Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I listen sometimes on the floor of the Senate and think there should be an Olympic Gold Medal for flexibility. It is interesting. For example, the flexibility would mean you are flexible enough to understand if a Republican President were to send down a nominee for the Supreme Court, and that person had never served as a judge previously, that would be a big advantage, and you would argue that would be something that is very salutary, that this person does not have judicial experience. Such was the case of Chief Justice Rehnquist, who did not have such experience. But because they were nominated by a Republican, it was a big advantage not to have judicial experience. Now a Democrat sends a nominee down and all of a sudden not having judicial experience is a liability. That is some flexibility, as far as I am concerned.

I met with the nominee, Ms. Kagan, and she is a great nominee. I am sure she is going to be confirmed easily in the Senate. I cannot believe the Judiciary Committee will have any opportunity to find very much wrong with this very credible, very high-qualified, well-qualified nominee. I did not come here to say that. But listening, again, as I do, I keep hearing the sound of sawing on the floor of the Senate, sawing away in a partisan manner. I simply wanted to observe that much of this has very little to do with substance and has everything to do with partisan politics that we hear on the floor of the Senate.

Madam President, today I rise on the floor of the Senate recognizing that we have white roses and a black drape adorning the desk of the late Senator Robert C. Byrd.

I had told him personally in the past that when my service is done I will have considered it a great privilege to have served in this body at the time when Robert Byrd served in this body. He was a lot of things. He was smart and tough and honest. Because he legislated and because of his career here, this is a better country, I am convinced of that.

All of us know Senator Byrd grew old here and became someone with health problems in recent years and yet even last week would come to this Chamber and cast his vote. In recent weeks I had several visits with him on the floor of the Senate.

All of us know as well that he loved his country. He, most of all, loved the Senate. He wrote a two-volume book of history on this body, and I say to anybody listening, if they enjoy history and enjoy knowing anything about the wonderful history of this body, read what Senator Byrd has written. It is extraordinary.

He loved the Constitution of the United States, and he never appeared on the floor of the Senate without having a copy of that Constitution in his suit pocket. He always had a copy of the Constitution with him.

He was also someone who did not just love the history of the Senate but loved Roman history. I recall sitting on the floor of the Senate many years ago when I first came to the Senate, listening to Senator Byrd talk about Roman history and the lessons in it for us. I recall him 1 day describing Hannibal crossing the Alps, with a conclusion of Hannibal, who had lost an eye--a one-eyed Carthaginian--on the plains, riding the last emaciated elephant before he was cornered, and taking a pill from a secret container in a ring and, rather than being captured, took his life.

I learned a lot listening to Senator Byrd on the floor of the Senate about a lot of things, including Roman history.

I also learned that he had one of the extraordinary memories you have ever known. And I thought today--because we are saddened but also mourning the loss of a friend and someone who served this country so well--I would read something he read on the floor of the Senate a couple of times, but he read the preamble to it and then recited it from memory, this great story. He did it because he was talking about a crime that occurred with respect to a dog, an animal. He talked a lot about his dog Billy, that he loved very much, and then he told us the story about a man named Vest, George G. Vest, who was to become a Senator later.

I will read what Senator Byrd said. He said:

At the turn of the century, George G. Vest delivered a

deeply touching summation before the jury in the trial

involving the killing of a dog, Old Drum. This occurred, I

think, in 1869. There were two brothers-in-law, both of whom

had fought in the Union Army. They lived in Johnson County,

MO. One was named Leonidas Hornsby. The other was named

Charles Burden.

Burden owned a dog, and he was named ``Old Drum.'' He was a

great hunting dog. Any time that dog barked one could know

for sure that it was on the scent of a raccoon or other

animal.

Leonidas Hornsby was a farmer who raised livestock and some

of his calves and lambs were being killed by animals. He,

therefore, swore to shoot any animal, any dog that appeared

on his property.

One day there appeared on his property a hound. Someone

said: ``There's a dog out there in the yard.'' Hornsby said:

``Shoot him.''

The dog was killed. Charles Burden, the owner of the dog,

was not the kind of man to take something like this lightly.

He went to court.

This was Old Drum that was killed.

He won his case and was awarded $25. Hornsby appealed, and,

if I recall, on the appeal there was a reversal, whereupon

the owner of the dog decided to employ the best lawyer that

he could find in the area.

He employed a lawyer by the name of George Graham Vest.

This lawyer gave a summation to the jury.

Senator Byrd recited the summation to the jury, and he did it without a note. It so reminded me of all the things I heard on the floor from Senator Byrd--yes, ``The Ambulance Down in the Valley,'' a piece of lengthy prose without a note, and this without a note. He recited the summation to the jury by George Vest:

Gentlemen of the jury. The best friend a man has in the

world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or

daughter whom he has reared with loving care may prove

ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those

whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may

become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has he

may lose. It flies away from him perhaps when he needs it

most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of

ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on

their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the

first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its

cloud upon our heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend

that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never

deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or

treacherous, is the dog.

Gentlemen of the jury, a man's dog stands by him in

prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will

sleep on the cold ground when the wintry winds blow and the

snow drives fiercely, if only he can be near his master's

side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he

will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with

the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper

master as if he were a prince.

When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take

wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in

his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens. If

fortune drives the master forth an outcast into the world,

friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher

privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against

danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene

of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and

his body is laid in the cold ground, no matter if all other

friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the

noble dog be found, his head between his paws and his eyes

sad but open, in alert watchfulness, faithful and true, even

unto death.

Well, I read this summation to the jury in the case of Old Drum. But Senator Byrd recited it, as he did all of these similar circumstances, completely from memory.

Senator Byrd came to the floor, and he had a way with words that does not so much exist in the Senate anymore. I was sitting on the floor one day when another Senator came to the floor and said some very disparaging things about a President of the United States. They referred to the President in a way that was very disparaging. Senator Byrd did not like that, no matter who the President was. He came to the floor, and I am sure the person who was disparaging the President at that point never understood what had happened to him after Senator Byrd was done.

But Senator Byrd came to the floor, and he stood up, and he said this: I have served here long enough to see pygmyies strut like Colossus. And he said, very like the fly in Aesop's fable, sitting on an axle of a chariot, ``My, what dust I do raise.''

And it occurred to me he had just told someone what they had done was unbelievably foolish. I am not sure they understood it. But he wrapped it in such elegant language, as he always did.

In addition to serving at a time early on in his career when things were different, when there was perhaps less anger and less partisanship and committee chairmen and ranking members got together and decided what we needed to do for the country and did it together and came to the floor together, he was also, on the floor of the Senate, someone who knew the rules. He studied the rules because he understood that knowing the rules to this Chamber and how this process works was also important to be successful here.

Aside from that, he was a skillful legislator--very skillful. I watched him walk out of this Chamber from that door and very often stop as a bunch of Senate pages--high school kids who serve in the Senate-- would gather around and then he would spend 15, 20 minutes telling them a story about the Senate, about the history of this great place. Too many of us walk back and forth around here, walking very briskly because we are late to go here or there and we are working on a lot of things. Senator Byrd always took time to talk to the pages--not just talk to them but tell them stories about what this great Senate has meant to this great country.

He also loved very much his late wife Erma and talked about her a lot to many of us.

He loved to play the fiddle. Early on when I came to the Senate, if you expressed even the least interest in music, he would get you down to his office and put a tape in his recording device to show us that he played the fiddle on the program ``Hee Haw.'' He was so proud of that. He was someone who loved West Virginia, loved his country, and was a friend to all of us.

Today is a very sad day for those of us who see a desk that was occupied by a great U.S. Senator for so many decades, now occupied with a dozen roses and a black cloth, signifying that we have lost this great man. America has lost a great public servant. As one Member of the Senate, I say it has been a great privilege--my great privilege--to serve while Senator Byrd served in this body.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, on occasion there are some things that happen in this Chamber that get precious little attention but represent very good news. Last evening, with virtually no attention, a piece of legislation was passed by the Senate unanimously, a piece of legislation, called the Tribal Law and Order Act, affecting Indian tribes across this country. It was bipartisan. My colleagues and I, as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, working with Republicans and Democrats, Senator Barrasso, and Senator Jon Kyl especially was helpful in recent days, and on our side, Senator Tester and Senator Udall and so many others--have gotten a piece of legislation through the Senate, which we hope will get through the House and be signed by the President, dealing with law and order on Indian reservations.

Lewis and Clark spent the winter in North Dakota on their expedition in 1805. When they came through North Dakota, there were Indian villages and settlements in North Dakota that had been there a long time. They were farming on the banks of the Missouri River. That is true all across the country. When new people exploring our country came upon Indian tribes, they had been there for a long while. They were the first Americans, and we displaced them, and we have sad chapters in American history that are described as ``Trail of Tears,'' the ``Massacre at Wounded Knee,'' and I could go on for a great length of time.

Native Americans were, in many cases, rounded up, placed on reservations, and then the Federal Government, for taking their property away from them, said: We will sign agreements with you. We will make deals with you. We will have treaties. We will accept a trust responsibility. We will educate you. We promised that since we have taken your land away, we will provide for your children's education, we will provide for your health care, and we will provide for your law enforcement.

It is what the Federal Government signed to do in treaties and the Government has systematically avoided the responsibility of meeting those conditions ever since.

I have talked at length on this floor about Indian health care and Indian education and Indian housing. In many areas on Indian reservations, it mirrors what we consider Third World-country conditions: people living in overcrowded housing, if they have housing at all; sending kids to schools whose desks are 1 inch apart, with 30 kids to a classroom, in a dilapidated building; people going hungry; people having very serious health care problems and not able to get adequate health.

We passed in this Chamber the Indian Health Care Improvement Act as a part of the health care reform bill. I am enormously proud of having done that. It is the first time in 17 years this Congress did something on the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. We worked and worked and worked. I am proud it is done.

This is another significant piece of work. We have had I believe 14 hearings on this subject in the Indian Affairs Committee. Twenty-two Senate colleagues cosponsored my legislation, Republicans and Democrats.

If anyone doubts the need for this legislation, let me demonstrate just in this week with three headlines, one in Indian Country Today. ``Rape on the Rez'' is the title.

The mother tries to be strong, looking at the photos of her

dead daughter's beaten and bruised face. She tries not to

cry, but eventually the images prove too much. ``That's what

they did to her,'' the mother says.

Marquita Marie Walking Eagle died November 1, 2009, the

victim of a violent sexual assault. The 19-year-old Rosebud

Sioux woman's alleged killer: a 17-year-old classmate from

St. Francis High School in South Dakota.

Just one headline, but, we also have studies. One in 3 American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped and sexually assaulted in her lifetime--1 in 3; not 1 in 10, 1 in 3. Think of that. Think of the violence on too many of these Indian reservations.

Another headline from this week: ``Addicted On The Rez,'' about drug abuse and crimes that are infiltrating the reservation. Another headline this week: ``Indian reservations on both U.S. borders are becoming drug pipelines,'' conduits for Mexican drug cartels and others to move drugs into this country and particularly addict young Indian children on those drugs and have them become carriers. Those are three articles from this week sitting on top of a mountaintop of other articles.

In my home state of North Dakota right now, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that actually is on the border of North and South Dakota--it is an area the size of the State of Connecticut. They had nine law enforcement officers for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week coverage. Well, that means

that very often there would be no more than one law enforcement officer patrolling an area the size of the State of Connecticut. So a women being raped, sexually assaulted, a burglary or a robbery in progress, a violent crime, a gun crime, and a plea and a call, a frantic call, might mean that 3 or 4 hours later--maybe not until the next day would someone in a police car show up to investigate that crime. That is what they have been facing.

On the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the year before last, the rate of violent crime wasn't double what most Americans experience; it wasn't triple; it wasn't quadruple; it was eight times the national average--eight times the rate of violent crime on the Standing Rock Reservation. There has been some improvement. In 2009 it was simply five times worse than what most Americans experience.

The question is, What can we do about those things? One Bureau of Indian Affairs officer on the Standing Rock Reservation--again, as I indicated, an area the size of the State of Connecticut, with nine law enforcement officers--what he said was: ``I felt like I was standing in the middle of a river trying to hold back a flood.'' He said they were forced to ``triage'' rape cases. He said: We only took a rape case if there was a confession; if not, didn't happen. This is not a Third World country. This is in America on Indian reservations.

Last summer, the Department of Justice issued a report to our committee. I am quoting now:

Native gangs are now involved in more violent offenses like

sexual assault, gang rapes, home invasions, drive-by

shootings, beatings, and elder abuse on Indian reservations.

This is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a photograph that was brought to a hearing I held on increased gang activity on reservations. This is another photo from the same hearing. These are very serious problems.

We have a war on terror and a war on drugs, and all too often across this country, Indian reservations are left to their own, told ``you do it,'' despite the fact that this country promised to provide law enforcement assistance. This entire system isn't working. It is the courts, the jails, law enforcement--it doesn't work.

That is why, with 22 colleagues, we introduced this legislation and now last night, thankfully, have passed it through the Senate. This does a number of very important things. It forces the BIA to consult with tribal leaders on joint law enforcement.

It says to the U.S. attorneys--by the way, U.S. attorneys are the ones who are relied upon to prosecute felonies on Indian reservations, and all too often it is part of the back room of the U.S. Attorney's Office: You know what, we don't have time; we are not going to do it. The declination rate--that means declining to prosecute--the declination rate for murders is 50 percent, according to Department of Justice information we received in the committee. The declination rate, that is, declining to prosecute, for rape and sexual assault is 70 percent. So 70 percent of the time, they don't prosecute because they are working on something else. It is on an Indian reservation. Hard to investigate, they say. Well, this legislation will change that.

This legislation will add the necessary tools to enable tribal governments to better fight crime locally. It will give police improved access to national criminal databases. Judges on reservations will have added authority to sentence violent offenders in tribal courts. Can you imagine that judges in tribal courts, under current law, can sentence to no more than 1 year for an Indian offender? No more than 1 year. Rape, murder, armed robbery--1 year. That is absurd.

The fact is, we have put together a bill that finally offers the tools to strengthen this justice system, that also works to cross- deputize Indian police in the Federal criminal system so that Indian reservations and those who patrol on the reservations can work hand-in- hand with those in the adjacent counties, the county sheriffs, police chiefs, and others.

This bill will reauthorize and improve existing programs designed to strengthen the tribal justice systems, prevent alcohol and substance abuse, which is the No. 1 cause of violence on reservations, and improve opportunities for youth on the reservations.

I am very pleased and proud that we have been able to get this done. We have worked long and hard. If this Congress completes its work having done the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and now the Tribal Law and Order Act, if in one Congress we will have made that kind of stride to address the issue of health care and crime and justice on Indian reservations, we will have done something very significant.

I ask people who think, well, this is just something that is out of sight, out of mind: Go to an Indian reservation and take a look at the condition of the housing. Go visit with the kids in school. I have done that. Go sit around, if you can, with 10 or 12 kids and ask them about their lives. Where do they get hope and inspiration and belief that they can be part of something bigger than themselves, that they can get educated, that they have an opportunity to do whatever they want to do? Where do they get that? The fact is, we have created circumstances, abysmal circumstances and broken promises, and it has lasted for a couple of centuries.

You know, we have been trying now for almost 6 months to get the Cobell settlement through the Senate. The Cobell settlement is a group of plaintiffs who are Indians whose property and land and resources from that land have largely been stolen from them for a couple of hundred years. The Interior Department has been managing the trust of these Indians for well over 100, 150 years.

The other day on the floor of the Senate, I showed a picture of a woman who had six oil wells on her land, and she lived in a little bungalow and never had anything all of her life. Well, why didn't someone who had six oil wells on her land have anything? Because the U.S. Department of the Interior was managing it, and she never got the money. That has been going on for 150 years. And now there is a court action that has gone on for 14 years and finally an agreement to settle the court action, and the judge gave us 30 days in Congress to settle this after it had been agreed to by the Interior Secretary, by the plaintiffs. Finally some justice after 100, 150 years, and the judge has had to extend that deadline now three or four times and we have still not gotten it done. It is in this underlying bill, the one that is being objected to by the minority.

The reason I mentioned that is there are so many injustices in this country to the people who were here first. The first Americans deserve better. The first Americans deserve to have this government keep its promise at long, long last. And this is but one: the providing of law enforcement. How many Americans would like to live in an area where the rate of violent crime is 5 times, 8 times, or 10 times the national average? Well, there are a whole lot of young men and women, young boys and girls, and elders living exactly in those circumstances in this country. And that violence exists every day.

We need to do something about it.

One final point. I have talked to the BIA at great length. There are some things happening right now experimentally to try to move some additional resources into tribal lands to promote greater law and order. It is true on the Standing Rock Reservation and others as well. But the Tribal Law and Order Act, which I have reason to believe will now be passed by the House as well, is a big step forward. We not only negotiated that in the Senate, but we worked very hard with Members of the House as we put this legislation together with their ideas as well. If we do this, we will be able to say this country, at long last, on this issue at least, kept its promise and began the long effort to make sure we are meeting our trust responsibilities to those who were the first Americans.

I thank many of my colleagues who helped us achieve this goal, and end as I began, by saying there is plenty of reason to be concerned about the lack of getting things done in this Chamber, but this is a good piece of legislation. Good news doesn't sell quite as well as bad news these days in our system. I hope all of us will be able to take some satisfaction in doing something that represents the public good for people living in this country who certainly deserve it.

I yield the floor.

Criminal Jurisdiction

Mr. President, I rise to speak on S. 797, the Tribal Law and

Order Act of 2010. I offered the text of this bill to H.R. 725, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act Amendments, and last night, the Senate passed this bill as amended by unanimous consent.

As chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, I have presided over 14 hearings relating to public safety on our Nation's tribal lands over the past three years. These hearings revealed a longstanding crisis of violence in many parts of Indian country. Indian reservations on average suffer rates of violence more than 2.5 times the national rate. In my home State of North Dakota, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation suffered 8.6 times the national rate of violence in 2008. In early 2008, there were 9 police officers patrolling this 2.3 million acre Reservation, which meant at times there was no 24-hour police response service. As a result, victims of violence reported waiting hours and sometimes days before receiving a response to their distress calls. With this level of response, crime scenes can become compromised, and justice is not served to the victims, their families, or the community.

Our hearings found that violence against Indian women has reached epidemic levels. The Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more than 1 in 3 American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetime and more than 2 in 5 will be subject to domestic or partner violence.

The broken and divided system of justice in place on Indian lands that was devised by dozens of Federal laws and Federal court decisions enacted and handed down over the past 150 years is not well-suited to address the violence in Indian country. Because of these laws and decisions, responsibility to investigate and prosecute crime on the reservation is divided among the Federal, tribal, and in some locations, state governments.

Based on this authority, these governments should be diligent in preventing and prosecuting these crimes. Thus, one of the primary purposes of the bill is to ensure that the United States upholds its treaty promises and legal obligation to investigate and prosecute violent crimes on Indian lands. Our Nation made treaty promises, and enacted laws--specifically the General and Major Crimes Acts--that provided for Federal criminal jurisdiction over Indian lands. At the same time, the United States limited tribal government authority to punish offenders in tribal courts to no more than 1 year for any one offense.

The Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 takes steps to hold the United States to these solemn promises, and will address the restriction on tribal court penal authority over defendants in tribal court where certain protections are met.

That is correct. The phrase that jurisdiction ``shall be concurrent among the Federal Government, State governments, and, where applicable, tribal governments'' is intended to clarify that the various State governments that are currently subject to Public Law 280 will maintain such criminal authority and responsibility. In addition, this provision intends to make clear that tribal governments subject to Public Law 280 maintain concurrent criminal authority over offenses by Indians in Indian country where the tribe currently has such authority. Nothing in this provision will change the current lay of criminal jurisdiction for state or tribal governments. It simply seeks to return criminal authority and responsibility to investigate and prosecute major crimes in Indian country to the United States where certain conditions are met.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Wednesday, June 30, 2010, at 9:30 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a business meeting on pending committee issues to be followed immediately by an oversight hearing entitled ``A Way Out of the diabetes Crisis in Indian Country and Beyond.''

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 30 minutes in morning business.

Mr. President, I listened to the leaders today. I was thinking about Will Rogers, who once said: You could call me a hick or call me a rube, but the fact is, I would sooner be the person who buys the Brooklyn Bridge than the person who sells it. I was thinking of the fiction in that clever Will Rogers quote and some of the fiction I hear on the floor of the Senate.

Everybody here understands--if not, they better understand quickly-- the dilemma of the unbelievable growth of deficits or debt for this country. It is unsustainable. There is no question about that. But it is interesting to me that just recently we have had the minority side of the aisle decide this is their life's calling despite the fact that this President, the day he was inaugurated and walked across the door into the White House, had this President done nothing but sleep for the next year, he inherited a Federal deficit of $1.3 trillion. This stuff about he said, we said, she said, they said, the American people aren't very interested in all that. What they are interested in is what caused this problem and who is going to step up and fix it.

Let's talk about what caused this problem. What ran this country into the ditch and what has caused this unbelievable runup in debt? No. 1, early on in 2001, I and others stood on the floor when President Bush-- yes, President Bush; and I am not here just to tarnish his Presidency, I am here to talk about his record--said: We now have 10 years of expected budget surpluses. Let's do something with that money. President Bush had inherited a record budget surplus from the Clinton Administration. The new President took over and said: We have to have very big tax cuts to get rid of these surpluses.

I stood on this floor and said: These surpluses don't exist yet. Let's be a little conservative.

He said: ``Katy, bar the door,'' we are going to give this money away.

Very big tax cuts, the largest benefits went to the highest income earners in the country. Then what did we experience? Very quickly, a recession, an attack against our country on 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then we sent soldiers off to war and didn't pay for one penny of it. Everybody in this Chamber knows better than that. You don't fight a war by asking people to go risk their lives but we won't risk anything by asking the American people to pay for the cost of the war. We will just put it on the debt.

As all this was going on, we had a bunch of new regulators who came to town from the new administration who said: It is a new day. We are going to have business-friendly regulation in this town. We won't look. We won't watch. We don't care what you do.

As a result, we had an unbelievable outpouring of greed that ran this country into the ditch by some of the biggest financial enterprises in the country.

I am not sure either side is much of a bargain for the American people these days. I understand that. But I don't think we ought to rewrite history. This President inherited the biggest mess since Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the Presidency. That is a fact. Now we have to try to work together to figure out what we do about it. How do we deal with this? How do we respond to the burgeoning Federal budget deficits?

By the way, some say: Let's make our stand by shutting down unemployment insurance for folks at the bottom, the folks who don't have a job, those people who have been told: Your job doesn't exist anymore; you are done; you are out of here. And we have about 20 million fewer jobs than we need in this country. In the last 9 years, we lost more than 5 million jobs of people who work in the factories.

Will Rogers also once said: I see where Congress passed a bill to help bankers' mistakes. You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but the whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the person who had absolutely nothing.

And so it is in this Congress--hundreds of billions here and there in tax cuts and bailouts. But now it is about helping people with unemployment. That is where we make our stand, according to some. It is pretty unbelievable. We need to start working together to find common solutions. Describing where the other side is wrong is hardly a productive enterprise. It is pretty easy to do, in fact.

That is not why I came to talk, but it does get tiresome trying to rewrite history here on the floor of the Senate. I am not suggesting one Presidency is good or bad. I am saying this President

inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. That is a fact. That doesn't come from me; that comes from the Congressional Budget Office. I understand, at least in part, why that happened. Some of us on the floor of the Senate did not support giving away tax revenues we didn't have. Some of us didn't support going to war without paying for it. I had that discussion. How about paying for some of this? The previous President said: You try to pay for it, I will veto the bill. Is it surprising, then, that we are deep in debt? Not particularly surprising to me. Those are not very thoughtful decisions.

Mr. President, 16 years ago I wrote a cover article for the Washington Monthly magazine. The title was ``Very Risky Business,'' the subtitle, ``If we don't watch out, a new kind of Wall Street gambling--exotic derivatives trading--could shake the market and put taxpayers on the line for another bailout.'' I talked about $35 trillion in derivatives. That is now a fraction of what is out there. I talked about banks that were trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. I said they might just as well have a roulette wheel or a craps table in their lobby. It is just flatout gambling, and it ought to be stopped.

It is not surprising to me because I made the same point 5 years after that, when they tried to repeal Glass-Steagall--and did successfully--in order for us to compete with the Europeans. That took apart the protections that existed after the Great Depression. It was decided that we don't need those protections anymore. They took it apart. I was one of eight Senators to vote no. I warned on the floor then that another taxpayer bailout would come within a decade. It did, regrettably.

Now the question is, as we put together a piece of legislation to address these issues, what do we do that doesn't have us just having a press conference to say: Look at what we did. What is it we have to do to make sure this doesn't happen again? Have we really tightened the regulations?

Let me go through a couple things. Will we have dealt with too big to fail? The answer is no, not really. Too big to fail means there are some businesses in this country in the financial services industry, some of the biggest financial institutions, that are determined ``too big to fail,'' and their failure would cause grievous harm to the economy, perhaps bring the entire economy down. Therefore, if they are too big to fail, they are, by definition, going to be bailed out.

I happen to believe that if you are too big to fail, you are simply too big. You ought to be pared back, trimmed down until you are not too big to fail. That is not what is happening here. We are going to pass a piece of legislation in which the biggest financial institutions are bigger than they were before we got into this mess. Too big to fail doesn't mean you are too big. In fact, you can get bigger with the kind of legislation that is being considered in conference.

Proprietary trading. Will they still allow banks to trade on their own proprietary accounts? Will they put a restriction, finally, on banks' ability to make speculative bets using their own capital in their own lobby? We will see. It doesn't look like it.

What about the issue of naked credit default swaps, CDSs? They have no insurable interest on any side of them, just flatout betting. No, this isn't going on in Atlantic City or Las Vegas; it is going on across the country with financial institutions. Will this be trimmed down? It doesn't look like it.

How about the ratings agencies, the agencies that gave AAA ratings to fundamentally worthless securities, had a bunch of people left with bad securities in the bowels of financial balance sheets? What about that? There was an amendment on the floor of the Senate to deal with that. That has now been watered down. Or capital standards.

I won't go on except to say that I hope the sum total of this conference between the House and Senate on financial reform is about working for the American people and not the interests that helped create this mess. I hope this is a time to suck it up and do the right thing. I hope the conferees understand that if this bill is excessively weakened--and it wasn't strong leaving here--they should not assume they will have the votes to automatically pass that kind of legislation back in the Senate and perhaps the House.

This is very important. This is not some other issue. This is about whether the economy will continue to provide strength and expand and promote hiring. It will be what our children and grandchildren experience in terms of opportunities for the future in our great country.

It is a conference that is pushed by all sides to do various things for various interests. I hope they understand that this is something that will revisit us again in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now unless we do the right thing and make certain we address the key issues.

Mr. President, I wish to talk about energy legislation. I have been reading today all the stories in the newspapers about the caucus we had last week in which we described energy legislation and climate change legislation and what we should or should not do.

There are two challenges for this country at this point: No. 1, we are far too dependent on foreign oil. Over 60 percent of the oil we receive comes from outside of our country; 70 percent of the oil we use goes into the transportation sector. We are far too dependent on foreign oil. If something should happen to shut off the supply of foreign oil to our country, our economy will be flat on its back for a long while. We need to be less dependent on foreign oil. No. 2, there is something happening to our climate. We are not completely sure what that is, but I don't think there is any question that there is a wide scientific consensus that something is happening to the global climate.

We should work on both, no question about that. But there is a practical limitation of what we will be able to consider and do between now and the end of this year. I have said previously that I support a cap on carbon. I support pricing carbon. I have said I will not support what is called classic cap and trade, which would serve the interests of Wall Street by creating a $1 trillion carbon securities market so they can trade carbon securities on Monday and Tuesday and tell us what the cost of our energy is going to be on Thursday and Friday. I have no interest in doing that, nor would I support it. But there are ways for us to price carbon and to restrict carbon. I understand that.

The question has lingered now about a piece of legislation that came out of the Energy Committee 1 year ago this month. We had 12 weeks of markup. It was a very difficult markup. We passed, at the conclusion of the markup, a bipartisan piece of energy legislation that advances our country's energy interests and will make us less dependent on foreign oil. It will substantially reduce carbon emissions because it will dramatically change the amount of production that comes from renewable energy, wind, solar, biomass, and so on.

For a year we have now waited for that legislation to come to the floor. It has not come to the floor because some say: If we can't do comprehensive climate change legislation, then we don't want to do any legislation. Even that which would reduce carbon, even that which would substantially increase production from sources of energy where the wind blows and the Sun shines so we can collect this energy and put it on a grid.

It does not make any sense, that we would not consider a bipartisan energy bill and end this year having failed to address something that, A, was bipartisan, and B, will in fact reduce carbon and will give us an opportunity to be less dependent on foreign oil. That makes no sense, not to be able to take advantage of that kind of success.

It seems to me there are not 60 votes in the Senate to bring up a comprehensive climate change bill in June or July of this year. I know some people will have heartburn when I say that. I just think that is the case. If that is the case, let's not block a bipartisan energy bill that does address production, efficiency, and a lower carbon future.

We need to produce more in this country. We need to save more, that is, conserve more. Even as we do that, we

need to produce more energy in a different way--wind energy, solar energy, the biofuels, obviously, that are renewable and, generally speaking, reduce carbon.

Building an interstate highway of transmission capability is essential because it is not the case that all people live in areas where they get the best sunshine or the most significant amount of wind. If we are going to get the most energy available from wind and solar, we need the kind of transmission that is capable of getting the wind energy and solar energy and then moving it to where it is needed.

The building efficiency plan that contains the best and quickest capability for saving energy is also in the bill we have written.

We will and we should produce more domestic oil. We are doing unbelievable things in new kinds of horizontal drilling. The Bakken shale in my State is the largest assessed reserve of recoverable oil ever registered in the history of the lower 48--just in the last 2 years--up to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.

Coal development, including carbon capture and sequestration, an especially beneficial use of carbon--all of that is capable of being done; and, yes, some nuclear energy. I support loan guarantees for nuclear plants, like requested by the Administration.

I think all of this is capable of being done in a way that reduces our dependence on foreign oil and is good for our economy. I understand change is hard and that is never demonstrated more concretely than in this Chamber. Change is very hard. I mentioned some while ago that a man named Rudolf Diesel showed up at the World's Fair in Europe about 110 years ago. Rudolf Diesel showed up with a new engine which we now know as the diesel engine. He was very proud of the engine he had developed, and it ran on vegetable oil. Yes, that was 110 years ago. Rudolf Diesel's new engine ran on vegetable oil. Most of what we can and should and I hope will do, does not need to represent a new idea.

Ninety-seven percent of our transportation sector runs on oil. So Senator Alexander, myself, and Senator Merkley have just introduced the electric drive transportation bill. We are moving toward electric drive vehicles, and we are establishing the capability of demonstration cities for infrastructure and all the things that are necessary, including battery investment and so on. I think ultimately we will have a 400- or 500-mile battery in vehicles that are electric drive vehicles.

Think of the changes in transportation, and it is pretty unbelievable. Nobody knows exactly what the future is going to hold, but we either decide to make that future or we just let it happen. I am a big believer in making it happen. In 1935, it took 3 weeks to go from Chicago to New York. Twenty-five years later, it took 3 days by railroad, then the cars, and then the jet airplanes, and all of a sudden things changed dramatically.

From the Roman legions time until when Lewis and Clark came and spent the winter in North Dakota on their wonderful expedition, there was no change to speak of in travel. One could travel as fast as a horse or a river stream could take them, and that was it. All of a sudden, in the last century, century and a half, things have exploded. But it has required a great deal of energy.

So the question is, What kind of energy? How do we produce it? What makes us less dependent, for example on foreign oil, so we do not find ourselves, at some point, tipped over in an economy that cannot work because we do not have the energy? How do we address the energy issue, still paying attention to the issue of climate change? Those are the issues.

As I indicated, very few people can see the future. In fact, most people are skeptical about anything. They say Fulton, when he developed the steam engine--he apparently was with Napoleon, talking to Napoleon about his idea--and Napoleon said: Are you kidding me?

He probably did not quite say it that way. He said: You are saying you are going to make a boat sail against the wind by putting a fire under its deck? I don't think so. That was Napoleon's response to Fulton.

Or Einstein said: There is no evidence whatsoever that nuclear energy will ever be achievable. I do not know, has anybody ever said Einstein lacked clarity about the future?

David Sarnoff once famously said about the wireless music box, which we now call the radio: Who on Earth would pay for someone to send a message that goes to no one in particular? Or Harry Warner who said: Who would pay to hear actors talk? So much for prognosis. Watson, at IBM, said he thought there was a market worldwide for about five computers. That was his assessment.

So it is very hard to predict the future. No one can see very far. The question, it seems to me is: Are we going to decide reasonably what we want our future to be, with new technology--perhaps using old technology--and move there, or are we just going to sit around and let things happen?

That is why this Energy bill is so important. We are charting a new path. RES--we say we want 15 percent, and if we can get the bill to the floor, I am going to offer an amendment for 20 percent. We want 20 percent of all electricity produced in America coming from renewable sources. Driving renewable energy will make us less dependent on foreign oil.

I also support domestic production of oil and gas and domestic production of coal. By the way, coal is one of the most significant quantities of resources in our country for energy, and there is great concern because it produces carbon when you burn it, and that is tough for the environment and goes against the issue of the global climate change matter. So what do we do about that? Well, one of the things I am convinced we can do is understand that carbon is a product, not just a problem.

What can we do with carbon? Well, we can produce fuel with carbon. We have work going on at Sandia National Laboratories that uses a heat engine. You put CO2 in one side and water in the other side, and you fracture the molecules and chemically recombine them, and you produce fuel. So take carbon and air and produce fuel, along with some water.

I do not think these problems are unsolvable. But in order to get there, we have to get this Energy bill to the floor of the Senate, and it has now been 1 year. I noticed this morning there were 15 or 20 of my colleagues who said: If a bill does not contain climate change, we would not support any bill coming to the floor.

Well, do you know what? Climate change means you want to reduce carbon to try to protect our environment. How do you reduce carbon? With the very kinds of policies that exist in this Energy bill, and we have done it on a bipartisan basis.

So my hope is, in the next couple of weeks or so, that we might finally, at last--at long, long last--get to the point where we are bringing up a piece of legislation that is out of the committee, that is bipartisan, that will protect our environment but, most importantly, will invest in virtually every form of energy production and conservation and make us less dependent--much less dependent--on foreign oil.

That ought to be the goal of all Americans. We do not think much of it, we do not talk much about it because we just assume energy is going to be a part of our lives beginning tomorrow morning. We get up in the morning, we turn off the alarm--that was electricity--we turn on the light--that is electricity--make a piece of toast--that is electricity--get a cup of coffee--that is electricity--take a shower-- that is electricity to heat the water. We get in the car and turn the key to start the engine--that is oil.

The fact is, we use energy in a prodigious way all day long and never think much about it. But if, God forbid, tomorrow morning something happens that shuts off the supply of foreign oil to this country, our economy would be in deep, desperate trouble. We would be smart, we would be wise, to understand that over dependence, that excessive dependence on foreign oil, is a detriment to this county's future. We better get about the business of trying to address it. There is a way to do that, and a way to do that at the same time that is very helpful to this country's environment by restricting and limiting CO2 emissions because we are going more and more toward the development of renewable sources of energy for the future.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I have filed an amendment to the underlying legislation. I know there is discussion about who might get an amendment. A lot have been filed. There is negotiation about which amendments might be made pending and debated. I hope this amendment will be. It has had a long and tortured history. It is an amendment I offered when the now-President, Barack Obama, was a Senator, and he strongly supported it. In fact, during his campaign, he talked a lot about this subject. It is the issue of shutting down a perverse tax incentive that exists in this country for shipping jobs overseas.

We provide tax incentives if you are willing to shut down your factory, fire your workers, and move your product elsewhere; we say we will give you a tax break. That is unbelievable. We have had four recorded votes in the Senate. I have lost all of them.

As it seems, many people believe we ought to continue this tax incentive. I think we ought to continue to try to get a majority in the Senate to agree with the proposition that, at long last, we have to stop subsidizing shipping American jobs overseas.

On this chart is a description of the ``cool, refreshing taste of mint dipped in dark chocolate.'' The ad, by Hershey's, is for their York Peppermint Patty, and it says, ``the cool, refreshing taste of mint dipped in dark chocolate will take you miles away.'' Little did we know that it will actually take you to Mexico, because that is where they began to make these mint patties. They used to be American made, all-American mint patties. But now they have gone to Mexico. In fact, 260 jobs were moved to Monterrey, Mexico, as part of a long-term Hershey's strategy. So that is mint patties. I suppose they

are not as important as, perhaps, automobiles, or jobs that are making sophisticated high-tech equipment. But still and all it is mint patties.

Hallmark Cards, an American company, privately held in Kansas City, MO, with a 100-year history in our country. It was founded by a high school dropout who started this company in 1910 with shoe box postcards. He sold a shoe box full of postcards, while living at the YMCA in Kansas City. This became a fabulously successful card company. In fact, all of us have used Hallmark cards to send a message to someone. When they say ``if you care enough to send the very best,'' they don't exactly now say where to send it. If you are going to send it where they are made, they have gone to China. What kind of a card do you send to a Hallmark employee whose job is now in China, where they are making Hallmark cards? So that is mints and cards--probably, as I say, not as important as making automobiles. But those jobs have also left.

Making refrigerators. Whirlpool has been involved, as well, in moving jobs. I have talked about this previously. Whirlpool refrigerators moved jobs all over the world from Evansville, IN. They moved work to a factory in Mexico, even though the company accepted a $19.3 million grant by the U.S. Department of Energy to develop smart appliances. Those smart appliances left to go south. So Whirlpool appliances have gone to Mexico, and 1,100 U.S. jobs moved to Mexico.

This is a picture of a woman named Natalie Ford, 42 years old, who worked at a Whirlpool appliance plant in Evansville for 19 years. She learned that her job was moving to Mexico in November of 2009. That is a photograph of Natalie when she discovered that her 19-year investment in this company was over.

It was like a punch in the gut, she said.

I notice every month we focus on this issue: How many jobs have we created in this country? How many have we lost? How many people are filing for unemployment insurance?

I consider the job thing like a bathtub. You have a faucet that puts jobs in, creating jobs in this economy, and then you have a drain, and it is wide open. We are talking about how many jobs we create next month, and the drain is wide open. They are going to China.

For example, I will show a couple of photographs of where some of these jobs go.

This is the home of a Salvadoran worker who makes NFL jerseys. They sell for $80 apiece in the United States of America--NFL football jerseys. Here is the home of the worker. I have held hearing after hearing about these issues.

This is a Reebok NFL jersey made by a Chinese-owned sweatshop in El Salvador. Again, that merges all the best of what we know is wrong with the issue of the migration of jobs--a Chinese-owned sweatshop in El Salvador making NFL jerseys for Reebok.

I have held hearings, and I have had people who work in El Salvador testify at hearings. I will not spend much time on this because I have shown it on the Senate floor so many times. This is Radio Flyer, a little red wagon made in Chicago. This a 110-year-old company, made by a wonderful immigrant who loved radios and loved airplanes, built a little red wagon that every kid in this country has ridden in. What did they name the little red wagon? Radio Flyer, because he liked airplanes and radios. We all understand what Radio Flyer means. It means a little red wagon that pulls kids. But they are gone. They are not made in Illinois any longer. They are all gone to China. Maybe that is OK if one doesn't care where these things are made and where the jobs are.

Finally, Huffy bicycles. I know I have described this company forever. But those who worked there were paid $11 an hour, and they all lost their jobs--all of them. There is still a Huffy bicycle. All the jobs went to China. They then declared bankruptcy, and all the pension plans of all the people fired in the United States making Huffy bicycles, made for decades, were taken over by the Federal Government because the company declared bankruptcy. Now the Chinese own the brand and they make these bikes in China.

I know who makes them. They are made by Chinese workers who make 30, 40, 50, 60 cents an hour tops. They work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. That is what is happening.

I have not described the automobiles and what is happening, or the airplanes parts for that matter. The list is very substantial. I have spoken about it at great length.

I described that Fruit of the Loom underwear left America. Maybe underwear is more important or less important than chocolate mints or Hallmark Cards. I don't know. Fruit of the Loom is the company that used to have the dancing grapes, the red grapes and green grapes people would dress up as. I don't know what kind of people dress up in grape outfits. They seem to have fun. They advertised Fruit of the Loom underwear.

All of a sudden, there is not any underwear made in the United States by Fruit of the Loom. Do you know there is not one pair of Levis made in the United States? Not one. Talk about the all-American company, buying your first pair of Levis, buying a pair of Levis for school, there is not one pair of Levis made in the United States. It has all migrated, all gone.

Here is the proposition. We stand idly by while month after month these jobs are leaving. I described previously on the floor about an airplane trip I took about 4 or 5 months ago. I sat next to a man who was wearing a gym outfit, sweat pants, and so on. He was pretty comfortable on that airplane.

I said: Where are you headed?

He said: I am heading to Asia. I am going to be on a long trip, 25, 30 hours, so I decided to dress down.

He was wearing one of those sweat outfits.

I said: Why are you going to Asia?

He said: My company wants to move the jobs and have the products that we buy from the suppliers made in Singapore, Thailand, and China. So I am going on a trip to Singapore, Thailand, and China to take a look at where we can move these jobs to these countries.

I thought, here is a guy sitting on a plane, wearing a sweat suit, and he is going someplace and there are perhaps thousands of workers whose job is going to be traded away because somebody decided: We can make those kinds of products less expensively if we can find people who will work for 30 cents an hour.

Perversely, it is not just that. We have also decided, if they will do that--just shut the door, fire the workers, chain the factory gate-- we will give them a big, fat tax break.

If you have two companies across the street from each other--both making the same product, both doing the same thing, both employing the same number of people--and one says they are moving to China, fires the workers, locks the gate, and the other says they are staying here, guess what the difference is the next year. If they make the same amount of money, then the company that stays here pays higher taxes and the company that leaves pays lower taxes. That is the perverse, insane tax incentive that exists in our Tax Code.

The amendment I have filed deals with the issue of what is called deferral--deferring the obligation to have to pay taxes to a later date when you repatriate the income. I do not eliminate deferral altogether. I eliminate deferral when a company leaves our country to go abroad and produce a product to sell back into our marketplace. If that is your motive, then you ought not get a tax break from this government or this country. It makes no sense for us to continue this behavior.

As I have indicated, I have required votes on this issue. We have had debates and I required votes. There are people in this Chamber who cast a vote against an amendment such as this and then rush off the floor and they will even be the ones who talk about how they support American jobs.

Don't tell me you support an American job if you support a tax incentive that moves our jobs overseas. Just don't tell me because it is not true.

We will again next month, right on the edge of a knife, be wondering what is happening to this economy by the evidence of unemployment numbers or the evidence of new jobs created. As I said, it is fine, and I work with all the people here. In fact, the bill that is on the floor is the so-called extender bill, a jobs bill, an attempt to invest in new jobs in this country, incentivize new

jobs in this country. To the extent we create new jobs in this country and at the same time incentivize jobs running out of the country, that is just boneheaded. We cannot keep doing that.

At some point, the Congress has to decide, based on some reservoir of common sense, that we are not going to provide incentives for people who move American jobs elsewhere. We have trouble enough competing with labor conditions that exist, as I have described in those charts, with a number of circumstances that exist in the hiring of workers in China who you can work 7 days a week, 12, 14 hours a day and, by the way, you can house them and sleep them in a cinder-block room that holds 12 people. That is what is happening. We have trouble enough competing with that, let alone giving a big tax incentive to somebody who says: That is where I want to do my business.

I am just saying, I filed an amendment. I know there is a dance going on here to decide who gets votes and who doesn't. If we are worried about this economy and worried about trying to incentivize American jobs, we have to vote on this amendment and we ought to pass it with a resounding vote.

Does anybody here care about whether ``Made in America'' once again is something we can put as a sticker on a product? Do we care at all? Or is it just that we do not need to make anything? It seems to me America's future is to understand and learn from our past that we are a strong, world-class economy only when we have a world-class manufacturing base. We will not long remain a world-class economy if we decide it does not matter what our manufacturing base is.

In the previous 9 years ending in 2009, we lost more than 5 million jobs in the manufacturing base of people who make things. I am talking about people who go to work and take a shower after work. They are on a factory floor and making real products, ``Made in America.'' That has been the reservoir and source of a lot of good jobs that pay well with good benefits. It always has been. That is what largely expanded the middle class in this country.

Now there is some notion that it does not matter somehow; this is just a world economy and it does not matter. Get on your airplane, search around the planet. Where can you land that plane, open a plant, and hire somebody for 30 cents an hour? I tell you what, the question of who is going to clear the products that are for sale from the shelves in this country is a very interesting question.

Mr. Ford, when he opened his Ford plant to begin building automobiles, believed that you ought to pay a wage to the workers that gave the workers a chance to buy the product they make. In the larger aggregate sense, the question is, Who will buy the products on the shelves if people do not have jobs? You fire your workers and you make Hershey's mint patties in Mexico, or you make Hallmark Cards in China, or you decide to make bicycles, little red wagons, automobiles, trucks, and airplanes elsewhere. Who is going to be on the factory floor producing products in this country? Who is going to earn the wage by which they become consumers?

We are short about 20 million jobs right now in this country, and 20 million jobs is what we need to put people to work.

We have just gone through commencement exercises in this country. There are a lot of kids who put on a cap and a gown with enormous pride, finally graduated from college, and a whole lot of them cannot find a thing to do. They cannot find work.

This President, when he walked across the threshold of the door of the White House, inherited a $1.3 trillion Federal budget deficit left by the previous administration. Had he done nothing, had he been Rip Van Winkle and slept for 10 months or a year, we were going to have a $1.3 trillion deficit. That is what he inherited, and an economy that was in desperate condition.

He has done everything he can to try to put this back on track. It is hard, and it requires both parties and the best ideas of both. This ought not be difficult. This idea of stopping this insidious subsidy from moving American jobs overseas ought to be an idea that takes root here and garners 90 votes, 95 votes. Instead, we have lost the vote on this amendment over recent years four times.

I started by saying that President Barack Obama, when serving in the Senate, was a supporter of this amendment. He voted for this amendment and believed in this approach. He still does. He has talked about it. I hope very much we will get a vote in the Senate on this today or tomorrow and put the Senate on record as having taken the first step in doing something meaningful to shut the drain and begin the process of saying to people: If you stay here, if you manufacture here, if you run a plant here and produce a product here, God bless you. We are on your side. We are not going to give your competitors who leave and move jobs to China a tax break. We are on your side if you stay here.

That is what we ought to be doing, investing in American jobs, investing in products made in our country, investing once again in a strong manufacturing base in order to remain a world-class economic power.

Madam President, at that point, I have exhausted all of the arguments once again for this amendment, hoping that enough will have listened or perhaps be given information that this is a worthy vote if you want to stand up for American jobs.

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

Mr. President, the legislation that is pending and on which we now have general debate is legislation that is important. I know there has been plenty of discussion about it. I want to discuss one element of it. The legislation includes provisions to approve the Cobell settlement. The Cobell settlement is perhaps something which people do not know much about. It is a settlement of a longstanding lawsuit that has been winding its way through the Federal courts for 14 years. It is about things that have been done to American Indians that are almost unthinkable and for which they have sought redress in the Federal courts.

Let me describe this, if I may, by using a photograph of a woman. This is a photograph of Mary Fish. By telling you a little about Ms. Fish, I can describe the problem that the Cobell settlement, which is in this underlying legislation, attempts to address.

Mary Fish died a few years ago. Mary Fish was an Oklahoma Indian. She lived in a very small, humble house with 40 acres. There were six oil wells on her land that had been pumping Oklahoma sweet crude for years. Even with all of these oil wells pumping on Mary's land, she made only a few dollars a year from those wells.

Why would it be the case that this woman had oil wells on her land, lived in a small, little house, had virtually nothing, and got only a few dollars from the oil wells? The problem dates back over 100 years when the Federal Government divided up Indian tribal lands, and distributed the land in trust to individual Indians, saying: We will take care of your land for you. We will manage it. We will handle it. And, by the way, we will provide you with the proceeds from leasing on the lands.

Almost as soon as this system was set up, the Indian people found that the Federal Government, and all kinds of other manipulators involved, stole from them, cheated, and looted their lands and trust accounts from those lands. The fact is, if you go back 100 years and try to reconnect the trust accounts the Federal Government said they were holding for these Indians--for grazing fees that were paid on the Indian lands, for oil that was pumped from Indian lands, for minerals, for agriculture--what you will find is this Federal Government going back all those years does not have any records, cannot reconnect, does not have the foggiest idea what happened. In addition, there were a lot of unscrupulous people who were stealing, cheating, and looting. That is why these American Indians, the first Americans--those who were here first--14 years ago filed a case in Federal court now called Cobell v. Salazar, a case against the Secretary of the Interior.

Cobell v. Salazar has languished for 14 years in the Federal court system. At long last, there has been a negotiated settlement to settle these claims that have existed for a long time. Claims of Indians being cheated by a government that, in some cases, was corrupt for over 100 years.

That settlement is in the underlying legislation. The settlement was not something the Congress did. The settlement was a settlement between the Department of the Interior, led by Secretary Salazar, and the plaintiffs, led by a woman named Elouise Cobell. Recently, the plaintiffs and the Department of the Interior reached an agreement-- finally reached an agreement--to address this unbelievable set of terrible events over the last century that cheated American Indians out of what they were owed.

My colleague from Wyoming has offered an amendment to change the settlement. My colleague, Senator Barrasso, is someone with whom I work on the Indian Affairs Committee. I am Chair; he is Vice Chair of the Committee. I have great respect for him. I do not take issue with the fact he thinks this settlement, perhaps, could be better. I don't know that. He has some ideas on how it can be changed.

The dilemma is that we are not a party to the negotiations to reach that settlement. Perhaps if the Senator would send his recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior and the plaintiffs and they sit down at a table and decide if they want to renegotiate this or decide that. Whether there are other ideas that could or should be added, perhaps that might be beneficial. But if the Congress now decides that this settlement, which is to be paid out of the United States Judgement Fund, is not something that Congress supports, that it needs to be changed, then I think this settlement will be scuttled, and we will be back in the same position we were in.

The Federal judge who watched over the negotiations that reached a settlement in the Cobell case set a deadline of 30 days and then a second deadline and then a third deadline. The Congress missed all of those deadlines--every single one. The Federal judge a few weeks ago said: I would like to call Members of Congress down to my court to find out what on Earth they are doing, what is going on. Why can this settlement not get approved by Congress, because after 14 years, I think the Federal court believed a settlement agreed to by both parties was the appropriate thing to do. Despite this, Congress has missed all the deadlines.

In these proceedings we have been considering the Cobell settlement which is a part of the underlying legislation. I support that settlement. Is it perfect? I don't know. I was not a part of the negotiating team. That was the Interior Department and the plaintiffs, the Native Americans on behalf of the plaintiffs who have been cheated over all these years.

My colleague Senator Barrasso says the parties themselves made changes to the settlement and so they should not mind a few more changes by the Congress. The difference is who makes the changes. The party to a settlement can make changes by agreement of the parties. But if Congress makes changes unilaterally, of course, then Congress risks voiding the entire settlement, which I fear would be the case.

Senator Barrasso's amendment would change the settlement and I think risk sending these parties back into endless litigation that has gone on now for 14 years. I do not think anybody wants that.

Senator Barrasso has said his proposed changes are within the framework of the settlement. But the administration, Secretary Salazar, and others have already sent a letter to the

Congress saying it believes these changes are material and would, therefore, void the settlement. I do not think any of us would want that to happen.

My colleague Senator Barrasso has not said the settlement is unreasonable or unjust, only that he wants to improve the settlement. With great respect to my colleague--and I do like him, and we work together well on a lot of issues--I believe now is not the time to decide after 14 years that this settlement needs improvement.

If the changes are within the framework of the settlement, my recommendation is that he meet with the parties who were at the table and reached this settlement. If they believe his ideas have some merit, maybe some of them will find their way into the settlement. The Congress was not a party to that settlement and should not make unilateral changes.

I hope very much we can finally resolve more than a century of theft and mismanagement through this settlement. When I talked about looting, stealing, cheating, and theft, I understand that. I said that deliberately. That is exactly what has happened. Even worse has been the unbelievable mismanagement of those funds that cheated a whole lot of people.

This is a photograph, as I indicated, of Mary Fish. I said she had six oil wells on her land. She lived in a humble little house and got a couple dollars from them. Somebody else got the money. Who got the money? What happened to the money from the oil wells on this woman's land that led her to die before she had a chance to lead a good life, to have the resources that should have been hers?

I have another photograph, this woman's name is Susan White Calf. She is from the Blackfeet tribe. She is a Blackfeet Indian. She passed away in November of 2007. This picture was in 2001. She took this picture with her grandchildren.

Mr. President, 2001, by the way, was the same year that the Federal courts found that the Federal Government had broken its trust responsibility to the American Indians by this unbelievable mismanagement of Indian trust funds. The Federal Government said: Trust us. We will take care of your funds. We will take care of your assets. Trust us. The fact is, unbelievable mismanagement, some theft, and some looting occurred.

Six years later after 2001, 6 years after the courts found that the Federal Government had broken its trust responsibility to American Indians, Susie died, still waiting to get the money that was owed her for grazing leases on land she owned. This is money that Susie White Calf should have had during her life but did not because the Federal Government dropped the ball, was guilty of unbelievable mismanagement. This problem of mismanagement goes back well into the 1800s.

When you read the stories of how the Indians were cheated and the federal mismanagement, and then take a look at where the records were being stored. It is unbelievable. You cannot even reconstruct the records that were stored in rat-infested warehouses. You cannot find some records, and you find others in rat-infested warehouses.

I ask unanimous consent to proceed for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. President, I will not speak long. Let me continue and finish.

When the historic accomplishment occurred of settling this lawsuit after 14 years between the Federal Government and the plaintiffs, when that historic agreement was reached, I was hopeful the Congress would move very quickly and provide the resources, from the Settlement Fund, that are available to make this settlement work.

I hope very much, if there is a vote--I don't know there will be a vote on the Barrasso amendment--if there is a vote on the Barrasso amendment, I hope very much my colleagues will oppose it.

I say to Senator Barrasso that the ideas, recommendations, and thoughts he has about this settlement should be presented to both sides who negotiated the settlement. In fact, if Congress were to unilaterally make changes, I think it would void the settlement. Void it after 14 long years and a lot of important work that would culminate in a settlement that plaintiffs have been waiting for and plaintiffs well deserve.

I urge my colleagues, as the Administration has urged, let us not unilaterally go outside the settlement that has been structured and negotiated. Let's decide to do what I believe Congress has a responsibility to do.

The longer this drags out, the more the American people see what was done to American Indians, the more people see how badly some of these people were cheated. Yes, this woman, who never got her money and died long before that money was ever available. Yes, this woman, who lived humbly all her life with six oil wells on her land and got virtually nothing from it. Do we have to continue to talk about these issues, or should we settle this and do what the Federal Government should do: own up to its responsibility, say we have done wrong here, say we will fix it now, say the trust accounts are going to work the way they should work. But to recompense for past mistakes and for money that was not given to the first Americans that the Federal Government promised would be theirs, that belonged to them, came from their lands, let's not interrupt that with an amendment on the floor of the Senate on this legislation. Let us instead decide we will ratify this agreement and put this behind us.

It is a very sad, sorry chapter in the history of this government in the way they have treated American Indians.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I understand the time has been divided during this debate until 1 o'clock. Can I learn how much time is available on our side?

Mr. President, I want to discuss briefly the President's remarks last evening to the Nation about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the actions that this administration has been doing to address that. I would also like to discuss issues related to BP, the company that leased the area offshore and drilled the exploratory well which exploded in the gulf.

First of all, I know there is a great deal of anxiety, nervousness and anger about all this. I understand all that because all of us are frustrated that the oil continues to flow. It is a mile down beneath the surface of the water, which is known as a deepwater well. All of us are frustrated that this spill has not been contained. But the President did not cause that spill, and the President himself cannot fix it.

I do know this though. The Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Energy, and many other senior administration officials have brought together the best minds in the world as a team to try to evaluate what kinds of technologies and actions that can be used to fix that leak and stop that gusher. They have consulted many experts. They have consulted the Norwegians who drill in the North Sea in deepwater drilling. They have consulted with many interests. While it is not a case where they have not done everything conceivable to shut down that spill, and I think, as the President suggested last evening, we are beginning to make some good progress.

Then the next issue is how do you deal with the impact on the coastal regions in the Gulf of Mexico. This is unbelievably devastating to these States. How do you deal with that? As I have indicated, what about the guy who has a fishing boat on the pier. The pier is deserted. The boat sits at the end of the pier. There is no opportunity to fish.

And that person has to make a payment on the boat each month. What about that person and what about the tens of thousands of others like him? What about the ecological and environmental damage that has been caused as well? All of those issues are critically important.

I appreciate the fact that the President gave a speech to the Nation. I think it was important to do that. I also appreciate the fact that this administration was on this very quickly. But it is frustrating for them and for all of us that the leak from that well has not been stopped.

I do want to mention the issue of BP because the President mentioned it last night, and we have talked about it before. BP has said they will stand behind all legitimate claims and reimburse people for those impacts. I said last week--and I know the President has also now said it as well. It is one thing to make a pledge but another to follow through on a commitment. We have heard about pledges before. In the Exxon Valdez disaster, Exxon made a pledge to pay for the economic and other damages but then fought it for 20 years. A whole lot of folks died before they saw the result of what they were promised. So pledges are one thing. I want a binding commitment from the responsible party. If BP says they are going to stand behind this--if they do not stand behind this, the taxpayers will eventually end up picking up the tab. So the issue is, if BP says: We pledge this, I say that is fine, let's make it a binding commitment. Put the money in a recovery fund. You can call it what you want--a trust fund, an escrow account, a recovery fund. Put the money in there so we know it will

be available for use to those who have been impacted. I also think that there needs to be some sort of special master work to find a mechanism by which you begin to get the money out to the people who are hurting. That is what needs to be done.

There is debate about whether BP should pay a dividend to its shareholders that it announced several weeks ago. Of course they should not pay a dividend. There ought to be no dividend at this point. They need to have the money available to recompense all of the damages for all of the people and all the natural resource damages that have occurred as a result of this devastating gusher a mile under the ocean. So I don't want them to pay a dividend. They shouldn't be talking about a dividend. All of the discussion ought to be about how much money you put in this recovery fund.

Thad Allen has written to BP saying: How about some more transparency in how your are making decisions to compensate communities and individuals? I know BP has paid some funding to people, but Thad Allen has said: How about some increasing transparency? Let's find out what you are paying, whom you are paying, how you are paying. What is the criteria? How about some transparency here? We shouldn't have to be asking those questions. The money ought to be put in a fund, and that fund ought to be administered by people who are putting together the criteria by which we address the problems that are being confronted by people all up and down the Gulf Coast. That is what ought to happen.

Another company that is responsible here is Transocean. By the way, Transocean was the company who BP leased the mobile offshore drilling unit from, and they were drilling under contract for BP. They are going to have some responsibility as well, I expect.

Let me give you a description here because it is so symbolic of what is happening too often in this country. Transocean was an American headquartered company, but they moved to Switzerland not too long ago. Why did they move to Switzerland? I assume so they do not have to pay American taxes. Go find a tax haven so you do not have pay taxes to the United States. So they have, as I understand it, about 1,200 employees working in Houston, TX, and about 12 employees in Switzerland. Yet they declare Switzerland their headquarters.

They had a meeting in Switzerland some weeks ago and decided they were going to pay a $1 billion dividend to their shareholders. They ought not be paying dividends either. They, too, ought to keep this funding available in case it is needed--when it is needed--to be helpful to the people on the Gulf Coast who are seeing these unbelievable impacts. So they ought not be paying dividends at all.

Again, we should be asking questions about Transocean. Is it a big company that should have some liability here? I guess so. It operates 140 mobile offshore drilling units. It is the world's largest offshore drilling contractor. But again I say, as I have said before, why is it that when you pull the pages back and unearth the story, you discover, that this is a company that moved its headquarters for tax purposes? They first went to the Cayman Islands and then went to Switzerland. Yet, hey have a handful of people in Switzerland and most of the people in Texas. Why does it not want to be an American company? I guess to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Why is it that all these companies want the opportunity to utilize all that our country has to offer but none of the obligations to the country? It is unbelievable, to me.

But with respect to dividends, I say to BP and Transocean: Don't be doing that. You are going to need that money.

Let's make a binding commitment--no more pledges. That old movie, ``Jerry McGuire,'' where Cuba Gooding, Jr., says, ``Show me the money''--show me the money. Let's have that money go from a pledge to a binding commitment in a recovery fund, and that will give a whole lot of folks who are hurting today some feeling that maybe, just maybe, they are going to get helped.

I also wanted to make a couple of other points about how the Senate addresses energy and climate change legislation.

Last evening, the President talked about the need for Congress to take up energy legislation. I agree with that. The fact is, we passed an energy bill out of the Energy Committee last June. I want to debate and vote on it on the floor of the Senate.

There are all of these questions about energy versus climate change. Look, the Energy bill we passed will maximize the production of renewable energy. It will help build the transmission lines, the interstate highway of transmission capability, around our country that is necessary so that you can produce energy where the Sun shines and the wind blows and move it to the load centers where it is needed. It can help do all of these things. It includes provisions for building efficiency and retrofits. It does a lot of things to reduce carbon.

I guess my approach to energy is best described--and I didn't take Latin in a high school of nine students in my senior class. But I call my approach ``totus porkus,'' which probably in Latin would mean something like ``whole hog.'' I think we ought to do everything. Let's do everything and do it well. Let's responsibly produce more oil and gas here and do it the right way. Let's maximize wind, solar and other renewable resources. Let's have the first ever renewable energy standard that says we anticipate that 20 percent. We need to get 20 percent of all of the electricity produced from renewable sources. Let's support biomass and more biofuels. Let's do all of those things and do them well, even as we do them differently, including using coal by capturing the carbon.

By the way, there are a lot of ways to do that. Sandia National Laboratories is working on ways to change the way we think about CO2. Yes, CO2 is a major problem, but it can also be a product. Why don't you think of this not just as a problem but a product? What kind of beneficial use can you develop with CO2 that turns a problem into an asset?

I chair the subcommittee on appropriations that funds the energy research and development for the Department of Energy. We are doing a lot of unbelievable things that take a look at beneficial use of CO2. Even as we reduce the emissions into the atmosphere to try to protect this planet, we can find ways to use CO2 in a beneficial way and protect our planet.

My point is this about taking up legislation: Some say, well, you have to bring climate change to the floor of the Senate right now. Look, I don't think there are 60 votes for a climate change bill. But if that is the case, we will see. But at this point, we do know we have a bipartisan bill on energy legislation from the Senate Energy Committee does all of the right things. We ought to try to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and do that soon. We can do that by bringing the Energy bill we have already passed on a bipartisan basis to the floor of the Senate--the sooner the better, in my judgment.

I know we are short of time. I know Senator Reid and others--

We have all talked about the prospects of debating energy legislation and want to do the right thing. I hope, as the President indicated last night, the right thing is to pass good, comprehensive energy legislation that will make us less dependant on foreign oil and begin to address climate change at the same time.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, June 17, 2010, at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled ``Indian Education: Did the No Child Left Behind Act Leave Indian Students Behind?''

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about the START treaty briefly. Before I do, let me mention, as I have previously, that I have been sending messages to the Justice Department and others. I was pleased with the Attorney General's comments today about the oilspill in the gulf, the gusher of oil that continues in the gulf, and about BP's responsibility.

There is no question that BP has said they pledged to cover legitimate costs as a result of this oilspill. The question I have is, Is that a binding agreement? And the answer from the Justice Department at a hearing recently was, no, it is not binding. If that is the case, if it is not binding--and I believe it is not--we need to move to take steps to make that pledge binding.

There are people today who are trying to figure out how on Earth do they get through this situation. In addition to oil spilling out into the gulf--and it has been doing that I think for 52, 53 days--there are people on a dock in a small town somewhere who are fisher men and women. They have a boat and they fish for a living. But their boat is idle at the end of the dock because they cannot fish. Yet they have to make a payment on that boat at the end of the month. Up and down the gulf, there are significant consequences of this situation. The question is, Who is going to reach out to help those folks? They did not cause these problems.

I think it is important for BP to be asked to put a significant amount of money into a fund, a recovery fund of sorts, and that fund be handled by a special master and perhaps by a counselor from BP.

In any event, it is important to turn this from a pledge into a binding commitment and to do so soon so that money begins flowing to those who are substantially disadvantaged by what has happened and this disaster that has occurred in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. President, let me speak for a moment with respect to the New START treaty. Strategic arms reductions are very important. We do not think about them very much. We deal with big issues and small issues in the Senate. Sometimes the small issues get much more attention than the big issues. But one is coming for sure to the floor of the Senate that is a very big issue; that is, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that was negotiated with the Russians. This is really a big issue and very important. I want to describe why and describe why I feel so strongly about it. I have spoken on the floor previously about this, but I want to do it again, describing a Time magazine article from March 11, 2002. The March 11, 2002, Time magazine article referred back to 2001, right after 9/11--It said this:

For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S.

officials believed that the worst nightmare of their lives--

something even more horrific than 9/11--was about to come

true. In October, an intelligence alert went out to a small

number of government agencies, including the Energy

Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Research Team,

based in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought

to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian

arsenal and planned to smuggle it into New York City. ``It

was brutal,'' a U.S. official told Time. It was also highly

classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the

Whitehouse's Counterterrorism Security Group . . . the

suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people

of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop.

Some while later, Graham Allison, who is an expert on nuclear proliferation wrote about this incident in a book titled ``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' In his book, he points out:

One month to the day after the attacks of 9/11, a CIA agent

codenamed Dragonfire reported that al-Qaida terrorists had

stolen a ten kiloton Russian nuclear bomb from the Russian

arsenal and may have smuggled it into New York City. Vice

President Cheney moved to a secret mountain facility along

with several hundred government employees. They were the core

of an alternative government that would operate if

Washington, DC were destroyed. President Bush dispatched

Nuclear Emergency Support Teams to New York to search for the

suspected nuclear weapon. To not cause panic, no one in New

York City was informed of the threat, not even Mayor

Giuliani. After a few weeks, the intelligence community

determined that Dragonfire's report was a false alarm.

But as they did the postmortem on this, they understood that no one claimed it could have been impossible that a nuclear weapon could have been stolen from the Russian arsenal. No one claimed it would have been impossible--having stolen a Russian nuclear weapon--to smuggle it into New York City or a major American city. No one claimed it would have been impossible for a terrorist group--who wanted to kill several hundred thousand people with a nuclear weapon--to have been able to detonate that nuclear weapon.

Now, as I indicated, I describe that as it was described in Time magazine in 2002, and as it was written about in the book by Graham Allison, a former Clinton administration official, in his book titled, ``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' I describe that and the apoplectic seizure that existed in parts of the U.S. government when it was thought that 1 month after 9/11 al-Qaida had stolen a nuclear weapon and was prepared to detonate it in an American city. And on that day, we wouldn't have had 3,000-plus Americans murdered, we would have had hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their lives. Yet that was about one nuclear weapon--one, just one. The loss of one nuclear weapon.

Now, it turns out it Dragonfire's report wasn't true. The FBI agent codenamed Dragonfire heard it, passed it along, but it turned out it was not accurate. But that was just one nuclear weapon. There are about 25,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. This chart shows the Union of Concerned Scientists' estimate for 2010 estimate that Russia has 15,100 nuclear weapons, the United States has 9,400, China about 240, France 300, Britain 200, and Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea each have some. So 25,000 nuclear weapons, and I have described the terror of having just one end up in the hands of a terrorist group. If it ever happens--when it ever happens, God forbid--and hundreds of thousands of people are killed, life on this planet will be changed forever.

Now, Mr. President, we have a lot of nuclear weapons on this planet of ours, and we understand the consequences of their use. These pictures from August of 1945 show the consequences of the dropping of two nuclear weapons--one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki. Those pictures are, all these years later, still very hard to look at. That is the consequence of two nuclear weapons.

I was recently in Russia visiting a site that we fund in the Congress under the Nunn-Lugar program. I want to show some photographs about what we have been doing to try to back away from the nuclear threat, to try to see if we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the number of delivery vehicles to deliver those nuclear weapons.

This is a photograph of the dismantlement of a Blackjack bomber. This Blackjack bomber was a Russian bomber--a Soviet Union bomber prior to Russia--that would carry a nuclear weapon that would potentially be dropped on the United States, then an adversary during the Cold War. You can see that we dismantled that Russian Blackjack bomber, and this is a piece of a wing strut.

I ask unanimous consent to show a couple of samples.

This is a piece of a wing strut of a Russian bomber. We didn't shoot it down. We cut the wing off. I happen to have a piece of it. This was happening because our colleagues, Senators Nunn and Lugar, put together a program by which we actually paid for the dismantlement of Russian bombers.

I also have copper wiring from the ground-up copper of the electrical wires of a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. We paid money to have that submarine destroyed, as part of our agreement with Russia to reduce that country's nuclear weapons.

This is a hinge from a silo in the Ukraine that previously housed a missile with warheads aimed at the United States. There is now planted on that ground sunflowers, not missiles, because we paid the cost of reducing delivery vehicles and reducing nuclear weapons in the stockpile of the former Soviet Union.

This is a program that works--a program that is unbelievably important. And as I and some others viewed these programs in Russia, we understood again the importance of what we have been doing under the Nunn-Lugar program: The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are now nuclear weapons free. That didn't used to be the case. There are no nuclear weapons in those three countries. Albania is chemical weapons free. We have deactivated, under the Nunn-Lugar program, 7,500 former Soviet nuclear warheads. And the numbers of weapons of mass destruction that have been eliminated, and their delivery vehicles, are 32 ballistic missile submarines--gone, eliminated; 1,419 long-range nuclear missiles; 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles, and 155 nuclear bombers. All of this has been done under a program that very few people know about--the Nunn-Lugar program. It works. It is a great program.

But, as I have indicated, there are still thousands and thousands and thousands--it is estimated this year 25,000--of nuclear weapons on this planet. So what do we do about that? This administration engaged with the Russians for a new treaty because the old START treaty had expired. This new treaty--the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty--was negotiated over a lengthy period of time. It required a lot of patience, a great deal of effort, but this administration stuck with it. They negotiated, completed, and signed this treaty.

The President of Russia and our President met in Prague, the Czech Republic, and signed this treaty. Now it needs to be ratified by the Senate.

I want to talk just a bit about the need to do that. I think all of us understand the urgency. There are some who feel strongly that perhaps we should begin the testing of nuclear weapons. I don't support that. I don't think we should. I think we need to be world leaders on these issues. We have stopped nuclear testing. Others have stopped nuclear testing as well, and we ought to continue that posture.

There are some who feel we should begin building new nuclear weapons. I don't believe we should. That doesn't make any sense. That is the wrong signal for us to send to the world.

There are some who believe that we need to make additional investments in the area of life extension programs and investments in making certain that the nuclear weapons that do exist in the stockpile are weapons in which we have the required confidence that those weapons are available, if needed. The President has asked that funding to do that be made available.

I chair the subcommittee that funds those programs, and I believe we will make available what the President requests. It is reasonable, it seems to me, to not only proceed--hopefully, on a bipartisan basis--to address something as important as the START treaty, but at the same time make sure that the programs that we have always had--the life extension programs and the programs that make sure that we have sufficient confidence in the weapons that exist--are funded appropriately. That is what the President has recommended in the budget that he has sent to the Congress.

It just seems to me there is so much to commend to this Congress the need to ratify an arms control treaty here. Mr. Linton Brooks, the NNSA Administrator under George W. Bush, said this, talking about the newly negotiated treaty and the President's budget request:

START, as I now understand it, is a good idea on its own

merits, but I think for those

who think it's only a good idea if you have a strong weapons

program, I think this budget ought to take care of that.

Coupled with the out-year projections, it takes care of the

concerns about the complex and it does very good things about

the stockpile and it should keep the labs healthy.

I don't quote Henry Kissinger very often, but Henry Kissinger says it pretty well when he says:

It should be noted I come from the hawkish side of this

debate, so I'm not here advocating these measures in the

abstract. I try to build them into my perception of the

national interest. I recommend ratification of this treaty.

Henry Kissinger says he recommends ratification of this treaty. And, finally, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen:

I, the Vice Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our

combatant commanders around the world, stand solidly behind

this new treaty, having had the opportunity to provide our

counsel, to make our recommendations, and to help shape the

final agreements.

It is not just us, but it is our children and their children that have a lot at stake with respect to reducing the number of nuclear weapons, reducing the delivery vehicles. It is the case that the amount of plutonium that will fit in a soda can, the amount of highly enriched uranium the size of a couple of grapefruits will produce a nuclear weapon that will have devastating consequences. So one of our obligations is to try to make sure nuclear material--the material with which those who wish to make nuclear weapons can make those weapons-- stays out of the hands of terrorists. That is one of our jobs. We are working very hard on that. We have programs that work on that constantly.

Second is to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I described the countries that we know have nuclear weapons. Now we have to stop the proliferation and stop other countries from getting nuclear weapons. That is our responsibility. We have to be a world leader to do that.

As I said, if, God forbid, somehow in the future--5 years, 10 years, or 20 years from now--a nuclear weapon is exploded in a major city, and hundreds of thousands are killed, life on this planet is not going to be the same. That is why it seems to me that a very important start-- and this is just a start, not a finish--is to take this treaty that has been negotiated, bring it to the floor of the Senate, and have this discussion. I would expect there will be Republicans and Democrats who will come down on the same side of this issue--that it is a better world, a safer world when we meet our responsibility to lead on the issues of nonproliferation, when we meet our responsibilities to lead on the matter of reducing nuclear weapons and reducing delivery vehicles.

That is what this New START treaty does. It does it in a very responsible way. So my hope will be that in the coming 2 months or so that we will have a robust discussion of the START treaty and have the celebration of having had the debate and had the vote and then exclaiming to the world that this was a success--that this treaty was a success. Yes, a first step but a success.

Beyond this treaty, there will be other negotiations that will take us to other areas in reductions. I think, as a result, if we do what we should be expected to do, this can be a safer world.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to executive session to consider Calendar No. 932 and all nominations on the Secretary's desk in the Coast Guard and NOAA; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc; that no further motions be in order; that any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record, and that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.

I ask unanimous consent that on Tuesday, June 15, at 11:30 a.m., the Senate proceed to executive session and debate concurrently the following nominations on the Executive Calendar for a total of 20 minutes, with the time equally divided and controlled between Senators Leahy and Sessions or their designees: Calendar No. 732, Tanya Pratt; Calendar No. 775, Brian Jackson; and Calendar No. 776, Elizabeth Foote; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to vote on confirmation of the nominations in the order listed, and that after the first vote, the succeeding votes be limited to 10 minutes each; that upon confirmation, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume legislative session.