Floor Statements

Mr. President, following the remarks, if any, from the two leaders, the Senate will resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 3221, the housing reform legislation. As has been announced earlier, there will be no rollcall votes today. The next vote will occur tomorrow morning around 11 a.m. That vote will be on a motion to invoke cloture on the Dodd-Shelby substitute with respect to the housing reform legislation. Senators will have until 11:30 a.m. tomorrow to file amendments to the substitute.

This week, we expect to turn to the consideration of the emergency supplemental appropriations bill and the FISA legislation, and, of course, we need to consider moving to the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act that Senators Baucus and Grassley are negotiating.

Mr. President, in short, we have FISA, the supplemental, housing, and Medicare that we need to focus on. When we finish those this week, I think there will be an opportunity for us to leave. We do have to vote on a number of judges whom we have indicated we would vote on, and we are going to try to do those tomorrow afternoon. We think that can be accomplished. Right after the caucus, we can start voting on those judges.

Mr. President, I now move to proceed to Calendar No. 827, H.R. 6304, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Mr. President, I send to the desk a cloture motion.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I ask unanimous consent the Senate Finance Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3540 and the Senate proceed to its consideration now; further, that a Baucus substitute at the desk, which is a 6-month FAA extension and a highway trust fund fix, be agreed to, the bill as amended be read a third time and passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid on the table with no intervening action or debate.

I would say, before I hear from my distinguished colleague, the junior Senator from Arizona, that I, of course, would rather be asking consent to finish the whole FAA bill, the complete bill. This is a 6- month extension, which is so important. The Highway Trust Fund is also upside-down. It is out of money. This would extend the FAA bill for 6 months, which is important. There are so many more things in that bill. In fact, I have spoken to the President's Chief of Staff on how important the FAA bill is.

But at this stage we have some problems. So, anyway, we have gone for a 6-month extension and doing something to fix the highway trust fund.

That is what this consent agreement is all about.

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

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to S. 3180 that was introduced today.

I ask unanimous consent the bill be read three times, passed, the motion to reconsider be laid on the table with no intervening action or debate, and any statements relating to this matter be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the agriculture committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 440 and the Senate proceed to it now.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid on the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 596.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until 10 a.m. tomorrow, June 24; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date and the Senate resume consideration of the House message to accompany H.R. 3221, the housing reform legislation, with the hour prior to the cloture vote equally divided between the two leaders or their designees. I further ask unanimous consent that the Senate recess from 12:30 until 2:15 p.m. to allow for the weekly caucus luncheons.

Tomorrow, around 11 a.m., there will be a vote on cloture on a motion to concur in the House amendment with the Dodd-Shelby substitute.

Senators will have until 10:30 a.m. to file amendments to the substitute. We have a big day tomorrow. We hope to get cloture on this housing bill and wrap it up as quickly as we can.

We expect to complete a number of judges, and we have, before the end of the work period, as I announced this morning, to do something about Medicare, the supplemental appropriations bill, FISA, and hopefully a few other things. But those are the essentials we need to do.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand in recess under the previous order.

Mr. President, what is the business now?

Mr. President, we are in the splendor of this beautiful Senate Chamber. We have all had a good night's rest. But around America today, there are people in the West who are just awakening and people in the East have been awake for a while. But a lot of those people have had bad nights; they are in danger of losing their homes. They don't know what to do. They realize other homes have gone to foreclosure and the neighborhood is going down. They can see it, and it has put a pall over the economic viability of our country. That is what this legislation is all about.

Those people will benefit from what was done in the Senate yesterday, and we will, I believe, sometime early next week, pass this bill. It is going to be a tremendous help to those people around America who are suffering as a result of this housing crisis, and they are suffering.

Sometimes we don't recognize what we need to do and what we have done. I feel it is extremely important to spread on the record--I have tried to do this the last few days--that the work done by the chairman of the committee, Senator Dodd, the ranking member, Senator Shelby, is exemplary work, bipartisan work. Recognizing the slim majority we Democrats have in the Senate, 51 to 49, anything we do is going to be close, people are going to have to give up some of their ideas as to a perfect world and recognize that sometimes we have to compromise. That is what legislation is all about.

I admire and appreciate the work that was done by the entire Senate yesterday.

Mr. President, I send a cloture motion to the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote occur 1 hour after use of leader time on Tuesday, June 24, the mandatory quorum be waived, and that occur no later than 11 a.m. on that day.

Mr. President, I am sorry. I have to revise my request. I thought we were reconvening at 9:30 a.m. We are not coming in until 10. I will restate the request.

I ask unanimous consent that the vote occur 1 hour after the use of any leader time on Tuesday, June 24, with the mandatory quorum being waived.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we are very close to being able to accept this. I think the consent agreement is appropriate. I think the times laid out are what we need. But I have a Senator who still has one more conversation with one of the nominees. He has been diligent. He has met with almost every one of them. He has one more. That person is in Europe now, and he has agreed to do that by telephone. So, in the next couple days, he will do that.

I have every belief that very early next week we should be able to complete these nominations. A number of these people have been very patient. They have been hanging on, basically living off their savings or their wife's work, whatever the case might be, but they have not been working because, as the Republican leader said, it has been nonfunctional, they have been out of work.

I think we can get this done very quickly. It is very important. It is important for Democrats and Republicans. We need a body there that questions can be submitted to, especially in the midst of this Presidential election and all the other elections going on around the country.

Based on what I have said, Mr. President, I object.

Mr. President, I wish to respond to a couple of issues.

First, on the Federal Election Commission, I wish to underscore that we would have a functioning Federal Election Commission today if the Republicans had accepted our offer before Memorial Day. What was that offer? There was one that was held over, but we agreed to confirm the four FEC nominations before Memorial Day. The Republicans objected because they weren't ready with their new nominee. We offered assurance that the new nominee would be taken care of very quickly, and we have followed through on that. They rejected our offer. They wanted to wait until the new nominee came. We waited. Nevertheless, when the new nominee came, we waived a hearing on a markup. And the reason we did that is that it was what we said we would do, even though they turned down a functioning Federal Election Commission--the Republicans. We said: OK, if that is what you want, a full FEC rather than those five, that is fine. We will go along with that. Now we have a Senator, Mr. President--which I think is very appropriate--wanting to talk to those nominees, and he has done that. There is one to go. That person is in Europe, and he will do that just as quickly as he can.

Again, I underscore the fact that we would have a fully functioning Federal Election Commission today if the Republicans had accepted our offer before Memorial Day. But we are where we are. We can do a lot of finger-pointing, but we are where we are.

We believe in the Federal Election Commission. I wish it were more powerful than it is. I wish it could do more than it does. But certainly we should do everything we can to give them the tools they need to function, and one of the things they need to function is members for the Federal Election Commission. Right now, there aren't any.

As I said, we will work very hard. I have talked to the Senator this morning to make sure that is the only problem he had, and he has said that is the only problem he has. With the time difference, it has been somewhat difficult to set up the phone call within the last 24 hours, but that will be done.

So, Mr. President, the Federal Election Commission will be taken care of within a matter of days, but the fact that it is not functioning now is not our fault.

Let me just say a couple of things about the comments regarding Senator Obama by my friend, the Republican leader.

It seems there is a lot of effort being made to divert the focus from the issues at hand. The issue at hand is that we offered on this floor a bill that would do something about gas prices. We have focused on the subsidies to big oil. And the subsidies are huge, costing the American people billions of dollars. We have focused on the fact that there is a bipartisan move in this body to do something about OPEC. That focus was brought by Senator Kohl of Wisconsin and Senator Specter of Pennsylvania. They believe very strongly that OPEC should be subject to the antitrust laws of this country. That is part of our legislation. We also said there should be a windfall profits tax, and we believe there should be something done with the speculation that is taking place. So we offered legislation to that effect, and the Republicans turned down even being able to debate that legislation.

In addition, we have now pending an issue that is extremely important. I think it is in the top one, two, or three issues facing America today; that is, renewable energy. Renewable energy. We have offered a reasonable piece of legislation to give a 6-year tax credit to solar--and there are other issues in that legislation--that will radically change how we gather our energy. We are told that there are hundreds of thousands--not thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands--of jobs waiting to be funded. If this bill passed, that would take place forthwith. Would all 100,000 go to work today? No. But thousands of them would go to work within a matter of a month or two, and it would keep building.

We have before this body, as part of the record, about 400 companies that have signed on to our legislation. Virtually all the Fortune 500 companies--Fortune 400, whatever it is--have signed on to this and say this is the way to go.

What is the holdup of our legislation? It is the Republicans. What is the holdup, Mr. President? They have become addicted to red ink. It is as if they are addicted to one of the illegal drugs, but this is red ink. They are addicted to it.

When President Bush took office, the price of gasoline was $1.46 a gallon. Now, in Las Vegas, it is $4.47 a gallon. The average around the country is approaching $4.10 a gallon.

The problem with our legislation, according to the Republicans, is that we want to pay for it. Oh, gee whiz. You mean we don't want to borrow more money to do something? No, we want to pay for it.

When President Bush took office, not only was the price of gasoline at $1.46 a gallon, but there was a surplus over the next 10 years of about $7 trillion. We are now approaching $10 trillion in debt this country owes.

The so-called pay-fors for renewables on these tax extenders are--for example, we all know the abuses, what these companies have done offshore. There is one little island over there where there are 50,000 companies that are cheating the Federal Government, in my opinion. What we have done is said, OK, the hedge fund operators should not be able to use that as a way to hide their money and not pay taxes. Listen to this: The hedge fund operators agree. They say it is unfair: We agree with what the Democrats are trying to do, to pay for these renewables.

We have tried and will continue to try to focus attention on the fact that we have long-term needs and short-term needs because energy is a problem.

Let's talk about offshore. I was fortunate last night--I got home before 9 o'clock. As I was eating my little bowl of soup before going to bed, there was a wonderful program on television about offshore drilling. They had a map. On that map they showed all the places people and companies can drill right now, some 58 million acres. That is a lot of acres, 58 million acres. But they are not drilling there. They have made a decision not to drill. Not because there is no oil there, they have made a business judgment not to drill.

I would say this about the offshore: Our great country is so fortunate to

have all the natural resources that we do have, but one of the natural resources we do not have is oil. Counting ANWR and all the offshore potential, we have about 3 percent of the oil reserves in the world; 97 percent of the oil is someplace else. We cannot produce our way out of our problems. Can we do a better job of producing? Yes, I believe we can. We can get more out of that percentage.

Let's talk about offshore a little more. The President of the United States came out 2 days ago saying: I want Congress to do something about offshore drilling. Listen to that. With the sign of a pen he can do something about it himself. President Clinton, with an Executive order, took certain areas offshore so that we couldn't drill there. President Clinton did that. President Bush has the ability himself to change that with a signature. But he didn't do that, did he? No, because he worried about Jeb Bush, his brother, who is totally against offshore drilling. Why wouldn't he do this himself? Why would he pass the buck to us?

I realize Congress controls the ability to take care of a lot of the offshore stuff, as we did last year, allowing drilling on the gulf coast, offshore. We expanded that because we thought it was the right thing to do. President Bush and Republicans need not lecture us on energy. They are the ones who got us into the problem we have now.

I close by saying that John McCain is a person who is an expert on offshore drilling. Why? Because he has taken both positions. He said, until 2 days ago, we should not be able to drill offshore, and he switched his position--the ultimate flip-flop. The next thing I am waiting for him to do is--right now, the election in Alaska is tied between McCain and Obama. One of the big reasons is John McCain is opposed to drilling in ANWR. I guess the people of Alaska expect Democrats to be opposed to it, but they don't expect Republicans to be opposed to it, and McCain has been for a long time. Is he going to do one of his flip-flops on ANWR? Don't be surprised.

John McCain doesn't have the temperament to be President. He is wrong on the war, and he is wrong on the economy.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 705, H. Con. Res. 307.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements related to this measure be printed in the Record.