Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider Calendar Nos. 706, 707, 708, 709, 713, 714, 715, 716, 717, 718, 719, 720, 721, 723, 724, 725, 727, 734, 735, and all nominations on the Secretary's Desk in the Foreign Service; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc; that no further motions be in order; that any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 158, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a Kerry amendment to the resolution, which is at the desk, be agreed to; the resolution, as amended, be agreed to; that a Kerry amendment to the preamble, which is at the desk, be agreed to; the preamble, as amended, be agreed to; the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate; and any statements related to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 228, S. 1067.

I ask unanimous consent the committee-reported substitute amendment be considered; that a Feingold amendment which is at the desk be agreed to; the substitute amendment, as amended, be agreed to; the bill as amended be read a third time and passed, the motions to reconsider be laid on the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 11; that following the prayer and

pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate proceed to a period of morning business for 1 hour with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, with the majority controlling the first 30 minutes and the Republicans controlling the next 30 minutes; that following morning business, the Senate resume consideration of H.R. 1586, the legislative vehicle for the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization.

Mr. President, rollcall votes are expected to occur throughout the day tomorrow. Senators will be notified when any votes are scheduled.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, my understanding is that following my presentation, Senator Gregg is going to be recognized, or a Republican speaker. I ask unanimous consent that following the Republican speaker, Senator Stabenow be recognized on our side. I do that with the consent of the chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, I wish to discuss two amendments, one of which I have filed and one of which I will file shortly. Before I do that, I have spoken with Senator Inouye, Senator Feinstein, and some others about something that is very important. It is the settlement of the Cobell lawsuit. The Cobell lawsuit has been in the Federal courts for 13 years. After a long period of negotiation between the Secretary of the Interior, other parts of our Federal Government, and the plaintiffs in lawsuit, there is finally an agreement that has been reached. The agreement would provide $3.4 billion to settle outstanding claims and address issues going back well over 100 years in which the Federal Government was supposed to be taking care of the trust accounts of American Indians. Some of those trust accounts were fleeced, stolen, and mismanaged.

This lawsuit has been going on for a long period. The agreement settles the claims of American Indians who lost their money, lost their assets, and lost their income. Many American Indians have died during the process of this lawsuit.

Now that a settlement has been reached, there is an April 16 deadline. The parties to the settlement agreement set an end date by which the Congress must act, or the parties may return to litigation. My hope is that the Congress will be able to meet that deadline. We really do need to put this issue behind us. It is a sorry chapter in this country's history. For over a century we have mismanaged the property, income, and royalties of American Indians. All of this resulted in the filing of a lawsuit.

I commend the Secretary of the Interior, Secretary Salazar, who has worked so hard to reach this agreement.

Having said that, let me describe two amendments I wish to offer to this legislation. One is an amendment I have offered on a number of occasions over the years. It is important to offer it again this year and get it done.

President Obama mentioned during his State of the Union Address that he wanted this legislation passed by the Congress. It is painfully simple. My amendment says when an American business shuts down its manufacturing plant in this country, locks the doors, fires the workers, and then moves the jobs overseas someplace for the purpose of selling the product they produce overseas back into our country, they should not get a tax break. Yet, under today's Tax Code, they, in fact, are rewarded with a tax break.

This amendment would end that ill-advised tax break and say: You are not going to be rewarded anymore in our Tax Code by shipping jobs overseas and then selling the product back into our marketplace. This should have been corrected long ago. It should be corrected now.

The amendment I filed is amendment No. 3375. My hope is we will be able to debate and vote on this amendment.

I described the other day this issue we have of trying to find new jobs and seeing how we can incentivize the creation of new jobs in our country. About 17 million people woke up this morning in this country without work, without a job, and wanting a job and are going to spend today looking for work and not be able to find it. We are trying to find ways to incentivize the creation of jobs. That bill is the faucet, trying to put more jobs in this economy.

What about the drain? What about all these jobs leaking out of this economy to China and elsewhere? Let me describe some of them, if I might. These are well known. I have told other stories on the floor many times.

Levis, the product of America. America invented Levis. People wear Levis all around the world, except Levis are made virtually everywhere in the world except the United States. They are all gone. We do not make one pair of Levis in the United States. Fruit of the Loom underwear; gone to Mexico; gone to Asia. Samsonite went to Mexico, then to China. Maytag now makes their appliances in Mexico and Korea. Hershey's chocolate. You know, Hershey's chocolate advertises York Peppermint Patties and they say: The cool, refreshing taste of mint dipped in dark chocolate will take you miles away. Well, apparently so many miles it ends up in Mexico--Mexico.

I have mentioned often the cookies made by the Nabisco Company--Fig Newtons. If somebody says to you: How about going to have a Mexican dinner, just buy a package of Fig Newtons. They left New Jersey and went to Mexico. I don't know if it is cheaper to shovel fig paste in Mexico than it is in New Jersey, but it is made by a company called Nabisco. You know what that stands for? The National Biscuit Company. Except the national biscuit, in this case, is made in Mexico.

Well, the list goes on and on and on. Hallmark Cards. Hallmark Cards was here for a century--a privately held Kansas City, MO, company, founded by a high school dropout who started the company in 1910 with a shoebox full of postcards. He made a living by selling them while working out of a YMCA in Kansas City, and it became an unbelievably successful greeting card company. All of us know that. Under its current management, despite annual revenues, I understand, of over $4 billion, they started to move jobs from Kansas City to three plants in China. You know, the company who cares enough to send you the very best? In this case, it sends you the very best from China.

My point is that I understand there are a whole lot of companies going to search for people who work for 50 cents an hour and whom they can work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, and that is better for their bottom line. It enhances their profit when they can do that. But when they leave America, deciding they are going to produce Etch A Sketch in Shenzhen, China, and then ship it back to a Walmart here in the United States to sell--when that happens, and that town in Ohio that was known for producing Etch A Sketch, the little toy that all of us have used as a child--we ought not be saying good for you, we will give you a tax break.

When the Radio Flyer little red wagon--the wagon we have all ridden in, started by a guy in Chicago, and for 110 years they made Radio Flyer little red wagons in the United States--when they moved the production of little red

wagons to China, we shouldn't give a tax break for those that are sold back into this country--a company that moves their jobs elsewhere in order to produce and then sell back into our country. We ought to say: You know what, you are not going to get a tax break for that.

Let me give an example of two companies, and two companies that make bicycles; all right? They are made in factories that are on the same street corner but on different sides of the street. One is called Huffy Bicycles. Most people have known the Huffy Bicycles and ridden them in their youth. The other is ABC Bicycle, hypothetically. Huffy Bicycles decides they are paying $11 an hour to their American workers, plus benefits, and they think that is way too much to pay an American worker so they leave America and go to China. And by the way, that is true. They did. The other company stays here and says: No, we are going to keep our American workers and keep our American plant open and keep these jobs in America. What is the difference between the two? When they are competing at Sears or Walmart or Kmart in this country, what is the difference between the two bicycles? Well, one was rewarded with a tax break because their production was sent overseas, and the other has a competitive disadvantage because it was made here by American workers. And that ought not stand.

This President asked during his State of the Union Address for us to plug this hole. It raises money, reduces the Federal budget deficit and finally says to American workers: We are on your side. We are not going to give a tax break to companies that ship their jobs overseas and sell their products back in America.

It is a very simple amendment. I don't know anyone who would wish to vote against this amendment. Yet, interestingly enough, I have offered it for many years and have not been successful for a number of reasons. Occasionally, we have had a vote, but most often it gets thrown off in a parliamentary procedure of some type. But this is a bill that is open to amendment on revenue issues, and my hope is that at last--at long, long last--at a time when so many millions of Americans wish they had a job and don't, at a time when we still have so many companies moving their jobs away from our country to other countries only to sell back into our country that which they made in China or elsewhere, my hope is that finally we will say we won't allow this to happen any more with a reward in our Tax Code for those that do it.

I was on an airplane a while back, and I sat next to a guy who was wearing casual clothes--sweat pants and so on--and we said hello to each other. I said: Where are you headed? He said: Asia. That is why I am dressed this way; I have 25 more hours of flying. I said: What are you going to do when you reach Asia? He said: Well, I am going to Thailand, Singapore, and I am going to China. He said: What we are trying to do with my company is we are trying to move our jobs from the United States to Asian locations and save some money in the production of these products we make. So I am going out now to Thailand and Singapore and China to scout out locations for our new manufacturing plants in Asia because we are going to move our jobs.

I was sitting next to this guy thinking: You know, there will be hundreds and hundreds of American workers who, that morning, instead of getting on an airplane as he and I did, are going to a manufacturing plant somewhere to make a product for his company, but they don't know yet that he is on an airplane to try to find a way how to move their jobs to Singapore or to China or to Thailand. And isn't that a shame?

Some will listen to this and say: Well, that is just protectionism. Listen, closing a tax break that rewards people from moving jobs overseas isn't protectionism. Keeping that tax break open is, in my judgment, ignorance. Standing up for fair play and standing up for American jobs is not protectionism, it is doing everything we ought to do to be supportive of the kind of economy we want and the kind of good jobs we want in this country's future.

That is one amendment. The second amendment deals with an issue that most people, I am sure, can hardly believe their ears when they hear about it. This is an issue I have spoken about previously, and some of this issue has been resolved but not all of it. As is usually the case when something abusive is happening, it gets shut down in part but not in total, because you say: Okay, let's stop it as of this date.

I am talking about something called SILOs and LILOs especially SILOs, or sale-in/lease out transactions. Most people don't know what that means--sale in, lease out. It doesn't mean they aren't smart. It is a title in the Tax Code that describes an activity that was created by some people who wanted to avoid paying U.S. taxes. They want everything America has to offer, they just don't want to pay taxes to their country.

Let me describe what has been happening in the last couple of decades, and this is almost a perfect description of the perversion in our economy and the greed in our economy by some--not all, but by some--who steered this place into the ditch. Here it is: A cross-border lease of Dortmund, Germany's streetcars--a company called First Union Bank, which is now something else because it has been bought two additional times. So First Union Bank in America wants to lease streetcars in Germany. Why would it want to lease streetcars in Germany? Because it wants to run German streetcars? No, because from a German city it can lease the city's streetcars and take those assets in a lease-in/ leaseback transaction and get tax breaks so it can avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Transactions involving streetcars is one thing, but here is a tunnel that one of our American companies bought--a tunnel in Antwerp, Belgium. Think of that, an American company deciding to buy a tunnel in Antwerp, Belgium. Why? Because they like tunnels, know something about tunnels? They don't have the foggiest idea about Belgian tunnels. It is a sale leaseback transaction used to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

But here is one that really struck my interest. Wachovia Bank which, by the way, has now been purchased by someone else. They ended up with a belly full of bad assets. And we ought to ask the question how did that happen? How did it happen that a massive amount of toxic bad assets landed in the belly of this bank--Wachovia Bank? But Wachovia Bank bought a sewer system in Bochum, Germany. Why would Wachovia Bank want to own a sewer in Germany? Because they have people on the board of directors who are experts in German sewers? I don't think so. Do we think maybe they have hired a new class of MBAs who are specialists in sewer valuations in Germany? I don't think so. An American bank wants to buy a German sewer system for the fact that it is a sale and leaseback. The German sewer system is sold to an American bank. Does this bank ever go over and seize possession of a sewer pipe? They never even see a sewer pipe. All they want is a paper transaction so they can depreciate the property to avoid paying U.S. taxes. And in this case it is reported on Frontline that Wachovia Bank saved $175 million by this scam of buying a German city's sewer system. Unbelievable.

By the way, this has been going on for some while before we were able to shut most of it down. I would also say that I often speak of the fact that there are some companies that are now stepping forward to the IRS--I believe about 45 companies have now stepped forward--and said they are willing to pay for the benefits they received, even prior to the time this was shut down. But there are some transactions that were allowed to continue, and we have American companies that continue to get the benefit of those transactions. My position is simple: This is abusive, it is unmitigated greed, and it should have been shut down-- all of it shut down. The Internal Revenue Service, by the way, is still going back even beyond that date which was in the Federal law and challenging these in court. In fact, there are a couple of very large companies at this point that are still disputing this and saying these are perfectly reasonable transactions. Shame on them. This doesn't meet a third grade laugh test--an American company picking up a German sewer system.

In fact, one American company bought a city hall from a German town, and the auditor in that town said: Well, we don't understand it, but

if that is what the Americans want to do with their money, God bless them. It wasn't their money. What they were doing was sucking money out of the coffers of this government, because in many cases they are companies that are trying to find every way possible to avoid their Federal tax obligations. Yes, they want all the benefits America has to offer, except they don't want the obligation of paying their full measure of taxes, as most people do.

Most people who go to work in the mornings work an honest day, they come home, and at the end of the year, when it is time, they file their tax return. They have had their withholdings and they pay their taxes to our country, to our government. But there are a whole lot of interests that are much bigger that find ways to send people around the world not only to move their jobs to where they can find 50-cent-an- hour labor, but perhaps while they are there, they might pick up a sewer system to boot so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. That way they can move your job overseas and avoid paying taxes at the same time, because you get a tax break for shutting your American plant down and moving your American jobs overseas, which I hope to shut down with my first amendment; and then you get a tax break by buying a German sewer system and depreciating it and getting a tax break under the Tax Code.

Both of these amendments deserve to be passed. Both would raise money for the Federal Government, both would reduce the Federal deficit and both have substantial merit. Will I get a vote on these? I hope so. One is now filed and the other will be filed in a short period of time. I hope very much that I will be able to get the opportunity to have a vote here in the Senate and close these tax breaks.

Let me say that there are a whole lot of businesses in this country that are working very hard to make it. Many American businesses have had to steer through very difficult times. This is the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and there are a lot of businesses, large, medium, and small, that are struggling every day to try to navigate through this deep economic abyss. Boy, I give them great credit. Many of these owners have risked their entire life savings to run their business. They get up in the morning and put the key in the door and open their businesses.

So, look, what I want to have happen is for us to recognize good businesses in this country that do the right thing every day--that hire American workers, produce products and strengthen this country's economy. My point is those businesses are at a significant disadvantage if we continue to say to the business across the street: Move to China and produce these products in China and, by the way, we will give you a tax break for doing it. And we say to those who stay here: You know what, you shouldn't have stayed here, because you would have gotten a tax break if you had left. That is exactly the wrong message. What we should do for those who stay is to reward them. They are the heroes. They make up the economy, the foundation, the strength of what America is, instead of rewarding those who do exactly the wrong thing for this country.

These are my two amendments that I would like to offer.

Let me just, finally, say this. I know I get upset sometimes when I talk about the abusive pieces of this tax policy and the abuse, I think, of trade policy that has resulted in the loss of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. By the way, the loss of 1.5 million manufacturing jobs in the last 12 to 15 months--think of that. Think of 1.5 million households in which someone wakes up and says: I am jobless. I don't have a job anymore. I used to make furniture but that furniture manufacturer is gone. I used to make tool and die machines-- gone. You name it.

I told the story the other day on the floor of the Senate about Pennsylvania House furniture, which is such a great example of what is happening in this country. Governor Wendell did everything he could to keep this great furniture company in Pennsylvania. They use Pennsylvania wood, so Pennsylvania House furniture was known as an upscale furniture manufacturer that used special wood from Pennsylvania. Then they were purchased by La-Z-Boy. By the way, La-Z- Boy is also leaving, but that is a different story.

They were purchased by La-Z-Boy, and La-Z-Boy decided they were moving Pennsylvania House furniture to China and just going to ship the Pennsylvania wood to China and put together the furniture and ship the furniture back. Governor Wendell did everything he could to prevent that from happening, but it happened.

The last day of work at the factory where they had spent a century, the craftsmen who put that furniture together got together, and the last piece of Pennsylvania House furniture that came off the manufacturing line every employee in that company gathered around, they tipped it upside-down, and every one of them signed the bottom. Somebody in this country, perhaps, has a piece of furniture they don't quite understand. It has the signature of every last craftsman to work in that manufacturing plant in this country.

That pride of production and contribution to this country is by workers who just want a job, who want a country that does not move its manufacturing jobs elsewhere but values its manufacturing jobs in this country.

In 2008, La-Z-Boy said in the next 2 years it would move 1,050 employees in Dayton, OH, to the plant in the Mexican State of Coahuila. They previously moved other jobs to China, but they did say this:

We regret the impact the moves will have on the families

and lives of those employed affected, and greatly appreciate

the contribution each of them made with their dedicated

services.

So 1,050 people discovered their jobs were gone. But the same company, then, is the one who moved the Pennsylvania House furniture long before that.

We have a lot to fix in this country, but we will. I am convinced our country's better days are ahead if we make the right judgments. If we pass both of these amendments I have offered, it will make a contribution significantly toward things that matter a lot in American families: good jobs that pay well that give them some confidence in the future.

I suspect I can't ask unanimous consent to pass both pieces, both amendments at the moment, so I will negotiate with the chairman of the committee to see if we can't get votes on both in the days to come.

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.

Mr. President, the legislation on the floor of the Senate at this point includes legislation that I have worked on with my colleagues for about 3 years. It is a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Travel Promotion Act. I wish to talk just a bit about it today, but before I do, let me describe the reasons for its importance.

When we began to put this together--as I said, 3 years ago last month, working with a good number of sectors in our economy to try to evaluate how do we promote international tourism to the United States-- we were not in a very deep recession. We were in a period of economic growth. In the intervening period, our country has fallen into a very significant and deep recession. It makes the urgency all that much greater to create new jobs and to do so as soon as possible.

Somewhere around 15 million to 17 million people, according to official estimates, woke up this morning in this country of ours without a job. They want a job. They want work. They have looked for work, but they can't find a job in the United States of America.

Now, that number of 15 million to 17 million is ominous enough. Just think of one person this morning who woke up not able to work because they can't find a job, and then think of 15 million or 17 million, and then fast-forward and think of perhaps 25 million to 26 million, which is what is estimated to be the total population of people who are unemployed in America, many of whom have stopped looking for work because they couldn't find work at all. This is a very big problem, and it affects our country in many ways. It affects the economy in a devastating way. It is very hard on American families when they are not able to find work to be able to take care of themselves. It results in more Federal spending for unemployment insurance and the other things. So we are trying to find ways to put people back to work.

Earlier this week we passed, with the leadership of Senator Reid and many others--work that I and Senator Durbin, Senator Schumer, and many others have done--a jobs bill that will begin putting people back to work when it is signed by the President. The legislation that Senator Reid brought to the floor today includes the Travel Promotion Act, which will also put people back to work. I wish to talk through this and explain why this is important.

Let me begin by saying that on 9/11/2001, we were the victims of a devastating terrorist attack on our country. Thousands of Americans were killed that day. As a result, since that period of time we have been engaged in an effort to prevent terrorism, to track down the terrorists and destroy the terrorist networks that would visit that kind of tragedy upon our country. But also during that period and following, it became clear to the rest of the world that our country was clamping down on visitation to our country. Many people believed: The United States doesn't want us to visit them anymore. It is harder to get a visa to come to the United States. We are not welcome in the United States. So what happened was, there was a dramatic reduction in visitation to our country by overseas travelers.

Why is that important? When you have millions of people who are traveling around the world to go experience and see the sights and take vacations and so on, they are spending a fair amount of money on those trips. They are creating jobs in many areas, not just hotels and cars and restaurants and so on but in many other areas as well. Our country, for the last 6 to 8 years, has had the experience in which the rest of the world has said: We are going to visit Italy, France, Japan, and India. But fewer of us are going to visit the United States of America.

In fact, we have seen a circumstance where after 9/11, we had fewer and fewer visitors coming to our country; that is, fewer than came before, and last year, in 2009, we had 2.4 million fewer people visit our country than visited our country in the year 2000. Let me say that again because I think it is important. We had 2.4 million fewer people come to the United States of America to visit as overseas travelers than visited in the year 2000.

The Presiding Officer is from the State of New Mexico. It is a wonderful State, and I know it is a State that attracts a lot of visitation not only from people in our country but from people

who come from outside of America to see the wonders of New Mexico. But it doesn't matter whether it is the wonders of New Mexico or Old Faithful in Yellowstone or Niagara Falls or you name it--the cities or the wonders of our country, the great national parks--2.4 million fewer people showed up last year to visit our country.

Let me explain why that has happened. Here are some headlines. The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia, headline: ``Coming to America Isn't Easy.'' It describes the difficulty of getting visas and coming to America.

The Guardian in England says: ``America: More Hassle Than it's Worth?'' Again, difficulty coming to America.

The Sunday Times in London: ``Travel to America? No Thanks,'' says the headline.

The newspaper says:

It is already a nightmare, but now they want to make entry

into the U.S. tougher, so let's not go.

Well, let me describe what is happening in other countries at the same time we are taking leave on this issue. Other countries are very busy advertising to the world to say: Are you traveling? Are you taking a vacation? Are you seeing the world? Come to our country. Come to see what is happening.

The poster says: Looking for an experience to remember? Be part of an adventure you will never forget. Come and see Australia. See the wonders. It is true what they say: To find yourself sometimes you need to lose yourself. In Australia they call this ``going walkabout.'' So a big campaign: If you are traveling, come to Australia. Come and see what we have to offer.

A campaign for the Emerald Isle: Go where Ireland takes you. If you are taking a trip, be sure and visit Ireland. Come to Ireland, it says. It is an international campaign.

Japan says: Sweet secrets from Japan. With its many unique culinary arts, they entice travelers; a stunning array of specialties, and on and on. Come to Japan. Thinking of traveling? Show up in Japan.

Are you taking a trip with your family? How about coming to the Eiffel Tower. Come to France in 2009. Vive la France. So France and Japan and India and Ireland say: Come and see us.

Belgium's national campaign says: If you are traveling with your family, come to Belgium where fun is always in fashion.

Brussels, sophisticated simplicity, the capital of cool.

I think you get the point. This one says:

One special reason to visit India in 2009. Any time is a

good time to visit the land of Taj, but there is no time like

now.

So we have millions of people traveling around the world. On average, overseas travelers spend over $4,000. All of these countries are saying to those overseas travelers: Come to our country. See our country and the wonders of what we have to offer the world.

In the United States of America, we have not done that. That is why, in my judgment, at least in part, we had 2.4 million fewer visitors last year than we had in 2000. That is pretty unbelievable.

This proposition is simple. There is a problem. The number of people between the years 2000 and 2009 visiting other countries--overseas travel--has increased by 31 percent. During the same period the number of overseas travelers coming to the United States has decreased nearly 10 percent. So overseas travel is up, but travel to America is down.

There is another important point here. There has been a lot of polling done, and it is clear that to visit America is to have great respect for and love for this country. There is almost no one who comes to this country and tours and travels and visits our country who doesn't leave America with a special understanding of the wonders of this great place. At a time when we want people to understand more about our country, we ought to be inviting them here and saying: Come to America, see what we have to offer.

We ought to be engaged in this process, but we are not. This legislation we are bringing to the floor of the Senate is legislation that will actually increase jobs, we think, by close to 40,000 jobs, according to the estimates. So you will increase 40,000 jobs and, in addition to that, the CBO says this will reduce the Federal budget deficit by nearly $\1/2\ billion. How many pieces of legislation come to the floor of the Senate that will both create jobs and reduce the budget deficit and also give us the opportunity to tell the rest of the world what a wonderful and great place this country is?

That is the reason for this legislation. As we build, one step at a time, opportunities to create additional jobs, this is part of it. The Congressional Budget Office has said that enacting S. 1023 would reduce the budget deficit. I think it will do that and help our country.

The specifics of this legislation will encourage international travel to all parts of this country. I think it will provide economic growth to all parts of our country. This creates a corporation for travel promotion. That is what we create--an independent, nonprofit corporation to be governed by an 11-member board of directors appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, and it creates the Office of Travel Promotion in the Department of Commerce--one that used to exist but no longer does, and it hasn't for a long while.

The purpose of this is to engage in the kind of campaign that exists in most other countries in the world and to say to those traveling around the world: Come here. You are welcome here. We want you here. Come and understand and experience this country called the United States of America.

Let me pay special attention to the work Senator Reid has done, and Senator Ensign who is a cosponsor and worked on this in the Commerce Committee with me, Senator Inouye, Senator Vitter, and Senator Klobuchar. Let me say that Senator Klobuchar, in the Commerce Committee working on tourism following my chairmanship of the tourism subcommittee, has taken on this issue with gusto and is a very important part of getting this done. My hope is that when we finish this, when the President signs this bill, all of us will understand that at a time when there is so much partisanship, and when it appears to the American people that so little can be agreed upon and that so little gets done--there is all that notion out there--the fact is, this is bipartisan, good for the country, will reduce the budget deficit, and it will increase jobs and put people back to work.

If ever something had all of the things that are necessary to have merit and to be worthy, this legislation surely does that.

My colleague from Minnesota, Senator Klobuchar, as I indicated, has done yeoman's work with me and others to put this together. We hope, of course, those who would come to our country would especially visit North Dakota and Minnesota and stay for a very long period of time-- yes, we all have parochial interests--and perhaps North Dakota even more than Minnesota, I might say from my own perspective. I do think it is seldom that we can come to the floor and say here is a piece of legislation that Republicans and Democrats support.

We had one vote on it already. It had 79 votes in support in the Senate. Seldom can we say here is a bill that is bipartisan that does a lot of good things for our country.

Thanks to the majority leader for putting this back on the floor. I congratulate him for his work on it and my colleague Senator Klobuchar as well.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I mentioned that there are incremental ways to create jobs, which is important. Senator Reid has taken the lead to bring bills to the floor to do that with, earlier this week, the jobs bill that was passed and, in addition, the Travel Promotion Act.

I want to mention as well that the majority leader indicated he intends to bring the FAA Preauthorization Act to the floor of the Senate, probably during this work period. It is also going to be job creating. I chaired the Aviation Subcommittee in the Senate. It is very important that we reauthorize the FAA and pass the legislation called NextGen, to do the next generation of air traffic control systems. We have an archaic system of ground-based radar that controls the airplanes in the American skies.

Most people are walking around with cell phones that have a much more sophisticated way of tracking anything--a GPS. Most kids have the opportunity to be able to track--if their friends want them to--the location of their friends at any moment. They can track up to 20 friends.

Teenage kids can track their friends, but we cannot track an airplane in the sky with a GPS. More commercial airliners are not equipped. We don't have the NextGen system that would modernize our air traffic control system and allow them to fly more direct routes from place to place, with less spacing, using less fuel, better for the environment. All of those things will be capable when we modernize the air traffic control system and go from a ground-based system to a GPS system for aviation flights.

That is so very important. It is very job creating.

I appreciate the majority leader saying that needs to be a priority to bring to the floor, get to a conference with the House, and get a bill passed and signed by the President.

There are also safety issues we have to deal with in the FAA Reauthorization Act. Tomorrow I will be chairing a hearing in the Commerce Subcommittee on Aviation on the Colgan crash in Buffalo, NY, the tragedy that occurred on that winter icy evening, in which the Dash 8 crashed and took the lives of so many wonderful people and took the life of the pilot and copilot as well.

There are so many questions about that flight and the circumstances that led to the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board will be testifying tomorrow at my subcommittee. I will not go into all of the issues, but the issue of pilot fatigue, the issue of training--so many different issues--the icing issue that occurred that evening. It will be a very important hearing tomorrow.

The reason I raise it is the safety issue is so important. Yes, we have a system in which we fly people all over this country and the world. We have not had fatal accidents, by and large, in commercial aviation. It has been enormously safe. The most recent accidents have been accidents that have been very substantially investigated. The Colgan crash in Buffalo, NY, has been investigated now at great length, and we will have the results of that and a discussion of that at our subcommittee hearing tomorrow. That will also give us a roadmap of what we might need to address in the FAA reauthorization bill on the safety issues.

Mr. President, 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.

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

Mr. President, later this afternoon, the Senate will consider a piece of legislation to try to create some jobs. I understand that the Federal Government, by passing legislation, doesn't automatically create jobs, although it can in some circumstances. For example, a summer youth program can put some kids to work in the summer if the Federal Government or State government sponsors it. By and large, the private sector creates jobs.

This piece of legislation this afternoon is a payroll tax exemption-- trying to encourage small- and medium-sized businesses that are ready to expand and capable to expand--giving them extra incentive to hire people and put them back to work. Section 179, business expensing, is another incentive to business. The highway trust fund extension--we know building highways puts people to work almost instantly. We have plenty of backlog in highway and bridge repair.

This is a piece of legislation that will put people back to work and create the incentives for companies--whether it is highway contractors or small- and medium-sized businesses--to hire those employees. Why is that important? Because we have probably somewhere around 25 million people today who wake up without a job. The hard-core unemployment, as known in the statistics, is about 17 million people. But 20 million to 26 million people are effectively unemployed in this country. They woke up this morning wanting a job and looking for a job but cannot find a job.

I recognize that one of the prevailing moods in the Congress is to do nothing. Those are the two words that best describe what we have seen, particularly from the minority recently, ``do nothing.'' It is a pretty easy position to take, but it is so wrong. Generally, it has always been wrong on the significant issues of the day. If this country doesn't believe that having 20 million, 25 or 26 million people out of work--and they don't believe that is something that is significantly wrong, something that weakens our country, then there is something wrong with their thinking.

This is a serious and urgent priority the Congress must address.

The do-nothing approach to public policy is something we have seen before. It goes all the way back to the basic rights of people--women's rights, civil rights, workers' rights. I have spoken on the floor previously, talking about the struggles to improve in those areas. Those struggles were against those who said let's do nothing. Women didn't have the right to vote for over the first half of this country's existence. They weren't allowed to vote. It took the beating in Occoquan Prison in 1917, when Lucy Burns, at night, was manacled and a chain between her wrists, hung over a cell door, with blood running down her arms all night long; and Alice Paul, a tube forced down her throat, force-feeding, to where she nearly drowned in her own vomit. She and 33 other women were arrested and chained to the White House gate. That is how women got the right to vote in this country. It is not because we had people who said let's do nothing, it is fine that women cannot vote. People pushed back and said what is going on is wrong.

Workers' rights. I wrote a book about the struggle to get workers' rights in this country. I said James Fyler died of lead poisoning. James Fyler was shot 54 times. Why? He felt people who went underground to mine for coal ought to be paid a fair wage. Think of the struggle for workers' rights and civil rights. I served in the Congress with John Lewis in the House of Representatives, who was beaten in Montgomery, AL. He was beaten because he believed one ought to be able to sit at a lunch counter as an African American. In some areas, it was against the law to drink from certain water fountains and ride in the front of the bus. It was against the law to sit at the lunch counter at Woolworth's.

Workers rights, civil rights, women's rights--all these things were struggles. There were those all along the way who said let's do nothing. Today, they say let's do nothing about the fact that 25 million or 26 million Americans are out of work.

By the way, here is a new report that shows that not everybody is out of work. We know that. A lot of people are working. In fact, there is full employment, according to the Northeastern Center for Labor Studies, among those who earn more than $150,000 a year. Their unemployment is 3 percent, but that is called full employment. Not everybody is having trouble. The more affluent Americans have full employment. It is a lot of folks at the bottom who are struggling and getting laid off and are out looking for work. So change is very hard.

The question is, Is this Congress going to do something about it? Does it care about it? In every case, you can go back a century, and the wailing and the whining of those who have opposed everything for the first time and said it can't be done, it will not work, it will ruin our country--they are the ones who dug in their heels and said let's do nothing.

What about today? What is our responsibility today? Well, it seems to me, in this economic crisis--a crisis, by the way, that is not some natural disaster; this wasn't some massive storm that enveloped America, some tornado or cyclone or some massive natural event that occurred. This was an economic wreck that was caused by unbelievable avarice and greed in some of our Nation's largest institutions. There was nearly criminal negligence on the part of regulators who wouldn't regulate. There was shameful, greedy behavior by people at the top of the financial food chain, whose business philosophy was to maximize profits at any cost, it doesn't matter.

Now we find ourselves in a desperate position. Yes, I think we have a foundation where we have found the bottom and are going to try to build from this point on. The question is, How do we move this process along to give hope to people who, at this point, get up this morning and don't have a job? Some say let's work on the faucet--that is what this bill is today, and I will support it. Let's work on the faucet that will put more jobs in this tank. I say also let's work on the drain because you can turn the faucet on, if the drain is wide open you are not going to make much headway. I will talk about the drain, but first I will talk about the faucet.

There is no social program as important as a good job that pays well. That is why this needs to be a priority with us. It is why we should pass this piece of legislation this afternoon. No, it is not going to fix every issue. I understand that. I mentioned we have full employment with the people on the top. What about the people who shower after work--the people who work hard all day and have to take a shower after work to get rid of the evidence of that work? Well, let's talk about them for a moment. I met with a group of people who were losing their jobs just before Christmas this year--500 people who worked for a company that made one of America's best products. They were told their plant was going to close down--500 of them. Can you imagine the Christmas they spent with their families, because there were no other jobs in that area. Yet 500 jobs is a reasonably small amount of the total number of jobs we have been losing.

That describes the drain on this economy of ours with respect to jobs. Let me talk a bit about that.

I am talking about particularly jobs in which Americans make something, produce something. Our manufacturing sector is rapidly losing steam. We have lost 5\1/2\ million manufacturing jobs since 2000. We now have 11.7 million manufacturing jobs left. That is the fewest number of manufacturing jobs since the early 1940s. Since 2001, we have seen the closing of 42,000 factories in America. One-third of all the factories that employ over 1,000 people have closed since 2001 in this country. They are gone. Some people blame the workers because they want a living wage. They say: If you cannot compete with 50 cents an hour in China, tough luck, you don't deserve to compete. It is an international economic system and if you cannot compete, that is too bad. That is a pretty ignorant way to look at it. This is a global economy, but who decided, after spending a century lifting standards, requiring safe workplaces, better labor standards, better wages and benefits, that all that should be washed away because we can't compete with somebody who worked for 50 cents an hour, somebody who works in a factory where they live in cinder block, little rooms, with 12 in a room at night, and they work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day--who decided that ought to be the standard with which we have to compete? That doesn't make sense to me.

I guess there are people who believe that ``made in the USA'' doesn't matter anymore. We don't have to be a country that manufactures. If we don't have a strong manufacturing base, we will not long remain a world economic power. That is a fact. This manufacturing base of ours is being sequentially and systematically destroyed.

We have, essentially, lost the area of producing machine tools in this country. We have lost electronics. We have lost automobile parts. We have lost furniture manufacturing. We have lost telecom. We have lost appliances. I am talking about the manufacture of these things. In 1960, 30 percent of our GDP in this country was manufacturing. Now it is 11 percent. There are 1.2 billion cell phones sold on this planet every year. Not one is made in America--1.2 billion and not one is made in America. We have lost 60 percent of the furniture manufacturing. You don't need to know all the stories, but I have spoken about the one we lost in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania House Furniture, which was an upscale fine furniture company. Governor Rendell did everything he could to stop it from moving to China. They used a special Pennsylvania wood to make this furniture. What they did is closed the plant and shipped the wood to China, made the furniture there and shipped it back and called it American production. The last piece of furniture that came down off the line--for a company that lasted 100 years, making top-of-the-line furniture--the very last piece of furniture, those workmen in that plant turned it over and all the people who worked in the plant signed their names because they said there would not be furniture such as this made again. Their jobs were gone in an instant, and 60 percent of furniture manufacturing is gone.

The list goes on and on and on. Eighty-four percent of the circuit boards, which used to be ours--we developed circuit boards--are now made in Asia. We defend, as all of us understand, our military security aggressively. Do we care about our economic security--that we are hollowing out the manufacturing base of our country? Apparently not.

In this economic recovery bill that was passed, I included on the Senate side something called ``Buy American.'' One would have thought I was exploding all of the relationships that existed around the globe. People here even had apoplectic seizures: What are you doing? Are you trying to start a trade war? No, I was not. ``Buy American'' is perfectly permitted in the WTO trade rules. In fact, Mr. Pascal Lamy, the WTO chief, says ``Buy American meets world trade rules.'' If we had not put a ``Buy American'' provision in so State and local governments and the Federal Government, when contracting to buy steel and to buy products with which to make highways and other items we are investing in, had we not done that, we would be spending our taxpayers' money to purchase from China, to import the steel from China. I thought we were doing that to put Americans back to work. So I put in a ``Buy American'' provision. If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, you just thought they were having seizures about it. Unbelievable, they say. No, it is not unbelievable to me. If you are going to try to get economic recovery in this country, you do not do that by incentivizing production in China and Japan. By the way, in their programs in China and Japan, they have their own provisions to purchase at home.

Here is the trade deficit we have with the world. This is why I say I support trying to do something with the faucet about jobs, to put more jobs in this economy. I am going to vote this afternoon on the proposal coming before the Senate. But here is the drain. Even as we do that, more and more jobs are leaving this country. Anybody who talks about fiscal policy deficits and is really worried that these fiscal policy deficits are going to sink this country, you can make a case--I used to teach a little economics in college--you can make a case that the fiscal policy deficit is money we owe to ourselves. You cannot make a case that this amount of red--these red lines go down, down, down, $800 billion a year for the last 3 years in a row. That is money we owe to other countries. That is money that will be repaid by a lower standard of living in the United States.

I say to all of those who care about fiscal policy deficits--and I do--you better care about this as well because this is a description of moving American jobs overseas in addition to indebting ourselves deep in debt to especially China, as this chart shows. This chart shows the red lines. This is only China, a country with which we have a $260 billion trade deficit and growing every single year.

By the way, we have with the country of China a reasonably ignorant bilateral which says to China--I am taking one piece of it now--it says: You are ramping up a very large automobile export industry, and we will very soon see Chinese cars on the streets of America. When they come to America under our agreement with you, you have a very large deficit with us, China, so when you ship us your cars--and they are coming--we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on automobiles from China into the United States. We agree that if we ship cars made in the United States to China, you may impose a 25-percent tariff. A country with which we have a $260 billion trade deficit, we agreed to give them a 10-to-1 advantage on tariffs on bilateral automobile trading. I don't know how other people define ignorance, but I believe that is ignorant of our country's economic interest.

That is the reason I indicated in the economic recovery--what is called the stimulus program--that if we are going to spend money to try to restart this economy, to try to get this engine restarted and put people back to work, we at least ought to have some understanding that the products we are purchasing with that are not purchased from China and Japan, with which we have these very large budget deficits.

Since repetition is so very important here--I received a letter the other day from someone who said: Mr. Senator, if you are, at the end of your third term in the Senate this year, going to leave the Senate, who is going to speak for Huffy bicycles?

I said: I don't know who is going to speak for Huffy bicycles, but I am going to continue to do so until the end of the year because it is a perfect description of what is wrong in this country with respect to this so-called bathtub which should hold jobs but has a wide open drain.

Huffy was an Ohio company. Not anymore. They all got fired, all of them, because all these bicycles are produced in China. Why? Because the folks in Ohio were making $11 an hour and that is way too much money to pay an American worker. I know where they are made now. They are made in China for 50 cents an hour by people who work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day.

The poignant story about Huffy bicycles is when the last factory closed and the last Huffy bicycle was made in America, all the workers, as they drove out of the parking lot, left a pair of empty shoes in the space where their car once parked. It was the only way they could send a message to the company: You can ship our jobs to China,

but you are never really going to fill this space of ours. So no more Huffy bicycles.

The list is endless. Huffy bicycles and Radio Flyer, the little red wagon every child has ridden in, are examples of what we do not make here anymore. Radio Flyer was made in Illinois for 110 years. The little red wagon was made by an immigrant who came to this country who not only loved airplanes--and so he named a red wagon ``Radio Flyer''-- but was a very good businessman. Every American child sat in those little red wagons and played in those little red wagons for 110 years, made in America. Not anymore. They are all made in China.

My point is this: I am going to vote for this bill this afternoon. It is the right thing to do. We will have people come here and spread the mantra again today as they have for so many weeks and months: Do nothing. Do nothing. Things will be fine.

Things are not fine. It is our responsibility to do something to address these issues. I want us to do something to try to create new jobs.

I chaired a hearing of the policy committee not too long ago. We had three small to medium-size businesses come testify. All of them were ready to expand and ready to hire new people. All of them were profitable businesses, all of them were ready to expand, and none of them could expand because none of them could find credit from the banks. Think of this: The biggest banks in America are now making record profits. I am talking about the biggest banks on Wall Street. They are making record profits and are prepared to pay record bonuses at a time when small and medium-size businesses that create the jobs in this country cannot find credit to expand even when they are profitable.

There is something wrong with this system. This system is not working. There are a lot of reasons for us to care a lot about what has happened in this country. I regret that there has never been the kinds of hearings with subpoena power that develops the master narrative of what has happened in the last 6 or 8 years that caused this economic wreck. The American people need to know. I understand there is now a commission, but that is not a substitute for what the Congress has a responsibility to do.

In 200 years in this country, we have gone from times when the productive sector--those who produce and manufacture--had the upper hand to other times when the financing sector had the upper hand. More recently, the financing sector has had the upper hand in this country. Manufacturing is an afterthought, and we are losing, losing, losing our manufacturing base.

The financing side, as all of us know, has become much larger. In fact, just about 15, 18 months ago, then-Treasury Secretary Paulson and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board came to the Congress and said: Look, we are facing near imminent collapse of this entire economy. At that time, one of the things they said was that we have too much concentration in the biggest financial firms in the country. Yes, that was true, except, you know what, the concentration is even much greater now, engineered by some of the same people who said there is too much already.

This is not rocket science. Too big to fail meant no-fault capitalism. The biggest financial firms in the country got bailed out. Why? Because it was feared they were too big to fail. I think too big to fail is just too big. This is not rocket science. If you are too big to fail, you are too big. Yet the very institutions that are too big to fail are getting bigger, not smaller, imposing more risk.

By the way, the biggest ones that are showing significant record profits and ready to pay record bonuses--we are told somewhere around $140 billion to $160 billion--the biggest firms are engaged in the same kind of activity that steered the country into the ditch. We still have the credit default swaps and derivatives out there that represent very substantial risks.

If anybody really wants to understand how this relates, just go to Las Vegas or a casino someplace. Look up and understand what a synthetic derivative means. It means you are buying a credit default swap to insure a bond, except this transition does not relate to anything that is real. It is just a wager. That is exactly what has gone on in this country, unimpeded by regulators who did not look, who were woefully blind, and who boasted about it for some years. Who pays the price for all of that? The 25 or 26 million people who got up this morning and could not find a job. In some cases, they got up on a morning a month ago, a morning a year ago, in some cases 2 years ago, and still could not find work. They are the victims. And the very folks at the top who steered this country into the ditch are reporting record profits. The folks at the top, as I just described with the new study from Northeastern University, have full employment.

It seems to me there is something wrong with this picture. How does one come to the floor of the Senate this evening and say: Let's do nothing. I have an idea: let's keep doing nothing, they say.

We have watched that inaction, and that does not work. The American people deserve better than that. I hope this afternoon we will have most Members of the Senate coming to the floor to say: Let's do something. Let's care today not about the people at the top of the financial food chain who are now making record profits and preparing to pay record bonuses, but let's do something for the folks at the bottom who have lost their jobs--5.5 million manufacturing workers just in the last decade. Let's do something to see if we can find a way to put them back to work. If we do that, maybe we will get a strong vote today for people saying we care about jobs.

We would like to work together--Republicans and Democrats--to get the best ideas both have to offer rather than the worst of each and see if we can advance the economic interests of this country once again.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. today be equally divided and controlled between the leaders or their designees, with the majority leader controlling the final 15 minutes prior to the 5:30 p.m. cloture vote.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Let me thank the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, and certainly Senator Reid and others. This vote was very important. The question for the Senate and the Congress is when 25, 26 million people wake up in this country and go looking for a job and can't find it--the numbers I know are 16 to 17 million people, but the real number of people who are unemployed in America is much higher than that. There are many who have given up hope. At a time when that many Americans are looking for work and can't find it, they need some hope. This Senate has a choice of doing nothing or doing something. There are too many in this Senate who have always been satisfied to do nothing. Tonight, finally, in a piece of legislation that will put people to work, we know, for example, that the private sector hires people, small and medium-size businesses. But we also know that when you spend money for highways, highway contractors are going to put people on payrolls immediately, because those programs and those projects are already engineered, already designed, ready to go. The money doesn't exist for them. When the money is made available, people will be hired immediately.

The same is true with respect to the wage tax credits in this piece of legislation. I held a hearing in the policy committee. We had three small to medium-size businesses there, all of which are profitable, all wonderful businesses, all ready to expand. But none of them could because none of them could find capital or they had no access to capital from their banks. Money was not available. These are successful businesses, profitable businesses, businesses wanting to and ready to expand, wanting to hire more people and can't do it.

The fact is, this legislation is another step in the direction of saying to small to medium-size businesses, when you are ready to begin hiring again, here is an additional incentive to hire that next worker. Slowly but surely we have to find a way to give people confidence, give the American people confidence that this economy is improving, that there will be a job, there will be opportunity and hope in the future.

We don't so much spend our days with people who are out of work. Most people serving in the Senate have a pretty wonderful opportunity. They put on a suit in the morning. We are the kind of people, we shower in the morning, put on a suit, are dressed up all day, come here. Our jobs are not being shipped overseas. In most cases, people in this Chamber have not been so much subject to the deep recession. But a lot of people have. Five-and-a-half million people who used to work in manufacturing making things have lost their jobs in recent years. The

question for most of those people who are looking for some hope from their leaders is: Will somebody do something, or is the government going to be content to do nothing?

The action this evening by which these four pieces of legislation, which include some incentives for small and medium-size businesses, some bonding authority that will increase economic activity, the extension of the highway program that will put people back to work, expensing for small businesses--these are all things that are going to actually put people on payrolls. It is not a case where we will hire somebody as a government worker. It is a case of incentivizing highway contractors to hire people to help build roads and bridges and repair roads and bridges. It is a case of incentivizing small to medium-size businesses to say: If you need that extra little incentive to hire that next person, here it is.

Finally, and even more important than the incentive, is the signal this sends, the signal that maybe at least, at long last, we will begin to see some progress, some cooperation, circumstances in which Republicans and Democrats vote together in sufficient numbers that things can get passed and get done. With as deep a recession as we are in, the deepest since the Great Depression, there is an urgency. It ought to be treated as an urgent situation. This vote this evening may well put us on the road to understanding how urgent it is and how important it is that we take action rather than delay.

I thank the leader and so many others. Senator Durbin and I worked on a jobs package. These four provisions are in that package. There are other pieces we can implement in the future that will also be substantially important in getting people back to work, putting America back to work. I know the Senator from Ohio will speak next. I know he hopes that perhaps we will not just put people back to work but perhaps will make products that say ``made in America'' once again. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing.

One additional point. I spoke earlier describing the metaphor of filling the bathtub. We are trying to get the faucet going with incentives to put people to work. At the same time you have to plug the drain a little bit. We have a drain of jobs going out of this country. The President, in the State of the Union, said: Let's get rid of that unbelievable tax break that we provide people for moving jobs overseas. I have been in the Senate working on that for a long time. It is unbelievable that we say to somebody: Close up your factory, fire your workers, move the jobs overseas, and you get a big fat tax break. We need to plug the drain, in addition to opening the faucet to try to get additional jobs and work on that in addition to the progress we have made this evening that will give some hope to the American people who want to go to work and need a good job.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 25, 2010, at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing to Examine Tribal Programs and Initiatives Proposed in the President's fiscal year 2011 Budget.

Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a business meeting to consider the nomination of Lillian A. Sparks to be Commissioner of the Administration for Native Americans, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Madam President, I will be brief. The vote that just occurred was a vote on the nomination of Martha Johnson, of Maryland, to head the General Services Administration. That vote was reported by the committee unanimously to the U.S. Senate on June 8 of last year-- June 8 of last year. It has been blocked since that moment, and now we have a vote. We didn't have a vote in July, August, September, October, November, December, or January; we had it now, 7 or 8 months later. After blocking it for 7 or 8 months, 92 Senators voted yes. Explain to the American people how you block a nomination for 7 months that you support. Try to explain that. In my judgment, it is a shameful disrespect for good government to block nominations for month after month after month.

The same is true with individual issues that are brought to the floor of the Senate. I will give you a couple of examples. An appropriations bill was blocked on the floor of the Senate, and then 80 people voted yes. A credit card holders' bill of rights was blocked in the Senate, and then 90 people voted yes. The Department of Defense appropriations was filibustered in the Senate, and then 88 Senators voted yes on that.

If ever there were a demonstration for all to see how unbelievably broken this process is, it is today, once again, that after 7 or 8 months, a very qualified candidate, reported out unanimously from the committee of jurisdiction to head the GSA now gets 92 people to vote yes, which means we have a lot of people who block things they intend to vote for later. It is an unbelievable example of why this place doesn't work. A minimum amount of cooperation, in my judgment, would go a long way to helping make this place work the way it should. This nomination should have taken 10 minutes on the floor of the Senate last June after it was reported out unanimously by the committee of jurisdiction.

If I sound irritated by what is going on, I think a good many Members of the Senate are irritated by what I believe is a show of disrespect for good government.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

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

Madam President, we are approaching the 1-year anniversary of the fatal crash of Continental Connection flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY, and today the National Transportation Safety Board is actually holding a public meeting to consider the final report they are making on that crash.

I think almost everyone has heard the tragic story of that crash last February 12. Two pilots, two flight attendants, 45 passengers on that airplane, and 1 person on the ground lost their lives. This flight was operated by Colgan Air. The plane was a Bombardier Dash 8-Q400 operated by a captain and a copilot, both of whom had commuted long distances to get to work to make that flight, both of whom had been found to have very little rest before that flight.

The copilot revealed her inexperience in the cockpit recording that I listened

to--inexperience in flying in icy conditions--in the transcript of the voice recordings. The captain failed a number of tests in his career as a pilot. The NTSB is now considering 45 findings and conclusions at a public meeting as I speak.

This morning the NTSB members said the plane and the flight crew were properly certified, and the plane was in good condition before takeoff. They also said the ice buildup that night flying into Buffalo was typical and did not affect the ability of the flight crew to fly the airplane. So while we are waiting for the final conclusions of the National Transportation Safety Board, the members of that board spoke about crew training, pilot fatigue, and pilot error as reasons for the crash.

These are the issues I have been holding some hearings on this past year. The NTSB is going to make recommendations to the FAA. We already know that when they make recommendations, the appropriate agencies don't always pay attention to those recommendations. For example, pilot fatigue has continually been on the National Transportation Safety Board's most wanted list for 19 years; that is, most wanted list of safety recommendations. Let me say that again. For 19 straight years, the National Transportation Safety Board has said ``pilot fatigue'' is on the most wanted safety recommendations list. Yet no one has been listening. Nobody seemed to ring the bell on those issues.

I have held seven hearings on safety in the aviation subcommittee that I chair in this Congress. We have heard from the FAA, the NTSB, pilots, regional airlines, major carriers, and safety experts. We have heard especially from the families who lost their loved ones in that fatal crash, that tragic crash in Buffalo, NY.

Let me be quick to say, we have had, fortunately, reasonably few airline crashes in this country in recent years. It is, generally, a very safe way to travel. But there isn't room for error with respect to these commercially airplane flights. I am going to be holding followup hearings with Senator Rockefeller and others in the Commerce Committee with respect to the NTSB recommendations. We are supposed to have what is called ``one level of safety.'' The NTSB said, in the middle of the 1990s, there is one level of safety for commercial airplane flights in this country. The big, major trunk carriers that are national and international and the regional carriers shall have one level of safety. But it is the case that regional airlines often employ pilots with much less experience, much lower pay, which forces difficult conditions.

In many cases, when you get on a small airplane for a regional flight, you see a crew with obviously much less experience. There are questions, from time to time, raised about the training--questions raised in this investigation, as a matter of fact. We know there are a lot of factors that play into this one level of safety. But I think most people believe that one level of safety standard, at this point, doesn't quite measure up. That is the reason we will examine the recommendations from the NTSB as a result of this crash.

At the time of the crash outside Buffalo, NY, Colgan Air didn't have a remedial training program for pilots. The captain of the flight had failed numerous performance checks over the course of his career and would have made an excellent candidate for remedial training. I know the FAA has been working on the industry to try to get them to do this for a long while. If the traveling public ever begins to have very significant concerns about safety on a commercial airline flight, it will be devastating to that industry. So safety must not just be a perception. Safety on commercial airlines, whether they be the major trunk carriers or regional airlines, has to be something everybody takes seriously and that the American people believe is taken seriously.

I wish to show you a chart that shows something that common sense would tell you doesn't work. This chart shows where Colgan Air pilots were commuting to. You will see they were commuting to Newark, their base of operations. On that fateful flight going into Buffalo, NY, the copilot flew all night long from her home in Seattle, WA, I believe deadheaded on a FedEx plane, stopped in Memphis, TN, changed planes, and got to Newark Airport. After flying all night long, she is now ready to take an airplane on its flight. There is no record of evidence of that copilot having a crash pad or someplace to find a bed and sleep. That is the copilot.

The pilot, on the other hand, came from Florida to Newark Airport. There is no evidence, outside of being in the crew lounge at the airport, that the pilot had a bed in which to sleep or that he had rest. So you have a pilot and a copilot who get on that airplane to take, in this case, those 45 passengers on that airplane on its flight to Buffalo, NY. On that flight, ice built up on the wings, and there is what is called a stick shaker on that airplane. There was rapid shaking of the control stick, which would have said to the pilot you must put the nose down in order to gain additional speed. The pilot didn't put the nose down but pulled the nose up, as I understand it, which is apparently a training issue as well. So you have a pilot and copilot traveling across the country all night long just to get to their duty station, and things happened in the cockpit. In the transcript, the copilot said she had very little experience flying in icing. Both the pilot and copilot lost their lives.

I take no joy in reciting what happened in that cockpit. Their loss of life was a tragedy for their families as well. My point is simply this: What happened here--by the way, I believe five out of the most recent seven airline crashes in our country have been on commuter carriers. This, it seems to me, raises a series of questions that must be addressed--and now I believe will be addressed in recommendations from the NTSB by the FAA, dealing with the issue of fatigue. Who is flying the planes? Are they getting proper rest? It deals with the issue of compensation. Is it the case that you get on a small jet and know that the copilot is making $18,000 a year or $20,000 a year, doing two jobs and flying across the country at night in order to get into an airplane cockpit? Does that give you confidence? The fact is, all these issues are now coming to the forefront--not just of this crash but other circumstances as well--and that requires the FAA to take a hard look at what happened.

At one of my hearings, I showed a Wall Street Journal article, in which Mr. Wychor, an 18-year veteran pilot described the routine commuter flights with short layovers in the middle of the night. He said:

Take a shower, brush your teeth, and pretend you slept.

That is not what you want in the cockpit of an airplane.

A 737 pilot flying to Denver said this, and this is an NBC News quote:

I have been doing everything in my power to stay awake--

coffee, gum, candy. But as we entered one of the most

critical phases of the flight, I had been up for 20 straight

hours.

That is an issue with me. It is one we have to address. I think all thoughtful people in that industry--and I have great admiration for people in the airplane industry. They do a great job. They understand we have to address these issues of fatigue, training, and compensation. That is just the fact.

All I wished to do today was to say the National Transportation Safety Board, I think, does a great job investigating accidents. The family members of the victims of that flight that crashed in Buffalo, NY, have been extraordinary. They have come to every single hearing held on Capitol Hill. They are witnessing, on behalf of their brothers and sisters and wives and children, saying: I don't want Congress or the FAA to let up. We want you to address these issues. That crash didn't have to happen. Our loved ones did not have to die. That is their message.

I say to them: You are doing exactly the right thing. What you are doing--showing up here at all these hearings and keeping the pressure on the Congress and, yes, on the FAA--will save lives. You will not know their names, but you are saving lives. Good for you.

Cloture Motions

Madam President, the issue of cloture motions sounds like a foreign language to a lot of people. If you are back home someplace and are getting up in the morning and struggling to get to work and putting in a full day and trying to make enough money to raise your family and get along in life, you

don't know about cloture motions or the 2-day ripening or 30 hours postcloture. That sounds foreign to almost everybody.

This is a graph of cloture motions in Congress. In the 1950s, there were two cloture motions filed in the entire decade. What does cloture mean? If you decide in this body--and you are the most junior Member of this body, you are the last one elected, you are the 100th in seniority and you sit back by the candy door because that is the last desk--I guess we should not talk about a candy drawer, perhaps, but you sit way back in the corner and you are No. 100 in the Senate. Once you are on your feet and recognized by the Presiding Officer, nobody else can take the floor from you--not the majority leader, not the most senior Member of the Senate. The floor is yours and you can speak until you are physically and mentally exhausted. That is the way the rules are; it is the way the Senate works. Washington described the Senate as a saucer that cools the coffee. You pour the coffee into the saucer and it cools. The Senate isn't supposed to work quickly or efficiently. It is supposed to slow things down, take a better look at it, and have more evaluation and ask: Does this make sense for the country?

That is the way the Senate was created. It is hard to get things done. But it is near impossible to get things done these days because of something called a filibuster and cloture motions.

I wish to provide some interesting statistics. This could not happen and wouldn't happen in any city council in America. There is no city council in America where this sort of thing could happen, no matter what the rules were, because they would be laughed out of town. We have people blocking bills they support. Can you imagine that? If you were on the city council and your business was to block things you support and your neighbor said: What are you doing, are you nuts? No, I am blocking things I support because it has a strategy attached to it. What is the strategy, they would say.

Here is the situation: In 2009 and 2010, it is projected we will have 146 cloture motions to shut off debate in this Congress. Let me describe what we are involved with next. We are on one now, by the way. We are now in what is called 30 hours postcloture. We had a nomination that should have been approved in 5 minutes. Those who want to vote against the nomination should vote no. But we could not do that. Instead, those who oppose the nomination for the Solicitor for the Department of Labor, a nomination--instead of having an up-or-down vote, during which those who don't like this nominee should vote no, they said you cannot even have a vote. You have to file a cloture motion and then wait for 2 days and then have a vote and see if you get 60. If you get 60, after you get the 60, we are going to insist you bleed off 30 more hours because the rules allow us to do that. Only then can you have a vote. That is where we are now. We had a cloture vote. It prevailed. Now we are waiting for 30 hours to elapse so nothing can be done during the 30 hours. It is just stalling. So then the 30 hours is done, and we will vote on this. Then we will go to the next nomination. So this week we will do two nominations, both of which should have taken 5 minutes, if people of goodwill worked together and decided: Here is the agenda; let's bring up these candidates for a vote. And if you like the candidate vote yes; if you don't, vote no.

So the next one is going to be Martha Johnson, GSA Administrator. By the way, this one has been objected to, and it has waited for 7 months. So 7 months ago this President nominated Martha Johnson to be GSA Administrator. April 3, 2009, was her nomination. June 8, the nomination passed through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously. So this nomination was voted on unanimously and approved by the committee, and that was June 8. Here it is February of the year following, and we now are going to get to vote on this nomination that passed the committee unanimously, but not until we are able to shut off a filibuster and then have 30 hours postcloture. It is the most unbelievable thing in the world.

Is this person qualified? Yes, absolutely. She served as the head of GSA during the Clinton administration and is hailed by former and current GSA employees as the ``golden heir of GSA.'' She was the chief of staff back during the Clinton administration. She would be a vast improvement, by the way, over the previous head of the GSA, the previous head of the GSA--and I spoke about her on the floor of the Senate--Lurita Doan.

On April 29, 2008, the Office of Special Counsel for the United States asked that she be disciplined to the full extent for the most pernicious of political activity prohibited by the Hatch Act. She then submitted her resignation, in accordance with that request by the White House. She had been accused of providing no-bid contracts to friends with whom she had extensive personal and business relationships. She and a deputy in Karl Rove's office at the White House had joined in a video conference with 40 regional GSA Administrators after a PowerPoint on polling about the 2006 election, and she said: ``How can we help our candidates?'' This is a nonpolitical office--heading the GSA--in our country.

This person got drummed out of office--and should have gotten drummed out of office--and resigned under pressure. So here is someone who is fully qualified and it is 7, 8 months later and we are finally going to get to have a vote, but only if we go through the motion of filing a cloture petition to end a filibuster. That is unbelievable to me.

Let me give some other examples of what is happening. Here is a bill that was filibustered--the credit card holders bill of rights. There is a filibuster against that by the other side, the Republicans. They filibuster everything--everything. So the credit card holders bill of rights, they went through a filibuster, delayed, and after the delay it passed 90 to 5. Obviously, we had a bunch of folks who said: I am going to lay down on the track until it is inconvenient for everybody, and then I will get up and vote for it.

We have people blocking things they support. You would get laughed out of town in any town in this country if you tried that on the city council.

The Department of Defense appropriations--filibuster. Had to go through the motion of filing--2 days, 30 hours--and then it passed 88 to 10. So, obviously, we had a bunch of folks on the other side who decided they were going to block something they supported, kind of a curious strategy.

The Energy and Water appropriations bill--that was my bill that I chaired--went through filibuster, cloture, and in the end 80 people voted yes. The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act was filibustered by the Republicans. Then when it was finally voted upon, after they had delayed it, 92 of them voted yes. Again, we see people blocking things they support. Only in the United States Congress, I guess.

Unemployment compensation extension was the subject of a filibuster, and then 98 people voted yes. People blocking things they support. What a curious thing.

I mean, what do you tell your children if they ask: What was your role, Dad or Mom?

My role was to slow things down. I just wanted to sort of spread glue around the Senate. Not that we don't think it is slow enough the way it is, we want to slow it down even further.

The fact is, people send men and women of goodwill to this Chamber. One of the things I have learned in many years in this Chamber is that almost every desk is occupied by someone who has pretty unique and interesting and special skills to get here. In almost every case, there are people here with very substantial skills. But they are not sent here with an agenda that says: You know what I would like you to do? I would like you to block everything and then vote for it in the end. That is not a message that comes from any State that I am aware of. They are sent here to try to do good things for this country. All of us are. We might have a disagreement about what that means and how to do it, but there shouldn't be any disagreement about these kinds of things.

In the middle of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, seven of this President's high-level nominees for the Treasury Department are not yet confirmed--seven of them. How do you justify that? How do you justify deciding, in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s, that you are

going to prevent the U.S. Treasury Department from having a full complement of people who can think through and work through trying to put this country back on track; who can restart the economic engine and put people back to work again? How do you justify deciding we shouldn't have a full complement of people to do that?

We had a fully qualified Surgeon General who was nominated, and that Surgeon General nominee was blocked. And this was after the H1N1 flu had been declared a major health threat. Think of that. That nominee was blocked even after we had a major health threat. We had the Ambassador of Iraq--obviously an important position--blocked during a time of war just when we most needed to resolve some political issues there.

One single Senator on the other side held up the nomination of the Deputy U.S. Trade Representative for 9 months--9 months that was held up--to try to force that U.S. Trade Representative's Office to file a complaint against Canada on some issue. I don't have the foggiest idea what that issue was, but I will tell you this: I would never, and have never, held up a nomination for 9 months in order to try to force something that I insist should happen. That is not the way the Senate is supposed to work.

One Senator on the other side blocked a highly qualified nominee to be Assistant Under Secretary for the Western Hemisphere at the State Department, and it had to do with our relationship with Hugo Chavez, which left us without the person who was supposed to be responsible for coordinating our response to the difficulty in Honduras last year. One Senator held up that nomination on and on and on.

Again, the fact is, as I said, this is called the great debating body, the most exclusive club in the world, and all of those descriptions. But this is not the way it is supposed to work. We have some models of how it is supposed to work. In the old days--and when I say the old days, I mean some decades ago--people would get together and decide what is the major challenge facing our country and how do we work together to find a way to resolve it; not who gets the credit or who gets the blame, but what is needed to be done to fix what is wrong in America. That is the way the Senate used to work. Regrettably, these days, it does not.

Our country rests on the precipice of a very significant cliff. We are still not out of this financial and economic crisis, although I think there has been some stability and we have, hopefully, found some foundation. But at a time when we most need cooperation, we see almost none--almost none. It doesn't. Just read the record: An estimated 146 cloture petitions are filed to shut off filibusters, and on issue after issue after issue we have the minority in this Chamber blocking things they ultimately vote for. How do you explain that--I was against it before I was for it?

Madam President, this country deserves and expects a whole lot better. This country is going through tough times. While I speak here, and while my colleagues are objecting to proceeding on anything--while we are in a 30-hour period where nothing is happening on the floor of the Senate--nothing--a whole lot of people are out looking for work. They are stopping by business after business with their resume, and thinking: Can I find a way? Can I please find a way to get on a payroll and get a job to help my family?

There are a whole lot of folks who need a job, need some hope, need to keep their house, who are struggling. They deserve a lot better from this Congress. The last thing they deserve is a Congress that decides its mission in life is to stop things from happening. The mission for every Senator ought to be to get up in the morning and reach out and see how we can work together to get the best ideas of what both parties have to offer this country. That is happening far too seldom in this Chamber.

It is not my habit to come to the Senate floor to be critical of the Republican side of the Senate. I don't do that often, but I see what is happening. We are sitting here today--and this is a good example of it--for 30 hours doing nothing. Why? Is it because there is nothing to do? No. It is because the other side insists on cloture, insists on the 2 days, then insists on the 30 hours. So what they will have done this week is insist that we will only be able to confirm two Presidential nominees--one is a Solicitor General in the Labor Department and the second is to head the GSA. That is what we will get done this week. That should have been done in 5 minutes, having a vote on those nominations. If you don't like the nominee, vote no; if you like the nominee, vote yes. Dispose of the nominations.

In my judgment, this system is broken, and it can't be 1 person or 10 people who fix it. It has to be 100 people with reasonably goodwill who want to make good things happen for the future of this country.

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

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

Madam President, on Wednesday of last week the President gave his State of the Union Address and talked about a lot of issues. One of the issues he mentioned that is especially important to me is one I have worked on for some long while here in the Senate, and that is changing the Tax Code to begin cutting out and getting rid of the tax break that is offered to companies that shut their American factories and move their jobs overseas. It is strange to most people to hear, but we actually have in the American Tax Code a reward for companies that would say: You know what I should do? What I want to do is shut down my American factory, I want to fire my American workers, I want to move those jobs to China and hire somebody for 50 cents an hour. By the way, if they do that, they actually get a tax break in this country. They get rewarded by the American tax system for moving American jobs to other countries.

That is an unbelievably ignorant and pernicious part of our Tax Code and needs to be changed. I have offered amendment after amendment here on the floor of the Senate on it, and the President in his State of the Union Address last week indicated he believed we needed to do this and do it soon. I could not agree more.

We are talking about jobs a lot in this Congress. We have had some discussions today about jobs again. Senator Durbin and I have worked to put together a jobs package that would try to stimulate and incentivize more jobs, especially small and medium-size businesses to be able to hire people and have the incentive to put people on payrolls. We are working on all of that.

Senator Baucus and certainly Senator Reid and others have been working together with us to put together a jobs initiative. Even as we try to find a way to create more jobs in our country, we still have this backdoor approach in the Tax Code that rewards people for moving jobs outside of our country. Most of us believe what we want to do is see more of those signs that say ``Made in the USA.'' Made in the USA means there is a job someplace here, particularly in a factory that is producing something, that is putting somebody to work to be able to make a living, to provide for their family. No special program is as important as a good job that pays well.

I have both written a book about this issue of moving jobs overseas and I have spoken on the floor so many times people have either nearly or completely gotten tired of it. But the stories are legend of what has happened in recent years. All of the little things we know and have expected to be American made--almost all of those things are gone. Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon--we have all ridden in it. It was a 110- year-old company in this country. They made those wagons for kids in America, made in Illinois. Not anymore. All those Radio Flyer Little Red Wagons are made in China.

Huffy Bicycles--all those people in Ohio lost their jobs. They were all fired and all those bicycles are now made in China. In the book I wrote I told the story about the last day at work at Huffy Bicycles in Ohio and those workers. As they left their parking lot, they left an empty pair of shoes in the space where their car was parked. It was a

way for them to say to that company, the Huffy Bicycle Company: You can move our jobs if you want, but you are not going to be able to effectively replace us. Those shoes, in an empty parking space in a big parking lot in Ohio when all those people lost their jobs, were a symbol of what is wrong.

A little company made something called Etch A Sketch. Every kid used an Etch A Sketch. It was also made in Ohio. Not anymore. It is now made in China. The list goes on and on, those American products that are gone in search of 50-cent labor and higher profits.

The people who make these products--Radio Flyer Little Red Wagons or Huffy Bicycles or Etch A Sketch or, yes, even airplanes--the people who make these products ask the question, What is wrong with my work? The answer is nothing is wrong with your work. You just can't compete with somebody who makes 50 cents an hour.

The second question is, Should I have to compete with somebody who makes 50 cents an hour? The answer to that is no, you should not. This country needs a vibrant manufacturing base and it needs to fix this unbelievable tax provision that says if you move your jobs overseas, we will give you a tax break.

In order to remain with a manufacturing base in this country, we need to reward the production of things in this country. ``Made in the USA'' should not be a distant memory. ``Made in the USA'' ought to be something applied to things made here that we are proud of.

The Senator from Washington State is here. She is going to speak in a moment. I will not be long.

But in every circumstance in this area of trade and the movement of jobs, other countries take advantage of us because we allow them to. For example, airplanes--Washington State makes some great airplanes in the Boeing Company manufacturing plants. A country such as China that has an unbelievable trade deficit with us, over $200 billion a year, says to us: If you want China to buy your planes you have to build most of it in China. It doesn't make any sense to me. If we are buying all those products from China in this country when we have something they need, they ought to buy American products to be shipped to China, not say to us you must move your product to be produced in China.

It is going on all the time and this country doesn't have the backbone or nerve or will to deal with it. What we ought to say to other countries is we are going to hold up a mirror and you treat us as we treat you.

If I might make one additional comment on automobile trade. Our automobile industry has been in a very serious problem. We came close to losing our automobile industry in this country, which is so important for our manufacturing capability. This country has a trade agreement with China, with whom we have a $200-plus billion a year deficit in trade. We have a trade agreement with China that says to the Chinese--who are, by the way, ramping up a very large automobile export industry and you will see Chinese cars on the streets of America very soon--we say to China: If you ship Chinese cars to the United States of America you will have a 2.5-percent tariff attached to those cars. But the agreement also says if we ship American cars to be sold in China, they may impose a 25-percent tariff. We have an agreement with the Chinese that says we will give you a 10-to-1 advantage on tariffs in bilateral automobile trade. That is a recipe for undermining America's manufacturing and economic strength and it goes on all the time. Frankly, I am sick and tired of it. One piece of it is something the President talked about last week and that is let's at least cut out this unbelievably ignorant and pernicious provision that says: You move your jobs overseas and we will give you a big tax reward. We will cut your taxes if you move your jobs overseas.

I say to the President: Good for you. Help us shut that provision down. Let's have ``Made in America'' be something we see more and more frequently these days.

I yield the floor.