacceptable for the White House talks, or any talks, to produce a controversial agreement at the eleventh hour and to then come before Congress in a panic and say: You have to enact this solution we came up with in secret, or the country will have a serious debt crisis.

That is the path we are heading down, just as we did with the CR--the continuing resolution--that was passed. That is not what the American people want; that is not what they deserve. They want regular order. They want Congress to have the opportunity to debate and vote. If it takes weeks--and it should take weeks for us to work through a challenge as serious as this one--then so be it. It just takes weeks. If it takes hundreds of votes, with people going on record and being criticized back home by one group or another for the vote they cast, so be it. That is what we are paid to do, and we are not guaranteed reelection. That seems basic to me.

Congress and the American people deserve an opportunity to fully review and consider any debt limit deal that is struck behind closed doors.

It has also been reported--in one publication at least--that in order to make the numbers look better, we are going to resort to certain budget gimmicks. In other words, let's say we eliminate a $100 million program. Well, we have been talking about how much that would save over 10 years, whether it would save $100 million over 10 years. That would be $1 billion. One of the gimmicks that was floated around, and was in fact used in the President's debt plan, was to say that we are going to do it over 12 years instead of 10 years as the deficit commission recommended. So we haven't actually cut any more; we have just added a couple of years to the timeframe that we are considering to make it seem like we reached the goal.

We have had gimmicks in which a big military payment to soldiers or a Social Security payment falling near the end of the month is pushed over to the next fiscal year--so it is due on September 30, and they make it payable October 1--and the numbers look better. We don't show the expenditure, but it is still there. The money is still going to be spent. Nothing has been changed except the date when the money is paid. These so gimmicks are unacceptable. Any plan that is presented on this floor, however it comes forward, must be free of gimmicks and accounting tricks. It must be an honest, fact-based budget. Additionally, raising the debt ceiling should not be accomplished by tax hikes. A punishing tax increase would not only threaten the growth we have to have in our economy, but it would also give a free pass to the egregious overspending of Washington. It would bail out the big spending excesses that have been put in place here. This overspending behavior is morally and economically culpable for our current crisis.

Federal Government spending already controls nearly 25 percent of our economy. It amounts to that much--the highest we have ever had. Some of that is because the economy is down. Some of it is because spending is up. But 25 percent of the economy is now driven by the Federal Government, with tax money and borrowed money. Sixty percent of what they spend is tax money; 40 percent-plus is borrowed. We take in $2.2 trillion, and we spend $3.7 trillion. That is why all the experts tell us this is unsustainable--and we know it is true. That is why we cannot do business as usual. That is why we have to do something. And that is why the House of Representatives produced a budget that cut spending. Some people didn't like it, but unless we have massive tax increases-- tax increase that will damage the economy--we have to reduce spending; right? Certainly this is correct. So that is where we are.

The difficulty is the spending and the resulting debt that is projected by the Congressional Budget Office--at least as they have analyzed the budget presented by the President. The current spending path, if it is just continued, is very dangerous. They are setting us on an even worse path.

Now, the President did submit a budget to the Congress. I offered it, and it was voted down 97 to 0. It made the already unacceptable debt path we were on much worse. Indeed, it would have doubled the country's debt, from $13 trillion to $27 trillion in 10 years. That is the path they projected, and the debt in the out years would be increasing, not decreasing; an unsustainable path.

So, ultimately, the numbers we have been hearing--like $2 trillion in cuts--are not sufficient. It is only a part of what we would have to do to get our country on a sound fiscal path. We hear this figure--that we need $2 trillion in cuts. A lot of people don't realize that the House budget reduces spending by $6 trillion over the next 12 years. By the way, over the next 12 years we are projected to add $13 trillion to the national debt, doubling it. So cutting $6 trillion is pretty significant. It requires us to take firm action.

This makes some people uneasy. They think we can't cut that much. But many of our States and cities and

counties have been cutting more than that on a percentage basis, and they are going to survive. They know they have to live within their means, but Washington has not gotten that message.

It is rumored that an unseen draft of the Senate Democratic budget proposes only $1.5 trillion in cuts. This is according to reports. They have tried to make the number bigger by counting interest savings, including those from tax hikes. This is a gimmick, because $1 in spending cuts is not equivalent to $1 in tax hikes. It just simply is not.

Cutting spending restores economic confidence and makes room for private sector growth. Studies show that this approach results in more significant deficit reduction. Cutting spending allows us to pursue a more competitive Tax Code. Hiking taxes is a less successful way to trim the deficit. That is the reality. Hiking taxes punishes families for the waste of Washington, and it enables a bloated government that needs to be trimmed and whipped into shape.

Raising taxes to pay for excessive government spending is a refusal to recognize there are limits to how much we can spend and how much we can tax. There is a limit to how much we can spend and how much we can tax if we want to be a government of democratic ideals, freedom, and free markets; and limited government is what our Founders intended.

A plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion and only cut $2 trillion in actual spending contains only a fraction of the savings we can and must achieve. That is my firm view, and I think we have many people in Washington, including, I have to say, our President, who are in denial about the challenges and difficulties we face.

This is not a situation in which a few little cuts here and there can put us on the path to fiscal solvency and get us off the path to fiscal destruction. It is going to take stronger steps, the kind of steps they are taking in New York State, the kind of steps Governor Christie is taking in New Jersey. We are not even reaching the level of cuts Governor Brown has achieved in California or what the English are doing in the U.K. We have to wise up. We cannot continue down this path.

Let me share a few other thoughts about debt because debt is a dangerous thing. It hurts us right now. Most of us have gotten into the habit of saying we are worried about our children and our grandchildren, and certainly we are worried about their future because of the debt burden we are placing on their shoulders. But the truth is, the debt threatens us right now. It is a danger to our economy. It is a danger and it is a drag on the economy. Let me explain how debt destroys jobs and why this Senate should pass a budget.

The House of Representatives has passed a budget; they have made it public and they have defended it and explained it. Let's see what the Senate Democratic majority will do about a budget.

Higher debt leads to slower economic growth. Empirical studies show that high levels of government debt inhibit economic growth by creating uncertainty, displacing needed private investment and placing upward pressure on interest rates and raising burden on the government itself through interest payments on the debt.

For example, the very well-respected and much commented-on study by Reinhart and Rogoff, Harvard and University of Maryland economists, found that in advanced economies with gross government debt above 90 percent of GDP--in other words, a total debt equal to 90 percent or above the size of the American economy--median economic growth tends to be between 1 and 2 percent lower, depending on the time period analyzed, when compared to countries with lower debt-to-GDP ratios.

What do we mean by 1 percent to 2 percent lower? In the first quarter of this year, we were expecting almost 3 percent growth. In reality, it was shockingly lower. It adversely impacted the stock market. What did it come in at? 1.8 percent. The second quarter may not be so good either. We are already above 90 percent of debt to GDP; so presumably, if this study is accurate, we should have been at 2.8 percent growth. In a sense, it is not a 1-percent reduction; it is 36 percent less than the growth we need to have.

Another study has shown that 1 percent growth in the gross domestic product, 1 percent growth in our economy, creates 1 million jobs.

When asked about this Reinhart-Rogoff study, President Obama's Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, told the Budget Committee he considered it an excellent study--not only that, he told us in the committee he thought it underestimated the problem. Because when you get debt the size of 90 to 100 percent of GDP--and we are projected to reach 100 percent of GDP as our debt by the end of this year--he said it creates the danger of an economic crisis, some sort of spasm like we had when we had the financial crisis or even something similar to Greece. Something that could put us into another recession, which would be the worst thing that could happen to our economy.

That is why this is serious business. We are feeling the impact of this debt right now. It is pulling down economic growth. It is costing us jobs. It is creating uncertainty and fear in the marketplace. We have to get off of it.

President Obama appointed the fiscal commission, cochaired by Alan Simpson, a former Senator, and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton. Erskine Bowles and Senator Simpson told the Budget Committee we are facing the most predictable debt crisis in this Nation's history--the most predictable economic crisis in our Nation's history.

In other words, they explained that the debt trajectory we are on guarantees an economic crisis. The question is when.

So that is why we have to change. We don't want to have to cut any spending. The last thing politicians want to do is cut spending. The reason we are talking about this is because we have to. I do believe President Obama deserves severe criticism for not being out front leading on this, not telling the American people what his own experts are telling him. This was his expert, Mr. Bowles, and his Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, telling us we have to change the debt path we are on. He needs to help explain to the American people why this is necessary, while it will be painful in the short run, but it can put us on the road to prosperity and not on the road to decline.

Other studies, including Caner, Grennes, and Koehler-Geib's 2010 study of 99 countries between 1980 and 2008, reached a similar conclusion about debt.

Successful debt-reduction measures relying on spending cuts, not tax increases, have consistently resulted in stronger economic growth. Research from Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, as well as a Goldman Sachs report, found that fiscal consolidations--reductions in spending--that focused on cutting government spending, including on subsidies, transfer payments, and government worker pensions, were successful in cutting fiscal imbalances, typically boosted economic growth, and were followed by improved equity--that is the stock market--and bond market performance. That is what their study found, an empirical study by Goldman Sachs and a professor from Harvard, economist Alberto Alesina--not Jeff Sessions. These are independent analyses.

Examples of successful spending reductions include Canada, which is in some ways doing far better than we are. We are at 9.1 percent unemployment and our unemployment numbers still seem to be going up; whereas, Canada is at about 7.1 percent and going down.

New Zealand had a dramatic turnaround in the early 1990s. They went from 22 consecutive years of deficit spending to now 16 years of surpluses. It was a deliberate, systematic decision by the people of New Zealand through their government to change what they were doing. They reduced spending. They created ways to make sure the government was productive and saved money. They privatized a lot of activities the government had taken over that didn't need to be government functions, and the country has been progressing solidly ever since.

Financial markets have issued dire warnings about the consequences of our inaction. Against the backdrop of a spreading euro zone debt crisis, the International Monetary Fund--certainly not a rightwing organization--the International Monetary Fund recently urged the United States to act

swiftly to address its soaring budget deficits saying: ``You cannot afford to have a world economy where these important decisions are postponed.''

The credit rating agencies Moody's and S&P have warned that they may place the U.S. Government's AAA bond rating under review for a possible downgrade within months.

Bill Gross, the head of PIMCO, the largest bond fund in the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars invested, has ceased buying U.S. Government Treasurys. None of that is in his portfolio. He said recently that what we are doing with our economy through the Fed, with this quantitative easing, and the government with its worthless stimulus package, is what he called a sugar high, not real, a temporary surge that has not changed the circumstances we are in. He is a man who deals every day with investments, and he has ceased to invest in U.S. Treasurys.

Yet the Nation has operated without a budget now for 785 days. The Democratically led Senate, even when they had a huge majority last year, perhaps the biggest majority in my lifetime--I can't remember a party having 60 votes in the Senate, when that last occurred--didn't pass a budget. You can pass a budget with just 50 votes. It was given priority. We know we need a budget. So we set up a Budget Act that allows even a bare majority of Senators to pass a budget, and set a plan for our Congress.

The Senate has not even allowed the Budget Committee to meet this year to mark up a budget resolution. The Budget Act calls for the Budget Committee to hold a markup by April 1. It calls for the Congress to pass a budget by April 15. The House passed their budget by April 15. We have not yet even had a markup to work on a budget resolution, and the leadership in the Senate has refused to pass a budget since April 29, 2009, 785 days ago. We wonder why this country is in a financial crisis when we will not even get together to pass a budget, as every city, county, and State has. I don't know of a single one that hasn't.

Over this time that we haven't passed a budget, the Nation has spent $7.1 trillion and added $3.2 trillion to the gross Federal debt.

The majority leader, my friend, Harry Reid--I know he has a tough job, but he made a big mistake. He recently said it would be foolish for the Democrats to produce a budget.

Foolish to produce a budget? Is this the kind of leadership the American people expect out of Washington, that the No. 1 Senator, the leader of the majority party, who has the power to control the flow of legislation in this body, says he is not about to produce a budget? Indeed, he says it is foolish to produce one, and he has basically sent word to the Budget Committee we are not to even have committee hearings.

I think nothing could be more foolish than refusing to provide the Nation's job creators, investors, and taxpayers with a solid blueprint for our fiscal future. A blueprint in which the American people can see we have gotten it, we understand the debt course we are on is unsustainable, and now we have a plan to get us on the right track.

Why wouldn't the people who wanted to be in the majority, who asked to lead, step forward and lead? Why will they not lay forth a plan that can be analyzed and shown to the American people? Why aren't they proud to present their vision for what America should be like and how we should handle their future?

I will say in conclusion that the breakdown of the talks does not surprise me. The Gang of Six tried. Those talks seem to have fallen apart. Then we went to the Biden talks. Once again, people said that we were about to reach an agreement any minute, that all the rest of us Senators could relax and all we needed to do is walk up and sign our name to what these wise few have decided our financial future should be like.

I think most of us realize we were elected. We are Senators. We are not rubberstamps for Vice President Biden and some of our fine colleagues. The Presiding Officer is an independent American citizen. He is going to make up his own mind. So am I. But when you are talking about a budget, a financial plan, a program to raise the debt ceiling in this Congress, we ought to read it, we ought to know what is in it. Not only us, the American people should know what is in it. They need to have time to absorb what it means for them and their future, that there will be no gimmicks or tricks, and it will be honestly presented. That takes some time.

I am worried and have been worried if they reach an agreement, even if it is a somewhat good agreement--I don't expect it to be a great one, but if a decent agreement is made, it is going to be brought forward and we will have to pass it within days because of a panic that we will have an economic problem if we do not raise the debt limit and we cannot spend so much money. I don't think we should head that way.

I don't know what is going to happen now. It is late, I will acknowledge, for us to go back to the regular order and have Budget Committee hearings and amendments in the Budget Committee and have people stand up before the world and explain their view and offer amendments. I don't think it is necessarily too late. I do not know where it will go. But this has not been a shining hour for the Senate, and after this last election in which Senators and House Members took a shellacking by the American people, who were very unhappy with us, the House I think appears to at least have gotten the message. They put forth an honest budget that changes the debt trajectory and they put it forth and explained it and defended it.

What do we have in the Senate? We have the majority leader saying it is foolish for us to produce a budget. We are not going to produce a budget. Did he mean it is foolish for America? No, he meant it is foolish for political reasons. He meant it was foolish for us as Democrats to step forward and lay out an honest plan because, wow, that plan may include tax increases. It might include spending reductions. It may not reduce the deficit very much, and we would have to defend that to the American people and we might not be able to defend it and people might be unhappy with us, as they were in the last election. So let's be clever, let's not produce a budget, let's let Mr. Ryan and the House lead with their chin, let them come out and make a plan and we will attack it. That is the Democratic leadership we have seen in this Senate.

It is not legitimate, it is not justified leadership. It is irresponsible and the President has not been engaged. He does not want to talk about it. He has not explained it in his State of the Union Address. He has not talked to the American people consistently about why his own debt commission chairman, Mr. Erskine Bowles, says we are facing the most predictable economic crisis in our history. No, he doesn't want to talk about that. Why? Because once you talk about it, it becomes obvious that spending needs to be cut and because it is obvious that you cannot fix your way out of this by raising taxes. If you are a tax and spender, you don't want to deal with that reality, in my view.

I am worried about it. I don't know where we are heading today. Senator Reid is a good man. Senator McConnell is a good leader on our side. I don't know what Speaker Boehner is going to do, what Vice President Biden will do. But the time, as old Snuffy Smith, the mountaineer, used to say, ``Time's a-wastin'.'' The deadline is coming closer and closer. We are going to have to figure out something to help secure the future of this country and I hope we can do it sooner rather than later.

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

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Paul, I call up amendments Nos. 502 and 503, and ask unanimous consent that they be reported by number.

Mr. President, I have been listening very carefully to the remarks of my friend about what we have to do, what is in front of us. Of course, he is speaking for the Republican Party for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

Let me say this: I want a balanced budget. That is what I want. I don't need an amendment to the Constitution to get me to vote for a balanced budget. What I want is for all sides to come together--that is what I want--and write a balanced budget. I want us to do it in a way that is responsible and do it in a way that is fair and do it in a way that protects our middle class, protects our kids, and stimulates economic growth by making smart investments and cutting out spending in areas we don't need it.

So all this yak about a balanced budget amendment--and I call it that, and I apologize if it sounds as though it is a derogatory term-- it is just so much talk. Let's get to it.

I think we ought to go back to the people and the party that was the only party and the only people to balance the budget in 40 years. I hate to break it to my Republican friends, but that is the Democratic Party. We are the ones who did it. We did it when Bill Clinton came into office. We did it after hard work. We did it after painful cuts. We did it with smart investments. We did it with everybody paying their fair share, and we didn't need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution to do it. It is a gimmick. We need a balanced budget, not a balanced budget amendment.

Let's look at what we did the last time this country ever had a balanced budget. Lucky for us, it wasn't that long ago. Lucky for us, a lot of us are still here who made that fateful vote. We didn't have one Republican voting for that budget, and when they came to the floor--I have all the quotes, chapter and verse--they said: This is horrible. It will never balance the budget. This is going to lead to a depression. This is the worst thing. But we know what happened. We not only balanced the budget, but we had a surplus. We not only had a surplus, but the debt

was going down so fast we thought we would never have to have Treasury bonds again. On top of that, we created 23 million jobs.

So I hope the public understands, when they hear Republican colleague after Republican colleague come to the floor saying we need to stay in all through July--fine with me. I will stay here through August. I will spend the night in the cloakroom, I don't care. Let's not talk about a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Let's talk about doing the hard work of balancing the budget. The way we do it, again, is to follow the lead of the plan that was laid out by President Clinton and which worked in the most amazing way beyond our greatest expectations.

What did we do? We looked at this deficit and we said: This is unacceptable. We went after programs that made no sense and we cut them. We either eliminated them or we cut them back. Then we asked: What are some investments we could make that would actually stimulate the growth of the private sector? I thought my friend, Senator Blunt, was right. That is what we need to do. We need to stimulate growth in the private sector. At that time, the investments were on the high-tech side--high tech, biotech. Today, clearly, it is clean energy. That is what the whole world wants. That is where we ought to be leading. That is what our President knows. So we cut out programs that don't make sense. We invest where it makes sense to create jobs and then guess what we do. We make sure we have enough revenues coming in to pay for the priorities.

I have news for my Republican friends. It is not that hard. Go after the billionaires. They can't get themselves to do it, can they? Go after the billionaires and the millionaires, the people who aren't paying what they should be paying. But when the House had its chance, what did it do? It allowed the biggest tax breaks ever to continue for the billionaires and the millionaires and they killed Medicare. Medicare is gone. It is becoming some kind of a voucher program, where we can imagine some 90-year-old woman who is suffering from disease has to now go out and try to find out where she can buy an insurance plan. Tell me who is going to cover her, A; and, B, tell me if she has the strength to do that; and, C, her Medicare benefit no longer goes to her. Who does it go to? It goes to the insurance company. That is the plan the Republicans passed in the House, and they cut everything that is near and dear to the hearts of the American people. In addition to Medicare, they cut education. They cut funding for clean air, clean water. Highways they cut by a third, and here they talk about jobs on the other side, private sector jobs. The highway bill creates thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs in the private sector. They cut that bill by 36 percent.

So when I hear my Republican friends talk about the importance of balancing the budget and they are talking about a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution--why don't they show us their balanced budget? Because the one they showed us from the House was such a disaster that they lost a congressional seat they held for eternity. It is easy to talk about a balanced budget amendment. It is harder to balance the budget the fair way, and that is what we have to do.

My friend, Senator Blunt, also talked about the importance of jobs. He is so right. I just ran for reelection. Jobs, jobs, jobs, the top three issues. Guess what. My Republican friends have filibustered every single jobs bill we brought to the floor. The last jobs bill is one I am very familiar with because it is a bill that came out of my committee. The whole committee voted, with one dissenting vote, for the Economic Development Administration to give seed money to areas in the country that need job creation and attract $7 of funds for every $1 of Federal money. It would have created 1 million jobs over 5 years. They filibustered it. They added amendments about the prairie chicken. They added amendments about things that had nothing to do with it, just to bring it down. They didn't even have--what is the word I am looking for? They didn't even speak against it when they voted against it at the end of the day. They didn't even come to the floor because they had nothing to say because it is a jobs bill, because it has passed every Congress since the 1960s. The last time it passed, it passed without a dissenting vote in the Senate in 2004 because the last President who signed it was George W. Bush. It is a jobs bill. They said no. Why? I go back to what their leader said. His top priority? Beating President Barack Obama. So we have to figure they are bringing every jobs bill down so this economy gets worse.

Let me tell my colleagues, it is not going to go down easy at home. It is not going to go down easy at home.

They killed a bill that Mary Landrieu brought out of her committee unanimously, a small business bill. It would have created thousands of small businesses. They voted it down. That bill was written by Warren Rudman, a Republican Senator. They voted it down. They filibustered it and voted it down. Why? They say jobs are their top priority. Why would they vote down a bill that was written by a Republican, that is passed without objection year after year after year? Why would they vote down another bill that was last signed by George W. Bush without a dissenting vote in the Senate? Why? Two jobs bills. Why? We have to ask ourselves why. Maybe they are willing to sacrifice jobs for political reasons. That is all I can come up with. I put that together with what Mitch McConnell said.

Now their big push is a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution--a lot of talk. Balance the budget, folks. We know how to do it. End the wars. That is $1 trillion over 10 years. Go after the millionaires and the billionaires who don't pay their fair share. That is another $1 trillion over 10 years. That is $2 trillion, right there. Go after the people who never pay their taxes. Go after the oil companies that are ripping us off at the pump and taking the highest profits ever. It is not hard to do. Yes, we are willing to cut some things that don't make sense. We could have a $4 trillion package pretty easily if we are willing to look at it in a fair way.

I heard our President today speaking to the Nation through a press conference, and he was very sweet about this issue. I was saying to Senator Durbin, as I watched him, he is explaining it to the people. Everybody has to give up something. If we want bipartisanship, that doesn't mean we all get what we want and somebody gets nothing. It means I give up some of the things I want and they give up some of the things they want. But we have declarations by the Republicans: We will never ever agree to any new revenues. Why? They just voted to eliminate the ethanol subsidy. That brings revenues. So why would they not take that to the table? How can they believe it is fair that billionaires sometimes pay less in terms of the effective tax rate than a secretary or a teacher or a nurse?

Come on. Come to the table. Don't come to the table with a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That doesn't do anything to balance the budget. It is a lot of talk. Balance the budget. Put a little faith in the people who know how to do it who did it before.

I was proud to vote to balance the budget. I was proud to vote for a fair budget. I was proud to be here when we saw 23 million jobs come. That didn't happen because we just said: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. End Medicare as we know it. It came because we were willing to look at what was working, what wasn't working, where to make the investments, where to make the cuts. We have to come to the table with everything on it. We have to say we are willing to listen to the other side. We need a fair plan. We have that as Democrats. We are not going to end Medicare. We are not going to hurt working people. We are going to do this in a fair way.

I hope the American people will put this together and connect all the dots. We have a Republican leader who has said on more than one occasion the most important thing is to defeat Barack Obama. We have a Republican Party that says it is for jobs and filibusters every single jobs bill that in the past they have broadly supported. We have Republicans walking out on the Vice President, taking their little teddy bear and their blankies and walking out of the negotiations because they didn't like the way the discussions were going. They walked out. Then, my friends on the other side--

and I thought Senator Blunt was very eloquent on the point. He said we need two things. We need to work on job creation in the private sector--and I just showed that despite the language, they voted everything down--and then we have to take uncertainty out of the equation. That was his big point. He is so right. How do we take uncertainty out of the equation? Do not play politics with the debt ceiling. Do not play politics with it. Because I have read what economists say, that if we do not do this right, and we do not agree, and the debt ceiling becomes a victim of this partisanship, Treasury bonds of the United States of America will be junk bonds--will be junk bonds.

So you want to play games? Go home, go on the corner, and I will play you a game. But do not bring it in here. It is too serious. This is the greatest country there ever was.

My parents, one of whom was born outside of this country, told me that I should kiss the ground of America. And how proud I am that I am here. But I will tell you, if I see people who are willing to turn U.S. Treasury bonds into junk bonds, I am going to do everything I can in my life to make sure those who have done this will not be nameless or faceless. It is too important.

The fact that we are even playing these games is ridiculous. The fact that we cannot come together and shake hands and say this budget deficit is terrible, we are going to deal with it, we are going to deal with the debt, we are going to do what we did under Bill Clinton, we are going to balance the budget, we are going to create a surplus--we can do this. You shake hands on it. You have the parameters of the deal. You pass a debt ceiling that is clean. You send a message to the market.

I used to be a stockbroker. When the President would sneeze, the market would go down 200 points. That is how the market responds to these things. We do not have to be playing with the stock market, with the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

It is pretty simple if everything is on the table. If all you want to do is destroy Social Security and Medicare, it is not simple. But if you are willing to talk to us, to have a fair taxation system, where the Warren Buffetts of the world are at least paying as much in an effective tax rate as a nurse, there is something to talk about here. But do not go walking out of discussions and going home because you did not get 100 percent of what you want. Life does not work that way.

I speak as a mother, a grandmother, a Senator from the largest State in the Union when I say this: You do not get everything you want in a negotiation. The Republicans control the House. The Democrats control the Senate. The Democrats control the White House. Correct me if I am wrong: two-thirds Democratic. In a fair world, we would get two-thirds of what we want. But we are going to give up more. It ought to be a 50- 50 deal. That is how you negotiate.

This is a tough time. If the other side thinks a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution balances the budget, it does not. You have to do the hard work of balancing the budget. You have to sit down in this tough time, in a tough, fragile economic recovery.

Remember when President Obama took over, we were bleeding 800,000 jobs a month. He had to handle two wars, unpaid for by George W. and his friends; a tax cut, unpaid for, to the richest people in America. He had to deal with a banking system that was frozen solid. He had to deal with an automobile industry that was going out of business. We had to work, and a few brave souls from the other side of the aisle worked with us, thank God, or who knows where we would be today.

And now, when we are finally moving out of this nightmarish economy-- not quickly enough--we have Republicans filibustering jobs bill, then coming down here and saying how important jobs are, and saying how important it is there is certainty, when they are playing games with the debt ceiling.

I am an optimist. That is why I stay in this world I am in, and I thank the people of California for giving me the chance so many times. But there is a saying back home: Are you on the level? Are you on the level when you are in negotiations? Do you want to have a deal? Do you want to fix it? Do you want to work with us? I do not know when I see them filibustering jobs bills, when I see them walking out on the Vice President, when I see them saying: Oh, that is off the table, and this is off the table, and that is off the table, when they do not run this country. They run the House. I wonder: Where are we going?

When I hear people saying: What is the big deal if we do not pay our bills, if we do not lift the debt ceiling and we cannot pay our bills, what people have to understand is, lifting up the debt ceiling is not about the future payments, it is about payments due.

I said we had a balanced budget under Bill Clinton--and a surplus. We went into deficit mode when George Bush took over and did the tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, and did not pay for it, and did a prescription drug benefit and never paid for it, did two wars and never paid for them, and we got into big trouble.

What is the solution of my friends on the other side? We are walking out of the negotiations because we cannot talk about taxing billionaires or taking away corporate welfare from oil companies. God forbid. It makes me wonder, really, who is on the level.

We can do this. We did it before. It is not that hard. We just need people of good will. I will say to my friends on the other side: Forget the reelection of Barack Obama. Forget the next Presidential race. You will have your candidate and we will have ours, and that is for another day. Right now we are in this Chamber. We are talking about how to have a credible plan to get this deficit down, to get this debt down, to strengthen our economy, to strengthen job creation, to keep the middle class vibrant.

I hear some Republicans now on the Presidential trail talking about doing away with the minimum wage. Can you imagine going back to the days when the minimum wage was $4 an hour? I remember when it was 50 cents an hour. It dates me a bit. That is what we hear from the other side. Their vision is not a good vision for the young people of this country who are looking forward to a life at least as good as that of their parents.

In conclusion, this is not a time to play games or reach for a political advantage. This is not a time to hold the future of this country hostage to some ideological agenda or some pledge that somebody signed to some political person outside of this Chamber. Pledges signed--it is not about that. It is about putting America first. It is about putting our families first. It is not about amending the Constitution with a balanced budget amendment. It is about balancing the budget in a fair way.

The Republican plan that passed the House that started with Paul Ryan did not balance the budget for 40 years. That is not a plan. We have to do better. But when you are willing, as they are, to say to millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires: You do not have pay your fair share, the revenues do not come in. What happens as a result, they have to kill Medicare--which they did in the House budget--they have to hurt education, make the Environmental Protection Agency a shadow of its former self.

I go out and look at polls. Eighty percent of the people want the EPA to stay out there and clean up the air and make sure we have safe drinking water. They want food inspections. They want air traffic controllers on the job. They want a next-generation air system.

This is the greatest country in the world. We do not have to walk away from our dreams. We just have to have everybody paying their fair share. If that happens, we can do this. And we need to end those wars that are so costly in so many ways. If we do those two things, we are on our way to a balanced budget. We are on our way to surpluses.

We can do this. The only thing standing in our way is politics. That is what it seems to me. If people think that more important than fixing this budget crisis is bringing down a President politically, we have a problem.

We take the oath of office, and we raise our right hand, we put our hand on the Bible, to be loyal to this country, to do right by this country. That is what we should be doing now.

If people want to stay in July, August, September, October, through Christmas, that is fine with me. But we have to have a plan that is fair. If we have a plan that is fair, we balance the

budget. We do it over time. We do it wisely. We create jobs. Interest rates remain low. We can do it because we did it before. The only people who have ever balanced the budget in the last 40 years have been the Democrats. That is a fact in evidence.

We have the path lights showing the way. It is fairness on spending; cut the things that do not work; fairness on taxation; make sure billionaires pay their fair share. We follow that path. We bring home our troops. We are golden. I think that is a pathway I would like to support.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, it is my honor now to rise as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to speak on behalf of S. 679, the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011, and I do so with great gratitude toward Senator Alexander, who is now on the Senate floor, Senator Schumer, and others who worked together to clear away procedural obstacles to focus on this piece of legislation.

This is a noble effort that has been tried before and failed, but I am confident this time, with the support of our leaders--really our bipartisan leadership, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, Senator Alexander, Senator Schumer, not to mention Senator Collins and me--we are going to, in our committee role, get this passed. This is a bipartisan effort to solve a problem, or at least help solve part of a problem, that has been growing for a long time in Washington in our government--certainly since the Kennedy administration--which is, it takes too long for an incoming President and a sitting President to get their team in place, and there are too many vacancies throughout the course of an administration, as I will indicate during my remarks.

The average is 25 percent, one-quarter of the positions in the administration, are empty at any one time because of the length of the process, the delays that occur in the executive branch, the White House, and in the Senate, and this is a direct attempt to try to lessen that problem. One of my favorite descriptions of our current nomination and confirmation process--I have used this so often I forgot who said it; the gentleman in the chair might have said it--described the current confirmation and nomination process as ``nasty and brutish without being short.'' So, hopefully, this will make the process at least less nasty and brutish and shorter as well.

Mr. President, 100 days into President Obama's administration only 14 percent of the full-time Senate-confirmed positions had been filled-- only 14 percent. After 18 months, 25 percent of key policymaking positions were still vacant. This is not an unusual circumstance. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush faced similar difficulties. It is a problem that does have, however, a serious national and economic security implication because crucial offices go unfilled for months and months.

President Bush actually did not have his national security team, including critical subcabinet officials, confirmed and on the job until at least 6 months after he took office. The 9/11 Commission pointed out how dangerous this was and recommended steps to speed up the process for national security appointments, some of which were adopted as part of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2004.

At the height of the financial crisis, which we are still working our way out of, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner was actually home alone, with no other Senate-confirmed positions at the Treasury Department filled for over 3 months. That is an outrageous result.

So what would the bill before the Senate now do? It would eliminate the need for Senate confirmation for about 200 positions out of about 1,200 that now need Senate confirmation. Of these 200 positions, most of them are in the areas of legislative and public affairs, internal management positions,

such as, chief financial officers who report to others up the chain of command, directors, commissioners, or administrators at or below the Assistant Secretary level who, again, will report to another Senate- confirmed official, and the members of a number of part-time advisory boards which, under the current state of the law, have to go through full vetting and then full Senate consideration and confirmation.

The proposal before us is not by any means a radical proposal. Removing these positions from the need for Senate confirmation would free up both the Senate and future administrations to concentrate more fully on the nominations for those key positions where public policy is made. I want to note, again, the bipartisan nature of these proposals.

In January, Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell decided the nomination and confirmation process had become too slow and cumbersome. That was in January of this year. They established a working group on executive nominations and asked leaders Schumer and Alexander to be in charge of that. Chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Rules Committee, Senator Collins and I were also privileged to be part of that group as chair and ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The reforms proposed by Senators Schumer and Alexander in our group have really been carefully crafted, and I cannot thank them enough for both their legislative intellectual work on this but also for sticking with it right to this moment. They introduced their legislation on March 30; that is, Schumer and Alexander, with a bipartisan group of 15 cosponsors. On April 13, our Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, again, on a bipartisan vote, reported the bill favorably to the Senate.

Senators Schumer and Alexander are also proposing an important Senate Resolution, S. Res. 116, that would streamline the confirmation process for approximately 200 other Presidential appointments that receive Senate confirmation by allowing their nominations to bypass the committee process and come directly to the Senate floor as long as no Senator objects. This is an important companion proposal.

So if all goes well, we will have 400 of the current 1,200 positions--that is about one-third of the current nominations requiring full Senate consideration, Senate proposal, committee consideration, et cetera--to be in a different status. These 200 positions that will be the subject of S. Res. 116 come from 30 bipartisan Federal advisory groups and councils, such as the Social Security Advisory Board and the IRS Advisory Board.

This is the way the Senate should work. A problem is identified, both sides of the aisle work together to craft a solution, then bring it to the floor for debate. Hopefully, it is a model for what we can and should do in a lot of other areas that are pressing not just on the Senate but on the country and the people of the country.

On March 2, Senator Collins and I--just speaking a bit more in detail--held a hearing which we called ``Eliminating the Bottlenecks: Streamlining the Nominations Process.'' We heard from a group of former executives, really White House officials, both parties, and from some experts in the private sector. They made a compelling case for change, and here is some of what we learned.

When President Kennedy entered office in 1961, there were 850 Senate- confirmed positions that the President had to fill. By the time President George W. Bush took office, that had increased to 1,143. When President Obama was sworn in just 8 years later, that was already up to 1,215. Not surprisingly, with more positions it takes longer to fill them. The delay is not, fortunately, at the Cabinet level. Between 1987 and 2005, it took Presidents an average of only 17 days from the time of a vacancy to nominate a Cabinet Secretary, and the Senate took an average of just 16 days to confirm the nominee. But it is at the critical subcabinet level where things slow to a crawl.

It took Presidents an average of 95 days--that is, of course, more than 3 months--to nominate Deputy Cabinet Secretaries, and the Senate took 62 days to confirm them, another 2 months. Now we are up to more than 5 months for Deputy Cabinet Members which are critical to the functioning of their departments. Noncabinet agency heads waited an average of 173 days for nomination and 63 additional days for confirmation. So we are up to over 230 days, over 7 months, approaching 8 months. Noncabinet agency deputy heads fared even worse, an average of 301 days before nomination and 82 days before confirmation. That is more than a year to go through this process while those offices are effectively unfilled, and the people's business is not being done.

Part of the problem is a large number of appointments that need to be made at the outset of an administration can overwhelm the resources available within the executive branch and the Senate to review and vet these nominees. So eliminating the requirement for Senate confirmation for nonpolicymaking or lower level positions should allow an incoming administration and the Senate, as well as the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics, which do the vetting, to focus on more important policymaking positions, speeding up the process.

Other problems contributing to the delay are the numerous duplicative and time-consuming forms that potential nominees are required to fill out. Most nominees actually submit to at least four reviews, each represented by a separate packet of government forms, including a White House personnel data statement, questionnaires from the FBI, Office of Government Ethics, and at least one questionnaire from the Senate committee of jurisdiction.

There is a very interesting study done by Professor Terry Sullivan at the University of North Carolina that found half the questions asked in those four reviews for each nominee are redundant. They are repetitive. This act would establish, therefore, an executive branch working group to study and report to the President and the Congress the best ways to streamline all this paperwork, along with a detailed plan for creating and implementing a smart reform. An example would be an electronic system for collecting and distributing background information for nominees requiring Senate confirmation. With a ``smart form'' such as this, a nominee could answer a question once and the information would be filled in for all of the relevant forms.

The need for reforms in the Federal appointments process is not a new topic. Over the past three decades, an abundance of commissions, think tanks, good government groups, and individual academics have turned their sights on this problem.

I will not list them all, but here are just a few: the National Academy of Public Administration in 1983 and 1985; the President's Commission on the Federal Appointments Process in 1990; the Twentieth Century Fund in 1996; the Brookings Institution's Presidential Appointee Initiative, cochaired by former Senator Nancy Kassebaum and former Director of the Office of Management and Budget Franklin Raines in 2001; and the bipartisan National Commission on the Public Service, headed by Paul Volcker, in 1989 and 2003.

The Senate has looked into making changes as well. In 2001, our committee--then called the Governmental Affairs Committee and chaired by former Senator Fred Thompson--held a 2-day hearing titled ``The State of the Presidential Appointment Process,'' which looked at many of the ideas we are considering today.

The committee also reported out a bill--``The Presidential Appointments Improvement Act of 2002''--that sought to make modest improvements to the appointments process, including streamlining financial disclosure requirements. But the full Senate never considered it.

Then, as I mentioned, Congress passed the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which included some improvements to help speed up the consideration of critical members of a new President's national security team.

Now it is time to take a modest next step. We have reasonable, bipartisan legislation in front of us and it is time--in fact, past time--to act.

Now let me address the question that seems to be of concern to some of our colleagues, which is: Is the Senate, in limiting by 200, and in some sense limiting another 200, giving away its

power to advise and consent? I say the answer is a resounding no, and I wish to explain why. Let me read directly from article 2 of the Constitution:

[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice

and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other

public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court,

and all other Officers of the United States, whose

appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which

shall be established by Law.

This part of the quote is crucial:

But the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such

inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President

alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The very first Congress, in which, of course, many of the Framers of our Constitution sat, did precisely what they authorized in the Constitution when they created the State Department, which was then called the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Secretary--a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson--was subject to Senate confirmation, but the legislation creating the Department also called for the hiring of a ``chief clerk'' who would be second in command--essentially the deputy. That position was not subject to confirmation and Jefferson hired a man named Henry Remsen, who had held the same job under the previous Articles of Confederation.

So right from the beginning--from the Founding Fathers, the drafters of the Constitution--it was clear they understood there had to be limits on the number of offices the Senate would be called on to advise and consent to.

Incidentally, I think it is also worth noting that in that first Congress, on a single day in 1789, the Senate took up 102 nominations sent to it by President Washington 2 days earlier and approved them all but one. Needless to say, President Washington complained about the one nominee whom the Senate did not confirm. But Washington, obviously acknowledged as the Father of our Country, was unique, and no President--appropriately, I would say--has received exactly that kind of deference since. The nominations process can be a rough and tumble one, and that is to be expected under our separation of powers.

This legislation, however, I wish to emphasize, does nothing to change that. In fact, I would argue this legislation enhances the Senate's authority regarding advice and consent by enabling us to focus our energies on the qualifications of those who would shape national policy. If we don't fix this system, which almost everybody regards as broken, I think we risk what has already begun to happen, which is that some of our Nation's most talented people will simply not accept nominations for these important positions because of the time involved, the redundancy involved, and they will go unfilled.

There has been a lot of work done to support this effort, some of which was done by some of our former colleagues, including Senator Bill Frist and Chuck Robb and former White House officials Clay Johnson from the Bush administration and Mack McLarty from the Clinton administration. For the past year, the four of them have headed up a bipartisan commission to reform the Federal appointments process and they have all endorsed this bill as well as S. Res. 116, and so too has the Partnership for Public Service.

I know there is a natural tendency--notwithstanding all the reasons everybody understands to limit the number of nominees that come before the Senate for advice and consent--when we come to that moment where individual chairs of committees and ranking members don't want to yield what seems to be any authority. But, honestly, this is not an authority worth fighting to retain, and it works against the general functioning of the Senate, against the functioning of our government and, in my opinion, actually undercuts the vitality of the advice and consent clause.

I call on my fellow chairmen, ranking members, and of course all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote yes on this legislation so future Presidents can recruit the best nominees to serve us and the Senate can make sure it does its full job under the advice and consent clause to investigate and confirm them before they take office and deal with the Nation's business.

As always, I have been privileged on the committee to be working with Senator Collins as my ranking member, and I yield to her at this time.

Mr. President, I thank our friend and colleague from Tennessee for his statement and even more for the hard work he has done, along with Senator Schumer--the hard work, the steadfast work, without which we would not be on the floor right now.

Senator Collins and I both agree this is one of those rare cases where I would not say we gave up, but we were beginning to grow pessimistic about our capability to achieve these reforms. It is unusual for us because we are usually so stubbornly persistent.

But Senator Alexander and Senator Schumer, working with the encouragement and blessing of the two leaders,

Senators Reid and McConnell, have put us in a position to get this done. It would be a real step forward. So I thank the Senator. Obviously, the work begins now.

The floor is open for debate, as of 3 o'clock, for amendment. If either of my colleagues do not have anything more to say, I would suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

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

Mr. President, I am delighted to join with the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, my dear friend Senator Lieberman, in rising today in support of the Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act of 2011.

First, let me join Senator Lieberman in commending Senators Schumer and Alexander for their leadership on this bill. Senator Alexander, in particular, has worked so hard on this issue. In fact, I am convinced we would not be where we are today without his persistent leadership. He deserves great credit for his patience and his dogged determination to bring this bill and this issue to the floor. Senators Reid and McConnell also deserve great credit. They made the commitment in January to make reform of the nominations process a priority.

Finally, I wish to recognize Senator Lieberman, the chairman of the committee, on which I have the privilege of being the ranking member. He and I have also been part of what has truly been a bipartisan effort to craft this bill. It is an effort we need to see more often in this Senate if we are to tackle and actually solve the many problems facing our Nation.

This bill before us addresses shortcomings in the process of confirming Presidential appointees without diminishing the constitutional roles of the President or of the Senate. The fact is this is a very modest bill that takes limited but much needed steps to reform the confirmation process. When we look at the full-time positions that now require Senate confirmation, this bill would eliminate only approximately 85 full-time positions, a truly modest number. These positions were selected because either they do not have significant policymaking authority or funding responsibilities or report directly to a Senate-confirmed official.

To be clear, not included in these numbers are almost 3,000 officer corps positions that would no longer require Senate confirmation under this bill. But let me quickly explain exactly what those officer positions are, because when many people hear the words ``officer positions,'' they are going to think the Department of Defense and that would raise the issue of civilian control of the military. Let me say these are not military or Department of Defense positions. Rather, they are members of the Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Corps of the Department of Commerce.

Apart from these officer corps positions, more than 83 percent of all currently confirmed positions and more than 90 percent of all the full- time positions will continue to require Senate approval under this bill. Let me emphasize that again because, unfortunately, there is some misinformation about this bill. More than 90 percent of the full-time positions in the Federal Government that have required Senate confirmation will continue to require Senate approval under our bill. Furthermore, nothing in this bill limits the ability of Congress to create new Senate-confirmed positions in the future. It may be that there is a new department created someday or a new position that is very important. The Senate can choose to exercise its will to make those new positions subject to Senate confirmation.

The companion standing order reported by the Rules Committee proposes that some additional 240 positions go through a new expedited confirmation process. Although that resolution is not now before us, it will be, I hope, shortly after we conclude our work on this bill. So I wish to explain briefly what the process would be under that resolution.

That expedited process would still require nominees to respond to all committee questionnaires and would still

provide the opportunity for closer scrutiny of a nominee if requested by a single Senator--any Senator. The confirmation process must be thorough enough for the Senate to exercise its constitutional duty, but it should not be so onerous as to deter qualified people from public service, particularly when they are being asked to serve as a part-time member of an advisory board.

A letter from three of our former colleagues, one House Member and two Senators, put it well. The bipartisan Policy Center in endorsing this bill sent us a letter that is signed by former Congressmen and Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, Senator Pete Domenici, and Senator Trent Lott, who of course served as the majority leader of the Senate. Here is what they said, and here is what we heard over and over at the hearing Senator Lieberman and I conducted before our committee. This is the bipartisan Policy Center's conclusion:

Many public spirited people are discouraged from serving in

appointed office because of the length and the extreme

adversarial nature of the confirmation process.

This is an issue the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has been working to address for a long time. In fact, in 2001, when Senator Fred Thompson chaired the committee, we held two hearings focusing on the state of the Presidential appointment process. As a result of those hearings, the committee reported favorably reform legislation. A few of the provisions of that bill were later incorporated into the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which I, along with Senator Lieberman, authored.

Let me give our colleagues some more background, some of which has been covered by the chairman of the committee but I think is important to repeat to counter some misimpressions about this bill that somehow it undermines our constitutional obligations. In fact, the Constitution, in the appointments clause, makes the appointment of senior Federal executive officers a joint responsibility of the President and the Senate. The President determines who in his judgment is best qualified to serve in the most senior and critical positions across the executive branch of our government. Then we, the Senate, exercise our independent judgment to determine if these nominees have the necessary qualifications and character to serve our Nation in these important positions of public trust. But at the same time, the Constitution envisions the appointment of lesser officers by the President alone. Specifically, the Constitution provides that ``Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.'' So that process is spelled out in the Constitution.

The National Commission on the Public Service, commonly known as the Volcker Commission, gathered some very illuminating statistics. They differ a bit from some of the statistics the chairman has given because he is using CRS, but what they show is the enormous increase in the number of positions that are now subject to Senate confirmation and approval.

When President Kennedy came to office, he had just 286 positions to fill that had the titles of Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, Assistant Secretary, and Administrator. But using those titles, there were only 286 when President Kennedy assumed office. By the end of the Clinton administration, there were 914 positions with those titles. Today, according to the Congressional Research Service, there are between 1,200 and 1,400 positions in total that are appointed by the President that require the advice and consent of the Senate. Too often, that large number of positions requiring confirmation leads to long delays in vetting, nominating, and confirming these appointees.

I would also point out that there is a great expense that goes along with this process. Having an FBI background check is expensive. Having our congressional investigators do their own vetting process is expensive. And many a nominee will tell you how expensive it is for the nominee to go through this process. The result of the length of this process is that administrations can go for months without key officials in these many agencies. That is why you will find there is bipartisan support from previous administrations urging us to finally tackle this issue.

The 9/11 Commission found that ``[a]t the sub-cabinet level, there were significant delays in the confirmation of key officials, particularly at the Department of Defense,'' in 2001. It was not until 6 months after President Bush took office that he had his national security team in place. Our enemies take note of that fact. That is what the 9/11 Commission found. And it creates a national security vulnerability that terrorists can and have exploited. We have seen that in the United States, we have seen that in Madrid, that when there is a change in administration, it is a particularly difficult time, particularly if we do not have our appointees in place.

As I have mentioned, Senators Schumer and Alexander have been the bipartisan authors of this bill, which has been cosponsored not only by Senator Lieberman and myself but by members of the leadership of the Senate on both sides of the aisle. But I believe, of all members of the working group, Senator Alexander may have the best perspective. In fact, I believe he does have the best perspective because he is one of the few Members of the Senate who have served as a Cabinet Secretary and as a Senator. He has endured the nominations process himself, and I am sure he will explain what he went through in his comments later, but he will talk about how long it was, that it was 9 months before he had a chief financial officer. It took him 6 months, I believe, to be confirmed, and he could not get his team in place because the process was so bogged down.

The nominations reform bill we take up today removes only 203 positions out of an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 from the Senate confirmation requirement, and most of those positions are part-time advisory board members. I would ask my colleagues, should the Senate really spend its time and its resources confirming 10 part-time members of the National Institute for Literacy Advisory Board? I am not in any way denigrating the work of this board or the people who are willing to serve on it. I am just suggesting that I do not think that board requires our confirmation. What about the National Board of Education Sciences or the National Museum and Library Sciences Board, which has 20 part-time members, all of whom have to be confirmed by the Senate?

Again, I would point out there is a cost involved for my colleagues, and that involves everyone here who is concerned about the amount of money we are spending in the Federal Government. There is a cost to an FBI background investigation. There is a cost to having a sufficient number of staff to go out and do the kinds of background checks and vetting that we do. There is a cost to the nominees involved, who have to fill out all these forms, who have to be very careful that they are divesting themselves of certain assets. And it makes sense for the Office of Government Ethics, which already has a system in place to check for those kinds of conflicts, to not have its work duplicated, and that is what happens now far too often.

This legislation will free the Senate and enable us to focus on those nominees whose jobs are absolutely critical to our Nation, who do have significant policy responsibility, who do have significant control over Federal funds, and that will make a difference. It will also enable the Senate to spend more time on the critical work of how can we best create more jobs in this country, how can we reduce our unsustainable $14 trillion debt, how can we strengthen our homeland security, and how can we conduct more effective oversight of the executive branch. Isn't it a better use of our time to be holding oversight hearings to examine the enormous duplication the Government Accountability Office has found across government that wastes hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of taxpayer dollars, rather than spending our time worrying about the confirmation of 20 part-time members of the National Museum and Library Services Board?

Over the years, our committee has continued to hear from experts on the executive nominations process. In April of this year, we received a letter from the bipartisan Commission to Reform the Federal Appointments Process, which is chaired by our former colleagues, Senators Frist and Robb, as

well as we have heard from the former Director of Presidential Personnel for the Bush administration, Clay Johnson, and the former Chief of Staff for the Clinton administration, Mack McLarty. They wrote--and I think this puts it well--that ``[m]ost everyone agrees the federal appointments process is broken.'' They underscored that the bill before us will help the next administration ``to put in place very early in its first year the . . . people that the new Department heads need to get off to a fast start . . . working effectively with Congress.''

I hope we can agree to undertake the modest reforms we have included in this bill. I hope we do not let this legislation and the Rules Committee resolution get caught up in the turf battles and the power struggles that too often sink good government initiatives in this body. This bill is a step in the right direction and a step we should take together by an overwhelming margin.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, if they have not already been printed in the Record, that letters endorsing the bill from the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Partnership for Public Service, Senator Fred Thompson, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, and former Senators Bill Frist and Chuck Robb be printed in the Record.

I thank my colleagues.

Madam President, I am not going to take long at this point. I absolutely support the policy behind the amendment offered by my friend and colleague Senator Coburn. In fact, I am a cosponsor of a stand-alone bill he has on this issue. My concern is that it is a rules change, and the bill before us is not a rules change. It is not a resolution. It is not a rules change. It is legislation.

Coming up after this bill is the second half of the nominations reform package, and that is a rules change that is coming from the Rules Committee.

My suggestion to my colleague and friend from Oklahoma is that his amendment would be better directed to the second half than to this bill. But, again, I am a cosponsor of his stand-alone bill, so it is not that I object to the policy.

I would note for the information of my colleagues, the Congressional Research Service does have concerns about whether it has the resources and the ability to carry out the task the Senator would assign it.

From my many years of working both with GAO and CRS, this sounds to me like a job for GAO, which has the auditors and the experience to do this kind of review and, indeed, has already started due to the good Senator's farsighted amendment which became law to identify duplication.