Floor Statements

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Is the distinguished Democratic leader aware that the work done in the Senate bill--$318 billion for transit and highways--was done on a bipartisan basis? I have been chairman of that full committee on two occasions. I understand it. I understand the committee very well. But there was cooperation such as I have never seen. With Senator Inhofe, Senator Bond, Senator Jeffords, and me being ranking member on the subcommittee now, there was no partisanship.

Is the Senator--I am sure--also aware this bill does not increase taxes at all, it is paid for with existing dollars, plus trust fund moneys? So anyone who thinks this is breaking the bank simply is mistaken. This is no new taxes, totally funded, no deficit spending. Is the Senator aware of that?

Mr. President, I will yield very quickly. I want to say this. I understand the procedures here in the Senate. I certainly understand the majority has the right of first recognition. If the majority decides they do not want us to participate in debate, it is difficult for us to be part of the debate.

But I want the Record to be spread with the fact today we have heard--and I hope it is wrong--when we complete action today on the underlying bill, that is, the welfare bill, the majority is going to go to the floor and prevent us from being part of the debate; they are going to talk about what Democrats are doing is wrong and what they are doing is right, and not allow us to have recognition. Now I say, as the Chair is aware, that we heard once before, not long ago, the majority was going to do this, and you will recall at that time I got the floor and kept the floor for a long time. That did not set a good tone, that the majority was, in effect, trying to force us out of the debate. The Senate is a debating body, and we should be part of that.

I say for the second time this morning, we know the majority can keep us from being recognized. It would set a very bad tone. I do not think it would be appropriate or fair, and we would do whatever we could to protect our right, and everyone should understand that.

Mr. President, I yield, on the time we have remaining, 20 minutes to the Senator from New York.

Mr. President, we appreciate Senator Cochran speaking when he did. We have 8 minutes remaining. I ask unanimous consent that the time be reserved. We had someone who was going to speak but has not shown up.

I ask that when we move to the welfare bill, TANF, that on our side for 30 minutes 7 minutes be given to our manager, Senator Baucus; 7 minutes to Senator Kennedy, the ranking member of the full committee; 5 minutes to Senator Reed from Rhode Island; and 5 minutes to Senator Boxer from California.

Mr. President, I ask the Senator if he will yield for a unanimous consent.

Mr. President, our remaining time will be yielded to the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. Feingold.

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

Mr. President, I wanted to say that last night I had the pleasure of going to the Smithsonian Institution and meeting members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. There were people there who were, to me--as a young boy, I wanted to be a baseball player and always listened to the game of the day. There were people there, including Gaylord Perry, Dave Winfield, Joe Morgan, Sandy Koufax, Stan Musial.

I have to say to my friend from West Virginia, as great an experience as that was for me visiting with those great athletes of yesteryear, that pales in comparison to the experiences I have had while serving with the ``Babe Ruth'' of the U.S. Senate.

When I was elected to this leadership job, Senator Byrd supported me. I wrote him a letter--and I am confident he remembers that like he does everything else--and I said I believed he was the Babe Ruth of the U.S. Senate. When I say that, he is a member of the hall of fame, of course, but the Babe Ruth in the Baseball Hall of Fame stands above all the rest. In the Senate, Senator Robert Byrd stands above all of us. I have a degree in history and I know something about it. I know we have great Senators here, but I have had the opportunity to serve with the greatest.

If the Chair would allow me to respond to the Senator from Virginia, the majority has 9 minutes and we have 9 minutes; is that correct?

The minority has what?

So the majority leader used morning business time?

Mr. President, I say to the distinguished Senator from Virginia, you are to go first today under the order that has been entered, and then we would go next.

Mr. President, on our side, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, be recognized for 5 minutes, followed by the Senator from Rhode Island for 6 minutes.

Mr. President, I extend my appreciation to my friend from Wisconsin for his statement. When the senior Senator from Wisconsin comes to the floor, he is prepared. I am always so impressed with the substance of his statements. The Senator and I have traveled to parts of the world. He has a great concern about what is going on in the world. He is able to express himself very well. I acknowledge his statement today and extend for the second time this afternoon my appreciation for his statement.

Mr. President, there has been a lot of talk on the Senate floor today, but I am very disappointed it has only been talk. We are not legislating. For this very important bill on the floor, we have had one vote. There are many people in the Senate who have more experience than I as a national legislator, but I have been here 22 years. I know how the Senate operates. I know how it used to operate.

The way it operates today is not pleasant, I am sorry to say. There is no reason we cannot be real legislators, take these amendments and work through them. I am convinced this is not the right way to legislate.

I have the greatest respect for the majority leader. He is a fine man. He is a humanitarian, as shown by his chosen profession. He is a real medical expert. He is an organ transplant specialist. And he has, in his capacity as a Senator, gone to countries where there is a shortage of doctors, and he does work that he is overqualified for but that is badly needed, doing hernias and other types of surgery.

So I do not say this in any way to take away from the dignity of his job. I do not want, in any way, to demean him personally. But I am just saying, the Senate is not being handled right. I do not know if it is because of the advice he is getting from his other Senators or what the reason is. Maybe he is getting advice from the White House. I do not know. But we should be moving through these pieces of legislation.

For example, the FSC bill, this very important tax bill, Senator Harkin offered an amendment on overtime. Why did he offer this amendment on overtime? Because we believe--and we have substantive facts to back us up--that 8 million people, because of actions taken by this administration, will no longer be entitled to overtime pay.

Who are these people? They are firemen; they are police officers; they are nurses. If someone disagrees with us, let them come and oppose the Harkin amendment in the light of day and say I don't like the Harkin amendment for this reason or this reason or this reason. And then let's vote on it.

Senator Harkin has said, on many occasions, he will take a very short time agreement on the amendment. What does that mean? It means he would take 15 minutes. The majority could have 15 minutes. Let's have a vote on the amendment.

This amendment passed before. It passed the Senate last October. The House instructed its conferees to do exactly what the Senate did. But that bill was not allowed to move forward because there was an effort made--and successfully--not to vote on that overtime amendment.

So now we move to the reauthorization of the welfare bill, TANF. Senators Boxer and Kennedy offered an amendment dealing with minimum wage. Certainly, on a welfare bill that is an amendment that seems to have some bearing. We want to do what we can. I have supported the welfare-to-work programs we have had going. But one of the things we have to do is make sure these people moving off welfare and on to work can earn a living.

As we have established on the Senate floor, quite clearly, minimum wage jobs are not jobs that are set aside for kids from high school to flip hamburgers or for old Americans who are in a state of semiretirement and need a little extra work. No. Sixty percent of the minimum wage jobs are held by women. And for the majority of those women, that is the only money they get for them and their families.

We want to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour. If someone opposes, let's have a debate on whether we should raise the minimum wage. But, no, we are not allowed to vote on that issue. There have been some complaints that, well, there are other amendments. We will give you a vote on that maybe, but we have to have an agreement on the other amendments.

Why can't we legislate the way we used to? Just work our way through these amendments and produce a tax bill and produce a welfare bill? It might require we work a night or two. It might require we have votes on Friday and even Monday, but I do not understand why we are in this situation. I do not think it is good for the institution. I know it is not good for the American public.

We are not in control of the Senate. Because of the untimely death of Paul Wellstone, our margin dropped from 50 to 49. It would have been 50-50 had he not been untimely killed in that plane crash. Now we are in the minority, 51-49. We understand that. We understand there will be a day in the future when we will be in control, and we will want as much cooperation as we can get from the minority. I hope when we are in the majority we will be treated to the sense that the Senate is the Senate, as it has been for more than 200 years, and we will work through these amendments.

We have been concerned--and I am happy to see the fact that in a bill earlier today the leader of the Budget Committee, Senator Nickles, and the ranking member, Senator Conrad, agreed there would be a real conference where Democrats and Republicans sit down and try to work out differences between the bill. That is the way we need to do it.

There has been a pattern where Democrats are not even allowed into the room at a conference. My limited amount of math shows me we are in the minority. And when you have a conference, we are going to lose most of those votes anyway, but we are entitled to have a discussion in those conference committees about ideas we have. Maybe if our ideas are good enough, we can get somebody from the majority to agree with us and we can win on some issues in those conferences.

I can't imagine why we are not doing a better job on moving these pieces of legislation. I see my distinguished friend, the majority whip, my counterpart. Maybe he is here with some good news that we are going to start moving some of this legislation. I hope that is the case.

I want to be as constructive as I can to help work through this legislation. But for the life of me, I cannot see why we can't vote on overtime and on the minimum wage. It is good for the institution. It is good for the country. We are willing to take our chances. If there are more votes to defeat overtime and the minimum wage, that is OK. That is the way things happen. But we think we can win both measures and move past this on to something else that is related.

I have heard discussions of the ranking member, Senator Baucus, who has indicated some of the things we need to get done in the TANF bill. I have said on the Senate floor on a number of occasions, I don't know of two Senators, in leadership positions with committee assignments, who get along better than the senior Senator from Iowa and the senior Senator from Montana. They work out their differences.

I am convinced there is ground to be made up here. We can still do these two bills. We want both of them passed. Forty-nine Democrats want the welfare bill to pass. We also want the tax bill we were on last week to pass. We want these bills to pass, but we believe there are some institutional issues that are important, and the American people are entitled to votes. I am not going to be drawing any overtime, but there are

8 million people who are entitled to a vote on overtime, whether the administration should be able to take that away from them. There are tens of millions of people who are entitled to a minimum wage increase. We need to do that.

Some States have gone ahead and said Congress is acting too slowly, and they have a minimum wage above ours right now. There is going to be a ballot initiative in the State of Nevada this year--they have to get some signatures, but I am sure they will get enough--to raise the minimum wage in Nevada to $6.15 an hour, a dollar more than what we do. The people of the State of Nevada will vote on that in November. I don't think they should have to vote on it. We should be doing our job. But we are not able to do our job because we are being stopped from doing this because we are in the minority.

We are going to continue exercising the rights we have. The Senate allows us to offer amendments. People can say: Why do you offer amendments that have no bearing on what we are doing? I think everyone would acknowledge that this overtime pay issue does have a bearing on what we do. It would be without any foundation in logic to say we don't have a right on a welfare bill to offer a minimum wage amendment. We should be able to do so.

I repeat--I want the record spread--we are not trying to stall. We believe passage of these two measures is extremely important. We want them to pass. We have confidence in the two managers of the bill. But the leadership of the majority has to allow us to move past where we are now because we are in a deadlock, and that is too bad.

Mr. President, we have an opportunity to, based on the statement of the Senator from Kentucky, move some of this legislation. But I cannot understand why, when we finish running one race, we have to immediately go to the other race. We need a little time to rest.

What I am saying about that is that we have on many occasions passed bills in the Senate and accomplished the desire of the people working on that legislation by working things out with the House. We have done that without using conference. We have done this simply in negotiating the differences between the House and Senate. We have done it in the 108th Congress; we did it 21 times then. In the 107th Congress, we did it 51 times.

I think before the end of this year, if we can get a few things done on the floor, instead of 21 bills, we can get it up to maybe 40. We have done it on very important things, such as AIDS assistance, TANF extension, military family tax relief, national flood insurance, Syria accountability, veterans benefits, the Defense Production Act, which are very important pieces of legislation. There have been some things we have done with a conference. As some will recall, last year we had a difficult situation with the fair credit reporting. But Senator Shelby and Senator Sarbanes decided that the best thing they could do would be to set a standard and the two leaders said, yes, we are willing to go to conference, we think we can do a good job. They did that. It became law.

We are one step ahead of where we should be. We want legislation passed in the Senate. When that is done, there are many ways to resolve differences with the House. We can do it in conference and there are occasions when we need to do that. Some may ask why we have balked at conferences. Very simply, for example, the overtime measure which passed here went to conference, and Democrats weren't even invited into the room where the conference was held. A bill came back here and, of course, overtime was stripped from it, and we had a bill that did not go through the conference process. They did not follow the Shelby- Sarbanes model.

We are willing to work to get legislation passed. We have said we want to do that, we want to work our way through these amendments. But to come here and say we will do it if you only have 4 amendments, the best way to get these bills passed is to work on them. These bills don't come magically. We have 49 of us here and 51 on the other side. We all have ideas as to how the legislation could be improved. Sometimes our ideas are good and sometimes they are bad. But individual Senators--there are two Senators from every State with the ability to get elected. We have wide interests we represent in our States. We have an obligation to allow them to offer amendments and move through this legislation.

I am not an expert in parliamentary procedure in the Senate. I don't think many people can claim that. I do understand a lot of the procedures in the Senate, and I understand that the best way to do legislation is to work through it. If you have an amendment you don't agree with, speak against it and vote against it. But don't stop others from having the opportunity to vote.

So, again, we are being told today, yes, we will let you have some amendments, or we will let you have more than some, but if we do that, you have to agree to go to conference. We are not going to do that. We are going to do everything we can to get a bill passed.

As I have indicated, Mr. President, in the 108th Congress, 21 times we have been able to get legislation passed and sent to the President without a conference. We have negotiated our differences in the language between the House and Senate. We can continue to do that. We did it 51 times in 107th Congress. So as I said before, and I repeat, there is no reason we should not legislate the way we always have in days past: You introduce legislation, it goes to committee, comes to the floor, we debate it, offer amendments, and vote on it. When that is done, you figure out how you are going to work your way through the differences with the House.

We want to pass the tax bill that was in effect on the Senate floor last week. I repeat, we want to pass this welfare bill. The only way we can show that is by agreeing to work through these amendments. There is not a single Senator who wants to filibuster this bill. We are not going to be stopped from offering these amendments, and we will hold together as a body and not allow cloture to be invoked tomorrow. It is not fair.

Mr. President, today is the 77th birthday of someone whom I admire greatly, Cesar Chavez. He was born March 31, 1927. I never had the opportunity to meet Cesar Chavez. I came close a couple of times, but I never had the opportunity to meet him.

He was a leader, a great father, a man of great moral character, and a humanitarian. He was a man whose name is synonymous with a broad social movement that accomplished substantive things. He was guided by principles of nonviolence and respect for human labor. He dedicated his life to helping those who had no voice. And that is an understatement.

Whether he was leading a 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento or staging one of his prolonged hunger strikes, Cesar Chavez worked tirelessly to focus attention to the inhumane conditions endured by migrant farm workers.

He gave life, dignity, and strength to the United Farm Worker movement. He knew firsthand the plight of migrant farm workers. He went to work in the fields and vineyards when he was only 10 years old, which was fairly standard at the time. He was forced to leave school in the eighth grade to help support his family. But even though he didn't have a lot of book learning, so to speak, he was a brilliant man. In 1944, he served his country in the United States Navy.

Forty-two years ago, Mr. Chavez joined Dolores Huerta, whom I have had the opportunity to meet. She is still an avid activist and gives inspiration to people in the State of Nevada and throughout the country. Forty-two years ago, Chavez and Huerta founded United Farm Workers Association.

Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Union opened the eyes of the American people. For the first time, many Americans began to learn about the hard lives and inhumane treatment of the workers who helped put food on the table.

Cesar Chavez was an integral figure in the birth of La Causa, as our Nation's Latino civil rights movement is sometimes called. Organized labor, religious groups, minority students, and many other people of good will joined Chavez in his fight to secure the rights and improve the lives of migrant farm workers.

Cesar Chavez is probably our Nation's most recognized Hispanic American historical figure, but he did not help only Latinos but Irish, Asian, Indian, German, Mexican. When it came to aiding farm workers, Cesar Chavez drew no racial lines. He placed his life on the line many times. He did it by protesting, by denying his body nourishment, in order to nurture the cause he so well served.

In 1968, he staged a fast. For 25 days, he ate no food. In 1972, he repeated this for 24 days. But, in 1988, he fasted for a remarkable 36 days. He embraced the philosophy of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He sought to bring about deep-rooted change through nonviolent means.

In those many difficult days migrant farm workers lived in makeshift homes with no plumbing, heat, or running water. It was not uncommon for them to be sent into a field or vineyard while the crop-dusting plane was actually dropping pesticides. And, in most cases, little or no attempt was made to educate the children of these farm workers.

Things have changed as a result of his work. Take, for example, the onion fields of northern Nevada, Lyon County. Farm workers now have very nice facilities. They have to meet certain standards. They watch how many hours they work. They have rights they never had but for this man, Cesar Chavez.

We have a lot of work to do on improving the lives of people who gather our food, but at least today they have dignity and hope. This is because Cesar Chavez gave them that dignity and hope. He personally led a very courageous life and, in my estimation, is a true American hero and an inspiration. He believed:

The end of all education should surely be service to

others.

He held this belief in his heart, and he lived this belief in his actions until his untimely death in 1993. I hope those of us in the Senate will understand that courage and commitment that guided Cesar Chavez's life and honor his legacy by looking out for those people with no voice.

Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate Clark High School for its victory in the 13th Annual Nevada Regional Science Bowl. In fact, this is Clark High School's second consecutive victory in this competition.

I commend the students on this year's Clark High School team--Young Ran, Alex Cerjanic, Yung Wang, and Ryan Weicker--for their hard work and commitment to academic excellence. I would want to recognize their coach, Beth Issacs, for her instruction and strong leadership of the team.

This past February, 32 student teams from across Nevada participated in the Nevada Regional Science Bowl. The Clark High School team performed exceptionally well and earned the honor to represent Nevada in the National Science Bowl. The team's success not only demonstrates the benefits of hard work and diligent study, but also reflects well on the students, faculty, and administrators of Clark High School.

The Department of Energy's National Science Bowl began in 1991 as part of a national initiative to encourage America's students to excel in mathematics and science. Teams of four or five students coached by a teacher must demonstrate their knowledge by answering questions related to various scientific fields. Over the past 13 years, thousands of students have participated in this competition and have demonstrated the great potential of our Nation's youth.

Please join me in congratulating Clark High School for its commitment to academic excellence and victory in the Nevada Regional Science Bowl.

Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate Elmo and Nancy Martinelli on their 50th wedding anniversary. These two native Nevadans have demonstrated a remarkable commitment to each other and their family for these past five decades.

Raised in Sparks, NV, Elmo and Nancy were high school sweethearts and were married on April 25, 1954. The son of Italian immigrants, Elmo served in the Army and opened a barber shop, which he owned for more than 30 years until his retirement in 1994. Nancy worked as an office secretary and bookkeeper until motherhood arrived in 1955.

Throughout their lives, Elmo and Nancy have dedicated themselves to ensuring that their children--Greg, Craig, Sheila, and Julie--could enjoy the best possible opportunities life has to offer. Their family would grow over time to include five grandchildren and three great- grandchildren.

As their children grew and moved on to college, the Martinellis created a new and no less active life, which included regular weekly golf games, improvement and maintenance of their home, and worldwide travel. In fact, Elmo and Nancy have traveled throughout the United States in their motor home, visited most of Europe and the Far East, and have taken cruises on most of the world's major bodies of water.

In the mid-1990s, the couple sold their Reno home where they had lived for 39 years and embarked on a new adventure: the construction of their dream

home. Elmo and Nancy built their new abode on an acre of land nestled in the foothills of the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains in southwest Reno. It is a testament to both Elmo and Nancy that their retirement has produced some of the most exciting times of their lives.

It gives me great pleasure to offer my sincerest congratulations to Elmo and Nancy on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Shawn Gallagher, a fellow in the office of the Democratic leader, be granted the privileges of the floor during consideration of H.R. 4.

Mr. President, this legislation has been long in coming. Senator McCain and I have worked on this for months. I think it is a tremendous step forward. It is a perfect example of how we have to cooperate with each other. This is not everything that Senator McCain wanted, it is not everything I wanted, but it is legislation that now is going to pass the Senate. It is something that has been needed for some time. It is the Professional Boxing Safety Act, but it also will take a very

close look at promoters, including those who are the networks, HBO, Showtime. It sets up a national boxing commission. It is important.

This is a multimillion-dollar industry, and it needs Federal oversight as a result of deaths that occur with boxers. We had a death of a person from Nevada who went to Utah to fight. He had been knocked out 21 times. He went to Utah to fight and got knocked out again and died.

As many of my colleagues know, I come to my work on boxing with a perspective that was formed both inside and outside the ring. Before I entered the political arena, I personally was a boxer. I also worked ringside as a judge in hundreds of fights, in all weight classes, and have judged championship fights. As a lawyer in private practice, I also represented professional fighters.

My State of Nevada hosts most of the premier boxing matches in the world. Nevada's state-of-the-art resorts provide fight venues that are unmatched in any other part of the world, and Nevadans take great pride in the historical role the State has played in boxing. The Nevada State Athletic commission is the most respected boxing commission in the world. It has led our country and the world in implementing terms of boxing safety and ethical treatment of fighters, promoters, and ringside personnel. Nevada's commission, under the outstanding direction of Marc Ratner, serves as a model for a national commission and has guided my work on this legislation.

Is there a need for the establishment of a national commission patterned after Nevada's commission to regulate boxing throughout the United States? The answer is a yes.

Last July, a boxer named Brad Rone fought in Utah and died at the age of 35. While Brad lived in Las Vegas, he had been banned from fighting in Nevada for more than three years. The Nevada Commission felt that he was at risk of getting seriously injured every time he stepped into the ring. Unfortunately, this ban didn't prevent him from fighting in other States. So despite the fact that he lost 26 consecutive fights, Brad was allowed to step into the ring in Utah to fight Billy Zumbrun. After only one uneventful round of what was to be an eight-round fight, Brad passed out and died. He wasn't knocked out. He was hit once and started to walk away and collapsed. An autopsy later revealed that Brad technically died of a heart attack, but many acknowledge that the continual physical abuse inside the ring contributed to his untimely death.

Unfortunately, the rules governing professional boxing and the enforcement of those rules vary widely among States. This legislation today will help avoid future tragedies like Brad's, and ensure a vibrant future for the sport of boxing and the Nation's boxers. If this legislation had been enacted before Brad's death, it would have required that his fights be approved by a Federal Commission after either his 10th defeat or fifth consecutive knockout.

This bill creates the United States Boxing Commission, USBC. The USBC will prescribe and enforce uniform regulations for professional boxing in order to protect the health and safety of boxers and ensure fairness in the sport. While it will not supercede States with higher standards, like Nevada, it will establish minimum standards and conformity for all States. The USBC will also have the ability to defer its authority to States with strong commissions when deemed appropriate.

Among other things, the USBC will maintain a national computerized registry for the collection of specific information on professional boxers and boxing personnel as well as certify for each boxing match the participating boxers' medical histories. It will require sites to have both an ambulance and emergency medical personnel with resuscitation equipment continuously present. There are some places today that have only one ambulance. Once a boxer is hurt, and the ambulance takes him away, there is no remaining personnel or equipment for the other fights on the card. This poses unnecessary and sometimes fatal risks to boxers and ring personnel. The USBC will also review plans submitted by all State athletic commissions for uniformity.

This uniformity will discontinue the use of forum shopping that we witnessed in 2002 with the Mike Tyson v. Lennox Lewis fight. That fight was originally scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, but the Nevada State Athletic Commission declined to grant Tyson a license to fight because of his violent behavior, both inside and outside the ring. The Association of Boxing Commissions, ABC, recommended that other State commissions honor Nevada's decision not to let Tyson fight. However, the ABC acts only as a quasi-federal agency and has no enforcement authority. Obviously, the ABC's recommendation was ignored, as Tyson was permitted to fight Lewis in Tennessee.

Another important problem this legislation begins to remedy is broadcasters acting as de facto fight promoters. Broadcasters who effectively operate as promoters ought to be held to the same standards and scrutiny as traditional promoters. They should be regulated in the same manner. This is only fair. Many broadcasters control when the fighters fight, who they fight, where they fight, and how much they are paid. This is the role of the promoter, and the media companies are acting as the fighters' de facto promoters. However, despite the fact that these companies are acting as promoters, they are not regulated by boxing commissions. While traditional promoters are regulated under the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, Ali Act, and State athletic commission laws, the media companies have been virtually free from regulation.

This legislation will require the broadcaster to make certain disclosures to the USBC similar to what promoters must do. Broadcasters will have to provide to the USBC statements of fees paid and owed to promoters, copies of all contracts, and a list of the sources of income they receive from the broadcast of the match.

Additionally, the bill requires the USBC to study for one year the definition of a promoter and report back to Congress their proposed revised definition, speculatively, to include broadcasters as appropriate. When Congress enacted the Ali Act, one of the main goals was to protect boxers from being unfairly treated by promoters. The Ali Act provided contractual reforms that prevented exploitive business practices that at that time allowed for coercive and lengthy contracts tying a fighter to a promoter for years. Today, many fighters are entering into promotional agreements directly with the broadcaster. Thus, in order to really give the Ali Act any weight, it is necessary that those who are conducting the business of a promoter comply with the regulations set forth in the Ali Act. The broadcasters should not evade the restrictions placed on promoters by the Ali Act simply by slipping through some technical loopholes.

The USBC should focus on two particular issues when making this important promoters decision. Both, I believe, strongly suggest that broadcasters be included in the promoter definition. First, it should examine the situation that exists when a broadcaster or network hires another individual or entity as the per se ``promoter'' to stage a boxing event. While the broadcaster pays this local promoter a fee, the broadcaster contracts to retain the boxer's rights to the fight, for example, the right to sell, distribute, exhibit, or license the match or in some cases several matches, and retains the right to choose dates, sites, and opponents. In this scenario, the broadcaster is really acting as a de facto promoter and should be subject to the regulations and disclosure requirements imposed by the Ali Act. However, since the local promoter is contractually charged with complying with federal and state laws, he is the only one required under current law to file financial disclosures with the boxer. The broadcaster who hires this local promoter does not have to disclose to the fighter how much the broadcaster is earning for the fight. Since conventional promoters determine when a fighter fights, where he fights, who he fights and how much he is paid, the broadcaster is doing all the work of a promoter yet circumventing the requirements of the Ali Act. It is the fighter who is left in the dark.

This situation I have described is illustrated by the roles of HBO and Showtime in the Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson fight. Lewis was under contract to HBO and Tyson was under

contract to Showtime. These two media companies signed an agreement to promote the Lewis/Tyson fight and a possible rematch. However, neither HBO nor Showtime was required to file their agreements with the two fighters or with a State athletic commission since they are not technically ``promoters'' under the Ali Act. Instead, they hired a local promoter to ``stage'' the fight, and because the local promoter was not a party to the master agreements for the fight, those agreements may have never been filed with the commission. Furthermore, the disclosures under the Ali Act which require a promoter to inform the fighters how much revenue is to be earned by it from the event may not necessarily have been provided since the ``promoter'' was only being paid a fee to stage the fight. Oftentimes, the ``multi-fight'' agreements which these broadcasters have with their fighters may contain terms beyond those permitted by law to promoters.

The second scenario the commission should examine is where the broadcaster contracts directly with the boxer or with the boxer's representative. By ``boxer's representative'' I am talking about any entity or company that employs the boxer or to whom the boxer has transferred the rights to his boxing services. Even if a broadcaster only obtains rights to the boxer through this entity, the broadcaster should still be deemed a promoter and be subject to the Ali Act because in essence, they are contracting with the boxer. Here is an example. When Tyson and Lewis fought, HBO contracted with Lion Promotions. Lion Promotions is--for all practical purposes--Lewis's company, yet legally, Lewis may or may not own or be employed by Lion Promotions. However, when HBO contracted with Lyon, they effectively contracted with Lewis directly. Thus, the contractual protections given the boxer in the Ali Act should apply in this type of situation.

In determining whether a broadcaster is acting as a de facto promoter, the USBC must study the contracts between broadcasters and such entities and any attached ratifications by the boxer him/herself; the contracts with local promoters; the contracts between the local promoters and the boxer; and the contracts between any involved broadcasters. The USBC is also directed to look at the sources of income received from the broadcast of a fight and examine the amounts received from each of these sources. Effectively defining the role of a promoter requires looking at who is contracting with a boxer for the rights to the boxer's service. These rights include the rights to sell, grant, convey, distribute, exhibit, and license the match or matches.

Conventional promoters control the rights to a fighter's boxing career and the right to exploit the boxer's name and image in connection with his/her boxing matches. By determining who is circumventing the requirements placed on a promoter under the Ali Act and thereafter including them within the definition of a promoter, the USBC will protect the fighter from exploitive business practices, regardless of the source.

It is envisioned that the commission created under this legislation, the USBC, will monitor the boxing world, creating an environment that will enable both the sport and its participants to thrive. I am proud of the work that Senator McCain and I have done to help in the reform of this great sport.