Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for as much time as I may consume and ask that the time be counted against the postcloture time.

Mr. President, this country, as all of us know, faces very significant challenges these days. We have roughly 20 million people who woke up in America today without a job, who probably are out today looking for work and haven't found it yet. It is a pretty tough thing in a severe economic downturn--the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s--to find that you lost your job, and in some cases your home, and you have lost hope and you wonder what is next for you and your family.

I suppose it is in keeping with our politics these days that, at a time when we face the most significant economic challenges since the Great Depression, if you stop and watch and listen and hear the sounds of democracy, which sound a little like fingernails on a blackboard sometimes, what you hear on the news is something about someone's dysfunctional behavior somewhere. Someone does something absolutely goofy, just a nutty activity, and all of a sudden, it is on the 24/7 news.

In the last couple weeks, I have been traveling and hearing on the television, radio, and in print about some nut from Florida--apparently a minister with a church of 50 people--who decides he is going to burn the Koran. We heard about it every day, all day. There is some suggestion that if you give this a lot of publicity and hold it up to the light and say, ``Isn't it ugly?'' you would say, ``Yes, but it is not America; it is just some nut.'' You find someone's dysfunctional behavior and say, ``Isn't this awful?'' Sure, it is awful, but that is not the backbone of this country or what this country is about.

We have to begin talking about what really matters to put this country back on track and to give people some hope for the future, that they are going to see more opportunity, that they are going to see expansion of hope and opportunity for themselves, their families, and their children.

I think it is true that of all of the issues that matter most at this point, it is, how can you put people back to work? There is no social program that we debate in Congress that is more important than a good job that pays well. That makes almost everything else possible. If you have a good job that pays well, with job security and benefits, it allows you to take care of your family and do the other things that expand your opportunities in this great country.

I have watched and observed what is happening, and I participate in the debates in the Congress about what is happening in our country. I am very worried about this issue of trying to turn the faucet on to create new jobs in America at the very time the drain is open, with jobs moving outside of this country very quickly.

I have spoken about this and have offered 4 amendments over 9 or 10 years, and I have gotten anywhere from 40 to 47 votes on an amendment that says: Let's decide to stand up for employment in America, stand up for jobs here. Let's shut down the insidious, perverse tax incentives that tell American businesses that if you shut down your business in America, fire your workers here at home, and you move it to China or Mexico, we will give you a big fat tax break. That is true. We have a tax incentive to say: Get rid of your American enterprise, ship it overseas, move it to Mexico, and we will give you a tax cut. I have tried four times in votes on the floor of the Senate to shut that down, and I lost all four times. But we need to try it again. We need to do this, especially when you have the deep economic abyss into which we have fallen. We now need to say to people that we are going to stand up for employers, those who run the manufacturing plants in this country, those who hire American workers, those who produce products that say ``Made in America'' on the label. We are going to stand up for them, and we are not going to continue to give tax breaks to those who decide to do exactly the opposite and move their jobs overseas.

I am going to talk about a few of those circumstances. I have done it many times, and sometimes people roll their eyes when I do. But it is important, it seems to me, to continue to talk about this failure in our economic system.

The American Prospect--a magazine I was reading a while back-- estimates that since 2001, there are 42,400 American factories that have closed their doors. Roughly three-fourths of those employed over 500 people. Why is that happening? Why is it that American factories are closing? Does it matter? Do we believe America will long remain a world economic power if it doesn't have world-class manufacturing? I don't. It will not be a world economic power without world-class manufacturing capability, and very quickly, it is dissipating. We are losing jobs and economic strength in the manufacturing sector. We see additional evidence of it every day.

Here is a June New York Times piece:

In Indiana, Centerpiece for a City Closes Shop.

Whirlpool plans to close a plant on Friday and move the

operation to Mexico, eliminating 1,100 jobs here [in

Indiana]. Many in this city in southern Indiana are seething

and sad--sad about losing what was long the city's economic

centerpiece and a ticket to the middle class for one

generation after another.

That is Whirlpool--1,100 jobs.

Last week, I was in Pennsylvania with Congressman Sestak, in Philadelphia. I told a story that I have known pretty well about something that happened in Pennsylvania. I told it on the floor many times. It is about something called Pennsylvania House Furniture, which is upper end, fine furniture, made by craftsmen. It is very good furniture. They worked for over 100 years, using Pennsylvania wood, to create Pennsylvania House furniture. Then one day the company was bought by La-Z-Boy, and La-Z-Boy decided: You know what, we are going to get rid of those craftsmen who work in Pennsylvania and ship these jobs to China. What we will do is continue to use Pennsylvania wood, but we will just ship the wood to China and have the Chinese fashion it into furniture and then send it back to sell in the United States and call it Pennsylvania House furniture.

What most people from Pennsylvania and across the country probably don't know is that on the last day of work, when those workers lost their jobs, after a century of making fine furniture in Pennsylvania, the last piece of furniture came down the line completed, and they turned it over and all of the craftsmen at Pennsylvania House furniture autographed it. Someone in America has an autographed piece of furniture by the craftsmen who cared so much about their jobs and had such pride in making the best furniture they could make. And then the jobs were gone. All the wood was sent to China and the furniture is sent back, and you have nearly 500 people out of work. So much for the story of Pennsylvania House furniture. Does it matter that we don't make Pennsylvania House furniture in this country? Well, it sure matters to the 500 or so people for whom it was their career, a job that made a difference for their families. It made a difference to them because they were out of work.

I just mentioned Whirlpool deciding to get rid of 1,100 jobs. Well, it is interesting, here is a story in the Indiana Economic Digest. It says:

U.S. based manufacturers are shipping jobs overseas.

That is a familiar story.

Whirlpool is just one local example of a story that has

played out across the nation for decades.

The appliance-maker is in the process of shutting down its

Evansville refrigerator plant. March 26 was the last day for

455 [people in that plant.]

Those jobs will go to Mexico in late June.

But then it says something different. It says:

But not all local manufacturers are interested in moving

overseas.

HMC manufactures and refurbishes large precision gears and

other machinery components. . . . The company has 75

employees. It has never laid off an employee.

Robert J. Smith III, the company's president and chief

executive officer, is dead-set against ever moving production

overseas.

``We wouldn't consider it in a 100 years.''

His grandfather and grandmother started the company in 1921. ``Offshoring in search of higher profits is a mistake,'' Smith said, ``because it ignores manufacturing's larger purpose in U.S. society.'' And here is what he says finally:

It's my belief that every American citizen, not only me,

should feel strongly about maintaining one of the most

important cultures we have, and that is manufacturing.

I have used examples previously--and I will again--because I think repetition is important. The peppermint pattie called York--it is a tiny little peppermint pattie in a silver encasing. It is made by Hershey's Chocolate, by the way. It says: ``The cool refreshing taste of mint dipped in dark chocolate will take you miles away.'' It sure did that. It took it all the way to Mexico. They decided to fire those American workers, and that mint chocolate went to Mexico to be produced.

The list is actually pretty endless. I just described Whirlpool, 1,100 jobs. They received millions in Recovery Act funds, and yet announced 1,100 job cuts--by the way, this is the long walk on the last day of work at a manufacturing plant. You go there to make it a career and then all of a sudden you discover the job is not there. Some foreign country has that job because America has decided to reward those who leave as opposed to those who stay.

If you wear a Reebok NFL jersey--and a whole lot of folks wear these jerseys--this is made in a Chinese-owned sweatshop in El Salvador. How do we get to the point where it is not just made in El Salvador but it is made in a Chinese sweatshop in El Salvador? This has to do with various trade agreements we have made where we incentivize the production of these being made in the lowest common denominator sweatshop wage area in the world. This Reebok jersey is made in El Salvador by a working man who lives in this so-called house. That working man makes less than $1 for an $80 Reebok jersey.

I have spoken on the floor of the Senate at great length about underwear--Fruit of the Loom underwear. I have said--and I know it is not chic to do so--I said I understand losing one's shirt, but Fruit of the Loom left the country with all of its underwear. It used to make underwear in America, and people appreciated those jobs. Fruit of the Loom left.

As we know, Fruit of the Loom was advertising with dancing grapes. They put men and women in fruit uniforms. I do not know where one gets a grape uniform, but they march them down a road and put it on television and they all sing and sound happy--happy for reasons I do not understand because all those Fruit of the Loom jobs, all that underwear is made elsewhere.

One might say: Who cares where underwear is made. I suppose the people who made underwear in the United States care because they had jobs at Fruit of the Loom, but it is gone.

I have spoken at great length about Huffy bicycle and shall not speak at great length today except to say this. Anyone who purchased a Huffy bicycle at Wal-Mart or K Mart was purchasing a bicycle made in Ohio, made by wonderful workers who had a career making Huffy bicycles. They made Huffy bicycles for many decades. They made $11 an hour plus benefits to make these bicycles. Now the bicycles are gone. Now they are made in China.

This is actually a trifecta. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. The company decided to fire American workers and build the bicycles in China. Then they declared bankruptcy and left American workers with no pension program so that the pension would have to be paid by the taxpayers out of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. And now China owns the brand. They got the company, the brand, make the bicycles, the workers got fired, and the American taxpayer got to pick up the pensions. It is unbelievable when you think about it.

Is this fair trade? I do not think so. It is a decision by a lot of people to decide we are going to move our manufacturing overseas.

Every young child has ridden in a Radio Flyer wagon, a little red wagon. They made those for 100 years in Chicago, IL. They do not anymore. They are all made in China as well.

I know where these are made. I know where Huffy bicycles are made. I know they are made by people who make 50 cents an hour and work 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week with never a Sunday off. Is that with what we want the American people to compete--a lower standard of living? Is it probably something we would like to do to help lift others in the world, or is it we want Americans to compete with the lowest common denominator, lowest wages, the workplace with the worst safety record? Is that what we want?

Those are other issues. The issue I came to talk about is the issue of what about the fact the company that makes the little red wagon and the Huffy bicycle and the York mint pattie and, yes, Fig Newton cookies--by the way, if you are wondering about Fig Newton cookies, they went to Mexico. They were made in New Jersey. Apparently when you make Fig Newton cookies, there is someone who shovels fig paste. You can get someone shoveling fig paste a lot less expensively by hiring them in Mexico rather than New Jersey. If somebody says, Let's get Mexican food, just buy Fig Newton cookies. They escaped to Mexico. The jobs are gone, and somebody down south is shoveling fig paste because you can pay cents on the hour to get that kind of labor.

The question is: Does it matter? Does anybody care? Does it matter that we do not produce Fruit of the Loom shorts and t-shirts, that we do not produce little red wagons, Radio Flyer, that we do not produce Huffy bicycles, that we do not produce Pennsylvania House furniture, that Whirlpool refrigerators are made in Mexico, that product after product has gone to China?

The fact is, people on this floor in this Congress and in other Congresses have voted affirmatively to say: We want to reward those who leave our country. We want to give you a tax break. Four separate times we have had votes on these issues, and four separate times the majority of the people in the Senate have said: We believe in giving tax breaks to those who ship American jobs overseas.

The reason I raise this issue today is this: We have about 20 million people who are out of work today. They want to find work. They want a job and cannot find one. Everybody talks about restarting this American economy. How about trying to find a sparkplug that will lift the American economy? What is that? If you are going to keep the drain open, how are you going to fill the tub? You can work with the faucet on all day long, but if you have the drain open, Whirlpool decides one day, We are moving 1,100 jobs out of this country--and the list goes on and on--where are the jobs going to be? Who is going to incentivize the creation of new jobs? We have to do this. It is our responsibility. It is not our responsibility to provide economic recovery for the Chinese economy or the Mexican economy. It is our responsibility to try to see if we cannot restart this economic engine at home. It seems to me implausible that at least a majority of the Members of the Senate would not understand that we need to stand up for American jobs.

I understand, because I have been involved in many trade debates and I subsequently wrote a book about it, that when you start talking about standing up for American jobs, there are a bunch of pointy-headed folks with thick glasses who call you a xenophobic isolationist stooge. You just don't get it; it is a world economy, Mr. Dorgan; you don't have the foggiest idea what you are talking about. Oh, really?

All those people who say that wear dark suits, take showers in the morning, and have never been unemployed. Isn't that a great thing? How about people who require taking a shower after work because they worked hard, and find out they lost a job because pointy-headed folks describe a world economy that reduces all the standards we built up over a century?

Think of the problems we went through to try to create the circumstances that built an expansion of the middle class in this country. Just think of it. In my book, I describe James Fyler, and I probably should not have. I said he died of lead poisoning. He was shot 54 times. Why was James Fyler shot in the early part of the last century 54 times? Why did he give his life?

Here is the radical proposition that James Fyler felt: He felt that people who went underground to dig for coal in this country ought to have an understanding that they are working in a workplace that is safe and ought to be paid a fair wage. For that he gave his life because that was unbelievably radical: insisting on behalf of workers that they work in a safe workplace and be paid a decent wage.

We went through all of that and finally said: A safe workplace is important. We have to protect workers. A fair wage, a minimum wage, is important--all of these things that we went through to lift up America and expand opportunity and put people to work. We have been through that and at great struggle, at really great struggle.

Yet now in the last decade and a half, the question is: Isn't that all old-fashioned? It is a world economy. Why can you not compete with a Chinese sweatshop in El Salvador making Reebok football jerseys? Why can you not compete with a worker in Shenzhen, China, willing to work for 50 cents an hour, working 7 days a week, 12-to-14-hour days? I say to you, the people at Huffy bicycle would have said: We cannot compete with that. We cannot live on those wages. And the people who employed them said: We don't care. Your jobs are gone.

The last day of work at Huffy bicycle in Ohio, when they were all fired and all those jobs moved to China to make those bicycles, those workers left in the space where their cars parked at the plant, in the empty space they left a pair of shoes. That parking lot was filled with empty shoes, not cars. It was a plaintive way for those workers to say to those companies that fired them: You can fire us and get rid of our jobs but you will never replace us. You will never replace us.

It seems to me if people in this country are wondering about where will the jobs come from, who is going to stand up for the economic interests of this country--no, not cut us off from the rest of the world, not suggest we are not part of the global economy, but rather suggest we will attempt to lift the rest of the world by saying: Here are the conditions under which we will involve ourselves in the global economy.

We are a country with a huge trade deficit with the country of China. This year I suspect it will be between a $200 billion and $250 billion trade deficit with the country of China. Our trade deficit this year generally will probably be around $600 billion, perhaps a little less. Last month it was a $50 billion trade deficit. No country can continue with this. It is not sustainable. You cannot sustain a country by hollowing out the manufacturing base and deciding manufacturing does not matter, yet we want to remain a world economic power. You cannot sustain a country that says we are going to do $50 billion a month in trade deficits and that doesn't matter either. A trade deficit ultimately is going to be repaid with a lower standard of living in this country.

We have a responsibility, and that responsibility now is to find a way to begin stopping the hemorrhaging of jobs overseas and decide to reward those companies that decide they are going to keep jobs in this country.

I just read this today about HMC manufacturers and Robert Smith III, the company's president and chief executive. Good for him. He said: We wouldn't consider moving our jobs overseas, not in a hundred years. ``Outshoring jobs in search of higher profits is a mistake,'' he said, ``because it ignores our manufacturing's larger purpose in America.'' Good for him.

How about doing something in this Chamber that says to people who are employing the manufacturing workers: Good for you. We stand with you. We want to incentivize you to continue, and then say to those who are shipping their jobs overseas: You know what, you want some help from this government? Go take a hike. Make something in America. And, by the way, you are not going to get tax help. We are not going to give you a tax break, as has been done for far too long when you ship your jobs overseas. It is not going to happen.

Unfortunately, it has been happening. I said it is not going to happen four times. We have had four votes, and I have lost on all four occasions. I hope at long last when we go through the deepest recession since the Great Depression, there might be enough of an urgency for people who come out here and bloviate and thumb their suspenders, cast the shine of their shoes on the magnificence of this great place that maybe that magnificence might spread to casting the right vote on something that stands up for this country's best economic interest.

Mr. President, the list of challenges are very significant. I have been talking at length about one, and that is jobs because it makes everything else possible. If we can get the American engine working once again, put people to work once again, this country will do just fine. But it doesn't do just fine when it is in a very deep recession and we have incentives that say jobs don't matter.

I grew up in a very small town, less than 300 people, and I knew every day that I was a kid--just because I understood it--that this country, this America, was the biggest, the best, the strongest, and that we could beat anybody in trade or economic issues with one hand tied behind our backs. That is how good this country was. We were good at almost everything. We invented, we created, you name it. We decided to split the atom. We spliced genes. We invented radar, the silicon chip, the telephone, the computer, the television. We cured smallpox and polio. We built airplanes and learned to fly them. Hundreds of attempts were made, and finally on December 3, 1917, they flew an airplane--the Wright brothers. Then we built rockets and walked on the Moon and planted an American flag. Nobody has done that, but we have done it. This is a great country.

Yet somehow, in the shadow of this very deep recession--that, in my judgment, was not some natural thing to have happened to our country. This was something that was caused by unbelievable avarice and greed and things that went on particularly in the largest financial firms in this country that had nothing to do with investment, that had nothing to do with savings or real banking but had everything to do with building a casino society so people could buy what they wouldn't get from people who never had it. They were all making money, but it was a house of cards.

I offered an amendment on something called naked credit default swaps. You know what. It sounds like a foreign language. Nobody even knew what a credit default swap was. We had tens of trillions of dollars of credit default swaps, and a fair amount of them were naked. What does that mean? It doesn't mean they didn't have clothes. It meant there was no insurable interest on either side. It was simply a wager, simply a bet, not on investment. I lost that amendment.

I probably should talk about something I won. But the fact is, on the big issues in this country, in most cases the big interests are well organized to make certain their interests carry the day in the Congress. It just seems to me that as we tackle these issues of jobs and Federal budget deficits, which is a very significant issue, and the issue of taxes--who pays them and how much--energy policy--how we remove our addiction to foreign oil--the trade issues I have just described in great detail, we have to do better. The American people deserve better and expect better. Instead of getting the worst of what both parties offer, we need to get the best of what each has. Both parties can contribute something significant to our country, in my judgment.

Mr. President, there is a lot, it seems to me, at stake. We can continue to see anemic economic growth--and as I say that, let me point out this President inherited a circumstance where just prior to his coming to office we were losing 700,000 jobs a month. That is what he inherited. I know some people come and say: Well, how dare you talk about the economy this President inherited. What else would you talk about? Would you create a fiction about it?

This economy was nearly in a free fall and, like it or not, this President took action. Like it or not, this President made proposals that began to put some capability under this economy to avoid a total collapse.

Now the economy is growing, but slowly, and too slowly. The President knows that and says that. This growth is good. We didn't suffer a complete collapse. We caught it. This President's policies have worked. Those, by the way, who come to the floor of the Senate and say the economic recovery act didn't create any jobs know better than that. Look at the studies that have been done: 3 million jobs at least have been saved as a result of taking the action that had to be taken. Would they suggest we sit and watch and be simple observers?

Now we come to this discussion about the economy and we are deep in debt and we have to get out of this. So the question is tax cuts. Who gets tax cuts? Well, 9 years ago, on the floor of this Senate, President George W. Bush said: Let's provide very substantial tax cuts. The bulk of them will go to the wealthy, but nonetheless everyone will get a tax cut. Why? Because for the first time in 30 years we had a budget surplus that year under President Clinton. The first time in 30 years we had a budget surplus.

So President Bush came to office and said: Well, it looks like we are going to have budget surpluses for the next 10 years, so let's provide very large tax cuts.

I voted against them. I said: You are talking about projections. We don't have the tax surpluses yet. When we get them, let's figure out what we do with them, but they do not exist yet. They are simply projections. President Bush said: Well, Katey, bar the door. He and Mr. Greenspan and others said we need to do this. Mr. Greenspan said he couldn't even sleep he was so worried that we were going to have such big surpluses that it would ruin the economy and we would pay down the debt too fast. I hope he didn't lose a lot of sleep over that.

So the Congress passed, without my vote, very large tax cuts for 9 years after which they would expire. So they expire at the end of this year. Now the question is, What do we do with them? The debate is, Should they be extended?

The President says let's extend them for the middle class. We are still in the middle of slow economic progress, so let's extend them for the middle class. The Republicans and others say: Well, let's make sure we extend them for everybody, including the wealthy.

Well, it just seems to me this: We decided--without my vote--to provide very large tax cuts because we needed to give back a surplus which then didn't exist in the subsequent years. A surplus didn't exist. Then what happened? Within a couple of months after passing the tax cuts 9 years ago, we discovered we were in a recession. Not a deep one, but a recession. That, of course, enhanced instead of surpluses Federal budget deficits.

Then what happened? We were hit on 9/11 with a terrorist attack and we went to war in Afghanistan and then we went to war in Iraq and not a penny of it was ever paid. In spite of the fact I and others came to the floor of the Senate and said: If you are going to ask our young men and women to go to war and to get up in the morning and strap on ceramic body armor, to be in harm's way and potentially lose their lives, the very least we can do in this Chamber is pay for the cost of the war. But, no, we couldn't do that. We have fought a war for 9 years and haven't paid for one penny of it. That is fundamentally irresponsible.

Now, the question is, In the middle of a very serious economic situation, who is going to get the tax cuts extended? Some say: Well, you have to extend them for the upper income folks, the wealthiest Americans, because their philosophy is that things trickle down. Put things in the top and ultimately they trickle down. Others, my philosophy, is things percolate up. Give the American family a little something to work with and get the engine working again and things will percolate up to help everybody.

I do think this: The tax rates that were paid by the upper income people in the 1990s, when we had the most robust economic growth in our country, are tax rates that I think should continue to exist for upper income people. I think that is fair. Plus, that $800 billion that it would cost for the next 10 years to do those tax cuts for upper income Americans will be added right to the Federal budget deficit, and that doesn't make any sense to me at all. How would that give confidence to the American people; that at last--at long, long last--this Senate, this Congress was willing to tackle these destructive budget deficits? That is not much consolation to people who watch what is happening in this country.

Now, Mr. President, let me finish by saying I have talked about a number of things, and things we need to correct. I remain hopeful about this country's future. I know we have a chattering class that spends all day and all night on the radio dial and television talking about what is wrong with America. I know there are plenty of challenges ahead of us. But I also believe there are a lot of people who, for two centuries, have bet against this country's future and lost. I think it would take a fool to decide this country would not get through this period.

But this country deserves good leadership from Republicans and Democrats. It deserves a President who is aggressive, and I believe this President is aggressive, in tackling these problems. It deserves a Congress that is willing to work together. If ever we needed an outbreak of some minimum amount of bipartisanship, some minimum cooperation, it is now. I have just watched all of this year circumstances where every single thing is objected to, everything is blocked. It doesn't take much in this Chamber. The two most powerful words are ``I object.'' One person saying ``I object'' grinds this machinery to a halt.

The fact is, I have seen circumstances in this Chamber this year where objections were raised and filibusters ensued on motions to proceed to noncontroversial items that ultimately got 96 or 98 votes, but it took a week to get through because of blocking and objections. I mean, if someone would have brought up a Mother's Day resolution, it would have been filibustered, I assume. Block everything, stop everything, make sure nothing gets done. That is not in the interest of this country. This country deserves better and expects more.

I hope in the coming several weeks--we don't have a lot of time--the things I have just described, the issue of jobs moving overseas, the issue of an unbelievably ignorant tax provision that says if you get rid of your American workers, you lock your factory doors and ship those jobs overseas, tell you what we will do. We will give you a big old fat tax break. I hope finally, at last, at long, long last, enough Members of this Senate will agree that has to stop; that we would pass legislation to shut it down and at the same time say to those who are moving their jobs overseas: You are off the public dole. But you know what. We are going to stand up for those who keep their jobs here. We are going to say: If you are running a manufacturing plant in this country, good for you. We want to do the things that help you continue, that help you hire people and help you be a good employer. Good for you. You are the ones we stand up for because you are the ones who will rebuild opportunity in this country.

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

Will the Senator yield for a question?

It is interesting to me that nobody--or very few--would know the statistics and the new jobs that the Senator from Ohio has described, largely because of the old adage that bad news travels halfway around the world before good news gets its shoes on. Nobody talks about the jobs being created, but the Senator from Ohio talks about the consequences of a country that would have lost its automobile industry.

I ask this question: Does anybody here believe we will long remain a world economic power without world-class manufacturing? Isn't that what the Senator is talking about when he talks about the tough decision to try to save this auto industry, when a number of people here said let them go, we don't need them, it is fine if they go under. Does the Senator believe--and I think I know the answer--that we would remain a world economic power if we decided that we didn't need an auto manufacturing capability in America?

Isn't it interesting, when the Senator talks about a plant that is hiring new people that will produce a new automobile, which is putting people back to work, there is no social work in this country as a good job that pays well. That makes everything else possible. That is good news, but I haven't heard it. I haven't heard about the new plant in Ohio.

What have I heard in the last week or two? About some nut in Florida wanting to burn the Koran. All the news organizations in America decided that is the big news--a minister with a congregation of 50 who decides he wants to burn the Koran. That is bad news, I guess, but it is sensational news of dysfunctional behavior. If you hold it up to the light, would you say this is ugly? Yes, but it is not America; it is just a nut.

The good news somehow never gets covered. When a new plant is created to produce an automobile in this country from a company that probably would not exist today unless the people had the courage to say we need it, it seems to me that is good news. We seldom ever see it covered.

I thank the Senator from Ohio. We have both written books about trade and are trying to stop the movement of jobs overseas and trying to invest in and create good jobs at home, make things that say ``made in America'' on the label.

I appreciate the Senator from Ohio talking today about some progress and some good news because not enough people have decided good news is worth trumpeting.

Madam President, as we conclude our work prior to the August break, we are working very hard to try to address the Cobell settlement and the Pigford settlement, these settlements are the result of lawsuits that were filed, negotiations that ensued, and eventually reaching agreement to settle these two cases.

I would like to talk briefly about the Cobell settlement. To start, I want to show a photograph, a picture of a woman named Mary Fish. I wonder how anyone serving in this Chamber or how anyone in this country would feel had they been Mary Fish. She was an Oklahoma Indian. She lived in a small, humble home, never had very much. But she had a piece of property, 40 acres, and she had six oil wells on her land--six oil wells on her land.

How she got ``her land'' dates back to 1887 when the Federal Government first divided up tribal lands and gave individual Indians separate parcels of land and then said to the Indians: You know what. We are going to give you separate parcels of land that will be yours. But, we are going to manage them for you. We will hold them in trust and provide income from your land to you.

So poor Mary Fish, an Oklahoma Indian, had six oil wells on her land and lived a humble life and died a few years ago waiting, waiting for justice, justice that she never received. The Federal Government never explained to Mary how much oil was being pumped from the wells on her land.

Even with all of the oil wells on her land, Mary made only a few dollars a year from six wells. At one point she got a check from the Federal Government for 6 cents. Another time she got a check from the Federal Government for $3. One time she got a check for $3,000. Another time, although oil was still being produced, one of the statements that Mary received showed a negative $5 in her account.

She died waiting for the government to account for the royalties on her land, and for this legislation that would settle this matter. She died waiting for justice.

So what is the Cobell settlement, and what does it have to do with Mary Fish and all the oil produced from her land. The Cobell settlement is an agreement reached by the Secretary of the Interior and the all of the plaintiffs in the Cobell lawsuit--individual Indians like Mary. I am going to speak about the Cobell settlement, and a couple of colleagues are going to talk about the Pigford settlement. We are here today talking about settling both of these issues.

The Cobell settlement established deadlines for the Congress to act. The Court wants to see this matter resolved. The current deadline for Congress is August 6. We have already missed six deadlines established by the federal court. And if Congress does not act, the parties will return back to litigation, litigation that has gone on now for almost 15 years in the federal courts.

As I indicated, this situation in the Cobell case resulted from a century of mismanagement of Indian trust accounts. I want to show a photograph of the way trust records of the accounts for the individual Indians were kept on one Indian reservation--rat-infested warehouses with boxes laying all over. They would not be able to find a piece of paper in this pile to save their souls. And this is how the government kept records for individual Indian trust accounts. The result is, so many Indians were cheated. Yes, there have been circumstances in the last century in which Indians were systematically cheated and looted. Grand theft occurred, a substantial amount of money was made off these lands. Someone else got it, the Indians did not. After all these years, it is long past the time for us to agree to settle these grievances.

The government has long known about the problem. In 1915, a government report identified ``fraud, corruption and incompetence in the management of these Indian trust accounts.'' That was in 1915. In 1992, a House report compared the federal government's management of Indian trust accounts to ``a bank that doesn't know how much money it has.''

Finally, in 1994, Congress passed a law requiring that the government account for the money it was managing for American Indians, and then 2 years later, where there was still nothing being done and no progress, Elouise Cobell filed a case asking the government to follow the law.

Elouise Cobell is a member of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana. She is quite a remarkable woman. Like many American Indians, she grew up hearing stories of government checks and how the checks never made any sense. The checks arrived once in a while and were in amounts no one understood or could explain.

In 1996, she filed a lawsuit. Her lawsuit said: Give me an accounting of the money that you have collected from my lands, and do the same for every other American Indian. That was in 1996.

We are now in the year 2010, and finally agreement has been reached by the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Justice to settle these accounts. It was 10 years ago when the court ruled against the Federal Government. The Federal Court said the Federal Government was wrong; they mismanaged these accounts, and violated the trust. Yes, there has been corruption, incompetence, and mismanagement.

So 10 years ago, the Federal court ruled against the Federal Government, saying the Federal Government had lost, damaged, destroyed trust records, and the Federal Government admitted it could not account for these trust moneys. After all of this, the government had the nerve to spend taxpayers' money to appeal the court's decision. So it goes on and on and on. Millions have been spent in endless litigation with no settlement in sight.

Finally, last December, and agreement was reached in settlement talks with the Interior Department and the Indians that resulted a settlement and this legislation to approve the settlement.

I want to just mention a couple of other brief points. I know a couple of colleagues wish to make some comments today.

The judge, when hearing of the settlement between the Federal Government and the Cobell plaintiffs, said the agreement was a win/win and that justice is on hold. That is what this is about. It is about providing the funding to settle the Cobell case and provide some amount of justice.

Others will talk about settling the Pigford case.

I will very briefly say again a lot of American Indians have died waiting for this moment. There are other stories I want to share.

This is Susie White Calf. She is a Blackfeet Indian from Montana. This picture was taken in 2001, the same year the courts found the Federal Government had broken its responsibility to Indians. Six years later, she passed away, in 2007. She will not get justice.

But perhaps we can provide justice for tens of thousands of other Indians by doing the right thing.

I have other things to say, but I know some of my colleagues wish to say a few words. If I might, the Senator from Arkansas has to be away from the Chamber very briefly. She wanted to say a few words. Then I know that Senator Kyl and some others wish to say some other words as well.

Madam President, Senator Barrasso and I, as chairman and vice chairmen of the Indian Affairs Committee, have been working on this issue for a long while. Senator Kyl, Senator Baucus--we have had discussions. Senator Kyl had to leave the floor, but I believe he will return. He very much wants to find a way to resolve these issues, as do I and others.

This is not complicated. This is a case where the Federal Government said to American Indians in the late 1800s: We are going to break up these tribal lands and give you personal ownership of these lands. And then we will manage the lands for you and take care of it for you in trust, and the income that comes off those lands will be yours. We will manage your trust accounts.

The fact is, they took control of the lands and created trust accounts. And the Indians got bilked, looted. Grand theft occurred.

Let me show one more photograph. This fellow is still alive. His name is James Kennerly. He is a Blackfeet Indian, standing in front of his rather humble home. He is hoping that Congress will resolve this by approving the settlement. His father was a World War I veteran, wounded, disabled in combat. The family lives on land that has considerable oil and gas leases. Thousands of barrels a week were pumped off that land. Years later, the oil wells still continue to pump, but all the lease documents have disappeared. This family lives in a humble home despite having had oil interests on their property.

Another person waiting for justice, Johnson Martinez, a Navajo Indian in his seventies, lives in a rundown trailer house near Bloomfield, NM. He has no running water and no electricity. At night, he builds a fire to keep himself and his dogs warm. He lives yards away from where the gas pipelines cross his family's land. He lives off the right-of-way fees for the gas pipeline. One month, he got a check for $80. Sometimes he gets a check for a few cents. A court-appointed investigator found that non-Indians were receiving 20 times more than Navajo Indians such as Johnson Martinez were receiving in the same circumstances.

And then there is Esther and Sam Valdez--Navajo Indians--they live 100 feet from natural gas wells. They have been producing natural gas for a long while. Yet this family has trouble putting food on the table. They receive checks for $6 and $8. Sometimes the checks come, sometimes they don't. The Federal Government can never explain to them what happens to the money. This is grand theft.

For more than a century, American Indians were cheated. Yes, there is some incompetence here. That is the comfortable word. But there is also looting and theft involved in having these folks cheated.

The lawsuit was filed 15 years ago. Ten years ago, the Federal court said the Federal Government is completely without merit and violated its trust. The court found in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that they have been bilked. That was 10 years ago. But, the case continued in Federal court with more and more money spent on lawyers.

Finally, at long last, Interior Secretary Salazar and Attorney General Holder, and the plaintiffs in this case negotiated an agreement, and the Federal judge in the case said: This looks like justice to me. This settlement was sent to the Congress for approval and to provide the funding for this agreement.

I came to the floor to offer a unanimous consent request to see if at long last we might put the Cobell litigation behind us and do the fair thing. I understand a unanimous consent request would be objected to at this moment because of what is called the ``pay-for.'' So we have a disagreement about that. But I also understand from discussions we have held that there is the possibility and the potential that this afternoon we might find a way to reach agreement on the ``pay-for'' portion of this and have the Senate finally approve the Cobell settlement, and also the Pigford settlement so that we can move beyond on this.

In the situation that led to the Cobell case, there are people who should hang their head in shame, many of them now departed, who have bilked the Indians out of so much money over so many years.

I would finally say this about the Cobell matter and the American Indians involved. This is a chart that shows the 10 poorest counties in America, the 10 counties with the most significant poverty in our country. Madam President, 8 of the 10 counties have Indian reservations in them--8 of them. We know that. We know what is going on.

Then I talk about these people, American Indians, who live in humble homes with no money, with six oil wells on their land. Somebody is getting the money, but the Indians are not. Who is cheating them? Who cheated them a decade ago, five decades ago, ten decades ago? Will we ever settle our account here? Will this country ever deal responsibly with what I call a shame?

Well, my colleague, Senator Barrasso, and I have worked on this a long while. He has had some concern about certain aspects of the settlement, but I do not think there is a disagreement between us at all about the need to move forward to resolve this issue. My hope is we can do that very soon.

As I said, I was intending to seek a unanimous consent request, but I think I will stop short of that at this moment because there is the potential, perhaps later this afternoon, for us to reach agreement on the ``pay-for'' and a couple of other elements and get a unanimous consent request agreed to, which would be a very significant achievement in this body today.

I know Senator Barrasso from Wyoming wishes to seek recognition. Let me yield the floor so that might happen.

Mr. President, as I indicated, I intend to withhold the unanimous consent request because it would clearly be objected to. There are some people who disagree with the method by which this settlement would be paid for.

But I also wish to mention that I have some hope that later today, finally at long last, we may be able to come to the floor of the Senate with an agreement that would be able to withstand the unanimous consent request. If we do that before we break, we would have resolved a very longstanding issue, not just 15 years of litigation, or a century of mismanagement, but also since last December, when this agreement was reached and the Congress was given time to approve it, but then that deadline had to be extended six times. At long last, perhaps we will be able to decide we can do this together.

I very much appreciate the work Senator Barrasso is doing and Senator Kyl and Senator Baucus and others. My hope is that later this afternoon I will be able to come to the floor with such a unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, earlier today we had some suggestion on the floor of the Senate about the Cobell case--that is the settlement of the Cobell case--the Federal court case Cobell, et al. v. Salazar. A negotiation ensued late last year with an agreement in December of last year that would settle at last--at long, long last--a 15-year litigation in Federal court dealing with American Indians and the mismanagement of their trust accounts--literally stealing and looting trust accounts over the years and, in addition to that, a substantial amount of incompetence along the way.

I described today people who have had oil wells on their land and who have lived in poverty because somebody else got the money from their oil wells. They didn't get it, despite the fact that the government held their land in trust and promised to provide them their income from that land, whether it was from minerals, oil, grazing, agriculture, or another activity. For 140 years, American Indians have too often been cheated.

Well, a court case that has existed now for 15 years determined that the Federal Government had a responsibility and liability. Rather than have that court case continue for more years in the Federal courts, there was a negotiation late last year with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Cobell plaintiffs. They reached an agreement and the Federal judge gave Congress 30 days to provide the funding and approve the settlement. The Congress did not do that in 30 days. In fact, the deadline for the settlement has been extended now six times during which the Congress has not acted.

We have tried very hard to find ways to satisfy everybody here, but apparently that is not capable of being done today. I am profoundly disappointed in that. I think my colleague from Wyoming wishes he were one of the negotiators. He was not, of course. It was the Interior Secretary who and the plaintiffs who negotiated. The Congress simply is an evaluator of whether it wishes to dispense the funding for the settlement that was done. I was not a negotiator. Nobody in Congress was a negotiator.

The question isn't, by the way, whether Indians were cheated or whether they are owed money as a result of mismanagement and fraud over these decades. The Federal court has already determined that was the case. They found in favor of the plaintiffs, and then the case was appealed further by the Federal Government.

The question is whether we have a responsibility here. We do. The Federal court has already found that to be the case. The question is whether we will meet our responsibility. This negotiation that ensued with Cobell v. Salazar, as far as I am concerned, represented a sound and reasonable approach, and I believe we should fund and approve it and move forward.

The unanimous-consent request that I am going to offer includes Cobell v. Salazar and the authorized settlement in that case, as well as the approval and funding for the final settlement of claims from the Black farmers discrimination litigation that has been discussed at some length on the floor as well.

Mr. President, having said that, I ask unanimous consent that the Finance Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 4994, and that the Senate proceed to its consideration; that the substitute amendment at the desk, which authorizes the settlement of Cobell, et al., v. Ken Salazar, et al., and to provide an appropriation for final settlement claims from In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, be considered and agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, all without intervening action or debate.

I object.

Mr. President, let me say again how extraordinarily disappointed I am. I have in my hand the proposal Senator Barrasso offered to the Secretary of the Interior.

By the way, I don't accuse anybody of bad faith. The Senator from Wyoming is a friend of mine. I am enormously disappointed with him at this point. He has a right to be disappointed with me, if he wishes. Let me just say this. This negotiation ensued last November and December, resulting in a settlement. None of us here were part of that settlement--excuse me, we weren't a part of the negotiation that reached the settlement. That is not the role of the Senate, to be involved in a 100-person negotiation.

The lawsuit was a suit brought by plaintiffs against the Secretary of the Interior. The negotiations were negotiations with the Secretary of the Interior, who was the defendant in that suit. That is appropriate and the way it should be.

If we don't like what that negotiations developed and don't support the settlement and believe we can do better, then we should object. But then we don't get this done. That has happened six times this year. Over and over and over again, we have failed to act on this matter.

My colleague has five things he wants that are different than the settlement. Maybe they are better, I don't know. I don't have the foggiest idea. I said to him a while ago that I wish he would take yes for an answer because the response to his requests of the Interior Secretary was a letter from the Secretary saying he agreed with him and would do them. But my colleague wants them in legislative language. That changes the settlement and the negotiation.

It is 7:30 on a Thursday night in August, months and months and months after the settlement was sent to the Congress by a Federal judge, saying do this in 30 days. I just say it is very hard to get things done. Next, it will be somebody else who has four provisions or five provisions or who can write the settlement better or think it through more clearly. I don't know. I do know this. The people who have been cheated--and there are a lot of them and many of whom have died waiting for this settlement--are not going to get any benefits from this settlement until this Congress decides whether it is going to pass legislation dealing with the settlement.

It may be that any Member of the Congress can do a better job and write better provisions, except that we weren't the negotiators because we were not the defendants in the lawsuit. We have every right to say no, if that is the point. We have said no since last December. If that is the point, I suppose more plaintiffs will die. They will wait years and probably go back to Federal court. Maybe we can go another 10 years in Federal court, having lawyers earning money and Indians living on lands with oil wells 100 yards from their house and they get checks of 5 cents or 8 cents or maybe $3 as revenue from the wells. That is what has been happening for the last 130 years.

I understand why there is frustration. If I sound frustrated, think of the people I describe who have been cheated and have lived in poverty most of their lives because they have not had the opportunity to get income from the lands they owned. I don't understand it. I guess people see competing UCs, and wonder what is the result of what are called in the Senate competing UCs? Does anybody go home feeling good? Not me. We are either going to do this or not. If we don't like this settlement, let's not do it. I happen to like it; let's do it. My colleague, perhaps, wants to respond.

I will yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me describe the difficulty with the procedure my colleague described. We can't just bring something up for a vote, because if somebody here doesn't like it, they object. Then you have to file a cloture motion, and it takes 48 hours to get a cloture vote. Then you have 30 hours postcloture. That is what we run into. I agree with that; let's put the best idea up and have a vote on it. If you don't like the settlement and decide that somehow these plaintiffs are not worthy, despite the fact they have been bilked for 130 years, then vote no. But we can't even get a vote.

At any rate, I will wait and see if there is a better idea that will get votes in the Senate or are we going to continue every 30 days or so to say to this Federal judge that we understand a settlement was negotiated and reached on behalf of the United States of America, but we don't intend to vote for it?

I have another bill at the desk. Before I ask unanimous consent, I will describe it. In the piece of legislation we passed today, dealing with FMAP, and funding for teachers, and so on, there was a provision that was first described as a pay-for but actually scored as zero, which meant it was a pay-for that had zero impact. It does have an impact on American Indians, and I wanted to describe it briefly.

When the Economic Recovery Act was passed, we proposed that at least a small amount of money go to Indian reservations around this country because they had the highest rates of unemployment. So there was put in place a piece of legislation that provided an Indian guaranteed loan program account. There was $6.8 million remaining in that account that would support a substantial number of projects around the country-- somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million--that would put a lot of people to work--investing in new infrastructure and projects. That legislation--the so-called pay-for that is scored as zero in the bill passed today--in my judgment, we need to rescind that action because it had no impact on the legislation the Senate passed. But it will have a substantial impact on loan guarantees for these Indian reservations, most of which have the highest rates of unemployment in the country.

I have spoken to a good many people about the need to do this. Again, I have been on the phone to the Congressional Budget Office. They say that a zero score--as I introduced it today, it will not score. Therefore, I believe it is very important to do.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3761, which is at the desk; that the bill be read the third time and passed; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record, as if read.

Mr. President, I understand my colleague from Wyoming suggests there are some here who may not be acquainted with this legislation. I have spoken to both Republicans and Democrats today, during the course of the proceedings, because I think it is very important. I think this is something we need to fix as well. I understand my colleague from Wyoming is objecting on behalf of others.

Let me make one other point on this. I have spent a fair amount of time talking to Senator Kyl about this. He is on an airplane at the moment. He was not able to hear from the Congressional Budget Office before he left town. I do hope, even though there is an objection now-- and to be fair to my colleague, he is objecting on behalf of other Senators with respect to this--that we can find a way to repair this because I think it is very important that we do so.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter dated August 5, 2010 from the CBO.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I have also come to support the nomination of Elena Kagan. She has an impressive background. I was very pleased with her nomination by the President for a lifetime term on the Supreme Court.

I had the opportunity to meet with her in my office, and I found her engaging and interesting, with a lively sense of humor. I found her to be a very interesting person. I had the opportunity to interview and talk with a number of folks who have been nominated to the Supreme Court. She stands out to me.

She has a very impressive background: bachelor's degree in history from Princeton; master of philosophy from Oxford; a law degree from Harvard. She has done a lot of things--associate White House counsel for President Clinton. She was a professor at Harvard Law School and then dean of the Harvard Law School. She was confirmed by the Senate as Solicitor General on March 19 of last year. I voted for that confirmation. I think she will make an excellent Justice of the Supreme Court.

I want to say that some of the criticism of Elena Kagan has been that she does not have judicial experience. In other words, she has not been a judge. That is true, in fact. Forty of the 111 Supreme Court Justices, including Justices John Marshall, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and the previous Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, had no judicial experience either. In many ways, that was considered a significant asset.

My colleagues who now criticize Elena Kagan for not having judicial experience extolled the virtue of that very thing when the Senate was considering the nomination of William Rehnquist who similarly had no judicial experience.

I find it a significant asset for Elena Kagan. She brings different kinds of experiences to the Federal bench, and I think she will make an exceptional Supreme Court Justice.

I might say, every Solicitor General, the position Elena Kagan now occupies, since 1985, including Kenneth Starr and Ted Olson, have said that Kagan ``would bring to the Supreme Court a breadth of experience and a history of great accomplishment in the law . . . We support the nomination of Elena Kagan . . . and believe that, if confirmed, she will serve on the Court with distinction.'' That is from every former Solicitor General going back to the mid-1980s. That is, in my judgment, some support.

The determination of who sits on the Supreme Court in this Nation is one of the most important decisions the Senate makes. It is a judgment by the President, first of all, to send a nomination to the Senate, and then the advise-and-consent responsibility of the Senate is to make a judgment about that nomination.

The decisions the Court makes have a profound impact on the lives of the American people, have an impact on the questions of what kind of freedoms exist in this country. We have at this moment one of the most conservative courts we have had in a long time in this country, perhaps in this country's history the most conservative court.

A recent study by Richard Posner, who sits on the Seventh Court of Appeals, and William Landes, University of Chicago law professors, ranked all 43 Supreme Court Justices who have served since 1937 on their ideology and their decisions. Their conclusion was that four of the five most conservative Justices since Franklin Roosevelt sit on this Supreme Court right now.

I do not think we ought to be thinking of this in terms of conservative versus liberal. I only use that category because so many of my colleagues said it is very important to have a conservative Justice. What I want on the Supreme Court is a Justice who will use common sense in interpreting the Constitution and do so without an understanding that they are on one team or another.

Frankly, it is disappointing not just to me but most Americans to see that the Supreme Court has become a court of nine Justices who break into teams: Our side, your side; five on one side, four on the other. That is not what we would expect of the Supreme Court.

My hope would be that the Supreme Court would take a look at issues not as conservatives or liberals, but as Supreme Court Justices who have studied the law and who would make a commonsense judgment about what the Constitution of this country means.

So often I find that the Supreme Court stands logic on its head. The recent decision in Citizens United is an unbelievable decision to me: that corporations should be treated as individuals for the purpose of campaign financing without any precedent or plain text basis. They overturned a statute by Congress because they said corporations are people.

Oh, really? Most of us understand corporations are artificial people created by the State for the purpose of allowing an entity to be created, to sue and be sued, contract and be contracted with. But no one ever suggested corporations represent a real person. If so, I assume one of these days we will have corporations running for office, perhaps a corporate candidate for the Senate. We can have General Motors running against IBM. Get your money together because it is going to be expensive. Which desk in the Senate chamber will belong to which corporation?

If corporations are, in fact, real people, as the Supreme Court has ruled, then it will not be long before we have that kind of political race in our country. It is an absurd decision.

The 5-to-4 decision in the Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear is another shocking example of standing common sense and a commonsense reading of the Constitution on its head. Lilly Ledbetter worked 19 years at Goodyear and had consistently gotten sterling, very high performance evaluations by her supervisors. Once she learned she had been paid much less than other workers who happened to be male--she learned this after 19 years, by the way. For 19 years, she worked hard, got paid, and then discovered all of those years she had been paid much less than the male counterparts doing exactly the same job.

She finally sued, and the Federal courts said: You are right; Goodyear, you have to make back payments. The appeals court then overturned it, and the Supreme Court ruled that this woman had to have taken action within 180 days of the discrimination beginning.

The fact is, she could not have done that in the first 180 days. She did not have the foggiest idea they were mistreating her, saying: If you are a man, you get this salary, and if you are a woman, you get this salary for doing the same thing, working side by side. She did not discover they were mistreating her for 19 years.

The Supreme Court did not care about that. They just said that if she did not pick it up in 180 days, sorry, out of luck, tough luck. It stands logic on its head once again.

The fact is, the Supreme Court has a profound impact in terms of the way they interpret the Constitution of the

United States. What I have seen recently and certainly in the case of Citizens United--and I believe it is the case in Ledbetter v. Goodyear--the Supreme Court too often these days divides into teams. By the way, the team that seems to be winning is the team on the side of the powerful, the team on the side of the big interests, the team on the side of the corporate interests. That ought not be the way the Supreme Court operates.

I came to support the Kagan nomination because I think she is someone with a facile, interesting mind who is going to bring a new spark to the debate among Justices about what this Constitution means. I do not know if she is a liberal or a conservative. I don't care very much. What I care is that we put some people on the Supreme Court we believe have the capability to make good decisions--decisions that will make life in this country better, that will reflect accurately the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

I hope very much when the dust settles and the vote is taken that we will have a very strong vote in support of Elena Kagan to become the next Supreme Court Justice. I think her background, her skill, her capability will make her an outstanding Supreme Court Justice. I will be proud to vote for her nomination when we have that vote this week.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I wished to talk for a moment on the subject of energy policy.

This week is our last week prior to the August break, and it is a very important week. We will likely see on the floor of the Senate the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act that was brought to the floor by the majority leader, Senator Reid.

I wish to commend him for what he has proposed. He has proposed a piece of legislation that includes a number of very important issues, including issues that deal with the oil spill and oil companies' accountability for the Deepwater Horizon spill, issues that will enhance the use of natural gas in our truck fleet in this country, provisions for electric vehicles and infrastructure, provisions that will provide substantial consumer savings in the HOME Star Program, and provisions to protect the environment and create substantial new jobs.

But I wished to also say that this is but a first chapter of the book of energy changes that are essential to this country's future. I wished to chat about why it is important this week to start a process that I hope will last through September, and perhaps through the lame duck session as well. I hope there will be opportunities that will allow us to achieve the objectives we sought beginning last year, when we spent 12 weeks in the Senate Energy Committee trying to write an energy bill and finally reported out a bipartisan energy bill from that committee.

That committee product includes a lot of very important things. First and foremost, people might say: Well, what is the urgency?

Why are we concerned about energy? We have people exploring the globe trying to figure out where they can punch a hole in the planet and suck oil and gas out. We have been pretty successful in doing that. Each day we take about 85 million barrels of oil out of the Earth. Each day about one-fourth needs to come to the United States because that is our prodigious appetite for oil. Some call it an addiction. Whatever it is found around the globe, one-fourth of all the oil that is extracted every day has to be delivered to this little place called the United States. Seventy percent of all the oil we use, from foreign oil to domestically produced oil, is used in the transportation fleet.

It is pretty clear we have a very substantial dependence on foreign oil. Over 60 percent of the oil we use in this country comes from outside the country. Some of it comes from areas of the world that don't like us very much, areas that are unstable. If we go to bed tonight and, God forbid, tomorrow morning we wake up and discover that in one way or another concerted acts of terrorism have cut the pipeline of oil into our economy, very quickly this American economy would be flat on its back.

What do we do about that? We talk about it. We talk about it every decade, about how we are going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We speak really well. We do a lot better job talking than we do enacting policy. That is for sure. We are going to make us less dependent on foreign oil, we say. Meanwhile, for a couple of decades we are more and more dependent on foreign oil. That potentially holds our country's future and the economy hostage to oil coming from other countries over which, in many cases, we have very little long-term control.

Should we do something about that? I think we should. I believe it is urgent. There is an assumption--not just about oil but about everything that represents our country, its strength and the opportunities we have always provided. There is a notion that here in America, what always was will always be in the future. That is not necessarily the case. It was the case when I was a child. I always knew we were the biggest, the strongest, and the best, and we would produce opportunities that other countries could not for the masses of people to expand job opportunity, to expand income, to allow them to climb the economic ladder. It is the case that we were very successful in doing that for a long time. But polls now show that the majority of the American people believe their children will not have it quite as well as they did. That is the first time that we have ever seen that. Most people believe the future is going to be less advantageous to their children than it was to them.

Part of that reason is because they look at policies and say: Are you making the right choices for the future? Are you making hard choices? Are you doing the right thing to make decisions that will help promote a better economic future?

One of those decisions deals with the question of energy. The fact is, we live on energy. It is central to our daily lives. Yet none of us think much about it. We get up in the morning, and when we get up, we shut off an electric alarm. We turn on a light. We start a coffee maker. We put some toast in the toaster that is electric. We get in our car and turn a key where we use oil.

The fact is, we use so much energy even before we get to work, never even giving it a second thought. The dilemma is, in the mix of energy in this country, we are far too dependent on foreign oil.

At the same intersection of concern about that dependency, that vulnerability, now comes climate change. There is something happening to our global climate which leads us to ask how do we use energy, particularly fossil fuels. In the future while we put out less carbon into the atmosphere, how do we address these two things together? Both are very important.

I tell all of that because we wrote the Energy bill, the American Clean Energy Leadership Act. It took us 10 or 12 weeks in the Energy Committee, 13 months ago. We don't yet have that Energy bill on the floor of the Senate. There are a lot of complicated reasons for that. But first let me describe what was in that bill.

No. 1, we do, in fact, reduce our dependence on foreign energy and increase domestic production. This bill would do the things that give us the opportunity to maximize the production of renewable energy, where the wind blows and the Sun shines. There is no reason for us not to collect energy in one place and ship it to where it is needed in the load centers. We do that in this bill.

We establish a first ever national renewable electricity standard, what is called an RES. It says: Here is where we are headed. We want X percent of our electricity to be produced from renewable sources. That is the way we get to a desired destination, by deciding where we are headed. If we don't care where we are going, we will never be lost. But we will never get to where we want to head if we believe the country needs to achieve a certain direction.

That is very important. If we are going to have our country less dependent on foreign oil, we have to produce more at home. I believe in responsibly producing more oil and gas at home, but I also believe in producing more electricity from renewable sources.

It also creates a transmission superhighway. We built an interstate highway over which we can drive. One of the interstate highways goes through my State. It connects New York to Seattle. It is a wonderful thing. It is also the case that we have not built a strong, interstate transmission system, an interstate highway of transmission lines to allow us to collect the energy where the wind blows. My State is the windiest State in the Nation. My State is called the Saudi Arabia of wind, but we don't need more electricity in our State. We produce far more than we need or can use.

So the question is, How do we produce it where the wind blows and put it on a wire and move it to a load center where they can transmit the electricity? We do that by creating a transmission superhighway which we don't have. We need to build it. That itself will allow us to maximize the production of renewable energy and make us less dependent on foreign oil.

The bill electrifies and diversifies our vehicle fleet. The fact is, we will make ourselves less dependent on foreign oil by moving toward an electric vehicle fleet. That makes a lot of sense as well and is a responsible step to take. The Senate Energy Committee just passed legislation I wrote, along with my colleagues Senators Alexander and Merkley, called the Promoting Electric Vehicles Act.

What we are trying to do is move the country in this direction by providing the right policies and incentives. It makes a lot of sense. If we build an electric system for peak load when people are air- conditioning and heating their homes during the day, and then at night that load requirement goes way down. But we still have the capability to produce all this energy, and we are just not using it. If we are able to plug in our cars in the garage at night to use energy that we have already developed an infrastructure to create, we make maximum use and opportunity of energy resources that currently exist.

That is what we do with respect to the electrification and diversification of the vehicle fleet. Energy efficiency is the lowest hanging opportunity in the country. We can achieve that through appliance standards, new technology, and building retrofits. We expand clean energy technology. All this means substantial job creation opportunities, and we train the energy workforce of tomorrow.

It is the case that the bills we will consider on the Senate floor, a piece of legislation that Senator Reid has decided to bring to the floor includes some pieces of what I have just described and apparently another competing piece of legislation and perhaps cloture votes on these issues--they are steps in the right direction but very short, in my judgment, of what we could and should do before the end of this session to say to the American people: We understand your concern about the future of this country. We understand about the vulnerability you know exists when we send $1 billion a day, every day, 7 days a week to other people around the world to pay for their oil.

We understand that makes our country vulnerable, and we will do something about it. We are not going to take baby steps. We are going to take big steps in the right direction to fix the vulnerability that exists.

We have had some in this Chamber who have held up the Energy bill from the Senate Energy Committee because they said we shouldn't do this unless we also take up a climate bill. I believe we should put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. Something is happening to our climate. We would be fools not to take a series of no-regrets steps so that 50 or 100 years from now, when we look in the rearview mirror, we decide to take commonsense steps. We would be fools not to have done some important things in the meantime that would help address these issues just in case.

I believe the consensus of scientists is that there is something happening to

the climate. But those who have insisted that this Congress in this year address climate change have said: If you are not going to address climate change, you can't do the bill from the Energy Committee.

If we brought a bill to the floor of the Senate that established all kinds of benchmarks on CO2 emissions, how would we then limit CO2? We would go back and do these very things I have just described. We would maximize the production of wind and solar energy, the biofuels, a whole series of things that represent what we have done in the Energy Committee. It has never made much sense to me that we would hold up or block the opportunity to do this bill. If we brought this bill to the Senate floor in September or in a lameduck session, it would be wide open for amendments to offer a climate title.

I have said I will support limiting carbon. I will also support a mechanism to price carbon. I have also said--clearly, many times--that doesn't include cap and trade because I have no interest in the trade piece by creating a $1 trillion carbon securities market on Wall Street. The reason for my concern about that is, I have watched in the last several years what has happened with respect to various kinds of speculative excesses in other markets. I am not someone who wants to sign up the cost of our energy future to carbon securities traders.

There is an opportunity between now and the end of this year. I hope we don't miss it. It is easy for us to minimize our actions. It is easy to take small steps. It is much harder to take bold steps in the right direction. But I am mindful, as is everyone involved in the political system, that the American people are plenty upset about a lot of things. We have just been through the deepest recession since the 1930s, and we are not out of it yet. There is some improvement, to be sure, but we are not out of this. There are a whole lot of folks out of work, feeling hopeless and helpless. Some have looked for jobs for a year, 2, 2\1/2\ years, and can't find them. They are concerned about pension benefits, concerned about Social Security, about whether grandpa and grandma will have decent health care, and concerned about quality schools among other national issues.

They are concerned about whether they live in safe neighborhoods. They are concerned about whether they can find a job or whether they have a job and job security. They are concerned about a lot of things. This is one of them, however, the issue of energy. They worry that if we are not smart and if we don't take action that is bold and decisive in the right direction, we will miss the opportunity to address some very important issues in the future.

The most important issue to me with respect to energy is our unbelievable dependence and vulnerability of having to get so much of our energy outside of our country, especially from areas that are in troubled parts of the world. We can do a lot better.

We hear a lot of people talking about wanting to hear ``made in America'' again. I want to hear that about a lot of products. I want to see a vibrant manufacturing industry and sector built once again. But ``made in America'' can also mean produced in America. We can use our resources--yes, even our fossil energy--if we use them differently.

One final point is the question about the use of hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas production. I know this is very technical. In my State, we produce a lot of oil at the moment, and it increases all the time. It is the largest reservoir or largest reserve of technically recoverable oil ever assessed in the history of the lower 48 States. It is called the Bakken shale. That oil shale formation is 10,000 feet underground.

In recent years, we been able to access it with great success. We go down 2 miles, 10,000 feet, with a drill, and then we make a big curve with the same drill and go out 2 miles. So we can go 4 miles, including a curve in the middle, with one drilling rig. Then with a water solution, we initiate hydraulic fracturing to crack open the shale rock to release the oil. I understand that is 2 miles below the surface. It is 100 feet thick. They drill for the middle third of a 100-foot seam 2 miles below the surface. That is how sophisticated it is.

The oil can only be extracted from that deposit by using hydraulic fracturing techniques. The U.S. has been using hydraulic fracturing for 50 years. Some people have raised concerns about what that does to the water table when producing oil or natural gas. There is like chance of doing anything to the water table 10,000 feet below. Hydraulic fracturing has been used for a long time in a way that has not affected the water table. I am very concerned about carefully vetting issues from who have concerns about hydraulic fracturing. I don't want to shut down a substantial portion of that which can be produced in America to support our country's need for homegrown energy in the future. I will have more to say about that at some point when the bill comes to the floor, but I did want to mention that issue because I think it, too, is very important as we discuss energy issues.

All of us want the same thing for our country. We want stability, economic opportunity, and environmental protection. We want to give our kids hope that the future for them is going to be better than the future for their parents. We all want those things. But the only way we will achieve those things is if we at last, at long, long last make some big and bold decisions on a wide range of issues. Yes, fiscal policy on energy policy and on a wide range of other issues, we need to make some big and bold decisions, some of which may not be popular in the short term but are essential for this county's well-being in the long term.

We need to do that now, not later, not next year. We need to take those steps this year. That is why I wanted to talk about the opportunities that still can be achieved well beyond the size of the legislation we are going to consider this week on the oil spill and energy. There is an expanded capability on energy legislation that took us 12 weeks to write. It was passed on a bipartisan basis and represents a menu of things we could and should do in order to address both our vulnerability and dependence on foreign energy as well as to begin to address the issue of climate change.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, soon I am going to ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of H.R. 5900. First, I want to make a couple of comments.

H.R. 5900 is a piece of legislation sent to us by the House of Representatives that will extend for 2 months the FAA reauthorization act. I regret that we have another extension. It is extension after extension after extension. It is so symbolic of the way this place works these days.

The reason there is an urgency to get the FAA reauthorization act done is that it includes so many significant issues that deal with the safety of the air traveling public, with the airport improvement funds, with substantial investments in air traffic control modernization--a wide range of issues that are very important. Despite the fact that everybody understands the urgency, the FAA reauthorization bill is stuck in the morass of difficulties that now afflict the Senate and House these days. It is very difficult to get anything done.

The question will be, Will we now--extending this for 2 more months-- at the end of this year adjourn sine die once again without having approved an FAA reauthorization bill?

The Europeans are moving very aggressively on air traffic control modernization. I have met with Europeans on these issues. We should be doing the same, and yet it is held hostage by not passing an FAA reauthorization bill.

The issue of safety is another very important issue. I have held hearing after hearing on the issue of safety. The question is, Do we have one standard of safety on airplanes these days as between major carriers and regional carriers? When you step onto an airplane that is 32-passenger or 50-passenger--a regional carrier--do you have the same level of safety as is applied with respect to the crew, the training, and all the other issues as exists with the major carriers? The law requires that; FAA requires that.

Does it exist? Well, we explored in great detail the crash of Colgan Air. We saw, with respect to Colgan Air, one flight on one night--one tragic

night--where 45 passengers got on a Bombardier Dash 8 at La Guardia to fly to Buffalo, NY. Flying through the ice that evening, they had their wings iced up and they went into a dive and crashed, killing all of the passengers on board--a flight attendant, two pilots, and one person on the ground as well.

When we dissected what happened that evening, it was unbelievable. It may be that this is one circumstance that has occurred only in that situation--I doubt it. Neither pilot had slept in a bed the night before. One traveled across the United States from Seattle, WA, to Newark, just to reach her duty station to go to work. Think of that, traveling all night because it is your commute to your job, from Seattle to Newark, and then getting in an airplane and flying. That was the copilot who flew the right seat--a person who, a report said, was paid $20,000 or $22,000 a year and had to have a second job to make ends meet, and who previously lived with her parents because of the low salaries paid to pilots on commuter airlines.

The pilot in the left seat had not slept the night before either. Evidence was that he was only in the crew lounge where there are no beds. He commuted from Florida, I believe--one of the Florida cities-- to Newark to his work station.

It is also the case that, as we looked at the transcript of the cockpit recording, we found all kinds of very difficult circumstances that existed--a discussion by the copilot that she had very little training flying in icing. This is someone in a cockpit flying a commercial airline saying: I have had very little experience flying in icing. We took a look at the records of the pilot and discovered that the pilot had failed, on multiple occasions, some key exams, and sufficient so that had the airline known, they said: ``We would not have hired that pilot had we known of those failures.'' Except the pilot's records were not transparent to the airlines. And the list goes on. It is about the training regime, stick shakers, stick pushers in the cockpit dealing with the circumstances that evening.

The question is: Was this an isolated incident or have we learned something that ought to be very concerning to all of us about safety in the skies? We included a number of recommendations in the FAA reauthorization bill dealing with safety. Some of those recommendations have been sent to us by the House of Representatives today in the 2- month extension. We will go ahead and adopt those and they will become law.

It does not represent all of the safety issues we have included in the Senate FAA reauthorization bill. It represents significant and important safety recommendations. It deals with FAA pilot records database and access to that database, the number of hours that are required for a pilot getting in a cockpit--1,500 hours as opposed to the 250 hours. The 1,500 represents what is required by the ATP, and that standard is applied in the House bill and also in the discussions we have had leading up to this point with the House negotiators.

We include issues such as the pilot training issues, safety inspectors, flight crew member mentoring, development, and leadership-- a range of things that are very important.

The FAA is also involved separately on issues dealing with fatigue. They are not at this point, I believe, dealing with commuting, but I think commuting is an issue and has to be dealt with.

The point is that the FAA reauthorization bill is not now going to be passed. We will pass a 60-day extension to the end of September. The extension will include the safety provisions I have just described.

I want to mention as well the families of the victims of the Colgan air crash who, in my judgment, need to receive a lot of credit for pushing these issues and making certain that those loved ones they lost in that crash--I guess whose memory they labor in to try to make these kinds of changes and push the Congress to do what is necessary to improve safety. I believe the families have done very substantial work and very important work.

At every hearing I have held on the issue of safety, those family members have been present. They wear on their lapels and on their suit jackets photographs of their loved ones. They are doing that because they want to make sure this does not happen again. My heart goes out to them. I also say thanks to them for doing the kind of work they have done to make sure these issues do not fall by the wayside.

Let me make one final point. We have now from the period of perhaps 3 or 4 weeks in September and then a few weeks in a lameduck session to get the FAA reauthorization bill done, and if it does not get done, then we will have once again failed. I am pretty familiar with that kind of failure. I have watched time and time again.

Without being disrespectful to any of my colleagues, I know there are a number of issues that are of concern and of controversy. They deal with the issue of the perimeter rule at Washington National Airport--DC National--and also the slot provisions at DC National. There are differences of opinion in this Chamber. I believe we must resolve them. Those issues are not that significant. There has been discussion of 16 conversions that would not result in additional flights out of DC National. It is not a case of somebody saying: Let's have more flights.

I hope that all of those who are involved in this discussion will find a way to reach a compromise. This place does not work without compromise. If we have a dozen people digging in their heels telling us the way to resolve this issue is my way and if you do not like my way, I do not intend to do anything to allow anybody else to get anything, then this place does not work.

Frankly, we are close to not working very well. In the first instance, last evening we had another cloture vote. I know the majority leader felt strongly we probably would have the opportunity to get that vote. It is symbolic, I guess, of this Chamber these days. All year long, we have had votes on motions to proceed on noncontroversial bills--cloture votes that require a cloture motion to be filed and then wait for 2 days and then have a cloture vote on a motion to proceed to a noncontroversial issue. Then in addition to being required to file a cloture motion to shut off debate on something noncontroversial, once we get cloture with an overwhelming number of votes, we have to wait 30 hours to take action. That is not legislating. That is stalling. That is obstruction. We have seen way too much of it in this Chamber.

At any rate, I feel of two minds at the moment. No. 1, I am very disappointed that we have to have another extension. It is over and over again, nothing much changes, extend, extend, extend, rather than do the kind of legislating we should do. We will do this extension to the end of September on the FAA reauthorization bill. It relates to safety in the skies. It relates to jobs. It relates to investment in airport infrastructure in America. It relates to air traffic control modernization--all of those important issues, all of them again put on hold for another couple of months.

That is a profound disappointment, as far as I am concerned. Even as disappointed as I am about that, let me say the safety provisions that we will now proceed to enact, sent to us in the bill by the House of Representatives, are a significant step forward. I am pleased we are going to be able to do at the minimum this amount of work. More will be done even on safety when the Senate bill, if the Senate bill, is ever able to be passed in the Senate and become law.

Having said that, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5900, the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010, received from the House and is now at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times, passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record, without further intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, let me finally say that while I have mixed feelings about having done this--one regret and the other a strong feeling of accomplishment on the safety issues--I intend to come back to the floor in September, and if we have not made progress to resolve the FAA bill--I do not shout very much, but I said yesterday I have had a bellyful of this sort of thing--I am going to come to the floor and act very unlike a Lutheran Norwegian. You can count on that.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the following postal-naming bills en bloc: Calendar Nos. 489, 490, and 491--S. 3567, H.R. 5278, and H.R. 5395.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bills be read a third time and passed en bloc; that the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc, with no intervening action or debate; and that any statements relating to the bills be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 602, submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, for the past 10 years I have had the privilege of working with Elizabeth Gore, the chief of staff of my U.S. Senate office.

Today, as Elizabeth leaves her job to pursue other career opportunities, I want to pay tribute to her extraordinary work. Elizabeth Gore has made important contributions not only to the effective management of my Senate office, but also to the creation of good public policy for our country.

Elizabeth joined my staff 10 years ago following a career that included work in both the U.S. House of Representatives and for the White House. She possesses that wide range of skills that is always necessary for success. She is smart, tough, honest, and has demonstrated an uncanny sense of good judgment.

I know the American people view the U.S. Senate through the lives of those of us who are elected to serve here. But, frankly, every U.S. Senator will admit that a substantial amount of the credit for their accomplishments in the Senate belong to some very talented staff. That has been especially true of Elizabeth in my office. She has directed a complicated set of issues in an office full of activity with great skill.

The term ``regular hours'' would not fit any job description in most Senate offices. Long hours, family sacrifices, and devotion to getting the job done describes everything about the commitment Elizabeth made to me, my staff, and the people of North Dakota over the past decade.

I know Elizabeth will now add another chapter to what is already an illustrious career and others will discover the joy of working with her.

I join all of my staff members in saying thank you to Elizabeth Gore for having spent the past decade working in my office. All of us owe her a great debt of gratitude.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor to talk about a piece of legislation that perhaps is not on the front pages of the newspapers today but is very important in this Congress and to the American people. It is very important that we pass this legislation. We have been waiting and waiting, and we continue to wait. It is called the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration bill. We have been working on this for a long time.

This is not just reauthorization for some bureaucracy; this is about safety for the American public who is flying today. Let me put up a chart that shows where the airplanes are in the skies today. I think I have a chart on that which describes the number of flights in this country. The air is literally packed with airplanes flying all across this country. The question is, How are they controlled? Ground-based radar systems are keeping track of all of these flights. This is a map that shows the airplanes that are flying in the country at a given time--very crowded skies. This FAA reauthorization bill has a lot to do with safety. The reason it is so important--I am going to talk about the safety piece first, and then I will talk about why it has been blocked and how we finally get some action on this and why I finally have had a bellyful of trying to persuade people that we ought to pass legislation that I think is critically important to save lives in this country.

Let me remind all of my colleagues about February 12 last year. February 12 of last year was the tragic crash of Colgan Air flight 3407. That crash should not have happened. That crash took the lives of 45 passengers, 2 flight attendants, 2 pilots, and 1 person on the ground. It should never, ever have happened.

The families of the victims of Colgan Air flight 3407 have consistently been to every hearing I have held on safety dealing with aviation. They have been, at every moment possible, here in the Capitol Building, office to office, door to door, saying: Pass this legislation to reauthorize the FAA, including the dramatic safety changes we propose.

They provided a chart board that shows photographs of their loved ones, those who climbed on that airplane that evening to fly from Newark to Buffalo, NY. It was a night flight on a Bombardier-8. During that flight, icing occurred on the wings.

I have read the transcript from that cockpit between the pilot and the copilot. Let me describe a couple of things we learned.

The young pilot lived in Seattle, WA, and commuted to work to Newark. She deadheaded all night long on a FedEx plane stopping in Memphis, landed in Newark--no evidence that she slept--and then she boarded an airplane to haul passengers to Buffalo, NY. That was the copilot. The copilot, I understand, earned somewhere around $20,000, $22,000 a year and had a second job in a coffee job to make ends meet. My understanding was she lived with her parents. That was the copilot. The pilot commuted from Florida. There is no evidence that the pilot slept the night before. He spent time in the crew lounge, where there is no bed. That pilot boarded the same plane. That raises all kinds of issues about fatigue and commuting--commuting all night to board an airplane to haul passengers.

When you read the transcript of what occurred in that cockpit, you also understand there were very serious issues about training--the stick pusher and the stick shaker and flying into ice and not following procedures, all of these issues.

Forty-five passengers died that night. The question is, Is there one level of safety in this country when you get on an airplane and you look in that cockpit? Is there one level of safety if you are on a large plane or carrier versus a small regional carrier? Do you have the same experience in the cockpit, the same level of training? Where have the crews come from? Did they fly all night all across the country just to get to their work station?

Well, the Colgan crash told us a lot. Here is what happened that evening. There was ice on the wings. This was the crash site near Buffalo, NY, on February 12, 2009.

Here is another photograph of the crash site. This crash should never have happened. Those victims should not have died. They should have been safely on the ground with their loved ones.

What has gone wrong here? Let me at least describe a few things that I think. One was fatigue. Clearly, that played a role. Here is a quote that NBC News ran from a pilot on a 737 jet flying to Denver, CO:

I had been doing everything in my power to stay awake:

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

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

hours.

Fatigue. Is this someone in a working condition who is sharp, on edge, landing a plane with perhaps 150 people on board?

Here is another quote from an 18-year veteran pilot, describing the routine of commuter flights with short layovers in the middle of the night:

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

He said that is the way it works.

Here is another quote from a pilot:

I was bathed in sweat and scared to death.

That is an 18-year pilot describing the approach to the runway after numerous early morning commuter flights over 3 days.

Here is a photograph of a pilot crash pad. He watches a movie on his computer at a crash house in Sterling Park, VA, which is not far from here. These houses, which can have 20 to 24 occupants at a time, are designed to give flight crews from regional airlines a quiet place to sleep near their base airports. Many can't afford hotels, so they use crash houses where they pay $200 a month for a bed.

I described the young lady who was the copilot on the Colgan Air flight that crashed. She commuted from Seattle, WA to Newark to get to her duty station. There was no evidence that she had slept in a bed. It raises a lot of questions.

At hearings I held, I held up this chart to show where the Colgan pilots were commuting from flying on that particular regional airline. They were flying out of Newark. You could see where they are commuting from, such as home stations in Los Angeles, in Seattle, in Texas, and they commuted to work all the way across the country.

I describe these charts only to talk about one phase of the investigation of the Colgan crash, and that is fatigue and rest--crew rest. We have a piece of legislation that addresses a number of these issues: What is the experience of the pilot in the cockpit? How many hours must that pilot have of relevant experience and training to sit in that cockpit and haul passengers on a commercial airplane?

We addressed that and so many other critical areas of safety. That is in the FAA reauthorization bill--a piece of legislation we passed in the Senate Commerce Committee long ago. Now it is awaiting action on the floor of the Senate. Yet, we have not been able to get it done.

I want to talk a little about the importance of this legislation. No. 1, it creates jobs. It is investment in infrastructure, airport improvement funds--investing in the infrastructure of this country.

Let me describe the central elements of this bill. Airport Improvement Program. That is tens of thousands of jobs around this country.

Aviation safety. I have touched on that.

Air traffic control modernization.

A passenger bill of rights.

Small community air service.

Let me talk for a moment about the air traffic control modernization. I showed a chart with all of those airplanes in the air. Every single passenger on every one of those planes could be flying in safer conditions now if we were moving, as we should, with this bill, in modernizing the air traffic control system. Our kids carry cell phones around that have GPS capability. Those of the commercial airliners in this country are flying to ground-based radar, not GPS. They don't utilize what our kids have in their cell phones in commercial airplanes, which would allow them to fly safer routes, fly more direct routes. Modernization of the air traffic control system is long overdue, and it has a lot to do with aviation safety. It is in this bill.

This bill must get done. To not move forward on this--Europeans are, and others--and to have us fall further behind is unthinkable to me. The passenger bill of rights--we include that in this bill, and it says some very important things. The passenger bill of rights says that they are not going to be able to keep you on an airplane for 6 or 8 hours when they have trouble on the runway and you sit on the tarmac for 6 or 8 hours. Three hours. We set the conditions under the passenger bill of rights, airplanes--that is, the aircraft companies, airline companies, must comply with the rules that we have established.

This legislation provides consumer benefits for 700 million plane trips per year taken by the American people. We have heard horror stories from around this country: passengers stuck on the tarmac for 6 hours, 8 hours, bathrooms not working, out of water. The fact is, this bill will improve that and the disclosure of flight information to passengers, impose certain burdens on the airlines, and that is the right approach. All of these things are in this FAA reauthorization bill.

What is holding up the bill? Well, first and foremost, in the Senate, we passed the bill with the understanding that there is a controversy called slots and perimeter rules at Washington National Airport. When we passed it through the Senate, 93 to 0, we understood that we didn't resolve the slots and perimeter rule issue. The House has additional slots at DC National, but we didn't do anything on it. We didn't do zero. We understood that we passed the bill and would negotiate it later, and negotiations have ensued. Now we have several representations saying: I represent my area, my region, or my airport, and therefore I object.

Do you know what. It is fine to represent your interests in your region, but it is not fine to block the bill. It is not fine to block this bill. In fact, the latest discussions that have been held, with respect to slots at DC airport, are 16 additional slots--not new flights in or out of DC National Airport, but flights that would have flown within the perimeter that would now fly outside of the perimeter. I know that is lost on most people because this perimeter rule limits the number of miles you can fly from DC National Airport. This would convert flights inside the perimeter to flights outside of it--16 flights. So it is no new traffic to DC National. Those who proposed it said: We would agree that we would have the same size airplanes flying the flights.

Yet, we have massive amounts of controversy around here with people saying: Well, I am going to block this and that.

Let me say this: If you care much about safety in the skies and at long last you want to pass an FAA bill to improve safety, if you care about the airport improvement program and infrastructure and airports and runways and building the infrastructure and creating tens of thousands of jobs, and if you care about small community air services, a passenger bill of rights and having America keep up with air traffic control modernization, you can't possibly be blocking this bill.

I am not going to describe who it is, with names and so on. This is not about Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives or liberals; this is about, are we going to fail again? I have watched so many failures because people have decided they are going to block this or that. What we have had in this entire Congress is one side of the aisle blocking most everything for a long period of time. This bill happens to be bipartisan. There is no excuse, no reason to block this legislation.

It appears to me that a couple things are likely to happen. If interests that have been involved in these discussions continue to block this, this bill will fail, and the American people will be flying in skies that are less safe than they could be. We will not have made the improvements we should make. We will not make the investments and create the jobs we should create. I suppose those who block it will think they have done something meritorious for the country, but they will have injured this country's interests.

My hope is that in the coming couple of days, those who have said they are going to block this legislation will think again and understand that this place only works through compromise; it only works if we are willing to understand that everybody has different views on these things, and let's find a way to effectively compromise and pass legislation that strengthens this country.

If I sound a little irritated, I am, because I have had a belly full of the intransigence that exists in this Chamber. Nobody fights harder for their interests than I do. But I also understand, having served here long enough, that there is a need to make this place work by being willing to compromise your interests in a fair way. We have gone at this now for some weeks. It has been a long while since the Senate passed this bill. It is very close to a point where, I believe, we will not have the time to continue working on this, and what we will see is that this bill will, once again, fail, and we will extend, once again, the FAA reauthorization bill for a short time, and then until the next Congress. God bless everybody who dug their heels in and decided they could only live with what they could live with and would not compromise, but they have done no favor to this country. They can all chew on that for a while.

I hope that in the coming days, yes, families of the victims of Colgan will

perhaps have some ability to influence those who want to block this legislation. Perhaps those who are out of work and would get work with the airport improvement funds will influence them. Maybe those who care about continued air service to small communities would have some ability to influence them. Maybe those who care about the passengers bill of rights--at long last, maybe they will be persuasive.

One way or another, I hope that finally we will see if maybe there is a public spiritedness in this Chamber and also an interest in doing the right thing and pass the FAA reauthorization bill.

I understand my colleague from Kansas is here ready to speak. I will defer until later.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if I may, I know the Senator from Kansas spoke about this issue that we worked on in the Energy Committee over a year ago. We worked together to get what is called a renewable electricity standard, some people also call it a renewable portfolio standard--through the committee process. A renewable electricity standard is a requirement that a certain percentage of electricity delivered be from renewable sources--wind, solar, and so on. I believe that it is very important to do that. I appreciate the Senator from Kansas and his position.

There is an old saying: If you don't care where you are going, you are never going to be lost. If our country does not describe the route we want to take, if we don't say here is where we want to go as a country, then wherever we find ourselves 5 and 10 years from now, that is where we are, I guess.

I believe however, that it ought to be a circumstance where we decide what our energy future looks like. I believe that we should incentivize the development of renewable energy. How do we maximize the development of wind and solar energy? By creating a renewable electricity standard that drives the development and by building the transmission that allows us to produce it in one area and move it to a load center in another area. We did that in the bill that passed the Energy Committee just over a year ago.

I fully support the notion of the Senator from Kansas that the 15- percent renewable electricity standard we created in committee ought to advanced in any energy bill. In fact, I don't know whether we will part company on this point, but I have always indicated that I support a 20- percent renewable electricity standard. I believe our country ought to push very hard to move in the direction of maximizing the capability to produce renewable energy where the wind blows and the Sun shines, and put it on the wires and move it to the load centers. That is exactly what we ought to be doing. The Senator and I sure agree on the philosophy of this issue and the need for this provision in an energy bill.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

The fact is, I happen to support limiting or capping carbon. I will support a price on carbon. I do not support cap and trade as a mechanism, as a way of doing that, or giving Wall Street the ability to trade carbon

securities. But that is another side to this.

Because we have not been able to do climate change legislation and develop a consensus on broader climate change legislation in this country, I have always felt we should bring the Energy bill to the floor which was, in fact, bipartisan and which would, in fact, do the very things we would want done to limit carbon. Take energy from the wind--that limits carbon. You develop energy without putting carbon into the air, just as an example.

I know Senator Reid is trying very hard to do a couple of things. No. 1, he is trying to get this session moving on issues that matter. He has a lot of things on his plate. The Senator from Kansas knows--I am not being partisan when I say this--that a lot of things have been blocked, even motions to proceed. So the Senator from Nevada, Mr. Reid, has a difficult job getting legislation to the floor and getting them moving. He has indicated he wants to bring to the floor an energy bill that includes a lot of items with which the Senator from Kansas and I would agree. We need to do something about oilspill regulation and safety and try to address those issues in the right way, and we do need to address a number of the other issues the Senator from Nevada suggested. I happen to think that using natural gas for long-haul vehicles on the interstate roadways makes a lot of sense. He has proposed a number of items, including electric vehicles. The bill I introduced, along with my colleagues, Senator Alexander and Senator Merkley, that we passed through the Energy Committee last week, begins incentivizing and moving toward an electric vehicle fleet. All of those things are good. I support that, and I commend the Senator from Nevada for doing that. To the extent we can, if we can find ways to add other things that have a broad bipartisan consensus, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that is what the Senator from Kansas is saying.

In order for a renewable electricity standard to be added, it would take 60 votes because things just take 60 votes around here. I went to a small school, and I thought a majority was just a majority, but it is not these days. But if we have the 60 votes--and I think there is some evidence that may exist--then adding a renewable electricity standard will substantially improve, I believe, the potential to pass an energy bill that would matter to America.

I want to say quickly that I understand Senator Reid is trying very hard to get something done, to get it up, get it passed, and get it done. I commend him for that. I do not want to be critical at all. But I commend the Senator from Kansas as well because he and I agree: If we can add a renewable electricity standard to this legislation, we will advance our country's energy interests in a very significant way.

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

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 listened with some interest to my colleague from Arizona, the minority whip, discuss his notion about the economic issues confronting our country. I wish to respond a bit to them with great respect, of course, because I think the opportunity to have competing ideas about our country's future is a very important opportunity here on the floor of the Senate.

Some long while ago I wrote in a book that I published about Stanley Newberg. I wrote in the book that I had read about Stanley in a very small New York Times article, but it so piqued my interest that I decided to try to find out about Stanley, so I did. I found that Stanley had come to this country as a young boy to escape the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. He, with his father, sold fish, I believe, on the Lower East Side of New York City, in Manhattan. He followed his dad selling fish. He learned English. He went to school. Then he was able to do well in school and go to college. His parents had saved for him. He went to college and graduated from college and then went to work. He got a law degree and then he went to work for an aluminum company. He did so well he rose up and finally managed the aluminum company and then purchased the aluminum company. When he died, they opened his will. In his will he said he wanted to leave his $5.7 million to the United States of America for the privilege of living in this great country, and that was Stanley Newberg's will.

I thought: That is really unusual for someone to die and in their will leave their money to this country with gratitude for the privilege of living in this great country. What a remarkable thing to remind all of us that being an American is something we shouldn't take for granted Monday through Friday or all week long, for that matter.

It is the case, I think, for most of us that when we grew up, we understood this country was the biggest, the strongest, the best, destined to expand opportunity for our children, and things would always be better for the next generation than for the last. That is how we viewed this country of ours.

But it is the case, it seems to me, these days that America has lost a step. There is great concern about whether the kids will have it better than we had it. There is great concern about the economy and the fact that there are probably 18 million to 20 million people who woke up this morning either without a job, or with less of a job than they could easily handle. They are underemployed or unemployed--18 million to 20 million people. People woke up this morning and saw the news that we are deep in debt and getting deeper in debt. They are concerned about the federal debt, and they should be, there is no question about that.

Let me, for a moment--because I want to engage on the proposition by my colleague from Arizona--transport us back to 2001. In 2001, on the floor of the Senate, during that period, we had a pretty raucous debate. That debate on the Senate floor was about the first budget surplus in 30 years under the last year of President Bill Clinton--a budget surplus of a couple hundred billion dollars. Alan Greenspan was not sleeping at night because he was worried that we were going to pay down the Federal debt too rapidly and that would injure the economy. Many of my colleagues said we have a surplus now, and the economists project that we are going to have surpluses for 10 years--as far as the eye can see. You have heard the old line that if you were to lay all the economists end to end, they would never reach a conclusion. Individually, almost all of them said we have a surplus, and now we will have one as far as the eye can see. Many of my colleagues supported George W. Bush's proposal to provide tax cuts for the next 10 years. They said: Let's provide tax cuts for the next 10 years because we need to give this surplus back to the American people.

I stood on the floor of the Senate then and said I don't think we ought to give back tax funds that don't yet exist. These surpluses are only projections. What if something would happen? How about being a little conservative about this? But, no, Katy bar the door; they said we are going to provide large tax cuts, and the largest to the wealthiest Americans, such that if you made $1 million a year in income, you got an $80,000 or so a year tax cut. That was the proposal. It passed--without my support, but it passed. So that was the experience in 2001.

Fast forward to 2010. Where are we? We are $13 trillion in debt. By the way, this is testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance by Leonard Burman, who is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University:

If the Bush tax cuts had never been enacted, the debt held

by the public at the end of 2009 would have been 30 percent

lower, to about $5.2 trillion . . . This was less than the

level of debt at the end of 1999.

The question is--and this is what brought me to the Senate floor--my colleague says we have to extend the tax cuts that were provided in 2001. The President says let's extend the tax cuts for middle-income folks making $250,000 a year, or below. My colleague from Arizona, and others, say, no, let's extend all of Bush's tax cuts from 2001. Let's extend them all. The difference is about $1 trillion added to the debt over the next decade. Extending those tax cuts for roughly 2 percent of the wealthiest U.S. households will cost, with interest, about $1 trillion.

My colleague says if you don't do that, then you are increasing taxes on upper income people, and that is going to retard economic growth. Let me talk for a bit about that, because it is interesting to me that those who are on the floor saying let us not let the tax cuts expire-- by the way, these were tax cuts for upper income people, who got the largest tax cuts, and they were given because we were trying to give a surplus back. Does anybody see a surplus around here? Has anybody seen a surplus for 9 years?

Right after the Senate and the Congress passed legislation to provide significant tax cuts for wealthy Americans, we had a recession in 2001, on 9/11 we had a devastating terrorist attack, and then we went to war in Afghanistan, and then we went to war in Iraq, and we had a continuing war against terrorism. We never saw a surplus beyond that year. That deficit and debt went up, up, up, and up.

At the same time all of that was happening, this new administration that came in in 2001 not only said we are going to cut taxes largely for the wealthy, but they said we are going to hire a bunch of regulators in this town who will promise not to look. You do what you want and we won't watch. Wall Street went wild. It was an unbelievable carnival of greed. We had trillions and trillions of dollars of financial vehicles being created that had never been created before, such as naked credit default swaps, synthetic CDOs--you name it--and they were trading back and forth. As Will Rogers said, people were trading things they never got from people who never had it. Everybody was making a lot of money on Wall Street, like hogs in slop, as they say on the farm.

The fact is that the house of cards they created came tumbling down. When this President crossed the threshold of the White House in January of last year, had he taken a Rip Van Winkle nap for a year and done nothing, the budget deficit he inherited was going to be $1.3 trillion. Now we have a $13 trillion Federal budget deficit, and now we have the circumstances of a tax cut, the bulk of which went to the wealthy, that was described by the minority 9 years ago as being essential to give back the surplus that doesn't exist.

The question is, will that tax cut be extended for the wealthiest Americans?

Phrased another way, shall we add another $1 trillion in Federal debt in order to give tax cuts at $80,000 a year to someone who makes $1 million a year? At the same time our colleagues say that is essential to do, they say if you don't do that, you will have an unbelievable impact on small business, because that is who will pay these taxes. That is not true at all--just not true. About 3 percent of small business income, would be captured by that; 97 percent would not. Those are the facts.

At the same time we have people pushing for that--adding $1 trillion to the debt by giving the highest income earners in the country extended tax cuts--the same folks are coming to the floor and saying, by the way, one of our highest priorities is not only to extend the tax cuts for the highest income earners, it is to make sure we repeal permanently the estate tax. They don't call it that; they call it the ``death tax.'' Why do they do that? Because a pollster did a poll and said if you call it the ``death tax,'' you can fool the American people who will believe there is a tax on death. But of course, there is not; there is a tax on inherited wealth.

It seems to me that is an interesting set of priorities. They say we are concerned about the Federal deficit and debt--and, by the way, we want to add $1 trillion to the debt by opposing President Obama's request that we not extend the tax cuts for people making over $250,000. We want to add $1 trillion to the debt, and we also want to repeal the entire estate tax.

I don't know how one believes that set of priorities represents the best interests of our country. I am for lower taxes. I would love it if people could pay minimal taxes across this country. But I am also for a country that works, and a country that matters, and a country that invests in itself and its future. Someone once asked the question: If you were given the assignment to write an obituary and the only information you had about the deceased was their check register, what would you write? So you look at that check register and find out what did they spend money on? What was their value system? What was important to them?

The same is true with the Federal budget and the priorities we described by taxing and spending. What will historians say when looking back and seeing that we were in deep trouble, with 20 million people out of work or underemployed, a $13 trillion debt, and the minority was saying the highest priority was to cut taxes for those earning $250,000, and more, and to repeal the tax on inherited wealth? That is unbelievable.

You know, the only way, as of last year, you would pay any tax on inherited wealth is if you had more than $7 million a year. How many families have more than $7 million net per year? By the way, this year, the inheritance tax is zero, and it springs back the next year. That goofy set of circumstances was arranged by the same people who wrote the tax cut bill in 2001 to give back a surplus that turned out not to exist. So we have a zero tax year this year, and four billionaires have died so far. By the way, their estate will pay a zero rate, and my colleagues come to the floor and say that money has already been taxed. Wrong, it has not. Much of it is growth appreciation of property or tax, and it has never borne a tax. It is just the folks who go to work every day and pay their taxes on time; they pay for their kids' schools, and roads, and police, and fire protection, and the Defense Department, and the CDC--they are the ones paying the taxes.

But do you know what? If you find the people who have 10, 15, 20, and $50 million in assets--I will show you that the bulk of that has come through growth appreciation that has never borne a tax at all in this country. That is the highest priority for the minority--to eliminate the tax on inherited wealth. That is unbelievable to me.

We in this country have a very serious set of problems. We need to cut Federal spending, there is no question about that. Federal agencies are big and, in some cases, bloated. I mentioned the other day that I think I have done pretty well myself. I want to spend in this country to invest in good things that will make this a better country. I want us to continue building and improving our roads, our schools, and the things that make this a better country. But I also believe we ought to cut back where we should.

In my State, some years ago, there was a proposal to build a new courthouse, and $46 million was put into an appropriations bill, which passed, to build a new courthouse in the largest city of my State. I thought it was way overboard, so I cut it to $23 million--in half. It was built for $19 million. Some people say: That is strange, cutting funding for your own State. But I thought it was excessive spending. I don't care whether it is my State, or other States; we need to tighten our belts and cut spending. We can cut in areas where we are spending too much, no question about that.

You don't address this unbelievable burden of debt deficit and by deciding you are going to cut your revenue as well. You cannot do that. Who will pay for this country and what it needs? We have some people at the top of the income ladder in this country who are only paying a 15- percent income tax rate--the highest income earner, 2 years ago, earned $3.6 billion--that is $300 million a month--and paid a 15-percent tax rate.

Most working people don't get to pay a tax rate that low. Some of those folks are running their companies through tax haven countries, with deferred compensation deals to even avoid paying a 15-percent rate. Somebody has to pay some taxes to invest in the future of this country. We need to invest in our children and in our infrastructure. Somebody has to pay those taxes. I understand that nobody likes to pay them very much, but we have to get control of this deficit, no question about that. We have to decide as a country that you can't ask men and women to lace up their boots and put on ceramic body armor and go halfway around the world and take a gun and fight and be shot at and, by the way, we ask you to do that in the name of our country, and we will not pay for a penny of it. We will add it to the debt. We have done that for 8 years. We cannot continue to do that. Americans know better than that.

Let me finish by saying that, as I said earlier, we should not necessarily believe that everything will be all right just because we live here in America. This country deserves good judgment and tough decisions to put the country back on track. In the book McCullough wrote on John Adams, they were putting this new country together and he was traveling in Europe. The record of all of that is in his letters to Abigail. He would write back as he was traveling abroad and ask the plaintive question: Where will the leadership come from to build this new country? From where will the leadership come? Who will be the leaders as we try to put this new country together? Then, in the next letter, he would answer the question.

There is only us to provide the leadership. There is me. There is Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Madison, Mason. In the rearview mirror of history, the ``only us'' represents some pretty unbelievable human talent who risked their lives, risked their fortunes, risked all they had to do the right thing for this country.

The question for us now, with a $13 trillion debt, an anemic economy, great partisan divides that exist between the political parties, and elections coming up in November, the question is, From where will the leadership come? Who really is willing to lead this country by saying: Here is what we have to do? It is not pleasant always. But who is willing to make those judgments to say we cannot just always take for granted what America's future might be based on what it was? This country deserves better.

I am not here to say one party is all right and one party is all wrong. I heard my colleagues say: If you do this, it is bad for small businesses. That is not the case in any event. We have had a bill on the Senate floor that would provide assistance, help, and investment to small businesses. It has been on the floor 3 weeks, and the very people who say they are for small businesses have been blocking it for 3 weeks. All we need is some straight talk from time to time.

I would like everybody to pay the lowest possible tax rate. I would like our government to be the most efficient. I would like us to invest in the future of our country. I would like all

those things to happen. I would like it if we were not at war. I watched yesterday down at a place called the Newseum. Once again, I watched the video of 9/11/2001. That was not brought on by us; that was brought on by others, and we did not have a choice but to address these issues.

When we do these things, we must do them as a country that cares about our future. We cannot just spend money, send soldiers to war, do all these things and say: We don't have to pay for any of it and you all will understand. That is not leadership.

This President inherited a pretty tough situation. Now he is criticized for saying he inherited a tough situation. The history books will write what he inherited. He is trying pretty hard but does not get agreement on much of anything these days. At the very least we ought to say we agree, let's extend tax cuts for middle-class Americans. This is a pretty tough time for them. But we had some of the highest rates of growth in this country when the wealthiest Americans were paying the tax rate that previously existed. Extending tax cuts for the wealthy at a time when we are at war and we say we would like to extend to them an $80,000-a-year tax cut if they have a $1 million a year income? That is not leadership, in my judgment.

This country deserves better, this country can do better, and this Congress can do better with a little less partisanship and a little more thought and see if we can come together to represent the future of this country.

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

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

Mr. President, I forgot to put my chart up again. Every day I want to remind people what this is all about.

Will Rogers, 80 years ago, said what applies today. He said:

The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we'll get

around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK.

We will get around to the unemployed as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK. I am part of the Old West out in the northern Great Plains. They used to say about wagon trains: You don't move a wagon train ahead by leaving some wagons behind. This country is best when it works together.

Will Rogers described this in the 1930s:

The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we'll get

around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK.

Wall Street got fixed up with hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and untold trillions from the back door of the Federal Reserve Board. They got fixed up. Now they are seeing record profits again.

There are a whole lot of folks at the bottom of the economic ladder who are not fixed up and are out of work--not from their fault, nothing they did; they are just out of work because they lost their jobs during a severe economic downturn.

It seems to me that is what requires our leadership. In this Chamber, at this moment, nobody is out of work. Everybody puts on a white shirt, a suit, and comes to work. Nobody is out of work. But a whole lot of Americans are. We ought to keep our priorities on that every single day.

This country works best when we are able to put people back to work. There is no social program this Senate is involved in, no social program as important as a good job that pays well. That is what makes everything else possible.

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