Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am here today on the eve of the debate that will be occurring on Thursday evening. I know most Americans will be watching. I think they are probably the most important debates, certainly, since the Kennedy-Nixon debate, which was the first one.

The issue, of course, is related to the security of the country. I am going to focus my few remarks on security here at home, in terms of homeland security.

Whatever you think of the war on terror abroad--and there are many different views and we will hear some of those on Thursday night--my view--and I tend to be hawkish--is that hawks should be as angry or more angry with the President than doves, because the bottom line is that Iraq wasn't thought through. We don't have a plan and there is nowhere really to go. The idea of keeping faith and saying, well, there will be elections in January and that will make everything better, that is similar to the idea that we will win the war in 3 weeks and that will make everything better. It is simply not thought through and there are all these chimerical sort of wishes and hopes.

First, the election will not be held in many parts of the country. Second, I don't think it is going to make the basic problems go away. A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure. One of the whole theories is that we were going to rebuild the country and show the Iraqis a better life. Because the terrorists who are there--who are despicable--have been able to do so much in terms of sabotage and criminal activities, in terms of taking those workers who would rebuild Iraq and treating them so brutally, it has made it basically impossible to rebuild. The President and his administration admitted as much when they took back the money for rebuilding and are now putting it into security.

Again, what everyone thinks about the war overseas--and there are many different views, and I believe John Kerry will enunciate a view that is far more consonant with the American people than what President Bush has done so far. I say that as somebody who supported the $87 billion and the vote to go to war, because I believe we need a strong, aggressive foreign policy.

I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

When you ask why, the bottom line is very simple: They don't want to spend the money. Their idea after idea after idea about air security, port security, rail security, truck security--we have the technology, not to make certain a terrorist attack doesn't occur but certainly to decrease the odds of it. When you go to the people in the agencies and ask why are you not doing this or that, they say: We don't have the money. When we come to the floor and argue about homeland security--as we just did when the Appropriations bill on homeland security came forward--we were told by my friend from Mississippi, the chairman, that we are spending enough. Let me tell you, we are not spending close to enough in any one of these areas.

Let's say, God willing, we manage to wipe out al-Qaida in the next year or two, and let's say the problems in Iraq subside--in my view, because Kerry will be elected and will handle them a lot better than President Bush has--we are still going to have new terrorist threats.

Terrorism can be described in a single sentence, which is that the very technology that has blessed our lives and accounted for so much of the prosperity we have seen over the last two decades has an evil underside; namely, that small groups of bad people can get ahold of that technology and use it for terrible purposes. So if al-Qaida is gone--and let's hope they will be--and if terrorism in Iraq greatly declines--and let's hope that occurs--there are going to be new groups that start using this terrorism and using it against us and trying to use it in our homeland. It could be Chechnians; maybe they will have a meeting and decide that instead of blowing up movie theaters and airplanes in Moscow, the real answer is to go after the United States. Maybe it will be East Timorese, who have been fighting for independence in east Asia. For all we know, it could be skinheads in Montana who decide to do this--a couple of them did it in Oklahoma City--but in a more structured and destructive way, God forbid. So we cannot even keep track of the various groups that could hurt us.

The sad fact is, if 500 random people around the world, with some leadership, were injected with an evil virus and they were to decide, fanatically, they would devote the next 5 years of their lives to figuring out how to hurt America and try to implement it, the odds are too high that they could succeed.

So do we need a good offense? Yes, we do. Do we need a good defense? You bet. On area after area after area, we are not doing enough. Let me catalog a few.

Air security, here we are doing something of a better job than we have done in the past. The screeners, for all the problems they have, are a lot better than they were before 9/11 when they were paid minimum wage by private security companies. Some didn't speak English adequately. We are inspecting cargo.

But probably the No. 1 way terrorists could now hurt us as we travel in the air is by using shoulder-held missiles. We know the terrorists have them, al-Qaida has them, and they are available on the black market. We are slow walking any attempt to put on our commercial airplanes the mechanism to deflect the rockets, the heat-seeking rockets that emerge from shoulder-held missiles.

Yes.

I am aware of it, and it frustrates me to no end. Senator Byrd has had amendments, Senator Murray has had amendments, Senator Corzine has had amendments, Senator Clinton and I have had amendments, one after the other, and they are turned down.

I say to my colleague from Nevada, I have asked people in the administration, both present and former--a few who quit in disgust--are President Bush and his people not aware of the dangers? They basically say, no, they are aware of the dangers, but they don't want to spend any money here at home. They would rather have all the money go to tax cuts, and so it is not that they do nothing in each of these

areas; they do the bare minimum: Let's have a study and let it take 2 years. Let's decide on what to do down the road.

For every year we wait, we become more vulnerable.

Mr. President, I am aware, to answer my good friend from Nevada, of this. I am frustrated by it, and, frankly, I am befuddled by it because an administration that is so aggressive when it comes to taking the war overseas and will ask us for billions and billions more at the drop of a hat----

I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. President, I rise in support of this amendment introduced by my colleague and friend, Senator Clinton, and me. It doesn't take money away from anybody else. It simply increases the amount of money to the high-needs areas. There are lots of ways to skin this cat. It is clear that the areas most under threat, cities such as New York City, the No. 1 target, as we know, of the terrorists, need far more help than we get. I think there has been a general outcry by the 9/11 Commission and many others that it is so unfair to give, say, the State of Wyoming more on a per-capita basis than New York City gets in terms of terror. I don't doubt the need Wyoming has for dollars. But if Wyoming has the need for dollars, certainly New York has a greater need for dollars.

What we have done with this amendment, which is one way to do it, is to simply increase the high-needs area. It does not touch the general formula but, rather, goes to high needs.

Let me share a little history about this high-needs area. As you may know, when we first were setting up this formula, I spent a lot of time negotiating with the White House as to how we would allocate money. Then the point person for the White House was the Secretary of OMB, Mitch Daniels. We came to the conclusion that obviously every State needed some money. And knowing how the House and Senate work, we weren't going to get a formula which would send money to the 5 or 10 largest cities or the 5 or 10 largest focal points. So we negotiated the formula in two parts.

The first was the general formula, and there was a specific need for every State and taking care of those States. Now, the remainder of that formula, which we are not discussing now, was supposed to be allocated by discretion by the administration. They basically punted the ball and did that on a per capita basis.

I ask unanimous consent that I be given an additional 5 minutes.

I yield to the Senator for that purpose.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, we had the high-needs formula, which really didn't do justice to the areas that had the highest needs. We came up with this high-needs formula.

Frankly, the first year it worked quite well and quite fairly. The bottom line is that, of the high-needs allocation the first year, which I believe was $700 million, New York City, the city that has been the focus of both terrorist attacks, received $225 million. While still on a per capita basis, we were not getting what we thought was a fair share, it certainly came a lot closer.

But what has happened is two things. First, on the high-needs formula, other localities came in and asked for money. They said they are a high-needs area. The number of cities last year that were under the high-needs rubric expanded. The first year it was a handful, the next year it was 30, and last year it was 50. So now lots of localities are competing for this high-needs money. That is fine. I am not one to begrudge that. I think we are not doing enough on homeland security, and this is one place we should be spending more dollars.

We are not trying to take away money from the high-needs area. I remind my colleagues that the amendment we are offering will apply to a larger number of cities than first proposed. But the bottom line is very simple; that is, once the high-needs funding was spread among many cities, the cities of the greatest need, such as New York and Washington, did not get the dollars they needed. Over the last 3 years, the amount of money that New York City has received has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. The bottom line is very simple: We are not getting what we need.

Let me talk about some of the needs in New York City. I live in Brooklyn, a proud Brooklynite. We have the Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Every time I cross that bridge-- usually by car and once in a while on a bicycle--there are two police officers at each end of the bridge. That bridge is guarded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as it must be. We picked up somebody in Ohio a few years ago who was intent on trying to destroy that bridge. Well, that is 20 police officers, because it is five shifts of four people. Multiply that by the number of bridges and tunnels comparable to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and that shows you the magnitude of what we are doing.

It is the same thing with our firefighters and our emergency responders and our hospitals. All of them have had to do so much more because our city is at the epicenter more, quite frankly, than a hospital, police department, or a firefighting department in a middle- sized city in the middle of America, which doesn't have to do quite what we do. My guess is that bridges in Omaha, or Wichita, or Albuquerque are not guarded by two police officers at either end for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; nor should they be. But they have to be in New York.

We will do everything we can to prevent another 9/11. Yet as we have gone further along, the amount of money New York City has been given has decreased. I know there are other cities that have needs. I worked hard to see that Buffalo was included in this formula, with $10 million. A few other cities in upstate New York have problems.

So there are only two ways to go about solving this problem. One is to rob Peter to pay Paul, to reallocate the funds that are there. That is not this amendment. We don't touch that. The other is to increase the high-needs funding, so the cities that are under the greatest threat and the greatest danger can at least be reimbursed in greater part. Certainly, we won't be made whole for the homeland security efforts that we must undertake.

We heard a few months ago, when we picked up the new intelligence, what the areas were they were focusing on: Washington, DC, and the New York City metropolitan area; five buildings, two in DC, two in Manhattan, and one in northern New Jersey. Again, we can bring home the need to focus that should be here. Yet we are not doing it.

Let me tell you, if you think we don't have the money, we are going to spend $416 billion on defense this year. We are only spending $33 billion on homeland security in toto. We are spending less than $2 billion on helping our first responders, on helping our localities that have worked so hard and so well to defend us from terrorism. It would seem to me that any fair allocation of dollars would be giving New York City more money, giving some of the other cities more money.

Let me go over the numbers. Last year, New York's share of high-needs areas dropped to 9 percent. We didn't receive 9 percent of the attacks. Thus far--and I hope there are no more anywhere in America--we received 100 percent of the two terrorist attacks that have occurred.

Our city, as I say, is struggling. We have needs like everybody else. We have a great police department, a great fire department, a great EMT department, and great hospitals. But they cannot do it alone. So it is my hope that our colleagues will rise to the occasion.

This money, as I say, will not just benefit New York but other cities of high needs throughout the country. Let's stop underfunding this very needed program. Let's stop saying let the other guy do it. In a time of terrorism, we need leadership. This amendment represents leadership, and I hope we can get the sufficient number of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk and I ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I will be brief. I know the hour is late, but as I am sure this body knows, these issues, I believe, are extremely important and have to be considered. This amendment deals with rail security. It is rail security and transit grants.

Now, first, I do want to say that we are providing $278 million for these grants. The amendment by my friend from West Virginia raised the amount to that. But it is not close to enough when we are considering that rail is one of the great dangers we face in this war on terrorism. If anything, we have learned since last year's appropriations bill that al-Qaida has chosen rail as one of its methods of terror. We all looked in shock at what happened in Madrid.

Our rail systems, whether they be mass transit, subways, commuter rails, passenger rails, freight rails, are utterly unprotected. While we are making small steps in the direction of protecting them, we are not moving close to quickly enough. Despite the significant threat to transit systems, the funding for transit security has been grossly inadequate.

Over the last 2 years, Congress appropriated only $115 million in transit security: $65 million in fiscal year 2003; $50 million--less-- in 2004. The administration's budget requested no additional funding. Now, of course, we have raised it a little bit here but not close to enough.

Furthermore, only 30 to 40 percent of what has been appropriated for transit security has been received by transit agencies. So even with the small amounts we have appropriated, our agencies that are supposed to make our subways, our mass transit, our commuter rail, our passenger rail safer have not been able to do it. As a result, many transit agencies, including those in my city, in my State, many of which are likely to be at risk, have pressing security needs that are still unfunded. In fact, the Banking Committee found that we have invested $9.16 per passenger on aviation improvements but less than 1 cent per passenger on transit security improvements. Now does that make any sense: $9.16 on air travel, less than 1 cent on transit?

On April 8, the Commerce Committee passed the Rail Security Act of 2004. The bill would provide $1.2 billion to enhance the safety of our Nation's mass rail systems. On May 6, the Banking Committee unanimously passed the Public Transportation Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. That bill would provide over $5 billion to enhance the safety of the Nation's mass transit systems and would mean so much to the New York area where we face a need for hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up our security. So when my friend from Mississippi will get up and say, well, we are giving some money, it is not close to what the authorizing committees felt was needed. It is not a little less; it is not a lot less; it is a huge amount less. If the Commerce Committee would say that $1.2 billion is needed and the Banking Committee would say that $5 billion is needed and we are appropriating as little as we are, clearly we are not doing something right.

These two bills were not taken up by the Senate leadership for several months, and then, in July, Secretary Ridge announced there was credible information indicating al-Qaida is moving ahead with plans for a large-scale attack in the U.S. aimed at disrupting the political elections. In reaction, all of a sudden the Senate leadership decided to try to pass some security measures that were long overdue. I am told the reason they did not bring them up is because they felt these measures cost too much. I am sure my esteemed colleague from Mississippi will make that argument again today, that spending $350 million to secure the thousands of miles of tracks, tunnels, bridges, and stations used by millions of Americans every day is too expensive. I have to respectfully disagree. We are vulnerable. God forbid 10 terrorists strap explosives to themselves and go into 10 of our busiest rail stations and detonate them at a single time. This would cause huge loss of life, tremendous suffering, and economic hardship.

There are things we can do. We can develop detectors that fit mass transit as we are doing in the airports. We are not. We can protect our tunnels and bridges upon which trains go. We are not. The bottom line is, we are doing virtually nothing.

I am happy to yield.

Mr. President, I appreciate the understanding of my colleague from Mississippi. I think I have used pretty much my time on transit even though I have been given another 10 minutes.

I just want to say this in conclusion: We are currently spending $5 billion a month in Iraq alone. While I wholeheartedly support making sure that our troops have everything they need--and I have supported all of these funding requests--if we can spend $5 billion a month in Iraq, we can surely spend $350 million over 5 years to help ensure the safety of our transit riders here at home. The priorities are wrong. There is a disconnect. We spend what it takes to win a war on terror overseas, as we should. We spend virtually nothing to protect ourselves at home. To say that a couple hundred million dollars is too much when the safety of our citizens is at stake and we are spending $5 billion a month in Iraq is a schizophrenia that this country, as we fight this war on terror in this brave, new world, cannot afford.

I urge adoption of the amendment.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the applicable sections of that act for the purpose of the pending amendment. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I offer the Schumer amendment on immigration security. The amendment is at the desk, I believe.

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

Mr. President, there are so many places where we have to tighten up our security at home. We have talked about security in the air and security at the ports and security on the rails and security with trucks. We have talked about helping our police and our firefighters and hospitals. There is another area that we do have to address even at this late hour because it is so crucial. That is security at our country's borders.

The question is, Who can come across our borders, whether by land or sea or by air, and how do we monitor who they are, and how do we make sure terrorists do not come into this country as they did in the years and months before 9/11, where one part of the Government knew that those who came across the borders might well cause harm, but those who were at the borders letting people into this country did not?

The good news is that technology can help us. We can keep our borders open and free. We can have commerce that we need and at the same time separate those few bad apples. Technology will allow us to do that. But we are not doing it. Again, we run the risk that our porous borders will serve as an attraction to those who want to be in this country to do evil things, either here or abroad.

The amendment I have offered would provide funding necessary to strengthen the eyes and ears and coordination of personnel at our country's borders. Perhaps the greatest threat to our country as a whole is what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has called ``people of mass destruction'' or PMDs coming through our borders. It was people of mass destruction who turned airplanes into missiles on 9/ 11, and we have to do something to avoid that.

My amendment contains five parts. First, the amendment provides $200 million to help bring the biometric technology already at our busiest ports of entry up to the standards called for by the 9/11 Commission and the task force report. The 19 hijackers who invaded my city and our country 3 years ago ran through the borders in a wave of deception. Were there more accurate measures of identifying those terrorists when they entered the country, we might not have suffered 9/11.

Three years after 9/11, it is staggering that we are leaving so much of our safety up to the subjective, fallible judgment of individuals rather than to superior biometric technology. The first part of the amendment deals with upgrading that technology.

Second, my amendment would provide $50 million to help ensure that all travelers entering the United States are held to the same high level of scrutiny. Specifically, the amendment would provide funding to help persuade visa waiver program governments to produce passports compatible with the state-of-the-art biometric technology that I hope will be deployed at U.S. ports of entry.

Third, the amendment would provide $25 million to fund the expansion of the Homeland Security Department's exit and entry data systems to accommodate the ever increasing traffic of travelers in and out of our Nation's ports of entry. As the pace of globalization quickens, U.S. airports, bridges, and ports see a rising number of visitors. We have to have the technology to keep up with that increasing number.

Fourth, the amendment addresses the need to integrate the entry and exit data systems housed within the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Department of State. We have in our Government a number of sophisticated databases collecting critical information about individuals who could harm our country. Each of these systems has different access rules and runs on different algorithms. It makes integration of these systems with one another and with the people at the borders very chancy and difficult.

Finally, the amendment would provide $25 million to support a uniform transliteration and translation system to identify each visitor entering and exiting. You don't want to let someone in because Mohammed or Bill was spelled incorrectly and that person slipped through the borders.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

The bottom line is simple. We have a long way to go to make our borders safe. The frustration that many of us have is we can do it but we are not. Again, we are taking tiny baby steps where bold, imaginative, and large steps are required. No one, no matter what their ideology, party, or even vote on this measure, wants to repeat what happened at 9/11 when people came across our borders and should not have. This amendment will help close that loophole. It is worth the cost. I urge its adoption.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the applicable sections of that act for the purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent my new Judiciary staffer, Joshua Levy, be given floor privileges during the duration of this session of Congress.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment I have at the desk be modified by language that is at the desk.

I thank the Chair. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Mississippi for his graciousness in allowing this amendment to be modified. I agree with him that we have the same goals, but our analysis of how well we are progressing toward those goals is woefully inadequate.

I want to make clear what the amendment seeks to do because there have been some concerns raised by the American Trucking Association and some truck firms. To address those concerns, which I did not think were real, I modified the amendment to make that clear. Here is what the amendment does not do: It does not require that members of the trucking industry purchase GPS systems for their truck fleets. It does not require trucking companies to present plans to TSA of current truck routes throughout the country.

My amendment simply provides the TSA with the resources to begin looking into how we go about monitoring what has been shown to us as a vulnerability within our existing plan to secure our country from terrorist threats. I know the ATA, which has resisted any regulation of the trucking industry, has raised some concerns, but their concerns are either incorrect or shortsighted.

My amendment provides the TSA with flexibility and much needed funds to address truck security and has none of the mandates or high costs that have been talked about. Both the TSA and DOT, I will agree with my friend from Mississippi, are currently working on improving and expanding truck-tracking systems and background checks for commercial driver's licenses with the HAZMAT endorsement. But let me suggest something. Here is the plan. First, they were doing nothing, and a year, a year and a half ago, I prodded and prodded. So now the plan is that any new application for a HAZMAT license will be checked out, a background check will be given. The problem is, all existing licenses will not be checked until they are renewed.

Since most States have 5-year renewal periods, we are not going to check many of these licenses until 2007, 2008, 2009, even 2010.

When one asks the TSA why they are not doing it more quickly, they say one word: Money. We do not have the money.

It is hardly believable that $10 million here or $9.4 million there, which is spread across a whole lot of programs and research, will be enough. So the bottom line is, we agree that we have to do this, but I would rather err on the side of making sure we get it done quickly, given that the terrorists have said--at least with al-Qaida--that truck bombs are a preferred weapon. Every one of us knows what has happened. We have not provided the money we need in homeland security, whether it is truck security or anything else. We slow-walk these programs.

To say that somebody could have a hazardous material license and be on a terrorist watch list and we will not catch up to them until 2010 makes no sense. When TSA says they have not done this or not done it quickly because they do not have the money, what we do is provide them the money. There is an offset, an offset from a pot of money that simply says let us outsource some structural personnel reorganizing.

It amazes me that we could spend $70 million for that but only $15 million for the whole program of truck security.

As for the GPS system, it is needed. We do not mandate it because we, like our friend from Mississippi, are not

sure exactly the best way to go. But we sure want TSA to come up with a plan quickly and figure out how to do it and not impose the costs on the trucking industry if need be.

Here in America, a lot of companies put in a GPS system on their own, not to deal with terrorism but to deal with stolen trucks.

I remind my colleagues that a truck carrying hazardous material is missing, gone, from Pennsauken, NJ, not far from my city, and we still do not know where it is. We do not know what has been done with it. In all likelihood, it was stolen for mercenary purposes. But can we afford the risk that the next truck is stolen for terrorist purposes?

Simply training with the ATA program, which trains truck drivers on safety in terms of terrorism, does not deal with the fact that a terrorist might wish to steal a truck, hijack a truck, use a truck. All the training programs of good drivers, legitimate drivers in the world will not deal with that, and that is why we believe these other steps are so needed.

The bottom line is this is not a whole lot of money. This is a serious threat. It is offset. There are no mandates. Again, I say to my colleagues, we do not wish to wake up one morning and say: What if--God forbid there was a terrible incident--we had done more and allocated the money needed?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me make a couple of quick points.

First, the ATA letter says there are mandates. It was written before we modified the amendment. If there were any, there was no intention to have mandates, but now the amendment as modified makes it clear, so I think their letter is outdated.

Of course, no industry wants any regulation. We are in a brave new world. The airline industry didn't want anything done after 9/11 unless the Federal Government paid for the whole thing. We are not outlining what ought to be done and what mandates should be, but we ought to move forward and find out how to make our trucks, particularly the trucks carrying hazardous materials, safer.

It is a small amount of money. It says take $70 million out of a pot of money to outsource, to make TSA more efficient, and put it into truck security to do two things: First, to check on who can get a driver's license for hazardous materials, to avoid a situation like the one when hijackers were able to go fly planes, and, second, to study how to set up a GPS system so we can track trucks in case they are stolen.

I urge support of the amendment. I think we would be foolhardy not to do so.

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

I ask unanimous consent that the Allen amendment be laid aside temporarily.

Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, this amendment, which I am told, for my colleagues' benefit, will not be voted on tonight but will be voted on at some point late Monday afternoon, is a very important amendment. It deals with truck security.

As we go forward in the war on terrorism, we learn more and more. One of the things we have learned only in the last 6 months is that the preferred method of destruction of al-Qaida is truck bombs. They have used these bombs in the past, but we were given a new sense of urgency about al-Qaida's use of truck bombs from intelligence that has been picked up in the last 6 months and subsequently made public.

Truck bombs, unfortunately, can create tremendous destruction. We saw that in Oklahoma City. At the same time they are very easy to put together. Ammonium nitrate, which can easily be made into an explosive device, is readily available. Then all you need is a truck filled with ammonium nitrate or some other kind of hazardous material and that truck can cause huge amounts of destruction.

In our brave new post-9/11 world, we have to guard against all forms of terrorism. It is not sufficient to say because on 9/11 the terrorists struck through the air that we can ignore other ways they might seek to hurt us. That means we have to tighten security at the ports and on the rails. It also means we have to look at truck security. Unfortunately, probably of all the areas where terrorists might hurt us, we are doing the least in terms of truck security. We pay some lipservice to it, but I am not aware of very much the Department of Homeland Security is doing at all in terms of defending us against truck security.

One may ask: What can be done? For one thing, we can put some limitation on how ammonium nitrate, especially in large amounts, is distributed. That is not the purpose of this amendment. I might be introducing further legislation in that regard. But second, we can be much more careful about trucks, particularly trucks that carry hazardous materials.

Let me say that right now we do virtually nothing. Only a few months ago, a truck with hazardous material was found missing in Pennsauken, NJ, neighboring the State of New York. They still haven't found the truck. Perhaps the truck was lost. Perhaps more likely it was stolen. But God forbid someone who might be part of a terrorist organization took that truck and is lying in wait to do something that would be terrible and despicable.

Of course, we know a truck bomb struck the people in Oklahoma. It was used by McVeigh. This is not something we are unaware of. Truck bombs have been used by al-Qaida in other parts of the world. Again, I underscore the fact that trucks are sort of the preferred method of terrorism for al-Qaida.

We have lots of these trucks available in America. According to the 1997 Census of Interstate Commerce, 740,000 hazardous material shipments travel each day by truck in America. In the United States, 50,000 trips are made each day by gasoline tankers, many of which hold as much fuel as a Boeing 757. They often end with a late-night delivery to a deserted gas station. Experts say that trucks carrying chemicals such as ammonium nitrate, chlorine, or cyanide form even a more deadly risk. Imagine if al-Qaida or another terrorist organization took 10 of these trucks, parked them near a large, tall building in 10 of our largest cities and exploded them all at once, something that would hardly be inconceivable right now. The amount of lives lost might even, God forbid, exceed those lost on 9/11, and fear would descend across this country.

We have to be doing more. In December of 2002, almost 2 years or more than a year and a half ago, I called on Federal officials to rectify this problem. The first thing that I asked be done is that background checks for truck drivers certified to carry hazardous materials be undertaken. The TSA announced it would do so on May 2, 2003, 5 months later. But despite this progress, much more work needs to be done. There are two particular areas that we think greatly need improvement. Those are the things we are asking for tonight.

The first is tracking technology for trucks. It is very easy. You can buy a car and pay a couple hundred bucks more and have a GPS system which tells exactly where the vehicle is. Wouldn't it make sense that every truck carrying hazardous material was required to have such a GPS system? That would mean if the truck were stolen, if the truck were taken to a far different location than where it should be and the company wished to find out where it was, we could find it in a minute.

Ironically, a country far less developed than ours requires this for all its trucks--Brazil. There is a GPS system on every one of its trucks. In fact, the companies that do it there do it not to combat terrorism but, rather, to deal with theft. They actually make money.

The point is this is feasible. It works. It is simple. It is hardly pie in the sky. It probably costs about $200 to install in each truck. I would be happy, if once TSA started implementing this for individual truck drivers who might feel that $200 is too much, even though a rig costs much more than 100 times that, to have the Federal Government pay, although we don't provide that in our legislation. We do require that any truck carrying hazardous material have a GPS system installed. There are many companies that want to put this in place but are waiting until Government rules are in place. Thus far there are no Government rules.

Second, there ought to be a HAZMAT database. Just as we plot the path of thousands of planes in general aviation and commercial aviation and where they go and we know that if they are off course, something is awry and our air traffic control system deals with that, we should do the same for hazardous materials.

The bottom line is, any truck with a hazardous material would simply file a little plan as to where it was going and what deliveries it was making. And then again, if the truck was stolen or went off course, we would know. In Brazil they have a system when the truck goes too far off course, the truck stalls and can't be driven.

We could actually do that here and the money that we are providing would be within the ambit of the Homeland Security Department to do just that. But with this database, if a truck carrying hazardous material would be off course, we would know, and there would be a much greater chance that some kind of action could be taken before the truck was used for terrorism.

As for the background checks of those certified to carry hazardous materials, again, I have been pushing the TSA to do this. They have said they are going to do it. They have delayed it several times, and they have not completed doing it yet. But we urge them to do that as well.

The hour is late. I don't want to hold up you or the President of the Senate or other colleagues. People will have the weekend to read this legislation. Again, it is a rather small amount of money, $100 million. We do offset it. We take money from the human resources account--the same $100 million--so this doesn't increase costs. The bottom line is very simple: On truck security, a lot more must be done.

The amendment I have will help move us in that direction. This is a danger that we face in this country, which we have done virtually nothing about, and we could be moving, for a rather small amount of money, toward making ourselves far more secure.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Can we agree that my amendment will be voted on on Monday afternoon when we resume voting?

Thank you.

Will the minority whip yield for a question?

I didn't hear exactly what has been said about the plan. There was another amendment Senator Clinton and I were going to offer. I was going to cover it this evening, but she could not be here because of the illness of her husband.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I believe I have 4 minutes, which I very much appreciate and I want to thank my colleague from California for yielding the time and for her tremendous and unstinting leadership on this very important issue.

If nothing happens, AK-47s, Uzis, and TEC-9s are going to be back on the streets next week. That is a giant step backward. It is hard to believe that with all the progress we have made in the fight on crime, with the reduction in crime, with the reduction in the number in law enforcement who are hurt and killed in the line of duty, with the new war on terrorism upon us, that we are going to make it easy for anybody to get an AK-47, provided they have not been convicted of a felony. Someone on a terrorist watch list will be able to walk into a store and get an AK-47.

What is going on in America? This should not be a contest. This bill should have been renewed without a debate. Everyone who studied it has agreed it has been broadly successful. This President and the previous four, from Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, are on record as being for this, and because of a small band of people who are ideologues, who are extreme, we are not going to see this happen.

This represents the dysfunction of American politics. When a country cannot deal with an issue in a straightforward, forthright way, when a country that has had success takes a step back because a narrow few have some ideological notion that everyone should be entitled to have any weapon they want--some of them even believe a bazooka or a tank is okay--then something is wrong.

We need some leadership. We need the President of the United States to ask the House of Representatives to vote on the bill. We have not heard a peep out of him. We need some leadership from the leadership of the House to allow the bill to be on the floor. The crime bill of 1994, for all the ``sturm und drang,'' was one of the great governmental successes of the last decade.

As we wrote it, our motto in that bill was tough on punishment and smart on prevention. We brought a grand coalition from the most liberal to the most conservative to deal with the scourge of crime. The only reason there is not much of a fuss on this issue, regrettably, is because we have succeeded, because crime rates are lower and the large impetus to do more has declined because of our success.

When one has success, the answer is not to undo that success. It is to continue what has been done, and we are not. It is a sign, in my judgment, of the weakness of our politics, and even of this Republic, that the Senator from California and I are on the floor today as the gates are closing, pleading with our President and our colleagues to allow a vote to occur. This is not the America of which we should be proud.

I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague from Nevada. I would be happy to set a time limit and then have a vote on the amendment.

That is fine with me. Maybe we could have a few minutes for the majority and a few minutes for the minority.

If my colleague will yield, I can assure him it is a good one.

Thank you, Mr. President. I will be offering an amendment on nuclear security in a few minutes. But first I would in general address this bill.

Let me first say at the outset I am glad we are doing this bill now. As you know, many of us on this side of the aisle asked that this bill come up much sooner. But to do it right here as our first order of business when we return from the summer break after the two conventions I think is very good. I am glad we are on this bill.

The second point I would make is this: I don't think anyone on this side--certainly not the senior Senator from New York--wants to obstruct or not have this bill pass. We want it to move forward. So there is no intention to delay. As my good friend from Mississippi has seen by my asking for a short period to debate this amendment, having spent 18 years in the House of Representatives, 45 minutes is a lifetime there, but here in the Senate it is a relatively short amount of time. There is no intention for dilatory tactics or anything of that sort.

I believe, being head of our Democratic Task Force on Homeland Security, and having talked to many of my colleagues about further amendments, my friend, our chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security Appropriations, will find similarly short time limits are being called for. That is all the good news. The bad news is many of us think this amendment being brought before us is woefully inadequate. I would like to discuss that in general.

I have been quite hawkish on the war on terrorism, having supported the President's request to go into Iraq. I supported the $87 billion and I believe we need a strong and muscular foreign policy overseas. Mistakes are often made. We should do a lot better in terms of those mistakes. But inaction is perhaps the greatest mistake of all.

I am for fighting a vigorous war on terror overseas. I believe what our President said--former President Bill Clinton--is exactly right. To have strength and intelligence--that is exactly what he said, something to that effect--are not mutually exclusive categories when fighting a war on terror. If we are fighting a strong war on terror overseas, we are certainly not doing it here at home.

If I had to choose perhaps the greatest weakness of this administration in its war on terror, it would be the inadequacy of what we are doing here at home. The bottom line is this: We get a lot of rhetoric. We don't get the focus, the thoughtfulness, or the resources, the dollars to do what we need to do. Sure, if you think this is a 20- year plan, maybe we are doing enough. But we sure don't think it is a 20-year plan when we go overseas, nor should we. It is not a 20-year plan here.

Let me say this. This is my own view. We have a window in this global war on terror. In other words, my view is that this war on terrorism we face can be described in a single sentence; that is, the very technology which has blessed our lives and accounted for so much of the prosperity we have seen over the last two decades here at home has an evil underside, and that is that small groups of bad people can get hold of that technology and use it for terrible purposes. You can be in a cave in Afghanistan, and as long as you have a wireless connection to the Internet you can learn as much about America as any of us knows. If you took 500 random people anywhere on the globe from the most highly intelligent and well-read and studied to maybe the guy who sweeps the floors at night and injected them all with an evil virus so that they all decide to spend the next 5 years figuring out how to do terrible damage to the United States and then implement it, the odds are too high they can succeed.

This is not simply a war against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida is the first group who learned how to use this technology to cause the terrible events in the city from which I hail and which I so love. Al-Qaida is on the run. We have not done enough maybe in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but clearly al-Qaida is weaker today than it was then. But it is only a matter of time before new groups--maybe the Chechens, maybe the East Timorese, maybe even the skinheads in western Montana--figure out they can use this technology and do terrible damage. So we have a window. It may be 2 years, it may be 4 years, it may be 6 years, but it sure as heck ain't 10 or 20 where we can tighten up our defenses, because even though we have to fight the war on terror overseas we also have to prepare a defense at home.

If 500 people can do such terrible things, the odds we will be able to catch all of them before any of them implement the first strike against us is rather small.

Like anyone who follows sports knows, to win a game you need a good defense and a good offense. Whether you agree with this administration or disagree, you can't take away that they are focused on that offense. When it comes to defense, they are not home. They would be ranked as one of the worst defenses around. I have tried to figure out why this is, why we are doing so little on homeland security at home; why when it comes to our ports or our trucks or our rails or our borders, we are making such slow and halting progress, almost grudging progress, if you will.

I am not a person inside the brain of the President or his chief advisers, but having talked to people who have worked there and left-- some of them in disgust--I can tell you that part of it is a lack of desire to spend the dollars necessary. Spend whatever it takes overseas, fine; spend whatever it takes here to make us secure, the money is not there.

There is also the mistrust of Government, a sort of antigovernment view that Government is not a good thing, that Government is not going to do it right, that Government should be the place of last resort. Unfortunately, when it comes to the war on terror, it is only the Government that can do it, whether it be overseas or here at home.

But as a result, this administration, in my judgment, whatever grade you give them in fighting the war overseas, would get a D or an F in most areas in terms of fighting the war here at home.

Let me give some general places where we are not close to doing

enough. Regarding the air, we have done a good job making sure another September 11 does not happen specifically in the way it did; in other words, simply bolting the cockpits of all our planes greatly cuts down the average of a plane being hijacked. Putting air marshals on the planes makes a great deal of sense. We have made progress inspecting baggage and luggage. In fact, I think the TSA has done a good job and is an example that Government can do a good job. They are doing better than the private sector did when they were hiring people at minimum wage who hardly spoke English. However, even in the air we are vulnerable to terrorists using shoulder-held missiles and taking down our planes. We can stop that.

There will be an amendment offered here either by me or by somebody else that will push us to do more, much more quickly. Are we doing nothing in these areas? Absolutely not. We are doing a little bit. Again, if you believe that we can take 20 years to tighten our defenses before, God forbid, terrorists strike again, that is fine. If you believe we have a window that may be 3 or 4 or 5 years, it is a dereliction of duty. It is a dereliction of responsibility, the same as not protecting our troops overseas.

Take the rails. We learned in Madrid that terrorists may want to hurt people by blowing up trains and railway stations. The best way they do that, the most efficacious way, is by using regular explosives. We have the technology to develop devices that can be like smoke detectors. They can be put on every railroad car, in every railway or subway station. If someone walks in with nitrates, they will be detected. We do this, of course, on airplanes. We have sniffing devices which are now used in a few airplanes. I went through one of the devices in Rochester. It works well. That does not work for crowded trains and commuter rails and subways. We can increase the technology and it can be like a smoke detector. Place it on the ceiling, and it goes off if somebody carries explosives, thereby thwarting a blowing up of a train or a railroad station. We are not doing that.

Nor are we protecting the egress and ingress at most of our train stations in case, God forbid, something blows up. Penn Station, the busiest rail station in the country, still has tunnels a mile and a half long without ventilation and without escape routes. Two or three years ago we allocated $500 million to improve that. Only $100 million has been spent.

My colleague from California, Senator Boxer, will have an amendment on rail security that will address some of these concerns. She and I will be talking about that.

What about the ports? We are still only inspecting, at best, 5 percent of all incoming containers. I was speaking to a few people who run the container operations in parts of New York. They say it is more like 1 percent that we are inspecting. Who knows what is in the containers? Shoulder-held missiles, nuclear weapons, terrorists themselves. They caught someone actually in a container trying to smuggle himself into Toronto. We do not inspect these containers. Almost anything can be in them. Again, the technology is there to do more, quicker, and better inspections, to detect explosives or biological or radiological compounds and to put a lock on the container so it cannot be opened again and something be placed in it. My colleague from Washington will be offering an amendment on port security.

How about trucks? We have learned al-Qaida is now using truck bombs as a weapon of choice. This is what our intelligence picked up when we had the last scare that said something might occur during the political season, either at the conventions--which, thank God, it didn't--or maybe closer to the political season. There were indications that truck bombs might be used. There are things that can be done, things that are technologically available and feasible to deal with truck bombs. We can, for instance, require any truck that carries hazardous material have a GPS system so we know exactly where they are going. If they go off course, we will know. If they are stolen, we will know. A truck was stolen in Pennshauken, NJ, my neighboring state, that contained hazardous material. It is missing. It has been missing for 3 months. Who knows who has it. The odds are it was robbery, but it is always possible someone for far more evil purpose was stealing that truck.

In Brazil, a country hardly as technologically advanced as we, every truck has a GPS system. When they go off course, it cuts off so the truck cannot run any further if they are worried. Brazilian truck companies did this to prevent theft. Why aren't we requiring it here? The cost is minimal. Put a GPS system in your new Cadillac, it costs a couple hundred bucks more. We can do the same thing for trucks.

We can have some controls on how ammonium nitrate is sold, which is used in truck bombs. We cannot stop it or limit it; our farmers need it. But certainly when someone buys a lot we could require they identify themselves and call an 800 number to make sure they are not on a terrorist watch list or a previously convicted felon.

We can put taggants in the explosions. With nanotechnology, the marking devices are very tiny and do not interfere with either the cost or the effectiveness of the explosive. That way, we can find out who tried to buy certain materials. It serves as a deterrent, as well. We are doing virtually none of that.

By the way, there will be an amendment on truck security.

Are our chemical plants secure? Absolutely not. My colleague from New Jersey, Senator Corzine, has been the leader on this issue. His State is one of the leading chemical producing States in the country. A terrorist can easily scout out a chemical plant and make plans to blow it up, creating huge damage. All these areas are not areas where we do not know what to do. We know what to do. They are not areas where the technology is not yet able to be developed. It is able to be developed.

I have talked to experts in all of these areas until I am blue in the face. We do not have the urgency coming from this administration when, time and time and time again the Senator from West Virginia, who has been such a leader on this issue, Senator Byrd, or any who have been focused on this area, have brought amendments to the Senate to provide the dollars to make these things feasible, we have been told we do not have enough money.

I ask, would most Americans rather see these things being done and have maybe half a percent less cut on the top tax rate? In other words, say we go, instead of from 39 to 35.5 percent, that would give us enough money to do all of these things. This is not a political choice. This is hardly pork. This is protecting our homeland every bit as much as providing our soldiers overseas with the weaponry, the backup, that they need. Yet no one is home. There is some rhetoric, but every time the dollars aren't there, there is not the focus, there is not the alarm, the sense of urgency some Members feel.

As we debate this bill, many Members will offer a series of amendments on each of the areas I have talked about and then some others.

These amendments are not intended for any political purpose. They are intended out of a sense of urgency, out of a sense of anxiety, out of a sense of even anguish that we are just not doing enough. I will be here making sure we vote on every one of these amendments. It will probably take us a day to debate them all, a full day, and if others say we do not have that kind of time, I would argue we do. If the majority leader thinks we have to work late to consider these amendments, so be it. But we are just not doing the job.

One final issue which I will be bringing up is our first responders. Our hospitals, our police departments, our fire departments--Senator Mikulski will have an amendment on the fire grants--are stretched. They have done a great job in their respective areas. Our police do a great job on the war on crime. Our fire departments keep us safe. Our hospitals are more and more advanced. But each of them has been asked to do special things since 9/11. Each of them has new burdens placed upon them and we are not giving them the dollars they need to do it.

Now, you may say, well, let the localities pay for it. But the hospitals in the localities are not paying. With Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements what they are, with the HMOs being more and more efficient, they do not have the money on their own. So if we do not do it, no one will.

With police and fire, it is not much different. We all know how our localities' budgets are strapped. We all know that the property taxes are a huge burden on people. To ask them to raise the property tax burden to do this means it either will not be done or will not be done in the full way that it should. Yet we are not helping our first responders: our police, our firefighters, our hospitals.

So there will be another amendment, I neglected to mention, which I will offer to increase funding overall for first responders. Senator Mikulski will have an amendment on the fire grants. But the bottom line is this: There is, as I said, a dereliction of duty, a dereliction of responsibility on homeland security. This administration almost has a disconnect. Dollars do not matter when it comes to fighting the war overseas, when it comes to defending our soldiers. Dollars cannot because their lives are precious. But dollars almost are the end-all and be-all when it comes to homeland security, and we do not do close to what we should be doing.

So in terms of my general remarks, I look forward to debating this bill. I hope some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will join us in supporting these amendments.

The bottom line is very simple: No one knows how the war on terror is going to twist and turn over the next generation. That is why I tend to like proactive policies both abroad and at home. But no one is a genius. There are a few geniuses, but not enough of them. No one can foresee the future, so we do not know what is in store for us. We certainly want to cut down the odds of a terrible, terrible incident occurring again the way one did on 9/11 in my city.

I wear this flag in memory of those who we lost. I put it on September 12, and I wear this very flag every day. I knew some of the people. I was friends with a firefighter who died, a guy who I played basketball with in school who died, a businessman who helped me as I was on my way up politically. So it is sort of personal. But the anguish I feel is maybe one-tenth the anguish, one-one-hundredth the anguish, one-one-thousandth the anguish of the families who live with this every day. But they would want us to do everything we can, and we are not.

It is my hope this debate will, at the very least, elucidate places where we are not doing what we should, and maybe even provide the kind of dollars, resources, and focus that have been so sorely lacking thus far.

Amendment No. 3580

With that, Mr. President, I now send an amendment to the desk to address the critical issue of nuclear security in our ports in terms of research and development.

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

Mr. President, this amendment deals with, to me at least, the greatest nightmare that--how much time does our side have, Mr. President?

Oh, we did not have a time agreement? Thank you, Mr. President. I only intend to take another 10 to 15 minutes on my own, and then maybe if my colleague from Mississippi speaks in favor of the amendment I will not even speak further. But if he speaks against it, I will try to answer what he has to say.

Mr. President, if you think of all the terrible things that terrorists could do to us--and there are so many you almost run out of mental space thinking about them--perhaps the worst that I can imagine is that a nuclear weapon, and I am not talking about a dirty bomb, which would be bad enough, but a real nuclear weapon would be smuggled into this country and exploded anywhere in the country, but particularly in one of our large cities.

The damage would be unimaginable. It is guessed if it were even a 10- kiloton device--smaller than the devices that were exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--that over 100,000 people would die immediately, hundreds of thousands more in the next month, and then perhaps even millions over the years from the radiation. The economic loss would be incredible, not just in the city where it was exploded but wherever the wind currents blew in terms of where the radiation blew. It would probably, in many ways, change the way of life that we cherish for every American, no matter in what part of the country you lived.

So it seems to me we should be doing everything we can to prevent a nuclear weapon from being exploded here. Part of that, of course, is to try to buy up the nuclear weapons we know parts of the former Soviet Union have had and a few other countries have had. We should be funding Nunn-Lugar. But the amendment does not go to that. The other is to prevent them from being smuggled in.

There is good news and bad news about nuclear material. The good news is, in terms of detection, every one of them emits something called gamma rays which can be seen and detected through metal, through anything but lead. Lead is very heavy, so it is hard to detect a device totally surrounded by lead. And then you can detect lead anyway.

The bad news is, right now the detection devices we have are not very proficient. They still have to detect the nuclear material at relatively close range. A Geiger counter needs 3 feet. Some of the other ones that have been developed need a little bit more space.

They are not foolproof, to say the least. I have talked to scientists in my State at Brookhaven National Laboratory and to scientists in many other States, and devices could be developed that, No. 1, detect any kind of nuclear materials from 70 or 80 feet away and detect them in a far more foolproof way than the present devices.

Now, the only way a nuclear device can be smuggled into this country very easily--the only remaining way--is in large containers that come into our ports by the tens of thousands every day or in a truck that goes over the Mexican or Canadian border.

It is very easy to imagine that we could place these detection devices on every crane that loads a container coming to our country. You may say: Well, there are thousands of cranes all over the world. That is true, but already we only allow containers to come into this country that are loaded from 15 ports. I do not have the list of them, but it is Antwerp, Singapore, places such as that. You do not want to detect them here because then they could be exploded while the ship approaches our shores and is not yet here. It could be placed on every toll booth. We would basically prevent any nuclear weapon from being smuggled into the country.

But the devices that really work well and can detect radiation far enough away and do it well and sensitively are not yet developed.

Scientists say that with a couple of years of research they can do it. They right now detect small amounts of nuclear material in cyclotrons and atom smashers at a great distance, but those devices are too large and delicate. They can't be bounced around very much to work.

All it takes is spending some dollars, maybe $150 million, maybe $250 million--it sounds like a lot, but it is not in terms of the $1.7 trillion budget--and then installing them in the ways that I have stated.

I have tried for 3 years to get this body to do it. A few years ago we accepted an amendment that would have at least put in $150 million for these devices. But when it came back from conference, only $35 million was left. Guess what. That was in the 2003 budget. They still haven't spent it. Is that amazing? It is $35 million to start on this research, and Homeland Security still has not let the contracts.

What is going on here? This is a huge catastrophe that could, God forbid, happen, and we are just asleep at the switch.

This amendment seeks to rectify that. This amendment will provide all of the necessary funding to develop the devices and then install them in places we need them. My guess is the whole process would take 2 to 3 years, if we really put the energy and the muscle into it. It is true that there are a few places where we are doing this with rudimentary, more primitive types of detection devices. Yes, one of them is in my harbor, Howland Hook on Staten Island. I have visited. I see how it works. It is better than nothing. But it isn't close to good enough. That is one container port, and there are 40 or 50 in New York alone.

We all know the terrorists have access to the Internet, and they know exactly where nuclear devices are being detected, the few ports that they are, and the huge number where they are not. They also know that the detection devices could be a lot bigger.

What we really want to do is develop a super Geiger counter, one that can detect nuclear materials from a distance and one that is more accurate. Again, you put it on every crane that loads a container bound for the U.S., on every toll booth that has a truck that will go into the U.S., you have dramatically reduced the odds of this type of catastrophe occurring.

Is there anyone who doesn't believe we should do that? Is there anyone who thinks the funding we are asking here, which is an additional $150 million, isn't worth the cost? Yet my guess is that when we have this rollcall vote in a short while, people will just march up to the podium and vote no, and there is no good answer.

I hope my colleagues will not do that. One hundred fifty million dollars is not going to break this bank. It is quite broken already. It is not going to break it much further, and it will do a world of good.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment. I hope, if we are going to support the amendment, that we will see it through in conference and not do what happened a couple of years ago where it was knocked out in conference and a much smaller amount of money was provided for and then that money was not spent.

I am ready to sit down. I know my colleague from Mississippi wants to move the bill forward. I do not disagree with that. I think the argument is pretty clear and pretty succinct. I hope we will be off to a good start on this bill by supporting this amendment and by not ignoring homeland security, particularly a catastrophe that could occur if a nuclear weapon were smuggled into this country.

Amendment No. 3580, As Modified

Mr. President, I have a modification of my amendment at the desk, and I ask unanimous consent that it be so modified. It is just changing one number.

It is actually a reduction in the amount of money by $50 million.

I urge my colleagues to support this deeply significant but, in terms of dollars, modest amendment so we can cut down the odds of a nuclear weapon being smuggled into this country and, God forbid, creating a catastrophe.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum be dispensed with so I might answer my friend from Mississippi.

Mr. President, I make this point. We were here 2 years ago, and a year ago, and my good friend from Mississippi, with the same eloquence, made the same argument: The amount of money is the amount of money we have; yes, we could double it, but let's leave it up to the wisdom of the Department and the committee.

We did that, and in the last year, we have had no money spent on developing better nuclear detection devices. That is a cheap shot? In all due respect to my colleague from Mississippi, and I would say in all due respect this could happen in New York and it could happen in Houston, TX, and blow over to Mississippi--this could happen anywhere in the country, and I am sure just as I would want to protect the citizens of every other State, so would my colleague from Mississippi.

This is hardly an urban issue. Chernobyl did not occur in an urban-- it may have been in an urban setting, but it ruined millions of acres of farmland, which I know my colleague cares a great deal about, as do

Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: My friend from Mississippi said the outlays were still $144 million below what had been allocated by the committee. If I were to ask unanimous consent to make this amendment instead of $150 million, $144 million, within the outlays, would a point of order still lie?

I ask the Chair. Given the Budget Act, if this amendment were to be modified instead of $150 million of new money, given what we just heard, if the outlays were below $144 million, below the full committee allocation to the subcommittee, would a point of order still lie?

Continuing my parliamentary inquiry, that would mean a point of order would lie even if we were within the outlays?

Just one further parliamentary inquiry: If we said zero budget authority but $144 million in outlays, would that be in order?

Mr. President, I imagine it is not. So pursuant to section 904 of the Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the applicable section of that act for purposes of the pending amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I ask to be recognized to speak in morning business.

Mr. President, I am going to speak on two issues: first, the imminent release of the final report of the 9/11 Commission, and then on the three judges we are voting on shortly.

First, on the imminent release of the report: First, I thank the commissioners. They have done an incredible job. In this town, racked by partisanship, to come up with bipartisan recommendations is an amazing accomplishment in itself. But when you look at what the recommendations are and the thoroughness with which the Commission investigated the mistakes that were made in the past, the report assumes even greater magnitude.

We will have a real challenge in Washington, at each end of Pennsylvania Avenue, to make sure these recommendations are implemented.

The area I want to touch on right now is homeland security, but I do want to say the reforms that were recommended, in terms of intelligence gathering, were right on the money. Many of us were puzzled after 9/11, learning that the FBI knew this little piece of information and an agent in another part of the FBI knew another piece, and the CIA knew this piece and that piece. The question was, why weren't these pieces tied together, which might have drawn the picture of what was going to happen? And I underline the word ``might.'' Who knows if it would have? But it certainly would have given us better odds.

The reason, as the Commission unveiled, is very simple: These intelligence agencies do not talk to one another. They regard the intelligence they have gathered, their work product, as so valued that they do not want to give it up to another agency. The recommendations of the Commis- sion are outstanding--outstanding--in terms of requiring the intelligence agencies to talk to one another.

I am very pleased the Commission did not engage in the blame game or finger pointing but, rather, looked at the facts--just the facts, ma'am; that seems to be their underlying view--and then looked at recommendations based on those facts so that another 9/11, God forbid, would never happen again.

There is a particular area that has not received too much focus that I want to mention today. That is homeland security. The Commission's report shows that while mistakes were made in intelligence gathering and while mistakes after September 11 have certainly been made in fighting the war overseas--we need a strong foreign policy, a muscular foreign policy to fight terrorism--those are mistakes of commission. In a brave new world, a post-September 11 world, anyone is going to make certain mistakes. The mistakes that have been made on homeland security, on protecting our Nation from another terrorist attack, are mistakes of omission. We are simply not doing enough. That is what the Commission's report is going to reveal when they release it at 11:30. I have been briefed on it already, and I guess many Members are being briefed today.

To win this war on terror--it is the same as a good sports team. We need a good offense, we need a good defense. Most of the focus has been on the offense. There has been verbiage devoted to homeland security, but the actual dollars, the actual focus, the actual changes that have to be made are not being made, plain and simple.

The bottom line is that in area after area, when billions of dollars are required, the administration recommends and Congress allocates tens of millions of dollars. They do not do nothing. They don't want to say we are not putting any money into port security, rail security, truck security, or improving security at the borders. But they do the bare minimum essential to get away with saying we are doing something.

It is frustrating to me, particularly coming from New York and knowing too many of the people who were lost on September 11, that we are not fighting a war--it is a war on homeland security--the way we are fighting a war overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is interesting is the technology is there. We know how to detect nuclear materials which, God forbid, might be shipped into this country. We know how to detect explosives if somebody were to walk into a railroad station or Disney World or somewhere else loaded with explosives that they might detonate. We know how to make our truck security more secure so people cannot use truck bombs. We know how to tighten up the borders.

The question is twofold: will and money. We are not doing either. As we stand here today, what are we doing in the Senate? We are debating three judges from Michigan who we know will not pass in a controversial and partisan way while Homeland Security appropriations languish. It has not been brought to the Senate. Why? What are our priorities? This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is not a liberal or conservative issue. This is an American issue. We want to preserve our homeland security. We want to make people secure. We want to make people safe.

Over and over again, we are not doing what we should be doing. The number of bills introduced and even passed out of committee to tighten homeland security are too many. It is not just homeland security legislation, it is legislation on ports, legislation on borders. Over these past few months, the Senate has been occupied by partisan political issues when nonpartisan and bipartisan issues that are far more important related to homeland security languish.

I hope the Commission's report is a clarion call. Let's get our act together. Again, this is not a partisan issue. This should not instigate fighting with one another. We should just do it.

I wish the White House in their budgets had allocated more money. When people in the Senate, both Democrat and Republican, said, We need to do this, that, and the other, had the President said, Yes, sir, right on--but we do not have that. We do not have leadership on homeland security. That is what the Commission's report shows.

Being a great leader and being a strong leader does not just mean fighting wars overseas in this brave new post-September 11 world; it means tightening things up at home. The bottom line is simple: Why aren't we protecting our airplanes from shoulder-held missiles which we know the terrorists have? Why aren't we saying more than 5 percent of the big containers that come to our ports on the east coast, the west coast, the gulf coast, should be inspected to see if they might contain materials that could hurt us? Why aren't we doing more to protect the borders? My State of New York has a large northern border. They have not allocated the dollars, the bottom line is they do not have enough manpower at the borders to prevent terrorists from sneaking in. They are doing a great job with the resources they have, but Lord knows they don't have them. We are not doing any of these things.

I point out one other thing the Commission has mentioned--here, Congress is as much to blame as the White House--and that is the allocation of homeland security funds. The Commission is very strong on this issue. The moneys that go to police, fire, and the others who are our first responders--we learned in New York how valuable they were. The report today will show the number of people who died below where the planes hit the World Trade Center towers was few--too many, but few--because of the great job the police and the firefighters did. Yet we are treating that money as pork barrel.

My State has greater needs than, say, the State with the smallest population, Wyoming. Yet Wyoming gets much more money on a per capita basis. To the credit of the administration, that did not happen the first year we allocated homeland security money. Mitch Daniels, a true conservative, the head of OMB, says he does not want to waste these dollars. He is sending dollars to the places of greatest need. I might have wanted more dollars, but at least the dollars that were allocated were allocated fairly. But now we have slipped away from that. Frankly, we do not hear the voice of Tom Ridge, who was the successor as we created a new Homeland Security Department, saying, allocate this money fairly. We do not hear the voice of the President, and we do not hear the voices of the House and Senate.

This wonderful report is very critical of what our Nation is doing on homeland security. It is saying we are not doing enough in area after area. I hope and pray this report will be a wakeup call. We do not want to be in the ``what if'' situation. God forbid there is another terrorist attack and the next morning we say: What if? What if we had done the job? What if the attack was by shoulder-held missiles? And we say: What if we had done the job. What if the attack was from ships and ports? We say: What if we had done the job on port security or on the rails? Or because someone got across our borders and shouldn't have? We do not want to be in a ``what if'' situation.