Floor Statements

Mr. President, we are debating the subject of children's health care at a time when our economy is in desperate trouble. Most all of us understand that 20,000 people today and 20,000 people tomorrow will have lost their jobs. Think of that. We are experiencing 20,000 people a day losing their jobs in this country right now during this economic difficulty. It was one thing at a time when the folks at the bottom of the economic ladder had a job and then had to worry about the issues understanding second job, second shift, second mortgage. But now it is not even that. Now they do not have a job at all.

Last month, over half a million people lost their jobs. As that happens, the question is about the necessities of life. How do you provide for the necessities of life? How about your children's health care?

I don't know what is second or third in everybody's life. I don't know what might be in second, third or fourth place in people's lives. But I know what ought to be in first place, and is for most people, and that is their children, their well-being, the health of their children.

This legislation deals with that subject, trying to provide health care to children who do not have health care, expanding the number of children under the Children's Health Insurance Program. Nearly seven million children are now enrolled. This expands it.

Four million additional children who do not have health care would receive health care under this expansion. It makes a lot of sense.

In my State, we have 3,500 children receiving benefits under the Children's Health Insurance Program. There are another 14,000 who are uninsured in North Dakota. So surely this ought to represent one of the significant priorities for the children of our country and for the children of our individual States.

I have come to the floor talking a lot about health care for American Indians. I have put up a couple charts on the floor talking about Avis Little Wind. She lost her life. I have talked about Ta'Shon Rain Little Light. She was 6 years old. She lost her life.

The fact is, these are children for whom we would expect health care would be available, and it was not. Multiply that by a million or 10 million children who determine whether their health care needs are met when they are sick by whether their parents have money in their pockets. That ought not be a criteria by which we treat sick children in this country ever--not ever.

One hundred years from now, we will all be gone and historians will look back and evaluate us--who we were, what we did, what our values were if you take a look at what we decided to spend money on, what kind of a budget did we have. Historians 100 years from now can take a look back and evaluate, at least in part, what our value system was. What did we think was important? What was valuable to us? What was most important to us?

The question that is begged by this legislation is, Are our children important to us? Do we care about our children's health? Don't tell me children are important if you are not willing to do almost anything necessary to provide for your children's health.

We must do this. This is not difficult. A lot of issues come to the floor of the Senate that are difficult and complicated and complex. You have to try to evaluate all the nuances to try to figure how do we put this together. This is not any of that. This is not difficult in terms of the mechanics, how it works. We know it works. It is not difficult in terms of the value system. Can you name two other things we do on the floor of the Senate that are more important than preserving the health of our children or treating a sick child who has no other options to get treatment or go to a doctor or go to a health clinic? Name something more important than that for your children or for the children you love.

This is not difficult, and we should not make it difficult. What we ought to decide is that this is a priority for this country. It is a long-delayed priority. We passed it twice, and President George W. Bush vetoed it twice. But its delay ought not concern us at this moment. What ought concern us now is that we move and move quickly to address this problem and say to America's children: You rank at the top of our priorities, yes, in our personal lives and also in our public lives. You rank at the top, and we are going to provide health care to America's children who are uninsured.

That ought to represent the best of our country and the best of what we can do in both political parties that serve in the Congress.

I yield the floor.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, this morning the Washington Post has a front-page story that says ``Buy American Rider Sparks Trade Debate, Proviso Limits Steel and Iron from Abroad.'' This is a story about a provision that is in both the House stimulus bill and the Senate stimulus bill that encourages, to the extent we are stimulating investment in infrastructure projects--building roads and bridges and dams and schools and repairing libraries and so on in order to try to put people back to work--that the acquisitions to come from American sources, where possible. If you are going to buy steel, buy iron, skid steer loaders, any number of different kinds of equipment, it ought to be coming from American factories so that we put people back on factory floors and back to work.

The Washington Post has editorialized in opposition to this. The story

itself almost sounds a bit like an opinion piece. It talks about ``opponents say it amounts to a declaration of war against free trade'' and ``will spark retaliation'' and so on.

I wanted to make a comment about this, because I think it is an important issue and one we ought to discuss. If today is like most other days recently, 20,000 people will have lost their jobs; 20,000 people will come home tonight and have to tell someone in the family that they lost their job. And 20,000 people every day are losing their jobs, 500,000 to 600,000 people a month. We don't know exactly what the menu is to try to put this economy back on track, but we know that doing nothing is not a solution. So the Congress is putting together a stimulus proposal, an economic recovery proposal to try to do things that would put people back on payrolls.

The quickest way to restore confidence is to put people back to work so they are earning a salary, have a job, and can provide for their families. And in the context of creating legislation that would put people back to work, building roads and bridges and building water projects and repairing schools and so on, the question is, we should spend American taxpayer money on U.S.-made products in order to make these repairs and build these projects. It's just common sense.

The Washington Post story had a number of things attached to it that were not accurate. I want to talk about it for a moment. This provision in the Senate bill says that public works projects that are funded by this stimulus bill should use American steel, iron, and manufactured goods. That is not radical. We ought not be embarrassed to suggest that we try to use, where we can, products that are built in this country so that we put people back to work on the manufacturing floors and the plant floors building these products. That is the purpose of this legislation.

The Washington Post suggests that the proposal has few exceptions. That is not true. The proposal has a broad public interest exemption, one that allows the administration to waive the ``Buy America'' program if it deems it to be in the public interest to waive it. There are exceptions where the products are not available. There are exceptions where using domestic material would increase the cost of the project by over 25 percent. There are plenty of exemptions and exceptions here-- public interest, 25 percent, not available. But in circumstances where a domestic product is available, where it is available at a price that is within the bounds of reason, and where we want to try to find a way to acquire products that are made in this country in order to put people back to work, that is a perfectly reasonable and important thing to do.

The Washington Post also suggested and had other people suggest as well that asking that we would purchase iron and steel and manufactured products in this stimulus bill made in America would somehow violate our trade agreements. That is simply untrue again. The Federal grant programs that are in this stimulus bill to the States for infrastructure investments, construction, repair and so on are not covered by our international trade agreements. So it is not true that what we are doing here would somehow violate trade agreements.

I had a reporter say to me: Some economists have said this harkens back to 1920s protectionism. I said: Give me a break. I am so tired of that nonsense. It cannot possibly be a sober economist. This country has a $700 billion a year trade deficit. We buy $2 billion more each day than we sell to foreign countries. We consume 3 percent more than we produce. We have a giant trade deficit. How could anyone in their right mind suggest this country is protectionist? It is absurd. How can anybody decide that when we put together a stimulus package to try to put people back to work, that we ought not buy things, to the extent we can, that are manufactured and produced in this country? It makes no sense to me.

The Washington Post also indicated that the foreign Governments could retaliate if we did this. Again, we have a $700 billion trade deficit, so it's hard to see how our trade imbalance could be less favorable.

But at any rate, let me say that Mr. Sarkozy in France said last month, with respect to their stimulus package, they want to make sure they are purchasing things that are made in France. It is a perfectly logical thing.

No, this is not creating a trade war. This is an emergency situation in which each of our countries is trying to put people back to work. That is a perfectly logical thing to do.

The Washington Post story also pointed out that the previous stimulus package, of which a fair amount was provided in tax cuts, went to stimulate manufacturing in China. A fair amount of it went to Wal-Mart. Eighty percent of the products in the Wal-Mart store shelves are made in China. So we are not going to stimulate economic jobs by purchasing Chinese goods. I am not suggesting somebody ought to stop their car at the moment and not walk into Wal-Mart. That is not my point at all. My point is, if we want to put people back on payrolls to try to put this country back on track and give people some confidence at a time when 20,000 people are losing their jobs every single day, the way to do that, with the hundreds of billions of dollars that are in this bill, is to say, at least try to buy things that are made in America. That is not unfair. It is not selfish. It is the right thing to do.

It is only in areas of the rarified air of our Nation's capital and some other areas where we have ground our heads to such a point that we don't understand what is logical. I understand it is a global economy. I fully understand that. There are circumstances where you perhaps cannot buy a product that is made here because there aren't any made here. There are circumstances where the domestic product's price is truly exorbitant. We don't want to do that. I understand all of that. All of that is provided for in this Buy American provision. Yet you see folks out in the hallways here having an apoplectic seizure over what some economist is saying about something that is so fundamentally sound in terms of what we ought to be doing to try to strengthen the economy of this country, to reach out to American citizens and say: We understand a job is important for you. We understand you have lost your job. We understand it wasn't your fault, and we will see if we can help you get a job back on the plant floor, back on the factory floor someplace, producing products made in this country. It is a fair thing to do and a critically important thing to do, if the result of this stimulus program is going to do as advertised, and that is put Americans back to work.

We have been through a long and tortured trail in recent months trying to determine what has happened and what needs to happen to try to fix what is wrong. What unites all of us is, none of us has been here before. We have never seen the convergence of the collapse of our financial system, the largest names in American finance sitting there with toxic assets in their financial bellies trying to figure out how they overcome the dreadful mistakes of the last 10 years with asset bubbles and a carnival of greed. At the same time that we see this collapse at the top of the financial system, we read about the subprime loan scandal and the nearly unbelievable circumstances of bad business that created it.

In addition to that, we read about companies that have taken massive quantities of money from the American taxpayers in the form of TARP funds, in the form of the Federal Reserve Board. By the way, it is about $7.5 trillion that has now been committed in the name of the American taxpayer in ways that I don't think is written in the Constitution. But we have watched all this happen and we still see what is going on on Wall Street. We hear about airplanes on order. We hear about bonuses. We have watched that for the last 10 years and wondered, how on Earth can this kind of house of cards continue to exist? The answer is, it couldn't and it doesn't, except there is a lot for this Congress to do with respect to oversight, investigation, and to require accountability.

One piece of business, an attempt to try to deal with the wreckage of this economy from this past decade of excess, one piece of business is to try to see if we can stimulate the economy to put people back to work. It is interesting how at the top everybody is interested in bringing a pillow and some aspirin to say: Are you comfortable? Can we help you? That is what happens

if you are a big bank. But how about at the bottom, the people who lost their job and their house. Anybody around to say: We want to help you?

In a stimulus program, if we put together construction projects, projects to create an asset for this country's future, and if we say: We would like you to see if you can buy the products with which you will produce those assets here in America so we can put people back on the payroll and get them working once again, that is not radical; that is the right thing to do. If there is a big, old dust storm and a whole lot of angst about asking people if they can buy in this country during this stimulus, that is too bad. That is exactly what we should do.

It is my intent, with respect to this legislation--I believe the intent of many others--that we continue to keep this provision in the stimulus bill as it moves through the Congress.

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

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

Madam President, how much time remains on each side?

Madam President, I came to the Chamber and heard my colleague from Iowa speak about the nomination before us and speak about the culture of greed and other events that have resulted in the collapse of our financial system. I want to make a point that the Senator from Iowa is not alone. There are a number of us who feel very strongly about what has happened on Wall Street, what has happened since the financial collapse, and what is happening every single day. You wake up in the morning and you hear of thousands and thousands of people being laid off, with 2.6 million people losing their jobs last year and an estimated 2.5 million people expected to lose their jobs in the first 6 months of this year alone.

This is a very serious problem for our economy, which is perched on the edge of a cliff. The question is, Who is going to steer us out of this mess? My notion is that the same people who steered us into the ditch are not likely to show up with an ambulance to get us out. And my great concern is that there needs to be a culture change. I must say I am concerned as well that we have some people coming to Washington who were part of the culture that got us into this mess.

It was 10 years ago when the Financial Modernization Act was on the floor of this Senate. My colleague from Iowa voted against it, and so did I. There were eight of us who voted against it in the Senate. That is what caused these big holding companies. Citigroup, or Citicorp at that point, wanted to buy Travelers Insurance but the law wouldn't let them. So they got busy and changed the law. They got Glass-Steagall repealed--the protections put in place after the Great Depression--so that banks could get engaged in riskier enterprises, such as securities and real estate and merged it all together into a big holding company and said it would be fine.

I stood here on the floor of the Senate 10 years ago and said: Mark my words, within a decade, we are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts if we pass that bill. I have no pride in being right. But I said at the same time, if you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas.

Why on Earth should we have done in 1999 what we did to fuse banking with

inherently risky enterprises? It created an unbelievable carnival of greed. People at the top were making money hand over fist, taking it home, and putting it in their big banks. Not everyone was making money, only folks at the top. The highest income in 2007 was $3.6 billion for one person. Think of that. Incomes from outerspace.

So what do we have? Well, the fact is some of the same folks in 1999 preached the gospel of deregulation--getting rid of those old-fashioned things put in place after the Great Depression--to get what they called one-stop financial service centers. You would have one-stop financial shopping. Now you would be going to one place to do your real estate and your securities and your banking. That is what they wanted. Well, they got it. Only eight of us voted no, so they got it. Now the American people bear the brunt of this colossal, unbelievable failure.

I have to say--and I have told the President this--that I worry some folks coming into this town now were part of the chorus supporting all of that deregulation in what was called modernization--the Financial Modernization Act and a couple of other pieces of legislation that occurred thereafter. So I am going to watch like a hawk the folks who show up around here who were part of the supporters back in 1999 who have taken apart the protections that had existed since the Great Depression. I am going to watch this like a hawk.

We have to fix this, but you can't fix it by tightening a few bolts here and there. We need financial reform. We need to ask basic questions: Was it ever in the public interest to begin securitizing everything and passing risk up the line and allowing the most unbelievable mortgages to be written--no documentation of income, you don't have to pay any principal at first or you don't have to pay interest for 12 months. All this sort of thing. And by the way, if you have a bankruptcy in your background, come to us, we want to give you a loan. If you are slow in paying, have bad credit, or a bankruptcy, come to us, we will give you a loan. That is the way it was advertised. Unbelievable.

This was a carnival of greed that has now toppled the financial structure of this country. And every single day American families around this country are bearing the burden and paying the price. Somebody is coming home and saying to their spouse, their loved ones, their friends, I lost my job today. It is not because I am a bad worker. It is because there were layoffs at the plant or the office. The price for this greed is unbelievable.

Now it has stopped because it has collapsed. But now we have to rebuild it. And the question is, who will be the architects who will give us confidence to rebuild a financial system in which underwriting is really underwriting; in which we soak out some of the greed and get back to basic values; you separate banking from risk; you begin to regulate, and you get rid of the folks around here who boasted about being willfully blind in terms of their responsibility to regulate behavior that long ago should have been regulated?

So I wanted to say that the Senator from Iowa speaks for a number of us--certainly myself--in being very concerned and determined to watch like a hawk what happens from this day forward with respect to those who are charged with and asked to help us reconstruct this system--a financial system, a system of employment, a system of production in this country where we put America back on track and give it the opportunity to expand, to grow, and to allow the American people to have confidence in the future once again.

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

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Maryland for her leadership. It has been a long struggle and she continues that struggle on the floor of the Senate today. I was thinking that the struggle for women's rights has been ongoing for a long time. It was 150 years in this country before women had the right to vote. Think of it. This has been a long and tortured struggle.

I say to my colleagues that I think this is the easiest vote to cast. We come to this floor sometimes to cast wrenching, difficult, controversial votes. This is not one of them. This cannot be one of them. Requiring women who have been discriminated against to bring a lawsuit against their employer before they knew they were discriminated against is absurd, and yet that is what the Supreme Court said. It seems to me it is time to correct that Supreme Court decision.

Women have been fighting for equality and especially equal pay for a long time. In this Ledbetter case, she was discriminated against by being paid substantially less than a coworker working right beside her, doing exactly the same thing, and they underpaid her for years and years and years. Finally, in the disposition of the Supreme Court, she was told that her case didn't stand because she didn't file that claim within 180 days. She didn't know for 20-some years, let alone 180 days. Why should she not have been able to have the right to continue redressing that wrong? So we must, it seems to me, do the work of the committee here today and pass this legislation.

This struggle, as I said, has gone on for so long. Abigail Adams was urging her husband John Adams to protect the rights of women as early as 1776. This struggle has gone on since before the Constitution was written in this country. I was reading some while ago about the struggle of the woman's right to vote. This is about equal pay, but the so-called ``night of terror'' happened in Occoquan Prison. On November 15, 1917, 33 women were severely beaten by over 40 guards in Occoquan Prison. Why? What had they done? They were arrested for obstructing sidewalk traffic in front of the White House. Why were they there? Because they believed that women ought to have the right to vote in this country. So they were arrested and hauled off to prison. Lucy Burn, one of the 33, they say was shackled around both arms and the chain between the shackles was hung on the top of a cell door and that was her position throughout the night as blood ran down her arms. Alice Paul finally went on a hunger strike and they shoved a tube down her throat and her vomit nearly killed her.

These women were tortured during the night of terror in Occoquan Prison because they obstructed traffic on a sidewalk? Why did they do that? They demanded, after 150 years, the right to vote. That is what they risked. They nearly died, some of them, to get this right to vote. Think of that struggle and how unbelievable that struggle was, and what heroes they were. But as always, there was push-back, people saying no.

My colleague from Maryland brings to us today an issue of fair play-- another long struggle, and it is not even nearly over--but at least today we can take a step in the right direction with respect to the Lilly Ledbetter case. A Supreme Court that says a woman has no right to bring a pay discrimination case before the Court because she didn't know she was being discriminated against? That is an absurdity and one that must be corrected.

This long struggle for fairness for American women will not end on the floor of the Senate today, but this should not be a difficult vote at all. I can't conceive of someone who would say the Supreme Court decision has any sort of fairness attached to it. A woman who is working for 25 years or more, beside someone who is doing the same job but paid much more because of that person's gender, that woman doesn't have a right to seek redress? What an unbelievable injustice.

Lilly Ledbetter, by the way, was here this week attending the inaugural of a new President. We have tried to solve this problem before in the last Congress, but couldn't. We will solve it now, because it is right, it is fair, it is just, and this struggle ought to continue until we win. This is one right step in the direction of this struggle of fair pay, and it is a step we ought to take today.

Again, I thank my colleague from Maryland for being such a leader on this issue. My hope is at the end of this day--this day--we will have passed this legislation and taken a very large step in the direction of justice for women.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if the Senator will yield for a moment, this issue is about discrimination, but it goes far beyond this case or discrimination in these circumstances. It goes to the fair pay issue which the Senator from Maryland has been fighting for here in this Chamber for months and years. Obviously, we are going to do

much more, but today is the first step in the direction of justice for women, and I think it will be a good day today if we are able to pass this legislation.

Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation called the Main Street Recovery Act to boost business investment and help jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy. We are facing our most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression and we must respond aggressively. Our financial services sector is in shambles and other business sectors are suffering.

Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--including 2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. Some economists are predicting that the unemployment rate could jump to 10-percent or more this year in many parts of the country.

The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008. The unemployment rate among construction workers in December was 15.3 percent, eight percentage points higher than for the economy as a whole. More than 1.4 million experienced construction workers are currently unemployed.

I believe immediate action is needed to prevent our economy from sliding into a deeper recession that would lead to more bankrupt businesses and massive layoffs of workers across the country. That is why I will support a stimulus program that will create jobs by investing in infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, water projects and more.

But I also think we need to provide some targeted tax incentives to encourage the business community to consider making capital investments even during the economic slowdown. The legislation I am introducing today includes the following tax incentives that I believe can stimulate business investment: a temporary 15-percent investment tax credit. To encourage manufacturers and producers not to wait on making crucial equipment and machinery purchases, we should give them every incentive to make these purchases now or in the near future when these investments will most benefit the economy.

We can accomplish this by offering a temporary, 15-percent tax credit through June 30, 2010 for businesses that purchase new equipment and machinery that is used as an integral part of manufacturing or production. Investment tax credits have been proven to work and will help generate growth and jobs in the nation's manufacturing and construction sectors.

Enhanced 50-percent bonus depreciation. To promote business investment now, when the economy needs it most,

we should extend the expiring 50-percent bonus depreciation for eligible assets placed in service over the next 18 months. This will help businesses make capital investments during the economic downturn by allowing businesses to write-off a larger share of their eligible business investments more quickly from their federal income taxes.

Increased $250,000 small business expensing. To help small businesses buy the equipment and machinery they need to weather this economic storm and begin to grow again, we should extend the expiring expensing provision that allows small businesses to expense, i.e. immediately deduct, up to $250,000 of their equipment and machinery purchases over the next year and a half.

In addition, there are many business owners that do not require new equipment or machinery but instead want to build a new business--maybe a restaurant, perhaps a retail shop or make interior and other improvements to such properties. Expanding the bonus depreciation and small business expensing provisions outlined above to cover investments in commercial real property will help provide business owners with the financial assistance they need to build that building or make long overdue improvements.

I am very pleased to have the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association for my proposals as part of a robust economic stimulus package.

The Senate is working on a large economic recovery package and I am optimistic that the package will include these important provisions. I am told that the Senate Finance Committee plans to mark up the tax portion of this package next week, and I am pleased that Chairman Baucus has recognized the need to help our Main Street businesses. In my judgment, including the tax incentives I have proposed will help stimulate much-needed economic activity and get our economy growing and creating jobs once again.

Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation called the Main Street Recovery Act to boost business investment and help jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy. We are facing our most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression and we must respond aggressively. Our financial services sector is in shambles and other business sectors are suffering.

Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--including 2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. Some economists are predicting that the unemployment rate could jump to 10-percent or more this year in many parts of the country.

The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008. The unemployment rate among construction workers in December was 15.3 percent, eight percentage points higher than for the economy as a whole. More than 1.4 million experienced construction workers are currently unemployed.

I believe immediate action is needed to prevent our economy from sliding into a deeper recession that would lead to more bankrupt businesses and massive layoffs of workers across the country. That is why I will support a stimulus program that will create jobs by investing in infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, water projects and more.

But I also think we need to provide some targeted tax incentives to encourage the business community to consider making capital investments even during the economic slowdown. The legislation I am introducing today includes the following tax incentives that I believe can stimulate business investment: a temporary 15-percent investment tax credit. To encourage manufacturers and producers not to wait on making crucial equipment and machinery purchases, we should give them every incentive to make these purchases now or in the near future when these investments will most benefit the economy.

We can accomplish this by offering a temporary, 15-percent tax credit through June 30, 2010 for businesses that purchase new equipment and machinery that is used as an integral part of manufacturing or production. Investment tax credits have been proven to work and will help generate growth and jobs in the nation's manufacturing and construction sectors.

Enhanced 50-percent bonus depreciation. To promote business investment now, when the economy needs it most,

we should extend the expiring 50-percent bonus depreciation for eligible assets placed in service over the next 18 months. This will help businesses make capital investments during the economic downturn by allowing businesses to write-off a larger share of their eligible business investments more quickly from their federal income taxes.

Increased $250,000 small business expensing. To help small businesses buy the equipment and machinery they need to weather this economic storm and begin to grow again, we should extend the expiring expensing provision that allows small businesses to expense, i.e. immediately deduct, up to $250,000 of their equipment and machinery purchases over the next year and a half.

In addition, there are many business owners that do not require new equipment or machinery but instead want to build a new business--maybe a restaurant, perhaps a retail shop or make interior and other improvements to such properties. Expanding the bonus depreciation and small business expensing provisions outlined above to cover investments in commercial real property will help provide business owners with the financial assistance they need to build that building or make long overdue improvements.

I am very pleased to have the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association for my proposals as part of a robust economic stimulus package.

The Senate is working on a large economic recovery package and I am optimistic that the package will include these important provisions. I am told that the Senate Finance Committee plans to mark up the tax portion of this package next week, and I am pleased that Chairman Baucus has recognized the need to help our Main Street businesses. In my judgment, including the tax incentives I have proposed will help stimulate much-needed economic activity and get our economy growing and creating jobs once again.

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

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

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

Mr. President, yesterday's paper and today's paper describes some pretty ominous news. And yesterday's action in the Senate was prompted as a result of the financial crisis that exists in this country.

Each day the paper brings us another chapter of this sad saga.

``Bank of America to Get Billions in U.S. Aid.'' That was the Wall Street Journal's headline.

``Bank of America to Get More Bailout Money,'' the New York Times.

Yesterday, this Senate voted to proceed with $350 billion in additional

funding for what is called TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program. In fact, TARP is not being used to purchase trouble assets, but that is what the program is called.

I did not support that proposal yesterday. I didn't support the proposal of releasing another $350 billion, but that is not surprising perhaps. I didn't support the proposal on the $700 billion last October.

I didn't support that, not because I didn't think there was a crisis--I think there is a financial crisis in this country. But I didn't think there was the foggiest notion of how that was going to be used effectively to address this country's financial problems. It turns out, I believe, I was right.

Since the $700 billion was authorized last October, we have seen the first $350 billion made available spread around in almost every direction. It is almost as if you turned a ceiling fan on to a stack of money. The Secretary of the Treasury said: We have a financial crisis. And he said: Here is a three-page piece of legislation, and I want you to pass a $700 billion bill in 3 days.

The Congress didn't do that, but in relatively short order, the Congress authorized $700 billion for the Treasury Secretary to do as he wanted to do: buy troubled assets from the largest financial firms in the country.

He got the money. But it turns out that he did not want to buy troubled assets after all. Instead, he wanted to invest in bank capital. So he began investing in bank capital. The investments in bank capital at one point was $125 billion to nine banks, some of which did not ask for it and did not need it, no strings attached.

He said: We are doing it to expand lending because we want to incentivize expanding lending and we want to try to unfreeze these credit markets. Well, $125 billion with no strings. So was lending expanded? Probably not. Nobody knows. Ask the banks what they did with the money and they will say: None of your business; money is fungible; we are not going to tell you.

Now the question is the other $350 billion. One of the reasons I was not even interested in starting on the $700 billion or the $350 billion is we don't have any regulations that will close the gate and stop the very kinds of practices that steered this country's economy into the ditch in the first place.

I come from a ranching background raising some horses and cattle in a farm State. I understand the notion about closing the gate. You have to close the gate. There is nothing here that closes the gate to stop the kinds of practices that put us in the position we are now in.

I talk about these headlines with Bank of America. Let me start out by saying Bank of America apparently has been a good bank. It is an FDIC-insured bank. I don't have particular problems with Bank of America. But I have serious problems with what has happened with respect to government-sponsored failure, and government-sponsored failure is not something of which we ought to be particularly proud. Government-sponsored failure is to stand behind failed financial institutions with taxpayers' money.

Winston Churchill once said success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. There sure ought to be a lot of enthusiastic people around because we are going failure to failure.

Let me describe what I mean. You take an FDIC-insured bank--in this case, Bank of America--and the Federal Government watches while the FDIC-insured bank buys the biggest mortgage company in this country which was failing, Countrywide Mortgage.

I have described that Countrywide was led by a man named Mozilo, largely celebrated as one of the great CEOs in America. He received the Horatio Alger Award. By the way, he got out of Countrywide with about $200 million, it appears, and Countrywide was failing. So Bank of America buys Countrywide, an FDIC-insured bank that the taxpayers are responsible for, is allowed to buy a failed mortgage company called Countrywide.

By the way, I have shown this many times. Let me show you what Countrywide was doing and why it was a spectacular failure. This big mortgage company was advertising this to the American people all the time they were running up this unbelievable amount of speculation and debt:

Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late

mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders?

Call us . . .

``Call us.'' You wonder why a business such as this fails-- advertising if you have bad credit, trouble paying your bills, call us, let me give you a loan.

So Bank of America bought Countrywide. I don't have the foggiest idea why they bought Countrywide. But 8 months later, the Federal Government encouraged Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch, a failing investment bank, that was about to go bankrupt, we guess, on about the same weekend Lehman went bankrupt.

The Federal Government helped an arranged marriage, apparently, without even any dating--at least you would think they would date a little bit. On a weekend, Bank of America, one of the biggest FDIC- insured banks in America that had picked up, 8 months earlier, a bad mortgage company that helped steer this country into the ditch, was now told: We want you to pick up a failed investment bank, Merrill Lynch. So they did.

What is the result? This arranged corporate marriage now gives us headlines and a deal overnight last week by which that parent company, Bank of America, needs billions more in order to keep going. What otherwise had been a healthy bank and what we are told this morning in news accounts that without Countrywide and without Merrill Lynch, Bank of America would be fine, now they need $20 billion. That is on top of another $25 billion last fall. This company now needs to be bailed out by the American taxpayers. Why? Because they put together FDIC-insured banks with more risks coming from, in this case, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide.

You think that is success? I don't. The question is: When do we stop doing things that fail?

So we wake up in the morning, and we discover that as a country, we have $20 billion less money in our hands, we have $20 billion less because somebody decided this company that bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch now needs $20 billion to keep going.

By the way, last month, the CEO for Merrill Lynch was trying to get Merrill Lynch to give him a big million bonus for 2008. It was reported there was a proposal somewhere in that system to give him a $30 million bonus. The CEO was apparently trying to get Merrill Lynch to give him a bonus after he sold Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America but before the bank actually took over Merrill Lynch.

Not only that, that CEO of Merrill Lynch had just joined Merrill Lynch the year before and received a $15 million signing bonus and a pay package valued at between $50 million and $120 million. I didn't know failure paid so well in this country.

The reason I am describing this specific case, and I have talked about this at length, and I am going to talk about it again, this all results from now almost 10 years ago on the Senate floor. Our friend from Texas, Senator Phil Gramm, authored a piece of legislation called Gramm-Leach-Bliley and, to be fair, supported by the Clinton administration, supported by the then-Treasury Secretary and some of the same people who are now being consulted on this crisis, they got something called financial modernization passed through this Congress.

What was financial modernization? Financial modernization was legislation that said: You know what, we have all these old-fashioned rules around here, for God's sake; let's dump them so we can move into the future with some modernization. Why should we still, 70 years after the last Great Depression, have on the books the laws that were put in place after the Great Depression that prevent banks from being involved in real estate and securities and insurance? Let's get rid of those laws. Let's allow our banks to be modern. Why can't our banks be involved in real estate and securities and so on?

That was the sermon that was being preached on the floor of the Senate and elsewhere.

What was a stimulant for it, by the way, was Citicorp wanted to buy Travelers Insurance, one of the biggest merger acquisitions in history, but they couldn't do it because the law prevented it. Why did the law prevent it?

Because after the Great Depression, where banks failed all across this country, because in the roaring twenties, everybody was making lots of money doing stupid things, a lot of speculation, everybody was getting rich, like hogs in a corncrib, they were all making all this money and loading up banks with risks. Banks were up to their necks in risky real estate. They were up to their necks in risky securities. And then the whole thing came tumbling down and banks failed in large numbers.

So after the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in and said: By the way, we are going to fix this. We are going to put in things that prevent that from ever happening again. We are going to separate banks from risky enterprises. Banks are not going to be engaged in real estate and securities. Banks are about FDIC-insured deposits of the American people, and you are not going to be engaged in those kinds of risks. We will prevent it. We will pass something called the Glass-Steagall Act, saying to banks you can't do it.

In 1999, Senator Phil Gramm and a whole lot of others who joined a big chorus to sing the same song said: You know what, those things are hopelessly old-fashioned. We have to get rid of those restrictions. Those were put in place in the 1930s. They don't apply in this modern age.

Eight of us on the floor of the Senate voted no. I wish to describe what I said on the floor of the Senate in 1999, when I opposed that legislation. I said:

Fusing together the idea of banking, which requires not

just safety and soundness to be successful, but the

perception of safety and soundness, with other inherently

risky speculative activity is, in my judgment, unwise . . .

That is what I said on the floor of the Senate almost 10 years ago.

I also said this:

I say to the people who own banks, if you want to gamble,

go to Las Vegas. If you want to trade in derivatives, God

bless you, do it with your own money. Don't do it through the

deposits that are guaranteed by the American people and by

deposit insurance.

I said this 10 years ago:

This bill will also, in my judgment, raise the likelihood

of future massive taxpayer bailouts.

I sure wish I had not been right. This bill will raise the likelihood of massive taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services industry at the expense of customers and others.

And I said this during the debate; that we will look back in 10 years' time and say: We shouldn't have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past.

I take no pride in believing, 10 years ago, that what was preached on this floor--and, yes, in the administration and elsewhere--about modernization was something that I felt would undermine this country's interest. But it has, and it will continue to.

The point I make today is none of these lessons has been learned. If when we went to bed last night someone was working to tell us this morning that $20 billion of American taxpayers' money has been taken in order to shore up a bank, one of the biggest banks in America because they are in trouble because they were allowed to buy an investment bank with toxic assets, if that is the lesson we learned from waking up this morning of what the people in charge of our money are doing with our money, I tell you, we haven't learned any lessons at all. Is there anything that will remind us of the absurdity of fusing together basically risky things with banking, which requires just the perception of safety and soundness? If people think a bank isn't safe and sound, it doesn't matter how much money that bank has, there will be a run on that bank and the bank will fail. Perception of safety and soundness is critical.

How do you retain that perception--in fact, more importantly, how do you have the reality of safety and soundness--if you have the biggest banks in the country merging through corporate marriages with some unbelievably bad mergers--in this case a very good bank, Bank of America, buying Countrywide Mortgage, and then purchasing Merrill Lynch? How do we justify that?

The reason I voted against the proposition of releasing the $350 billion yesterday is I am not prepared to move forward with any of these things until and unless there is a commitment by the people running these operations that they have learned the lesson and they are going to close the gate and this sort of thing can't happen.

Now, I have a chart to show you that we have now committed $8.5 trillion of the taxpayers' money--$8.5 trillion--and here is how it has been committed. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that describes this kind of governing--nothing. The Federal Reserve has contributed about $5.5 trillion. They have opened their window for the first time to loan money directly to investment banks. Never been done before in the history of the country. And if you try to find out who got the money and how much, you can't--$5.5 trillion. FDIC programs, $1.5 trillion, Treasury Department programs, $1.1 trillion, and Federal Housing Administration, $300 billion. All this taxpayer money shoved out the door with no accountability, no transparency, and much of it without strings. I am not willing to be a part of that.

If I felt that those who steered us into this ditch were going to show up with an ambulance, or if those who steered us in this ditch had learned their lesson that you can't continue to do this sort of thing, I would feel differently. But yesterday's and today's newspapers tell me they haven't learned a thing.

So my notion is that we are still going down the same road. And to believe that while America sleeps we will keep throwing money at failure--because we merge banking with risk--and somehow people will believe that we don't have this risk attached to banking is not going to work.

Let me talk for a second about Citigroup. One of the largest banking institutions in America--in the world, in fact--is coming apart. It lost $8.2 billion in the last 3 months, and it lost $18.7 billion in 2008. Citigroup is a bank. It is an investment bank, it is a brokerage business, it is an insurance company. It is almost everything. How does all that happen? It happened because in 1999 the Financial Modernization Act said: You know what, to be modern you have to allow big holding companies and gather all this stuff together in one place. You put it in a big holding company and then you can build firewalls. It turns out they were tissue paper firewalls, but nonetheless we have all these mergers and holding companies, and now Citigroup is completely coming apart. In the meantime, these companies are judged by our country--by the Federal Reserve and others--to be too big to fail. It doesn't matter how incompetent they might be, they are too big to fail. Interestingly, they have not been big enough to regulate. I am talking about the investment banks. It seems to me if you are too big to fail, you surely are not too small to regulate.

Why would we not have regulatory authority to prevent this sort of thing? Five banks that are deemed too big to fail, by the way, hold $171 trillion in what are called derivatives. Most people don't understand the lexicon of derivatives, CDOs, collateralized debt obligations, swaps, or credit default swaps. Most of that doesn't even sound like the English language. It is like some foreign language. In fact, some is so complicated that those engaged in it don't understand it. But again, these banks--too big to fail--hold a notional value of $171 trillion in derivatives.

Going back to the mid 1990s, I have offered five pieces of legislation here in the Congress to regulate derivative trading and also to regulate hedge funds. Obviously, there is enormous resistance by Wall Street and others to anybody who wants to regulate anything they do, and so I have not been successful. It is not because I haven't tried, but there is a massive amount of dividends out there. And what prompted me to do that is that banks--FDIC-insured banks--were trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. They might as well have put some craps tables or blackjack tables right in the lobby of the bank because that is what you are doing exposing that kind of risk to basic banking.

But everybody was fat and happy around here. Regulators were willfully blind. They would come to town and say: Let me be a regulator so I can put blinders on. Or as one of them said at the SEC: There is a new sheriff in town. This is a business-friendly place now, which meant that those who were

supposed to look out for the public interest didn't give a rip. In fact, Alan Greenspan was right in front of the parade. He believed in what is called self-regulation. Isn't that interesting. If we don't look, don't pay attention, don't worry, and be happy, self-regulation will be fine. Well, it is about $8.5 trillion short of being fine.

And the question is, When--when--at last, at long, long last--will this Congress, this administration and the new administration, decide that we are going to regulate these activities in the future; that we are going to close the gate; that this cannot happen again. When will we decide if you want to trade in derivatives, then it will have to be not in the dark--no more dark money--it will have to be transparent and regulated. If you have an FDIC-insured bank, you are not going to be able to buy a Merrill Lynch because you can't fuse risky enterprises with FDIC insured banks.

Now, let me say that is not unbelievable criticism of Bank of America because, as I said, that was a corporate sponsored marriage. Apparently, the folks down at Treasury went to Bank of America and said: You know what, we have this pretty little corporation called Merrill Lynch that is in some trouble and we would like you to marry it. So as I said, with apparently not too much thought, they decided to hitch up. Turns out to have been a pretty bad marriage. My point is it is not only this. I mention Citi and I have mentioned Bank of America. The fact is this river runs deep, the river of failure here. And the question is, When--when--will we get to the point where we are going to say yes, that we are willing to make investments to steer us out of this problem in exchange for regulation and in exchange for coming back to pass a piece of legislation similar to Glass-Steagall, similar to the protections that were put in place after the Great Depression.

Unbelievably, there are a whole lot of folks who are not even willing to entertain that. They say: No, no, no, you don't understand what you are talking about. We still need to be modern, we still need to compete, and we still need these new financial, exotic instruments. What they are is a new wrapper; kind of like sheep intestines, a new casing for sausage. They wrapped around something called a securitized product that began securitizing everything. All of them did. They were giving bad mortgages to people who couldn't pay them, no documentation of income, teaser rates at maybe 2 or 3 percent that will triple or quadruple in 3 years and lock in prepayment penalties, and then wrap them in a security and sell them upstream with everybody making fat bonuses and lots of income.

The problem is, the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is not just Mr. Madoff having breakfast in his $7 million apartment jail in Manhattan. Yes, that was a Ponzi, apparently by $50 billion. But this whole approach was a Ponzi scheme--wallpaper the country with credit cards. Wallpaper everything with credit cards.

The other day I talked about my son, when he was 12 years old, getting a credit card solicitation from a dozen different companies. They offered him a Diner's Club card to go to Europe. In fact, I brought a bunch of those solicitations to the floor of the Senate at that point. And I said, I am sure my son would love to go to Europe at some point, but he is only 12, and he ought not get a credit card. But these companies wallpapered America with credit cards and then they securitized credit card debt and sold securities upstream. Is there any reason these assets are toxic? Securitized credit card debt, much of which won't be repaid; securitized mortgages by Countrywide and others--Zoom Credit, which says in their advertisements: Is your credit in the tank? It is like money in the bank. Come to us.

It seems to me you don't effectively repair a house unless you first begin to strengthen the foundation. And the foundation for all of this, to try to put this country back on track, in my judgment, is to go back and revisit what was done in the last dozen years or so under the rubric of financial modernization--modernization of the financial system, modernization of commodity trading. If we don't go back and revisit that, this country will not be able to steer itself out of this problem.

This is a pretty significant financial wreck that has happened in this country. It is one thing for people to put on blue suits and come and talk about it; it is another thing for over a half million people last month to go home and tell the person they love or go home and tell their family they have lost their job--perhaps the same people who had to tell them a month or two ago they lost their home. These are tough times. A lot of people are hurting badly. We need to find a way to steer this country back to economic growth and prosperity again. But it will not happen unless we fix the foundation and reconnect those things that were taken apart over a decade ago.

Let me finally say again, while I have talked about this at some length on a number of times, despite it all, if we keep pushing in the right direction, I have hope that this country will prevail. This country has done so many terrific things against the odds, and we will again. But it requires people to be smart and tough. You cannot have a wall of debt out there that you don't care about, an unbelievable wave of speculation that you say doesn't matter. You can't have regulators who refuse to regulate. You can't have an avalanche of dark money that no one can see. The fact is you have to fix all these things, and we can.

This problem was created by public policy here and by corporate policy there, and we can fix it and put this country back on a better course, a course that will grow and provide jobs and opportunity and hope once again.

But it won't happen by itself. It is going to happen when we as a country decide that we are going to work together to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and steer a legislative course and steer some more responsibility on the corporate side to work together and fix these fundamental problems. I believe that is possible, and it is why I come to the floor so often to talk about what has caused these problems and what we ought to do to fix them. It is not hopeless. I am hopeful. But it is going to take a lot of work.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following

interns in my office be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of today's session of the Senate: Greg Innocent and Matt Hanson.

Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation with Senator Mikulski and 10 of our colleagues that I hope will be added to any economic stimulus package considered by Congress in the coming weeks. This bill will put the brakes on a tax break granted to U.S. companies that move U.S. jobs offshore.

The U.S. economy is facing its most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression, and we must respond aggressively. I think a new economic stimulus plan is urgently needed to help prevent the economy from sliding deeper into a long-term recession. I agree with those who say that a major goal of the stimulus package should be to create more jobs, but I think we also have an opportunity to make a change to ensure that we keep the jobs we already have.

Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008, continuing the disturbing loss of more than 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since the end of 2000. Federal tax laws have contributed to this problem.

There is one thing that Congress can do immediately to stem the loss of more manufacturing jobs: repeal the perverse tax subsidy in the Federal Tax Code for U.S. companies that move manufacturing operations and American jobs overseas. Not only will this help keep good-paying manufacturing jobs here at home, it will save American taxpayers more than $15 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Unbelievably, there is an insidious tax subsidy that rewards U.S. firms that move their production overseas and then turn around and import those now foreign-made products back to the United States for sale. When a U.S. company closes down a U.S. manufacturing plant such as Huffy bicycles or Radio Flyer little red wagons, fires its American workers and moves those good-paying jobs to China or other locations abroad, U.S. tax law actually provide those companies with a large tax break called deferral--allowing them to avoid paying any U.S. income taxes on their foreign earnings until those profits are returned, if ever, to this country. If a company making the same product decides to stay in this country, on the other hand, it is required to pay immediate U.S. taxes on the profits it earns here.

Repealing this jobs export tax subsidy will not hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete against foreign competitors in foreign markets, as some special interests have claimed. It is targeted only to U.S. firms that move production abroad and then turn around and ship those products back to this country for sale.

If there was ever a tax policy change that would help save U.S. manufacturing jobs and should be part of a robust economic stimulus plan, this is it. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation. With a new Congress and administration in place, now is the time to kill this ill-advised tax subsidy once and for all. I look forward to working with my colleagues on this important tax policy matter in the coming weeks.

Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation with Senator Mikulski and 10 of our colleagues that I hope will be added to any economic stimulus package considered by Congress in the coming weeks. This bill will put the brakes on a tax break granted to U.S. companies that move U.S. jobs offshore.

The U.S. economy is facing its most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression, and we must respond aggressively. I think a new economic stimulus plan is urgently needed to help prevent the economy from sliding deeper into a long-term recession. I agree with those who say that a major goal of the stimulus package should be to create more jobs, but I think we also have an opportunity to make a change to ensure that we keep the jobs we already have.

Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008, continuing the disturbing loss of more than 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since the end of 2000. Federal tax laws have contributed to this problem.

There is one thing that Congress can do immediately to stem the loss of more manufacturing jobs: repeal the perverse tax subsidy in the Federal Tax Code for U.S. companies that move manufacturing operations and American jobs overseas. Not only will this help keep good-paying manufacturing jobs here at home, it will save American taxpayers more than $15 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Unbelievably, there is an insidious tax subsidy that rewards U.S. firms that move their production overseas and then turn around and import those now foreign-made products back to the United States for sale. When a U.S. company closes down a U.S. manufacturing plant such as Huffy bicycles or Radio Flyer little red wagons, fires its American workers and moves those good-paying jobs to China or other locations abroad, U.S. tax law actually provide those companies with a large tax break called deferral--allowing them to avoid paying any U.S. income taxes on their foreign earnings until those profits are returned, if ever, to this country. If a company making the same product decides to stay in this country, on the other hand, it is required to pay immediate U.S. taxes on the profits it earns here.

Repealing this jobs export tax subsidy will not hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete against foreign competitors in foreign markets, as some special interests have claimed. It is targeted only to U.S. firms that move production abroad and then turn around and ship those products back to this country for sale.

If there was ever a tax policy change that would help save U.S. manufacturing jobs and should be part of a robust economic stimulus plan, this is it. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation. With a new Congress and administration in place, now is the time to kill this ill-advised tax subsidy once and for all. I look forward to working with my colleagues on this important tax policy matter in the coming weeks.

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

Mr. President, I have been interested for some long while about new technology and the Internet and all those related issues.

I recall reading a couple of years ago a statement by the former president of IBM in which he described the unbelievable leapfrog in technology and capability--most of it breathtaking. Most of us understand that because we use the Internet we can go anywhere in the world at our fingertips on the keyboard, but he described something breathtaking to me. He described the issue of storage density and the new capability of storage density. He said that we are on the cusp now of being able to reduce in storage density all of the works that exist in the Library of Congress--I think it is somewhere around 14 or 16 million volumes of work--which is the largest repository of human knowledge that exists anywhere on Earth; to be able to store that on a very small wafer the size of a penny.

Think of that: a wafer the size of a penny representing the storage device that contains the largest repository of human knowledge in history. Pretty remarkable.

Assume that you are able to walk around with a storage device the size of a penny in your jacket pocket which you can put into a computer and peruse all that human knowledge that has been gained since the start of human history. On that storage device would be a lot of information, but what wouldn't be on that storage device--of all the human knowledge accumulated since the beginning of time--would be how we get out of this financial mess that the country is now in. There is no formula, there is no rule, there is no experience that would give us a roadmap of how we get from here to where we need to be to get out of this financial wreck.

We are indeed in a financial crisis. And the one thing that unites the smartest economists in the country or the deepest thinkers or the latest self-proclaimed greatest sage and all the rest of us, the thing that connects us all, is none of us has ever been here before. We are all walking in the woods for which there is no map and all we have is a guess as to how we are to try to put this economy back together.

Now, some people say: Well, what does all that mean, this financial crisis? How do we understand that there is this wreckage occurring in the economy? Well, you can look at it a number of ways. You can look at the people who have been saving for a long period of time, investing their 401(k) in a mutual fund or in the stock market. After 30 years of work, they had a nest egg for retirement, but they have lost 40 or 50 percent of it, just like that. Half a lifetime of savings gone, like that. That is one piece of evidence. It is pretty dramatic for every family in this country.

But there is other evidence as well. And that evidence especially, it seems to me, describes the crisis in our families in this country. If you look at last month's unemployment report, it says, in a kind of a sanitary way, that 524,000 people lost their jobs. Well, what if you just say 523,999 and then focus on the one, just one person who had to come home, in most cases, and tell a spouse: You know what, I have lost my job today. No, I am not a bad employee. I have worked hard for that company for 10 or 15 years, but they laid employees off today. To that one family, that is 100 percent unemployment, and that is a disaster for that family. Think of it. Last month, over half a million Americans had that discussion some night around the supper table: What are we going to do?

And it is not just the half million people who lost their jobs last month or 2.6 million people who have lost their jobs since this recession started, and which has grown deeper; it is the hundreds of thousands and millions more who have not only had to say I have lost my job but who have had to say I have lost my house as well. It is pretty unbelievable.

This is an extraordinary country, with great strength, and an economic engine that has been the wonder of the world. No one in the world has done what we have done to expand the middle class and give everyone a feeling of opportunity. No one has done that. I have described before the unbelievable accomplishments of our country. We have survived the Civil War, survived a Great Depression, and we have been through two World Wars. We represent the beacon of freedom around the world. We have always been a country that represents hope.

I have been in so many parts of this world and asked people: What do you desire for your life? I remember being on a helicopter that ran out of gas between Nicaragua and Honduras in a mountainous area. We landed under power but we landed because we had no fuel, and campesinos from around the region came to see who had landed in this helicopter. We were stranded for about 4 hours until we were found. We had an interpreter, and so during a discussion, through an interpreter, I asked a young woman, who walked up with others--she had about three or four children with her, probably in her early 20s--what do you aspire to do for you and your family? Oh, I want to come to the United States, she said. Why? Because the United States is where there is opportunity and freedom, she said. So in a discussion up in the mountains between Honduras and Nicaragua someone who had never seen an American understood America as a place for her and her family, a place of opportunity and freedom.

It is unbelievable what this place has represented to the rest of the world. We split the atom, we have spliced genes. As I have said before, we have cloned animals. We invent things--the silicone chip, plastic, and the radar. We cured smallpox and polio. We built the telephone, the television, the Internet, and the computer. We built airplanes and learned to fly them; built rockets to fly to the Moon. It is unbelievable what we have done. Our country is just that resourceful.

But we have found ourselves in recent months in a very deep hole. We find ourselves right now perched on the edge of a cliff, and the question is: What do we do to try to restore economic health to this country so that next month the news is not another half million Americans have lost their jobs; so that perhaps next month, or some month in the future the news will be that more Americans are working, more Americans have found jobs, more Americans are owning homes. How do we do all that?

The fact is, there is not anything in recorded human history that replicates this and there is not anyone who knows what is the menu to use to restore economic health. This country is in some very severe difficulty.

I wish to talk about what all this means and what I think we have to do. President-elect Obama came to the Senate today and spent time with the Democratic caucus. He spent the lunch hour with us and spoke for nearly an hour. It was an extraordinary exchange of views. He is a very gifted person who I think has great promise and, I think, hope that we can restore economic health to this country. He is going to need a lot of help. He is going to need a lot of us, Republican and Democrat. He is going to need the American people to join in an effort to restore economic health to this country.

In the Thomas Wolfe book ``You Can't Go Home Again,'' he describes the kind of unique character of the American people. He describes it as a quenchless hope, boundless optimism, indestructible belief. I think these qualities exist in this country and it has gotten us through many difficult periods and will again and will this

time. But this will take some effort. This will not be easy.

I have described before what has caused much of this. It is not rocket science to describe it. We have seen what I think is an unbelievable carnival of greed, creating and trading exotic financial instruments that had dramatic risks, attaching that risk to some of America's biggest financial institutions and some of America's biggest banks. To go right to the origin of it--I have said it before and I will say it again and again, as long as I have an opportunity to speak about this because you have to close the gate. You cannot restore confidence in this country until you close the gate. Here is the house of cards that was built. We know what happens to house of cards in a high wind and all that, it has come down.

I described the other day, and I am going to once again, what is called a subprime mortgage scandal. They were advertising mortgages. We have all seen it. We have seen these advertisements. Here is the Countrywide ad. It was the biggest mortgage bank in the country. It now doesn't exist. It was subsumed into another company. By the way, the CEO of Countrywide, I am told--at least reading the newspaper--got away with a couple hundred million dollars for himself so he is not exactly shedding tears about all this. But here is what they were advertising for the American people: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. We would like to give you a loan.

Does that sound like sound business practices? It doesn't to me. What does it mean? The broker was able to get $10,000, $20,000 in bonuses for the loan. The mortgage company took their cut. Then they securitized it. They sold the security and rolled it into others--like they used to in the old days pack sawdust in sausage and roll it all together--they rolled these loans into a securities instrument, sold it up to hedge funds, sold it to investment banks. And they put prepayment penalties into it so borrowers were locked in, 3 years from the teaser rate, to interest rates that the borrower couldn't possibility repay and everybody was fat and happy and everybody was making a fortune-- millions of dollars. Everybody was making a fortune.

The problem is it was a lot of air. It was not just Countrywide. Zoom Credit Company--here is what they said in their advertisements:

Credit approval is just seconds away. Get on the fast track

at Zoom Credit. At the speed of light, Zoom Credit will

preapprove you for a car loan.

Even if your credit's in the tank, Zoom Credit's like money

in the bank. Zoom Credit specializes in credit repair and

debt consolidation.

And then they finished with this:

Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit--who cares?

Does that look like a good business practice to you? It looks like a Ponzi scheme to me.

This morning the judge in New York said Mr. Madoff, who had a $50 billion alleged Ponzi scheme, was not going to be incarcerated. He apparently bilked people out of $50 billion, but he is spending today in a $7 million penthouse apartment in New York City because the judge says: No, no, he should not be incarcerated. That was a Ponzi scheme, apparently. People thought they had money invested with him. They, in fact, did not. It turns out there was not the money they thought was in their accounts.

But it is not just Mr. Madoff who had a Ponzi scheme. Do you think this is not a Ponzi scheme, a company such as this says: If you are bankrupt, you cannot pay your bills, you have slow credit, you have no credit, come to us; do you think that is not a Ponzi scheme? Because what do you think they did with that when they roped this customer into coming to them for a mortgage? They said: Tell you what, we have a sweet little deal for you. We will give you a mortgage called no-doc, that means you don't even have to demonstrate your income to us that will demonstrate you can repay it--no-doc loans. By the way, we will give you a mortgage, no documentation of your income, and we will give you a mortgage in which you don't have to pay any principal at all, just interest. Or, if that is not good enough, you don't have to pay all the interest for the first year. If that is not good enough, we give you a mortgage where we make the first 12 months' payments for you. But wait, we will give you a teaser rate. You can pay 2 percent interest rate. You can cut your home mortgage in half.

We don't tell you about the fine lines that say we are going to reset the interest rate to a much higher level in 3 years and you are not going to be able to repay it. And, by the way, we are going to put a prepayment penalty in so you can't get out of this because--do you know what we are going to do with this mortgage? We are going to package it up with others, called securitizing it, and we are going to sell it so we don't have any responsibility for it anymore and a hedge fund is going to buy it. Do you know why a hedge fund is going to buy it? We have a prepayment penalty in there with high interest rates and it will reset in 3 years and we are going to make a lot of money. They were all fat and happy when they built this huge bubble and the bubble burst and it helped cause a collapse in this economy.

I say all of that just to say it is not over. Go to the Internet right now, and see if you can find what I found--no-documentation loans. We still have shysters out there advertising this kind of nonsense: We will give you a loan. You don't even have to document it.

What happened as a result of this? Some of the biggest financial names in our country, it turns out, were investing deeply in what we now understand is toxic assets. We all understand the word ``toxic.'' It always used to be associated with a waste dump, toxic waste dump. Maybe toxic is an appropriate term. When the Treasury Secretary says toxic assets, it seems to me the bowels of some of the biggest financial institutions represent toxic waste dumps because that is where these bad assets exist.

So the Treasury Secretary came to us when it looked like everything was going to collapse and said I need $700 billion from the American taxpayers and I need it in 3 days and I have a three-page bill I want you to pass. Why? What I am going to do, I am going to buy these assets from the biggest financial companies in the country and relieve them from this toxicity deep in the bowels of the banks. I did not vote for it, but sufficient numbers of my colleagues voted for it to authorize $700 billion.

Now $350 billion has either been spent or committed. The scandal is we cannot find out how the taxpayers' money has been used. To whom? For what purpose? Under what conditions?

We know in total there is about $8.5 trillion that has so far been committed by the Federal Government. That means the taxpayer is on the hook for about $8.5 trillion--the Federal Reserve programs, $5.5 trillion; FDIC, $1.5 trillion; Treasury Department, $1.1. Do you know what? The Bloomberg News Corporation had to sue the Federal Government to get information about this. Isn't that unbelievable? They should not have had to sue anybody.

Let me show you the statements that were made by the Treasury Secretary and others. Here is what the Treasury Secretary said on the 23rd of October:

We need oversight, we need protection. We need

transparency. I want it, we all want it.

That is just words. It didn't mean a thing. There is no transparency. You cannot find out what is going on. The Treasury Secretary took $125 billion and shoved it at nine banks and said: I am going to invest in capital. I changed my mind, I am not going to buy any assets. So the TARP program, which got its named for troubled assets--there are no troubled assets purchased by the Secretary. He said: I changed my mind, now I want to give capital to banks.

That is not necessarily a bad idea, except he took $125 billion and plugged it into nine banks, some of which didn't want it, and there were no strings attached. He said: I am doing this because I want you to expand lending. There was no requirement they expand lending, no requirement they not use it for bonuses or dividends.

If you ask the Treasury Secretary: Did they expand lending with the $125 billion of taxpayers' money you sunk into capital, his answer is: I don't know. Ask the banks. They tell you money is fungible, we are not going to tell you that answer. We know don't know. But ask people wanting to get money from the banks. They will tell

you there is no additional lending or expansion of credit. It was just a commitment on behalf of the American taxpayers of $125 billion in search of a solution that didn't exist because he didn't put strings on it or attach some conditions to it, so that is where we are.

Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve Board, said on the 24th of October, ``Transparency is a big issue.'' I guess so. It is certainly a much bigger issue, given what he has done. He has moved massive quantities of money through the Fed--by the way the Fed opened its window to direct lending to investment banks for the first time in the history of this country. They used to only do direct lending to FDIC- insured banks. They opened the window to direct lending to investment banks. The question is, Who got the money? Under what conditions? How much? The answer is, We don't know. We are not telling you.

That is unbelievable to me. There is nothing in the Constitution about this. The Constitution is a short little document that talks about powers, the powers of the executive branch, the powers of the legislative branch, and judicial branch. You go read the Constitution and try to figure out whether you think the opportunity exists for somebody, even in a crisis, to commit $8.5 trillion, $8.6 trillion on behalf of the American taxpayer and then tell us you will not to get information about this? Go to court. That is unbelievably arrogant, in my judgment.

Having said all that--which is, in some ways, therapeutic for me to go through what has caused so much of this and to talk about the folly of the pursuit of a solution. That we cannot possibly succeed unless you have conditions and attachments to those moneys that are being used--all of this, it seems to me, is wrapped in a circumstance where we now find ourselves with a new President. He will be sworn in on the west front of this building next Tuesday. He inherits the most significant set of economic problems I think of any President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don't think there is much question about that.

The question is, Where does this go from here? You know the law of holes: When you are in a hole, stop digging. The question is, How do you stop digging? How do you find a way to put this back on track to some sort of growth? Where is the bottom? How do you stop this from falling off a cliff? There are all these folks, the so-called smartest people in the room, who share with me and with my colleague from Arkansas, who is the Presiding Officer--share the fact that none of us understand the answer. Nobody understands exactly what to do.

But I wish to say this: I think at the root of this is always, and will always be, with this economy of ours, the issue of confidence. Do people have confidence about the future? If they are living in a place, in a country and at a time when they can be confident about the future--confident for themselves and their kids, confident that they will have a job, retain their jobs, have job security, have a decent payroll, have benefits in the future--then they are confident and do things that manifest that confidence: buy clothes, take a trip, buy a car, buy a house; they do the things that expand this economy. But when they do not have confidence--and the American people at this point do not--they do exactly the opposite, which contracts this economy. They defer all those purchases and decide, you know what, we don't have confidence that we are going to keep this job, have this income, provide for our kids. We need to cut back, and that contracts the economy.

So the question is this: It is not, as I have said often, about how do you tune the engine on the ship of state. How do you go down to the engine room and take a look at every dial, gauge, lever, knob, and just adjust it just right?

In fiscal policy or in monetary policy, how do you adjust it? Tax credits? M1B? Fiscal stimulus? It is not that at all, in my judgment, because there is not a perfect menu to provide confidence to the American people. And it does not matter how you adjust those issues if you do not find a way to instill confidence, the economy is going to contract. So I have introduced legislation with a number of pieces that I think are essential to try to provide that kind of confidence. Let me describe them.

First and foremost, I do not think you can do this and give the American people confidence unless you look back and look forward. That means accountability, and accountability means looking back and looking ahead, it seems to me. I described the absurdity of Mr. Madoff running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, living in his $7 million apartment in New York City, and the judge saying: That is okay. It seems to me there is an equal absurdity here of having the equivalent type of Ponzi schemes in which you loaded some of the biggest American financial institutions with dramatic amounts of risk and debt and say: Well, now that is past, no one is accountable. It seems to me someone is accountable for that. Are they still around? Were they getting $20 and $30 million a year? Some of them were. There was a recent investigative piece by the Washington Post describing the person in charge of risk management and describing a trader at the same firm, both making somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million a year. Who is accountable for that, for the collapse as a result of the loading up of dramatic risk in an investment bank and then having the American taxpayers bail it out?

Here are some of the so-called biggest institutions that were deemed ``too big to fail.'' Until this point, they have not only been ``too big to fail,'' they have been ``too small to regulate'' apparently because we have a lot of folks in this town who do not want to regulate anything. They want to be willfully blind, including those we pay to regulate these entities. They are the ones who helped us decide long ago, as a country: We are not going to look at derivatives, we will not regulate derivatives, and we are not going to regulate hedge funds. We are willing to countenance a lot of dark money out there because we do not need to see it. You know, the high priest of that thought was, of course, Alan Greenspan, whose notion of how you handle all of this is self-regulation. Self-regulation will work just fine, he said. Well, it turns out that was a miscalculation to the tune of some trillions of dollars. It did not work fine.

Here is what we need to do--accountability going back. I have just described Alan Greenspan. He came and testified. He said: ``I made a mistake in presuming the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their own equity in the firms.''

You know the old saying that there is no education in the second kick of a mule. We know this. We knew this. We have been through this in the Great Depression. We were through the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties. None of us lived then, but we learned the lessons and put in place the protections to make sure it never happened again.

About 10 years ago, the Congress took apart most of those protections. I voted against it. I thought it was a terrible decision. But here we are paying the price for that.

Those protections, it seems to me, at this point need to be reconnected. So what should we do? Well, first of all, I think, in addition to a rescue plan of some type, or a stimulus plan, as it is being called, it seems to me you need some type of taxpayer protection. Nobody is looking out for the taxpayer here, and the taxpayer is having to make the commitment through the Treasury Secretary, through the Federal Reserve, and through the Congress. Let's have a taxpayer protection plan or a Taxpayer Protection Act.

One, I think we ought to extend the oversight, accountability, audit, and all the reporting provisions that were imposed originally by the Treasury Department under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to cover any financial entity that provides emergency economic assistance to private firms. There ought to be complete transparency, no secrecy, nobody saying: We will not tell you, we will not show you, we will not disclose to you.

Second, all private firms receiving emergency financial assistance should be subject to the same set of rules and restrictions relating to executive compensation, golden parachutes, dividend payments, to name a few.

You know, we had the auto industry executives come down here, and they were widely pilloried for flying Gulfstream IVs wing tip to wing tip from

Detroit to Washington, DC. It turns out that there were over 20 commercial flights that day from here to Detroit and back. One could have sat them in first class and provided them Dr. Pepper in a paper cup, or whatever it is they do in first class, between Detroit and Washington, DC, and they would have been fine. But they flew down wing tip to wing tip in Gulfstreams and, you know, making $2 million, $2.5 million a month, whatever it was. There was a lot of criticism about it--justifiable, in my judgment. I want the auto industry to succeed, but that was not a very smart thing that day.

But the question is, Why it is just the auto industry? Where are all of those folks who ran some of those big investment banks into the ditch? Where are the folks who caused that wreckage? How about the people who ran these big mortgage companies that were selling these unbelievable mortgages to people with bad credit and getting big bonuses as a result? When are they going to be brought here under subpoena and asked the same questions and subject to the same requirements?

I think we ought to create a taxpayer protection prosecution task force. I believe there is a lot of illegal activity that has not been uncovered. And I do not think it ought to be laid at the feet of some attorney general someplace in some State. There ought to be a Federal prosecution tasks force empaneled, and that task force must make it a top priority to investigate and prosecute financial fraud cases and seek to recover any ill-gotten gains. The task force shall make recommendations to the Congress, within 60 days, about extending the statute of limitation in complicated financial crimes, if necessary.

There ought to be a reform commission on the financial system that determines the causes of this financial nightmare. And the commission would report its findings, conclusions and make recommendations for preventing a similar debacle in the future. I do not think it is just a matter of jump-starting the economic engine; I think you have to rewire the system here. You have to rewire the financial system. This does not work.

Securitizing instruments for which there was never any decent underwriting because you did not have to underwrite if you were going to send the risk upstairs--that does not work. And you cannot have dark money out there beyond the gaze of regulators.

You do have to regulate. It seems to me you have to completely reform the financial system, and I do think the people who caused this wreck are going to be the ones who are going to help us reform the system.

So those are four areas that I think we have to do on behalf of the American taxpayer.

You know, my sense is that everyone in this country wants this new Government to succeed. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned across this country on the subject of change. We all understand the need for that change. The fact is, there is plenty of blame to go around. Lots of folks, Republicans, Democrats, one administration, another--there is a lot of blame. But it seems to me there are special obligations laid at the feet of those who in the last 8 years have decided to be willfully blind and decided that self-regulation was more important than having people do their jobs who were supposed to be regulating. And the result was the creation of a house of cards or a Ponzi scheme sort of thing that has caused dramatic damage to this country.

Now, it is a mess, but I think this country can get out of it. I think it would be hard for anybody in this Chamber to decide to get up and go to work if they did not have an abiding hope about the future of this country. And I do. But that hope is joined, it seems to me, by requirements to find out what happened, take action based on what happened, and make sure it never happens again. That is not rocket science; that is what we are obligated to do.

This is, as I said, a great country with a wonderful history of overcoming the odds. We have people who came to this country from different parts of the planet searching for opportunity. Most of us come from immigrants who came from one part of the planet or another, one part of this globe, and came to this country because they believed this is the place where opportunity existed.

There was a man named Stanley Newberg who died, and there was a tiny little piece written in the New York Times about him some years ago. It was a piece that intrigued me, so I looked into it to find out what was this about, Stanley Newberg. It said, in this one-paragraph piece, something that I discovered more about. A man came to this country with his parents to flee the persecution by the Nazis of the Jews, and they came here and landed in this country, with nothing, in New York City. His dad had a job peddling fish on the Lower East Side of New York, and Stanley Newberg trailed along, this little tyke with his dad every day peddling fish. Then he went to school, and his parents struggled because they had nothing, and he did well in school. They struggled to get him some loans and try to help him get to college. He went to college, graduated from college, and went to work for an aluminum company. He did very well with the company and rose up to management in the company and then purchased the company.

Later, he died. When they opened his will, Stanley Newberg, in his will, left $5.7 million to the United States of America. In his will, he said: For the privilege of living in that great country. Is that not remarkable? Here is a man who came here with nothing, was enormously successful, then at the end of his life left his inheritance to the United States of America. I am not suggesting everyone do that. I am suggesting it inspires me when people--in this case, coming here as a boy with nothing--understand the magic of what this country of ours offers in terms of opportunity and freedom. And I think, with all of the hand-wringing that exists in our country about these very serious troubles we face, I am absolutely convinced, if we work together, with a new President, a new Government, if we call the American people to be part of something bigger than themselves, to say this is a moment to try to put this country back on track and build better opportunity and greater opportunity for all Americans, I have great hope then for this country.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 2:30 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing on Job Creation and Economic Stimulus in Indian Country.

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

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 40 minutes.

Mr. President, we have learned this morning that the unemployment rate has gone to 7.2 percent. Percentages don't mean much to a household in which one spouse comes home and says: Honey, I lost my job. We have seen now more than 2.5 million people lose their jobs in the last 12 months. We face a very severe and deep financial crisis. There is no question

about that. There has not been a debate in the Senate about whether there is a problem. This is probably the first area of agreement. There is a big problem with this economy.

The question is, What do we do about it? What can give people confidence that we can pull this economy out of the ditch and try to provide for growth and opportunity and expansion once again?

It is interesting. I read in the newspaper yesterday that the New York Yankees offered a pitcher $22 million a year to pitch for the next 8 years. So not all of the economy is in deep trouble, apparently. There is at least one baseball team and one pitcher smiling today. But even as we read those kinds of stories, many American families are worried about losing their jobs and their homes, concerned about what the future holds. I wanted to talk about that today.

All of us understand the economic engine of America has stalled. All of us understand the mechanics of starting an engine. If the engine of the ship of state is stalled, I am all for hooking up jumper cables and trying to start it. That is the discussion we had in our caucus for 2 hours yesterday--about what kind of emergency actions can jump-start the economy, what kind of jumper cables or hand crank or whatever effort one wants to make will help get the economy up and running again. The point I made yesterday was, that is important to do, and I support it. But we ought to focus like a laser if we are going to spend money we don't have to put together an emergency plan for some sort of economic recovery. That means we are going to borrow money. If we are going to borrow money at a time of escalating substantial Federal deficits, I want every single penny to go toward creating a job that will put somebody back on the payroll and give their family hope for the future.

This is all about building confidence. But even as we do that, if we ignore the fundamental requirement to rewire this engine, then we have missed the boat. By rewiring, I mean this financial system has collapsed. The biggest names in finance have collapsed. They have been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal help. We have to rewire the whole thing. If we don't rewire that system and make basic fundamental reforms, we will not restore confidence in the American people about the financial system going forward. That means accountability looking back and accountability looking ahead.

It means making certain we end what we have seen created in recent years--a house of cards. I have the house on top because this starts with an unbelievable scandal in the mortgage industry, subprime lending, and so on. I know we read in the papers about Mr. Madoff having absconded with $50 billion of investor money by building a Ponzi scheme. The tongue and groove of all of the rest of this fits and is no different than the Ponzi scheme of Mr. Madoff. It was brokers, mortgage bankers, investment banks and hedge funds. It was collateralized debt. It was securitized instruments. It was exotic structured financial instruments created for one purpose: to give everybody a lot of money as they all wallowed in the creek. So the fact is, we have to fix it.

Everybody is talking about jump-starting economy, putting people back to work. I am all in favor of doing that, but I want to make certain we rewire this system. I want to talk a little about what needs to be done.

Let me say also that people who created this wreck, the people who steered this country into the ditch, are not going to be the ones who show up with an ambulance. They will not be the ones we will turn to for advice on how to fix it. That is just a fact. My great worry is we have already authorized $700 billion for the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. Isn't it interesting that the title of that program has nothing to do with what is happening? I didn't vote for it because I didn't think those who requested it had the foggiest idea what they were going to do with it. The request came from the Secretary of the Treasury saying: I need $700 billion in emergency money, and I need it in 3 days. Here is a three-page bill to do it. That made no sense. He wanted to relieve financial institutions of troubled assets.

Why did they have all these troubled assets? Because they were greedy and dumb, buying things that now in retrospect had very little value and very big risk. So we ended up with the biggest financial institutions in the country having massive amounts of assets on their balance sheets that have lost value.

So the Treasury Secretary said: Give me $700 billion of taxpayer money so I can go buy those bad assets and relieve those poor companies of these failed assets. So the Congress voted for $700 billion, $350 billion of which was made available right away.

The Treasury Secretary then decided: I really don't want to do that at all. I don't want to buy troubled assets, despite the fact that is in the name of the program. What I would like to do is provide capital for big banking institutions so they can expand lending because that is the circulatory system of our economy. We need to expand lending.

So a rather substantial amount of money was given to the biggest financial institutions, $125 billion in one tranche to nine of the big financial institutions. It was essentially no-strings-attached money. The money was provided to those financial institutions without saying to them: By the way, you have to use this to expand lending in order to deal with the credit freeze. There were no restrictions that said: If you take this money, you can't then give it out in executive bonuses. In fact, we now have a report from December of last year on the Troubled Asset Relief Program by the GAO. It says:

The standard agreement between Treasury and the

participating institutions does not require that these

institutions either track or report how they plan to use or

do use this money.

Isn't that unbelievable? We gave all this money to the biggest banks, and there is no requirement that they track or report on how they plan to use or do use the money? Then when a number of them were asked what they did with the money by the GAO, many executives of those companies said: Well, money is fungible. They don't intend to track or report what they did with that capital.

That is unbelievable to me. This is apparently some sort of no- accountability Government. There is nothing I am aware of, of course, in the U.S. Constitution that decides this is the way that representative Government ought to perform.

But when the Treasury Secretary came to the Congress, along with the Chairman of the Federal Serve Board--talk about secrecy, by the way, that is another institution that has another story attached to it--but they came to the Congress--the two of them; the head of the Fed and the Treasury Secretary--and here are the kinds of things we heard from them: We need oversight. We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.

Well, the administration the Treasury Secretary works for--after he told us that--has failed. This is a Washington Post report: The administration has failed to establish sufficient oversight over its $700 billion program and must move rapidly to guarantee that banks are complying with the limits on conflict of interest, lavish executive compensation. So they say, yes, we agree. Give us the money. There will be oversight. And we discover: Well, there is no oversight at all.

The Federal Reserve Board, they are refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of assistance backed emergency loans from American taxpayers. They refuse to identify the troubled assets they are accepting as collateral. The Federal Reserve opened it window for the first time in history to noninsured banks. They have all kinds of programs now to move money out. I understand there is an urgency here, but I do not understand why the American taxpayers are told: By the way, you are the guarantor of a lot of these debts, you are going to pick up the pieces, and you are going to pay for it, but we are not going to tell you what it is we are doing. Mr. President, $2 trillion of emergency loans for troubled assets and they say: You don't deserve to know. We are not going to tell you.

In fact, Bloomberg, the news organization, had to sue the Federal government to try to get details about the

total has gone out in terms of guarantees and capital which, by the way, is over $8 trillion. It does not mean we are going to lose all that. My point is, why should a news organization have to sue the Government in order to give the American people some information about how much they are on the hook for with all of this emergency activity?

About $8.5 trillion is what we have discovered as a result of Bloomberg and the work of some other enterprising reporters. It certainly is not the work of a Federal agency that has come to the Congress to say: Oh, by the way, here is exactly what you need to know. In fact, just the opposite has happened. The Federal Reserve program has about $5.5 trillion now they have engaged. I understand that is an organization that prints money, but I also understand that organization, in the end stage, is an organization created by the U.S. Congress, and any liabilities existing there are liabilities of the American people. The FDIC program is $1.5 trillion; the Treasury Department, $1.1 trillion; and Federal housing, $300 billion. That is, at this point, a compilation of about $8.5 trillion of liability that exists out there.

Now, I want to make a couple points before I try to describe what has happened and what I think should happen.

This has been a consumer-driven economy. It is not surprising. I brought to the floor of the Congress one day a whole stack of letters. At that point, I had a 12-year-old son, and the Diners Club had written to my son offering him a credit card, preapproved, suggesting perhaps a trip to Europe would be in line. So I brought that and probably a dozen or two dozen other solicitations to my children from credit card companies--from MasterCard and Visa and Diners Club and American Express--all of them writing to my kids. Obviously, they had no idea whose kids they were or how old they were. They were just names in some sort of a name bank. They were writing to them to say: Here is a preapproved credit card for you. Go have a good time.

What has happened all across this country is they are wallpapering college campuses with credit cards. It is unbelievable. On most college campuses, many kids don't have a job. They are going to school. Yet credit card companies understand that is the best place to go find a customer.

So there are credit cards all around, wallpapering the entire country with credit card solicitations. In fact, if you have another card, get rid of it. Bring it to us. We will charge you zero interest for 3 months. We don't tell you, by the way, if you have a little problem one month, we are going to jack your rate up to 25 percent or whatever it is they are doing these days in rates and fees.

The fact is, that dramatic runup in the last couple of decades in credit card debt has been unbelievable, and that is what has been supporting a substantial amount of the consumption.

In addition, about $300 to $350 billion a year has been supporting additional American consumption because of the increase in home values which, of course, represents that huge bubble that was created in home values. That allowed people to believe they had more money because their home was more valuable and they could borrow against the home, and that contributed another $350 billion to the economy. But it was a substantial amount of consumer initiative coming from credit card debt and from home values that they could borrow against which it turns out were illusory increases in home values because those values have now collapsed.

My point is that our consumer-driven economy was driven by, in some cases, fumes that are not going to be around in the future, and we are not going to be able to replicate that to build a new economy with that same kind of debt consumer-driven initiative.

As you know, about at that point, oh, 8, 10 years ago, as the bubble began to develop in home values, there was this issue of thinking that everybody could make a lot of money by developing new and exotic mortgages for homes and putting people into their homes who probably could not buy a home or finding people who were in existing homes and saying to them: You are paying way too much. So what happened was, a huge industry developed in this country. Even as they were securitizing credit card debt and selling it back upstream, they began to develop a new industry to finance homes, and then found a way to securtize those home mortgages and sell those back upstream as well.

This is what we began to see in this country. Everybody saw it. All you had to do was watch your television set and you saw the commercial come across. This was Countrywide, which was the biggest bank: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us.

The biggest mortgage company in the country said: Are you a bad person because you can't pay your bills? Are you a bad credit risk? Do you have lots of trouble? Are you buying things you can't pay for? Hey, I tell you what, we have a deal for you. Come. We will give you a loan. That is Countrywide.

By the way, this company failed and has been purchased by someone else. But the head of this company, Mr. Mozilo, was given the Horatio Alger award as one of the best executives in America, and from what I can tell, he it appears to have walked away with about $200 million. So even though his company is gone and he does not have the job he had, he certainly cannot be weeping, or if he is, he is wiping his tears with $200 million of cold cash.

So it was not just Countrywide. Millenia Mortgage--again, we saw all these. This was not some dark secret: Twelve months no mortgage payment. That's right. We will give you the money to make your first 12 payments on your home. Just call in 7 days. We will pay it for you. Our loan program could reduce your current monthly payment by 50 percent and allow you to make no payments for the first 12 months. Just call us. Pretty enticing, right? You want a home, you want a mortgage, you don't want to make a payment for a year. No problem. Just call us up.

ZoomCredit. ZoomCredit says in their advertisement: Credit approval is seconds away. Get on the fast track at ZoomCredit. At the speed of light, ZoomCredit will preapprove you for a car loan, a home loan, or a credit card. Even if your credit is in the tank, ZoomCredit is like money in the bank. ZoomCredit specializes in credit repair, and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit--who cares?

Can you imagine a company that says: I have a new model. We are so proud of our company, we actually specialize in giving credit to people who don't deserve it?

Now, does one wonder--when companies such as this sprang up all over the country--why our economy is in a wreck, why we have experienced this economy being driven into the ditch by a lot of bad people? Three mortgage companies--and, oh, by the way, just in case you are wondering, is it over? No.

This is from the Internet: Low-doc loans and no-doc loans. What does that mean? It means if you go to the Internet, you can still find a company that says, just as the others did: We have a new financial instrument for you that is really intriguing--no documentation of your income. That is right. We will loan you money without you having to document your income to us. Does that sound ignorant? It does to me. But we will charge you a higher interest rate in exchange for your deciding not to document your income. No-doc loans: no doc, no payments for the first 12 months. And, oh, by the way, when you do first start making payments, you don't have to make any payments on principal, just interest. If that is not good enough, we will give you a no-doc loan, no payments for 12 months, no principal, and you don't have to pay all the interest because we will wrap the principal and some of the interest on the back side. Does anybody wonder why we had a financial wreck?

So we had all these companies put out this sort of Ponzi scheme. Yes, Madoff is apparently a pretty awful guy because he ran a Ponzi scheme of $50 billion, it appears to me. This was all a Ponzi scheme as well, and everybody was involved in it.

So these mortgage companies put people in these mortgages called subprime mortgages, and then the broker made a lot of money because the broker was able to get people into these mortgages. And I did not mention, they put prepayment penalties into the mortgages so you could not pay it off early or you had a big penalty? Then they wrapped it into a big

security. They put all of them together, like you put a snowball together, in a big security--that is called securitization--and then you sell it. So you sell it to perhaps an intermediary or perhaps you sell it to a Wall Street firm that takes a look at it and says: That is pretty good. That has a high rate of return because you have prepayment penalties and all these things, and the interest rates were really low, but they reset in 3 years to be really high. What a good deal. So I am going to buy these securities.

Everybody is buying securities like hogs in a trough. The brokers are making money. The mortgage company is making massive amounts of money. The people who are securitizing it are making money. The big investment banks are making money. In fact, the current Secretary of the Treasury--his firm and four other firms came to the Securities and Exchange Commission one day in 2004 and said: What we need you to provide is some relaxation for us so we can take on more debt to buy more of these kinds of securitized instruments and make more money.

In the basement, deep in the bowels of the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a hearing, by unanimous vote, the SEC, for the company that was headed by the current Treasury Secretary and four other of the largest investment banks, said: It is OK. We will allow you to take some of this money you set aside in the event of failure of your assets--the reserves--and you can take some of those reserves and use them now to make more money by these investments. That meant some of those firms went from 12 times leverage to 30 times leverage.

Isn't that unbelievable? They were all fat and happy, making money left and right. And then the whole thing crashed. That financial scandal, this subprime scandal, took this country right to the edge of a cliff. It was not just this, but it was led by this, and it was especially this.

At the same time all of this carnival of greed was going on in this country--at the same time we were spending, in budget policy--President Bush leading the charge; and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, a part of it--spending in fiscal policy way beyond our means, $600 billion a year. Oh, I know the reported budget deficit was $400 billion last year. It was not $400 billion. What your deficit really is is what you had to borrow for the year. That was over $600 billion. So we were $600 billion out of balance in fiscal policy, and that is going to be over $1 trillion this year.

Then add to that a trade problem of $700-plus billion a year, consuming 3 percent more than you produce every year--year after year after year--and then energy prices on a roller coaster. Oil runs way up to $147 a barrel in day trading, just like that, and then collapses right back down, and now goes back up because of the circumstances in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Then health care is busting everybody's budget--the family budget, the business budget, the Government budget. All of those together is an almost perfect storm.

So the question is, What do we do about all that because this economy is a mess? It is in very serious trouble, and the one thing that unites me and the smartest economist or the most prescient business mind in this country is that neither of us have ever been here before. We are walking in woods that have no maps. We do not know. None of us know exactly how you are going to move people out of this situation, how you move this country. I taught economics in college ever so briefly but I do know this: This is not about charts and bar graphs, and it is not about supply demand curves. It is all about confidence. Will we see the restoration of confidence? Because if people are confident about the future, they do things that manifest that confidence. If they are confident about themselves and their jobs, they buy a suit, they buy a car, buy a home, take a trip; they do the things that expand America's economy. If they are not confident, they do exactly the opposite. They defer the purchase. They decide not to take the trip, not to buy the car. That is the contractional side of the business cycle, but this is much more than a business cycle. Still, confidence is at the root of our opportunity to put this country back on track.

I have great hope for this country, but I wish to say this again. I have described some of the unbelievable circumstances of the carnival of greed that has led us into this economic trap, and if we don't address both sides of this issue--first, to try to jump start this engine of ours and rewire it at the same time--but if we don't at the same time, then, make those in this kind of financial industry accountable for past actions and for future actions, we will not in any way give the American people confidence about the future.

So the question of what do you do in addition to a recovery package or stimulus program--which I will speak about in a moment--the question of what you do in addition to that leads me to the discussion I had with my colleagues last evening. I said we must revisit unbelievably bad decisions and judgments that have been made in the last 10 and 15 years. For example, in 1999, the Financial Modernization Act was passed by this Congress; financial modernization to help create the large financial holding companies, to take away the Glass-Steagall Act-- abolish the very act that was put together following the Great Depression that said: You have to separate banking interests from risk interests. You have to separate securities and you have to separate real estate. That was Glass-Steagall. You have to keep them separate. In 1999, this Congress, in legislation called Gramm-Leach-Bliley, after Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, said: You know what. We have to do something that modernizes our financial system. We have to get rid of Glass-Steagall. We have to create big bank holding companies. We have to allow that to be the case, and we have to allow banks to merge with real estate, with insurance, with securities.

Now, I was one of eight Senators to vote no. On the floor of the Senate, here is what I said in 1999: This bill will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts.

I regret I was right.

It will fuel consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services and it will be done at the expense of the American people.

I said at the same time in that debate: I say to people who own banks--talking about the folks who pushed this--and, by the way, this was pushed because one large bank wanted to merge with one large insurance company and they couldn't do it because the law wouldn't allow it. What is the response? We will go get the law changed. It wasn't just this Congress; it was President Clinton and his advisers-- some of whom, by the way, are going to work in this new administration. They said all of this is good. We are going to modernize the system. I thought it was nuts. Three years before this, I had written a cover story for the Washington Monthly Magazine, talking about derivatives and what I had previously described as securities sold upstream by the big mortgage companies, and the title of my cover story, in 1994, I believe it was, in Washington Monthly Magazine: ``Very Risky Business.'' From that time, I have introduced five pieces of legislation to require the regulation of derivatives and to prohibit banks from trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts but to no avail because there were too many people who believed we need to modernize the system--meaning, they said, take away the restrictions that were put in place after the Great Depression. Take away the restrictions that prohibited banks from engaging with real estate and securities and other things that were risky. Well, they succeeded. I failed in stopping it. The fact is, it is what set up this unbelievable, spectacular financial collapse in this country. The question is: Now what?

I am going to introduce some legislation today, and I wish to talk about, specifically, the requirements of the legislation. I am not willing--as I was not willing last fall on the $700 billion proposal--I am not willing to advance assistance proposals unless the American people are protected. I am going to introduce the Taxpayer Protection Act that does four things that are tough, certain, and require accountability. I don't know whether there is the support or the stomach to pass this kind of legislation, but I will not be advancing support for additional taxpayers' money until and unless we have some assurance that these things are done. First of all, establishing a Financial Market Investigation and Reform Commission.

Back at the end of the Roaring Twenties, which, by the way, the history books will certainly compare the era of the Roaring Twenties with the Gay Nineties and the unbelievable excess and greed--but at the end of the twenties and early thirties, the Congress put together a committee that investigated and subpoenaed and brought people here to find out what happened, who did it, how did it happen, and what do we do to stop it from ever happening again. That needs to be done again. There ought to be a select committee of the Congress doing that right now, and I hope we will do that. Some will say: Well, we have existing authorizing committees in the Congress that can do that. The fact is they are not going to do it. They have never done it and will not do it. If we don't put together those kinds of committees or commissions here and now and issue subpoenas and discover what happened, we will not know how to prevent it from happening again. We need to establish that reform commission to investigate and then propose reforms. That is the rewiring portion of what I described.

Second: I want all emergency economic assistance programs, including the troubled asset relief program--the $700 billion that I didn't vote for, but others did--to have oversight, accountability, and transparency. That needs to be required for all of that. There is no oversight for $7.8 trillion in emergency economic assistance at this point that has been issued by the Federal Reserve Board. No oversight at all. None. The same requirements in the TARP program ought to be applied to every other bailout by the Fed or by the Treasury or others providing similar help.

Third: we should make conditions imposed on one company receiving emergency economic aid applicable to all companies, and that is limits on executive compensation, prohibiting bonuses and golden parachutes, and payment of dividends and private aircraft ownership, and more. We should require those private entities receiving the emergency economic assistance to be subject to audit, provide detailed monthly reports, tell us: What did you do with that money? Is that money advancing the economic interests of this country to put this country back on track?

Finally, we should create a Taxpayer Protection Prosecution Task Force to investigate and prosecute financial fraud cases and other violations of laws that contributed to the collapse of this country's economy.

It is unbelievable to me that a couple things conspired at the same time. One, Congress passes the Financial Modernization Act, which was a complete disaster for this country. Two years later, President Bush came to town and hired a bunch of folks who were supposed to be regulators who, actually, in some cases, boasted: We don't intend to regulate. We want to be willfully blind. That combination has injured this country in a very significant way.

Our country's financial markets--the Wall Street Journal said in an article by Arthur Levitt on October 23--are in their darkest hours in 76 years. We are in this situation because of an adherence to a deregulatory approach. Our regulatory system failed.

I know there are people I serve with who think regulation is a four- letter word. It is essential. The free market must, in certain areas, have proper regulatory authority.

Alan Greenspan, who bears a significant part of this responsibility as then chairman of the Fed, here is what he says now: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations--specifically banks and others--were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity. What he was saying, if I translate this to English, he was saying: I believed in self-regulation, or I believed in no one regulating because they will self-regulate.

I come from a small town and a small school. I graduated in a high school class of nine. That wouldn't pass a laugh test in second grade. Just let them all go and they will do what is in the country's best interests? That is unbelievable to me.

So we have a lot of work to do. The banking system after 1999 evolved so that we had a lot of banks that were considered too big to fail, but they weren't big enough to regulate, apparently. Too big to fail, which means that if they get in trouble, we are the ones who are going to pick up the costs. We bear the burden. We will be responsible. But they are not big enough to regulate, so they get the best of all worlds. They get taxpayer protection with no requirements, no accountability. This is just a few of them.

Let me make an aside. Even as I have described on the floor of the Senate in the past, some of the same firms that, by the way, require bailouts are firms that have been so irresponsible in other areas. Yes, I am upset about the way these mortgages were put out. I am upset about the greed and the avarice and all the money people were making; one guy making $20 million a year and his buddy making $30 million a year, running one of the biggest investment banks into the ground, by the way. One of the biggest bailouts has been of one of the biggest investment banks. To my knowledge, nobody lost their jobs, nobody parked their airplanes.

Wachovia Bank. Wachovia Bank went sour, so they had to be purchased, but it wasn't just because they were involved in toxic assets. Wachovia Bank--it is a culture apparently here. They had bought a German sewer system. You might ask the question: Why would an American bank buy the sewer system of a German city? Because they like sewers? Because they have a sewer department in the bank? Because they have special knowledge of sewers? No. They bought a German city's sewer system and leased it right back to the city because you are not going to dig up the sewer pipes of a German city, right? Why would you want to own it in a German city? Because you can lease it right back. It is a big scam because you can reduce your U.S. tax bill to the U.S. Government by hundreds of million of dollars.

I shouldn't pick on Wachovia because there are plenty of others who did it. This happens to be a convenient case. A big old bank buying a sewer system of a German city so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. By the way, the same company got in trouble with bad assets; part of the whole scam in terms of what happened with the scandal of the subprime system that steered this country into the ditch.

Now, let me say that this issue of President-elect Obama proposing to us a stimulus program or economic recovery program is a very important issue for us to consider. I am a chairman of one of the subcommittees on appropriations. We are working on my portion of this effort to find out what could we invest in, in what some call ``shovel ready jobs'' that will put people to work immediately. There are water programs, highways, bridges, schools, things we can do that will put people to work and do it immediately, put people back on payrolls. At the end of that expenditure, you have better schools, better roads, better bridges, and water projects that will enhance life. So those are the right things to do. But we all know there are plenty of people who have proposals that have nothing to do with putting people back to work. I am very concerned about that.

I am also concerned about the tax side of this. We are talking about 40 percent of this proposal representing the tax side. I think there are some things we can do in the tax system to encourage investment which encourages employment. Here are some of the proposals I have made: $250,000 expensing for small business equipment so we encourage the decisions to make or buy or build equipment right now. That puts people to work. So there are some things on the tax side that I think make some sense, but I worry about 40 percent on the tax cut side. No one is going to have a problem saying: Yes, give us a tax cut. Everybody likes that.

But the proposition on the expenditure side, a whole lot of folks are coming in with projects that have nothing to do with creating jobs. I don't want to be part of that. Money is going to be borrowed in any event. We need to get this right. I am willing to participate, and I am willing to support the kinds of investments that will put people back to work and create an asset for our country--better roads, better bridges, better schools, water projects that we need for the future. I am willing to do all that if it puts people back to work. But we ought to be looking

with a laser at what is it that will put people on payrolls to try to jump-start the economy.

Even if we do that, if we don't rewire this system and do the financial reform I described in the legislation I am introducing today, we are not going to succeed because the people will not be confident about the future.

We have to fix what has helped cause this scandal, and that includes fixing a trade system where we consume 3 percent more per year than we produce, fixing a trade system where we have $700 billion a year trade deficit, fixing a fiscal policy budget situation that is way out of balance. We have to do all those things.

I would not be able to come to work in the morning if I were not hopeful. I still have great hope for this country. I am an optimist. Yes, I want to look back and hold people accountable. I want subpoenas, and I want to prosecute wrongdoing. I want to do all those things with respect to this financial scandal. I think it is big. I think a whole lot of folks took the $30 million, and they are at home and they are wiping their tears with American currency while a lot of other people have lost their homes and their jobs. I want us to investigate. I want accountability looking back, and I want accountability going forward. All of that is very important to me. But I do want to say this: I am somebody inspired by the ability of this country to recover and to ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to come together and do things that will pull up this country, lift this country.

The other day, I was reading a news report of a guy, and I was so inspired by it. It is so typically American of somebody out there--way out there thinking: I can do this. I read about a guy named Ken Mink. I don't know Ken Mink from a cord of wood.

Ken Mink comes into the house one night and says to his wife: Honey, it is back.

She said: What is back?

He is 73 years old.

Honey it is back.

What is back?

My shot.

He had been out shooting baskets in the backyard.

My shot--I am shooting baskets. I am not missing any.

He had been a college basketball player, and because of a prank, he got kicked out of college. At the age of 73, he is shooting baskets in his backyard and says: Honey, it is back.

So he sat down and wrote applications to college. A junior college said: Yes, we will give you a shot; you can come to school here and try out for the basketball team. At the age of 73, Ken Mink played basketball with a junior college team just a month ago and made two free throws. He was the oldest man, I think, by 42 years to ever score a point in a college basketball game. Isn't that wonderful? It is so inspiring that people don't know what they can't do.

As an aside, my Uncle Harold is 88 years old, and he is training for the Senior Olympics because he qualified to go to San Francisco to run in the 100-meter dash. He runs it in under 19 seconds, by the way, at age 88. My aunt thinks he had a stroke, she thinks he has gone crazy because he runs all over the country running races. My uncle is 88 and can run faster than most people his age and has 100 medals. I am inspired by my Uncle Harold and by Ken Mink, and I am inspired by people who don't know what they can't do.

I hope in the coming days when we talk about all the ingredients of all the issues, the proposals that are complicated and difficult, I hope all of us will understand, if we ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves, to help this country recover and put this country back on track. You go back over two centuries of history, and there is not much this country cannot do. There is just not much America cannot do. This is a country that rolls up its sleeves and has great hope for the future.

I know my colleague from Oklahoma is here to speak. I appreciate his forbearance. I will be back Monday to talk some more about these issues.

There is no social program in this country as important as a good job that pays well. The reason I say that is the root of giving people hope about the future is to have opportunities for the American people to find a good-paying job, keep a job that has some benefits, to give them an opportunity to take care of their families. That is where we start.

I hope in the coming days, as we discuss and work on these issues, we will have the opportunity to call on what is the best in this country rather than the worst and come together and do what we can to restore to America the kinds of opportunities we have always felt will exist for our children.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to add my congratulations to Senator Robert C. Byrd for his historic achievement today. Senator Byrd arrived in the Senate 50 years ago. For decades, he has defended the Constitution and the principles upon which it stands. Senator Byrd is truly a statesman, a patriot, a proud son of West Virginia, and an important voice in the history of this country.

The people of West Virginia definitely know that they have a champion who will stand up for them. Senator Byrd has never forgotten the hard life that he had as a boy growing up in poverty in the southern West Virginia coalfields. He has always remained true to his faith and his family and has worked to build a better future for West Virginia and the Nation.

In the history of our great Nation, Senator Byrd has served longer than all but one Member of Congress and has been a committed public servant. Senator Byrd first came to Washington in 1953 as a Congressman and served three terms in the House before being elected to the Senate. Senator Byrd quickly learned the rules and procedures that make the Senate run. He used these to his advantage while serving as the Senate majority leader and in other key leadership positions. On June 11, 2006, Senator Byrd became the longest serving U.S. Senator in history, and in November 2006, he was elected to an unprecedented ninth full term.

During his tenure, his colleagues have elected him to more leadership positions than any other Senator in history. This includes Senate majority whip, chairman of the Democratic Conference, Senate minority leader, and Senate majority leader. Currently, Byrd is the President pro tempore. Throughout his career, Senator Byrd has cast more than 18,100 roll call votes in five decades of service in the Senate.

Senator Byrd is also the longest serving member of the esteemed Appropriations Committee. He has served as its chairman or ranking member since 1989. After many distinguished years of service, he has stepped down from his leadership position but will remain an important voice on this committee. I have enjoyed serving with him on the Appropriations Committee and have learned a tremendous amount under his leadership.

There are other sides to Senator Byrd that have contributed to his life's accomplishments, his achievements as a musician and author. Senator Byrd learned to play the fiddle at a young age and carried it with him everywhere he went. His skill with the instrument led to performances at the Kennedy Center and on a national television appearance on ``Hee Haw.'' He even recorded his own album, ``Mountain Fiddler.'' He is also the author of a magisterial four volume set about this body entitled ``The Senate, 1789-1989'' and other works.

No tribute to Senator Byrd would be complete without mentioning his life's love, Erma Ora James. For nearly 69 years, the Byrds were inseparable, traveling throughout their native West Virginia and crossing the globe together. Sadly, Mrs. Byrd passed away on March 25, 2006, but Senator Byrd speaks lovingly of her and their life together each day.

The times have changed considerably since Senator Byrd was first elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates and eventually the U.S. Senate. We have seen a man walk on the Moon. We have mapped the human genome, and we have seen unbelievable technological advances that have changed the way we live, work and communicate. But through it all, the one constant is Senator Byrd's steadfast championing of our Constitution and the people of West Virginia. I join my colleagues in offering my hardy congratulations to him on this important day.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 20 minutes in morning business.