Floor Statements

Mr. President, I expected my colleague from Arizona would speak on the estate tax. He, in fact, spoke about the subject which we will now spend the next 30 minutes on, on this side, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act. He raises some questions, and my expectation is that debate and discussion about this proposal will promote some rather aggressive discussion in the Senate. That is fine. It is nice at this point that after all these many years we are debating this issue.

I will give a little bit of the history as vice chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs. That committee is the committee that brought this legislation to the Senate. The action was bipartisan. We have decided this is a worthy piece of legislation. I support it. The committee supports it. That is the basis on which it is in the Senate now.

I don't know the history nearly as well as my colleagues, Senator Akaka and Senator Inouye, but let me describe a little of the history, if I might. I know a bit of this because I represent a State in which we have numerous Indian tribes. Those are the first Americans. Those are the folks who were there before my ancestors showed up. They owned the land. They farmed along the Missouri River. I understand something about Indian tribes, tribal governments and self-determination. I understand that because I work in that area a lot with the Indian tribes from my State.

Let me describe the issue of aboriginal and indigenous peoples in the United States, and especially in Hawaii, from the small amount of history that I know. Again, the rich history here will be better recited by my colleagues, Senator Inouye and Senator Akaka.

January 16, 1893--that is a long, long time ago--the United States Minister John Stevens, who served, then, as Ambassador to the court of Queen Liliuokalani, directed a marine company onboard the USS Boston to arrest and detain the queen. This is the queen that served the indigenous people in Hawaii. She was arrested. She was placed under arrest for 9 months at the palace.

That event was engineered and orchestrated by the Committee of Public Safety which I understand consisted of Hawaii's non-native Hawaii businessmen, with the approval of Minister Stevens.

So we have a people in Hawaii who were the first Hawaiians, the indigenous people to Hawaii, who had a government, who had a structure. The head of that government was summarily arrested and a new government was created in Hawaii. That new government apparently was a government that would meet at the pleasure of those who engineered the arrest of the queen.

Today, after many decades raising questions, should there not be an opportunity for Native Hawaiians, very much as there has been an opportunity in our country in what is called the lower 48 for Indian tribes to seek reorganization, to seek reorganization--there should be some opportunity along the way for there to be a Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act. The reason this is a ``reorganization'' is because that government existed. This is not the creation of a new government. This is a government that previously existed, but many decades ago was essentially dissolved or destroyed as a governing unit by the actions I previously described.

My colleagues have come to the Congress from the State of Hawaii and have asked that a bill authorizing the reorganization of a Native Hawaiian governing entity that could negotiate agreements with the United States and the State of Hawaii to address a good number of issues relating to self-determination and self-governance of the Native Hawaiians be brought to the Senate and be considered and debated. That is the basis on which it is here today.

Upon introduction last year by my colleagues from Hawaii, this bill was referred to the Committee on Indian Affairs. We held a hearing on the bill, received testimony that demonstrated broad bipartisan support, strong support for this bill in Hawaii and also in Indian country around America.

We heard from Governor Lingle from the State of Hawaii about the importance of this bill to the people and to the economy of Hawaii. We heard from Native Hawaiians about the significance of this bill on all aspects of Native Hawaiian life. We heard from the National Congress of American Indians about its long-standing support for Native Hawaiians to be formally afforded the right to self-determination. This bill does not by itself do that. It establishes the process for a reorganization in order to create that structure.

There has been back and forth between interested parties on this bill. There are some who have concerns and questions about it. Significant efforts, I know, have been spent by my two colleagues, Senator Akaka and Senator Inouye, to address concerns relating to jurisdiction, claims and gaming issues. I believe these concerns in almost all cases have been adequately resolved.

Even more importantly, I believe the Members of the Senate, finally, deserve the opportunity, and my two colleagues from Hawaii deserve the opportunity, to have this legislation before the Senate open for discussion and open for debate.

Senator Akaka requested floor time for this bill 1 year ago. His request was not granted because we were compelled to address other imminent concerns relating to hurricane relief and other matters at that time that were urgent.

Bills on this issue have been introduced since the 106th Congress. None have received time for floor debate. Fairness, I believe, now requires this Congress to offer this bill in the Senate for full debate.

Let me finally say this. I know of no two Members of the Senate who have worked harder, with greater determination to advance the cause in their State that has broad bipartisan support in their State on behalf of Native Hawaiians, a right that is already afforded to many other aboriginal and indigenous peoples around the United States that has not been afforded to those Native Hawaiians. I know of no one in this Senate who has worked harder for an important issue of passion in their hearts than Senator Akaka and Senator Inouye. I am very pleased that the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs was able to pass this legislation and bring it to the Senate today.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Kansas, Senator Brownback.

Mr. President, we come on a Monday to the floor of the Senate to discuss public policy and important issues. And today the majority leader has brought to us a proposed constitutional amendment. It is the first of what I believe will be two constitutional amendments that will be considered by the Senate for the next 7 or 10 days. That is not unusual. In fact, I had someone go back and check to see how many proposed amendments to the United States Constitution have been offered here on the floor of the Senate or in the U.S. House, or at least offered in bill forms. I discovered that in recent Congresses that there were I believe something like 76 proposed amendments to the Constitution. In another year, there were 67 proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution has not been amended except for the first 10 amendments which were the Bill of Rights. Outside of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution has been amended 17 times in nearly 220 years--17 times in more than two centuries.

The reason for that is most people believe that we ought to amend the Constitution only rarely, and then only when it is urgently necessary and only when it is the last resort. We have had a lot of different proposals to change the Constitution. There was a proposal to change the Constitution to provide that the Presidents of the United States for one term shall come from the North and then shall be succeeded by a President who comes from the South. That was a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Fortunately, for our country, not many of these ideas over all of these many, many years have been adopted by the U.S. Congress and by State legislatures, which is required in order to amend the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution for this country was written by 55 white men. It was in a room in Philadelphia. In that room in Philadelphia, if you go to visit today, you will see the chair that George Washington sat in at the front of the room. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention. You will see where Ben Franklin sat, where Madison sat, where Mason sat. Those 55 men wrote a Constitution in a hot Philadelphia summer period and presented it then to the country. It was really a quite remarkable Constitution. It begins: ``We the People.''

In the writing of the Constitution, they created a framework for this new kind of government which has become over the last two centuries the most successful democracy or representative government in the history of humankind. We have lived only a blink of that history. And, yet, during that period this is the most successful democracy on the face of the Earth.

Two-hundred years after the writing of the Constitution, there was a celebration in that same room. I was one of the fortunate ones to go to that celebration representing one of the 55. These 55 people were men and women and minorities. It wasn't 55 men as existed in that room when they wrote the Constitution. The 55 people who celebrated in that room the 200th birthday of the Constitution--it was really quite a remarkable event. I sat in that room thinking about the history, thinking about George Washington sitting at the front in that chair with the piece of wood that is decorated as the sun on the back of that chair.

I thought to myself: What a remarkable thing it was for me, coming from a town of 300 people, from ranching and wheat country in southwestern North Dakota, from a high school with a senior class of nine students, and here I am sitting in the room where George Washington presided over the writing of the Constitution for this new country of ours.

I tell that story only because it is important for us to understand the circumstances of amending the Constitution.

Today, we have on the floor of the Senate a proposal to amend the Constitution with a constitutional amendment that would prohibit gay marriage.

Next week, we will have a constitutional amendment that would prevent desecrating the American flag or give the States the ability to prevent flag desecration.

On the issue of gay marriage, I voted as a Member of the U.S. Senate for a 1996 act called the Defense of Marriage Act. I did that because it creates for Federal law a definition of what marriage is. It defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, husband and wife. That is Federal law. I supported that. I was happy to support that. That is what I believe.

I don't believe we should be altering the U.S. Constitution. I don't believe we should be amending the basic framework of our democracy on this subject. The current law, the Defense of Marriage Act, which the Federal Government passed in 1996, still stands today.

I see no reason to amend the U.S. Constitution.

This past week in my State an organization called Focus on the Family ran a newspaper advertisement taking up the large part of a page in daily newspapers. It says: Senator Dorgan does not believe that a child needs both a father and a mother.

They also ran the same language in radio ads in my State.

Now this organization--I am not familiar with them--must think there are 9 commandments. There are actually 10 commandments. This must be an organization that has forgotten the commandment that says: Thou shall not bear false witness. My hope is they might go back and review that. There is nothing in my record that suggests I don't care whether a child has a mother and a father.

This is a legitimate discussion we are having about a constitutional amendment. The issue of gay marriage is an important and legitimate issue to discuss. But one would think it is also worthy of organizations on both sides to be truthful in that discussion. That, regrettably, at least in this case that I have cited, has not been the case.

This issue of amending the U.S. Constitution is clearly before the Senate because it is an even-numbered year. The even-numbered year is one in which the late Claude Pepper used to say the American people have the miracle of grabbing the American steering wheel and deciding which direction they want to nudge our great country. It is, after all, the American people who are in charge and the American people who will make decisions about the direction of our country.

This is an even-numbered year. We understand why this issue is before the Senate. It is about an election this fall. I am not saying it is an unimportant issue; I am saying that the notion of having to amend the basic framework of our government, amending the Constitution, that is a political debate aimed at this fall, not this week.

But let me talk just for a moment not about the issue of gay marriage. We have addressed that. I supported addressing it in the Defense of Marriage Act. I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, voted for a definition that a marriage is between a husband and wife, a man and woman. That has already been done.

So let me talk about what we could be doing today and tomorrow and in the next week and a half or 2 weeks instead of the agenda given us by the majority leader. There are some people pretty dispirited about this Congress. Because the polling says this Congress is not very well thought of, we conclude the American people are kind of dispirited about the agenda, about what we are doing. We have a lot of trouble.

We have federal debt up to our neck, and there is more to come. The President is offering us budgets with the largest deficit proposals in history--this from a President who described himself as a conservative. But that is not what his budgets are about.

We have the highest trade debt in annual deficits in the history of this country, dangerous trade deficits, $702 billion last year. Add the increase to the national debt from a budget standpoint to the trade debt, and we are $1.4 trillion out of balance. Let me say that again: We are out of balance $1.4 trillion in a year. Does anyone seem to care about that? Is there the urgency to deal with that as we have for constitutional amendments? I don't think so.

Fiscal policy, trade policy, foreign policy--we have serious foreign policy issues and problems. Health care: add up the challenges we face and ask yourself: What are we doing about these challenges? Do we have these issues on the floor of the Senate? Not that I can see.

It won't be very long--in fact, it is happening now--that we have people who are now paying for prescription drug coverage, a monthly premium, but who no longer get prescription drug coverage because of what has been legislatively defined as a doughnut hole. In other words, they lose coverage for a significant period of time, but they should still pay the premiums. Maybe we should have that on the floor of the Senate and fix that.

We could fix that easily. There is a study that shows we could fix that by simply removing the perverse provision in that act that prohibits the Federal Government from negotiating lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. We could fix that so-called doughnut hole, or fix the problem of people having no health care prescription drug coverage through Medicare at the same time they are required every month to pay premiums. Would that be an advisable thing to do? I think it would.

We are going to also be debating the death tax. I heard on the opening portion of the Senate that the death tax is

going to be repealed. It may be a surprise to those who are still alive, but there is no death tax. There is no death tax. The term ``death tax'' is a creation of a pollster who took this nugget of a creation, took it to a political party and said: I have something really interesting, and it polls off the charts. Tell people there is a death tax and come out for its repeal.

There is no death tax. There is a tax on inherited wealth. When the husband or wife dies, the other spouse owns everything with no tax consequences at all. There is a 100-percent exemption. So for the first spouse there must be a universal exemption. In addition to that, there is now a $2 million exemption on an estate for one spouse. In addition to that, the majority party says it is urgent that we get rid of the so-called death tax, the bulk of which would help those who are the wealthiest Americans.

So if Donald Trump--just to use a name because he likes having his name used on everything--if Donald Trump were to die, God forbid, at some point when he dies, a substantial portion of his estate will have been created through the appreciation of his assets--and has not been taxed. The same would be true of most of the richest Americans.

The second richest American is Warren Buffett, quite a remarkable man from Omaha, NE. He is really special. He says: Look, if there is a class war going on, my class is winning--speaking of the wealthiest. He doesn't believe there should be a provision brought to the Senate to get rid of the estate tax. He does not believe that is fair. He does not believe it is the right thing to do.

But we are up to our necks in debt, we have massive fiscal policy budget deficits, the highest trade deficits in history, and what is the priority? The majority party, we were told this afternoon, the priority is we have to get to the Senate a provision to provide very significant tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Unbelievable.

Someone from the outside would look at that and ask: Is this a joke? Are you really serious as legislators? No wonder people take a look at this Congress and say: What are you thinking about? What on Earth do you have on your minds?

I talk about the dispirited feelings people have about this Congress. The polls are pretty clear. But I also think there is a great reservoir of hope in this country. So let me talk a little bit about the hope, the hope that maybe we can address things in the coming months that really matter to the people of this country in a way that really affects their future. I am not suggesting that which we will discuss here does not matter. I am just saying there are a whole series of things that confront us that are challenging, difficult issues.

A woman called me during my last campaign. During the campaign she was in a hospital. A friend of hers called me on her behalf. Her friend said: She is in her nineties. She has been a friend of yours and a supporter of yours. You have never met her, she never met you, but she always liked what you have done. Would you call her in the hospital? I said, of course I would.

I called the hospital and talked to this woman. She had elected to die. She had been on kidney dialysis. She said: I have lived a great life, but I decided I just don't want to continue with the kidney dialysis, so I will die here. I will be here a couple more weeks, maybe a week, and eventually--I have made this decision, I am at peace with it. I have had a great life. She said--this is about 3 weeks before the election--she said to me: Byron, before I came to the hospital, however, when I made this decision, I put up all the yard signs, put up yard signs on both sides of my property with your name on it, and then I voted absentee. She said: By the way, if there is some technical requirement that you be alive on election day, don't tell people that I am not alive.

This woman had a great spirit about wanting to be involved, even at the end of her life, wanting to be involved in this country's political system.

John F. Kennedy used to say that every mother kind of hopes her child might grow up to be President as long as they don't have to be active in politics. But politics is an honorable profession. It is the way we make decisions in America. All the American people ask of this Senate, all they ask of policymakers and decisionmakers is to focus on things that matter most. What is ahead of us? What do we do about it?

We need, in this political system, to justify the faith the American people have always had in this system. That faith is shaken now, but we need to take action to justify that faith. What do we stand for? What needs to be done? What is required to be done? What things are required to be done to put our country back on track?

There was a great little book written by Robert Fulghum, ``All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten.'' Some may have read that book, ``All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten.'' Play fair, follow the rules, don't hit, wash hands, flush--the book went on and on. ``All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten,'' I was thinking about that with respect to all we really need to know in the Senate, about the concern of the American citizens, about their future.

Let me describe our agenda more simply. Perhaps if I were to write a book like that, not so much kindergarten but all we really need to know, let me describe what I think we ought to be doing.

First of all, we ought to pay our bills. You cannot spend money you don't have on things you don't need. We are choking on debt in this country. Especially this Congress and at the White House, pay our bills. Take care of our kids. That has to do with education and health care and much more. Honor our parents, Medicare, Social Security, and other issues. Reward work. Clean up our mess. I guess that is the environment. Defend freedom.

Let me talk a little bit about a couple of these areas, all we really need to know. What about the issue of paying our bills? We have one more chapter of the same, tired book brought to the Senate. Instead of paying our bills, this chapter says we collect $20-$30 billion a year from the tax on inherited wealth. Let's not worry about the fact we are choking on debt. Let's just get rid of that tax in a way that benefits the wealthiest Americans.

We have already had a vote on the proposition of whether the transfer of a family farm or other family business ought to be taxed with an estate tax. I offered that amendment twice. Twice. And on January 1, 2003, the transfer of all family farms and all family businesses to lineal descendants or the kids who want to run them would have been permanently exempt, 3 years ago. We already had that vote, so don't raise that issue. Incidentally, the majority voted against that--twice. We had that vote and made that decision, regrettably.

The question is: Pay our bills. Are we going to do that? Are we going to keep finding ways to provide emergency appropriations for the monthly costs in Iraq and Afghanistan and other related issues and pay for none of it? The only people we ask to deal with that issue are the soldiers we send to Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't ask the American people to believe we ought to pay for it. We have been asked to provide roughly $440 billion in emergency funding, every dollar of which is borrowed from future generations.

Pay our bills. What about our kids and grandkids? Are they the ones who will pay the bills? Is that responsible? All we really need to know is the lesson, pay our bills.

How about taking care of our kids? Health care, education, poverty. We have a lot of things to work on there. We have all of these issues with respect to kids without health care, these issues about adequately funding education in this country. Is there anything more important to anyone than their children? Is there anyone here who believes they don't want to do everything they can to leave a country or leave a world that is better for their children than it was for them? Whatever is in second place to the kids is a long ways behind.

Can we manifest an agenda in the Senate that puts children first, that takes care of our children and doesn't have them pay debts we don't have the courage to pay? Can we decide their education is of the utmost importance? Can we decide there is no child that ought to show up at a hospital or a doctor's office whose medical care is a

function of how much money their parents have in their pocketbook? Can we make those decisions?

Yes, pay our bills and take care of our kids. How about those for two short lessons?

How about honor our parents? Medicare and Social Security. In the last century, people are living much longer. We went, in 100 years, from an average life expectancy of 48 years to 78 years now. Think of that. We added 30 years to the average life expectancy in this country in one century. That is pretty unbelievable. Now, that has caused some strains on Social Security and Medicare. That is not surprising. That is called success. All of the strains in Medicare and Social Security are born of success. People are living longer, better, and healthier lives.

What is the solution to that? Some say the solution to that is to privatize Social Security, take it apart. The President led an effort last year--he ran a lot of gas through Air Force One--he went all over America saying we ought to privatize Social Security.

It wasn't the first time for him. He did that in 1978, when he ran for Congress in Texas. In 1978, he said Social Security would be broke in 10 years. He was wrong then. He was wrong last year. Now at least we don't have that discussion in front of us. It does require us, from time to time, to make adjustments in Social Security or Medicare but not under the guise of taking it apart because you never liked it.

How about fair prices for prescription drugs? Maybe honoring our parents would be deciding that whether you are on Social Security or Medicare or not quite at that age, that you shouldn't have to pay the highest price in the world for prescription drugs. Maybe changing the law so that we would allow people to reimport FDA-approved drugs from other countries at a fraction of the price would be honoring our parents. Standing up for Medicare and standing up for Social Security and the values they have brought to our country, maybe that is honoring our parents.

How about rewarding work? Paying our bills, taking care of our kids, honoring our parents, how about rewarding work? This Congress four times has said we want to continue providing tax cuts to companies that close their American manufacturing plants and ship the jobs overseas. That is perverse, but that is exactly what has happened in the Senate. Four times I have offered an amendment to say let's shut down the tax break that says to an American businessman or woman: Close your American factory, fire your workers, and move the jobs overseas, you get a big, fat $1.2 billion-a-year tax break. And we can't close it.

We have lost nearly 3 million jobs in the last 4 or 5 years, shipped overseas. Alan Blinder, a respected former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, a mainstream economist, says all U.S. manufacturing jobs, some 14 million, are at risk to outsourcing. But more than that, we have a total of 42 to 56 million jobs, including service jobs, that are susceptible to being outsourced to other countries--China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and others--and even those who do not leave our country in search of 33 cents-an-hour labor by kids or others who don't have rights, even those who don't leave will see a lesser standard of living or depressed wages because they will be in competition with people in other parts of the world who will work for far less.

So the question for our workers is: Who is going to stand up for them? Does it matter that we fought for a century for the things that matter to them--the right to organize, the right to work in a safe work plant, child labor laws, a minimum wage, decent health care, decent retirement programs? Does it matter to them that we now have a circumstance where we say to American companies: Here is the green light to search for cheap labor elsewhere. You can get rid of all the things that are troublesome to you.

How about cleaning up our mess? Would that be a value that would make some sense? Dare we talk about the environment, about our mess with respect to energy? We suck 84 million barrels a day out of this Earth. We put straws in the Earth called drilling rigs. We suck 84 million barrels a day out of the Earth of oil, and we in this little country of the United States use one-fourth of it. Twenty-one million barrels a day of that oil comes from Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Kuwait, Venezuela and other areas of the world that are troubled. Does it make sense for us to be that dependent on those troubled areas of the world? Should we care about the environmental consequences of energy? Should we care about the dependence on energy, all of those issues? The answer is: Yes, clean up our mess. What about defend freedom? There are a lot of ways to defend freedom. We have troops in harm's way today that defend our freedom. They don't ask questions. They put on a uniform and go. Part of defending freedom is also keeping our promise to veterans. Those who come home, those who come home losing an leg or arm and go through the system at Bethesda or Walter Reed, they are still soldiers, but then, ultimately, when they are released, what happens is they become veterans. Is the money made available by this Chamber to provide for veterans health care sufficient? Will we continue to be a billion and a half dollars short because we have other priorities?

Defending freedom is a lot of things. It is about honoring soldiers, especially honoring soldiers. It is about keeping our promise to veterans. Defending freedom is not about wiretapping the American people. Defending freedom is a lot of things. It is important. It also has to be part of any agenda that we describe. There are a lot of freedoms that I am proud are a part of our political system--women's rights, workers rights, civil rights.

The decision of this Congress to decide what we want to work on is one that will be evaluated by the American people. What do they want us to work on? I said when I started, I don't suggest that the issue of gay marriage is an irrelevant issue or unimportant. I do suggest that we have dealt with that issue in the Defense of Marriage Act. We did it in 1996. I also believe the reason it is on the floor today, relative to all the other things that I have described, all the other things that we should be tackling--paying our bills, taking care of our kids, honoring our parents, rewarding work, cleaning up our mess, defending freedom, all of those issues--the reason this issue is on the floor is about November. That will be true for some long while now.

The American people will have a chance to evaluate that. Interestingly enough, when that Constitution says, ``We the people,'' it means the power of one. For the American people, it comes down to the power of one, one person casting one vote on one day. All of the power, all of the political power in America exists right there. They have the chance to describe what they want for this country, what their hopes and dreams are. There is a town square still, and in that town square there needs to be a discussion, a conversation in America about the glue that keeps this country together. What is this country? What kind of glue exists that keeps Americans together as Americans, talking in the town square about how to shape the country, how to preserve and protect it?

What we have done and where we have been is extraordinary. This country was born of the blood of patriots, not people given to be worried about themselves. They gave everything of themselves. This country survived a Civil War. We beat back the forces of Nazism and imperial soldiers of Japan. We survived the depression. We learned how to fly airplanes. We left the ground and flew around the world. We built rockets. We walked on the moon. We cured smallpox and polio. We created the telephone and television and computer. What we have done is breathtaking and quite extraordinary. We did that because our country has always been interested in the challenge, in what is ahead, what is around the corner.

Thomas Wolfe, in his book ``You Can't Go Home Again,'' talked about the American people being filled with an almost quenchless hope, an indestructible belief, a boundless optimism that somehow, some way, something good was about to happen. That still exists in the soul of this country. Something good is about to happen. My hope is that those of us who work in this body will not be so quick to believe that that something good is the need to amend the Constitution this week, next week, next month, and the month after.

Not too long ago in a congressional session, we had something like 63 different proposals filed to amend the basic framework of our democracy. We have amended it 17 times in 200 years, one of which was to prohibit alcohol. That got repealed. We have amended the Constitution rarely. Yet we have people who come routinely to the floor of the Senate to say: Change the Constitution. I see very few people here who look like George Washington or Franklin or Mason or Madison or Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention. He was abroad at the time.

By suggesting I don't see people who look like them, I don't suggest that people here aren't good-looking people. I am saying go back and read what they did, understand what they constructed. Understand what exists in the Constitution and why. Understand what the first 10 amendments intended to be for this country. Then ask yourself how prepared are you to decide we should add several more amendments to the Constitution, maybe two this week and next week? How about three or four more? There are others filed. Is the Constitution a rough draft? Is the work of Franklin and Madison and Mason and Washington a rough draft for those who believe that the mood of the moment is to continue to amend and amend?

I know there are those who think this is similar to passing a law. It is not. It is whatever the emotion of the moment is ought to persuade us to do that. That is not the case either.

A couple weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia and there is a place called the Constitutional Center. All 55 men who wrote the Constitution are memorialized in statue in a room, and they are life size, made to their exact measurements. It is pretty remarkable to walk among them and then to think about what they created. They were an extraordinary group. I doubt very much whether such a group exists today. Perhaps it was divine providence that gave us at that moment that talent to create that Constitution that has created this country. I have been fairly well criticized for a long while for not being willing or anxious to amend the U.S. States Constitution unless it was the last resort, the only resort to respond to something that urgent. I have not found that in most cases and have in most cases opposed those who wish to amend the Constitution.

I don't intend to cast aspersions on those who believe this is an important issue. I believe strongly this is the wrong issue to be on the floor of the Senate today. I believe strongly there are so many other issues that we ought to be dealing with today. But having said all that, we will, in one way or another, decide as the Senate about these two constitutional amendments and about the question of whether our country should continue to have a tax on inherited wealth. We will get through this. My hope is that at least some of the suggestions I have made about paying our bills, about taking care of our kids, honoring our parents, cleaning up our mess and doing the things that defend freedom and honor work, maybe those are the things we might get to soon. I hope so. In that case, I think the American people could take some hope and believe that Congress has sunk its teeth into that which matters a great deal to our future.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4095 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. The legislation that has come to the floor of the Senate dealing with immigration is legislation that not only describes how we might deal with 11 million to 12 million people who are here illegally in this country, it also says in addition that we need to bring more people into the country who now live outside of our country.

I have on other occasions come to the floor of the Senate and said that I don't think it makes a great deal of sense to have what is called a guest worker program which brings additional millions of people into the country who now live outside of America. Why don't I think that is a good thing to do? Because I think the American workers are under a great deal of stress. They see in this country that there are substantial numbers of jobs being outsourced to China, outsourced to Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other countries. And as jobs are being outsourced in search of cheaper labor and American workers are having trouble hanging on to their jobs or finding jobs or continuing to keep their jobs, even as that is the case, we now see a desire to import jobs--cheap labor--through the back door. That is what this guest worker program is.

This guest worker program, by the way, is a program which purchases the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Export good American jobs overseas; import cheap labor through the back door. That is what this is all about.

I offered an amendment to strip the guest worker program out. I lost. I understand that. I didn't prevail. Many Senators here voted in a way that says we need more people to come into this country who normally would be illegal, but we will simply describe them as legal under a guest worker program. Well, when we had the vote on my amendment to strip the guest worker program, the Washington Post the next day observed that many of my colleagues many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle came to the floor intending to vote for my amendment but then switched their vote out of deference to the President who just the evening before had expressed support for a guest worker program.

I understand the Senate has made a decision about this, but I suggest with this amendment that at least with the guest worker program, the guest worker proposal, that we have a sunset after 5 years. The sunset provision which I offer with this amendment would give Congress a chance to examine the impact of the so-called guest workers--or low- wage replacement workers, as I would call them--what impact they will have on U.S. jobs and wages. It ought not be in debate.

I quoted a Harvard professor who did a study that shows the impact of these illegal immigrants, or in this case legal, low wage immigrants who now live outside of our country whom this bill will allow to come into our country.

We now know the impact it will have on American workers. It drives down American wages. It makes it more difficult for American workers. We know that is the case.

Title IV of the bill, which is the guest worker title, calls on the Census Bureau to prepare a study of the impact of guest workers on U.S. jobs and wages. I suggest that not just gather dust. I suggest a study be done and Congress take a good look at the impact and, at the 5-year mark, there will have been 1 million guest workers coming into our country. I suggest the underlying bill be changed at this 5-year point to sunset the guest worker provision so Congress can take a look at it and see what this has done to American workers.

I heard all of this discussion in this Chamber now for 2 weeks about immigration: immigration, immigrants, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants--all about immigration. Where is the discussion about the American worker?

Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a mainstream economist, says this. He says here is what the American worker faces. He says there are between 42 million and 56 million American jobs that are subject to outsourcing by America's corporations; 42 million to 56 million American jobs potentially could be sent to China or Indonesia or elsewhere in search of cheaper wages. He says, in his article in Foreign Affairs, not all of those jobs will be outsourced. He understands that. But all of the workers in jobs in that category that are subject to outsourcing are going to be competing against people who live elsewhere, who will accept much, much lower wages, and therefore it puts downward pressure on wages. That is a fact.

Let me describe some of the things that we have decided to sunset so we can take a new look at it. After 5 years, if we sunset the guest worker program to evaluate what impact it has had on American workers, we would be sunsetting it as we have done with provisions in the farm bill, the energy bill, the PATRIOT Act, the bankruptcy reform bill, the intelligence reform bill, the Trade Promotion Authority Act. Sunset it and take a look in 4 years, 5 years, 6 years; take a new look.

I propose with this amendment we sunset the so-called guest worker provision. Let me say again I understand those who have put this legislation together say this legislation has to hang together. If you come to the floor of the Senate and you pull a loose thread, it is like a cheap suit: If you pull a loose thread, the arm falls off and the whole thing collapses. That is always the work of the people who bring something to the floor: It can't be changed.

If it is changed, it destroys the compromise. Shame on those who want to change it.

I am pulling a loose thread here and the arm is not going to fall out. I am saying maybe just once we would have somebody on the floor of the Senate talking about the plight of the American worker. Who are they competing against? What is happening to their wages? I will tell you what is happening. On average, wages decreased $1,700 a year because of back-door immigration, cheap labor through the back door while they export good jobs through the front door. Send the jobs to China and bring in cheap labor through the back door--that is what the construct is. That is what is happening and there is no discussion about what is happening to the American worker.

I understand we have an immigration problem. My feeling is you ought to address it, the first step, with securing America's borders. When you have done that, the second step then is to thoughtfully understand what you need to do with all of those who are here illegally. But there ought not be a third step. If 11 or 12 million people who have come here illegally, if this Congress decides they are legal, why is it we need 400,000 or 200,000 of the people who live outside of our country, who are not here, to come as guest workers, above the H-2A, H-2B, and all the other legal mechanisms by which people can come to this country?

My understanding is the numbers last year show this: 1.1 million people tried to come into this country and were stopped, prevented, most on the southern border; 1.1 million people were stopped at the southern border and turned back. Close to three-quarters of a million, in most cases through the southern border, got to this country illegally and became a part of the 11 or 12 million people here illegally. And 175,000 people came to the southern border and came into this country legally because there are many ways in which to do that.

That is the process by which we deal with the immigration issue. We have a lot of people who want to come in. We stop some, don't stop many, and now the proposition is we should tighten up the border, we should allow guest workers, and we should provide legal status for 11 or 12 million who are here.

I believe we ought to tighten the border, but we ought to do it in a way that makes sense, in a way that really is something that will work. I was here in 1986. All of the discussion we hear now we heard in 1986. None of it worked. I also believe we ought to deal sensibly with the 11 or 12 million people who are already here.

I don't support those who say round them up and throw them out. It is not something we should do or can do. We can't do that, frankly. But I don't understand for a minute why we decide that it is not enough; we should also suggest there are others who do not yet live in this country, don't come to this country, who have not been here, who live elsewhere, who should be invited in as guest workers.

It seems to me the underlying proposition of this bill is to make guest workers out of 11 or 12 million people. We need more? At a time when the American worker is under such siege by competition from companies that decide they want to access 33-cent-an-hour labor in China and take American jobs and shift them to China and then, by the way, the jobs they don't ship overseas they want to replace with low wage workers coming through the back door?

Just once I would like to hear some discussion about the plight of the American worker.

I understand immigration is an important issue. I don't denigrate those who come to the floor who have spent a great deal of time responding to it. My colleague from Arizona is on the floor. He likely will speak against my amendment. I am great friends with him. I have great respect for him. We just have a disagreement on this, as I do with my friend from Pennsylvania.

All I ask is this. We have a very serious problem with jobs in this country, jobs for American workers, people at the bottom of the economic ladder who are struggling, trying to figure out, How do I make enough money to provide for my family? How do I make a salary that is worthy? How do I provide for my family's health care when they are stripping health care benefits? How do I have a pension when they are stripping pension benefits away? How do I keep my job when they are sending my job to China and Indonesia and Bangladesh? How do I do that? At the same time this Senate is talking about issues other than the plight of the American worker. I just wish we could have a mix and a balance of discussions about both.

Yes, immigration is important. Yes, we ought to be sensitive in how we deal with it and thoughtful in how we deal with it. But we also ought to understand our first obligation, our first opportunity here in this Chamber is to speak up and stand up for the plight and the interests of the American workers who are having a pretty tough time.

This amendment is very simple. I suggest that we sunset this guestworker program after 5 years. A million guest workers will have been allowed in after 5 years. All of us know it will be far more than a million, but a million under the 200,000 a year will have been allowed in after 5 years. Let's stop, let's take stock, let's evaluate and understand what the consequences are of this for the American workers. Let's do that.

If we do it for the farm bill, the energy bill, the PATRIOT Act, the bankruptcy bill, the intelligence bill, the trade promotion bill, why would we not do it here? Stop and take stock on behalf of American workers and evaluate what has all of this meant? What has been the consequence for American families at the bottom of the economic ladder, struggling to make a living?

I hope my colleagues will support sunsetting this legislation, the guest worker provision of this legislation, at the end of 5 years so the Senate can take a new look and evaluate what the consequences have been.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, obviously the opposition has more time. If they are prepared to yield, I will just make some observations for a couple of minutes.

Let me say that I always find it difficult to disagree with my friend. And I sort of have the code here in the Senate over the years. If they say you are

respected, that means they think they are going to beat you by 5 votes. If they say you are articulate, they think they are going to beat you by 10 votes. If they say you are passionate, they think they are going to clobber you by 20 votes.

I understand the language here a little bit.

Let me say this: What if this were a proposal for guest Senators. There wouldn't be one vote for it, would there? But there are no guest Senators. No one here is going to have their job threatened by all of this. This is about guest workers.

My colleague says we can't shut down the border, that there is going to be illegal immigration. Let us be real about this. So the proposition of being real is, let us label those who are going to be illegal ``legal.'' That is the way to deal with this. If we can't shut down the border, they are going to come across anyway, so let us call them ``legal.'' They won't have to call them ``illegal.'' I don't understand that at all.

There are 11 million to 12 million people who are here illegally who this bill is going to say we will give a legal approach to, or an approach to establish legality, and that is not enough. That is not enough. We want to bring more through the book door? I don't think so.

I am not the only one who cares about American workers. I tell you, very few are talking about the impact on American workers. That ought not be some theory. We understand the impact on American workers, those who are struggling to make ends meet, to get a decent salary, to have health care, to have retirement programs and care for their kids. They are wondering about their jobs. The good jobs are being shipped out the front door and the other jobs are being replaced through the back door.

I ask the question: What is happening to the American worker? Take a good look. I ask all my colleagues to take a good look at what is happening to the American worker today in this country.

Alan Binder, a former Vice Chair of the Fed, a mainstream economist, said there are 42 million to 56 million American jobs subject to outsourcing. Not all will go, but all of them are eligible to go and will be competing against people who work elsewhere for 33 cents an hour.

That is a fact. That is not being discussed in this discussion about immigration.

What is the impact on the American worker? And what excuse do we have for adding an additional 11 million to 12 million people and making them legal by this to say we need more, those who live outside this country called guest workers, to come in?

One excuse we are told is we can't keep them out anyway, so let us call them ``legal.'' I don't think that is the way to deal with this. I don't support that.

This is baby step in the right direction, not a big step. At least with this guest worker program, let's sunset it after 5 years, take a look at what it means to the American worker, what it means to this country, what it means to wages and jobs for the American worker. Let's do that after 5 years. This is a baby step. Let's vote for this baby step in the right direction.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if I might inquire, I thought you were intending to yield back the time. That was the proposition under which I decided to speak. I said that if the other side was prepared to yield back the time, then I will use my time.

Mr. President, normally the Member who offered the amendment would close. That was my assumption, to close the debate on my amendment.

If the Senator wishes to speak, proceed. My understanding was we were going to yield back the time.

Of course.

Mr. President, let me point out that to the 11 million to 12 million people who have come to this country illegally, this sunset issue has nothing to do with those folks. They are here.

I have not come to the floor suggesting that we interrupt the bill with respect to their plans for these folks. I have said in addition to the 11 million to 12 million, the suggestion that we need to bring in more who now live outside the country makes no sense to me. Even as jobs are moving out the front door of this country--nearly 4 million of them have gone in the last 5 years--you can hardly make a strong case that we ought to bring jobs in the back door, and particularly low-wage jobs.

I know that there are not many of us here who spend our days trying to figure out how you get a job at the bottom of the economic ladder, or how do you make ends meet on a minimum wage that hasn't been raised for nearly 9 years, or how you provide for your family at the bottom of the economic ladder and have health care being stripped away and no retirement program. Not many of us experience that. But that is what a lot of American workers are experiencing every single day.

This provision deals only with the issue of the extra guest workers who do not now live here but who this bill says we should bring here because we need them to be here to do those jobs. The fact is these jobs ought to go to people in this country who are struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder. We ought to be fair to those American workers.

I am not anti-immigrant. That is not my point. We have a lot of them in this country, and they enrich and nourish this country. But first and foremost our responsibility is to stand up for the American workers who are struggling.

If Members do not believe they are struggling, look at the data. Look at what is happening in their lives. Look at the jobs that are gone. Go to Shenzhen, China, and look at the American jobs that now exist there. They are paid 33 cents an hour, 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. If American workers were asked to compete with that, they can't.

My point is very simple. Let's stand up for the American worker. Let's sunset this guest worker provision. Let's do the right thing.

I move to reconsider the vote and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, today my colleague Senator Snowe and I are introducing the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

Internet freedom, known as net neutrality, is one of the most important issues facing us as the telecommunications landscape continues to change, and frankly, how this issue is resolved could determine whether our Nation continues to be a world leader in the area of innovation and technology.

Consumers, businesses, and the very marketplace of ideas have benefited from the historically open nature of the Internet.

From the largest of corporations to the person working alone in a garage, all have had the ability to offer their content, services, and applications over the Internet and to reach consumers, because of this open structure of the Internet and the existence of net neutrality nondiscrimination rules.

I think it is important to point the wide variety of groups that have called for the preservation of strong net neutrality protections: groups as diverse as Consumers Union, AARP, Microsoft, Amazon, Gun Owners of America, and the National Religious Broadcasters, and over 150 organizations or companies so far have weighed in on this important issue.

The Internet, and the broadband network operators that bring the Internet to businesses and consumers, have enabled even the most rural town in my State of North Dakota to be connected to the rest of the world, and this connection has brought economic opportunities, and advances in health and education that could otherwise not have been possible.

Now, however, the open nature of the Internet is at risk. It is at risk because of actions by the Federal Communications Commission, and because of the lack of competition in the broadband market.

Non-discrimination rules that existed for years on broadband providers have been removed, leaving only the marketplace to act as a check. The problem is, however, that the broadband marketplace is highly concentrated--98 percent of consumers get their broadband from either cable modem or DSL, and up to 50 percent of consumers can only get their broadband from one broadband provider.

Thus, the situation is not a marketplace of players on an equal footing. Broadband network operators have substantial market power and the incentive to use it. There have been public statements by some of their CEOs that have made clear that they intend to use that leverage to exact payments from content providers and to operate as gatekeepers.

These broadband network operators have become more than just the pipe that carries content, services, and applications to a consumer; they now are in the business of these content, services and applications as well. Thus, they have the leverage, and the incentive to favor their own services over competition.

Until now the Internet has been driven by consumers and innovators, which have in turn, encouraged broadband deployment.

Consumers pay for their Internet connection, and expect that they can go anywhere they lawfully want to on the Internet.

But without maintaining the longstanding nondiscrimination rules that have been in place for decades, the Internet could go from being driven by consumers and innovators to bring dictated by network operators.

What will be the impact on the next great application or service over the Internet if the very first thing the next start-up has to do is work out an agreement with the broadband provider?

What will be the impact on consumers if their choices are artificially limited by their broadband providers as to what VOIP or video service they can get?

I agree that broadband network operators are investing millions of dollars in building the next generation of infrastructure, and I commend them for that. Under our bill they will still be able to be compensated for their investments, as they are now, by charging for their broadband connections.

But they should not be able to put up additional tolls on the Internet, or erect barricades to competition that will change the nature of the Internet as we know it.

Our bill will preserve the freedom and the openness of the Internet that we have come to take for granted, but that is now at risk.

I ask my colleagues to support this legislation that I introduce today with Senator Snowe.

Mr. President, today my colleague Senator Snowe and I are introducing the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.

Internet freedom, known as net neutrality, is one of the most important issues facing us as the telecommunications landscape continues to change, and frankly, how this issue is resolved could determine whether our Nation continues to be a world leader in the area of innovation and technology.

Consumers, businesses, and the very marketplace of ideas have benefited from the historically open nature of the Internet.

From the largest of corporations to the person working alone in a garage, all have had the ability to offer their content, services, and applications over the Internet and to reach consumers, because of this open structure of the Internet and the existence of net neutrality nondiscrimination rules.

I think it is important to point the wide variety of groups that have called for the preservation of strong net neutrality protections: groups as diverse as Consumers Union, AARP, Microsoft, Amazon, Gun Owners of America, and the National Religious Broadcasters, and over 150 organizations or companies so far have weighed in on this important issue.

The Internet, and the broadband network operators that bring the Internet to businesses and consumers, have enabled even the most rural town in my State of North Dakota to be connected to the rest of the world, and this connection has brought economic opportunities, and advances in health and education that could otherwise not have been possible.

Now, however, the open nature of the Internet is at risk. It is at risk because of actions by the Federal Communications Commission, and because of the lack of competition in the broadband market.

Non-discrimination rules that existed for years on broadband providers have been removed, leaving only the marketplace to act as a check. The problem is, however, that the broadband marketplace is highly concentrated--98 percent of consumers get their broadband from either cable modem or DSL, and up to 50 percent of consumers can only get their broadband from one broadband provider.

Thus, the situation is not a marketplace of players on an equal footing. Broadband network operators have substantial market power and the incentive to use it. There have been public statements by some of their CEOs that have made clear that they intend to use that leverage to exact payments from content providers and to operate as gatekeepers.

These broadband network operators have become more than just the pipe that carries content, services, and applications to a consumer; they now are in the business of these content, services and applications as well. Thus, they have the leverage, and the incentive to favor their own services over competition.

Until now the Internet has been driven by consumers and innovators, which have in turn, encouraged broadband deployment.

Consumers pay for their Internet connection, and expect that they can go anywhere they lawfully want to on the Internet.

But without maintaining the longstanding nondiscrimination rules that have been in place for decades, the Internet could go from being driven by consumers and innovators to bring dictated by network operators.

What will be the impact on the next great application or service over the Internet if the very first thing the next start-up has to do is work out an agreement with the broadband provider?

What will be the impact on consumers if their choices are artificially limited by their broadband providers as to what VOIP or video service they can get?

I agree that broadband network operators are investing millions of dollars in building the next generation of infrastructure, and I commend them for that. Under our bill they will still be able to be compensated for their investments, as they are now, by charging for their broadband connections.

But they should not be able to put up additional tolls on the Internet, or erect barricades to competition that will change the nature of the Internet as we know it.

Our bill will preserve the freedom and the openness of the Internet that we have come to take for granted, but that is now at risk.

I ask my colleagues to support this legislation that I introduce today with Senator Snowe.

Mr. President, the discussion this morning is once again on a subject called guest workers. I don't happen to think we ought to have a guest worker provision in this legislation. The discussion now is, if it exists in the legislation, what are the conditions under which guest workers can petition for citizenship, and so on and so forth. I hope we are not done with the question of whether there should be so-called guest workers or, as some call it, future flow, the soft- sounding words. They could call it tourism for all that matters.

What this is about is grafting onto this bill to deal with the question of illegal immigrants coming into this country--because we have quotas, and those who come in illegally are a pretty serious problem, the 11 million or 12 million people we think are here illegally--this is grafting onto this bill that deals with illegal immigration a proposal that people who live outside this country and have not come to this country before now are to come into this country as so-called guest workers or future flow. What are those people going to do? They are going to come into this country and they are going to work. It is as if the 11 million or 12 million are not enough, we need more.

The original proposition by the President was an unlimited number. The original proposition in the bill brought to the floor of the Senate was 400,000 a year, plus a 20-percent escalator. I tried to knock that out, and my amendment got clobbered, so I was unsuccessful. My colleague from New Mexico took the 400,000 down to 200,000. Actually, the substitute bill took it down to 325,000, then down to 200,000. However you calculate it, we are talking about millions of people who do not live in this country, who live outside of this country, who will come into this country for the purpose of taking jobs.

Here is the strategy. The strategy in the country these days, and it is a strategy embraced on the floor of this Chamber, is to export good jobs and import cheap labor. I don't hear any discussion on the floor of this Senate about American workers--none. You can go to the newspapers and see a discussion. You can see the headlines about American workers who are losing their jobs because their employers are moving the jobs to China or Bangladesh or Indonesia or Sri Lanka; and yes, some of those Americans are finding other jobs, and the headlines also tell us those jobs pay less than the jobs we used to have. We lost 3 million to 4 million jobs in just the last 4 or 5 years.

Alan Blinder, a very respectable mainstream economist, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has just written a piece and said this: This issue of exporting American jobs even as there is this urge to import cheap labor--he said this about exporting American jobs--he said there are 42 to 54 million American jobs subject to offshoring.

He said 41 to 54 million American jobs are subject to being moved out of this country in search of cheaper labor--at 33 cents an hour in China, perhaps Indonesia, Sri Lanka, wherever they would move to. He said that not all of the 40 million to 50 million jobs will leave this country by employers, not all will be moved out of this country by employers, but even those who stay are subject to the competition of lower wages abroad. Therefore, there will be lower wages, less health care, less benefits, and less retirement benefits.

That future for the American worker on one side, and on the other side we have this urge to import cheap labor.

Where does that urge come from? My understanding is the price the Chamber of Commerce requires to support this bill is that there be additional guest workers attached to it.

What is the purpose of that? That is the purpose of bringing in the back door folks who are willing to assume the bottom-end jobs.

The President and others say these are jobs the American people will not take. I don't think that is the case at all. They may not want to take them at current wages, at the bottom of the economic scale. We haven't changed the minimum wage for nearly 9 years. This Congress will not change the minimum wage. The President doesn't support it. If we change the minimum wage and perhaps pay what the jobs are worth at the lower economic level, at the bottom of the economic ladder, perhaps then we wouldn't need to import cheap labor. This is about importing cheap labor on the back side. That is what guest workers is all about. I know they call it ``future flow'' and guest workers. It is not about making 11 million to 12 million people legal

who are already here illegally. But more needs to be done. Allowing people who would normally be illegal and stamping them as ``legal'' is kind of a ``let's pretend'' approach.

I understand the Senate has already voted on my amendment, and I lost pretty handily, as a matter of fact. But I think there is more to do on this. The bill is still open for amendment. For example, we have a so- called guest worker provision which says let's pretend that illegal immigration is legal immigration. Should we have that provision that lasts forever and is permanent, or should we sunset it after a few years and have a real honest study by people who might evaluate how many Americans are losing their jobs as a result of this back door, cheap labor coming as replacement workers?

How many Americans are losing their jobs? I see very little discussion on the floor of this Senate in this debate about immigration which, after all, is all about jobs, among other things. I see very little discussion and Members standing up on the floor of the Senate saying: Let us wonder what this means to American workers. What does it mean to the steel worker? What does it mean to the punch press operator, to the fabricator or how about the farmer? What does it mean to manufacturing? Very few people are talking about American workers. It is all about immigration and how many additional guest workers we can bring into this country under this piece of legislation.

My understanding is that we will be on this bill for another week. That will give us time to revisit this so-called guest worker provision and see if we can write a piece of legislation--yes--which deals sensitively, without diminishing the dignity and worth of others who have been here some long while. Some have been here for 25 years. Some immigrants came here many years ago. They have children and grandchildren here. I don't want to, in any way, diminish their worth or their dignity or their value. We should deal with them in a way that is sensitive.

I don't think this Senate should jump on the notion advanced by business interests and the Chamber and others that we don't have enough cheap labor in this country, and we need to bring more through the back door as we are exporting good jobs abroad.

You talk about a recipe for economic trouble ahead, probably not for the people who wear blue suits in the morning and wear neckties all day and have jobs such as Senators and Congressmen. I do not know of anybody in this Chamber who has lost a job because their job was outsourced. Nobody here has lost their job because their job has been outsourced. It is other folks--folks working on the manufacturing line someplace, and they are called up one day and are told: You know what, our entire company is leaving. We are going to China because you can produce an Etch A Sketch in China for much less money. But the jobs have gone to China. Etch A Sketch is one example of hundreds of examples of jobs that go to China.

Those are the folks who pay the price. Those are the folks who have the burden of this sort of new economy. The ``world is flat'' economy-- move American jobs to China. The other folks who stay here, the folks who work at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, struggling to advance and pay their bills and take care of their families, they are now told: By the way, we also need to not just export jobs, but we need to import cheap labor.

I think is a recipe for disaster for this country. I don't think it works.

Our country became a great country and a world economic power because we built a burgeoning middle class, and that middle class had good jobs that paid well. There is no social program in this country as important as the good job that pays well, which allows people to work and take care of their families. There is no social program as important as that. These good jobs are shrinking away. You can go through the entire list, industry after industry, telling workers: We are going to move your job elsewhere, and we are going to shrink the jobs that remain here to $8 or $10 an hour. And by the way, what we would like to do is bring people through the back door whom we might be able to employ for $6 or $7 an hour.

That is the construct which is occurring throughout the country today, and I think it is fundamentally wrong.

My hope is we continue these discussions about guest workers. We will have other opportunities to offer amendments. I will have some, and perhaps we can get back to where we should be and that is dealing with the central question of our country's border; protect us first against terrorism; and, second, to enforce the quotas we have that allow people to come into this country legally. We have quotas with which we accomplish that. Seal this country's border so we have border protection and an orderly flow of people in and out of this country; and, second, enforce standards against employers that routinely and knowingly hire illegal workers.

I was here when we passed Simpson-Mazzoli. In fact, I went back and reread some of the debate on the floor of the Senate and House.

What was said was we are fixing immigration. Back then, there really was amnesty. Amnesty was given to a good number of millions of illegal immigrants. We said to employers: Don't you dare hire illegal workers. If people come into this country illegally to take Americans' jobs, don't you dare hire them. If you do, you will be subject to fines and penalties that are significant.

Guess what. There has been no enforcement at all. Last year, one company was subject to enforcement action in the entire United States of America; the year before, three companies in the entire United States. The message implies Katy bar the door; hire illegals if you like; pay substandard wages because they are illegal; don't worry, nobody is going to look; nobody is going to fine you; and nobody is going to enforce the law.

That is why this entire thing has failed. Twenty years later, we have the same language. You can change the names and it is the same language--going to get tough, going to fix this issue.

The fact is, if we don't decide, first, to secure our borders and, second, to have real sanctions against those who want to hire illegal immigrants for substandard wages, this will not work. All we are doing is playing let's pretend. We play that often around here. It is not going to work.

What we ought to do is stare truth in the eye on this issue and decide that we are going to do what is necessary to evaluate what the immigration issue is, how to fix it and go about the business of doing it. Instead, there is all this energy to see not only how we deal with the immigration issue but how we add a new guest worker program to bring people into this country who otherwise would be illegal and how do we bring new people into this country to take the jobs that American workers need. That doesn't make much sense to me, and it is not a proposition that I can support.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I would like to explain my reasons for my vote on the Vitter amendment No. 3963.

It is estimated that there are currently around 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. And I do not support the proposition that everyone of those 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States should be given the right to a green card and eventual citizenship.

However, there are certain cases where illegal immigrants have been here for a very long time--in some cases, for decades. Some of these people have families here and deep ties to their local communities.

The Vitter amendment would have made no exception for such cases at all. And I do think that we need some flexibility for humanitarian reasons.

For this reason, I voted against the Vitter amendment. But I would like to emphasize that I am not in favor of a broad, blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Amendment No. 4018

Mr. President, is the Senator asking an inquiry at this point? I did not hear the inquiry.

I will be laying the amendment down in just about a minute. I am reviewing one piece of it. I will be laying the amendment down in about a minute.

Mr. President, I will do that, but I will not do it at the moment. I want to perfect the amendment and begin discussions, see how many on my side and perhaps your side wish to speak on it before we would make an agreement with respect to the time.

I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I have offered an amendment. I will describe very briefly what it does. It essentially strikes the guest worker provision, as it is now known. Guest worker is described in other ways--future flow, guest worker. It strikes that provision, but it does it in a way that would not interrupt the underlying bill's decision to have those who are here for 2 to 5 years to step outside this country and step back in. It would not affect those folks, but it would prevent the guest worker provision from being operative in a way that would allow those who are now living outside of our country, who are not in this country, living outside of the country, to come in in future years under this guest worker provision.

The guest worker, future flow--all these titles that are used by the President and by people in the Senate, it is kind of like Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. These are wonderful-sounding terms--future flow. I didn't know what that was until I learned or heard some of the descriptions of future flow. What that means is we are going to provide a circumstance where we try to get control of immigration but at the same time allow others who are now outside of our country to come into our country under a guest worker provision.

Let me describe the circumstances, especially on the southern border, for the moment. Last year, we believe there were 1.1 to 1.2 million people who tried to come into this country but were apprehended and stopped and prevented from coming in illegally. We also believe that in addition to the 1.1 million or so who were stopped and not allowed to come into this country illegally, there were another probably three- quarters of a million people who came illegally across the southern border.

In addition to that, about 175,000 people came in legally across the southern border--those who had children here under the quotas or other circumstances and came into our country legally. So 1.1 million were apprehended and stopped, about three-quarters of a million came illegally, and about another 175,000 came legally into this country.

We are at a time where, if you read the paper every single day, what you see is the new corporate economic strategy. In fact, Tom Friedman wrote a book, ``The World Is Flat.'' Of course, the world isn't flat. That sells a lot of books, but the world isn't flat. The proposition of ``The World Is Flat'' is that there are now 1 billion to 1.5 billion people around the rest of the world

willing to work for a very small amount of money, so those who want to produce products can move those jobs now to China, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and produce for a very small amount of income. So they pay pennies: 20 cents an hour, 30 cents an hour, 40 cents an hour to produce the product. They ship the product into the United States to sell. Then they run the income through the Cayman Islands so they don't have to pay taxes.

Even while this strategy of shipping good American jobs overseas is underway by some of the largest corporate interests, those interests also want not only to ship those jobs overseas, they want to import cheap labor at home. That is the strategy: export good American jobs and import cheap labor. That is probably a good strategy for profits, I am guessing, but it is an awful strategy for this country. That is not the way we built this country. The broad middle class that burgeoned in this country in the last century happened because of the good jobs that paid good wages and had health care benefits and retirement and so on. That is what helped create a middle class in this country. And the presence of that middle class in this country, the middle-income workers in this country, has made this country something very unusual on the face of the Earth.

Now we see a new strategy. The world is flat, we are told. That flat world means you can get rid of American jobs, move them to China. I have told the stories forever, so I will not again, but Fruit of the Loom underwear, you know, the underwear with the dancing grapes telling us how wonderful Fruit of the Loom is, they are gone; Levis, they are gone; Huffy bicycles, gone; the Little Red Wagon is gone; Fig Newton cookies is now Mexican. I could tell stories forever about exporting American jobs, but the corollary to that is that is not enough. Exporting good American jobs is not enough. Now it is importing cheap labor.

Alan Blinder--no radical economist, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--Alan Blinder just wrote a piece. He said there are somewhere between 42 million and 54 million American jobs that have the potential to be outsourced. He said not all of them will be moved abroad in search of cheap wages. But, he said, even those that stay here are going to have to compete with cheaper wages, with lower wages abroad. So that is the future. That is the strategy. That is the new corporate approach--aided and abetted, I might say, by the Congress with these trade deals.

In addition to that which is threatening American workers, we have the back side coming in: illegal workers. Yes, they are illegal. When they come into this country, they are illegal if they don't come through a legal process. They come in and compete with subpar wages with American workers.

Let me just ask the question for a moment: What would happen in this country if tomorrow we had no immigration laws at all? If we said: Look, we are the United States of America. We are a great country. We say to the rest of the world: Welcome. Come here, stay here, live here, work here. Just come on, come to America. You are welcome. There are no longer any immigration laws at all.

What would be the result of that in a world in which one-half of the population lives on less than $2 a day, in a world in which one-half of the population hasn't even made a telephone call? What would be the result of our saying we no longer have any immigration laws; we invite the rest of the world to come to this country?

It is interesting. There have been polls done in other countries: How many of you would like to immigrate to the United States? It is massive numbers of people. We would be awash in people. So it is not selfish for our country to be somewhat protective of our standard of living, somewhat protective of our jobs and our interest in retaining a middle class that lives well, that has a job in order to work at a decent wage, has health care, has retirement. It is not selfish for us to do that.

There are many voices speaking for immigrants. I don't want in any way to diminish the dignity or the worth of immigrants. I come from immigrants. I assume most of the people serving in this Chamber come from immigrant parents, grandparents or great-grandparents.

I don't want in any way for this debate to inflame or in any way diminish the worth or dignity of immigrants. I don't want us to inflame passions against those who have tried to escape poverty in their own countries to come to the United States to escape misery and poverty. But we in America have a responsibility as well to our citizens, and there is precious little talk about them in this Chamber these days. We have built the strongest economy in the world. Now we talk about immigration. I don't think that we can talk about immigration without talking about American jobs, about salaries, workers' benefits, and opportunities for those who are here legally. Yes, I am talking about all the American workers. That includes Hispanic workers, African- American, Asian, Caucasian, all American workers.

I will show some charts in a few moments to discuss what is happening to them.

We have gotten a lot of people speaking up for those who are immigrants, many who have come here illegally.

Let me speak for a moment on behalf of American workers, and let me talk for a little bit about what has happened to the American workers.

We are told by the President and by others, including debate in this Chamber, that Americans don't want these jobs, so we need the illegal immigration to occur. And now we would make it legal, and now we would have additional guest workers to occur because Americans will not take these jobs.

Seven percent of the transportation workers are illegal, but 93 percent are legal.

Americans will not take those jobs?

Ninety-one percent of the jobs in manufacturing are U.S. citizens, legal workers, and 9 percent are illegal workers.

Construction: 86 percent of the people who work construction in this country are American workers, legal workers, American citizens here legally. And we are told that Americans will not take these construction jobs? I don't think so. Of course, they will.

The evidence is pretty substantial. The question is: What has been the impact on American workers of illegal immigration?

We talk about this, as I said, as if it is kind of ``Mister Rogers' Neighborhood''--it is all feel-good, easy sound bites, soft words, future flow, guest workers.

Let me talk about a study by Professor Borjas of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2004. He said the impact of immigration from 1980 to 2000--and principally we are talking about legal immigration, the impact by ethnicity of U.S. workers--has cost the average American worker $1,700 in lost wages per year.

Whom does it hurt the most? It hurts the Hispanic workers in this country, those who are here legally. It hurts the African-American workers. It hurts Asian workers. It hurts all American workers.

This is not a painless or pain-free exercise to have millions and millions of people come through the back door into this country illegally to assume jobs. It is not painless. The American people are paying the cost of that. The American workers are experiencing the problems as a result of it. The problems are lower wages.

Let me describe what has happened to income in this country. As we can see the changes in after-tax earnings by income bracket, the top 1 percent are doing well. It is the case of the top fifth. The people at bottom are hurting, with very little income increase at all.

What is happening is we have now the development of the ``haves'' and the ``have nots.'' At least a portion of that, in my judgment, a significant portion of that imbalance comes as a result of public policy in this Chamber from people who believe that as the economy works when we put something in at the top--and it is called classic trickle-down economics--put something in at the top, it filters down, trickles down, and pretty soon everybody gets a little damp. It is not true. It doesn't work.

I would like to show some additional charts about what we are dealing with.

When we talk about guest workers and future flows, let me describe it specifically with respect to the bill that is

on the floor. The bill on the floor says we have 11 million to 12 million people who have come here illegally. We are not sure how many, we need to find a status for them. And it develops three different categories for them. But it also says, in addition to all of that, there are other people living outside of our country whom we want to invite in, in the future, 325,000 a year, and over 6 years with a 20- percent escalator each year that is in this bill you are talking about the potential of 3.8 million additional people.

This piece of legislation says: By the way, let us invite another 10 million people here in 10 years.

That is the way it grows, with 325,000 and the 20-percent escalator.

Is that what we should be doing in our country? Is that the strategy that makes sense?

This country is unusual on this planet. We live here with about 6.3 billion neighbors. We circle the Sun, and in this spot on the globe there is illumination of having developed something extraordinary in the world. I have described the time when I was on a helicopter that ran out of fuel in the mountains and jungle area between Honduras and Nicaragua. We landed under power, but the red lights were on and the bells were ringing and we were not going to fly anymore. We were stuck there for some many hours until we were found. The campesinos from the mountains came to see who had landed. We had an interpreter with us. I was asking them, through this interpreter, a little bit about their lives, what they would aspire for their lives. A young woman was there with three or four children. I said: What is it you aspire for your life?

I want to come to America. I want to move to the United States.

I asked: Why?

Because that is the area of opportunity. The United States is an area of opportunity. It is jobs. It is for me and my children to have jobs in the future.

We find that virtually in every part of the world. So as a result of that, we have had to have immigration laws. Twenty years ago, we had this same problem; that is, illegal immigration overrunning this country.

It has a direct impact, as I have shown, on American workers, something not much discussed in this Chamber today. But it has a direct and a detrimental impact on American workers. That includes Hispanic workers who are here legally and have been here a long time. It diminishes their wages. But 20 years ago we had this debate.

The debate when I was serving in the House at the time was: How do you deal with immigration? The answer was simple. Senator Simpson was on the floor of the Senate, Congressman Mazzoli was in the House, and a piece of legislation passed and was signed into law called the Simpson- Mazzoli bill. There was great celebration because this was going to solve the immigration problem.

How would it solve the immigration problem and employer sanctions? The proposition was that the lure for people to come to this country is to find a job. If you shut off the jobs and you say to the employers: Don't you dare hire illegal workers, don't you dare bring people through the back door and pay them subpar wages because they are illegal. If you do that, you are going to be hit with sanctions. This Government is going to penalize you.

Guess what. Last year, I am told there was one enforcement action in all of the United States against a company that was hiring illegal workers. The year before, there were three actions in all of the United States against employers who hired illegal workers.

This Government did nothing to deal with it, nothing.

The other day in North Dakota--they are building an energy plant--I believe it was the highway patrol who picked up seven people, illegal workers. I think six were from Guatemala and one from Mexico. They drove them about an hour north to Minot, ND, to the immigration office. They processed them through the immigration office. They then drove them back to the motel near, I believe, Washburn, ND, dropped them off and said: You are now required to come to Minneapolis within the next month--they gave them a specific date--to a hearing on your case. Of course, they will never be in Minneapolis. We will never see them again. They will never show up again.

It is the process. As some call it, catch and release. You catch them, you let them go, and say: Show up later. Oh, by the way, next time they show up, they will probably be on another job site because this Government does nothing to enforce the law. Now we are told this is a three-legged stool, as if this is a furniture store. All morning I hear three-legged stool. I do not know where the stool came from. I don't know about the three legs. All I know is that you must, it seems to me--if you are going to be dealing with immigration issues--find a way to effectively reduce illegal immigration. You have to do that. You don't do that by turning a blind eye to the issue of employer sanctions.

Say you are an employer and want to bring in a string of illegal agricultural workers and pay them subpar wages, you are going to get in trouble. If you do that, you are not going to solve this problem.

In the President's address last night to the country, I didn't hear a word about that. He is going to deploy the National Guard, an overstretched National Guard. They have been on multiple deployments, in some cases, to Iraq, but no discussion about shutting off the jobs that represent the lure for illegal workers to come into this country-- not a word.

It is true that the first step to deal with the immigration issue is to enforce the prohibition on hiring illegal workers.

This issue we are discussing is a big, broad issue. It has legal immigrants coming in who are not citizens but entitled to work under the H-2A program and the H-2B program. We have workers who come in on a temporary basis dealing in agriculture. We already have processes by which people come into this country legally to work. What is being discussed is on top of all of that.

You have a bill that comes to the floor of the Senate that says: All right. Let us take the 11 million or 12 million--whatever it is--who are here illegally and separate them into three groups. One is the group that has been here less than 2 years. They have to go back. The second is the group that has been here 2 to 5 years. They have to go back, and then they can come right back in.

Third is the group that has been here longer than 5 years, and they have the capability of earned citizenship, as will the 2 to 5 million people under certain circumstances.

So that is what is in front of us.

On top of that, as if they put a big old discolored patch on an inner tube, this legislation--and by the way, in addition to dealing with that and trying to get tough on employer sanctions, something I have heard before as all of my colleagues have as well, and responding to those needs--in addition to all of that, we have decided there are not enough people coming into our country, so we want to allow more, up to 3.8 million more in the coming 6 years. These are people who do not now live here whom we want to come in to take American jobs. We are told the reason for that is there will be people attempting to get across the border anyway.

Let us at least recognize they are going to be what are called future flows.

That seems to be giving up on the issue of whether you have good border enforcement. You either have decent enforcement on the border or you don't. If you have good enforcement, why on Earth would you decide that in addition to allowing 11 million or 12 million people who are here illegally to deal with their status internally in this country and decide in addition to that we have decided that, yes, we have quotas for our country. We have immigration opportunities in H-2A and H-2B and many other areas. But on top of that, we have decided we want up to 3.8 million more to come through our doors. Why is that provision in this bill?

I am told it is in this bill because that is the price the Chamber of Commerce extracted for supporting this bill. No one has disabused my plea of that. I am told that is the basis on which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would support this piece of legislation. Why would they want up to another 3.8 million in 6 years, or far more in 10 years? Why would they want additional guest workers or future flows to come in legally on top of what is already allowed in this legislation? The answer is

simple. It goes back to the first chart I showed. It is the economic strategy and the new national world, exporting good jobs and importing cheap labor. The guest worker provisions and the future flow provisions are about importing cheap labor.

Yesterday I mentioned a man named Jim Fyler. Jim Fyler died because he was shot 54 times. He was shot 54 times because Jim Fyler believed strongly that people should have the right to collectively bargain and to organize. Jim Fyler cared deeply about coal miners and the conditions under which coal miners were working: underground, long hours, child labor, bad wages, no benefits. Jim Fyler was one of those folks who, on behalf of collective bargaining, on behalf of forming a union of coal miners, was shot 54 times.

We have gone through all of that in a century--people losing their lives fighting, battling for the right to organize, people battling for the right to work in a safe workplace. We have had the political fights for minimum wages, the fight to prevent polluting the air and water by companies producing products and dumping their chemicals into the water and the air. We have been through all of these fights.

Now the American worker is told: By the way, those fights are over. In fact, you won them for a while, but now you have lost because anyone who wants to produce can pole-vault over that and move their production to China and hire someone for 33 cents an hour, work them 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, and if American workers do not like it, tough luck: The reason we did it is because you cannot compete.

By the way, for those who still have your jobs and they are not outsourced, look behind you. In the back door, we are bringing in low wage workers. Those low wage workers will work for substantially less money than you are willing to work.

This is about low wage replacement workers, as I call them. It is not guest workers. It is not future flow. It is low wage replacement workers, 3.8 million in the coming 6 years in this bill.

My amendment does two things. One, it gets rid of this future flow guest worker. That does not mean we won't have immigration. We will. We have many other provisions in the law allowing for legal immigration, temporary workers, agricultural workers. That already exists. I eliminate the provision that is above that.

My amendment also accommodates the underlying bill, if, in fact, it passes, and will not interrupt that with respect to the 2- to 5-year people who must step out of the country before they come back into the country and then seek legal status. I have written this amendment so I don't interrupt that, either. Someone mentioned earlier that they thought this would affect that. It does not. This simply affects the piece of legislation that will allow those who never lived in this country, who now live outside of our country, and who, in this piece of legislation, will be told, in addition to all the legal ways you can come to this country, we are going to have a future flow, a guest worker provision that allows you to take American jobs. Why? Because I guess American workers are not available for those jobs or maybe it is because this same body has not increased the minimum wage for nearly 9 years. For 9 years, this body has not seen fit to increase the minimum wage. Maybe there are jobs they have trouble getting the American workers to take. Maybe it is because they have not increased the minimum wage at the bottom of the economic ladder, the bottom rung. The solution to that? Well, we will not increase wages for American workers. Let's not shore up benefits for American workers. Let's instead decide we will bring in additional guest workers from outside of our country.

I will show a chart that describes what these folks are earning. In Russia, it is 51 cents an hour in wages; 37 cents an hour in Nicaragua; 33 cents an hour in China; 33 cents an hour in Bangladesh; 30 cents an hour in Haiti; and 11 cents an hour in India. This is what we want American workers to compete with?

It is one thing to see American jobs moved to those overseas wages. I have spoken at great length and I have almost resisted the attempt to speak at greater length about these companies which have decided to avail themselves of 20-cents-an-hour labor so they can ship their product to the store shelves in Pittsburgh, Fargo, Los Angeles, and Chicago. I have almost resisted that, but I am thinking maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should discuss at some length the circumstances of moving those jobs overseas. Then, by the way, for those whose jobs have not moved, we have a surprise for you in the back end.

We now have, additionally, guest workers coming in who will work at the bottom of the economic ladder and, as the professor from Harvard has said, put downward pressure on wages in this country.

All I am asking the Senate is this: Maybe we could have some discussion, even as we talk about immigration, about the impact and the effect of this subject on American workers, on workers who are here legally. Yes, those are Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, Caucasians, everyone. Many are struggling. They lose their job and get another job at lower pay. The burgeoning middle class is slimming down because the world is flat. We are, too.

That is total rubbish, of course. The so-called flat world is a rose- colored evaluation of how corporations can simply make more money by having American jobs leave our shores and then sell their products back into our country. I am saying that in the long term, I don't think that works. I don't think that supports or creates the foundation for the sustaining of a strong, robust economy in this country that grows for everyone.

We have dangerous inequalities in this country of ours with respect to income. I have shown a couple of charts about that. We need to have some discussion about the impact on American workers with respect to these policies. That is why I have offered this amendment.

I believe the Senator from Pennsylvania wishes to speak.

I am not in a position to do that. Forty minutes a side is satisfactory. I have a number of Members who have asked for time to speak on amendments. We are trying to reach them.

I understand the Senator from Pennsylvania has an interest in efficiency and moving forward, but there are a good many jobs that depend on getting these things right. This is an important amendment. I am happy to agree to 40 minutes a side.

Will the Senator yield?

Mr. President, let me say quickly, and I appreciate the Senator's courtesy for yielding, my amendment does nothing with respect to agricultural workers. We still have the provisions in underlying law allowing for temporary workers to come in and support the agricultural needs of this country.

Mr. President, I yield up to 15 minutes to the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer.

I will yield the Senator 5 minutes.

If the Senator will yield, I intend to use my remaining time at the conclusion of the comments of the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. President, the Senator from Pennsylvania is not on the floor of the Senate. My understanding was when his side was finished, he was going to yield back his time. I will proceed on the assumption that his time is done, and I have the right to close. How much time remains?

Mr. President, this is an interesting discussion and interesting debate. A couple of points have come to mind.

I have heard now three or four people come to the floor of the Senate and say: We have worked a long time and we put together a comprehensive proposal--in fact, they credited the President for saying the proposal needs to be comprehensive--and you can't take any part of this and change it. It is like pulling a loose string on a cheap suit: pull the string, the arm falls off. You destroy the bill if you do anything that alters it.

Then they come to the floor and say this is a three-legged stool, and if you cut off one of the legs, the stool falls over. Maybe they ought to bring a four-legged stool to the floor of the Senate. If you have a bad leg, you better have another leg to balance on.

The fact is, this is not a three-legged stool or a cheap suit. It is bad policy, just bad policy.

I want to answer some of the offers made by the other side. First, this issue of guests, temporary workers. We have a guest bedroom in our home. We call it the guest bedroom because it is not used much. But when someone uses the guest bedroom, you expect they are going to be there for a short period and leave. They are friends who come and stay. If somebody were to come and stay forever in that room, I guess I wouldn't call them a guest. Yet this so-called guest provision they have stuck in this bill by saying we are going to declare illegal immigration legal for up to 3.8 million people in the next 6 years-- that is the way we will deal with illegal immigration. We will just call it legal. The so-called guest provision is people who come here, then apply for a green card, and then stay. There is nothing temporary about that. Don't call them guests. Guests, future flow--what soft- sounding words. Maybe tourists, guest tourists, future flow. But we know why they are coming. My colleagues described why they are coming. They want to work in this country.

The problem is, in all this discussion, I don't hear anybody talking about the American worker. What is the impact on the American worker?

I didn't know all of the economists just cited by my friend from Pennsylvania. They are probably very distinguished economists, probably extraordinarily well-educated economists, probably economists whose names I should know and, if so, I apologize.

Let me read this name, Paul Samuelson. I studied his textbook on economics. I actually taught his textbook in college. Professor Paul Samuelson. If you didn't learn this in Economics 101, then you should have failed. He says:

Let us underline this basic principle: An increase in the

labor supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress

wage rates.

That is exactly what has happened in this country. Now we say there are 11 to 12 million people who have come to this country illegally. I said earlier that I don't want to diminish the worth or dignity of anyone who is in this country legally or illegally. I am not interested in trying to diminish their worth or dignity. Somebody has been here 25 years, didn't come legally 25 years ago, has a child here, or two, perhaps a grandchild, they worked here, paid taxes here, I am not interested in rounding them up and moving them out of this country.

I understand some of the urges of people who have written some of this legislation. What I don't understand is this: There is no discussion about its impact on the American worker when they say: Oh, by the way, let's solve all these issues and let's, on top of all of this, add one more big arm that sticks out, and that is the so-called guest workers where we allow 3.8 million people in the next 6 years who are not here now, not working in America now, living outside of our country now, to come in and take American jobs.

What on Earth are we thinking? Can't there be some modicum of discussion about the effect on American workers?

I put this chart up earlier, and I will put it up again because this discussion relates exactly to a string of failures. I am told we are all complimenting the President for his speech last night. I don't compliment the President for his trade strategy. We have the highest trade deficit in the history of this country: every single day, 7 days a week, $2 billion in trade deficit--every single day. That means Americans jobs are going overseas. We are choking on debt.

What is the status of this trade? It is a green light for big companies to export jobs, and they are going wholesale, 3 to 4 million jobs just in the last few years. They are leaving.

By the way, Alan Blinder, a mainstream economist, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said in his recent piece: I believe in ``Foreign Affairs,'' that there are now 42 to 54 million American jobs that are potentially subject to being exported to other parts of the world because now we have 1 billion to 1.5 billion people in the rest of the world willing to work for pennies. So 42 to 54 million American jobs are subject to that kind of influence.

He says they won't all be exported, but even those who remain here will see lower wages and downward pressure on wages and benefits, health care, and retirement. That is the future on that side. Exporting good jobs.

The world is flat, we are told. The book shines from the bookstores, ``The World is Flat.'' We look with rose-colored glasses at all the American jobs now in Bangalore, now in Xinsheng, China. We say: Isn't that something?

I will tell you what is something. Those jobs used to be here supporting families. There is no social program this Senate works on that is more important than a good job that pays benefits and allows people to take care of their family. There is no social program as good as that.

We are talking about exporting good jobs, and exactly the same influence that resulted in this provision being put in this bill wants there to be imported cheap labor through the back door. That is what this guest worker provision is all about: importing cheap labor.

We are told the reason the 1986 law that was trumpeted 20 years ago, immigration reform, sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants didn't work is because there was no guest worker program. That is unbelievable to me. That is not the case at all.

This proposition is to say: You know how we will stop illegal immigration? We will just define them all as legal.

At least 325,000 plus 20 percent, that is 3.8 million in 6 years. We will define them as legal. We won't have a problem, we will just change the definition.

Let me show a couple of charts. These are people living in extraordinarily primitive conditions. They are undocumented workers. We can see where they are bunking. They were brought in, by the way, by a company to help repair in the aftermath of Katrina, a Government contract, mind you, with undocumented workers.

Let me tell you whose jobs they took. That contractor hired these folks, and all the electricians, including one Sam Smith whose house was completely destroyed in the Ninth Ward after Katrina slammed into that coast. He returned to the city because of the promise of $22-an- hour wages for qualified, experienced, long-term electricians. He and 75 people were guaranteed work for a year at that naval institution.

He was quickly disappointed. He lost his job within 3 weeks because the other contracting company brought in undocumented workers who were unqualified and were willing to work for pennies.

I am the one who exposed this situation, and not long after I exposed it, there were inspectors who went on that base. I don't know the result of it all. All I am telling you is this is going on all across this country. This is a guy who lost his home and had a job and was displaced by someone coming through the back door willing to work for pennies. It wasn't just that person, it was the employer who decided they wanted to fatten their profits by hiring, in this case, illegals.

The way to solve that is not to say: Let's make them legal. The way to solve that is to say that job ought to go to Sam who lost his home, who is a qualified electrician. He is the person who needed that job. Yet contractors bring in these undocumented workers or, in this case, they perhaps bring in workers under the so-called guest worker provisions. Actually, they are not really guest workers, they are low- wage replacement workers. We should call them what they are.

We were told in the discussion earlier that we should accept this because we can't stop it. It is going to happen whether we like it or not, so let's just declare them legal. I don't understand that at all.

I mentioned earlier that this planet we live on, to the extent we know it, is the only place in the universe where we know life exists and we move around the Sun. On this planet of ours, we were blessed to be born in this country, live in this country, or come to this country and be a part of this great place called the United States. We built a standard of living unparalleled in the world. We did that through great sacrifice and through great debates. Now we are told none of that matters very much because it is a flat world, it is a global economy; by the way, we can move jobs overseas, and we can bring cheap labor through the back door.

Just once--and I guess it won't happen this afternoon--just once I would like to hear a real debate about jobs in this country, about American workers and, yes, that includes Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American workers--our entire workforce. Just once I want to hear a discussion about what this means to American workers. Yet almost none of that has been heard on the floor of the Senate any time during this discussion.

I will be happy to yield.

That is exactly the case, although this is Professor Freeman. I have never known an economist to lose his or her job to a bad trade agreement. They sit around thumbing their suspenders. They occasionally smoke a pipe, wear their little corduroy coat with their leather arm pads. They pontificate about these issues. The fact is, half of them can't remember their telephone numbers, and they are telling us what is going to happen 5 years in the future.

I understand, and I think most people understand, what is happening in this country today. What is happening today is the export of good jobs and the import of cheap labor and depressing the conditions of employment in America. That is what is happening, and nobody seems to care very much.

The inequality grows. The wealthy get wealthier, the people at the bottom are stuck--they haven't had an increase in the minimum wage in 9 years, mind you, so they are stuck and they are losing ground.

The question is, Who is going to stand for them and speak for them?

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I mentioned earlier--and I think it fits exactly with the debate--the export of jobs and import of cheap labor. I mentioned about the dancing grapes. All of us have seen when Fruit of the Loom advertises their underwear, they do it with people called dancing grapes. Somebody is dressed in red grapes and somebody else is dressed in green grapes. We have all seen them. What kind of adult would wear a grape suit and sing? Nonetheless, we are all entertained by dancing grapes.

The dancing grapes represent Fruit of the Loom underwear, T-shirts, shorts, so on. They were made in this country, just as Levis and other products were made in this country. The dancing grapes danced right out of our country. All those jobs to make those underwear, gone. This country doesn't make one pair of Levis anymore. Not one pair of Levis is made in the United States.

Anyway, the dancing grapes leave our country, and those jobs are elsewhere. Why are they gone from this country? Because they went in search of cheap labor.

So to the extent that companies can move these jobs out of this country to find cheap labor, they will. They still want to sell back into this country. They still need the American consumer, the American consumer who has just lost his or her job. One question is, then, where is the income going to come from?

In any event, even as they move these jobs out of this country, there are some that will remain in this country. In this new global economy, there are some jobs you can't move. And some of the same economic interests that want to move the jobs they can want to displace the jobs they can't with cheap labor.

How do they do that with cheap labor? What they do is they attract people to come into this country from areas around the world--and one- half of the people in this world live on less than $2 a day--they attract people to come in the back door. At the moment, it is illegal, so we gather on the floor of the Senate to talk about illegal immigration. What is one of the approaches to solve this? Let's just get a stamp and stamp it legal. That way we can say we don't have illegal immigration. So it appears to me what we are going to have is up to 3.8 million people in the next 6 years, who will come into this country and take American jobs, who otherwise would be declared illegal. By the way, that is on top of the 11 million or 12 million people the underlying bill will describe as legal. They say we are going to allow them to come in, take American jobs, but they will not be illegal because we have decided in the Senate we are going to put a different stamp there. It is going to be fine.

So nobody on the Senate floor is standing up and saying: What about the tradeoff here of an American family? We hear a lot about other families. One of my colleagues just described

economic immigrants. Man, the world is full of them. If the world has one-half of its population making less than $2 a day, are there economic immigrants willing to come from many corners of this globe to this country? The answer is, of course. But we have immigration laws and quotas because if we were flooded with tens and tens of millions of people searching for opportunities in our country, we would diminish opportunities for Americans who live here and work here and built this country. So that is why we have immigration quotas.

One final point, if I might, on this issue of employer sanctions. That is a matter of will. You know there are no employer sanctions. The law says there are employer sanctions. Last year, I am told--I need to check this for sure, but I am told that there was one enforcement effort against one employer that hired illegal immigrants. The year before, there were three in the entire United States--three. That is a matter of lack of will. That is a matter of looking the other way when businesses want to hire cheap labor through the back door. Only when they are pressed will authorities finally go down and take a look at the folks living in these conditions who have taken jobs of people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. Only when they are forced will someone show up, knock on the door, and say: You know something, this isn't legal.

This is a very important debate. In some ways, I regret that we have as short a time as we do. I probably should not have agreed to a time agreement, there is so much to say about it. Yet we will have a vote this afternoon.

My colleagues have spoken here with great authority. We all come here and wear white shirts and dark suits and all sound authoritative. Some are right, and some are wrong. It is hard to tell the difference. So we will have a vote on this. At the end of this vote, I suppose this will move right ahead because we are told, if this vote prevails, if my amendment prevails, as I said earlier, it is like pulling a loose thread on a cheap suit--the whole arm falls off and the whole suit is worthless. I don't understand why they construct legislation that way, but every time somebody brings a proposal to the floor of the Senate which is the result of negotiations, they say you can't interrupt anything because, after all, when we shut the door and negotiated this, we all did that in good faith, so don't be messing with our product. If you pull one piece of it out, you ruin what we have done. I have heard that a million times on the floor of the Senate.

I think the Senate ought to just mess with this piece and say to those folks who constructed it, with respect: You are wrong about this. This piece is the price for the Chamber of Commerce to support this legislation. This piece is the price for the Chamber of Commerce to say: Allow us to bring 3.8 million people through the back door, cheap labor, and we will support the legislation, the substantial immigration reform.

I just happen to disagree with that. I happen to stand here in support of and concerned about--immigrant families, yes, but in support especially of American workers, in support of workers who do not seem to have much of a voice on the floor of this Senate.

The next trade bill that comes up, once again we will see their jobs further traded overseas. It is bizarre. There is no minimum wage increase for 9 years. Every trade agreement that comes along is pulling the rug out from under American workers, God bless them. See you, so long.

That is the way it goes around here. Maybe we ought to call this what it is. Maybe we ought to stop at this. Maybe the stop sign on behalf of American workers ought to be to say it is time for this Senate to stand up for American jobs. After all, this country's middle class, which we built over the last couple of centuries, especially the last century, that middle class is what supported the highest standard of living in the world. But that standard of living will not long exist if we export good jobs to low wage countries and then import cheap labor to perform those subpar-wage duties here in this country. That is not, in my judgment, what works for our country's best economic future.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, the Senator, I believe, wanted to ask if I would yield for a question. I am happy to do that.

The Senator is absolutely correct. It seems to me this is not at issue, the question of what this means to American workers. It just is not.

Mr. President, let me say that this economic strategy isn't working. This doesn't work. Fig Newton cookies moved to Mexico, and the Chinese just bought WHAM-O, Hula Hoop, Slip `N Slide, and Frisbee. To the extent this bill will make illegal workers come in stamped as legal, we know they are not going to make Fig Newtons and Frisbees because those jobs are gone, but we know there is a reason for a guest worker provision, and the reason is there are interests that support this bill only on the condition that they continue to allow low wage workers to come in the back door even as major American corporations are exporting good American jobs out the front door. I think that is a construct that 5, 10, and 20 years from now is dangerous to this country and restricts opportunity rather than expands it for the American people.

I do not support this provision. I hope my colleagues will support my amendment and strike this guest worker, future flow, or low wage replacement worker provision, as I call it, in the underlying piece of legislation.

I yield the floor.

I yield back my time.

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

Mr. President, my understanding is we are on the immigration bill as of this afternoon, and there is an amendment now pending. I wish to say a few words about the general issue of immigration and also talk about a couple of items the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, spoke about earlier today.

First of all, I think this needs to be, and I hope will be, a very sensitive debate. The fact is, this is a great country in which we live. It is a country

that in many ways over many decades of its two-plus centuries has been built by immigrants, has been nourished by immigrants. Virtually every one of us in this Chamber would have come from immigrant parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. So it is important we understand that and we understand what immigrants have brought to and have given this country.

It is also important that we understand why as a country we have decided to have immigration laws and to have quotas for immigration. The reason we have had quotas for immigration is the world has progressed in different parts of this globe at a very different rate. In some countries, the economies have lagged far behind. In other countries, the economies have become very advanced, and the circumstances of the countries are very different.

This Earth of ours has somewhere around 6.3 billion people living on it, this little planet. We circle around the Sun. Of the 6.3 billion people, somewhere now nearing 300 million people live in this little place called the United States of America.

We are pleased to live on this planet. One-half of the people who live on this planet make less than $2 a day, one-half of the people who live on this Earth have never made a telephone call, and 1.5 billion people living on this Earth don't have daily access to clean, potable water. There are people living on this Earth with great challenges.

We, however, are a country that has been blessed with resources, wonderful people, and ingenuity, and we have built something very special. Building it was not easy. Building the kind of economy and the standard of living we have had in this country has required sacrifice. We have had people die on the streets for the right of workers to organize. We have had very substantial debates about rights--about civil rights, workers' rights, about women's rights. We have done a lot of things that are very tough and challenging, and we have built quite a remarkable country.

Because of that, this is a country to which many around the world aspire to come, to live here, to work here, to be here. If tomorrow, for example, we in the United States said, on Tuesday, tomorrow, May 16, there is a new policy, and that new policy is this: Anyone living on this planet is able to come to this country unrestricted, come here, stay here, live here, work here, you are welcome, the welcome mat is out, if we did that, what do we think might happen? I know what would happen. Tens of millions of people--tens and tens and tens of millions of people--would aspire to find their way to the United States of America because it is, in fact, a beacon of hope and opportunity all around the world. There are jobs in this country, jobs available, rates of pay that are far in excess of those of Third World countries. The difference between, for example, the jobs in Mexico and the rate of pay for those jobs versus the jobs in the United States is very substantial.

We have on our southern border people who aspire to come to this country from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, on up through Mexico to try to cross our borders. The result is we have, in order to protect our way of life and our standard of living and to protect jobs that need to go to American workers, quotas that limit the amount of immigration, and those quotas year by year are quotas we work with to try to understand how many we can have come into this country from various parts of the world.

Let me give some statistics about last year to the extent we know it. Last year, 1.1 million people tried to come into this country illegally from the border of Mexico, up through that southern border; 1.1 million people tried to enter this country illegally and were apprehended, stopped, and not allowed to enter the United States illegally. Mr. President, 750,000, it is estimated, did come to that border and got across the border illegally and were not detected and were not stopped. So 1.1 million were detected, stopped, and prevented from entering. Probably three-quarters of a million entered illegally. Another 175,000, it is estimated, came to that border and entered legally; that is, children, relatives, and others. Under the quota system, they entered legally. This is a circumstance just on our southern border.

The result is we have immigration laws, and those laws are laws that determine how many we can allow into this country. We do that for the protection and for the economic interests of the American people.

The American people include immigrants who have been here, came here legally; some have been here a long time. We want to make sure that jobs are available for them, that the middle class in this country has jobs that pay well with benefits.

We also have another influence in this country, and the other influence is that larger corporations are now made much larger because of mergers and are wanting to export good American jobs to China and import cheap, substandard labor, particularly from the South, and pay even less than minimum wage, and because they are hiring someone illegal, they are highly unlikely to be critical of them if they don't pay the minimum wage. They feel they don't have the right to criticize.

We have a circumstance where at least some enterprises in this country want to export good American jobs and import cheap labor on the bottom. That is, in my judgment, the circumstance that will pull apart the middle class in our country. That is why we have to be concerned about all that is happening.

The situation which exists in this country is that we put together, recognizing there was an immigration problem, a bill 20 years ago in the Congress--I wasn't serving in the Senate at the time, I was in the House. It was a bill called Simpson-Mazzoli. It was named after Senator Simpson and Congressman Mazzoli. It was said at the time that the way to deal with illegal immigration is to shut off the jobs because people aspire to come here illegally to take a job. They see this job as hope and promise for the future.

I have pointed out many times about a helicopter I was on that ran out of gas at one point. We were touring down near Honduras and Nicaragua in the jungle and mountainous area. I was on a helicopter, and we ran out of fuel. We landed under power, but the red lights were on and alarms were ringing, and the pilots brought us down right then and there in this jungle, mountainous area. We were there a good many hours until the U.S. Army found out where we were and hauled us out of there.

The campasinos in the area came walking through the underbrush to see who landed in these two helicopters. Three of us had an interpreter with us. I was talking to the campasinos through the interpreter. They had never seen anyone from the United States. They lived up in the hills, a life of significant difficulty and poverty.

I was talking with them about their lives. I asked one young woman: How many children do you have?

She said: Only four, kind of disappointed. She was a very young woman. The interpreter told me later: The reason that woman said ``only four'' is you should understand there is no social security program down here. The only social security you have is to have as many children as you can possibly have and hope that enough of them survive that perhaps if you are lucky enough to reach old age, you will have children alive to support you in your old age. That is social security.

A number of women with a number of children came looking to see who landed. I was talking with, as I said, this young woman: What is your wish, your desire for your future and your children's future? What are you hoping for?

She said: That is easy. I want to come to the United States of America.

I said: Why do you want to come to the United States of America?

Oh, she said, that is an area where there is hope and opportunity for my children, and jobs.

You find that all over. So it is not surprising there are people trying to cross our border, trying to find jobs and opportunities in this country.

We passed legislation 20 years ago called Simpson-Mazzoli. The basic premise of that legislation was very simple. The premise was this: The attraction for people to come to this country illegally is to find a job and to earn money. If you shut off that attraction, shut off that job, you at least substantially diminish illegal immigration coming into this country. And so the legislation was passed.

I went back recently and read all the debate about Simpson-Mazzoli. The legislation was passed, and it was going to shut off the jobs. In fact, how was that going to happen? It was going to happen because there were going to be employer sanctions, saying to America's employers: If you hire illegal aliens, if you hire illegal immigrants to come into this country to take a job, you are going to be in some trouble. You can't hire people who are here illegally to work in your plants, to work in your businesses.

Those then were the approaches that were going to be used to shut down this illegal immigration. What happened? Let me give an example. I am told that last year, there was only one action taken against an American business--one--in all of America for hiring illegal workers.

I will give an example of hiring illegal workers. A couple of weeks ago--there is an energy plant being built in North Dakota--the highway patrol picked up I believe it was seven people. I believe six were from Guatemala, one was from Mexico. They detained them. They were not here legally. They had come here illegally to take a job in constructing the energy plant.

The law enforcement people took them to Minot, ND, to the immigration office. As a result of that, they took them back down to a motel nearly an hour south of Minot and dropped them off at the motel where they were staying with the admonition that they are now required, because they were here illegally, to show up in Minneapolis some weeks hence for a hearing. Of course, they will never show up in Minneapolis. They are gone. That is the way the system works: Come here, find a job; if you get caught, they say show up later; you never show up later. And that is the way the system works. That is the way the system works.

Now, what about the employer who hired these seven people? In 2004, in the entire United States of America, the administration took action against three companies that hired illegal immigrants. Let me say that again. In the entire country, they took action against only three companies that hired illegal immigrants. That is the same as saying to companies: You know what, don't worry, be happy. Hire illegal workers if you wish. Pay them substandard wages if you wish because they won't complain because they are illegal. Don't worry about it. It is a great way of cutting your costs. Be our guests because we are not going to enforce the law.

That is unbelievable to me.

So the whole promise of the law that was changed 20 years ago to shut off these jobs for people who are not in our country legally was a complete failure because there was an abject lack of enforcement. Now we have a piece of legislation on the floor of the Senate dealing with immigration, and we are going to go through this process again. We are told there are 11 million to 12 million people who have come into our country illegally. Some have come in recent years, some have been here a long while, and some have been here long enough to have children and grandchildren. So the question is: What do you do about that?

Then we have people come to the floor of the Senate and they say: Well, let's do a new immigration bill. Yet doing a new immigration bill without effectively finding ways to shut the border to illegal immigration will have us back in the same Chamber in 10 years or 20 years saying: Now what do we do about the next 10 million or 20 million people who are here illegally?

Let me tell you why I think this is so important. No. 1, I said when I started that I think it is important that this be dealt with in a very sensitive way. I don't want people to in any way suggest that this debate diminishes or demeans immigrants. We have some wonderful people who have come to this country. That is how I got to this country. I wasn't alive when my ancestors came here, but they came over from Norway, and most Members of this Senate are here in this country because someone had the courage to get on a boat and probably land at Ellis Island. So let's understand that, first of all, about immigration.

But let's also understand that the issue of legal and illegal immigration is different. There are legal ways to come to this country and there are ways to get into this country illegally. What we have built in this country is very unusual on the face of the Earth.

I have spoken before about a man named Jim Fyler. Jim Fyler died. He was shot 54 times--54 times he was shot. Do you know why he was shot? Because he felt that coal miners ought to have a right to organize for better pay and better work hours, so he gave his life. Well, Mr. Fyler is one example of dozens of examples of what we have done in this country: The courage of men and women to stand up for the interests of workers for good jobs that pay well, with benefits, including retirement, health care, and more. So we have built something very special.

Now we have a whole series of influences which include, yes, illegal immigration to diminished salaries, diminished wages, diminished benefits, and diminished opportunities for American workers. It is not right.

So what I feel we should do is work on this immigration system in a serious and thoughtful way and try to evaluate what do we do about several issues. First, what do we do to control our border? I know some of the discussions today and perhaps this week and next week will be about terrorists. Yes, we have to try to keep terrorists from coming across the border. That is something that is very important. Terrorists wish to do harm to the American people. We need to keep terrorists from coming across this border and trying to kill American citizens. But in addition to the issue of detecting terrorists and preventing them from coming in, we also need to have some control of our border to prevent an uncontrolled inflow of illegal immigrants who will take American jobs at substandard wages and then beginning to put downward pressure on American workers and American wages.

It is not an accident what is happening in this country today. You can read all the newspapers and evaluate what you find. You find companies that want to ship good jobs overseas to China. Why? Because they pay less money to get their products produced, and they want to ship their product back to this country to sell it and then they want to run their income through the Grand Cayman Islands and not pay taxes. So the same companies that want to export good Americans jobs are the same companies that would like to import cheap wages for the jobs we lost here.

Alan Blinder, a very respected economist, used to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He wrote a piece that is interesting. I know some, when they talk about exporting American jobs, are viewed as xenophobes and isolationists and protectionist.

Allen Blinder wrote a piece; he is a former vice chair of the Fed, a very respected economist. He said there are somewhere between 42 million and 54 million American jobs that are potential jobs to be outsourced--outsourced--because there is a billion to a billion and a half workers in the rest of the world who will do those jobs for 30 cents an hour, 50 cents an hour, and you can put them in unsafe work plants, put the chemicals in the air and water. You don't have to worry about all that. They are much less expensive than hiring an American worker. He also said that it is likely that 42 million to 54 million American jobs would not be exported, but even those that are not exported, if they remain here, they are competing with lower wages and with those workers overseas who are willing to accept much lower wages.

So we face some very significant economic pressures for the American worker and the middle class in this country. Nobody seems to think much about it, care much about it or talk much about it. But it is implicit in this discussion as well, and it applies not to a certain class of American workers; it applies to all American workers. Yes, those are Hispanic workers and African-American workers; all American workers are affected by this. Those who are in the minority suffer most. They are the first to lose their jobs and the last to get a job back, and when they do get a job back, it is lower pay because they are told: This is a new global economy, and you have to compete with others in other parts of the world willing to work for much less money.

So that is the subtext as well for this kind of discussion, but I want to finally say this: If this debate moves forward

without an understanding that you have to find a way to deal with this issue of employer sanctions or shut off the lure, shut down the lure of a job; if we don't decide to get serious about saying to employers: You can't hire illegal immigrants, you can't do that without significant sanctions; if we don't do that, then we should make reservations to come back every 10 years and have another debate about how we deal with the next 5 million or 10 million people who want to come into this country.

So I think that this issue in the coming couple of days is going to be a difficult issue with perhaps a lot of amendments. I will be offering an amendment. My amendment will be one that will eliminate the guest worker provision which is the extra ``above'' provision saying that there are another--with this new proposal before us, there is another, I think it is 3.8 million workers who don't yet live in this country, but above H-2A and H-2B and the other programs, above all of that, there is another 3.8 million workers living outside the country now that will be allowed in as a part of this compromise. It doesn't make any sense to me. That is not, in my judgment, the right thing to do.

So there will be, as I said, a lot of amendments and a difficult debate, I am sure. I think this is a very important issue, but I think it is very important that we do it right and get it right. One of the questions we ought to consider for all Americans as we proceed is what are the consequences on American workers, on American jobs, wages, retirement, the future? That is a very important issue as we consider these immigration issues in the next 2 weeks.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and make a point of order that the quorum is not present.

Mr. President, I like my colleague from Iowa. We work together on a lot of things. But I know he will give me room to disagree today.

I disagree very strongly about the philosophy, the approach, and the legislative initiative that is in the Senate. I was thinking about legislating. We do not have legislative reviews, like movies do. In movie reviews, you can get a sense of what is going to happen, and maybe someone will have made a judgment about it.

I have a review from ``Groundhog Day.'' I don't know if anyone here has seen ``Groundhog Day,'' but it is about a weatherman who goes to cover Groundhog Day to determine how much additional winter will exist, and then he goes back to his hotel room. Every morning, the alarm rings at 6 o'clock and the same day starts over again. He simply cannot get out of it. That was the movie ``Groundhog Day.'' The review for it said that Phil Conners is an egocentric weatherman who annually covers a Groundhog Day celebration in a small Pennsylvania town. Phil finds himself reliving Groundhog Day over and over, which makes him realize he has to change his ways.

So this is like Groundhog Day in the Senate. We are reliving over and over and over the ability of the majority party to cure whatever ails America with another big tax cut that goes largely to upper-income Americans.

We have a big deficit that is out of control. We are deep in debt, choking on debt. What is the solution? Cut the revenue. What kind of solution? How do you cut the revenue? Cut the revenue for the top folks. The big guys. The big shots. Because the little folks do not pay taxes, we are told. Oh really?

Well, there are lots of taxes people pay. There are payroll taxes. That is a proportional tax. The person at the lowest end of the economic ladder pays the same percentage in payroll taxes as the person at the very top. Yet we are told, somehow, that these people at the bottom do not pay taxes. Therefore, when we construct an income tax rebate or an income tax cut, sure, most of it has to go to the upper income folks.

Here is a description of where most of the tax cuts have gone in this bill. This is from the Tax Policy Center. It says that if you are somewhere between zero and $20,000 in income, you are going to get a $3 tax cut--not $2, not $4, but $3. So just get ready, that is one gallon of gasoline you will get. But if you have over $1 million in income, you in this conference report which is brought to the Senate today, boy, you ought to get ready to celebrate. You will get a $42,766 tax cut on average. Someone says here is a check for $42,000. All we know is that you have a lot of money, you are at the top of the scale, but you will get $42,000 and the person over here is going to get $3.

Let me read something that comes from a fellow whom I like. He is one of the wealthiest people in our country. His name is Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett wrote a piece for the Washington Post a few years ago. Here is the op-ed piece by the second richest man in the world. Here is what he says about the tax cuts in the Congress. He talks about himself and the receptionist in his office. He wrote this op-ed piece when the majority party was proposing that there be a zero tax rate on investment income, dividends, and the like.

He said:

Now, the Senate says dividends should be tax free to

recipients.

I admit this bill does not make them tax free. It takes dividends to the low tax rate of 15 percent and keeps them there.

Now the Senate says dividends should be tax free to

recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the

directors of my company therefore decide to pay $1 billion in

dividends next year. Since I own 31 percent of my company, I

would receive $131 million in additional income. I wouldn't

owe another penny in Federal tax. My tax rate would plunge to

3 percent--

He is talking about his income----

while my receptionist would still be paying 30 percent.

So here are comments from the world's second richest man who is taking a look at the strategy for tax cutting by the majority party, saying--and he said it in another venue--if this is class war, my side is winning, and I don't need these tax cuts.

But that is exactly what is happening because there is a belief here that somehow our economy works when you put something in at the top and it filters down. We have heard of this ``trickle down'' for a long time. But that is what is at root here, the ``trickle-down'' economics. I had a guy once tell me: I have heard of this trickle down for 10 years now, and I ain't even damp yet. But that is because he did not earn a lot of money and he was not getting big tax cuts.

Well, let me describe what is not in this legislation. At a time when we have very significant budget deficits--everybody here should understand the country is off track. We are seriously off track. We are going to load up and burden our kids and grandkids with all this debt at a time when we just passed a $109 billion emergency supplemental bill that was not paid for, to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief, and so on.

Just following that, we bring to the floor of the Senate another massive tax cut. Groundhog Day: Do it again and again and again. It will cure every ill, we are told.

What doesn't this legislation have? Let me give you an example of what it does not have. It does not have any provisions that should have been in the bill that would attempt to get the taxes owed by U.S. multinational companies that park their earnings offshore or use tax- haven countries to avoid paying their taxes on income they earned in this country.

Let me give you an example of that. I have used this many times on the floor of the Senate. This is compliments of David Evans, an enterprising reporter for Bloomberg. This is a picture of a five-story building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands. This is home to 12,748 companies.

Let me say that again because it is important. This little white building called the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands--a tax haven country--is home to 12,748 companies.

Now, do they live there? No. No. That is just their mailing address set up by a lawyer. For what purpose? So they can run income through it to avoid paying taxes. It is a sham. In the nature of an old spaghetti western, you would think the sheriff would get on his horse and ride right into the canyon after these folks. It is unbelievable what is going on. Now we believe the proposal that would shut this down would raise about $15 billion over 10 years. It is not in here.

I will give you another example. In addition to the Ugland House, where companies run the income--incidentally, in many cases, these are the same companies that moved their jobs to China, sell their product in America, and run the income through the Cayman Islands so they do not have to pay taxes; and the same companies that next week will be here saying: Yes, I moved my jobs over to China. And I also want to, through the back door, bring cheap labor in through a different source. That is another story for another debate next week, perhaps.

But in addition to the Ugland House and 12,000 companies perpetrating a myth that this is home for tax purposes, we see U.S. companies moving their jobs overseas and the Joint Committee on Taxation says we are losing $1.2 billion a year subsidizing and providing tax breaks to these very companies that are closing their American manufacturing plants and moving their jobs to China or Indonesia or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh or elsewhere.

People will say: I don't believe that. That can't possibly be happening. Yes, it is happening. We actually have this pernicious tax break in tax law that says to a company: This is a global world, a global economy. Shut your American plant, fire your American workers, move your jobs to China, sell your product back into the United States, and we will give you a big, fat tax break.

Should that tax loophole be closed and maybe raise a little money? I have tried four times on the floor of the Senate to close it. Four times I have lost that vote. It is nearly unbelievable.

In the broader case of fiscal policy, there is no philosophy that I can understand--economic philosophy or political philosophy--that would justify at this moment deciding what America needs most is to reduce its revenues, especially by benefiting the highest income earners at a time when we are choking on debt.

I have said before, and I say it with some amount of jest, I guess, that there was a time when the majority party here in this Congress-- the party that controls the White House, controls the House and the Senate--could be relied upon for a couple of things. Conservatives were conservative.

In my little town of 300 people, I knew what a conservative was. I could see them. I could see it operate day to day. I could see the way they behaved in our town. You could count on them for something, always. I always kidded, they wore gray suits like bankers, they wore wire-rimmed glass, and they looked as though they had just eaten a lemon--very serious. The one thing you could count on was, they would stand up for fiscal policy that says: We demand balance. Balance your budgets. Save for the future. Conservative values. That is what they always gave to our country, always gave to our communities, State legislatures: the philosophy of staying on track, balancing your budget, decent fiscal policy.

It is gone. It is absolutely gone. Proposed increases in the Federal debt of gigantic proportions, tax cuts coming to the floor when we are choking on debt, bills coming to the floor saying: Let's spend $109 billion more. And, by the way, don't worry, we don't have to pay for it. Just declare it an emergency. Where on Earth is the conservatism that used to be involved in fiscal policy construct? It does not exist.

Some of us understand, I think, that this is off track, and we have a responsibility to put it on track. Ronald Reagan used to ask the question: If not us, who? If not now, when? If not us, who is going to do this? We are elected to do this. It is our responsibility to look truth in the eye and decide: This is unsustainable. We can't continue on this track. If we don't do it now, when will we do it? Next month? Next year? I don't think so.

This is the kind of Groundhog Day of fiscal policy; every time we come to the floor and turn to another chapter in this book, the next chapter says: It does not matter what is wrong with us, what we need is to cut taxes, and we need to cut them for the top folks. If you earn $1 million or more a year, you get a $42,000 refund check. If you earn $10,000 or $20,000 a year, you get $2 or $3.

I am saying that is not what I think is going to cure what ails America. We need a strong fiscal policy that recognizes our responsibilities, one that is fair, and one that stares truth in the eye and says: This cannot continue. This current fiscal policy is off track. We have a responsibility--yes, we do; Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, this President and this Congress--now. It is us, and it is now. That is the answer.

We have this responsibility, and I hope we act sooner rather than later. For that reason, I will not vote for this legislation. This legislation is, in my judgment, poorly constructed, provides all the benefits in the wrong direction. But, secondly, and even more importantly, it seems to me the worst step you could make at this point is to send a signal to the folks who are watching this country's economy, saying: Yes, we are way off base. We are about $1.4 trillion, just in the last 12 months, off track--about $650 billion in additional borrowing on the fiscal policy side, and a $700 billion deficit on the trade side, added together is almost $1.4 trillion in the red--and the signal we are going to send to people is: We are not serious about that. What we want to do is cut revenues.

I am telling you, people watching this--the bond markets, the investors--worldwide will say: This is not a Congress that is serious about addressing this country's problems.

America deserves better than that, in my judgment. That is why I cannot vote for this legislation.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have listened to some of the debate today. It has been very interesting. The last speaker spoke about choice and choices. I want to talk about choices in health care a bit. This is Health Week, we are told. It is an opportunity, for a change, at long last to talk about some health care issues on the floor of the Senate.

The intent, I believe, of the chairman who brings this bill to the floor is that we should speak only about and address only the issues dealing with small business health plans. However, he knows and I know there are many other health issues that have been long delayed by this Chamber and that need to be debated. I intend to offer a number of amendments. They are in order under the rules of the Senate. They are amendments that deal explicitly with health care issues.

The issue before the Senate is not unimportant. The question of rising health care costs is very significant to everybody--individuals, businesses, governments. Everyone who is a consumer has to deal with increased costs of health care and we should, indeed, address the issue of health care costs for business associations and for small businesses. There is no question about that. I wish to be a part of the group that works on that in a bipartisan way, in a way that expands opportunity, not narrows opportunity; in a way that expands coverage, not narrows coverage; in a way that covers everyone, not just a few. I do not agree that we should make health care unaffordable for the older and sicker and then make profit out of insuring people who are younger and healthier. That is not the right way to do this.

But having said all of that, let me describe some other things that have been long delayed on the floor of the Senate that need to be addressed. Let me talk about the first one. It is the

issue of reimportation of prescription drugs. A bipartisan piece of legislation has been long ago introduced and discussed here on the floor of the Senate, and we have not had the opportunity to vote on it.

The reimportation of prescription drugs, why is that important? Because the American people are charged the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs; it is not even close--the highest prices in the world. Consumers in every other country are paying lower prices. Try to buy Lipitor and if you buy it in the United States you pay a higher price than in any country in the world--France, Germany, England, you name it. You pay the highest prices in the United States. Why should U.S. consumers be charged the highest prices?

With consent, I want to show a couple of things on the floor of the Senate. Let me show, if I might, two bottles of Lipitor. I ask consent to show these on the floor of the Senate.

As you can see, they look identical: identical labels, identical pills in the same bottle made by the same company--shipped to two different places. One is shipped to Canada and one is shipped to the United States. The difference? One is half the price of the other. Guess which. It is the Canadian consumer who gets the benefit of paying half the price for the identical prescription drug.

Let me also show a couple of containers of Prevacid. This is a drug that is widely used for ulcers. Once again, as you can see, it is essentially the same bottle, same pill, made by the same company, made in an FDA-approved plant and shipped to two different locations, one to Canada and one to the United States. The difference? This one costs twice as much. Who buys this one? The U.S. consumer; twice as much for the same pill.

An old fellow sitting on a hay bale in North Dakota at a farm meeting said, my wife has been fighting breast cancer for 3 years. She took Tamoxifen for breast cancer. Every 3 months we drove to Canada to get Tamoxifen because it was the only way we could afford it, and we paid about 80 percent less than it would have cost us to buy that prescription drug to treat her breast cancer. We paid 80 percent less by driving to Canada to get it.

The fact is, they allow a small amount of drugs to come across the border for personal use. But other than that, a U.S. consumer cannot access an FDA-approved prescription drug nor can a U.S. pharmacist access that same FDA-approved prescription drug. That is unbelievable. We have a bipartisan group of Members of the Senate who say consumers ought to be able to purchase FDA prescription drugs by reimporting them from other countries. That would put downward pressure on prescription drug prices in this country. A bipartisan group of Senators wants to do that, but we are prevented from doing it by current law. We want to change the law.

Yet we are prevented from changing the law because the majority leader won't bring this legislation to the floor of the Senate. This is something we can offer as an amendment to the bill on the floor. It is well within the rules of the Senate, it deals with health care, and I am serving notice now that this is an amendment we will offer and vote on during the conduct of this discussion, providing we are allowed to offer amendments. I am hearing rumors that perhaps the majority leader will decide to fill the tree legislatively and allow no amendments. If that is the case, it will be a long week, but my hope is he will not do that. If amendments are allowed, I will offer this amendment and will get a vote.

Let me go back to about midnight on the night of March 11, 2004. That is a little over 2 years ago--midnight. The reason I remember it was midnight, I was sitting right back here and I reached an agreement with the majority leader, Senator Frist. Here is what Senator Frist announced that evening after our negotiations, and after which I agreed to release the name of Dr. Mark McClellan to be promoted from the head of FDA to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. As a result of that, Senator Frist came to the floor and put this in the Record.

I announce for the information of my colleagues that, with

consultation with the chairman of the Senate Committee on

Health, Education, Labor, Pensions, Senator Dorgan, Senator

Stabenow, Senator McCain, Senator Cochran, and other

interested Senators, the Senate will begin a process for

developing proposals that would allow for the safe

reimportation of FDA-approved prescription drugs.

Two years later, nothing: No vote on the floor of the Senate, nothing. My colleague, Senator Vitter, sent a letter around a year ago. It says:

. . . in the context of the Lester Crawford FDA

nomination, I obtained an agreement with Majority Leader

Frist regarding drug importation legislation. . . .The Senate

will probably hold some floor vote on a reimportation

amendment soon, probably on the Agriculture Appropriations

bill. Should that vote demonstrate that reimportation has 60-

vote support on the floor, then Leader Frist will be open to

and work in good faith toward a floor debate and vote on a

reimportation bill. . . .

What happened as a result of that? Nothing. No action, no votes, nothing.

This bill on the floor of the Senate is amendable. This bipartisan amendment deals with health care. It has been long delayed--and no more. I intend to offer this amendment this week.

Finally, at long last, perhaps the American consumers will no longer be charged the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because they will be able to access FDA-approved drugs by reimporting them from virtually any other country in which the consumers are paying a lesser price for the identical prescription drug. That is unfair to the American people. The only reason we have not changed it yet is there are, regrettably, a few people in this Chamber who have blocked that opportunity, I assume on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. But that blocking is about done. This week this bill is open for amendment. I intend to come and offer this as an amendment.

That is one.

Let me talk for a moment about another issue, once again long promised here to the Senate. We are told we are going to have an opportunity to do this--again and again and again--and we are not. We don't get the opportunity. It is called stem cell research. It is controversial; there is no question about that. I understand the controversy. But is it important? Yes, it is. We have all these people who talk about life. This is about life. This is about life-giving medical research, to find ways to unlock the mysteries and to cure some of the worst diseases known to people: Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's. There is an unbelievable opportunity for medical research to unlock the cures for some of these diseases. But we need to proceed with stem cell research.

We have been long promised the opportunity to have a vote on stem cell research on the floor of the Senate, and guess what. No such vote. On May 24, almost 1 year ago, the House of Representatives passed a bill on stem cell research. We are still waiting to have a vote on that here on the floor of the Senate--once again, a bill with bipartisan support.

Let me describe, if I might, the importance of this in the eyes of a young woman. I met with this young girl about 2 weeks ago. It is not the first time I met her. She is a young lady, Camille Johnson, 13 years old, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 4. She is the one in the middle, playing the clarinet. She has had some very serious health problems, some very serious problems in her young life. She would like very much to live her life without diabetes. She would like diabetes to be cured for her and millions of others.

In 2002, scientists at Stanford University used special chemicals to what is called transform undifferentiated embryonic stem cells of mice into cell masses that resemble islets found in the mouse pancreas. When this tissue is transplanted into the diabetic mice, it produces insulin in response to high glucose levels in animals. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, through this stem cell research, we cure diabetes; if we could tell this young woman your life is not going to be a life of diabetes. We can cure that disease.

I have been involved in political campaigns recently and have been told by opponents that my proposal and my position on stem cell research is one that

murders embryos. Nothing could be further from the truth, nothing at all. Do you know there are 1 million people living among us, walking, breathing, talking--1 million people who were conceived through in vitro fertilization? One million people. When that in vitro fertilization takes place, the uniting of a sperm and an egg in a petri dish, more than a single embryo is created. A number of embryos are created in that process. Some are implanted into the uterus of a woman and some become a human being. Some are cryogenically frozen and stored in the event they should be used again if this did not result in a pregnancy.

There are some 400,000 of those embryos frozen at in vitro clinics right now, 400,000 of them, and 8,000 to 11,000 are discarded, thrown away, every year. They become hospital waste.

Should some perhaps be used for stem cell research with the hope of saving lives? The answer clearly is yes. This is not about murdering an embryo. If in fact this is the murder of an embryo, then the discarding of the embryos at the in vitro fertilization clinic, 8,000 to 11,000 a year, is also murder.

We had one person testify at the Commerce Committee a couple of years ago who said those 1 million people who are here as a result of in vitro fertilization should not be here; it was wrong to create these people. Tell that to the parents who had those children; the childless parents who, through in vitro fertilization, discovered the miracle of having a child.

The question of stem cell research is not about murdering an embryo, it is about an opportunity to cure some of the dreaded diseases.

The other issue--and the reason I am talking about this is this is a big issue that we are not allowed to vote on in the Senate. This, too, should be an amendment on this bill. This, too, during Health Week is a very important issue dealing with health.

The other side of this research is something called somatic cell nuclear transfer. Simply it is this: Let us assume a patient takes a skin cell from their own earlobe and that skin cell from their earlobe is then put in an evacuated egg and stimulated to become a blastocyst of a couple of hundred cells.

That blastocyst now has predictor cells. They use the predictor cells for heart muscle, to inject back into the heart muscle to grow a stronger heart, to repair a heart attack.

Some would say you have destroyed or murdered an embryo. There is no fertilized egg. There is only the skin cell from the person who had the heart attack whose cell is now being used, through somatic cell nuclear transfer, to save that person's life. This is about lifesaving. Yet we have so many here who said: Let's not worry about these diseases. Let's shut off this research because we think it is about murdering embryos.

That is not what this is about. It is about this young girl and whether we decide we want this young girl to live her life as a diabetic, a life filled with hope at this point that Congress will finally do the right thing.

The House of Representatives did it. The Senate needs to vote on it. Perhaps this week is as good a week as any. We have been promised. A year ago we were promised, just like drug reimportation. This Chamber is full of promises, but we never quite get to vote on important issues.

I am not suggesting that when I talk about stem cell research that there are not ethical considerations, without serious concerns and serious issues to which we should be attentive. We should. I don't dismiss all the other concerns. But I do say this: If you have lost a child, if you have lost a loved one, and you have watched someone die from Parkinson's or cancer or heart disease, if you have been through that and then say to yourself: But I want to shut down promising research that could potentially cure diseases, then you have not been through it the way a number of people in this Chamber have been through it. I think it is so important for us to do the right thing and to continue this breathtaking research that can save lives.

There are so many other issues. There are just a couple of minutes remaining. Then I will yield the time to my colleague from California.

We passed recently in the Senate a piece of legislation that provides prescription drug benefits to senior citizens. But we did nothing to put downward pressure on drug prices. There is a special provision in the bill which my colleagues, Senators Wyden and Snowe, were talking about earlier today, that actually prevents the Federal Government from negotiating for lower prices with the pharmaceutical industry. That is unbelievably ignorant. A provision like that is unbelievably ignorant, and it ought to be repealed.

All we need is a vote on that on the Senate floor. That, too, is a health issue. There is no excuse for this Congress to say: By the way, the Federal Government cannot negotiate for a lower price. We already do it in the VA. We end up with far lower prices as a result of the negotiations.

In this case, with this bill, there is a provision that says: Don't you dare negotiate. It would be against the law for you to try to get lower prices and reduce Government spending. That, too, is a health issue. That, too, will be in order this week.

I hope very much that we will have a vote on that. Yes, the underlying bill is important. We ought to find a bipartisan way to fix it. No, it doesn't work the way it is. It will restrict choice, in my judgement, increase prices for some, and make others completely uninsurable. We ought to fix it in a bipartisan way.

But on the other three issues--reimportation of prescription drugs, stem cell research, repeal the law that prevents negotiation of lower prices with the pharmaceutical industry to save taxpayers money-- shouldn't we do all three of those? We ought to do all three of those this afternoon, right now. We have been blocked for far too long.

If there is, in fact, an amendable vehicle--and I hope it will be; we will know that tomorrow morning--then I have just described three amendments that I believe should be offered, and when offered I believe will be approved in the coming days. If not, if this is a charade, and tomorrow we discover there is a legislative approach called ``filling the tree,'' which is simply setting up a little blocking device to say we are not going to allow anybody to offer anything, then I think the Senate will have sent a very strong message that this isn't Health Week. This is a week in which you want to trot out a little proposal of your own and avoid votes on serious issues that we should be taking in the Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today marks the start of what the majority leader has called Health Week in the Senate. We start today with two cloture votes because legislation has been brought to the Senate that deals with what is called medical malpractice, or ``medmal,'' reform. The bills we are being asked to consider have not been before a Senate committee, have not been a part of a committee hearing. They have just been brought to the floor of the Senate so we can have two cloture votes, both of which will fail. This is about someone wanting to cross a check off their list of what they feel they must do in the Senate. It hardly serves the opportunity to address serious issues. There is a way, for example, to address the issue of medical malpractice reform. But it is not this way.

I must say, as I said the other day, there are challenges in this area, but I think the way to address the challenge of medical malpractice is not to decide that victims of medical malpractice should not be given the opportunity to seek redress. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Mr. President, there are many things we can and should talk about this week, if this is, in fact, Health Week. When the cloture votes are held later in the afternoon--and both will fail--then my understanding is that we will go to the legislation offered by the Senator from Wyoming. It is further my understanding that the leader will what is called ``fill the tree''; that is, we will be on that legislation, but we will not be able to offer any amendments.

Let me talk about a couple of things. I came to the floor to talk about, during Health Week, the need to deal with something called stem cell research. I know that is a controversial issue. But it is one I think the American people deserve to have the Congress address and deal with. Almost 1 year ago--May 24, 2005, to be exact--the U.S. House of Representatives passed their Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act with broad bipartisan support. It will expand the number of embryonic stem cell lines eligible for Federal funding.

Back in July of 2005, the majority leader in the Senate made a speech and he outlined his support for expanding the number of stem cell lines available for research. He pledged to bring the issue to the floor of the Senate at some point during this Congress. If this is the week we are going to be dealing with health care in the Senate, I encourage the majority leader to set aside time for an open and fair debate on stem cell research.

Embryonic stem cell research holds great promise for addressing some of the devastating diseases that we face--diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, cancer. To shut off or limit medical research is an unbelievable mistake for this country. I, like many others, have lost loved ones to disease. When I lost a daughter to heart disease, I decided that I would never try to placate one group or another by stopping promising research to try to address diseases that people all across this planet face.

Embryonic stem cell research is so unbelievably promising. This is not just about some ethereal debate, it is about real people. We have about 400,000 embryos frozen at in vitro fertilization clinics, and 8,000 to 11,000 of them are thrown away every year. Yes, 8,000 to 11,000 fertilized embryos that are frozen at the IVF clinics are just discarded, put in a trash can called ``medical waste.'' Would they not better be used to advance medical research? One million babies have been born in this world by in vitro fertilization. It started in England, called the ``test tube baby.'' One million babies have been born.

When we had a hearing in the Commerce Committee about stem cell research, one of the witnesses was asked the question--in fact, I asked the question. He opposed in vitro fertilization. He said it should not happen.

I said: Do you think those 1 million people who were born that way should not have been born?

He didn't think they should have been born; it was wrong. There are 1 million people living among us that are here as a result of in vitro fertilization. At the clinics where IVF takes place, the egg and sperm are united in a test tube and fertilized in a petri dish for the purpose of implanting in a woman's uterus and growing a baby. They produce far more embryos than they need. As a result, you have in storage about 400,000 embryos--400,000--of which 8,000 to 11,000 each year are simply discarded.

President Bush and others have decided that they shall not be used for stem cell research. I am not talking about the stem cell research in which a cell is cloned. That is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. I will talk about that in a moment. I am talking about embryos that are going to be thrown in a waste can and discarded. This Administration and too many in this Congress believe these discarded embryos cannot and should not ever be used for embryonic stem cell research.

Let me put a face to this issue and hold up this picture. This is a young woman I met with recently. This is a picture of Camille Johnson. She is in the middle. She plays the clarinet in the middle school band. I have met Camille and her mother several times. She is a volunteer with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. She gave me something that I keep in my office. This is to describe what this young girl goes through with diabetes--and I will describe why I am talking about diabetes.

This young lady has had some very close calls and serious hospitalizations with her diabetes. It is very aggressive. She is poked with a needle every day at 7 o'clock, 11 o'clock, 5 o'clock, and 8 o'clock--1,460 pokes with a needle to test her blood every single year. She receives 1,095 shots every year. She has to watch her diet every day. If she does not keep her diabetes under control, the complications are amputation, blindness, kidney failure, heart failure, and death.

Why do I describe that? Because there is remarkable research going on to use stem cells to treat diabetes. The work that has been done in the transplant of islets to the pancreas is unbelievably important work. Yet we are told that much of this work cannot continue with Federal funding. Stem cell research has shown such great promise. For example, in spinal cord injuries, stem cell research has allowed disabled rats with damaged spinal cords to walk again. It has relieved diabetes and Parkinson's disease symptoms in mice. It has developed heart cells, eye cells, and nerve cells. I was told of a researcher who described, I believe, two dozen mice in which researchers induced severe heart attacks. They injected stem cells back into the heart muscles of those mice, and a couple of weeks later nearly all of the

mice not only didn't show severely damaged hearts, which they had after a heart attack, but they showed no damage to their hearts at all. So there has been unbelievable progress with stem cell research.

Yet we are told by some that research should not go forward. Let me describe for a moment some of the other areas, in addition to embryonic stem cell research, that are so controversial: The issue of taking one skin cell from one's ear lobe, for example, and putting it into an evacuated egg. The skin cell is stimulated to create a blastocyst, or cluster of cells, 100 to 200 cells. Those cells can eventually be injected back into your own heart muscle. There has been no fertilized egg. It is simply your own skin cell that has been stimulated to reproduce. Yes, it creates an embryo, but there is no fertilized egg. It creates an embryo that will never become a human being.

We are told by some that is murder; you have destroyed an embryo. No, this is about life, about saving lives. Those who want to shut down these promising areas of research, in my judgment, are just dead wrong.

The last campaign I ran for office, the first two television commercials that were run by my opponent--the first was about gay marriage, that I voted against amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gay marriage. I can hardly think that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Mason and Madison, as they looked at what they had created as a Constitution, would think: What have we missed here? We need to put something in about gay marriage. I don't think that belongs in the Constitution.

The first commercial was of two men kissing, with the message you would expect from the extremists. The second commercial was about a campfire leader sitting around a campfire at night with little kids sitting around gathered in front of him. ``Tell us a scary story,'' the little kid said. Then the campfire leader said, ``Well, there is a man named Byron''--referring to me, I guess--``and he has a plan to implant embryos into mommies' uteruses, wombs, and harvest them later for body parts.''

That is an unbelievably ignorant television commercial, but that commercial was born of an attempt to distort my position on the issue of stem cell research.

I am not interested in harvesting body parts. I am not interested in the discussion about murdering embryos. I am interested in a discussion about saving lives and about continuing the kind of promising research that exists that might unlock the mysteries of Alzheimer's disease, might provide a cure for Parkinson's, for diabetes, or heart disease.

I am not suggesting there are not some ethical considerations that need to be made with respect to how we do it, and I don't suggest we should discard those issues. But I am suggesting that a country that shuts down that research has made a horrible mistake. My point in coming to the floor was, if this is Health Week, then let's talk about health issues, about the Indian Health Care Improvement Act that has been stranded. Let's talk about that and bring it to the floor and vote on it.

No group of Americans has more difficult health issues to face than Native Americans. Let's talk about that on the floor of the Senate.

Let's vote on the proposition the majority put in the prescription drug bill that prohibits the Federal Government from negotiating for lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. Let's have that on the floor and vote on that. There are half a dozen of those issues. But I speak today about stem cell research. If we are going to be serious about health care and have a health care week, then we ought to talk about this issue.

The House of Representatives has already passed a bill. The majority leader said we would have a bill on the floor of the Senate, and it appears at this point that we will head toward the end of this session, despite the fact there is bipartisan support for legislation that will deal with stem cell research in the appropriate way.

I understand this is a serious issue. I don't dismiss the concern of others, nor do I accept, however, that this is somehow a discussion about murder. This is a discussion about saving lives. It is a discussion about finding cures to devastating diseases. This country ought to be in the lead when it comes to research that can provide cures for diseases. Stem cells provide much of that opportunity.

This young girl, Camille Johnson, deserves to have the opportunity to have the very best treatment available. Some of that will come from stem cell research. And perhaps we will find a cure for diabetes. Perhaps Camille Johnson will not live her life as a diabetic. Maybe through stem cell research we will find this cure and one day she won't have to take shot after shot to provide her body with sufficient insulin for her to live. Let's hope that is the case.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. President, this has been an interesting week, and next week in the Senate will also be interesting. I want to talk about a couple of those matters.

I know there are a lot of people in the country, some in this Chamber, who believe that politics in America these days is pretty dysfunctional. We are not speaking directly to the issues that are most important to the American people. We are not confronting the issues that have developed with the American economy and foreign policy. Many people are concerned about that. I count myself among them.

I have always been proud to serve in the Senate. I come from a town of 300 people, a high school class of nine students, and to go from a desk in a small high school in southwestern North Dakota to a desk in the Senate, I have always felt enormously privileged to do that. But there are times when I am very concerned about the institution of politics.

John F. Kennedy used to say that every mother kind of hoped that her child might grow up to become President, as long as they didn't have to be active in politics. But of course, politics is the method by which we make decisions. The document called the Constitution that starts with the three words ``we the people'' means the people are in charge. They are the ones who decide, grabbing the American steering wheel, which direction we head.

Let me describe my concern about the dysfunctional politics and the dysfunctional system that exists. I don't think one party is all bad and the other party is all good or that one is all right and one is all wrong. I do think that we are on the wrong path and off track. We have one-party control in the White House, the House, and the Senate. It seems to me we need to get busy and get serious about addressing the fundamental problems we face in domestic policy and foreign policy.

Next week we are going to deal with health issues, we are told. But even though we are going to deal with health issues, the majority leader has said the way the Senate will deal with health issues is, he will file cloture on some bills to come to the floor dealing with medical malpractice, dealing with health care costs. The purpose of this process is to say: We are going to deal with the issue of medical malpractice, and we are not going to allow anyone else to deal with any other issue dealing with health care costs.

I happen to have pretty strong views about this issue of medical malpractice. We have somewhere, it is estimated, between 40,000 and 90,000 people a year die in hospitals as a result of mistakes. To suggest that someone should be immune from accountability because of mistakes is wrong. I have a longer story about all of that. But would I like to see there be a process that is simpler and easier than going through the tort system to resolve these issues? Yes, I would. I believe that is possible. But to suggest that we ought to limit those who are victimized by bad medicine--and there are cases of bad medicine; it does exist--to suggest we ought to limit their opportunities to seek redress is wrong.

As long as we are going to talk about health care costs--and that is a very serious issue; health care costs are increasing dramatically for families, for businesses, for the Government in Medicaid and Medicare-- perhaps we should talk about the array of issues we should be dealing with. Let me cite some examples.

No. 1, the highest rate of growth in health care costs is the cost of prescription drugs. It used to be when someone got sick, you would put them in a hospital bed for acute care, and then they would be let out, discharged, a week or 2 later, and that was the way health care was delivered. These days we have miracle drugs. Prescription drugs are used to treat illnesses so that people don't have to have acute care hospital stays. But the increased price in prescription drugs is almost unbelievable. We pay the highest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs. Why is that the case? It is the case because the pharmaceutical industry can charge the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

I took a bus one day and took some North Dakota citizens to Canada. In a one-room pharmacy in Emerson, Canada, just miles north of a pharmacy in North Dakota, these North Dakota citizens purchased their prescription drugs.

They were all FDA approved, in many cases made in America and shipped to Canada. So our citizens went to Canada to buy prescription drugs, Lipitor, Prevacid, a whole series of prescription drugs. All of them were dramatically less expensive in Canada than they are here. And not only Canada, they would have found the same thing in England and France and virtually every other country. We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

A bipartisan group of Senators and Members of the House believe that the way to break the back of increased drug prices or drug pricing that is unfair to the American consumer is to allow the reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada. The FDA will allow someone to come across for personal use with maybe 3 months' worth of drugs, but otherwise it is illegal. In Europe, it is not illegal. If you are in Germany and want to buy a drug from France, if you are in Spain and want to buy a prescription drug from Italy, they have a system by which you do that. It is called parallel trading.

It has been done for 20 years. There is no safety issue. And through it the consumers are able to get the best prices on approved prescription drugs. In this country, you can't.

The majority leader is going to bring a health care bill to the floor next week that deals with medical malpractice and will apparently ``fill the amendment tree'' or file cloture so that no amendments can be offered. But will the majority leader allow us to vote on a bipartisan proposal to put downward pressure on prescription drug prices? No, he would not do that. Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want that legislation on the floor. So we will not have it, I guess.

We have been trying for years. A bipartisan group of Senators believe we ought to do that, believe we ought to tackle the issue of increased cost of health care by tackling the escalating prices of prescription drugs. But we can't get that bill onto the Senate floor.

The majority leader is taking specific steps now to prevent it. Why? Because he is helping, in my judgment, the pharmaceutical industry. It is what they want. How about doing what the American people want for a change? Let the American people in these chambers. How about opening the door to having the people's interests served here? So we won't be dealing with the issue of prescription drug prices, I guess, next week. We are going to try, but the majority leader will block us, I assume. That is what we have been told.

How about this little provision--the most unbelievably pernicious provision that was put in the bill that was passed to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Do you know there is a provision added in that bill that says, by the way, the Federal Government cannot use its purchasing power to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. Is that not unbelievable? A prohibition on the Federal Government negotiating for lower prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. In whose interest is that, do you think? Is that in the pharmaceutical industry's interest? Of course it is.

I wish somebody would come to the Senate floor and take credit for it and say I wrote that, and I wrote it because I believe the pharmaceutical industry should be able to charge higher prices and should not have to negotiate. Not one Senator, I believe, will claim credit for that legislation. But it was there. So the majority is deciding that they are going to block an opportunity to get rid of that, repeal that provision and allow the negotiation for lower drug prices that will put downward pressure on health care costs. The majority says we don't want anything to do with that; you cannot offer that amendment next week. We are going to talk about health care and health care costs, but you are prevented from offering that amendment. Why? Maybe it would pass and that would not be good for the pharmaceutical industry. It is unbelievable to me. Talk about dysfunctional behavior in the Senate. If we are going to deal with health care and health care costs, how about allowing legislation on the Senate floor that

really does that. Let's have an up-or-down vote on the issue of reimportation of prescription drugs so that the American people can benefit from the same prices people are paying in other countries. Should the American people be paying the highest prices?

Some time ago, I sat on a hay bale on a farm at a meeting of farmers. And a fellow in his mideighties said:

My wife has been fighting breast cancer for 3 years, and

for 3 years we have driven to Canada every 3 months to buy

her prescription drugs.

I asked why. He said:

Because we pay only 20 percent of the price we have to pay

in the United States for the same drug.

Tamoxifen is a drug to treat breast cancer. If one uses that, you can save 80 to 90 percent if you buy that in Canada. It's an FDA-approved drug. Is that fair to the American people--to say you should pay the highest prices in the world? Oh, by the way, we are not interested in helping you put downward pressure on prices in this country.

That makes no sense to me. Next week we will see this dysfunctional behavior in the Senate. We will be prevented from the ability to consider pieces of bipartisan legislation. In both cases that I have talked about this morning, they will prevent votes on them. Why? Both are opposed by the pharmaceutical industry. So God forbid the Senate should have an up-or-down vote.

It is interesting. Regarding pharmaceuticals, senior citizens in this country are about 12 percent of the population, and they consume about one-third of the prescription drugs. So senior citizens are 12 percent of the population and consume one-third of all of the prescription drugs. In many cases, they are the least able to pay these escalating prices. And pharmaceuticals--the prescription drugs that you need--are not a luxury; you need them.

It is interesting that the same is true with respect to energy, isn't it? Another part of the dysfunctional behavior around here is dealing with energy costs. That is another subject.

Are we going to get legislation on the floor of the Senate to deal with energy issues? Not likely--at least not in a meaningful way. We have seen press reports about what is happening. Exxon oil had a $36.1 billion profit last year, which is the highest profit in the history of corporations. I am not against profit at all. Good for them. But all that profit comes at the expense and pain of the American consumer. So that is not good for the consumer.

So what do we do about that? I say this. If all that money that is going into the coffers of the oil industry is being used to sink back into the ground for exploration and development of additional supplies, and therefore lower prices, good for them and good for us. But I know that is not happening. I know that Exxon is using about a third of its profits to buy back its stock. Business Week magazine says that big oil invested in trying to find oil on Wall Street. Well, there is no oil on Wall Street. That is all about mergers and acquisitions. That doesn't expand the supply of energy. I think we ought to say this to big oil: If you are not using these profits to expand the supply and reduce the price, then you ought to be paying a portion of that into the Federal Government as a recapture, a windfall profit recapture that we send back in its entirety to the consumers from whence it came. I would like to vote on that in the Senate. I think that is something we ought to consider on the floor of the Senate.

Energy is not a luxury. Look, I understand we have serious problems with energy. Those who come to the floor and say there is a free market in oil--what a load of nonsense. There is no free market in oil. First of all, you have OPEC ministers in a closed room around a table deciding how much they are going to produce out of the sands of the Middle East. OPEC ministers decide how much they are going to produce and what that might do to affect price. Second, the big oil companies have two names now. They fell in love and got married. It was Exxon and Mobil, and then they merged and now it is ExxonMobil. There was Philips and Conoco. Now it is PhilipsConoco. They decided to get hitched. The Federal Government turned a blind eye to that and said that is fine.

And finally, you have futures markets. The futures markets become orgies of speculation. It is a dramatic amount of speculation that drives up prices. The result is that the consumers in this country, I think, are seriously injured by what is happening. All of the pain is on the side of the person who is driving up to the gas pump or the farmer who is trying to figure out how to pay for the fuel he needs for spring planting. All of the gain is on the side of the enterprises, the major integrated oil companies, making the highest profits in the history of corporations, and the OPEC countries. And the royal family of Saudi Arabia thanks you.

This is something wrong with this. I understand that we have long- term problems and we need aggressive energy policies that address them. I have been working for some long while on the issue of trying to pole- vault over the circumstances by which we power our vehicle fleet in this country. We need to get to a hydrogen fuel cell future, with twice the efficiency of power to the wheel. You put water vapor out the tailpipe using hydrogen and fuel cells. We have, for a century, decided we are going to use gasoline to run through carburetors, and now fuel injectors, to power our vehicles. It doesn't make sense to me. Sixty percent of all of the oil comes from troubled parts of the world--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Venezuela. It makes no sense to be that dependent and for America to be hostage to that situation.

We need to move to a different future. I think it ought to be hydrogen and fuel cell. Even as we move along, we are never going to not need oil, natural gas and coal, but at least let's remove our addiction to finding it from troubled parts of the world that hold our economy hostage. We need to increase production of fossil fuels and do it in a way that doesn't injure our environment. We need to do much more with respect to renewables. I am talking about the biofuels, ethanol, and biodiesel. We need to do much more with respect to efficiency as well. Everything that we do every day with light switches and virtually everything that powers everything we do needs to be made much more efficient.

We need to tell the auto makers that you cannot do this anymore; you cannot build 5,000-pound cars that get 15 miles per gallon. At least we should say to consumers that it is not in your interest to buy them. We ought to say to the auto companies that the way you are going to compete best is to make efficient cars, and we are going to hold you to a better and higher standard. In the long term, we understand this.

We suck 84 million barrels of oil out of this planet of ours every single day--84 million barrels a day out of this Earth. We use one- fourth of it in the United States. This little spot uses one-fourth of all of the oil. China has 1.3 billion people. They now have 20 million automobiles. In 15 years, China is going to have 120 million automobiles. They are going to add 100 million automobiles to the roads. Where is the energy going to come from? That is the question.

That is why I say we have long-term issues we have to deal with. We have to decide that we are going to go to a different future. Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina and I had a caucus on hydrogen and fuel cells. If you don't care where you are going, you are never going to be lost. You have to decide what your destination is. What policies do we want for our energy future? We cannot sit around thumbing our suspenders and bellowing about all of these issues and doing nothing about them.

We passed an Energy bill a while ago--and my compliments to Senators Domenici and Bingaman. I am one of the senior members on the Energy Committee. I helped write the renewable fuels title and the hydrogen fuel cell title. But we need to do much more. And at the moment, what has happened to oil prices at $75 a barrel--when the major oil companies had their highest profits in history when oil was at $40 a barrel, it is fundamentally unfair to American consumers. We need to do something about it. I would like to vote on that in the Senate.

I think it is important to consider how do we deal with this issue because this is clearly unfair. The oil industry is important to us. I have done a number of things to try to be helpful to

them. But when I see something that is wrong, I think we ought to set it right. The oil industry is upset with my saying, look, if you are going to accumulate these profits, use them to reduce price; and if they are not going to do that, we ought to recapture it and use it as a rebate exclusively to the American consumers and find a way--not this $100 nonsense that floated around here, but a real rebate that takes some pressure off of these American consumers. I think that is something that we have a responsibility to do.

I want to mention as well that yesterday we passed an emergency supplemental bill. The reason we are dealing with an emergency bill is that President asks for zero money, no money in his budget for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have spoken on the floor many times about that. The administration comes in and says, all right, we don't know how much it is going to cost to have our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we are not going to ask for money in the regular budget. We are going to ask for it later as an emergency, so it doesn't count and isn't scored, and we add it to the Federal deficit. That is a game. It should not happen. We are now spending somewhere between $7 billion to $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan. Honest budgeting would require this administration to say here is what we think we are going to spend this year and ask for the money; then figure out how we are going to pay for it. Is the only sacrifice we are going to ask from the soldiers who we say, go to Iraq for a year, or the National Guard to whom we say, put your boots on and for the next 16 or 18 months you are going to be gone from your home, your family, your job--you are a citizen soldier, but you are going to spend 12 months in Iraq and 4 or 5 months perhaps training to get there. So we are going to take you away from home for 16, 18 months. Is that the only sacrifice being asked in this country? Could we perhaps, as a Congress, decide to ask the people to begin to pay for the cost of this? Is that wrong to ask the American people to sacrifice as well? We have to spend this money, so maybe we can all pay for it.

The President doesn't want to do that. The President doesn't want to confront the reality of where our fiscal policy is. We are far off track. We have the biggest deficits in history, and I know they brag that they say our deficit is only going to be $300 billion, $350 billion in the coming year. But look at the increase in debt. They are to go borrow more than $600 billion in the coming year. In addition, they are borrowing over $700 billion for the biggest trade deficit in history. We are out of kilter to the tune of $1.4 trillion, and they snore their way through all of this.

Just hang around, shine your shoes, thumb your suspenders and snore a little. Don't worry, things will be happy, things will be better.

What a dysfunctional system. The American people, I think, deserve this Congress and this President to stare truth in the eye and understand what is going on, yes, in fiscal policy, in health care, in education, in military policy and, yes, in foreign policy. I don't think, regrettably, that is happening.

There is a remarkable thing that happens in this country, and that is every even-numbered year, our Constitution provides the American people grab the steering wheel.

Last weekend, I was in Philadelphia. I went to the Constitution Center. It was the first time I had been back to Philadelphia in a while. I remember something that happened, I believe, in 1988. In 1988--I think I have the year right--was the 200th birthday of the writing of the Constitution.

As all of us remember, the Constitution was written by 55 White men. Fifty-five White men went into a room in Philadelphia, pulled the shades--there was no air-conditioning; it was a hot Philadelphia summer--and they wrote a constitution for this country. George Washington's chair, by the way, is still in that room.

When you go to the room and see where they sat, you will notice George Washington's chair is still there with half a rising Sun decorated on the back of the chair. Ben Franklin sat over here. Mason and Madison sat over here.

So on the 200th birthday--at the time 55 White men wrote the Constitution, and I emphasize ``White men'' only to make the point that our country has changed in the way we govern and the way we respond--55 Americans went back into that room in Philadelphia. I was one of the 55 chosen to go back into that room to be involved in the 200th anniversary ceremony of the writing of the Constitution. Among the 55 were men, women, minorities.

It was pretty remarkable. I sat in that room thinking about coming from a small school in North Dakota and studying the Constitution, understanding the first three words, ``We the people,'' and then trying to think back a couple hundred years in which these 55 men, really remarkable people who wrote this framework of ours, the framework of our Government, that has been altered only 17 times in over 220 years, outside of the 10 amendments for the Bill of Rights.

I tried to think of how they were evaluating what kind of country is this, what kind of country will it become, and what kind of a constitutional framework will be flexible enough to allow it to change with changing times.

It is pretty remarkable what they did. The work they did was pretty dramatic. It is work that is the creation of the most successful democracy in the history of humankind, and it is relatively young, not much more than a couple hundred years old. Not very old. And yet it is the most successful in the history of humankind.

It provides for the separation of powers, branches of Government-- legislative, judicial, and executive. And it provides that the American people, we the people, are in charge. All the power in America is in the power of one--one person casting one vote on one day. That is all the power in America. There are no guns. There are no armies that march. There is just the power of one enumerated in the Constitution that on even-numbered years, the American people one by one grab America's steering wheel.

The reason I mention that is this is another even-numbered year. We have two grand political parties in this country. I am not somebody who believes one is all bad and one is all good. Both parties have contributed substantially to this country's past, and I hope they will contribute to its future. Occasionally, this country gets off track, and I think we are very seriously off track. It is the case in fiscal policy. It is the case in health policy, certainly the case in foreign policy, immigration policy--you name it.

We have serious problems that require, should require this Congress to stare them in the eye and work in a bipartisan way to fix them. But we have this dysfunctional system. We have a complete abject lack of leadership coming from the White House, in my judgment, with all due respect, and we have a majority party in this Congress that now in the next series of issues dealing, for example, with health care costs will decide next week that we should not be able to offer amendments to deal with the real issues of health care costs. So we are not addressing head on the kind of issues about which the American people care.

Having said all of that, I want to make the point that if I felt so discouraged that nothing can get done and nothing will get done, it would be hard to get up in the mornings to go to work. But I think there are enough people of good will, enough people who come to these positions who understand that America needs good stewardship, and responsible politics means addressing real issues, as hard as they are and as tough as they are. I think there are enough of them that at some point very soon, we are going to see a different track, a different approach, and we are going to see real efforts to address real problems at long last.

There is much to be concerned about regarding our country's future, but there is also much about which to be hopeful. This country has been a beacon to the world in many ways. We have survived a civil war. We beat back the oppression of Adolf Hitler. We have done so many unbelievable things. We split the atom. We spliced genes. We invented plastic. We invented radar. We invented the telephone, the television, the computer. We built airplanes and learned how to fly them. Then build rockets to fly to the Moon, walk on the Moon, and plant the American Flag. What an unbelievable place this is.

Travel around the world and ask people how they see this country--I haven't talked about immigration, but if tomorrow we said as a country we have no more immigration quotas, this country is open to anyone living anywhere in the world who wishes to come to America, welcome, come and stay and work, if that happened, we understand what the circumstances would be. We would be overrun with immigration.

I landed in a clearing in kind of a jungle area between Nicaragua and Honduras one day. The helicopter ran out of gas. The campesinos had come to see who came down in a helicopter. We had an interpreter with us and started talking because we were lost and didn't get found for some hours. We asked the campesinos from Honduras and Nicaragua: What is it you aspire for your lives? We want to come to America; we want to come to America, they said. Why? Because there is opportunity in America.

It is unbelievable. So if we just said: Look, anybody who wants to come can come, we would be overrun with people coming into this country. We can't do that. This is an Earth that spins around the Sun. It has 6.4 billion people living on it. Half of them have never made a telephone call, half of them live on less than $2 a day, and 1.5 billion don't have daily access to potable water. And this little spot called the United States is extraordinary, but it didn't get there by accident. It got there because enough people cared about the right things. Yes, about rights--especially rights--women's rights, worker rights, civil rights, the rights that people have, the rights to which people, we the people, refer. Those are fights we have had for a long time.

Having said all that, I still believe there is a great reservoir of hope for this country to have its best 200 years ahead of it. It requires, however, for us to work together and to understand you can't gloss over problems, you have to confront problems and deal with problems in a thoughtful, sensitive way.

I will come on Monday, I assume, and if the plans are as I heard yesterday to bring a bill to the floor and then prevent any other ideas on health care costs, we will be right back in the same dysfunctional approach we have seen for far too long coming from both the White House and the Congress. I think the American people hope for better. They certainly deserve better. And I hope next week we will see something better than that.

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

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

Mr. President, first of all, let me compliment my colleague from New Mexico on his presentation about energy. I know in recent days I have read reports by various spokesmen and spokeswomen here in Washington and in the press around the country saying that there is a lot of hysteria in the Congress about the price of gasoline and the price of oil, and the Congress is making much ado about nothing, according to some. It is a very serious issue, and it suggests an even tougher set of circumstances to come with respect to this country's energy supply. Let me describe some of the reasons why, and let me add to some of the things my colleague from New Mexico just described that I believe our country must do in order to resolve these problems.

We have about 20 million vehicles that are being driven in the country of China today, I am told. China has 1.3 billion people, with about 20 million automobiles. In 15 years, it is estimated that they will have 120 million automobiles. In other words, China is set to add about 100 million cars and trucks to their roads. Will that substantially change demand for oil? Yes, it will. Will it have an effect on the price of oil and the accessibility of oil? It will, and it will have an effect on us in the United States. That is not because of our difficulty today, but it is reason to be concerned about tomorrow.

Every single day, we take about 84 million barrels of oil out of this Earth. Every day, about 84 million barrels are sucked out of this planet and used. Twenty-one million barrels are used here in the United States. One-fourth of all the oil that is taken out of this planet every single day is used here in this country. This country has a lot of automobiles, a lot of vehicles. We are an advanced country, we are highly developed, and we use a great deal of energy. Now we see the price of oil spike to $75 a barrel, the price of gasoline at the pump to $2.80, $2.90, $3 and above per gallon, and people are concerned about that, and should be. It ought not be a surprise to anyone that people in the Congress are concerned about this issue.

The fact is, we have a circumstance where there is one sector that has all of the gain, and all of the rest of the American people experience all of the pain. I am not in any way opposed to the oil industry. I have supported the oil industry on many occasions and will again, I expect. We need oil. We need to use our fossil fuels, and we will continue to need to do that, as far as I can see, for the long term. So we need to produce more. As an energy policy, we need to produce more. We also need to conserve more. That is very important. We need to provide new and different kinds of energy in the form of renewable energy. Most especially, in addition to conservation, we need what is called efficiency for all of the things we use every single day.

Let me talk a little about what has happened in this country. This chart shows the expression of concern that a lot of people have these days. This shows the largest oil companies--there are only four up here, but this shows the increase in profits--I guess there are actually five--the increase in profits year by year: a 17-percent increase in profit, a 43-percent increase in profit. ExxonMobil went from $21 billion in net profits to $36 billion in net profits in 2 years. Shell had a 47-percent increase in profit. We see another 37 percent increase in profit.

Now I am not opposed to profits. I am opposed to profiteering, but I am not opposed to profits. We have a capitalistic system, a market system. It works. Having taught some economics in college, I don't know of a better system of allocating goods and services than the so-called free market system of capitalism that exists here in this country. It is by far the best method of allocation of goods and services. But that free market sometimes doesn't work very well, and sometimes it needs a referee.

I am reminded of the fact that it is the free market which has given us a circumstance where a baseball shortstop signs a contract that is the equivalent of the payment to 1,000 high school teachers. So you weigh it, right? The free market system says a shortstop in the Major Leagues is worth 1,000 high school teachers. Do you think so? I don't. It seems kind of strange to me. Then there is Judge Judy. I seldom watch Judge Judy, but occasionally, when my television remote moves past the channels, I see her. She seems kind of intemperate to me. Judge Judy, according to People Magazine, makes I believe about 200 times the amount of income that Judge Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, makes. Free market system? Fair? Thoughtful? I don't know. It doesn't seem right to me, but that is the system, I guess. So the free market system is a system which I have always supported, but it does from time to time create strange results and needs a referee.

Having said that, we don't have a free market in oil in any event. With respect to the oil market in this world, you have several things happening.

One, you have OPEC ministers, and OPEC ministers from the OPEC countries sit in a room and they make a decision: How much are we going to produce, and what price do we want for it? So they decide how much they are going to produce. They are a cartel. I mean, that is the antithesis of the free market.

It is interesting that on this planet of ours, we have 6-plus billion people, and we circle around the Sun on this planet of ours. For some strange reason, we have been blessed by the Almighty in this wonderful country of ours with a standard of living that is nearly unparalleled, and yet that which we need to use, particularly in the case of oil, exists under the sands--in the largest quantities--under the

sands, for example, of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq.

The OPEC ministers from the OPEC countries sit around a room, and I assume it is a closed room, but I don't know because I have never been there. I assume they sit around in a closed room and make judgments about how much they are going to produce and how much they want for it.

Second, the oil companies are the ones who decide these days because they have more raw muscle in the marketplace--and I might just point out that they all now have two names. They used to have one name, but then they got romantically entangled and decided to marry up. Exxon used to be Exxon, but Exxon fell in love with Mobil and by and large it became ExxonMobil. Chevron-Texaco and ConocoPhillips, they all had a romance and they all merged, and this orgy of mergers--these megamergers became these blockbuster, huge companies, and that now gives them more muscle in the marketplace, and that is just a fact. It is hard to contest.

So again we have the OPEC ministers sitting around the table, and then we have the large oil companies, much larger because of the blockbuster mergers, and then third and finally we have the futures market. And the futures market regrettably has become, in my judgment, just a huge amount of speculation, giant speculation about oil. I understand how that speculation works, but sometimes speculation drives these markets in ways that are completely unintended.

So we don't have a normal supply-demand relationship with respect to the price of oil. As a result of that, today people drive to the gas pump and it costs $50 or $60 to fill up with a tank of gas. A farmer is trying to figure out how to order a load of fuel for their farm to put in the spring planting, and then they try to figure out: How on Earth am I going to pay for it? And even as they drive up to the gas pumps and the farmers try to figure out how they are going to pay for a load of fuel, they see the profits of the large oil companies, the highest profits in the history of corporate America, the highest profits ever.

The minute you say that, people say: Are you against profit? No, I am not. I am not at all. But I think it is pretty unfortunate that you have one side with all the pain--that is, the consumers--and on the other side are the biggest oil companies with all the gain. It is almost as if you have a hose hooked up to the pocketbooks of the American people just sucking money out to go right to the treasuries of the big oil companies.

So what do we do about that? I propose a windfall profits rebate. It is simply this: We say to these companies, the major integrated companies--only the major integrated companies--we say this to them: On profits above $40 a barrel--and I picked $40 a barrel because that was the price in 2004, the average price at which the industry had the highest profits in their history--at profits above $40 a barrel, you will have a 50-percent collection fee you have to send, which will be rebated back to the consumers. The Federal Government will get the money and rebate it to the American consumers. So it is a windfall profits rebate. We collect it and then send it all back to the consumers.

There is a way the oil companies wouldn't have to pay that. In the legislation I have proposed, the way they would avoid paying that is if they are investing all of that windfall profit back into the ground to explore for more energy and thereby increase the supply of energy, or if they are building refineries above ground, then they wouldn't have to pay it.

They say: We need these profits because we are using them to invest back into exploration and drilling to find more oil, but they are not. They are doing some of that, but they are using the majority of their profits to buy back their stock or to drill for oil on Wall Street--and incidentally, there is no oil on Wall Street. But if they, in fact, were doing what they claim they are now doing, they wouldn't be affected by the proposal I offer. A windfall profits rebate would say to the oil industry: If you are not using these profits to expand the supply of energy and therefore reduce the price of energy, then you are going to have to pay this and it will be coming to the Federal Government and rebated to the American consumers from whence it came. It is pretty simple.

We are literally, unfortunately, in this country held hostage to this price of oil and therefore the price of fuel and the price of gasoline. We can do something about it in an aggressive way in the longer term.

I helped, along with 2 of my colleagues, to write the renewable fuels provision that was in the energy bill. We are going to go to 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol fuel by 2012. That makes sense to me, using renewable fuels and being able to have farmers plant in their fields the corn that can be turned into ethanol. Then we could drive up to a pump someday and say: Fill it up with corn. That makes sense to me. Biofuels, ethanol, biodiesel makes a great deal of sense. As I said, I was one of three Senators who wrote the provisions that will take us now to 7.5 billion gallons a year, more than double the ethanol we are now using.

Wind energy. How remarkable it is to be able to take the energy from the wind with the new, better turbines, more efficient turbines, take energy from the wind and turn it into electricity. By the way, using electrolysis, you can separate hydrogen from water and produce hydrogen and use hydrogen in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. By the way, with the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, which I hope will be our future, you put water vapor out the tailpipe and have twice the efficiency of power to the wheels. What a remarkable thing.

Virtually everything in our life has changed. Technology is unbelievable. The Lunar Lander, in 1969, when our two astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, landed on the Moon--a new automobile today, sold in the United States right now, has more computing power in it than the Lunar Lander that landed them on the Moon.

My point is technology is changing everything. It is unbelievable what is happening with technology. But you know something, nothing has changed with the car or automobile with respect to the way you fuel it. It is full of computers, full of technology, it has more computing technology than the Lunar Lander that landed on the surface of the Moon, but nothing has changed since 100 years ago with respect to fueling a car.

I often tell my colleagues that my first car was a 1925 Model T Ford that I bought for $25 dollars, and as a teenager, I spent 2 years rehabilitating this old Ford. I discovered later you can't do much with the Model T, you just drive it until it starts boiling over and then turn and drive it against the wind for half a mile and then drive it a little more, so I sold it. But I loved rehabilitating that old Model T. What I discovered about a Model T is you put gasoline in a 1924 Model T Ford exactly the same way you put gasoline in a 2006 Ford: You drive up to the pump, take the cap off the fuel tank, you put the hose in, and you start pumping. Nothing has changed. Almost everything else in our lives has, but nothing has changed with respect to fueling a vehicle.

That is why I think, in the long run, we ought to go to a hydrogen fuel cell future. I hope our children and grandchildren are driving vehicles that do not need to use gasoline from oil. That's my fervent hope. That can happen if we make it happen.

We decided to go to the Moon, and we did it by the end of a decade. We can drive vehicles by remote control on the surface of Mars. But we can't figure out how to remove ourselves from our addiction to oil, particularly most of which comes from troubled parts of the world? That doesn't make any sense.

I think we have an intermediate strategy, including renewables, wind, biodiesel; it includes dramatic conservation including more efficient automobiles and a range of other things--more efficiency; more production. Yes, we need to produce more oil. I don't believe we should produce in ANWR. I do support producing in Lease 181 of the Gulf of Mexico. There are a range of areas I think we can and should produce, in areas in which we are not now producing.

But at this point I think we ought to understand, if we sit by and do nothing at a time when you have all of the gain from these dramatically increased oil prices going to the largest integrated oil companies, only part of which is being invested back into searching for more energy, while all of the pain goes

to the rest of the American consumers, I think we should not be surprised when consumers say to Congress: What on Earth are you doing? When are you going to get off your backside and do something about this?

People have a right to expect that Congress will take action when things go haywire, when something is wrong. Clearly, what is happening now is not right. My hope is in the coming days we will see action on the floor of the Senate that begins to address these issues. They are not easy to address. I understand that. But to suggest that there is nothing wrong, to put our head in the sand and say this is just a temporary aberration, don't worry about it--after all, we can easily afford a tank of gas on congressional salaries. What about people who cannot afford the tank of gas? That money is going, not incidentally, just to the major oil companies. We have 60 percent of our oil coming from off our shores. A portion of this money goes to the Saudi royal family, and they thank you. But it is not fair.

There is much to do. I notice in recent days a real pushback by those who say: Don't be hysterical about this, let's not do anything, let's not play the blame game--let's do nothing. Let's just let the coffers of the major integrated oil companies fill up, don't worry a bit, let people exhibit the pain, don't worry a bit, this will all be fine in the long term. John Kenneth Galbraith stated: In the long term we are all dead.

How about in the short term? What about the intermediate term, where we can do something about the problems that exist, the real problems that confront this country?

This country deserves better than it is getting. This country deserves leadership. It deserves aggressive leadership to tackle problems that are real problems in the lives of the American people. This is one.

My hope is that that leadership is something that we can exhibit sooner rather than later.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend paragraph 4 of rule XVI for the purpose of proposing to the bill H.R. 4939 amendment No. 3670. (The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of amendments.'')