Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the children's health insurance bill, H.R. 3963, occur at 3:45 p.m. today, and that if cloture is invoked it be considered invoked as if the vote had…
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the children's health insurance bill, H.R. 3963, occur at 3:45 p.m. today, and that if cloture is invoked it be considered invoked as if the vote had occurred at 6:30 p.m. today and concluded at 6:50 p.m., with the time following the conclusion of morning business prior to the vote equally divided between the two leaders or their designees.
Mr. President, I wish to yield to myself 30 minutes, and I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Kennedy be yielded 30 minutes of the majority's time.
Mr. President, I am going to talk about a couple subjects this afternoon. I am going to begin, however, talking about the issue of children's health insurance.
The Children's Health Insurance Program will be the subject of the cloture vote later this afternoon, and it is a very important issue. We have a lot of children in this country who do not have health insurance coverage. Ten years ago, we put together a piece of legislation called the Children's Health Insurance Program. It has worked. It has been very successful. Millions of children who otherwise would not have had health insurance coverage now have health insurance coverage.
The President, when he campaigned for office a couple of years ago, said he supported and wanted to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program to cover more children. The Congress, on a bipartisan basis, has now passed the Children's Health Insurance Program reauthorization that would provide additional coverage for nearly 4 million additional children in this country--3.8 million additional children, to be exact. The President vetoed it--this after he campaigned saying he supported expanding the program. In fact, not only did he veto the expansion of the program--that was done on a bipartisan basis in the Congress, and fully paid for, I might say--but he sent Congress a budget that left 21 States without enough money to continue to cover the existing kids in the program.
So this administration has it wrong. That is not just me saying it, it is a bipartisan group of Members of Congress who believe very strongly we need to do what is right to try to get health insurance to children. We should try to make sure every American has health insurance. That is very important. But it seems to me if you do not have legislation that does that, at least start with the children.
I have said before, I do not know what is in second or third or fourth place in most people's lives in terms of what is important, but I know what is in first place in the lives of most people. It is their children and their children's health. If this is not a priority, if it is not a priority at the White House--it passed the Senate with a wide margin, passed the House with a wide margin, but we did not have 67 percent of the votes in the House to override the veto--if it is not a priority at the White House, I ask what is a priority? If providing health care for an additional 3.8 million children is not a priority, what are the priorities at the White House? What is more important?
Once again, this may be unfamiliar territory to the President because this is a piece of legislation that is fully paid for, unlike much of what we get from the White House these days. I am going to talk about that in a bit. But before us here in Congress, the President has two requests. In addition to his regular budget, the President has said to us: I want another $196 billion for the purposes of continuing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he said: I want the $196 billion declared an emergency. I do not propose we pay for it. I propose we put it all on top of the debt. That will take us to almost two-thirds of a trillion dollars the President has asked for--none of it paid for, all of it requested by the President as an emergency.
Contrast that, by the way, a $196 billion emergency request--none of it paid for--with a bipartisan group in the Congress that says: We believe the priority is our children. We propose to cover 3.8 million additional kids with health insurance coverage, and we fully pay for it. That is a very significant departure from what we hear at the White House these days.
Now the President gases up Air Force One, flies all over the country, and flew
down to Arkansas not many days ago and said: I am the fiscal policy President. I am going to get tough. I am vetoing bills. Interestingly, he did not veto a bill in the 6 years his party controlled both branches of Congress. He did not veto bills in the 6 years in which, in nearly every case, the appropriations coming out of the Congress exceeded his request or at least were dramatically changed from his request.
It is now, only in the shadows, the evening hours of his Presidency he decides he wants to be a fiscal policy President, tough on fiscal policy. The problem is, it is not so much what you say that matters, it is what you do that matters, and he has before us one more demonstration of the reckless fiscal policy we have seen now for some years, turning a very significant budget surplus, when he took office-- and, yes, we had a budget surplus of about $240 billion in that year-- turning that into a stream of fiscal policy budget deficits, adding $3 trillion to the Federal debt, and asking us, once again: Please give me another $196 billion above all the regular appropriations.
By the way, even as he asks for the additional $196 billion, he says we cannot afford providing insurance coverage for 3.8 million kids whom we fully pay for in a bipartisan bill.
I am telling you, I think the President is wrong. I admire the fact this is a bipartisan bill. We did it the right way. The President will have a second opportunity to have a bill on his desk. My hope is he will understand the good faith and goodwill of bipartisan Members of Congress who have the right priorities, saying our children come first and children's health insurance is very important.
Indian Health Care Improvement Act
Mr. President, that leads me to talk about a health insurance issue that includes the Children's Health Insurance Program but is much more than that. It is a bill that is going to come to the floor of the Senate soon, and thanks to the commitment by Senator Reid, the majority leader, it is the reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.
It has been 8 years since Congress should have reauthorized the Indian Health Care Improvement Act--8 years--long past due, long past the time for us to have done this. The fact is, in this country we have 2 million of the first Americans--they were here greeting the folks who came to this country--American Indians, and many of them live in Third World conditions, and many of them experience health care rationing, which I think is a scandal.
It is not written much about these days, unfortunately. But there is a full-blown scandal, in my judgment, with respect to health care that is not available to American Indians--health care that was promised, health care that was committed, and health care that is our trust responsibility as a government to American Indians. We made that commitment, and we are not keeping it.
Indian children will benefit from children's health insurance as well. But also, Indian children live--and in some cases die--with the results of the Indian health care system.
This young lady shown in this picture is a 5-year-old beautiful young girl--sparkling eyes, with a beautiful dress, dancing in the traditional Indian dress--5 years old. Her grandmother, who testified at the Crow Indian Reservation, at a hearing I headed with Senator Tester, held this picture up. Her name is Ta'shon Rain Littlelight--5 years old.
Ta'shon died. Her grandmother brought her photograph to the hearing and held it high. She talked about her granddaughter. She said Ta'shon lived the last 3 months of her life in unmedicated pain, and died of terminal cancer. She was taken and taken and taken again to the Indian Health Service, was diagnosed with depression, and treated for depression. Ultimately, it was discovered she had terminal cancer--not depression, terminal cancer.
She was flown to Billings, MT, and then to Denver, CO, and this young 5-year-old is gone. Her grandmother asks the question: Would better health care have saved her? Should she have been diagnosed in a different manner? I don't know the answer to that. I do know this: There are too many children like Ta'shon Rain Littlelight who do not have the same health care as others have, and Ta'shon lost her life.
It is not just this beautiful little girl. This is the photograph of a young girl whose photograph I have shown my colleagues before. Her name is Avis Littlewind. Avis Littlewind is also dead--14 years old. She took her own life. Her sister took her own life. Her father died at his own hand. She was in a fetal position in bed in her bedroom for 90 days at age 14, and somehow no one quite figured out this young lady desperately needed mental health treatment. So she took her life.
I went to that Indian reservation. I talked to the school officials. I talked to Avis Littlewind's classmates. I talked to the tribal officials to try to understand: How does a 14-year-old child fall through the cracks?
Well, there was not mental health treatment available in any significant way for this young child. The people who would get her health care would have to beg and borrow a car to drive her someplace. But she is gone. This young girl apparently felt hopeless and helpless and took her own life.
The question I ask with respect to the mental health treatment she should have gotten--with respect to so many other kinds of health care that should be available to American Indians--the question I ask is: When? When will they get the health treatment they deserve?
This is a picture of a woman from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. I have described her situation to my colleagues previously as well. Suspected of having a heart attack, she was put in an ambulance and driven to a hospital--the nearest hospital off the Indian reservation. Arriving at the hospital, as they were carrying her into the hospital, transferring her to a hospital gurney, they discovered at the hospital something taped to her thigh with an ordinary piece of tape.
Here, as shown on this chart, is what was taped to this woman's thigh, as she was taken into the hospital off of a gurney, suspected of having a heart attack. What they found taped to her thigh was a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services, and it described that this woman was not going to be eligible for contract health funding because they were out of money: So if you admit this woman to your hospital, understand, you are on your own. Financially, you are on your own. We are warning you.
That is what the letter taped to this woman's thigh said. That is health care today in modern America on Indian reservations.
Now let me describe why there is an urgency to pass Indian health care legislation, to reauthorize the Act that should have been reauthorized 8 years ago.
We spend twice as much money per person on health care for Federal prisoners incarcerated in our Federal prisons as we do for American Indians, and we have a responsibility, a trust responsibility, for health care for American Indians. This is not being generous. This is meeting a promise America made to Indians. This country made the promise over and over again that we would provide for their health care. But we have not met that promise.
If you take a look at what we spend per capita for American Indians, what you will discover is, we spend half as much per person for American Indians as we do for Federal prisoners. We have a responsibility for health care for those we incarcerate. I understand. If you stick someone in a Federal prison, you have to take care of them, provide for their health care.
Why do we spend twice as much for a Federal prisoner's health care as we did for Ta'shon Rain Littlelight's or Avis Littlewind's or, in per capita expenditures, we do for American Indians? We spend $6,700 a year, per capita, on Medicare expenditures, veterans, $4,600; Medicaid, $4,300; Federal prisoners, $3,200; Indian health program; $2,100 per capita. We have to do better than that. We have significant responsibilities, significant problems, and regrettably, full-scale health care rationing on many of America's Indian reservations, and I think it is a scandal and an outrage and we have to fix it.
Senator Murkowski and I, as chairman and ranking member of the Indian Affairs Committee, have written in our committee a piece of legislation called the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. We are ready to bring that to the
floor of the Senate at last, at long last. Lives will be saved if we can pass this piece of legislation. Senator Reid has given us a commitment that we will have this piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate, and when we do, I think it will be a day of some celebration for American Indians who have been promised health care and, regrettably, have not received the benefit of the promises that were made. I am not suggesting there aren't some talented men and women who work in the Indian health care system and who work in public health. I am not suggesting there aren't some very talented people out there. But I can tell horror stories that are almost unbelievable.
A woman goes to the doctor on an Indian reservation, and she has a knee that is unbelievably painful--bone on bone. It is the kind of knee that if it belonged to a Member of the Senate or one of the Senator's families, they would go and get a knee replacement. Bone on bone, unbelievably painful.
This woman is told: Wrap your knee in cabbage leaves for 4 days, and it will be fine. Well, that is not fine, and that is not medicine. That isn't what we should expect in terms of meeting our responsibilities in this country to the first Americans.
Again, I asked the grandmother of Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight if I could use her image, and I do so respectfully and I do so understanding the delicacy of it. But when the grandmother came to the hearing and held up the picture of this beautiful young girl with the sparkling eyes, and said: My granddaughter died, and here is how she died. In 3 months of unmedicated pain after her terminal cancer had not been diagnosed for months and months and months.
I think it is important for us to ask the question: Does this matter? Do we care? I hope the answer is yes, it does matter and, yes, this Congress does care and, yes, this Congress is going to meet its responsibility. I hope in the coming weeks that certainly will be the case, starting here in the Senate.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and 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, how much time remains?
Mr. President, I wanted to speak about the subject I referenced briefly, and that is fiscal policy and this President. It gives me no joy to come and be critical of the President's fiscal policy. But it should give the American people no joy either to understand the consequences of a fiscal policy that turned very large budget surpluses, which took us a long time to begin to see, into very long-term Federal budget deficits and three trillion dollars of additional debt. That is a reckless fiscal policy and one that has to be fixed.
When he recently asked the Congress for an additional $196 billion-- none of it paid for, all emergency--the President said: Now we will see whether the Congress supports the troops. Well, the fact is, not all that money goes to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. A substantial portion of that money goes to contractors.
I wanted to go through with my colleagues some examples of what we are finding with respect to the spending of taxpayers' money for contractors. I believe I have held 17 hearings over the recent 4 years as chairman of the Policy Committee on these issues.
Let me put up a couple of charts to describe where we are headed.
This is a Congressional Budget Office estimate of October of this year. The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when you count the very large interest costs because this is being financed with borrowed money. Again, a President who says he is a conservative borrowing all of this money, insisting it be borrowed and not paid for, and we end up in this country paying a fortune for the war costs.
So the question is, is this money for the troops? Well, let me describe what we have. Last month, military officials said contracts worth $6 billion to provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan--including food, water, and shelter--were under review by criminal investigators. In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for soldiers and material for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities.
Think of that: $88 billion; $6 billion under criminal investigation; $88 billion, financial irregularities by these contractors.
Once again, under this President, last month the Army reported that it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments, and had uncovered over $15 million in bribes.
Another $196 billion, while those who prance around this money have a field day. It doesn't seem like conservatism to me.
Again, in August, 2 months ago, the New York Times reported:
The enormous expenditures of American and Iraqi money on
the Iraq reconstruction program, at least $40 billion over
all, have been criticized for reasons that go well beyond the
corruption cases that have been uncovered so far. Weak
oversight, poor planning, and endless security problems have
contributed to many of the program failures.
So we ante up money from the United States Congress--billions and billions of dollars. We are going to provide health care clinics for the Iraqis. We are going to build 142 health care clinics. We hire the contractor. The money is gone, but the clinics aren't there. An Iraqi doctor--a very courageous Iraqi doctor--testified at one of my hearings. He said: I went to the Health Minister in Iraq and said: You know, we had these contracts with an American contracting company that was going to do these 142 health care clinics in Iraq. I would like to visit them. The Iraqi Health Minister said to this physician: You don't understand. Most of those are imaginary clinics.
Well, the American taxpayer got fleeced. The money is gone. The contractor got the money. The clinics don't exist.
We can't even keep track of the guns that are being sent to Iraq. We sent Iraq 185,000 AK-47s, and at this point we know where 75,000 of them are; 110,000 are gone and unaccounted for. We sent them 170,000 pistols, 90,000 of them we can't account for. Are some of these AK-47s and pistols being aimed at American troops? Of course they are. How is it that we fund with American taxpayers' money the shipment of massive quantities of weapons to Iraq and don't keep track of where they are? Again, there are 110,000 AK-47s, we don't know where they are, and 80,000 pistols, we don't know where they are. This is almost staggering incompetence, in my judgment.
Saddam Hussein is dead. He was hanged by the neck. The Iraqi people no longer have Saddam Hussein in their lives. The Iraqi people voted for their own new constitution, and they voted for a new government. All that is left for the Iraqi people is to provide for their own security. The question is, when will the Iraqi people demonstrate the will to provide for their own security?
We have trained 360,000 Iraqis in the interior forces and defense forces, soldiers and police men and women--360,000 have been trained, and they can't provide for their own defense, for their own security. Is there not a will in this country in which Saddam Hussein is gone, a new constitution, a new government exists, and they have 360,000 people trained, and that training was paid for by this country--is there not a will, then, to provide for security? If they can't, we can't. We are not going to provide security in Iraq for the next 5 or 10 years. We should not be going door to door in Baghdad in the middle of a civil war with U.S. soldiers.
But it seems to me we should reasonably ask the question: If we have trained 360,000 for security in Iraq, and they can't provide for their own security, where are they? We are now told that up to 50 percent of those we have trained are probably not on the job anymore. We don't know where they are.
I also just saw information a couple of days ago that the number of people
we are training has dropped by two-thirds. I mean, everyone talks about--including the President--the way out of Iraq is to train the Iraqis for their own security. We have trained a third of a million of them and now we have reduced the amount of training by two-thirds and now we have a surge of American soldiers going door to door in Baghdad in the middle of a civil war. I am just saying I don't think that adds up in the context of what this administration is asking of this Congress.
Between April 2003 and June of 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency, much of it in one-hundred-dollar bills, was dispersed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. That is us. We airlifted billions of dollars in C-130s. Some of it was shoveled out the back of pickup trucks in Baghdad. You think that doesn't attract flies and people who want to cheat and steal? It does. What happened? About $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed, it is said.
ADM David Oliver, who was a senior official of the Coalition Provisional Authority was asked by a reporter about what happened to the cash that was airlifted to Baghdad. Our official said:
I have no idea. I can't tell you whether the money went to
the right things or didn't. Nor do I actually think it's
important.
Oh, really? You don't think it is important whether billions of dollars was used for the proper purpose?
An independent oversight agency reported this month that it could not complete an audit of a $1.2 billion contract to train Iraqi police because records kept by the State Department and by DynCorps International, the contractor, were inaccurate and in disarray, documents not sufficient to do any kind of an audit.
The State Department paid $43.8 million for manufacturing and temporary storage of a residential camp that has never been used. They paid $36.4 million for weapons and equipment, including body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment that couldn't be accounted for.
Among the problems identified before an audit--this is a New York Times story of this month--were duplicate payments, the purchase of a never-used $1.8 million x-ray scanner, and payments of $387,000 to house DynCorps officials in hotels rather than other available accommodations.
My colleagues get my point. I could show 100 charts which would all show in my judgment massive, staggering incompetence and lack of oversight of these contracts.
The President says: I want $196 billion in emergency funding, none of it paid for, and by the way, if you don't support that, you are not supporting the troops. Well, a substantial amount of this money is supporting contractors, not troops, and there is substantial evidence that there is dramatic waste, fraud, and abuse of these contracts, and no one seems to care. No one seems to be watching the store. That goes for the Defense Department, the Secretary of State, and many others, including the White House.
Finally, when we vote on the issue of whether we should provide additional emergency funding for the President, and yes, for the troops, and also for these contractors, I am going to suggest something very different. Some things are habit forming, and one of them, it seems to me, is to ask the Congress to increase spending substantially and not pay for it. This President has done this now to the tune of two-thirds of $1 trillion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Aside from the fact that I think it is wrong because it doesn't have the country going to war with the soldiers--it seems to me if you send soldiers to war, you also ought to ask the country to be with those soldiers, not just with their thoughts and prayers but also to pay for the cost, rather than charge it to some future generation and have the soldiers fight the battle, and then come back to our country and pay the bills for those battles.
So I have said to my colleagues, and I would say to the President, when we consider this issue of additional funding, I am going to offer this time some ways to pay for a portion of it, and I am going to give some examples. I have used many of these before, but this time, we will have a chance to vote on them. Maybe I will win, maybe I will lose, I don't know. But it seems to me we ought to do some things that are thoughtful and patriotic, even as we decide that we are going to provide support to our troops.
Let me give an example.
Let me give you an example. I have used this many times. This is a five-story white building in the Cayman Islands. A very enterprising reporter from Bloomberg named David Evans went to that building. It is on Church Street. That five-story white building is home to 12,748 corporations. They are not actually there, of course; it is legal fiction that was created by smart lawyers to give corporations an address in the Cayman Islands so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. I have legislation that says it doesn't matter if you are living in this building, you are not going to be able to avoid taxes by doing that; if your operations are not there, you cannot attempt to ``move'' your operations there to avoid paying U.S. taxes. I will attempt to close that.
This is one of the most egregious. Wachovia Bank in the United States is one of the most prominent companies to do this. They purchased a sewage system in Bochum, Germany. It is not because they have a special interest in sewage systems. They don't want a sewage system. They bought it and immediately leased it back to the German city, which never lost it, and the Wachovia Bank never got it. They just had a financial transaction that gave an American bank a $175 million tax writeoff for the sham of buying a sewer system in Germany.
Mr. President, only a portion of this practice has been shut down. I will give my colleagues a chance to shut that down and also raise revenue to begin to pay for some of the costs of the war as well.
This one is a streetcar in Dortmund, Germany. We had First Union Bank lease streetcars there--not for the purpose of running a streetcar system; they wanted to avoid paying U.S. taxes. That is a scandal.
I will also offer a piece of legislation that will shut down the tax scam that says if you fire your workers, close your plant, and move your jobs overseas, as Huffy Bicycles did, we will give you a tax cut. It is unbelievable that we provide that tax cut in this country. If you get rid of your American workers, shut down your plant, move overseas, and then ship the product back here, you get a tax deferral. Huffy is now a Chinese bike company. All the workers in Ohio got fired, and the American tax system gave a reward to this company for moving to China.
We have had a chance--four times--to vote on this, and a majority in the Senate supported that tax break. One of these days, it will get closed. We will vote on that in the context of paying for some of the costs the President is asking us to pay for.
Finally, just two more.
This is, as you know, a picture of the dancing grapes from Fruit of the Loom. We have seen the television commercials. I don't know why someone would dress up as a grape and dance, but they made an imprint for Fruit of the Loom underwear before they left America. I assume they are still dancing, but I assume those who lost their jobs when Fruit of the Loom went to Mexico and other countries are not dancing. It is not that people stopped wearing underwear, but they are not making them in the United States.
Finally, the little red wagon--Radio Flyer, a Chicago company for over a century--is now made in China. It was for the same purpose: tax cuts and low wages in China. I am going to close that loophole with respect to the description I have just given of moving your company to China and getting a tax cut.
The point is, the President wants $196 billion in emergency funding. I don't know whether the Congress will do that. When the President asks for funding in the future, saying he wants to charge this, leave office, and then somebody else can pay the bill, we in Congress ought to say that there are easy baby steps to at least begin raising some funding. I have named three of them. We can stop American companies from benefitting from buying sewage systems or streetcars in other countries, stop paying an incentive for people to move American jobs overseas, and stop allowing companies to set up sham offices on Church Street in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
It doesn't take a giant step or a lot of courage to decide to shut down those tax scams and those wrongheaded, perverse economic incentives. Doing that will raise money and allow us to offset some of these war costs. And I hope that perhaps--I know better than to say this. I was going to say that perhaps the President will support this. But this administration opposes most of the proposals I have described that would raise funding by shutting down some of these terrible loopholes.
This issue of if the President asks the Congress for $196 billion-- which he has now done in emergency money, with none of it paid for, and says: Now we will see whether the Congress supports the troops, I want my colleagues to understand that a substantial portion of this money is not going to troops, but it is going to contractors. I think this is the most substantial waste, fraud, and abuse that has existed in the history of this country, with respect to what is going on with the contractors. That is something we should be considering or a portion of what we should consider as well as we react to the President's proposal. Who is minding the store? Who is providing real oversight? Why have we allowed this to happen? Those represent the hard questions I believe Congress has a responsibility to ask.
We all want the right thing for this country. I think we all want to be able to extract ourselves from a war in the Middle East, to be successful in the fight against terrorism, to expand opportunities with an economy that provides jobs and expand the middle class in this country. We all want to fix the health care system and provide solutions to our energy needs so that we are not so unbelievably dependent on foreign sources of energy. We all want that. I hope in the coming weeks, particularly as we end this year, we can find ways to decide to work together. There ought to be common purpose and a common set of goals for us to advance the interests of this country.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent that the time be equally charged to both sides.