Floor Statements

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend paragraph 4 of rule XVI for the purpose of proposing to the bill H.R. 3058 amendment No. 2078.

(The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of Amendments.'')

I am told that Senator Murray, the ranking member of this appropriations subcommittee, is delayed but apparently has landed and is on her way to the Senate. It would be, I am sure, her intention to offer an opening statement.

If it is all right with the chairman of the subcommittee to speak in morning business for 10 minutes, with the understanding if Senator Murray arrives during that time I will be happy to relinquish the floor.

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

Mr. President, this morning I and a number of other Senators held a policy committee hearing on the issue of FEMA and some of the expenditures dealing with Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the devastation of the gulf coast of our country. Some of what we learned is enormously distressing. I will share some of it with my colleagues, including some ideas about what we ought to be doing about it.

One of the people who came to Capitol Hill this morning was a man named Paul Mullinaux, a truck driver who owns his own tractor and trailer and lives in Florida. He was contracted by FEMA to haul ice to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and for the devastation on the gulf coast. Mr. Mullinaux is a person who, when asked to perform this service--obviously he was paid for it, but with his refrigeration truck and with an opportunity, he went to New York City and picked up a load of ice in his 18-wheeler and his refrigerated trailer. That load of ice was for delivery to Carthage, MO. He wasn't sure why it was to be delivered to Missouri, but it was. He took his 18-wheeler to Carthage,

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, because we are at this point postcloture, I want to speak on a subject unrelated to the bill. I ask unanimous consent to do that.

Mr. President, I want to speak about the price of oil and gasoline. I know there are a lot of discussions around this country about many issues of public interest. The American people are concerned and interested about a lot of challenges we face. We have the biggest budget deficit in the history of this country. I know people say it is getting better. The fact is, it is not. They show a little smaller budget deficit by using the Social Security surpluses to make it look smaller. We also have the largest trade deficit in the history of the country. The trade deficit and the budget deficit combined are over $1 trillion this year. We have challenges there.

We have challenges in Iraq dealing with foreign policy. We have our men and women wearing America's uniform in harm's way. Our hearts go out to them and our prayers are with them.

We have a lot of issues. The gulf coast was hit by a devastating natural disaster, by Hurricane Katrina followed by Hurricane Rita. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their homes. Many of them have lost everything, living still today in shelters with a bleak prospect ahead. And our country is coming together to try to say to them, You are not alone. We face some challenges.

Let me speak about one other challenge; that is, the challenge of the people who drive up to the gas pump this afternoon and buy 15, 16, or 18 gallons of gas, put it in their tanks, and discover it costs over $50. There are a whole lot of families in this country who cannot afford that. While people drive to the gas pump and put in 15 or 18 gallons and have a $50 bill to pay, the major integrated oil companies in the country have reaped the highest profits in their history. These major integrated oil companies are bigger, stronger, more powerful and muscular than they have ever been.

Thanks to megamergers that have occurred in recent years, all these oil companies fell in love with each other, started dating, got hitched, and now, instead of two companies, it is one company. It is ExxonMobil. It used to be Exxon and Mobil, but it is now ExxonMobil. The list goes on. So we have bigger, stronger, and more powerful companies that have more impact in the marketplace, and they are more profitable than ever in their history.

Let me use a few statistics.

In January of last year, the average price of oil was $34.5 a barrel in this country. At that rate, the major integrated oil companies made the largest profits in their history--Exxon earned $25 billion. What did they do with it? Nearly $10 billion went to buy back their stock another story I will talk about in a moment. At $34.5 a barrel, the integrated oil companies had the highest profits in their history. Add $30 a barrel to that. Then ask yourself, What are the profits going to be this year? You have the answer. Profits are windfall, excess profits far above anything justified.

We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in this country. The world uses 84 million barrels of oil every single day. We use a fourth of it. Think about that. We use a fourth of the oil pumped out of the ground every day in this country. Sixty percent of it we buy from other countries, and 40 percent we produce in this country.

People say--well, those who support the oil industry; there are plenty of them here--it is fine for them to be making $60 or $65 or $70 a barrel. That gives them a chance to invest in more production and refineries. Let me show you what was printed in Business Week in June of last year entitled ``Why Isn't Big Oil Drilling More?''

Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have

preferred to buy rivals--``drilling for oil on Wall Street.''

There ain't no oil on Wall Street. Wall Street is about big finance, high finance, buying and selling. There is no oil.

``Why Isn't Big Oil Drilling More?''

Oil has been over $20 a barrel almost continuously since

mid-1999. That should have been ample incentive for companies

to open new fields, since new projects are designed to be

profitable with prices as low as the mid-teens. Nevertheless,

drilling has lagged.

This is Business Week. This isn't some liberal rag. This is Business Week, a conservative business journal.

Far from raising money to pursue opportunities, oil

companies are paying down debt, buying back shares, and

hoarding cash.

While the American people pull up to the gas pumps to pay $50 for gas, where

it is going? Is it going into the ground to look for more oil or build refineries? No, it is not. The pain of the person at the gas pump is the gain of the treasury of the major integrated oil companies. It is a fat treasury on the one hand and enormous pain on the other.

Katrina and Rita hit this country, and we have people here who say that is what is causing this angst about the price of gasoline and oil. Not true. The fact is, oil was in the mid-60s a barrel before Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the gulf coast. The price of oil was well above $60 a barrel. This isn't about the hurricane.

Others of my colleagues say this is a free market in oil.

I was on one television program--I think a CNBC segment--and the moderator, a real thoughtful gentleman he was, said: You are a socialist because you want to take the windfall profits that exist and tax them and use that money to give a rebate to consumers. This is socialism, he said. I was tempted to say: Grow up. But he was a television commentator, so I didn't do that. But the point is, there is no free market in oil. There is no free market. Some OPEC oil officials that sit around the table and make decisions about supply and price to some extent can influence it.

Then what you have are the now giant integrated oil companies that have been made larger by blockbuster mergers in recent years. In addition to that, you have the futures market which is supposed to provide liquidity for trading which has become an unbelievable bazaar of speculation. So those are the elements that tell me there is no free market here.

You have a market in which the price of a gallon of gasoline is delivered. In fact, nobody ever sees it. It shows up at the gasoline pumps, you pump it into the tank of your car, and the money goes from your wallet. There are a lot of hard-working families in this country and low-income people who can't afford it--from their wallet into the treasury of the major integrated oil companies.

Then the question is, Why isn't big oil drilling more? I made a proposition. I introduced a piece of legislation, along with my colleague, Senator Dodd, and others, to say anything above $40 a barrel--incidentally, $40 a barrel is the price at which the oil companies had the largest profits in their history by far--if you are not using it to drill for more oil or build more refineries, you get hit with a 50-percent excise tax on those windfall profits, and all of that money is used to give rebates to consumers. It is not money for the Federal Treasury. It takes the money back from the oil companies that are soaking people at the gas pump and returns it to consumers. There is a huge cry about that--interfering with the market, we are told.

Let me refer to this article from the New York Times. This is February of this year. This goes back 8 months or so.

. . . the worlds 10 biggest oil companies earned more than

$100 billion in 2004, a windfall greater than the economic

output of Malaysia. . . .Their sales are expected to exceed

$1 trillion for 2004, which is more than Canada's gross

domestic product.

Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil

company, earned more than $25 billion last year and spent

$9.95 billion to buy back its own stock; Royal Dutch/Shell

Group . . . pledged to hand out at least $10 billion as

dividends to shareholders this year.

Last year, the largest integrated oil companies spent 24

percent of their cash on dividends, 12 percent on share buy-

backs, and 12 percent on paring debt . . . As a share of

exploration and production expenses, spending on exploration

has declined over the last decade, and now accounts for 20

percent of the total.

There was an interesting piece in a newspaper just days ago. Most people know what AAA is, the American Automobile Association--headline:

Finger-pointing Begins After Gas Prices Jump 24 Cents in 24

Hours; Exxon Dealers--

These are the gas station dealers--

--Say They Are Chafing Under Higher Prices Decreed From Atop.

A growing chorus of Exxon dealers in the Washington metro

area are raising their voices and accusing the world's

largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, of profiting from the

exorbitant prices at the pump in the wake of Hurricane

Katrina . . . In candid conversations with AAA Mid-Atlantic,

a handful of local dealers accused the oil giant of raising

their wholesale price to service stations by 24 cents in a

24-hour period.

The disgruntled dealers say the steep price increases put

them on the horns of a dilemma . . . By raising their prices,

they risk losing their loyal customer base, which has taken

them years to build. By raising their voices against Exxon

Mobil's practices, they risk losing their contracts.

Question: What is happening here? What is going on? It is really an interesting dilemma. The inclination, I suspect, of most people here in the Congress is to do nothing. Go to ``parade rest'' is the most comfortable position for politicians. It has always been and perhaps always will be. But we not only see prices at the gas pumps coming from the price of a barrel of oil, now $30 above last year's prices and record profits, we are now heading into a winter season where folks from my home State, the State of North Dakota, folks from the home State of the Presiding Officer, the State of Minnesota, and others will be paying 70 percent more for natural gas.

We had a vote yesterday on the low-income home heating assistance program. We lost that vote. We will come back and have it again. We will eventually have that vote. We don't have a choice. Low-income folks have to heat their homes, and heating a home in winter is not a luxury.

But this is not just about them. What about the other folks, the folks who are in the middle-income ranges who are still trying to figure out how to make ends meet? How do we buy school clothes for our kids and pay for gas for our car and pay our mortgage, buy the groceries each week, and do all the things we need to do for our family, and then pay a 70-percent increase in the cost of heating our homes for winter? What about those people? Does anybody here care, or are we just content to thumb our suspenders and light our cigar under the glare of klieg lights? God bless the free market. Let it all go. What utter, sheer nonsense.

There is no free market in oil. I know people with suits that cost a whole lot more than mine are going to be cranky about this statement. There is no free market. They will say: Of course there is a free spot market. There are people trading right now as you speak, Senator Dorgan. There are people trading back and forth, and of course there is a market.

Totally absurd. There are the OPEC ministers, there are the larger and more powerful through blockbuster mergers integrated oil companies, and then there is rampant speculation in the futures market. They are combined to make a pretty interesting dance, but there is no free market.

There is substantial pain in this country at the price of gasoline, substantial pain that will occur this winter with a 70-percent increase in natural gas prices, a 40-percent increase in home heating fuel prices, and people are going to ask the question, Why is this happening? Who is on my side? Why do we have a circumstance where the biggest in this country, the largest economic enterprises, make record profits and smile all the way to the bank while all the rest of the folks are bearing the pain?

I have often spoken about the Texas Playboys, a band from the 1930s that had the refrain in their song, ``Little bees suck the blossom, but the big bee gets the honey. The little guy picks the cotton, and the big guy gets the money.'' If ever those lyrics meant something, it means something now in this circumstance with respect to the pain and the gain in this energy policy.

So I introduced a piece of legislation. It is very simple. It says that at oil prices above $40 a barrel, if the windfall profits accrued from those prices are not being used to explore for more oil and natural gas and if they are not being used to build refineries and add capacity, then they shall be taxed at 50 percent, and all of the proceeds will be used to provide rebates to American consumers. It is a form of revenue sharing from the oil companies that are experiencing windfall profits to the folks who are pulling up to the gas pumps and the folks who are going to try to pay a heating bill that is exorbitant.

I don't have any idea whether this Senate will act on this legislation. It is more likely the Senate will do what it usually does in areas of controversy: it will stand with those who have the most economic clout. The question of whose side are you on, regrettably, at least in recent years, the Senate has

demonstrated that it is not on your side. It is not on the side of the little guy, that is for sure. We can pretend and act as if we have our hands over our eyes for some months and say it just didn't work out that we could do anything, really. So the market system works. If it costs $50 to fill your tank, that is the way the market is. God bless you. See you tomorrow. Good luck, by the way.

Or when you find the 70-percent increase in your home heating fuel and it is 30 below zero and the wind is blowing 40 miles per hour--and yes, it does in some parts of our country--and you are cranking up the furnace to make sure there is enough heat in the house for you, the family, and the kids, so you can go to bed and not freeze, and those who say this is just the free market, good for you, God bless you, keep that furnace high, but you have to make it a priority to pay the heating bill. It is not our fault the heating bill is so high. Congress decided not to do anything.

By the way, now it is December and the Congress is not in session anymore, and it is, you know, good luck to you. God bless you. Go back and forth to the post office and visit a little bit about how high the prices are, but nobody is going to help you much.

I don't believe we are a country that can do without oil. We produce oil in my State. I support the oil industry in many areas. I believe we ought to produce more in this country. I believe we are dangerously addicted to foreign oil. It is unusual, to say the least, that one- fourth of the world's oil is consumed in this country every day. We share this globe with 6.5 billion people, and in this country alone we have a claim on one-fourth of all the oil that is consumed.

It is a peculiar thing that somehow given how this planet is put together, there is this little area halfway around the world covered with sand where most of the oil deposits exist, and the largest deposits are in countries called Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. That is a curious and strange thing and one that is also dangerous for us.

We have become so dependent on that supply of oil--and now I am not talking about the price and windfall profits of domestic companies; I am talking about the dangerous addiction we have to foreign oil. If we do not as a country decide we will try to find a way to break this addiction--I am not suggesting we will not always dig and drill--but if our energy policy is just digging and drilling, that is a ``yesterday forever'' policy and it is one that is destined for failure.

We have to become independent in terms of our energy needs, particularly of those troubled countries in the Middle East. I find it fascinating we have such a relationship with the Saudis. The Saudis have the largest reserves of oil in the world. Under their sands exist the world's largest oil reserves. Because of that, even our foreign policy is altered.

I have spoken in the Senate many times about the 28 redacted pages in the 2002 December report about the September 11 terrorist attack in this country. Fifteen of the 19 terrorists were Saudi citizens. The combined Intelligence Committees of the House and the Senate did this first investigation of September 11. They sent it to the White House. The White House published the book, but 28 pages were redacted. What were they? Twenty-eight pages, according to published reports and according to my colleague Senator Graham, in his book, had to do with the Saudis. Why? Because all that we do with the Saudis, all we do with them in foreign policy, even with respect to this issue of terrorist attacks, has to do with our incredible dependence on Saudi oil and on Middle East oil.

This is dangerous for our country. We have to remove ourselves from that, remove that addiction. How do we do that? There is a wide range of things. We passed energy legislation in this Congress. It is not great, but it is not bad. I voted for it. It moves us in the right direction. That is the immediate term. In the short term, we are confronted with this unusual price for a barrel of oil which converts to an unusual price for a gallon of gasoline. Every American driving up to the gas pump today understands the shock value of having to pay these prices. Every American trying to heat their home this winter will understand the same shock value.

They will and should ask the question, Is anybody doing anything about this, or is this an appropriate form of a new market system we do not understand? The answer is, the Congress should do something about it. Again, let me say there are all kinds of reasons and excuses and especially distortions that are moved around on these subjects. Let me give an example of one.

We have people who say, look, the reason we did not have more oil flowing, which would relate to supply and demand, with the supply- demand curve, if you have more supply going in against a fixed demand or an increasing demand, a greater supply means lower price. The reason we do not have that is because of the eggheaded environmentalists, they would claim. They have prevented oil companies from building refineries, so shame on them, that is the problem today. We do not have enough refineries.

We hear that in the Senate and the House and all political debate, over and over. It is a branding technique, the notion if you say it often enough, people will start believing it: 150 refineries have been closed in the past 25 years and no new refineries have been sited in the same period.

The fact is most of the evidence points to the oil companies themselves as making the decisions about closing refineries. They have decided to shut down existing refineries and decrease output as a business matter. They do that following big mergers and also restructuring. The big integrated oil companies control a majority of the Nation's refined oil and gas products. In many cases, they control this process from the point of pulling oil from the ground to pumping it into your gas tank.

The fact is, there is an interesting amount of evidence about this issue of refineries. We had an Energy Committee hearing about this. We had three experts who knew about all this. Why are there not more refineries being built? Because the margins are not higher, is why. That is from the experts. It has nothing do with environmentalists. The margins are not higher. So when oil companies restructure and merge, they close refineries because they want to. The fact is there is a wealth of information about this refinery issue that suggests this is not about environmentalists; it is about the oil companies deciding in their own interests how much refining capacity they want and what kind of margins they want from refining.

My point is very simple. We have a serious problem in this country with an energy crisis. It is not getting better. We have a dislocation, terrible pain, for a lot of working folks, a lot of low-income people, not just to drive their cars but also to heat their homes as we approach this winter. And they will ask the question, and should, is anyone going to care about this? Will somebody do something about it? Will someone be on our side and stand for us?

We will have some people say this is the free market and if you do not like it, tough luck, we do not intend to intervene in a free market.

Then there are others, such as me, who say that is nonsense, this is not a free market, this is not fair competition. A free market economy is about competition. Easy entry, easy exit, competition around price. There is no free market here. We have OPEC, oil companies, and rampant speculation. They have created a distortion of so-called market prices.

The American people deserve a Senate that will stand in at times when oil prices reach $60 and $70 a barrel and we have profits that represent the biggest profits in the history of corporate America. The American people deserve a Senate that will stand up and say, We are on your side and we will do something about it when the market system does not work.

America can do better. The fact is we can do better on energy policy. We can do better on policy I just described. We owe it to people to intervene in circumstances where we must intervene. The Senate should make it a priority to consider this kind of legislation.

We have meandered our way through this year. There has been no discernible pattern, no discernible journey that makes much sense to me. But in this Congress we have wandered

around, place to place. We did not pass our appropriations bills, intervened in a whole range of issues, including the Terri Schiavo case. I could go on and on and on. We intervened in all the other issues.

The key things most people are concerned about in their daily lives, that they talk about at the supper table when they sit around and have something to eat together--this is one of those key issues. What is the price of energy? Can we afford it? If not, what do we do?

The proposal I have offered with some of my colleagues for a windfall profits recapture would not injure any major integrated oil company under any set of circumstances because they would not have to pay it. They would choose not to pay it if, in fact, they are using their windfall profit to explore for more oil and build more refineries; and if not, they would choose to repay part of that profit in a form of rebate back to their consumers.

My hope remains in these coming days as the Congress lurches toward the end of this year, that Congress and the Senate, particularly, will find time to do what is the bull's eye, the agenda the American people want, to deal with things that affect them every day in a very significant way.

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

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

Last Friday I was in the Senate briefly and indicated we were introducing legislation that repeals the law that was passed in the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina that took the limitation on the credit cards carried by Federal employees from $2,500 to $250,000. That is right, the bill that responded with emergency funding for Katrina also included a provision that increased the limit on Federal credit cards that are carried by some 300,000 Federal workers, increased the top limit from $2,500 per purchase for $250,000 per purchase.

When I discovered that, I thought, that is not right, that cannot be believable. It, in fact, was. I discovered the White House had requested that increase in the limit on Federal credit cards be provided.

In fact, the person who came down to brief the Congress on that was Mr. Safavian, top procurement officer at the Office of Management and Budget, who was arrested 2 weeks later by the FBI and now has been indicted. But all this happened some weeks ago. The credit card limit went from $2,500 to $250,000 on the credit card that is carried by a Federal worker, and there are 390,000 or so around.

I introduced with my colleague Senator Wyden a bill that would restore it back to the $2,500 limit. My point was, this is nuts. It is goofy to put a $250,000 limit on a credit card. It is unbelievable. I pointed out the Inspector General's reports and also the GAO reports about abuse of credit cards by some Federal employees.

One Federal employee put breast enlargements for his girlfriend on a Federal credit card. Buying liquor, trips, guns, unbelievable expenditures in the abuse found by the GAO, and we will increase the top limit on the credit cards to $250,000?

I introduced that legislation and I am pleased to say on Monday of this week the Office of Management and Budget and the White House announced they support the legislation to take this back to $2,500. So it is actually $2,500 plus an emergency $15,000 post September 11, that happened after September 11, which is what we would take this back to. The White House has said they want to rescind the $250,000 and take it back to $2,500.

That is the legislation I have introduced with my colleague Senator Wyden. My hope is at the first opportunity, given the support of the White House, that I can offer this as an amendment, perhaps not to this bill, because I think we are limited in amendments and we are probably on auto pilot with respect to the amendments. The very next piece of legislation, it would be my intention to offer that.

As I said, that will have the support of the White House. Without it, of course, the law still exists. It was put in law at the request of the White House to take the top limit from $2,500 to $250,000. I want to take it back. The White House says they want it back. So let's decide here in the Senate to put it on a bill and get it to conference and get this sort of thing done.

Let me also say to OMB and the White House, I appreciate their candor and their willingness to do the right thing. Everyone understood what was requested was a mistake. It should not have been requested. The decision now is to change the law and to make it where it ought to be, a $2,500 limit on the credit cards.

Yes, we have to respond in a significant way to Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes that might encourage somebody or require somebody in certain circumstances to have a larger purchase, but there are plenty of ways to accommodate that without risking the waste, fraud, and abuse that will go with having credit cards with $250,000 limits.

Our legislation is pending. I make the point I appreciate the administration deciding to do a U-turn on this policy. We will offer this legislation in the Senate as soon as we are eligible to offer it on perhaps the next piece of legislation brought to the floor.

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

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wyden pertaining to the introduction of S. 1805 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. President, Senator Wyden and I are introducing legislation today to change a provision in law that was attendant to the emergency supplemental passed recently dealing with hurricane Katrina. That provision in law increased the amount of money that would be available to be spent on a Government credit card from $2,500 to $250,000. That is right--$250,000 for purchases on a Government credit card.

Here is what a Government credit card looks like. There are about 390,000--somewhere in that neighborhood--390,000 Government credit cards in the country. I have three GAO reports that describe substantial abuse and misuse of these Government credit cards.

The proposal that passed this Congress attendant to the hurricane emergency relief says that on these credit cards, the limit will go from $2,500 to $250,000. Let me describe for a moment what the GAO found in various investigations.

What has been charged to a Government credit card? Hiring prostitutes, gambling, breast-enlargement surgery--yes, it was for a girlfriend of somebody who had a Government credit card--cigars, mounting a deer head, jewelry, wine, and the list goes on.

Now the limit goes to $250,000. We aim to take it back to $2,500. It will still have the emergency capabilities that existed since 9/11 which will allow a $15,000 limit under emergencies.

We had a hearing at which a professor from GW Law School who is an expert in this area of Government procurement testified. Here is what he said about the $250,000 credit card limit:

The potential for abuse is staggering.

Everybody knows that: ``The potential for abuse is staggering.'' If you don't believe it, take a look at the GAO reports with respect to the abuse when the limit was $2,500. Now it is $250,000 for a credit card purchase? Who is going to stand up for the interest of the taxpayers?

This fellow, Mr. Safavian, was the top contracting officer for purchases of

the Federal Government. He just said several weeks ago about the $250,000:

This guidance--

That he and OMB would provide--

This guidance helps make sure that adequate management

controls are in place to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are

spent efficiently and responsibly in support of disaster

victims.

Meaning the new $250,000 on credit cards will be spent efficiently and responsibly. That is from David Safavian, Director of the Office of Procurement and Policy. The problem is, Mr. Safavian was arrested by the FBI on September 19 and charged with lying to an ethics officer and so on. He is the guy who gave us the assurance that taking the credit card from $2,500 to $250,000 will be just fine because there are all these limits in place and it will be spent wisely and efficiently. Yes, and the Moon is made of green cheese.

Who is going to believe this, especially when we have the GAO reports that show past abuses with even the $2,500 limit, which includes the hiring of prostitutes on Government credit cards? It includes breast- enlargement surgery on Government credit cards. When on Earth will people wake up and start thinking?

So Senator Wyden and myself are today introducing legislation to say, How about let's sober up and think through this the right way on behalf of the American taxpayers.

We want to help hurricane victims, no question about that. But I do not want people walking around with credit cards that have a $250,000 limit that say U.S. Government on them, in a way that the GAO says puts us at risk and in a way that Government procurement experts tell us is very dangerous for the American taxpayer.

I am pleased to do this with my colleague, Senator Wyden. For the past several years, Senator Wyden and I have taken a look at a whole range of wasteful issues. I might just say that Senator Wyden and I, a while back, found deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there was a plan to create what was called a futures market for terrorism. I think they were preparing to spend another $8 million on it. And, yes, they were going to actually have a futures market for terrorism so that people could make wagers buying futures contracts on things such as how many American soldiers will be killed in the next year, will the King of Jordan be assassinated within the next year. One could actually wager and make money by betting on those kinds of things.

Senator Wyden and I blew that wide open. The next day, both Secretary Rumsfeld and the President said they did not know it was going on. They shut it down and it is all over. In my judgment, that was unbelievably stupid as a public policy, whoever allowed that to happen. It is now shut down.

A lot of bad things happen in circumstances where no one is watching. In this case, with credit cards that have a $250,000 limit, there is something fundamentally wrong with that. I do not know who put that in the emergency supplemental. It should not have been there. But it was there. We aim to repeal it on behalf of the American taxpayer.

I would be happy to yield to my friend from Oregon.

Mr. President, in answer to the Senator's request, he is asking that of perhaps 390,000 credit cards that exist in the possession of Federal workers, do we know how many have this $250,000 limit? We do not have the foggiest idea.

The Senator indicated we want to help people who are dealing with the hurricane. Our interest is not in pulling the rug out from under people who are working and trying to respond to the devastation of these hurricanes, but I am not interested in paving the way for additional waste, fraud, and abuse with the misuse of Federal credit cards.

Yes, there are thousands of dedicated public servants who will use these responsibly, but increasing the limit from $2,500 to $250,000, in my judgment, is fundamentally irresponsible, and we aim to take it back with this amendment and aim to offer this amendment to the next supplemental that deals with this hurricane.

I will yield the floor so my colleague from Oregon can have the floor, and I would like to propound a question at some point later when he finishes his statement.

Mr. President, I conclude by pointing out that, yes, others have described their concern about the $250,000, and some have talked about a $50,000 limit and other approaches. Senator Wyden and I say that we ought to go back to the old limit, $2,500 per credit card per transaction. That is why we introduced this legislation and hope that our colleagues will agree.

Again, this is what the credit card looks like. There are nearly 400,000 that are possessed by Federal workers. We do not allege that these are not dedicated public servants. We do allege that at least in some instances, according to three GAO reports, there have been massive abuses. These are just a few.

I put up another chart about them: Liquor, gambling, mounting a deer head, cigars, ski clothes and diamond rings, not to mention hiring prostitutes and breast enlargements--all put on Government credit cards.

Does that make a person look and pay attention? Of course. Should that be happening? Of course not.

The $250,000 limit on the credit card, this is what Professor Yukins said, who is an expert in these areas:

[T]he Administration has announced various protective

measures. . . . It appears, however, that those additional

protections will not address the core problem with the new

procurement exceptions: Under the new law, agencies will be

able to spend billions of relief dollars without any of the

competition, transparency or other legal rules that normally

protect our procurement system.

I ask my colleagues how this got into the supplemental bill, taking it from a $2,500 to a $250,000 limit on a Federal Government credit card. How did that happen? When one looks at that they say: Wait a second, we are going to increase the limit on a credit card from $2,500 to $250,000? What on Earth are you thinking about?

Well, it came from the White House. The White House made the specific request, believing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina people were going to need emergency capabilities to do these kinds of purchases. So the White House said they wanted an increase to $250,000. The person they sent down to brief staff in the Senate of how this would work and why it is necessary was Mr. David Safavian. He was the head of all procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget in the White House.

What did he tell us publicly and what did he tell the American people? ``This guidance''--guidance about procurement with the $250,000 limit on a credit card:

This guidance helps make sure that adequate management

controls are in place to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are

spent efficiently and responsibly in support of disaster

victims.

That was said 2 weeks before Mr. Safavian's arrest by the FBI for lying. This is the person who came to brief the Senate staff about why the $250,000 limit on credit cards was necessary.

It not only is not necessary, it is terribly unwise. In my judgment, unless changed, from this we will see a dramatic amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. I guarantee this proposal to increase credit card limits for Federal employees to $250,000 is the wrong way.

Senator Wyden and I are going to do everything we can to see if we cannot in more sober moments persuade everyone here that we ought to go back to the previous limits and that we ought to enforce them the right way. The GAO's reports say that even with the $2,500 limits, there are serious problems with the use of these Federal credit cards.

That is our proposal. I want to thank my colleague from Oregon with whom I have worked on a number of occasions on many areas of Federal waste. Yes, this is a big old government, a big bureaucracy. There are wonderful people who work in it, and it does wonderful things. There are also areas of waste that make me furious. Senator Wyden and I have worked on that in a number of areas, in a number of ways, and I hope we can continue to do that. This is a preventive way to try to restore that $2,500 as a limit on Federal credit cards.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Senator Wyden and I are introducing legislation today to change a provision in law that was attendant to the emergency supplemental passed recently dealing with hurricane Katrina. That provision in law increased the amount of money that would be available to be spent on a Government credit card from $2,500 to $250,000. That is right--$250,000 for purchases on a Government credit card.

Here is what a Government credit card looks like. There are about 390,000--somewhere in that neighborhood--390,000 Government credit cards in the country. I have three GAO reports that describe substantial abuse and misuse of these Government credit cards.

The proposal that passed this Congress attendant to the hurricane emergency relief says that on these credit cards, the limit will go from $2,500 to $250,000. Let me describe for a moment what the GAO found in various investigations.

What has been charged to a Government credit card? Hiring prostitutes, gambling, breast-enlargement surgery--yes, it was for a girlfriend of somebody who had a Government credit card--cigars, mounting a deer head, jewelry, wine, and the list goes on.

Now the limit goes to $250,000. We aim to take it back to $2,500. It will still have the emergency capabilities that existed since 9/11 which will allow a $15,000 limit under emergencies.

We had a hearing at which a professor from GW Law School who is an expert in this area of Government procurement testified. Here is what he said about the $250,000 credit card limit:

The potential for abuse is staggering.

Everybody knows that: ``The potential for abuse is staggering.'' If you don't believe it, take a look at the GAO reports with respect to the abuse when the limit was $2,500. Now it is $250,000 for a credit card purchase? Who is going to stand up for the interest of the taxpayers?

This fellow, Mr. Safavian, was the top contracting officer for purchases of

the Federal Government. He just said several weeks ago about the $250,000:

This guidance--

That he and OMB would provide--

This guidance helps make sure that adequate management

controls are in place to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are

spent efficiently and responsibly in support of disaster

victims.

Meaning the new $250,000 on credit cards will be spent efficiently and responsibly. That is from David Safavian, Director of the Office of Procurement and Policy. The problem is, Mr. Safavian was arrested by the FBI on September 19 and charged with lying to an ethics officer and so on. He is the guy who gave us the assurance that taking the credit card from $2,500 to $250,000 will be just fine because there are all these limits in place and it will be spent wisely and efficiently. Yes, and the Moon is made of green cheese.

Who is going to believe this, especially when we have the GAO reports that show past abuses with even the $2,500 limit, which includes the hiring of prostitutes on Government credit cards? It includes breast- enlargement surgery on Government credit cards. When on Earth will people wake up and start thinking?

So Senator Wyden and myself are today introducing legislation to say, How about let's sober up and think through this the right way on behalf of the American taxpayers.

We want to help hurricane victims, no question about that. But I do not want people walking around with credit cards that have a $250,000 limit that say U.S. Government on them, in a way that the GAO says puts us at risk and in a way that Government procurement experts tell us is very dangerous for the American taxpayer.

I am pleased to do this with my colleague, Senator Wyden. For the past several years, Senator Wyden and I have taken a look at a whole range of wasteful issues. I might just say that Senator Wyden and I, a while back, found deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there was a plan to create what was called a futures market for terrorism. I think they were preparing to spend another $8 million on it. And, yes, they were going to actually have a futures market for terrorism so that people could make wagers buying futures contracts on things such as how many American soldiers will be killed in the next year, will the King of Jordan be assassinated within the next year. One could actually wager and make money by betting on those kinds of things.

Senator Wyden and I blew that wide open. The next day, both Secretary Rumsfeld and the President said they did not know it was going on. They shut it down and it is all over. In my judgment, that was unbelievably stupid as a public policy, whoever allowed that to happen. It is now shut down.

A lot of bad things happen in circumstances where no one is watching. In this case, with credit cards that have a $250,000 limit, there is something fundamentally wrong with that. I do not know who put that in the emergency supplemental. It should not have been there. But it was there. We aim to repeal it on behalf of the American taxpayer.

I would be happy to yield to my friend from Oregon.

Mr. President, in answer to the Senator's request, he is asking that of perhaps 390,000 credit cards that exist in the possession of Federal workers, do we know how many have this $250,000 limit? We do not have the foggiest idea.

The Senator indicated we want to help people who are dealing with the hurricane. Our interest is not in pulling the rug out from under people who are working and trying to respond to the devastation of these hurricanes, but I am not interested in paving the way for additional waste, fraud, and abuse with the misuse of Federal credit cards.

Yes, there are thousands of dedicated public servants who will use these responsibly, but increasing the limit from $2,500 to $250,000, in my judgment, is fundamentally irresponsible, and we aim to take it back with this amendment and aim to offer this amendment to the next supplemental that deals with this hurricane.

I will yield the floor so my colleague from Oregon can have the floor, and I would like to propound a question at some point later when he finishes his statement.

Mr. President, I conclude by pointing out that, yes, others have described their concern about the $250,000, and some have talked about a $50,000 limit and other approaches. Senator Wyden and I say that we ought to go back to the old limit, $2,500 per credit card per transaction. That is why we introduced this legislation and hope that our colleagues will agree.

Again, this is what the credit card looks like. There are nearly 400,000 that are possessed by Federal workers. We do not allege that these are not dedicated public servants. We do allege that at least in some instances, according to three GAO reports, there have been massive abuses. These are just a few.

I put up another chart about them: Liquor, gambling, mounting a deer head, cigars, ski clothes and diamond rings, not to mention hiring prostitutes and breast enlargements--all put on Government credit cards.

Does that make a person look and pay attention? Of course. Should that be happening? Of course not.

The $250,000 limit on the credit card, this is what Professor Yukins said, who is an expert in these areas:

[T]he Administration has announced various protective

measures. . . . It appears, however, that those additional

protections will not address the core problem with the new

procurement exceptions: Under the new law, agencies will be

able to spend billions of relief dollars without any of the

competition, transparency or other legal rules that normally

protect our procurement system.

I ask my colleagues how this got into the supplemental bill, taking it from a $2,500 to a $250,000 limit on a Federal Government credit card. How did that happen? When one looks at that they say: Wait a second, we are going to increase the limit on a credit card from $2,500 to $250,000? What on Earth are you thinking about?

Well, it came from the White House. The White House made the specific request, believing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina people were going to need emergency capabilities to do these kinds of purchases. So the White House said they wanted an increase to $250,000. The person they sent down to brief staff in the Senate of how this would work and why it is necessary was Mr. David Safavian. He was the head of all procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget in the White House.

What did he tell us publicly and what did he tell the American people? ``This guidance''--guidance about procurement with the $250,000 limit on a credit card:

This guidance helps make sure that adequate management

controls are in place to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are

spent efficiently and responsibly in support of disaster

victims.

That was said 2 weeks before Mr. Safavian's arrest by the FBI for lying. This is the person who came to brief the Senate staff about why the $250,000 limit on credit cards was necessary.

It not only is not necessary, it is terribly unwise. In my judgment, unless changed, from this we will see a dramatic amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. I guarantee this proposal to increase credit card limits for Federal employees to $250,000 is the wrong way.

Senator Wyden and I are going to do everything we can to see if we cannot in more sober moments persuade everyone here that we ought to go back to the previous limits and that we ought to enforce them the right way. The GAO's reports say that even with the $2,500 limits, there are serious problems with the use of these Federal credit cards.

That is our proposal. I want to thank my colleague from Oregon with whom I have worked on a number of occasions on many areas of Federal waste. Yes, this is a big old government, a big bureaucracy. There are wonderful people who work in it, and it does wonderful things. There are also areas of waste that make me furious. Senator Wyden and I have worked on that in a number of areas, in a number of ways, and I hope we can continue to do that. This is a preventive way to try to restore that $2,500 as a limit on Federal credit cards.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for a few minutes.

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

Mr. President, I introduced a piece of legislation a few weeks ago with my colleagues, Senator Dodd and Senator Boxer, dealing with the issue of a windfall profits tax on the major integrated oil companies in this country. The proceeds of this profits tax would be used to give rebates back to consumers who are now paying extraordinary prices to fill up the tank of their car and will be paying extraordinary prices this winter for things such as natural gas and home heating fuel.

Well, this proposal for a windfall profits tax in order to capture some of that windfall or excess profits and move it back to consumers has drawn a fair amount of criticism from, of course, one of the largest and wealthiest industries in our country. I expect that and understand that.

An op-ed piece this past weekend by James Glassman is typical of that. James Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and he wrote an article that said:

Look, the free market is working. The markets are working, he says. He is very critical, of course, of the legislation I have introduced. ``The markets are working.''

Well, I decided I would bring this over. This is the James Glassman, by the way, who wrote the book in year 2000, ``Dow 36000.'' He was predicting the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to go to 36,000. It did not quite work so well. But among the pundits here in Washington, DC, there is no such thing as trying to track back to find out who is right or wrong, you just keep writing. The Dow at 36,000? Yeah?

The oil markets are working? Sure they are.

Let me show you what is happening with these markets.

First, this was in the Washington Post yesterday. It shows there is a 46-percent increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline for the crude oil producer since last September.

That is for the producers. It shows a 255-percent increase for refiners over the past year. Incidentally, in most cases these are the same companies. Because of the behemoth mergers of the 1990s, giant oil companies were formed. Many of these are integrated companies that do everything from pulling oil from the ground to putting it in the car.

What has happened? Well, let me give you some statistics.

The 10 largest oil companies earned revenues last year of over $1 trillion and had net profits of over $100 billion. These are last year's numbers. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, earned more than $25 billion last year and spent $9.9 billion of it to buy back its stock. In addition, it has kept $18.5 billion in cash. Profits for the largest 10 oil companies jumped more than 30 percent last year over the year before.

Now, there is an exception to this, because these profits are going to look minuscule as compared to the profits they are getting this year. The price of oil has gone up another $30 a barrel. It is $30 a barrel above the record profits the major oil companies had last year.

So while people drive to the gas pump and pay through the nose, this notion of ``fill 'er up'' no longer just pertains to the gas tank on the car, it pertains to the treasuries of the major oil companies. And are they being filled up.

Now, what is happening with all of that money? Well, let me read a BusinessWeek article that says: ``Why Isn't Big Oil Drilling More?'' Interesting. One would expect, as Mr. Glassman argues: Gosh, if the oil companies can just get rich, they'll look for more oil. Everybody wins. Right?

BusinessWeek: ``Why Isn't Big Oil Drilling More?''

Well, the answer in the article was:

. . . by cutting the number of rivals, mergers have made

it easier for them to get away with that reluctance to spend.

Far from raising money to pursue opportunities, oil

companies are paying down debt, buying back shares, and

hoarding cash.

Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have

preferred to buy rivals--``drilling for oil on Wall Street,''

as they call it.

So you have a massive amount of money that is going to the treasuries of the big oil companies. And they are ``drilling for oil on Wall Street.''

Well, I have news for them. There ain't no oil on Wall Street. The megamergers of the 1990s, the creation of these behemoth organizations now have us in a situation where they are getting extraordinarily wealthy with, in my judgment, windfall or excess profits.

The American consumer is paying through the nose, and these companies are profiting beyond that which we have ever seen in corporate America.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission head says she doubts new laws dealing with profiteering would be effective. It is not surprising to me. The Federal Trade Commission, as a result of a provision I put in the new energy bill that was signed by the President, is required by law to investigate the pricing of oil and gas. But do any of us think this tiger without teeth called the Federal Trade Commission is very interested in doing that? No.

And if you wonder, take a look at the writer's article of 22 September 2005. Before they have even taken a hard look at all these things, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission is taking the typical probusiness line.

Let me say this: The proposal we have offered for a windfall or excess profits tax, and using it to provide a rebate to consumers, is one that makes a lot of sense. This is not the old windfall profits tax of a couple decades ago.

This says: If the excess profits that integrated oil companies are getting for selling a barrel of oil above $40 are being invested back into the ground to develop the nation's energy supply or invested to build refineries, then they will not bear the burden of this recapture. Our proposal is simple: There will be no recapture and no tax if this windfall profit is being used to explore for more oil or to increase refinery capacity.

But I read to you the BusinessWeek article describing what they are doing. What are they doing? They are using this extra money to buy back their shares of stock, to pay down their debt, to hoard cash--in Exxon's case, in excess of $15 billion. Of course, that is a ready reserve with which to take a look at new companies to buy. That is the reference to ``drilling for oil on Wall Street.''

Well, I suppose there are many in this Congress, perhaps in this Senate, who share Mr. Glassman's views. After all, he comes from the American Enterprise Institute. They hand out a lot of paper and kill a lot of trees to dispense information here in the Senate about the market system. But there is no free market in oil. What you have

with respect to oil are a few OPEC countries in the Middle East whose ministers sit around a big table and talk about production and price.

In addition to that, you now have behemoth oil companies that have the capability to exercise much more impact on market prices and supply. In addition to that, you have futures markets which are supposed to provide liquidity but which now are playgrounds for speculators. You have speculators. You have bigger oil companies. You have the OPEC countries. And we have free marketers talking about a free market? What are they smoking? There is no free market here.

What is happening is the American consumer is being taken advantage of. They are paying extraordinarily high prices for gasoline. While people go to the gas pump and put 15 gallons of gas in their tank, and pay $50 for it, and people this winter will have a 70-percent increase in natural gas prices for heating their home, we have some of the largest corporations in this country profiting in an unusual, unwarranted way.

I say simply this: If these oil companies are using those profits to find more oil, that is one thing. If they are not--and they are not; to wit, the article from BusinessWeek--then, in my judgment, some of that excess or windfall profit ought to be recaptured and sent back to consumers.

Let me say, my State produces oil. So I have some people in my State who are a little cranky about what I proposed. I do not aim to hurt the oil industry. If, in fact, there was a free market I would not be here. But it is also true that consumers in my State are bearing the pain.

Let me describe my consumers in North Dakota. We drive exactly twice as much per person as New Yorkers do. We use twice as much gasoline per person than the average New Yorker. Why is that the case? Well, in New York, if they are going to see an aunt or an uncle in New Jersey, it is a big trip. You pack an emergency kit. You go get your car serviced. You talk about it for several months and then drive 40 miles to see the relatives. That is a big deal out East.

Not in the Midwest, not in the northern Great Plains. Forty miles is nothing. People drive 200 miles one way for a meeting, and then drive 200 miles back in the same day. That is why in our part of the country, in a State such as North Dakota that is 10 times the size of the State of Massachusetts in land mass with 640,000 people spread out over that land mass--we drive twice as much as New Yorkers.

What does that mean? Well, when the price of gasoline doubles, it hurts us twice as much as it does those in States where they do not use gasoline as much as we do.

So I recognize the oil industry would like to keep all this going: $3, $3.50 a gallon. By the way, this all started before there was any hurricane. I saw on the news last night a sophisticated news report about all this, and it was linking the price of oil to the hurricanes. The fact is, the price of oil was up over $30 a barrel above last year's price--at which point you had record profits in the industry-- long before Hurricane Katrina. So this is not about hurricanes.

The question is, will Congress care? Will Congress do something about it? We spend a lot of time on things that do not have much of an impact on the American people. I wonder if for a moment we can spend some time on something that does. There is a tendency around here to treat serious things way too lightly, and then to treat light things way too seriously. This is a serious issue. A whole lot of folks cannot afford to pay this. They cannot pay the cost of $3-a-gallon gasoline or have a 70-percent increase in natural gas prices or have a 40-percent increase in the price of home heating fuel to keep warm in the winter.

The question is, does Congress care? Does the Senate care? We will have people come here in blue suits saying: This is a free market. This is not a free market. Again, if this were a free market, I would not be on the floor talking about it. This is a market with clogged arteries, clogged in a manner that is horribly unfair to the average American, and clogged in a way that provides handsome profits, unparalleled profits, to the oil industry.

But let me say, once again, lest others misrepresent what we are proposing, if that industry is using these profits to find oil in the ground, or above ground on refineries to process oil, they would not be affected by a windfall profits tax. But if they are not--and they are not, in most cases--then they would bear the burden of a recapture of a portion of these windfall or excess profits, and they would be sent back to the consumers in this country, as a matter of basic fairness.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this country is reminded virtually every morning that we are at war. This morning we learned that additional Americans--these, I believe, civilian contractors--have been killed in the country of Iraq.

I have been listening in recent days to the discussions in the Senate and discussions from President Bush about where we find ourselves and what our obligations are. We not only are at war, we have just experienced the most significant natural disaster in the history of this country along the gulf coast, with a million people displaced from their homes. Yet the discussion in recent days from the President and others is that nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Our agenda is the same.

I went back and pulled out a speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fireside chat on April 28, 1942. I want to read what the discussion was by someone who provided, I thought, great leadership to this country at a time of war. He said:

As we here at home contemplate our own duties, our own

responsibilities . . . our soldiers and sailors are members

of well disciplined units. But they are still and forever

individuals--free individuals. They are farmers, and workers,

businessmen, professional men, artists, clerks. They are the

United States of America. That is why they fight. We too are

the United States of America. That is why we must work and

sacrifice. It is for them. It is for us. It is for victory.

That is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The thing is, leadership is not about accounting or numbers. Leadership is calling this country together to say we are all in this together; yes, in a war, and in a response to a devastating hurricane. Yet we continue to hear around this Chamber and at the White House: No, things haven't changed. The agenda is the same. More tax cuts. Repeal the death tax--which, incidentally, doesn't exist. There is no death tax.

But it is still a priority. We must repeal the death tax; tax work, exempt investment. Nothing really has changed.

The thing is, perhaps the President's agenda hasn't changed, but everything else has changed. Some years ago, 4\1/2\ years ago, we had a robust economy. It was morning in America, as it would have been portrayed in 1984 in the Reagan commercials: ``Morning in America.'' We had budget surpluses, we were told, and things were growing and we had budget surpluses that would last 10 years. So the President, the new President, said let's provide very large tax cuts for a long period, the bulk of which went to the highest income earners in America.

Some of us, and I, on this Senate floor, said maybe we should be a little bit conservative. What if something happens? After all, these budget surpluses don't yet exist. They are projections. What if they do not exist? What if they do not materialize? What if something happens in the interim?

``Oh, be happy, don't worry,'' the President and others said. So the Congress passed very large tax cuts, and it was not long before some things happened. We found ourselves in a recession. Then, very shortly we found ourselves victims of a devastating attack by terrorists on 9/ 11/2001. Following that, we found ourselves in a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and then we saw, instead of budget surpluses, the largest deficits in history begin to grow in this country. Even as that happened, we saw the dependency of this country on foreign oil continue to increase to now over 60 percent and headed toward 69 percent. Following that, of course, a natural disaster unlike any we have seen in this country, with a million people displaced, called Hurricane Katrina.

The response from the President? Nothing has really changed with respect to his fiscal policy or his plans. We have spent over $200 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of it borrowed, none of it paid for. It is anticipated we will spend somewhere close to $200 billion with respect to Katrina and the natural disaster, the devastating disaster. The question is, What do we do to pay for that? The President says we can manage that. We can manage that.

We send soldiers abroad and ask for their sacrifice, but we ask nothing of the American people at the same time: Be happy.

There are legitimate questions being asked about the response to Hurricane Katrina. But in my judgment we face a time when the question is not, Are we doing things right? The question is, Are we doing the right things? Are we on the right track? As I said, it is not about accounting; it is about leadership. It is about asking a country to join in common purpose and asking a country to sacrifice. Sometimes leadership asks people to do things that are not popular at the moment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted a country out of a depression and lifted the spirits of the country in the middle of the Second World War. He did that by being brutally honest with straight talk. He said to the American people: Here is what you must sacrifice. And he said: Sacrifice is a privilege, when in this country, together, we go to war with a need to be victorious over the oppression of the Nazis.

So he asked the American people for sacrifice. That is what leadership is about. It is about being honest. It is about straight talk, which we have too little of today.

The truth is, this country is off course and we need to put it on course. The truth is, we have made some mistakes, all of us. We started a war in Iraq because we said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It appears there were not. The intelligence community provided this information to us with great certainty, but now it turns out it was wrong. The person who led the Central Intelligence Agency during that period was given the Medal of Freedom after he retired, for reasons I will never understand.

But we are where we are. We now must ask more of the American people. In my judgment, we should not just ask of our soldiers for their sacrifice. We are where we are and we must ask the American people for their sacrifice as well.

We had the largest tax cuts in the history of this country because we were expected to have 10 years of budget surplus that was unprecedented. It turns out that was not accurate. It turns out things happened that were not anticipated by this President and others, and the result is we now have the highest deficits in history, not the highest surplus in history. But now we are told that the tax cuts were not for the purpose of giving back the surplus. That is what they were designed to do, and that is what we were told they were in 2001, but now we are told the tax cuts are really about stimulating the economy. So nothing ever really changes and now we have a hurricane, a devastating hurricane that hits the gulf coast of this country displacing 1 million people, perhaps costing up to $200 billion.

We need to create kind of a Marshall Plan to rebuild and to tell those folks we want to help you. Surely, if this country can reconstruct the country of Iraq, it can decide it is important to reconstruct this country. Any country that commits the billions of dollars we have to reconstruct the country of Iraq can reconstruct the gulf region of the United States of America. But we can't do that saying nothing has changed and our priority remains tax cuts for America's wealthy.

Cut spending; we should tighten our belt. I will support spending cuts. I believe all of us ought to tighten our belts. But if belt tightening, as it usually does, means withdrawing health care from poor people and the kind of things that hurt most those who are poorest in this country, that, in my judgment, is not advancing America's cause.

Warren Buffett, the second richest man in America and perhaps the world, as far as I know, wrote an op-ed piece and said: By the way, when all these tax cuts proposed by the President are phased in--that is exempting income from investments and taxing work--I will pay a tax rate of one-tenth the tax rate that is paid by the receptionist in my office.

So the question is, Are we willing as a country to sacrifice? Have some things changed? Are we willing to change course? Are we willing to take some risks? Is there some leadership, perhaps in the White House, maybe in this Congress? After all, we are in this together. All of us want the same thing for our country.

I take no pleasure in criticizing the President's program, nor the President and his actions. But I understand that our future is dependent on making right choices now. It is dependent on our deciding to look truth in the eye and to insist the President do the same and understand things have changed. That requires us to adjust course. It requires us to ask of the American people that we have a common purpose together and work together and join together--yes, to support our soldiers, to support those in the gulf region who are rebuilding, to support those in this country who have no health insurance, to support those in this country who are jobless so we lift America up and make America better. That is our responsibility.

That will not happen by a message coming from the White House or from this Congress that nothing has changed, that our responsibility is to continue to press to see if we cannot give higher tax cuts, more tax cuts. At a time when we are borrowing money to fund a war and we are going to borrow money for reconstruction for Iraq, to give more tax cuts for the upper income people in America--why? Because those who do believe that America works when you dump something on top and it filters down--that is called trickle down economics.

I had a guy in North Dakota write me some while ago who said: I have been listening to all this trickle down nonsense for a long time and I ain't even damp.

The fact is, trickle down does not work. What works in this country is percolate up economics. You give the American people something to work with: A job and opportunity and hope.

When America goes to work, America does just fine. But, as I said, you have to look truth in the eye. And when this President says nothing has changed, he is wrong. My hope is that Republicans and Democrats will understand two things: Yes, we need to tighten our belts. Yes, we need to cut some spending. Yes, we need to decide when we are going to have to start paying taxes once again, and that we have a common purpose, and our common purpose

ought to be to work together and march together toward a common goal.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, my colleague from Iowa, Senator Grassley, has offered a second-degree amendment to the amendment I have pending dealing with our trade laws. This amendment is just fine, as far as I am concerned. I hope everyone will support it. It restates what is already in the underlying bill. It reminds me of those days when, as a young boy, I used to buy magic kits and they would have vanishing ink. You would write it and then you wouldn't see it. There was nothing there. So we have these vanishing ink amendments that mean nothing, say nothing, do nothing. I am for it. We apparently will have an opportunity to vote on the Grassley amendment. I hope we will have side-by-side opportunities to vote on the Grassley amendment that does nothing, and then an amendment that does something, something that stands up for the economic interests of the American people.

This is probably one of the only institutions in the entire world in which failure is deemed a success, and the more failure, the more we ought to do of it, according to the philosophy of some here in the Senate.

This chart shows our trade deficits, the red ink. This is the record trade deficit of last year, and it is going to be higher now. This is a description of how much we are buying from abroad more than we are selling abroad and, therefore, a description of how many American jobs are being sent abroad. That is what it means. Every single day--today is Thursday--we buy $2 billion more from other countries in goods and services than we sell to other countries. That means every single day someone outside of this country ends up with a $2 billion claim against America, American assets, American securities, American property.

Does it matter? To some it doesn't. Some think this is wonderful. They are like hogs in a corncrib; they can't get enough of this. Why? Because as we move American jobs overseas and fire American workers and then hire workers in Bangladesh or Indonesia or China, and pay them 33 cents an hour to make bicycles and trinkets and trousers and shirts and shoes, and send them to the big box retailers in America in Toledo and Los Angeles and Chicago and Fargo, the consumer gets to go in and buy an Etch A Sketch for $9.99 or a shirt for $9.99.

What a wonderful thing that is that the consumers get to buy a cheap shirt

made in Indonesia or China, a shirt that used to be made by an American worker who got fired. Because we buy all of that merchandise, goods and services from abroad every day, and because China ships $170 billion more of it to our country in 1 year than it buys from our country, it means American jobs are leaving in wholesale numbers.

So this is what results, massive trade deficits, getting worse and worse, and nobody seems to care. This body, the White House, the entire Congress seems to sleep through it all. It is kind of a ``Rip Van Winkle'' public policy strategy. Why? Because there is not one person here who is going to lose their job over it. There is not one person wearing suspenders, not one person wearing a blue suit or smoking a cigar who is going to lose their job because jobs are outsourced to Indonesia or China. It is working folks. Bob Wills of the Texas Playboys--I have quoted him often in a song from 1941 which says: The little bee sucks the blossom, the big bee gets the honey. The little guy picks the cotton, the big guy gets the money.

So it is all of this red ink for America and jobs moving overseas which is represented as a foundation of injury to American workers and profits to those who can pole-vault over all of those nuances in public policy, such as child labor laws, minimum wages, environmental laws, the right to organize.

Well, the small trade amendment I have offered to this bill that caused such an apoplectic seizure yesterday so that we could not continue to vote, that small trade amendment I offered, does the following: It says there is a trade negotiation going on in a place called Doha. Not many have been to Doha. It is not a secret why trade negotiations are held behind closed doors in Doha because if they held them in any major city in the world there would be traffic jams with protesters, people concerned about what this is doing to their jobs.

There is a negotiation going on in Doha, and in that negotiation other countries have objected to something we have done in this country. We have something called antidumping laws to try to protect American businesses, American farmers, American workers. If other countries decide, look, we are going to target the American marketplace, there is only one American marketplace on this Earth of ours, we are going to target it because we want to go in and dump products at below cost, destroy the domestic industry, and then we will have the entire market to ourselves in the United States. If they try to do that, it is unfair trade. That is unfair trade.

So we have something called antidumping laws that would take action against those countries that try to engage in unfair trade. We also have laws that deal with countervailing duties if a country is deeply subsidizing its product in order to dump it into the U.S. marketplace. So we have protections for American businesses, American workers, American farmers, American ranchers.

At the trade negotiation in Doha, other countries are demanding that we get rid of the protections that exist that would prohibit dumping of products into our marketplace. They demand that we get rid of these protections. Our trade negotiators have said, all right, everything is on the table to be negotiated. It should not be, and I do not agree that it should be, and so I have introduced an amendment that says nothing in this act that funds our U.S. trade ambassador's office or the Commerce Department should allow them or can allow them to engage in negotiations that will weaken the basic protections that exist in this country that require trade fairness.

The White House has issued a veto notice if my amendment should pass. Curious and strange that a provision that stands up for the economic interests of our country would engender a threatened veto from the White House.

The Cato Institute has sent around the following, and they can be counted on, by the way, to provide aggressive support. They have everything except the pompoms to be bona fide cheerleaders. As we get in deeper and deeper trouble, these folks think moral failure represents success. Here is what the Cato Institute says: This amendment--speaking of my amendment--is highly irresponsible, shortsighted, opportunistic, and severely detrimental to the U.S. economic interests and the conduct of U.S. trade and foreign policy.

I do not know, but as I read that work, it seems they do not support my amendment.

The United States hopes to open foreign agricultural, nonagricultural, and service markets. To achieve those goals, it must be willing to reform its agricultural and antidumping policies. What does that mean? The United States must be willing to reform its policies on antidumping and agricultural policies? Interesting, is it not?

This is what the Cato Institute is really saying: We have to get rid of these protections that exist in current law in this country to protect American workers and American business. We have to get rid of that because others do not like it, so let us negotiate it away. If it hurts farmers, so what. I mean, that is the attitude. Talk about elitists. A lot of people throw around the term ``elitists.''

If it hurts farmers and ranchers, so what; just negotiate away the protections that currently exist for farmers and ranchers in international trade, protections incidentally that are seldom implemented because we have trade officials who do not have a will, a backbone, or a nerve. Aside from those anatomical deficiencies, they exist in law. Now we have people who want to negotiate away the basic protections.

My colleague has come to the floor to offer a second-degree amendment, the purpose of which is to kill the basic premise of what I am trying to do. The second-degree amendment is interesting, and I was at first thinking curious, but it is not curious because it is simple. It simply restates that which is in current law. It will do nothing to prevent our negotiators from doing what they say they are able to do in the current Doha negotiations, which is to negotiate away the basic protections that exist for our farmers, our ranchers, our businesses, and our workers.

The Cato Institute further says: If Senator Dorgan is unhappy with the final text of the Doha agreement, should it come to fruition, he can vote against its passage.

Well, one can do that for sure. The only thing one cannot do is they cannot amend it. Why? Because this Congress, with the support of Cato and the President, decided what would be smart for all of us to do is put all of us in a straitjacket and decide beforehand that we will give fast-track trade authority for people to negotiate--in this case in Doha--behind closed doors, in secret, and the product they bring back to this institution will not be able to be amended. We are able to amend almost anything else, including nuclear arms agreements, but trade agreements, no; no, because those are negotiated in secret. And when they come back, they come back under something called fast track. So there are no amendments, even to correct the obvious deficiencies.

We have had almost this exact scenario previously. It occurred in 2002, May 14, my birthday, incidentally. We had an amendment on the floor of the Senate by Senator Dayton and Senator Craig, a bipartisan amendment, that would have done essentially the same thing. It said there is no fast-track authority for any trade agreement that comes back in which our negotiators have negotiated away the basic protections, the antidumping laws and so on, that exist for our farmers, ranchers, and businesses. That passed with 61 votes. It was true then that I believe either Senator Grassley or Senator Baucus offered another amendment that was kind of a cover amendment, and that passed 98 to 0 because it did not particularly mean much. It set up objectives but objectives that are similar to a strainer, enough holes so that whatever one wants to put through it goes through it.

So Senator Grassley now has a second-degree amendment that says: Let us all agree to that which we previously agreed to that does not do anything.

So sign me up. If there is a list, let me be signed up real quick to say: Let me agree to that which was previously agreed to that does nothing. And then we will have a vote on my amendment that says: Let us stand up for the economic interests of this country; let us stand up for the economic interests of businesses and workers and insist to

other countries that the right way to do trade is fair trade. If it is not fair, then every country has a right to use its remedies to address and take action against unfair trade.

I mentioned yesterday we very seldom take any kind of action under any circumstances. We do not ever take trade action. We did once against Europe recently. We slapped the Europeans with tariffs on truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. That scared the devil out of the Europeans. This big old strong country decided to take action against Europe. We are going to single out truffles, Roquefort cheese, and goose liver.

That is hardly the ``John Wayne'' approach to dealing with what we understand and know to be unfair trade.

This represents a crisis. This represents a real problem, and nobody seems to care very much. My amendment is an attempt to prevent further damage in the new negotiations. It is not, as the Cato Institute insists, that I do not believe in trade. I believe in expanded trade. I believe it makes sense to have expanded trade, provided it is fair. I believe trade ought to try to lift other countries up, not press American workers and firms down.

Perhaps there will come a time when we will look back and say: Why did we not understand what this meant to our country? Why did we not understand the danger that buying $2 billion a day from abroad more than we send abroad in exports, the danger that portrayed to our economy? Why did we not understand that? Why did we not catch it? Why did somebody not blow the whistle on it?

My hometown is 400 people, and we had a whistle similar to a lot of hometowns. We have a fire whistle, but it is also used for other purposes. Every noon, the whistle blew in my hometown. Every day at 6 the fire whistle blew in my hometown. Every day at 10 the whistle blew. We had the fire whistle blowing three times in a town of 400 people. Small towns did that to signal that it is 12. Everybody in town should know it is 12, the fire whistle is blowing. We do not have any signals around here.

I would like to see somebody blow a whistle around here at some point. When do you blow the whistle--at a $700 billion, $800 billion, $1 trillion trade deficit in 1 year? We had people doing gymnastic exercises earlier this week because the trade deficit in the past month, I think it was announced last Friday, was only 57-plus-billion dollars in 1 single month, the fifth worst trade deficit in history, and people said: What a great thing that is. It actually improved a little from the month before momentarily.

My only point is, I think that those who are content to sleep through what is a growing American crisis do no favors to American workers and American business and certainly do no favors to future economic opportunity in this great country of ours. This country is measured in terms of its wealth, not by what it consumes but rather by what it produces, and if we do not stand up for producers to insist and demand fair trade, yes, ranchers and farmers, manufacturers and businesses, we do not have the strength and backbone to do that, if we are content to let people with tiny, little glasses and big degrees go halfway around the world, behind closed doors, and negotiate in secret trade agreements that continue to give us this kind of performance and move American jobs overseas and undermine American business and undermine American farmers and ranchers, then this Senate and this Congress ought to hang its head.

We can do a lot better, and should, and the place to start the first baby step, in my judgment, is to start with two things: Vote for the Grassley second-degree amendment that says we agree with which we have previously agreed and want to vote yes for something that does nothing, but it does not harm anything, so we will all vote yes and then vote for the amendment that I have offered--it has been now pending for almost a week--that does stand up for this country's economic interests. It does not impede fair trade or free trade. It demands and insists that we have the right to protect ourselves when others will use trade practices to injure our country, our workers, our manufacturers, our farmers, our ranchers. So we will vote at some point and my hope is that those who feel as I do will support the amendment I have offered for the reasons I have described.

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

Mr. President, I have spoken previously on this amendment. I will not prolong the debate. This amendment is very simple. It says that our negotiators, in negotiating a new trade round, shall not be allowed to negotiate the weakening of the basic protections in our trade law, antidumping laws, countervailing duties, the protections that protect American ranchers and farmers and businesses and workers. We must stand up for the economic interests of this country.

The reason this amendment is necessary is because it has been widely announced that our negotiators are prepared to agree with others to lay on the table the weakening of our basic protections, such as antidumping laws and countervailing duties. That would injure this country, move more jobs outside of this country, hurt farmers, ranchers, businesses, and workers.

I hope support for this amendment will send a very strong signal to those who are negotiating these trade treaties.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, is it in order at this point for me to engage in a short discussion of an amendment that I have pending?

Mr. President, let me take the 5 minutes now. I know people are trying to put together unanimous consent requests. I indicated I would take just a few minutes to describe the amendment I have offered, which I hope will be voted on at 12:30. They are discussing a consent agreement by which they might vote on the amendment I have offered and I believe the amendment that Senator Clinton has offered. Even though the unanimous consent agreement has not been entered yet, let me at least describe the amendment I have offered.

The amendment I have offered is an amendment that I offered to the armed services bill, the Defense authorization bill that came to the floor of the Senate and was on the floor for some while. This amendment is pending on the Defense authorization bill, but the Defense authorization bill has been taken off the floor and it appears it

will not come back to the Senate, and therefore I will not get a vote on this amendment. So I offer the amendment to the appropriations bill, understanding this is not the optimum place to do this. I will have to suspend the rules to accomplish it. But let me describe what it is.

We are spending billions and billions of dollars on reconstruction in Iraq. I will read some headlines.

Let me say at the start, the minute anyone comes to this floor and mentions the word ``Halliburton,'' they think it is partisan, political, going after the Vice President of the United States. It is not. It is true he was the CEO of Halliburton, but that was long before he reentered public service as Vice President, and none of this has happened under his watch. This has nothing to do with the Vice President.

What it does have something to do with is large, no-bid contracts given to a very large company, large no-bid contracts with virtually no oversight and a substantial waste of the taxpayers' money. Let me read some headlines.

Houston Chronicle, February 3, 2004:

Uncle Sam Looks Into Meal Bills; Halliburton Refunds $27

Million as a Result.

Houston Chronicle, February 4, 2004:

Halliburton Faces Criminal Investigation: Pentagon Proving

Alleged Overcharges for Iraq Fuel.

Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2004:

Ex-Halliburton Workers Allege Rampant Waste: They Say the

Firm Makes No Effort to Control Costs.

May 18, 2004, Houston Chronical:

U.S. Questions More Halliburton Meal Charges.

July 27, 2004, Houston Chronicle:

Millions in U.S. Property Lost in Iraq, Reports Say;

Halliburton Claims Figures Only ``Projections.''

The Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2004:

Halliburton Is Unable to Prove $1.8 Billion in Work,

Pentagon Says.

Is anybody investigating this? No. This is a company that charges for 42,000 meals served in Iraq, and it turns out they are serving 14,000 meals to soldiers. We are paying for 42,000 meals. Does anybody care? Overcharges for fuel? These are big, no-bid contracts. And oh, by the way, the courageous woman in the Pentagon, Bonnatine Greenhouse, the highest civilian in the Corps of Engineers responsible for making sure these contracts are handled the right way, is the one who objected to these contracts saying it was, in effect, a good old boys club giving contracts to their friends. Guess what. This woman, who received excellent reviews all of her career and rose to become the highest ranking civilian officials in the Corps of Engineers, has been demoted. Why? Because she had the courage to speak up and speak out.

Nobody is investigating the rampant misuse of funds and waste of funds in these no-bid contracts. There should be oversight hearings in the Congress, but there are not. There is not an oversight hearing held on these issues, so I have chaired Democratic Policy hearings, and let me tell you a couple of things we have heard.

How about brand new trucks, $85,000 trucks. Drive one down the road in Iraq and get a flat tire and what do you do with it? Abandon it. It gets torched. A brand new truck. If it has a fuel pump that is plugged, what do you do with it? Abandon it. It doesn't matter--no-bid contracts. It is all taxpayers' money. It is unbelievable what we have uncovered.

Serving food to soldiers with date stamps that have long since expired and the supervisors say it doesn't matter: Serve them anyway.

They order towels. The guy who worked for the Halliburton company as the purchaser said he was told you can't just order towels for soldiers that are just towels; you need to put a logo on the towels. So you put the company logo on the towels, and you double the price of the towels that go to soldiers, so you have the company logo on the towel. It is unbelievable waste, fraud, and abuse. It is not millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, it is billions dollars, and nobody is minding the store. Nobody cares.

Some years ago, in 1941, Harry Truman stood in this Chamber, and he said there is rampant waste, fraud, and abuse going on in military contracting, and we ought to get to the bottom of it. He was relentless. He was a Democrat here in this Chamber, and we had a Democrat in the White House. It didn't matter. I am sure that was kind of an uncomfortable thing; it didn't matter. They set up a Truman committee, a special committee that uncovered massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.

In this case, we know it is happening. We have direct testimony it is happening with big, no-bid contracts--particularly with Halliburton, but there are others as well--and nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care.

I propose that we create a type of Truman committee, of the type we have had previously, that starts taking a good look at waste, fraud, and abuse that is occurring. Whenever you give massive quantities of money on a no-bid contract and say go ahead and spend, you are going to have this waste, fraud, and abuse.

There are stories about someone saying: Let's air-condition that building in Iraq. We will buy some air-conditioners through this reconstruction funding, and then it goes from a contractor to another subcontractor to a sub, and pretty soon the job is done, you have a ceiling fan, and the American taxpayer has paid for air-conditioning. It is unbelievable, and it is going on all the time.

My proposal is very simple. When American taxpayers' money is doled out in such enormous quantities--billions of dollars--somebody ought to watch the store.

I held up a poster the other day of stacks of 100-dollar bills which were wrapped in Saran Wrap--stacked in big piles because the contracting officer, who testified at the committee which I chaired, said that is the way it was. We said to the contracting companies: Bring cash and bring a bag. We do business in cash. He said: We used to actually play football with these stacks of 100-dollar bills with Saran Wrap. You could actually throw them back and forth across the room. They were paying for the ministries, among other things, in Iraq during the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was us, by the way. They were paying one Iraqi ministry for 8,206 security guards on duty-- paying 2,206 of them salaries--and there were only 602.

Does anybody care? Does anybody care about this? Will this Congress finally do what it is required to do--to require accountability for the expenditure of the taxpayers' money?

We have spent a massive amount of money dealing with contracting in Iraq for reconstruction. What we are finding is that the few people who had the courage to blow the whistle about favorite contracts--no-bid contracts--having contractors even in the room, in the meeting, when they were with talking about what the specs of the contract should be. Bunnatine Greenhouse, a young African-American woman who rose to the top, the highest civilian job in the Corps of Engineers, blew the whistle on this old boys network that was doling out that money to private contractors, she is going to pay for it with her job, we are told. Shame on them.

This Congress ought to have the courage to stand up on the side of the taxpayers and say: If we are spending taxpayers' money, the taxpayers ought to get full value for it. We ought to put an end to waste, fraud and because.

When Harry Truman got to the White House, he had a sign on his desk that said ``The Buck Stops Here.'' For accountability on this sort of thing, the buck doesn't stop anywhere. Nobody wants to look them square in the eye. It is time for Congress to look truth in the eye and understand what is happening. My amendment is the first opportunity to do that.

I regret that we didn't have a vote on it on the Defense authorization bill. That is where it should have been. I offered it on the authorization bill. The bill has been pulled from the calendar and from the floor and apparently will not come back. I will offer it today and to other appropriations bills. It is uncomfortable, I suppose, for those who do not want to vote against this, but they are going to have to keep voting against it until at some point there will be sufficient votes in this Chamber to do what is right. To do what is right is to follow the model of Harry Truman. Even when there was a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat said: We insist, we demand, accountability on behalf of the American taxpayers, and we are going to put an end to waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayers' money.

It is very simple. This is not a complex amendment. It is the simplest of

amendments and the simplest of choices.

In this Chamber--the Chamber of the Senate--we don't do very complicated things. Every single choice that we make every day on this floor is either yes or no. There is no maybe, no later; it is when it comes time to vote yes or no.

That, it seems to me, is an enormously simple choice with respect to an amendment that is this persuasive.

I hope the Senate, when it votes midday today on this amendment, will do the right thing.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to the notice properly filed, I move to suspend the rule with respect to amendment No. 1670, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Durbin be added as a cosponsor of that amendment.

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Clinton, pursuant to the notice she properly filed, I move to suspend the rules with respect to amendment No. 1660, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, we are on the Commerce-Justice appropriations bill. My understanding is there are a number of amendments left, one of which is the amendment I have offered. It is an amendment that is germane, an amendment I expect to have a vote on. I know that amendment has caused quite a lot of consternation on the floor of the Senate in recent hours, also in the Washington Post, and now in a letter from two members of the President's Cabinet, on behalf of the President, suggesting that were this amendment to come to his desk in a piece of legislation, they would recommend a veto.

This is about trade issues and about whether we are finally, as a country, going to stand up for this country's economic interests.

I only take the floor again to urge those who do not want to have a vote on this amendment to relent. We have a right to have a vote. I properly offered this amendment, and I would expect a vote before the day is out.

The vote is very simple. It is an amendment that says no funding in this appropriations bill can be used by the Commerce Department or the trade ambassador's office to negotiate a trade treaty that reduces or eliminates the protections that we have in this country to protect domestic producers against unfair trade.

I have mentioned before that some years ago I drove to the Canadian border one day with a man named Earl Jensen. Earl had a 12-year-old, 2- ton orange truck. We drove to the Canadian border with some durum wheat. We got to the Canadian border and we were stopped. They said: You can't take American durum wheat into Canada. They stopped us.

On the way to the Canadian border, we saw 18-wheelers hauling Canadian wheat into our country. We saw truck after truck after truck bringing Canadian wheat across the border into our country, and we couldn't get a little old 12-year-old orange truck into Canada with about 150 bushels of durum wheat.

What was happening was the Canadian Wheat Board--which is a sanctioned monopoly by the Government, which would be illegal in this country--was selling all that wheat into our country at secret prices, undercutting American farmers, engaging in unfair trade, taking money straight out of the pockets of American farmers with unfair trade. You could not do anything about it.

We demanded of the Canadian Wheat Board all of the information--the materials, the data--that defined their sales that they were making at secret prices. We sent the Government Accounting Office, the GAO, up to the Canadian Wheat Board. They thumbed their nose at us and said: We don't intend to give you any of that information. We don't intend to do anything that gives you information. Go fly a kite, they said.

So year after year after year that unfair trade existed, until finally an action was filed against the Canadians, and some countervailing duties were levied against that wheat coming in as unfair trade. Well, that countervailing duty represents a protection we have in our country for farmers, yes, for businesses, for industries-- protection against unfair trade by other countries that attempt to destroy a business or destroy an industry in our country by sending in products that are deeply

subsidized or sold at dumped prices in order to injure this country's economy or injure an industry in this country.

We have laws against that. The laws are antidumping laws and countervailing duty laws. We have laws that would prohibit another country from targeting our country with unfair trade. We have a right to stand up for our interests and say: You can't do that. That is what these laws are about--countervailing duty laws and antidumping laws.

But now there is a new set of trade negotiations occurring in Doha, halfway around the world. They are occurring in secret, and our country is involved in them. Our country has indicated, at the demand of other countries, that we will get rid of our protections, such as countervailing duties and antidumping laws. Our country said: OK, we'll negotiate some changes in that.

Let me read what this morning's Washington Post has to say. It says:

The Bush administration agreed to negotiations on U.S.

anti-dumping and countervailing duty laws when the latest

round of world trade talks was launched in 2001. Many other

countries view the measures as an unfair trade barrier and

want to discipline U.S. ability to use them.

In other words, other countries are saying it is unfair we have antidumping laws in this country.

It is unfair that we have laws that prohibit other countries from dumping their products in this country at far below the cost in a way that would endanger U.S. industries and businesses and workers. It is unfair, they say. So they want to negotiate an end to those few things left in our trade laws that allow us to protect our own economic interests.

The administration, involved in the Doha talks, has said they would agree to put all of these things on the table to potentially negotiate away our antidumping laws and countervailing duty laws. Rather than the $2 language of trade, another way to describe it is to talk about what it means to this country and to its workers and businesses. As you know, I have talked at great length about the number of companies that have outsourced their jobs, told their American workers: We don't need you any longer, don't want you, because your jobs are gone. They are now in China or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Indonesia or any number of other countries where we can hire people for pennies on the dollar and not have to worry about all the nuisances that exist in this country with respect to child labor and safe workplaces and the ability of workers to organize and form a union, and so on.

So as companies increasingly move their jobs offshore to other countries, we are engaged more and more in unfair trade practices against our country, and our trade negotiators are willing to negotiate away the last vestiges of protection we have.

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration urged the Senate on Tuesday to

reject an amendment they said would cripple chances of

reaching a new World Trade Agreement.

The measure . . . is aimed at preventing U.S. trade

negotiators from agreeing to change any laws that allow the

United States to impose duties against unfairly priced or

subsidized imports.

The trade ambassador says:

We strongly urge the Senate to reject this unwise

amendment.

The provision would ``provide our trading partners an

excuse to refuse to negotiate on sectors and subjects they

consider sensitive'' and greatly diminish our chances of

reaching an ambitious world trade deal.

I am not particularly interested in anybody reaching a deal if the deal is not fair to this country. The objective of negotiating is not to negotiate a deal, if a deal is not fair to us. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about GATT, United States-Canada, NAFTA, CAFTA, at the end of the day, our trade negotiations in the last 25 years have left this country in a weaker position and have put this country in a position where our jobs are leaving this country. I am not interested in a trade deal unless it represents this country's best interests.

It is time for this country to understand that trade agreements must be mutually beneficial. This week, to a giant yawn in the Senate Chamber, there was an announcement that we had the fifth highest trade deficit in the history of our country. It was only $58 billion for a month. Did that create a traffic jam for people to come to the Chamber to say: Maybe we ought to stare truth in the eye and deal with this issue? No. It wouldn't interrupt any naps around here. Nobody cares about trade. Nobody cares about jobs. Nobody wearing blue suits is going to lose their job because politicians don't get outsourced; it is just workers. They are the ones who come home and say: Honey, I lost my job. I worked there 20 years and did a great job, but they have told me my job is now going to India. And by the way, I am going to train the person in India that works my job because they are bringing them over to get training from me. Then I am done.

My only purpose for offering this amendment is to say that at some point this country might want to stand up for its own economic interests, for its farmers, businessmen, and workers. It has not done that. I am anxious to have a discussion about how anybody in this Chamber thinks it advances our interests to go to Doha and, in secret, negotiate an agreement that would weaken the protections we have for our producers to require competition in trade be fair. I wish to have a discussion or a debate with anybody in the Senate who thinks that is a good deal for this country. I don't know. Maybe we have become immune to the news when in a month our trade deficit is $57 billion, $59 billion, $55 billion. Our trade deficit with China alone in a month is $16, $17, $18 billion. Every single day we buy $2 billion more from abroad than we send abroad, 365 days a year.

You can make a case, if you are an economist with real tiny glasses and not much breadth of thought, that the budget deficit and our budget is what we owe to ourselves. You can make that case. You cannot make a similar case with respect to the trade deficit. That is a deficit that we owe to others outside of this country. Those are claims against American assets. It is what Warren Buffett, a businessman I hugely admire, calls creating an economy of sharecroppers.

It is fascinating to me that somehow we are told there is a doctrine of comparative advantage with respect to the Chinese, which is our largest trading partner in terms of the deficit. We have a huge deficit with China that is likely now to reach close to $200 billion in 1 year. What is the comparative advantage? Is it a natural economic advantage such as the Portuguese and English trading wool or wine? No. The advantage is, you can hire somebody for 33 cents an hour, work them 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. If they complain, you can throw them in jail. And if they try to form a labor union, you can fire them first, then throw them in prison. That is the advantage. The advantage is borne on the backs of workers.

We are not exporting enough product because we are importing $2 billion a day more than we are exporting. What we are exporting is misery, the misery of people who are working in circumstances where they don't have a voice. They are fired if they attempt to form a labor union. They work in unsafe plants. They work 7 days a week and they are paid pennies an hour. That is the export of misery.

I didn't intend to speak at great length about this. The administration has written a letter saying, through Rob Portman, trade ambassador, and Carlos Gutierrez, the Secretary of Commerce:

We and other senior advisors will recommend to the

President that he veto this legislation if the Dorgan

amendment were included.

God forbid that we should include an amendment that stands up for this country's economic interests.

All of these folks have painted these wonderful mosaics with respect to trade agreements, whether it is CAFTA or any of the others. After each single trade agreement, our trade deficit has increased, and the number of American jobs lost, the number of American jobs moving overseas has increased. You would think at some point just by chance the Congress would decide, this doesn't make any sense. At some point when you see things don't work, you probably decide you might want to reevaluate them. Not this Congress. In fact, if something is not working, this Congress says: Let's do a lot more of it. It is like the old story about the guy hauling coal. He is losing money so he

starts hauling a lot more coal. That is the attitude of this Congress: It doesn't matter, $700 billion a year in deficits. Let's do some more. Let's send our guy to Doha.

It is interesting. Why do you think trade negotiations are going on in Doha? Why not London or Paris or New York? Why in Doha in secret? Because if they had these trade negotiations in London, Paris or New York, the streets would be jammed with protesters. So they go to Doha and have a negotiation that is in secret, and they come back and tell us--with fast track, so that you can't offer any amendments--here is what we negotiated behind that closed door. Like it or lump it; you can't change it.

This is now a new world order. It is going to affect our country in a lot of ways. It won't affect anybody wearing blue serge suits, just workers. If workers lose their jobs and those jobs are sent overseas, that is part of the advancement of an enlightened economy.

This is not enlightenment, not after you work for 100 years, to decide that you want to create a standard by which people can live well, work, get paid a decent wage, work in a safe workplace, have job protection, the ability to organize, and then negotiate all of that away which is exactly what is happening.

I mentioned yesterday James Fyler. I probably shouldn't have said: James Fyler died of lead poisoning. He was shot 55 times. James Fyler was a labor organizer, and he lost his life for trying to organize for rights of workers. That was in 1914. Over a long period of time, we finally made progress and decided there are conditions of production with respect to the environment and workers and other things that make sense. And now all of a sudden, once we have established those rules, you can avoid all those rules as a company by pole-vaulting over them to India or China and deciding: That is where I am producing because I don't have to put up with all this nuisance such as not being able to hire kids or having to pay a livable wage or having to put up with workers that want to organize with respect to workers' rights.

I mentioned yesterday how much I admired liked Lech Walesa. He was the fellow in Poland who took down a Communist Government, leading workers' rights strikes in the country of Poland. We deeply admired him. Maybe we ought to stand up for similar issues in other parts of the world on economic matters. Maybe once we ought to decide that our real role is to bring others up, not push us down. That is why I offer this amendment.

I know there are plenty of people who feel very strongly that I am dead wrong about this, but they are not supported by the facts. All of the evidence is opposed to it working. There isn't anyone who can come to this heir argument that the current trade strategy is floor and tell me that a strategy that produces $700 billion a year in trade deficits, $2 billion a day in trade deficits, somehow works to the advantage of this country. It does not. It weakens America. We will not long remain a world economic power unless we have a strong manufacturing base and decide to stand up for the standards we fought for, for a century, that created a broad middle class that represented the purchasing power to move America forward. That is what so many forget.

Mr. President, I wish to make one other point. The amendment is nearly identical to the amendment offered by Senator Dayton and Senator Craig when we had fast track before the Senate, and it received 61 votes. It passed the Senate, though it was dropped in conference. That is why I assume they do not want to vote on this amendment today. They worry they will lose the vote in the Senate.

My hope is they will understand that I have timely filed this amendment. It is germane. I have a right to a vote. I insist on a vote. And I believe it is the only conceivable way we can finally begin to change this country's trade policies and tell trade negotiators they cannot get into an airplane, fly halfway around the world, shut the door of the room in which they are going to negotiate, and negotiate away protections of American businesses and workers who demand fair trade. They cannot do that. We will not allow them to do that.

I say to the leadership on the other side, I hope they will now come back and have a vote on my amendment this afternoon. Win or lose, I feel passionately that this country needs to speak about this issue and do so in support of this country's economic interests.

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

Mr. President, I know my colleague from Arkansas is intending to seek recognition in a moment. I wanted to ask the manager and ranking member of the subcommittee, I offered the amendment that deals with trade and weakening of trade remedies. I offered that previously, and I am wondering where that might exist with respect to the vote we might have this evening. I know the manager wants to finish the bill. I want to be helpful in doing that, but I think my amendment is germane. It has been offered. I have debated it. I wonder what we might expect with respect to a vote.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alabama. I believe the amendment is germane. I have debated it, and I hope we can find a way to have a vote on that amendment. It is a very important amendment with great merit. My expectation is we ought to proceed.

I thank the Senator, and I will look forward to having the opportunity to have this vote.

I yield the floor.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. New London that it was permissible for a government to use the power of eminent domain simply for the purpose of economic development.

I am greatly troubled by this case. I do not believe that the government can or should take property for a non-governmental purpose simply because it will generate additional tax revenue.

This court decision stands logic on its head--and it is a dangerous precedent as well.

I understand that there will be times when it is essential for the government to use eminent domain for the public good. For example, eminent domain is appropriate in order to build a flood control project to protect a city. Or to construct a highway or lay a water line.

But it makes no sense for the Court to allow a city--or a state or even the federal government--to use its power to allow private developers to acquire property under the takings clause. Once you start down that path, whose private property is safe? Could my home be condemned because a larger, more expensive house could be built on that lot? Can a local cafe be seized in order to provide space for a new, high-end French restaurant?

Government at all levels should be protecting and strengthening private property rights--not diminishing them.

So today I am introducing legislation to clarify and strengthen private property rights and ensure that government cannot abuse its power of eminent domain in the name of ``economic development.''

First, my bill prevents the use of Federal funds for any economic development project that uses property that was subject of an eminent domain taking. This would cut off the spigot of Federal dollars to these questionable projects. Frankly, most economic development projects rely in some way on Federal dollars so this provision would have the practical effect of sharply curtailing this practice.

Second, my bill is explicit that traditional public use and public purpose projects are still permitted. I am not trying to end the use of eminent domain in order to protect public health and safety or in order to build important infrastructure in our communities. My bill makes this clear.

Finally, this bill clearly lays out that the funding prohibition includes takings of private property for the use of, or ownership of, another private individual or entity. One of the most troubling trends in this area is the use of eminent domain by a government that then turns the property over to a private person or group for their private gain.

This issue also demands attention at the state level. I commend the efforts of a number of leaders in North Dakota to make changes to our state constitution in a way that will protect private property owners.

Our former state attorney general, Heidi Heitkamp, is spearheading an effort to prevent the use of eminent domain at the State level for economic development purposes regardless of whether Federal funds are used. This is an important initiative and I fully support it. It is an important complement to the bill I am introducing today. In fact, much of the language in my bill reflects the language in the initiated measure in North Dakota.

Strong private property rights are a fundamental part of our country's heritage and I believe that we should take steps to protect those rights. This bill will afford all Americans better protection against inappropriate uses of eminent domain and seizure of property.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. New London that it was permissible for a government to use the power of eminent domain simply for the purpose of economic development.

I am greatly troubled by this case. I do not believe that the government can or should take property for a non-governmental purpose simply because it will generate additional tax revenue.

This court decision stands logic on its head--and it is a dangerous precedent as well.

I understand that there will be times when it is essential for the government to use eminent domain for the public good. For example, eminent domain is appropriate in order to build a flood control project to protect a city. Or to construct a highway or lay a water line.

But it makes no sense for the Court to allow a city--or a state or even the federal government--to use its power to allow private developers to acquire property under the takings clause. Once you start down that path, whose private property is safe? Could my home be condemned because a larger, more expensive house could be built on that lot? Can a local cafe be seized in order to provide space for a new, high-end French restaurant?

Government at all levels should be protecting and strengthening private property rights--not diminishing them.

So today I am introducing legislation to clarify and strengthen private property rights and ensure that government cannot abuse its power of eminent domain in the name of ``economic development.''

First, my bill prevents the use of Federal funds for any economic development project that uses property that was subject of an eminent domain taking. This would cut off the spigot of Federal dollars to these questionable projects. Frankly, most economic development projects rely in some way on Federal dollars so this provision would have the practical effect of sharply curtailing this practice.

Second, my bill is explicit that traditional public use and public purpose projects are still permitted. I am not trying to end the use of eminent domain in order to protect public health and safety or in order to build important infrastructure in our communities. My bill makes this clear.

Finally, this bill clearly lays out that the funding prohibition includes takings of private property for the use of, or ownership of, another private individual or entity. One of the most troubling trends in this area is the use of eminent domain by a government that then turns the property over to a private person or group for their private gain.

This issue also demands attention at the state level. I commend the efforts of a number of leaders in North Dakota to make changes to our state constitution in a way that will protect private property owners.

Our former state attorney general, Heidi Heitkamp, is spearheading an effort to prevent the use of eminent domain at the State level for economic development purposes regardless of whether Federal funds are used. This is an important initiative and I fully support it. It is an important complement to the bill I am introducing today. In fact, much of the language in my bill reflects the language in the initiated measure in North Dakota.

Strong private property rights are a fundamental part of our country's heritage and I believe that we should take steps to protect those rights. This bill will afford all Americans better protection against inappropriate uses of eminent domain and seizure of property.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

The majority leader, my colleague from Tennessee, speaks of methamphetamine. It is an enormous problem in this country, especially in rural States. I certainly appreciate the comments he has made today. It is something on which we must provide enormous focus. It is destroying lives. It is one of the most highly addictive drugs we know. You can cook methamphetamine virtually anywhere--an abandoned farmhouse.

You can buy the products from which you make methamphetamine, in many States, across the counter. This is a deadly drug causing havoc for so many people.

If you talk to law enforcement people about dealing with methamphetamine, they will tell you that when they arrest someone involved in methamphetamine, they don't quite know what they are going to get. These are people who can become the most enormously violent people in the world, or they can be passive. You don't quite know what you are going to find, what you are going to get. It contributes to substantial crime and destroys lives. I appreciate the comments of my colleague, the majority leader.