Floor Statements

Madam President, I have an amendment at the desk.

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

Madam President, I offer this amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Graham of South Carolina, Senator McCain, and Senator Hollings. I thank my good friend, Senator Lindsey Graham, who worked long and hard on this issue with me. Senator Graham and I have been working on quite a few pieces of legislation together. He is a good legislator and a fighter for the things in which he believes. We do not agree on everything, to say the least, but it is a pleasure to work with him.

I thank my colleagues, Senator Burns and Senator Wyden, both of whom have worked long and hard on this legislation for many years. They both were willing to work with me and accommodate some changes which I hope make the legislation better. I believe they do. But the foundation of this bill is their hard work. This is a good day for both of them because they have spent a long time and they deserve a great deal of accolades for their hard work on this important legislation which, hopefully, will pass today.

I thank my colleague, Senator Hollings, ranking member of the Commerce Committee, who offers this amendment along with myself, Senator Graham, and Senator McCain. We are all going to miss Fritz Hollings. He is one of the true gems of the Senate. He is a forthright man and a direct man. He is a smart man. He is a principled man. I, for one, know that my amendment might not have happened, certainly wouldn't be in the form it is now, without his intervention. I thank him for that.

Finally, Senator McCain and I have worked on a whole number of things together. It is a pleasure to work with him. Again, he is a man of his word. He is able to bring different people together to produce good legislation. He cares about the average person. He never lets any of the special interests get in his way. We wouldn't be here today without the Senator's leadership. I thank him very much.

Let me begin by saying how important this whole bill is to the continued vitality of e-mail and the Internet itself. Unsolicited e- mail has grown at astronomical rates over the past months. It is safe to say we are now under siege. Armies of online marketers have overrun e-mail inboxes across the country with advertisements for herbal remedies, get-rich-quick schemes, and, unfortunately, pornography. What was a simple annoyance last year has become a major concern this year and could cripple one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century next year if nothing is done.

Way back in 1999, the average e-mail user received just 40 pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail, spam, each year. This year the number is expected to pass 2,500. I know that I am lucky if I don't get 40 pieces of spam every day. As a result, a revolution against spam is brewing as the epidemic against junk e-mail exacts an ever-increasing toll on families, businesses, and the economy.

Let me illustrate this point with a story. My wife and I have two wonderful daughters, one of whom is about to complete her first year at college; the other, a 14-year-old, is an absolute whiz on the Internet. She loves sending and receiving e-mails. As parents, we do our best to make sure she has good values and that the Internet is a positive experience for her, a device to help her with her school work or learn about events taking place around the world, and maybe even a way to order the latest In Sync CD, although I think she likes other groups better.

You can imagine my anger and dismay when I saw my daughter on e-mail. I would say: Great, she is not watching television. And then you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that not only was she a victim of spam like myself, but like all e-mail users, much of the junk mail she was receiving advertised pornographic Web sites. Some of the things that crossed her e-mail were things I would not want to see, let alone my 14-year-old daughter. I was and remain virtually powerless to prevent such garbage from reaching my daughter's inbox.

Recent surveys unambiguously show that the public shares my concern about spam infested with pornography and how it impacts their children. The bottom line is, if parents can control what their kids watch on TV, they should be able to control what their children are exposed to on the Internet. We have parental advisory notices on music, as well as ratings for TV shows and movies to ensure that parents are able to keep their children from being exposed to what they consider inappropriate. So it makes you scratch your head about why there is no safeguard in place to enable parents to protect their kids from vulgar e-mail. The e-mailing public has been at the mercy of spammers for long enough. They want to take back the Internet.

A recent survey conducted by UnSpam, one of the ardent foes of spam and backer of my legislation, and InSightExpress, a research group, backs that view. Here is a quick rundown of some of the highlights of the survey:

Almost 9 in 10 parents say they are seriously concerned about their children receiving inappropriate e-mail versus 5 percent who don't care. Ninety-six percent of parents want the ability to block pornography from their children's inboxes. A paltry 2 percent don't want that right. Ninety-five percent think children should be given extra protection under any anti-spam law, 3 percent undecided. And 93 percent think spammers should face enhanced penalties for sending inappropriate messages to children.

Our amendment is a solution that will give parents--the only solution--the ability to protect their children from offensive and obscene e-mail spam by registering their children's e-mail address. Parents across the country are increasingly worried about this problem, and we should do the right thing by giving them a registry. Parents and children are not the only ones who will benefit from a no e-mail registry. Business owners and ISPs across the Nation can identify with the frustration many of us feel in the battle against spam. With surveys showing that nearly 50 percent of e-mail traffic qualifies as spam, businesses spend millions of dollars each year on research- filtering software and new servers to deal with the ever expanding volume of junk e-mail being sent through the pipes.

According to Ferris Research, spam costs businesses in the United States $10 billion each year in lost productivity, consumption of information technology resources, and help desk time.

That is $10 billion that should be spent on growing American businesses and jobs instead of fighting spam.

The Do Not E-mail Registry created by the FTC would allow businesses to cut costs and improve productivity in the workplace by giving them the ability to register their entire domain names. Very important to businesses.

Some have expressed concern about creating a list of e-mail addresses that spammers could exploit. The FTC has already said it is technologically possible to create and secure the list. This is no longer a worry and one of the breakthroughs we made in the last few months that are allowing this legislation to come to the Senate floor.

In fact, we know that the database of addresses can be protected by military-caliber encryption so that its valuable contents will not fall into the wrong hands.

I want to take a few minutes to talk about the underlying bill and other amendments, and then I will get into mine.

First, I commend Senators Burns and Wyden for their long efforts on this bill. The bill will, for the first time, set minimum standards for all commercial e-mail. It will require all commercial mail to include valid return e-mail addresses and physical addresses of the sender. It must provide accurate header and router information. And most messages will be required to have an opt-out system.

It does not stop there. In addition to these provisions, it will take aim at the mass collection of e-mail addresses and the rampant fraud which, according to a report released by the FTC, is present in 66 percent of junk e-mail.

I am hopeful that we can add important criminal provisions to these civil measures. I know both my colleagues, including Senators McCain and Hollings, want to do that. I worked in the Judiciary Committee with Senators Hatch and Leahy on a bill that makes it clear that fraud and deception in e-mail will not be tolerated. And those who do not heed the warnings in this bill will face stiff punishment. These criminal provisions will outlaw some of the spammers' favorite tricks.

About our legislation as well, let me just say it is really important that we put in the registry, which, in my judgment, is the best way to get at spam. No system is foolproof and, as Mr. Morris of the FTC has said, no bill will solve all of the problems. But the registry is the most complete, comprehensive way to do it, combined with the criminal penalties that we are adding in the Hatch-Leahy-Schumer amendment.

The minute somebody spams someone on the Do Not Call list, there will be an immediate cause of action and criminal prosecution.

The good news is that since we know that a large amount of spam comes from a small amount of people, we can get after these few people. This legislation, as you know, gives the FTC 6 months to come back with a comprehensive proposal. We then get 3 months here to examine it to see if we want to change it, and then the FTC may implement it. I have received--and they have both verbalized this on the Senate floor-- assurances from Senators McCain and Hollings that if the FTC should decide they don't want to implement it, or come up with something that is unworkable, they will use their clout with the FTC to straighten things out and get this done. Otherwise, we in the Congress can respond.

I believe this amendment will allow, without any further action by Congress, as long as the House passes it and it stays in the bill--and I thank Senator McCain for assuring me that he will not even sign a conference report that doesn't have this amendment in it, and I know all of my colleagues are for this legislation. But once it passes the House and is signed into law, we set the road for a no-call registry. It is all downhill after that.

Within a year, it is my belief we will have that registry and, just as the no-call registry was a great success, I believe the no-spam registry will be a great success. It will take a little longer, it will be a little more difficult, but the same basic popularity and support that the American people have given the no-call registry, they will give, for sure, to the no-spam registry, and the combination of a good proposal that the FTC will have to send to us in 6 months and vigilant enforcement, plus the no-spam registry, plus the underlying base of the bill, will put a crimp, a real dent in spam.

Are we ever going to eliminate all spam? For sure not. But is this legislation, along with the amendment I am adding, going to be the toughest, best approach, and greatly curtail spam? Indeed. It is my belief that when we enter these portals a year from now, spam will have greatly decreased.

One of the great inventions of the 20th century, which is now sick and ailing, will be healthy and going full steam ahead. The bottom line is that this is a very fine day for those who use computers and e-mail and for American technology in general. It shows that we can all work together and get something done--get something done that the American people want.

I ask my colleagues to support this amendment and the underlying legislation. Let's finally do something about one of the greatest technological problems that we face right now in this country, the proliferation of spam.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that we adopt the amendment and add it to the legislation.

Will my colleague yield?

I once again thank my colleague from Arizona for helping us with this list and his commitment in terms of keeping this in the conference and then making sure the FTC moves forward with this in every technological way possible. I very much appreciate it. As I mentioned before, the Senator is a true gentleman, a man of his word. We would not be here today without his good work.

I think the Senator from Arizona has the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague. I will be brief. I rise in support of the amendment. The bottom line is, in our post-9/11 world, we have learned that intelligence is more important than ever. To prevent terrorism, in essence, small groups of people who can do real damage to us, depends on intelligence.

Maybe things are working fine, but maybe they are not. The amendment of my colleague from New Jersey casts no aspersion on the job the Intelligence Committee is doing. But it seems to me perfectly logical, in our post-9/11 world, to get as many voices with different perspectives as possible, especially early on because this war on terrorism is going to be with us for decades. It makes eminent sense.

I have never served on the Intelligence Committee, and I have no doubt that the 10 staffers on that committee who were mentioned by my friend from Kansas and praised by my friend from West Virginia are excellent, but they have one perspective. They have been involved day to day in dealing with intelligence matters, and to have a new outside commission take a look at these specific instances can only benefit the American people.

Having some experience with this leak of the name of the CIA agent, I am utterly amazed at what is going on here and among some--not all, not a majority but some--in the administration, there is an idea that we should not get at the full truth; an idea that if someone tells you something you don't like, they are to be disparaged and, in the case of Ms. Plame, hurt much worse than that.

The bottom line is very simple: If we are going to stay a great power--and I hope and pray we will--we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

To say that a 10-staff-member group that has been thoroughly involved in intelligence matters cannot add much perspective is totally wrong, but just as much, to say that a new commission of fresh blood with a new look at the matter might come to some different conclusions than that 10-member staff is equally totally wrong and hurts America.

This amendment of my colleague from New Jersey is not aimed to be nasty; it is not aimed to be political; it is not aimed to be partisan. It is aimed to find different ways to get to the truth because we all know in the wake of 9/11 that our intelligence was not what it should be. It probably was good enough for a preterrorism world, but it is not good enough for a terrorism world.

I hope my colleagues will support this amendment. It is not, again, to disparage what the committee is doing, but to say we should only have one voice at a time when intelligence is so important, to me at least makes no sense, and I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support this very much needed amendment.

Mr. President, as aggravated as my colleague from Alaska is with me, I am with him. This is not intended to be political. I believe that our intelligence needs improvement. I think most Americans--Democrat and Republican--believe that. And if every time we say improve intelligence, look for different ways, people get accused of being political, that is the very point I am making.

Let's debate this on the merits. Let's not call people names because they happen to disagree that our intelligence is doing a fine job. I don't. It may have been doing a fine job in the cold war for a cold-war era, but the whole tectonic plates of foreign policy have changed. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.

I ask my colleague to go on the streets of any city in New York or any city in America, mine or his--in New York or Alaska--and ask the average citizen do they think the intelligence is working fine. My guess is they will say it needs tuning up. That is all this Senator is trying to do, without being political.

Reserving the right to object, I have an amendment which I know is not yet in the queue, but after Senator Durbin speaks, I would also like to speak for 5 minutes about the tragedy that happened in New York. I was going to ask to do that later but it seems an appropriate time, and I ask unanimous consent to be able to do that, and only that, for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, I have an amendment I will be offering shortly. First, I am going to discuss it for a little bit to inform colleagues about it. The amendment I will offer expresses a sense of the Congress that the Attorney General should appoint a special counsel to conduct an independent investigation of the leak of a CIA agent's identity. The bottom line is this--and we have been through this on the floor, so I will not go over the basic facts, other than to say that, to me, this act--disclosing the name of an undercover agent--is dastardly. It places a gun to the head of that agent; it puts in grave danger operatives that agent may have had while he or she was undercover and, of course, perhaps most important of all, it says to every member of our intelligence community who puts themselves on the line, just as our soldiers do, if you go seek the truth, report the truth as you see it, and somebody upstairs doesn't like it, you are putting yourself or your spouse in real danger.

To me, this is something that is not befitting of a great power, not befitting not only because of its immorality--and I believe it is immoral to do such a thing--but also for practical reasons, because when great powers, as history shows us, lose touch with what is actually happening and begin to delude themselves one way or another, they lose power.

This country has had as its hallmark truth, open debate, and has had as its hallmark, if you disagree, speak out. That, by the way, has been one of the great things about our intelligence services, certainly since World War II. The CIA, the DIA, and many of the other intelligence services are known for reporting the truth. That is why they are somewhat insulated. That is why the CIA was separated and made its own agency. The day this country cannot gather the truth, at least as seen by the brave men and women representing us in the intelligence services, is the day we begin to decline. Yet that seems to be what has happened here.

Ambassador Wilson went to Niger and reported the truth, as he saw it, on a mission he was asked to undertake, and somebody didn't like what he said. First, they tried to suppress it, and then when they couldn't because Ambassador Wilson had the courage to go

forward, it seems that somebody--it seems likely maliciously this was done but perhaps not; we don't know; we don't know all the facts--gave to Mr. Novak the name of his wife and identified her as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

That, in itself, is a crime. It doesn't matter what the motivation is. That is a serious crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. So it is a very serious act.

Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives--people from every corner of the country--are totally aghast that this happened.

I will after I finish my basic outline. I have great respect for my friend from Arizona and will yield for a question at the conclusion of what I have to say.

I may be a little while. He might want to take his seat. He is a strong man. He can stand if he likes. I just want to inform him.

There was a view that we ought to get to the bottom of this situation. I think, again, that was universally held. Our President himself stated it. However, when we looked at the mechanism to get to the bottom of this, there didn't seem to be a very good one. You couldn't go to the inspector general of either the Justice Department or the Defense Department because they can't look at the White House. The independent counsel law had lapsed, and to allow the Justice Department itself to conduct the investigation seemed to many of us at the outset to pose, at the very least, an apparent conflict of interest that now seems to be a very real conflict of interest given the facts that have come out about the Attorney General's relationship with Karl Rove and some of the others who, it is bandied about with no backing in the sense there is proof, but there are signs, have said that he was involved. So many of us called for a special counsel. A special counsel is still allowed.

Special counsel was the type of law that allowed Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski to get to the bottom of Watergate. A special counsel does not run into the problem that the independent counsel did: that it can run amok and just look at everything under the Sun because it is still under the Attorney General's control ultimately. If that special counsel were to decide to, say, investigate something that went on in Indonesia unrelated or something related to the President's campaign finances, the Attorney General could snip it right off. That was the main objection to the independent counsel law.

The advantage of the special counsel is very simple, particularly if someone of some stature and independence is appointed, such as some of our previous colleagues--Senator Danforth, Senator Rudman, Senator Mitchell, or Senator Nunn. Then there is an assurance of some independence and integrity and, at the same time, the day-to-day operations of the special counsel are not under the control of the Attorney General.

The special counsel, if he or she were blocked by the Attorney General, would at the end of his or her investigation have to report to the Congress that ``I wish to interview so and so and the Attorney General said no.'' Or ``I wish to pursue this lead, and the Attorney General said no.''

We all know the Brandeisian quote: Sunlight is the great disinfectant and, therefore, as long as this becomes public, there is almost a prophylactic effect. People will be unlikely or be far more reluctant to block an avenue of investigation or the interrogation of a certain witness.

The investigation has proceeded, and it is very clear that all of the things we worry about--we worry about an apparent conflict of interest. That obviously exists. We worry about a conflict of interest that, too, still exists.

By the way, because the Attorney General is a close political friend and associate of the President's, all the more reason that a special counsel was then and still is needed.

There are two models for appointing Attorneys General in this sense anyway. One is to appoint a close friend, confidante, even relative. President Kennedy appointed his brother. That is reasonable to do, but you lose independence. The other is to appoint someone more independent, the Janet Reno model. But in this case, the President chose to appoint someone politically tied to him, someone with a close relationship, so no one even believes there is much independence there. We ask for this special counsel to avoid both apparent conflict and the real conflicts that exist.

Those pleas, done certainly by me earnestly--I am just outraged by what happened, and I think we have to get to the bottom of it no matter where it leads. I called for this investigation on July 22, long before any names such as Rove or some of the others were bandied about because I felt so strongly that whoever did this should be punished. It is a despicable act. But as the investigation began to unfold, we saw there was an additional problem, and that is that the investigation was not being run very well; that by textbook prosecutorial rules and ways of operating, this investigation had a number of failures. In fact, our leader, Senator Daschle, and my colleagues Senators Biden and Levin, and I sent a letter to the President on October 9 that outlined some of these missteps. I thought I would read the parts of the letter that are relevant.

I ask unanimous consent that the entire letter be printed in the Record.

I thank the Chair. I am going to read these five steps that, again, fly in the face of good prosecutorial practice:

First, although the Department of Justice commenced its

investigation on Friday, September 26, the Justice Department

did not ask the White House to order employees to preserve

all relevant evidence until Monday, September 29. . . .

Second, when the Justice Department finally asked the White

House to order employees to preserve documents, White House

Counsel Alberto Gonzales asked for permission to delay

transmitting the order to preserve evidence until morning and

the request for delay was granted.

In both these instances, every seasoned prosecutor knows that is not standard practice. You don't give those who might--underline ``might''--want to destroy evidence an opportunity to do so. The first thing a good prosecutor does is gather as much evidence quickly and as broadly as possible.

Third, instead of immediately seeking the preservation of

evidence at the two other Executive Branch departments from

which the leak might have originated, i.e., State and

Defense, such a request was not made until Thursday, October

1. Perhaps even more troubling, the request to the State and

Defense Department employees to preserve evidence was

telegraphed in advance not only by the request to White House

employees earlier in the week, but also by the October 1st

Wall Street Journal report that such a request was

``forthcoming'' from the Justice Department.

I have talked to prosecutors who flipped their lid at that one. You put in the newspaper that you are going to request evidence of potential suspects? Wow. Something is wrong. Is it done nefariously? I do not know. Perhaps not. But it does not matter. Certainly, the leaker, whoever he or she is, is under a cloud and worried about potential criminal prosecution. Whether this was done by accident or by design, it does not make a darn bit of difference. It fouls up the investigation to a fare-thee-well.

Fourth, on October 7, going back from the letter, White House spokesman Scott McClellan stated that he had personally determined that three White House officials: Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, and Elliott Abrams, had not disclosed classified information. According to press reports, Mr. McClellan said he had spoken to each of them individually.

What is going on? We have the White House press spokesperson on his own--or maybe with authorization. Did he get it from Justice? I doubt it, but I sure would like to know--goes and interviews the witnesses, or potential witnesses?

He then came to a conclusion and told it to the Nation: They were not involved in leaking classified information, nor did they condone it.

Again, this comes from prosecution 101. A media spokesperson does not have the legal expertise to be questioning possible suspects or evaluating or reaching conclusions about the legality of their conduct.

In addition, by making this statement, the White House has now put the Justice Department in the position of having to determine not only what happened but whether to publicly contradict the White House spokesperson.

Fifth, and maybe most importantly, the letter goes on to say that the investigation continues to be directly overseen by Attorney General Ashcroft, who has well documented conflicts of interest in any investigation of the White House.

So we renewed our plea. Now, let me make two additional points that have not come out since we last spoke about this on the Senate floor. First, we do not know who is in charge. Who is running this investigation? Is it, as some newspaper reports have said, the head of the Counterterrorism Division within the FBI, a gentlemen named Mr. Dion? Is it the head of the FBI, Mr. Mueller? Is it the Attorney General? Is it the Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division or somebody else? Who is making the decisions? How the heck can there be a prosecution when we do not know who is in charge?

Then, of course, we do not know if that person is reporting to Attorney General Ashcroft day to day. Is this person available? If the White House press spokesperson will do his own little investigation and tell everyone what happened, how about letting the public at least get an idea from who is doing the investigation not to talk publicly about the details but to let them know what is going on because, when one looks at the press reports, it is either Judge Gonzales or a Justice Department spokesperson or a member of the Justice Department who gets up and says this is what is happening. It is unheard of. This investigation already is so tainted.

So many of us ask, if they are not going to go for a special counsel, which is what should happen, at least Attorney General Ashcroft should publicly recuse himself. He has not even done that. What kind of assurance does the public have that we are going to get to the bottom of this?

Then the President says we may never get to the bottom of it. Well, maybe he is just stating what he thinks, maybe he is just stating what he hopes, or maybe he is sending a signal. I do not know which is which, but he should not have said that. One day he said he wants to get to the bottom of it, and we should, and that was great. The next day he says, well, we may never know.

So this investigation is fraught with mistakes and errors, whether by design or by accident, that imperil its results, whatever they come to be.

I have never quite seen anything like it. I was on the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives for 16 years and have now been in the Senate for 5 years. I am somewhat familiar with how our Federal justice agencies work. In all of my years, I have never seen what happened. We can be sure that if this had happened during the Clinton years, and these mistakes were being made, what we are saying and asking to be done would be mild, would be pablum, compared to what some of my colleagues on the other side would be asking for.

One other point before I get to the substance: This morning's New York Times reported the following, and the headline is, ``Senior Federal Prosecutors and FBI Officials Fault Ashcroft Over Leaked Inquiry.'' I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.

So now we are finding that even people within the Justice Department mention in the article that political supporters of Mr. Ashcroft at the Department's headquarters and at the U.S. Attorney's Offices around the country object, take issue with the way this investigation has been conducted.

Again, this was a serious crime.

This is what former President George H. W. Bush says about the leaking of names of undercover CIA agents: I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.

Serious stuff, traitors, not in the words of some partisan Democrat but of our present President's father, our former President.

Here we are running an investigation that makes one scratch one's head and wonder how serious, how competent, and how careful this investigation is.

I quote a former CIA agent, Mr. Marcinkowski, from an October 7 appearance on CNN, where he said:

As an operations officer on scene in a country, the effects

of this--

The leak--

are that anyone who knows you or did know you will now look

at your mosaic. They will look at the people you've come in

contact with. They will suspect those people, be they

official contacts or innocent contacts. They will suspect

those persons of being intelligence agents. They could be

subject to interrogation, imprisonment and even death,

depending on the regime that you may be operating under.

He goes on to say:

There's also ramifications for CIA morale. I'm not naive

enough to say this is having a huge impact, but certainly, it

contributes to a decline in morale when you know that your

own government can identify you as a clandestine operator.

Certainly, there's going to be a reluctance on the part of

foreign nationals that may want to help the United States in

these trying times. They're going to be reluctant to serve

and help us with information, based on the fact that their

identification may be revealed by the government.

So it is more obvious now than when we tried to ask for it several weeks ago that at the very minimum we need a special counsel and that Attorney General Ashcroft should recuse himself immediately. Yet we get continued mistakes and continued handling of this case as if someone does not know how to do it or someone does not care or someone is afraid to do it in a full-fledged sense.

I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, this is not going to go away. The best thing we could do, not only to serve our country, which is in a time of war and I have had sympathy for that, but to serve this administration, is to put this out of any question, appoint a special counsel of high repute and integrity, and let the investigation go forward on its own and see wherever it leads.

That is why the amendment I will be introducing shortly is so important to all of us. I am not going to introduce it as of yet because I know several of my colleagues wish to speak.

I will be happy to yield to my colleague from Iowa for a question.

I thank my colleague from Iowa for his question, which is an interesting question, as well as his dogged pursuit in regard to the truth in this matter. I know this is one of many times he has come to the floor.

The bottom line is this gets us into the realm of journalists' rights and the shield law and other things. I think if the President would ask all of those in his office to release journalists from any strictures, any compunction about letting it be known--if they believed it appropriate--who leaked to them, that would be a very good idea.

I hasten to add that the journalists themselves might not do it. They have not done it in previous times. We probably would still need this investigation. But it certainly--and my colleague from Iowa is right and I wouldn't want to compel them and I know he wouldn't either, but it certainly would, again, call into good light the desire, professed desire, of those in the White House, including the President himself, to get to the bottom of this because obviously it could, and it could quickly, provided the journalists who were so released would be willing to come forward.

It does. I thank my colleague. It does strike me as strange. I agree with you. The times there has been joking or bantering about this, it bothered me very much.

Another thing that bothers me, along the same line as to what he has asked: This President, in my judgment, to his credit, has made it a point that we have to do everything we can to defend our soldiers on the front lines. Whatever one's opinion of the war in Iraq, whatever one's opinion of our actions in Afghanistan and Kosovo and everywhere else--Korea, where we have soldiers--this President has made it a hallmark of defending those troops and doing everything to defend those troops. In fact, we are here in the Chamber defending, of the $87 billion, the vast majority, I guess--over $60 billion--to help defend them in Iraq, something that most of us, myself included, support.

Yet when it comes to defending an agent who was on the front lines and has been betrayed by, in the words of President George H. W. Bush, a traitor, we get nonchalance, a joke here and there, ``What's the bother? What's the fuss?'' Excuses--``This wasn't an agent, it was an analyst.'' Or, ``This wasn't done by malice''--the effect still being the same. That is serious.

I would say one other thing to my colleague. The President could also demand that the culprit turn himself or herself in. I haven't heard that yet. Would you think that would be the case if someone had betrayed some of our soldiers in the field in Iraq?

There is sort of a strange dichotomy that my colleague from Iowa is absolutely right to point out. That is, for this betrayal of a soldier, if you will, who has been on our front lines, there is a nonchalance, an attitude: Well, who cares too much about this?

Do you know what it makes the average American think? It makes them think maybe there is something there, because if the President were certain that it might not go to one of his close associates, or the President were certain in his belief we had to get to the bottom of this, I don't think we would see the kinds of actions we have seen from the White House and even from the prosecution, because the prosecution itself, as I said, is not being handled well. Again, maybe not by design, but just by the structure that the President--the buck stops at his office--has allowed to persist, the structure being investigation.

I thank my colleague from Iowa for his good question.

I would be happy to yield for a rephrased question.

I would like to answer my colleague. I do indeed. Don't take my word for it. A few minutes before my colleague came to the Chamber, I quoted former agent Mr. Marcinkowski who said that on CNN. It has been reported by the media all over the place that those who have served in intelligence say exactly that--that perhaps the greatest danger that has occurred here may not have been to the individual agent, may not have even been to the group of contacts that agent had when undercover but, rather, to the morale of the intelligence agency and, as importantly, to the effectiveness because agents know they can be ``outed'' because they or someone they are close to says someone high up may not like it and it could well have a chilling effect.

My reports are that the CIA from top to bottom is just furious that this happened for the very reason of my friend's question, and the answer to that which I was just giving.

The only way to alleviate it--the only way to restore that credibility--is to get to the bottom of this in a full and thorough investigation.

I am happy to yield.

In answer to my colleague's question, I believe this certainly calls into question the effectiveness of this investigation, perhaps the desire to get to the bottom of it, how strong that is and how full that is. In a letter, which I, along with Senator Daschle, Senator Levin, and Senator Biden, sent to the President, we raised that very question. We have not yet received an answer.

I thank my colleague.

I know my friend from Alaska is eager to draw this to something of a close and still allow us to have a vote.

For the purpose of a question.

In answer to my colleague--and let me say I thought there was a gentlemen's agreement between leaders Frist, Daschle, the bill managers, yourself, and our colleague from West Virginia that if the minority agreed to help complete work on this important bill by Friday the majority would not raise points of order against our amendments. In fact, as I understand it, a number of amendments have

been allowed to be voted on where points of order might stand.

Also, if I might just continue the point----

In 1 minute. I want to finish the answer to the question. It was indeed a question and not an invitation for a statement. I understand that.

But if this agreement was designed to address the fact that the House hasn't completed its work yet on the supplemental, it makes it impossible for Senators to defend the germaneness of our amendments without the text of a House bill to which to refer. We don't know what is in the House bill, nor if the House bill has a provision in there which might make this germane. That is why we came to that agreement.

Again, I wish to underscore the fact that my colleague from Alaska has honored the agreement and allowed votes on a number of amendments which clearly would be not germane. I think our side has honored the agreement as well, and we have tried to proceed without undue delay with our own amendments. Yet now we are arguing that this amendment might not be germane.

First, I disagree. It is utterly germane to the debate we are now involved in about supporting our troops overseas. As I mentioned, Valerie Plame was just as much a soldier in the war on terrorism. She was an expert on weapons of mass destruction, which is the casus belli of where we are. It is vital we get to the bottom of it.

I think this amendment is quite germane--more germane, in fact, than others. The supplemental includes $600 million to fund further weapons inspections. If we are going to spend $600 million, we have to know there is an honest assessment of whatever they may find or not find without fear of retaliation.

I understand that my colleague from Alaska has the right to object to this under germaneness. But I also understand--and I ask the question of him: Hasn't there been an agreement to allow nongermane amendments, and hasn't my colleague, in keeping that agreement, allowed nongermane amendments to be called up for a vote on the floor?

I yield to him for an answer.

Just for a question.

I thank the Chair.

I thank my colleague for his question. He underscores my point. I understand what he is saying. But we have no knowledge if the Counterintelligence Division is solely in charge of this investigation. They have to report to the Attorney General, or to the head of the FBI, or to somebody else at every move they make. Have they been countermanded in where they want to go? We know none of that. In fact, the very statement my friend from Alaska related about his staff inquiry is the most information that has been publicly given about how this investigation is being conducted.

The problem we are trying to get at here and the reason a special counsel is so needed is very simple; that is, we don't know who is in charge. My colleague from Alaska said, staff to staff, they say it is counterintelligence.

May I yield to him for the purpose of a question only and then reclaim the floor? I ask my colleague for that permission.

I thank the President. I thank my colleague from Alaska.

Does my good colleague know if Mr. Dion, head of the Counterintelligence Division--I have nothing bad to say about him--is required to report to anybody about whom he subpoenas, whom he questions, what kind of facts he is allowed to pursue, or can he do this completely on his own?

I thank my colleague for his answer. I simply say that in an area such as this, which is so unusual, this is not just the typical leak. The counterintelligence division handles scores of leak cases every year. My good colleague from Alaska is correct. However, none, as far as I am aware, have involved the revealing of the name of an agent. It is a much more serious situation. It is a crime in itself.

The bottom line is very simple: This is so important that we cannot leave to conjecture that the counterintelligence division generally does a good job so we will assume they are doing a good job here. I appreciate my colleague being on the floor when I spoke, but there have been a number of missteps along the way not caused by the counterintelligence division but by others. This is too important to leave to supposition. That is why we are seeking a special counsel. We cannot just say they generally do a good job, we assume they will do a good job on this. This is a crime, a matter of great importance. I would like to go further than that. That is the purpose of this amendment which I hope my colleague will allow us to offer and vote on, given the agreement.

I am happy to yield for another question.

It is my impression, in answer to my colleague's question, this is a question of rare impression. The number of times the name of an agent has been publicly published in the newspaper and leaked by somebody not on the other side but rather by somebody who is ``a high administration official,'' I cannot think of a one. I know some spies leak names. Aldridge Ames leaked names and was punished for it, but I don't know of a single instance where someone within the administration leaked the name of an agent.

If it is not a first impression, it is a very rare impression, quite different than most of the leaks we have had. That is my answer to my colleague's

question. I don't think this is usual or typical. I pray to God it is not.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to lay aside the pending amendments and consider the amendment which I send to the desk.

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

Will the Senator yield for a minute?

Mr. President, I appreciate the thoughtful words of my colleague from Illinois. Many sports fans across my home state have known both joy and anguish from our sports teams, and I assure the Senator that I sympathize with the sorrow that Chicago Cubs fans are feeling today over last night's loss.

And now, Mr. President, I rise to speak on a matter that has caused much sadness in my home state of New York. It is with a heavy heart that I come to the floor today to speak about the tragedy on Staten Island that took 10 New Yorkers from us too soon, and changed the lives of dozens who were injured. As you know, the ferry in New York crashed into a pier adjacent to its terminal, with tragic and unforeseen and unprecedented results. We mourn for the families of those who were lost.

Staten Island has had a very difficult time in the last several years. We know, for instance, 286 Staten Islanders were lost on 9/11. Staten Island is 5.5 percent of New York City's population, but on that terrible day sustained nearly 20 percent of New York City's September 11 deaths. Many of those were police officers and firefighters. We had the refinery fire on Staten Island not too long ago, and now this terrible incident.

One thing I can tell you is the people of Staten Island are strong, they are resilient, they are self-reliant. Many of them come from my home borough of Brooklyn and have moved to pastures across the narrows. But they retain the same feistiness and the same ability to bounce back from tragedy their forebearers did, across the narrows in Brooklyn. So Staten Island will bounce back and be stronger and better than ever. But, right now, we mourn them.

The Staten Island ferry's history is so important to our city. It is as long as our Nation's history. It has existed in some form since 1713, and 70,000 New Yorkers, mostly from Staten Island, ride it every day. That would be enough people to fill a medium-sized city almost anywhere else in the United States.

It is one of the great symbols of New York City, up there with the Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Yankee Stadium. It is one of the best ways to see the great symbols of opportunity in New York, the Statue of Liberty--Ellis Island, and, sadly, until 2 years ago, the World Trade Center.

The view of lower Manhattan coming into the terminal at Whitehall or landing at St. George has been nothing short of breathtaking, although I must admit, having taken the ferry since 9/11, it now has some sadness to it as we see the empty space on the skyline where the towers once existed.

It is a necessity for many on Staten Island. It is also a great opportunity for tourists to see New York. I might say, also, it is a very good first date, particularly at its price. The Staten Island ferry is free.

I am proud to say this morning, due to the resilience of New Yorkers and their transportation commissioner, ferry service resumed at the St. George terminal at 5 a.m., the site of yesterday's tragedy, befitting the spirit of New York and the spirit of Staten Island, where we bounce back quickly. The terminal was packed, the boats were crowded, and the people to a one, it seemed, were determined not to shy away but to go on with their lives as best as possible, while remembering those families who were suffering in the wake of this terrible tragedy.

We remember the lives lost, but not to stop living. This attitude is at the heart of what it means to be a Staten Islander: grit, determination to survive and move on, but to never forget what has happened and to never stop trying to make a better world for our children.

I would like to mention the names of those who passed away, and send my condolences to each of their families: Joseph Bagarozza, Pio Canini, John T. Healy, Vincent Ferrante, Darios Marshall, Guillermo Pagvay, Louis Robinson, Frank Sullivan, John Valinski, and the woman--our condolences to her family, too, even though her name has not yet been released.

Today Congressman Fossella of Staten Island and I are asking the United States Department of Transportation to pay for the repairs of this ferry. The Federal Government has been actively involved in the ferries. We have received money for them in the past and will ask once again that Washington rise to the occasion of another tragedy in New York. Our budget, as you know, is tight as a drum and these funds will not bring back a single loss of life and, in fact, pale before the loss of life.

We will move forward, hopefully, in whatever way, and make our city and Staten Island even greater than ever.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today, the Senate came together to pass S. 1053, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. I cast my vote in favor of this bill because I think it takes an important first step in the right direction. It is my view, however, that the bill does not go far enough. I commend my colleagues for their efforts to craft a bipartisan compromise, but I have serious concerns that the final bill does not include adequate enforcement provisions.

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents employers and insurance companies from treating individuals differently because of their genetic predispositions. It stops a health insurance company, for example, from charging an individual a higher premium because her mother had breast cancer.

S. 1053 does not, however, have adequate enforcement provisions. There is no recourse for individuals who feel that their rights under the law have been violated. There is no opportunity for a person to hold his employer accountable for genetic discrimination in a court of law. The current accountability provisions, which consist of nominal fees, are not sufficient in order to protect individuals who have been treated unfairly because of a genetic predisposition.

Therefore, I voted for this bill with some reluctance. I was very pleased to see this issue addressed in the Senate, but concerned that the language of the bill does not adequately protect the people for whom it was written. I hope that there will be opportunities in the future to strengthen this bill and ensure the rights of victims of genetic discrimination.

I appreciate my colleague's courtesy.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his words and his thoughts. His sense of timing is exquisite, realizing he had only 15 seconds left. I always enjoy listening to him. I appreciate his remarks and thank him for his courtesy.

Mr. President, I came to the Chamber this morning because I thought we would be on the DC appropriations bill and was prepared to offer a sense-of-the-Senate amendment to that bill concerning the appointment of special counsel to conduct a fair, thorough, and independent investigation into a national security breach.

I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, now I am told the bill has been delayed because this amendment was going to be offered. I am going to talk about the amendment and have a dialog with my colleague from California.

On July 23, I believe it was, when I read the Novak column that named high administration sources as revealing the wife of Ambassador Wilson, Ms. Plame, as an agent--I hasten to add, I don't know if she is a covert agent. That is classified. But that is what was in the paper--I was outraged. I didn't know who had leaked the information. No idea. I am not an expert on the internecine rivalries among the various agencies, but the fact it was done just boiled my blood. So I wrote the FBI and asked Mr. Mueller to undertake an investigation of this act. The act, make no mistake about it, is a very serious act. In fact, it is a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Why is it a crime? Why have this body and the other body made this a crime? For obvious reasons. Our covert agents put their lives at risk for us every day. They are soldiers just like our brave young men and women in Iraq and around the globe. And in the post-9/11 world, the world of terrorism, they are among our most important soldiers because we have learned intelligence is key. When the name of an agent is revealed, it is like putting a gun to that agent's head. You are jeopardizing their life; in many cases, you are jeopardizing the lives of the contacts they have built up over the decades, and you are jeopardizing the security of America. So the seriousness of this crime is obvious.

When, in addition, we learned that it was done in all likelihood for a frivolous, nasty reason--namely, that somebody was angry at Ambassador Wilson for speaking the truth, at least as he saw it--I tended to agree with him. I don't think anybody disputes it. In fact, the administration has admitted, the yellow cake sale from Niger to Iraq and the documents were, in fact, forged and the President was incorrect to use them in his State of the Union Address. This was a way of getting back at him through his wife or perhaps to cower him to make sure he didn't speak any further. Nasty. Not just nasty, it was like kneecapping.

In fact, John Dean, who has been through this, just wrote an article in something called TruthOut Editorial. The title is ``The Bush Administration''--that is assuming it was done by the administration, but that is what all the reports are--``Adopts a Worse-than-Nixonian Tactic: The Deadly Serious Crime of Naming CIA Operatives.''

I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Dean's article be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, this is serious stuff, and I was furious. I had no idea who had done it at that point in time. ``High administration official'' can mean a whole lot of things. So I wrote the letter to Mr. Mueller and publicly called on him for an investigation.

I learned shortly thereafter that for such an investigation to proceed, the CIA had to fill out, I think it is, an 11-point questionnaire about the person named, what they did, and what was revealed. Of course, last week it came out on television and in the newspapers that the CIA had asked for an investigation. The logical, though not certain, conclusion of that, of course, is that they believe a crime might well have been committed; that Ms. Plame, indeed, was hurt by the revelation, and that it was illegal to reveal it.

I cannot tell you how many people I have talked with in this body and throughout the country who are just outraged by this--just outraged. The attitude that seemed to be indicated by the administration spokesperson yesterday--oh, we get plenty of leaks, and this is just one of them, and we investigate all of them--is even more infuriating.

This is not an ordinary leak. I challenge any of my colleagues on either side of the aisle to bring to me the situation where someone in a high administration position leaked the name of an agent and jeopardized their life, their contacts, and America's security. This is a totally different ball of wax. This is not just a leak. This is a crime, plain and simple.

Mr. President, I will be happy to yield to my two colleagues in just a minute.

Even the White House saying, ``We will fire whoever did it,'' is not sufficient. If you have a company and someone is suspected of murder and they say, ``If we find out they are convicted of murder, we will fire them,'' would that be a sufficient enough punishment? Absolutely not.

What we have here is an attitude: Let's sweep this under the rug, let's make sure nobody says much about it, and maybe it will go away.

I yield first to my colleague from Nevada.

I will be happy to yield to my colleague from Nevada for a question.

I thank my colleague for the question. I have asked myself the same question. I was told first that the reason the DC appropriations bill has not been put forward is that they are afraid of this amendment. This is a pattern. This morning--

That is what the signs seem to indicate. This morning, I was asked to go on the ``Today Show'' and talk about this issue. They asked a whole bunch of Republican Senators. None would appear. They asked the administration to send somebody. No one would appear. Again, the attitude seems to be: Let's shrug our shoulders and hope this goes away.

I will make one other point to our colleague. Our President has made it his hallmark of defending our troops. That is why we are debating or we will be debating the money for them. That is why we will be debating all of this. Every CIA agent is one of our troops, and for the President to not address this directly, for the President to have his spokesperson say this is one of a whole lot of leaks, to say if they find out who it is, they will be fired--well, I just ask my colleagues to think about this. Let us say they were certain it would cause no damage to them, that these high administration officials were somewhere far away. Do my colleagues think we would have the same attitude from our Commander in Chief, and one who correctly prides himself in protecting our troops?

So it makes one scratch one's head and say, What are they worried about? Why will they not get to the bottom of this? This, again, as my colleague has said, is very likely a crime, and a serious crime.

I read my colleagues what President Bush, Sr., the 41st President, said about this type of crime. He ought to know because, of course, as we all know, he was head of the CIA before he was President.

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray

the trust by exposing our sources. They are, in my view, the

most insidious of traitors.

Do we just answer, this is a leak like every other leak when dealing with traitors?

I will be happy to yield for a question.

If my colleague from Nevada will yield, that is exactly right.

That is exactly true.

I would be happy to yield to my colleague from California for a question.

I thank my colleague for her thoughtful, incisive, and from-the-heart-type comments. I will comment on them.

The one I would like to focus on a little bit is the intimidation. The greatness of this democracy through the centuries has been the structure the Founding Fathers set up which allows debate on the issues. It is wonderful.

If we had to think of a sentence at the core of America, it might be: We believe in the competition of ideas, and the best idea will win out. Free speech, that is the competition of ideas in its pure form. Free enterprise, that is the competition of economic ideas. Freedom of religion, that is the competition of spiritual ideas. Democracy is the competition of political ideas. When we no longer have that, the democracy frays.

When people are afraid to say what they think, not because their arguments will be answered directly but, rather, because they will be hit below the belt, we have the beginnings of the fraying of the democracy, and that is what is happening.

I hate to say this, but this administration seems to have a peculiar penchant to attack someone's patriotism when they disagree. I have basically been a supporter of the President on the war and foreign policy, but for those who disagree, there has been not just, here is why you are wrong and let me tell you why--there has been some of that--but in addition there is an impugning of motive, an impugning of character, a kneecapping. One of the reasons this issue resonates so is that it is the worst of that.

Now, about our families, of course, they should be off limits. I will tell a little story, and then I will yield to my colleague from Iowa. But the points of my colleague from California are so good.

When I ran for the Senate in 1998, my daughter was starting ninth grade in a new high school. My worry was she was going to start in September. If, God willing, I won the primary, the next day I knew that my opponent, who was known as a hardball political player, Senator D'Amato, my predecessor--with whom I now get along quite well, I am happy to say--would go after me. My greatest worry, and the No. 1 reason I debated not to run, was that I thought she would be new in high school, with a whole bunch of new people, and she was going to a different high school, not in Brooklyn but in Manhattan, and people would not want to be friends with her because they would see these horrible things being said about her father on television. Of course we talked it over with Jessica, too, who was a mature 10th grader then-- now she is in college and doing great--and we decided to run. As it turns out, they did run all the nasty ads. The morning I won the primary I turned on the TV and there they were. It didn't affect her or her friends. That is the worry we had.

What they are trying to do here is send the message that even your family is not off limits, perhaps. That is a horrible message. That frays democracy, just as does the inability to dissent.

I respected Ronald Reagan. When you asked Ronald Reagan something, if he disagreed with you he would say exactly why: Well, I am against Head Start because I think parents should be in charge of their children until they are 5.

All too often in this administration they don't answer directly. In fact, they will get up and say, ``We love Head Start,'' and then they will cut the money.

So the candor, the debate on the merits, seems to be going away, and that worries me about the future of this country. This incident is an apotheosis of that, both in terms of intimidation, in terms of going after family, in terms of being malicious, and in terms of saying our political agenda is more important than the lives of the people fighting for us--in this case, in the intelligence agencies.

I am happy to yield to my colleague from Iowa for a question.

That is correct.

That is exactly the allegation.

I thank my colleague for asking that question. Indeed, whenever the DC appropriations bill comes up, I am going to bring up this sense of the Senate.

I thank him for bringing up something else. I don't want this to be a partisan issue. When I first wrote the Director of the FBI, I had no idea who put this in there. I just wanted to get to the bottom of it because I was so outraged at the tactic. What I think we ought to be doing is getting the special counsel because the special counsel is the way to certainly remove any appearance of a conflict, and perhaps a conflict itself. Attorney General Ashcroft, whom you quoted, is known as a close political ally of the President's. There is an argument that the Attorney General should be removed from the President and be a lawyer for the Nation. And there is an argument that the Attorney General should be a close political ally of the President. Democrats and Republicans--it has not been a Democratic or Republican issue.

John Kennedy appointed his brother as Attorney General. But when you appoint an Attorney General who is a close political ally and friend, and when something sensitive with conflicts of interest occurs, then you have an obligation, in my judgment, to move for a special prosecutor. You pay a price, in a certain sense. You gain things by having a political ally as Attorney General, but you also lose things, and you lose the guise of independence, the actuality of independence.

My colleague is so right. The best thing that could happen is we pass this resolution unanimously, we all work together to get a respected independent counsel--someone like a John Danforth or a Warren Rudman or a Sam Nunn or a George Mitchell--and then they go forward with their investigation. I think every one of us on this side of the aisle, as well as the other, would be content that the chips will fall where they may so this dastardly crime, and that is what it is, will be exposed.

This idea of not bringing up such a resolution, of not wanting to debate it, of, again, maybe casting aspersions on the motivation of those who are for it--we have 14 or 15 of us, and we will have more--is going to make the American people think: Wait a minute, maybe they are worried; maybe there is something to hide--which there may or may not be.

I thank my colleague.

Ten.

I thank my colleague for that. That is what the President ought to do. This President--I mentioned this earlier to my colleagues, when I was having a dialog with my colleague from Nevada-- is known for defending our troops. That is what we are talking about with $87 billion. That is a good thing.

Our CIA agents are our troops, just as our soldiers are our troops. In fact, after the war, after 9/11 and the global fight against terrorism, they are even more important because intelligence is so important.

It seems to me that it would be logical for this President to do just what the Senator said--to say: You know, yes, we have to have a legal investigation, but I want to get to the bottom of this immediately because this conduct is reprehensible.

I don't believe the President was involved in this. I disagree with him politically. It doesn't seem part of his character. But he should sure want to get to the bottom. He does not address it at all. His spokesperson comes out there and says: Oh, these are leaks just like all the others. We will find out and we will fire him.

One wonders.

I ask unanimous consent, since there is no one from the other side, that we be given an additional 10 minutes.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I thank the Senator. I so much appreciate my colleague's intelligence and integrity and passion which he brings to so many different issues. He is exactly right. Even if this agent should decide to retire, the damage would be great because other agents would think: Maybe I will get in trouble. What will I get in trouble for? Speaking the truth?

We depend on truth in our intelligence services more than just about anything else. President after President has said one of the keys to governing well is good intelligence that will tell you when you are off base as well as when you are on base. It is so serious. The Senator is exactly right. This transcends any one person. It transcends any specific person because it goes to the integrity.

I say to my colleague one other thing: From what I understand, our intelligence services are livid because this happened.

I don't know for a fact. But my guess is there was great debate in the CIA because it was a tough thing to do given that ``high administration sources'' were implicated. But the anger among the Agency is red hot, as I understand it, and with good reason.

I thank my colleague. I would be happy to yield to my colleague from Florida for a question.

I thank my colleague. Again, he is on the money. That is all we seek here now--the truth.

The spokesperson for the President, Mr. McClellan, said we are referring it to the Justice Department and the professionals. If you look at the chain of command, it goes right up to the Attorney General.

As I mentioned earlier, the Attorney General is a close political ally with the President. There is nothing wrong with that. That is one model of the Attorney General. But it certainly sacrifices the appearance of independence, and perhaps independence itself particularly goes very high up.

Why we have asked for a special counsel is very simple: It is to allow professional law enforcement to do the job unfettered so they know they will not pay a price if they pursue it completely and fully. That would entail a special counsel of great legal background and sterling repetition for independence and integrity. I think it would behoove the administration to do that.

There are all sorts of doubts now. Are they telling the truth about this, that, or the other thing when it comes to foreign policy? Were we to appoint a special counsel, people would say: Yes, maybe they are.

But I will say this: The effort to sort of sweep this under the rug and say, oh, this is just one of the leaks that occurs every day, that makes me angry, to be honest with my colleague. That is unfair not only to the CIA agent in question but to the thousands of intelligence agents across the globe who at this moment, as my good colleague points out so correctly, are defending just as our soldiers are defending us and are more needed than ever before.

That is why in the intelligence community there is such livid anger because this occurred. My guess is--this is just my guess--that is why Mr. Tenet requested the investigation. My guess is that in his head he was saying, Oh, boy, this is going to get me in trouble the way, say, Janet Reno may have gotten in trouble with the previous President, the Attorney General from the Senator's State. But he knows that the integrity of the intelligence service is important. My guess is that is why he did it. Maybe that is why it took a bit more time than I had imagined when I first requested this on July 24. But he did request it.

Now our obligation to the thousands of brave men and women who are in our intelligence services and risking their lives is to get to the bottom of it with a fearless, complete, and thorough investigation.

Right.

I thank my colleague. Well said. It is a tribute to how familiar he is with our intelligence services and how many from his State serve in the intelligence community.

I was glad to hear, for instance, that these days, on the college campuses, signing up for intelligence is a coveted thing.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we be given another 5 minutes.

Thank you, Mr. President.

There are lines to join the intelligence services, sort of as there were after World War II, when some of our best and our brightest wanted to go into our services.

I will tell you, if politics can be played--and those of us asking for an investigation are not playing politics; it was the people who outed this agent, if, indeed, that is proven to be true, who were playing politics--but if that is allowed to prevail, it is going to hurt our intelligence agencies in many more ways than one.

I thank my colleague.

Mr. President, I would just make two points. No. 1, I will continue to make an effort to bring up this amendment. It has now been printed in the Record. I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to read it. We were judicious in our language. It does not have any kind of political language or diatribe. It just states the facts. I would hope we could get colleagues from both sides of the aisle to sponsor it.

And I would hope we could move it forward--move it forward quickly-- as a message because that is all it can be, but as a message to the President that we need a thorough, complete, and fearless investigation, and that only a special counsel can do that for us.

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

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

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

Mr. President, I yield to my colleague, our leader from South Dakota, as much time as he wishes.

Mr. President, first, let me thank our leader from South Dakota for his right-on-the-money words as well as his leadership on this issue with so many others. I think I speak for every Member on our side when I say we are proud to follow his leadership, and every Member of the

Senate, that he is just a fine leader and fine man.

This is a sense-of-the-Senate resolution. As our distinguished Democratic leader stated, it simply says that the rule of law should be upheld. When I read in the Novak column that an agent was outed, I was just furious. My first reaction was to call the FBI and send them a letter asking that there be a thorough investigation. I was told that before anything such as this could happen, the CIA had to answer 11 questions on a certain form that would show the law was--and I am not sure of the standard; it might be probable cause but violated, or at least the significant possibility of it being violated. Evidently, last week the CIA sent those 11 pages back and asked for an investigation.

There are so many points to make, and I will make a few. First, the dastardliness of this act; it is despicable. I have been in Washington 22 years. I have never seen anything quite like this. To reveal the identity of an agent, or an analyst, the law does not matter--and I know that it was said on television yesterday by Mr. Novak, well, she was not an agent, she was an analyst and therefore it does not matter, but the law is very clear, and if someone is covert, a member of the CIA, and their identity is revealed, that is a crime.

Furthermore, we do not know if she was an analyst or an agent. If we are going to believe Mr. Novak on this part of it, then maybe we should believe him on all the rest of it. Everyone would agree that some high administration officials did a very terrible thing. To take this agent, analyst, this covert individual, who has served their country, and expose them, endangers them, endangers their sources and their contacts. As my good colleague from California has said, it puts a halt on their career and endangers the security of this country.

Furthermore, we have always felt that our intelligence agents are on the front lines. I was told earlier today by my colleague from Florida, Mr. Nelson, that the first American killed in Afghanistan was not a member of the Armed Forces but a member of the CIA. In a post-9/11 world, our intelligence sources are so important. What does it say to all of those thousands of men and women who serve us that if they tell the truth and somebody high up does not like it either they or their family can be outed? It goes to the very heart of what that Agency is all about. It is no wonder that the CIA, its employees from top to bottom, were just furious about this activity.

I do not know where this will lead. Rumors abound. If the Washington Post is correct and six media outlets were called, it is going to be pretty hard to keep it a secret as to who made the calls, where and when, but that is not the point. The point is, this crime demands a solution. This outrageous act demands justice.

To hear Mr. McClellan of the White House say yesterday, first, there are 50 leaks every week, belittling this, made my blood boil. This is not a typical leak. To reveal a covert operative's name is a crime, not a leak.

Then second, to say, if we find them, we will fire them, well, that is like saying someone in your company is a murderer and all that should happen is they should lose their job. There was a serious crime committed. What makes the crime worse is that it appears on its surface it was committed for reasons of malice, for reasons of stifling debate and dissent. As somebody who has generally been supportive of the President in Iraq, I find it just as outrageous as somebody who might be opposed.

I would be happy to yield to my colleague.

I would assume that is correct. The bottom line is the CIA has asked for it. This is a very sensitive matter. He is the head of the CIA, so I think it is a pretty good assumption that he asked for it. I think another assumption, that he realized this would ruffle a whole lot of feathers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, at the White House, in the administration, is true. But from what I am told by sources who know what went on there, the obligation to the men and women in the intelligence service transcended any feathers that might be ruffled. It is a pretty courageous act.

I thank my colleague.

I wish to clarify a few points that should be made to everyone. The reason there is a debate about an agent or analyst is that is what Mr. Novak said on one of the shows, that is what we were told earlier today.

I have something from CNN.com. They say that other sources told CNN on Monday--yesterday--that Plame was an operative who ran agents in the field. Let me repeat that. Other CIA sources told CNN on Monday that Plame was an operative who ran agents in the field. I don't know if Novak is right or if these other sources are right; that is the very point. The issue of whether she was an agent, an operative, or an analyst is beside the point. The law was broken.

The law is clear, and while it says covert agent but defines agent as an officer--I am paraphrasing--employee, present or retired, of an intelligence agency whose identity has not been previously publicized, revealed, that is the point.

Once again, my colleague from California makes a very astute point. No one is revealing the face of this person. No one was revealing the name of this person. The bottom line is it is quite clear the law was broken. The only question we don't know is who broke it. What we are trying to do--and again the Senator from California is exactly right-- is keep the politics out of this issue.

The idea that when a law is broken and someone calls for a full and thorough investigation, and the mechanism to do it, is politics is absurd. I will tell you what politics is--despicable and nasty politics. It was revealing this person's name because they did not like what her husband said. That is the politics of this issue.

I will be happy to yield.

I thank my colleague from California for her strong, intelligent, and heartfelt words.

I would like to make just one other point, and this is a very important point I have not talked about before, so I hope my colleagues will listen. People ask, Why ought there be a special prosecutor? Why not let Justice do the job?

There are obvious reasons. Attorney General Ashcroft is a close political associate of the President's. If this goes high up into the White House, there is obviously the appearance of a conflict, if not a conflict itself. There is nothing wrong with the President appointing a close political associate as Attorney General. Some have. John Kennedy did. Bill Clinton didn't. The other model is to appoint someone at some distance, someone removed, a professional law enforcement person. But when you appoint someone who is close, you lose any vestige of independence when something sensitive comes up, making the need for special counsel more important.

A special counsel is not a runaway counsel. The independent counsel law expired because people were worried about that. It is still appointed by the Attorney General. The differences are threefold. No. 1, the day-to-day running of the investigation is not under the Attorney General or the staff that is directly under him with the chain of command going up.

Second, a very important prophylactic measure: Anytime the Attorney General should reject the request of the special counsel--to subpoena someone or bring someone to a grand jury or file some charges--a report has to be made to Congress. That is an extremely important and prophylactic measure.

Third, special counsel, when they have been appointed--and by the way, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, people like them, fell under a law very similar to the President's special counsel law because that was before the independent counsel was allowed and after 1999. After it expired, Justice passed this regulation allowing special counsel again. But they have stature. They are not going to be pushed around. Everyone will see who is appointed.

Obviously, if the Attorney General should appoint someone who doesn't have the stature, doesn't have the political independence, they will not be given the respect that someone of stature and independence would. But because it is public, that is generally what happens. A Warren Rudman or a John Danforth or a George Mitchell or a Sam Nunn would be ideal type candidates as independent counsel.

Let me show an example. This is the point to which I want people to pay attention. We just had an example of why we need a special counsel. This was reported, as I am told, by Mr. McClellan. We learned this morning that the White House Counsel, Mr. Gonzales, had sent an e-mail to all White House employees to preserve all their records, their logs, their e-mails and things like that. It was a good thing to do.

But what Mr. McClellan just confirmed is that he was asked by the Justice Department to do it last night. He said: Can I wait until the morning? And the Justice Department said yes.

Did anything happen between last night and this morning? I don't know. Nobody knows. You can be sure, if it was a special counsel, that ability to delay for several hours the sending out of this very important e-mail wouldn't have happened, or it only would have happened with an extremely good reason.

But when you don't have a special counsel, when the White House Counsel makes the request, it is given the benefit of the doubt. Frankly, at least from the allegations we hear the White House Counsel is in the same place as the person or persons who did this dastardly act. So if there was ever an example of why we need a special counsel, it just came out when Mr. McClellan told us about this delay in sending out the e-mail. For all we know, and this is just hypothetical, rumors went throughout the White House that there will be an e-mail this morning--and this is just hypothetical and, hopefully, it didn't happen--but maybe that somebody who did it didn't save what they were supposed to save, inadvertently threw them out. Who knows?

Again, if the special counsel were there, it is likely not to have happened. And if it did happen that the delay was sanctioned, people would have more faith that there was a justification for it.

So we need a special counsel. It is not a perfect mechanism, but it is the only mechanism available that has some semblance of independence, of fairness. Along with my 15 cosponsors, we are requesting a sense-of-the-Senate resolution that that be done.

I remind my colleagues, this is a sense of the Senate. It is basically a

sense of the Senate that in a very real sense says: Do you want to get to the bottom of this, and do you want to do it fairly and not politically? It doesn't require it to happen.

Excuse me, we have now 22 cosponsors.

It doesn't require it to happen, but at least we go on record, this body, as saying there ought to be a full, fair, and independent investigation--and a fearless investigation, I would add, an investigation that will go wherever it leads.

I repeat, I have no idea who did this. There are names bandied about. If it is true that six people in the media were called, this is not going to be a top secret, even though the media people will not want to reveal that they were called because of their sources. But a special counsel should be able to get to the bottom of it. Any counsel should be able to get to the bottom of it if, A, they really want to; B, they don't fear getting to the bottom of it; and, C, they are not told by somebody else not to, subtly or otherwise.

I guess that is another point I would make. What this case is about in many ways--not every way, there are so many ramifications to it already--the reason it has resonance is not only that what was done was despicable, but it relates to a methodology in Washington that has become too current lately, which is knee-capping people with whom you don't agree instead of having an open debate, saying you think this; I think that; let's see what the people decide. To call into question their character or patriotism or anything else--we have seen that in many different areas in the last year or two.

So it has tremendous resonance, but ultimately one thing this is about is the ability to tell the truth without being hurt for telling that truth, hurt professionally. Isn't that, indeed, the reason we need a special counsel? If there is a career diplomat in the Justice Department who is doing this investigation, maybe he or she, even if told nothing, will say: Hey, if I bring this all the way to the top where I think it ought to go, it might hurt my career. Who knows? With the special counsel, if it were a John Danforth or a Sam Nunn, they would not worry about their career. Their integrity is rock ribbed, and they will take it where it leads.

I hope we will allow a vote on this amendment. I don't know what the other side is afraid of, or whoever is afraid, to not allow a vote on this amendment. It is a simple sense-of-the-Senate resolution, and I would argue it will be more foretelling if this amendment is being blocked from being voted on. It will be very revealing if this amendment is blocked because it is saying somebody, somewhere, is afraid of where this investigation would lead.

I think if a point of order is raised and not overturned in any way, then--I guess it cannot be overturned. If the point of order is raised and a vote is prohibited, it is going to say something. It is going to say those who raise the point of order are afraid of where the truth may lead. That is one of the things we all worry about.

Once again, I say to my colleagues that the very fact that the e-mail which went out this morning was asked for last night, and delayed for several hours, raises questions. They may be answered; they may not be. But that is the kind of question that will come up every day in an investigation if we do not have a special counsel.

I thank my colleagues from South Dakota and California and the so many others who spoke this morning--the Senators from Nevada, Iowa, and Florida.

All I can say is for the sake of this country, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of the continuing rebuilding and the viability of our intelligence services, I hope this amendment passes. I hope no one will block it on a parliamentary procedure called ``a point of order.'' I hope we will get to the bottom of this dastardly act and find out who put the integrity of the intelligence services and possibly the lives of people on the line for simply the purpose of malice or the purpose of preventing the truth from coming out.

I am going to yield as much time as he would like to my colleague from Illinois, a member of the Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, I believe I have 5 minutes.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I rise in strong support of this legislation. In my time in the Senate, I have never seen legislation move so quickly through the House and Senate for any issue.

Why? There are three reasons. The first is, of course, the need for this legislation. Fifty million people have signed up on a registry and are expecting it to work October 1. We should fulfill those expectations. None of us, me included, because this has happened to my family when we sit down to dinner all the time, hopping up and down like jackrabbits to answer the phone and then hear someone on the phone trying to sell you something. It drives you crazy. No. 1 is the need.

No. 2 is the fact the court decision was so goofy. The bottom line is, if you read the legislative language, if you read the statutes, in my judgment, there is no question we granted authority. I think the judge went out of his way to try to throw out this list. This may be an example of judges making law rather than interpreting law that we have talked about for so long. On this, we all agree that we do not want the judge making law, particularly making law that so goes against the will of this Congress and the American people.

The bottom line is, our intent was clear from the language of the February 13, 2003, statute called the Do Not Call Implementation Act. I cannot understand how a court would conclude Congress would have directed the FTC to implement the registry if it had not assumed that it had authorized the FTC to make the registry, either in previous law or through the implementation act itself.

If this were not enough to demonstrate Congress's intent on this issue, on February 20, 2003, the Omnibus Appropriations Act was signed into law which authorized the FTC to ``implement and enforce the do not call provisions of the Telemarketing Sales Act.''

That is as clear as the nose on your face. The court's decision is based on an overly technical view that ignores the clear intent of Congress. So the second reason we are moving so quickly is this law was so poorly interpreted by the judge.

The third is this has a consensus behind it. It is needed. There are a lot of laws that are needed but do not have a consensus. It was thrown out by a court in a strange decision. There is almost a universal consensus that this is the right thing to do.

The telemarketing industry feels badly about this. I understand there are many people who work in this industry. They are going to have to find a way to telemarket--which is a good thing when people want telemarketing--they will have to refine their processes. I would not mind refining this list and allowing people to file, if we could technically, to say I only want to get calls about mortgages or I only want to get calls about garden tools, but not to subject everyone to answer the phone, particularly at dinner time and evening time when the family is home alone and relaxing. This has happened in my family. It does not make any sense.

It is a good law. I wish there were more days in Congress that we do important things in a bipartisan way without tarrying. Let's savor it while we can.

I make one additional point. This approach can also work for another problem facing American consumers very similar to the annoying telemarketing call: e-mail spam. As in telemarketing calls, spam traffic is also growing at a geometric rate. It has become more than an annoyance. It is now a real danger to the future of the e-mail part of the Internet. Fifty percent of all e-mail is spam. What was a simple annoyance last year has become a major concern this year and could cripple one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century next year if nothing is done. We should be doing the same thing against spam.

Admittedly, it is easier to cut off a telemarketer than a spammer, but the same basic concept applies and the telemarketing provisions worked. The anti-e-mail spam provisions are the best we have to deal with spam right now.

This morning the Judiciary Committee passed the Criminal Spam Act of 2003. I was proud to cosponsor that along with my colleagues, Senator Hatch and Senator Leahy. For the first time that will criminalize some of the spammer's favorite tricks. Those that repeatedly use predatory practices to evade filtering software will face stiff punishment, including the potential of jail time, but we should add the registry to those provisions. I did not do that in committee today, but I hope we can do it on the floor when it comes forward.

A spam registry such as the Do Not Call Registry has broad consumer support. It has bipartisan support. Senator Graham of South Carolina and I are the lead sponsors. The registry provides parents with the unique opportunity to register their children's e-mail addresses to prevent unwanted advertisements that go to our children for pornography and lots of things the kids should not see.

I commend my colleagues for moving so quickly to defend consumers against unwanted telemarketing calls. Fifty million people cannot be wrong. I hope we will do the same and move with the same speed and urgency when we deal with e-mail spam and create an anti-e-mail spam registry as well.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, this is the first of four nominees from New York. They are all very qualified, fine people.

The only point I wish to make is that the administration and the Governor worked closely with the Senate and with me and Senator Clinton on these nominations. I think it shows, when there is cooperation, when there is true advice as part of the advise and consent process, we can come up with excellent nominees.

Each one of the nominees meets the criteria I believe we should have in every Federal judge--legal excellence, moderation, not too far left, not too far right, and diversity.

I will speak once because there are four of them, but I am proud to be here to vote for every one of the four nominees.

Again, if we get cooperation, we can do this without acrimony, without partisanship. That is what has happened in New York.

Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It adds $400 million to the Ryan White fund to deal with the problem of AIDS. AIDS is spreading throughout our country. Many rural States that have not experienced AIDS in the past are experiencing large increases. This money

goes to reducing AIDS, the ADAP funding, to the early detection centers, to the centers that develop prevention. If ever there was a ``stitch in time saves nine'' amendment, this is it.

This has broad bipartisan support in the Senate. I hope we will fund it. This is not an ideological issue. No one disputes whether Government should do this. It is not a question of whether the money is needed. We all agree it is needed. I hope we can step to the plate and support this modest increase so that Ryan White is appropriated at the level that is needed.

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

Mr. President, on the eve of the second anniversary of 9/11, I feel compelled to take the floor and share with my colleagues some of my thoughts. As a New Yorker, of course, as somebody who lives within sight and looks every morning, when I am home in New York, out my window at the empty space that once was occupied by the twin towers, this is something that never escapes my mind and the mind of every New Yorker. It doesn't escape the mind of every American, and probably doesn't escape the mind of just about every citizen of the world. Because 9/11 changed us in many ways, and we can never go back. But hopefully we can learn from it.

I would like to address at least my thoughts to three different areas: Those of the families and victims and those who rushed to help them; the city and the State of New York; and how it has affected us as a Nation.

First, of course, we think of the families. The day after that horrible terrorist attack occurred, I asked Americans to wear the flag or display the flag out their windows. I put on this very flag. I wear it every day in memory of those who were lost and, God willing, I will wear it every day for the rest of my life in their memory. We think of their bravery, the bravery, of course, of the 343 firefighters who were lost, the many police officers, Port Authority personnel, and the first responders who were lost.

We think of the bravery of average citizens. There was just a story in our New York newspapers about two men who braved the fires and braved the smoke and created a passageway and saved the lives of perhaps a dozen and then went back up to try and save more and perished. In a very real sense, those heroes will live with us forever, like the heroes at Bunker Hill and the heroes at Gettysburg and the heroes on D-Day and the heroes of all the great battles our Nation has faced. Many of those heroes are civilians--whether they be police, fire, EMT, or just ordinary citizens. That shows you how our world has changed because we are all on the front lines.

We think of their families as well; the hole in their hearts will never heal. It is not simply the loss, although that is overwhelming and preponderant. It is that they were taken in such an act of bitter meanness and nastiness and atrocity. We have to do everything for them. We have to be with them spiritually. We have to provide for them, and we have to, in a sense, sanctify the memory of those who were lost for whom they mourn every day.

I can think of the faces in front of me right now of some of the people I knew--a brave firefighter, a friend who led a company, a high school classmate with whom I played basketball--all gone, simply because some vicious, terrible people thought they had a deranged message. We will never forget the families. And if you ask the families and ask the victims what they want us to do, they would want us to keep our resolve. And keep our resolve we must.

New Yorkers, Americans, good citizens of the world must keep their resolve. As for my city, we are still wounded. Still, every day, so many of us look up at the skyline and see the empty place. People who go on the subway or get in the car or just walk down the street every so often say, Could it happen again? Our city is still wounded. We have suffered large economic loss, but we have suffered far greater personal loss. But the amazing thing about New York is that we are strong, we are vital, and we rebound.

I am so proud of New Yorkers. I was proud of New Yorkers on the day it happened. Many people rose to the occasion. I always think of the man who owned a sneaker store. He stood outside the store and gave all the women who were fleeing the World Trade Center sneakers. He said, ``What size are you?'' and he gave them a pair of sneakers because it would be hard to walk in their heels. Those acts of generosity have continued.

The fortitude of New Yorkers has also continued. Battery Park City, a residential area by the World Trade Center, which emptied out is full again. Businesses are beginning to return. A leading law firm came back to downtown and opened last week. So the plans proceed apace. Because we are New Yorkers, of course, there are some disputes, but the plans proceed apace for how we should rebuild--both remembering those who were lost and also remembering that terrorists tried to destroy the commercial greatness of our city. We are going to rebuild commercially as well. I was so proud of the polls that showed that more New Yorkers said they wanted to stay in New York after 9/11 than before 9/11. That is the spirit of the city. It is a great city.

It is the spirit of the whole New York area because there were people who lived in the suburbs who rushed in to help, and they all suffered losses. It is the spirit of our whole State, where people from Buffalo in the north and every point in between rushed to New York City and helped us, and we try to remember to help them.

We are grateful that the Nation has remembered us. The money we worked on to bring back to New York is being spent wisely and being spent well. We are not rushing to spend it. Every so often, there is a newspaper article that says not all of it has been spent. Of course not. But the fact that the President--and I give him credit. We disagree on many issues, but he stood by New York and he remembered what we needed and never broke his word. This Senate and the House, both Democrats and Republicans, again, had disputes about how to do it, but the Congress was very generous to our city. We may come back and need more, of course, but the generosity is real, remembered, and appreciated by New Yorkers.

Finally, what did we learn on 9/11? We learned that the very technology that blessed our lives and accounted for so much of the prosperity we have seen in the last two decades has a dark and evil underside; namely, that small groups of bad people can get ahold of that technology and do tremendous damage in our country. You can be in a cave in Afghanistan, and if you have a wireless connection to the Internet, you can learn as much about America as many of us know. The sad fact is, if you took 200 people anywhere in the world, or maybe a thousand, and injected them with the ``evil virus'' and they would decide to fanatically devote themselves to hurting America for the next 5 years, the odds are too high that they could succeed. But we are beginning to respond to that challenge.

The war against terrorism is not a 1-, 2-, or 3-year phenomenon. It is going to be a 30-, 40-, or 50-year phenomenon. Today is not the day to bring up the disputes that we all have about this issue, but it is rather to say that it is brand new, and every one of us should walk humbly before proffering solutions because in a certain sense, we have no experience pool. Mistakes will be made.

In a real sense, we are analogous to, say, 1946. America had just beaten the Germans and the Japanese. The average American said let's forget about the world and put our feet up on the coffee table and enjoy our fruits of our labor here at home. All of a sudden, there was a large Communist monolith looking over our shoulder. Initially, we didn't know how to react, and we made mistakes along the way-- McCarthyism and Vietnam--but eventually we triumphed over communism. I am not sure the war on terrorism will take us that long to triumph. It may be 20, 30 or 15 years, but it will not take 2 or 3 years.

We are going to have to be vigilant to the memory of those who were lost, to those who suffered. To rise to the greatness of this Nation, we are going to have to be vigilant and remember that no one has all the answers and we will make mistakes, but we will prevail provided we keep our resolve, which I believe we will. Yes, it has changed us. But Ernest Hemmingway once wrote that the world breaks us in certain places and we grow back stronger over the breaks. Hopefully, that will happen here. I believe it is happening here. We are learning, we are adapting, and we will triumph.

So we say to those evil people halfway around the world, who did what they did on that day 2 years minus 1 day ago, you messed with the wrong city, you messed with the wrong country, and you will pay a price. We will not let you and your evil message prevail.

So it is 2 years now. In some ways, it seems like yesterday. In some ways, it seems like a lifetime. We will remember those who were lost. Our city will maintain and even achieve greater greatness, and our country will prevail over terrorism. God bless those families who still suffer. God bless our city and State, and God bless America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to offer an amendment to increase the funding levels in the Ryan White CARE Act.

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

Mr. President, I will be brief because I know we have a lot to do to finish this bill tomorrow.

This amendment increases the funding levels of all titles contained in the

Ryan White CARE Act by a total of $401 million, with $214 million specifically going toward the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, commonly referred to as ADAP.

The CDC estimates that nearly 900,000 people are living with HIV in the United States, and among those are 362,000 who are living with

I move to waive the appropriate section of the Budget Act, Mr. President.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I believe the regular order is for the minority to be given a half hour on the proposal to proceed with the Estrada nomination; is that correct?

Mr. President, we are back to voting on whether to proceed with the Estrada nomination. Before I get into the merits of Mr. Estrada, I want the record to show that we have now confirmed 140 of the President's nominees. By the end of the week, it could be over 150. By the end of the week, we may be blocking as many as 4. So right now it is 140 to 4 and could be at the end of the week 150 to 4. That is a record that even Yankee fans would be jealous of.

We have this view of some, including the White House, that we are obstructionist because we have tried to block 4 out of 140 nominees. My guess is if James Madison or George Washington or Benjamin Franklin or any of the Founding Fathers were looking down on this Chamber, they would say: Why are they blocking so few? We wanted the President and the Senate to come together on judicial nominees.

It outlines in the Federalist Papers that the Founding Fathers didn't want the President to have sole power to choose judges, nor did they want the Senate to be a rubber stamp. In fact, one of the first nominees, John Rutledge from South Carolina, was rejected by the Senate, which contained a goodly number of the Founding Fathers themselves because they were appointed to the Senate in those days right from the Constitutional Convention. Rutledge was rejected because of his views on the Jay Treaty.

So this idea that unless we find the candidate to have some kind of criminal record or has done something unethical, we should not be examining that record or speaking to that record makes a good deal of sense. President Bush is a classic case of what the Founding Fathers were worried about in the way he has chosen his nominees because the Founding Fathers, I believe, wanted nominees to be from the American mainstream. They wanted them to interpret the law, not to make law.

There have been times when judges have leaned to the far left--the 1960s and 1970s--and they now lean to the far right. The bench becomes infused with ideologues and ideologies, and those judges want to make law, not interpret law--very much against what our Founding Fathers wanted. That has been the case of President Bush. I don't think it is disputed that he has nominated judges through an ideological prism more than any President in our history. You don't have a sprinkling of Democrats or liberals or even moderates--you have a few moderates, but the overwhelming majority of the President's judges have been hard core, hard right. A few of them have been so far over that they don't deserve nomination. They include Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen, and they include, in my opinion, two nominees we may vote on later this week: Carolyn Kuhl, and the attorney general of Alabama, Pryor.

If you look at the records of these judges and you put scales, left to right, 10 being the most liberal and 1 being the most conservative, these judges are ones, to be charitable. When Bill Clinton nominated judges, he nominated mainly sixes and sevens, people who tended to be a little more liberal, but were moderate and mainstream--very few legal aid lawyers or ACLU charter members, much more prosecutors and partners in law firms.

This President, for whatever reason, has chosen to nominate judges way over to the far right side.

I am proud of what we have done in this Chamber. I am proud that we are bringing some moderation to the bench. I am proud that we are following the wishes of the Founding Fathers and not just being a rubber stamp. For those who try to beat us with a two-by-four, by calling names, by saying we are anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti- Catholic, anti-women, when we oppose a judge who happens to be of that description, we are not going to win. We believe in what we are doing. We believe it is mandated by the Constitution. We believe we are following the will of the American people who don't want judges either too far left or too far right.

I assure you, Mr. President, and I assure President Bush, and I assure my colleagues in the Senate that we will continue to do this. You can prolong this and put up all the visuals and nasty ads you want, like the one just run by one of the President's associates in Maine, accusing those who will vote against Mr. Pryor of being anti-Catholic, including good Catholics in this Chamber. That is wrong. In fact, I think it is reprehensible. But I tell the other side, not only will it not work, if anything it strengthens our desire to do the right thing.

Let's talk about Miguel Estrada. This nominee was unusual in this sense: He had no real record because he had not been a judge previously, nor written law articles. By many reports, his views were very extreme. But when I approached the hearings for his nomination, and when many colleagues did, we were willing to see what he thought. The bottom line is that he didn't tell us what he thought. The bottom line is that when he was asked very simple questions on issues that he had an obligation to expound upon, such as: What is your view of the first amendment; how broad or narrow should it be; what is your view of the commerce clause; what is your view of the relationship between the States and the Federal Government; he kept hiding behind this idea that canon 5 of lawyers ethics says you should not comment on a pending case if you are nominated to be a judge, so that he could not comment on anything. If Mr. Estrada were asked how should Enron be treated, he would rightfully say: I cannot answer that because I might judge Enron on the bench. But if he is asked what his views on corporate ethics are, of course, he has an obligation to answer that question. He did not. And doing so was an affront, not to any one individual, but to our Constitution.

If Mr. Estrada were correct, then probably most of the judges we have nominated in the last two decades should be cited for violation of canon 5. They all answered these questions. Judges nominated by President Bush before and after Estrada have answered these questions. So why would Mr. Estrada not come clean and tell people what he thought? Why would he not do what every American has to do?

When every American applies for a job, the employer says: Please fill out this questionnaire. Can you imagine someone saying I refuse to fill out the questionnaire in getting the job? It would be rare to do that. That is what he did. He is applying for a job--not just any job, but one of the most important jobs this Government has--a Federal judge, with awesome power. He kept refusing to fill in the job application form by answering the questions we had asked.

We then came to the question: How could we tell what his views were? We

did not stop. We asked him, and we asked the Justice Department to give us some documents about issues on which he had worked when he was in the Solicitor General's Office. There were some in that office who reported, again, that his views were way over, that they were extreme, and we were refused our request.

I will tell you this, Mr. President, and I will tell every Member of this Chamber, as long as Mr. Estrada refuses to answer questions about issues over which he is going to have virtual life and death power in terms of governing the American people and we do not know how he feels, we are going to continue to block him. We are proud of that fact.

At first when it started, most people said: Don't do it; politically they will attack you--and this and that. I told my colleagues I thought we ought to do it because it is the right action to take, regardless of politics.

A funny thing has happened. Politics seems to be rolling in our direction. People are beginning to understand that this President is not nominating mainstream, moderate judges. People are beginning to understand that there is a desire to pack the courts and turn the clock back.

Congress will not turn the clock back. The President himself will not turn the clock back. We are elected. But if you put judges in, they can turn the clock back for a whole generation. There is a view out there that this is happening.

What started out as something done out of a deep conviction remains a deep conviction, and our view about the direction of this country, our view about the appropriate role of the Senate in the nomination process of judges is not ending up to be the political loser that some prognosticated.

We will continue to block this nomination. If nominees stubbornly and arrogantly refuse to answer legitimate questions of members of the committee, we will not allow them to become judges. That is not our doing in an ultimate sense; it is their own doing. If nominees are so far out of the mainstream that it is quite clear they will make law, not interpret the laws that others have made, we will oppose them as well.

We will vote on the nomination of Mr. Estrada for the seventh time. I make the point that my good friend from New Mexico was saying we have to move the Energy bill forward. Our majority leader is saying we have to move the Energy bill forward, but we are taking out time to vote on this nomination again. The purpose I do not know, a purpose grander than I can think of. But we are here and we are doing it.

No one has changed his or her minds. Mr. Estrada has not answered the questions, and as long as he continues not to answer these important vital questions, he will not be approved.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Will my colleague yield?

There are others who wish to speak in addition to the Senator from Massachusetts.