Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise to introduce S. 2248, a bill that would clarify the States' sole authority to regulate the process of hydraulic fracturing at the State level as opposed to the Federal level.

I am pleased to be joined by Senators Murkowski, Vitter, Sessions, Cornyn, Risch, Hoeven, and Lee as cosponsors.

The reason for this bill is the State jurisdiction of a process called hydraulic fracturing, which has taken place since 1949. In 1949, the first hydraulic fracturing well took place in Duncan, OK. It is interesting that there has not been one documented case, in over a million wells using this process--in 60 years--of groundwater contamination.

As a matter of fact, numerous studies, including reports by the Groundwater Protection Council, the EPA, and recently the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, have found no evidence of hydraulic fracturing posing a risk to water wells or groundwater. A lot of people believe--and I am among them--that the reason to take it over at the Federal level is to do away with hydraulic fracturing. It is interesting that, recently, with some of the shale deposits and discoveries that have been made in the United States, we have been able to get in there, using this process, and come up with huge reserves and start producing these reserves.

In every case, without exception--in fact, I will go so far as to say you cannot get one cubic foot of natural gas out of a type formation without using hydraulic fracturing. The process is and will continue to be a safe process. Despite the evidence, in President Obama's recent campaign rhetoric, this administration continues to wage an all-out war on domestic oil and gas development. During the State of the Union Message--it was interesting because, apparently, now because of the high price of gas at the pump, the President is feeling political pressure, so he is coming out and saying: No, I am not against all fossil fuels, even though he has been for 4 years. And he started talking about clean, plentiful, cheap natural gas. I agreed with that; that is what it is. However, at the same time, if he could have that rhetoric and be able to make the case that the Federal Government needs to take over the process of hydraulic fracturing to be under his control and he can stop that process, he can cut off almost all production altogether.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service--and this is one that came out this month--since 2007, ``about 96 percent of the [oil production] increase took place on nonfederal lands.''

A recent study also found that 93 percent of shale oil and gas wells are on private and State lands. The Department of Interior is in the process of issuing rules which will further discourage production on Federal lands and federally regulate disclosure of fracking fluids, well integrity, and waste water. According to Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, these are rules which they hope will serve as a model for future regulation of State lands.

The Obama EPA alone is looking to regulate hydraulic fracturing through its offices of Water, Air, and Toxics.

What does this legislation do? It is simple. It makes clear that the States have the sole authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing on any land within their borders. This would include Federal lands within the borders of a State.

It also requires hydraulic fracturing on Federal lands to comply with the State laws of which the Federal lands are located.

Activities related to hydraulic fracturing are already regulated at the Federal level under a variety of environmental statutes, including portions of the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.

States better understand their unique geologies and interests. I happen to be from Oklahoma, which is an oil State, and it varies from State to State. Louisiana deposits are found at a different level than ours in Oklahoma. Recently, people think of all these deposits being located in the West. However, the Marcellus discoveries that have been made are actually in New York State and Pennsylvania, so their local regulations are much more applicable than it would be if you did it at the Federal level.

I invite cosponsors. Here we are in the United States with more recoverable reserves in oil, gas, and coal than any other country in the world. We can be completely self-sufficient from the Mid Eastern oil if we get politics out of the way and use our own resources. We are the only country in the world that doesn't develop its own resources. This is the answer to the problem--the answer to the price of gas at the pump. It is one more option. We need to get out of the way of this process called hydraulic fracturing.

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

Mr. President, I rise to introduce S. 2248, a bill that would clarify the States' sole authority to regulate the process of hydraulic fracturing at the State level as opposed to the Federal level.

I am pleased to be joined by Senators Murkowski, Vitter, Sessions, Cornyn, Risch, Hoeven, and Lee as cosponsors.

The reason for this bill is the State jurisdiction of a process called hydraulic fracturing, which has taken place since 1949. In 1949, the first hydraulic fracturing well took place in Duncan, OK. It is interesting that there has not been one documented case, in over a million wells using this process--in 60 years--of groundwater contamination.

As a matter of fact, numerous studies, including reports by the Groundwater Protection Council, the EPA, and recently the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, have found no evidence of hydraulic fracturing posing a risk to water wells or groundwater. A lot of people believe--and I am among them--that the reason to take it over at the Federal level is to do away with hydraulic fracturing. It is interesting that, recently, with some of the shale deposits and discoveries that have been made in the United States, we have been able to get in there, using this process, and come up with huge reserves and start producing these reserves.

In every case, without exception--in fact, I will go so far as to say you cannot get one cubic foot of natural gas out of a type formation without using hydraulic fracturing. The process is and will continue to be a safe process. Despite the evidence, in President Obama's recent campaign rhetoric, this administration continues to wage an all-out war on domestic oil and gas development. During the State of the Union Message--it was interesting because, apparently, now because of the high price of gas at the pump, the President is feeling political pressure, so he is coming out and saying: No, I am not against all fossil fuels, even though he has been for 4 years. And he started talking about clean, plentiful, cheap natural gas. I agreed with that; that is what it is. However, at the same time, if he could have that rhetoric and be able to make the case that the Federal Government needs to take over the process of hydraulic fracturing to be under his control and he can stop that process, he can cut off almost all production altogether.

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service--and this is one that came out this month--since 2007, ``about 96 percent of the [oil production] increase took place on nonfederal lands.''

A recent study also found that 93 percent of shale oil and gas wells are on private and State lands. The Department of Interior is in the process of issuing rules which will further discourage production on Federal lands and federally regulate disclosure of fracking fluids, well integrity, and waste water. According to Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, these are rules which they hope will serve as a model for future regulation of State lands.

The Obama EPA alone is looking to regulate hydraulic fracturing through its offices of Water, Air, and Toxics.

What does this legislation do? It is simple. It makes clear that the States have the sole authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing on any land within their borders. This would include Federal lands within the borders of a State.

It also requires hydraulic fracturing on Federal lands to comply with the State laws of which the Federal lands are located.

Activities related to hydraulic fracturing are already regulated at the Federal level under a variety of environmental statutes, including portions of the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.

States better understand their unique geologies and interests. I happen to be from Oklahoma, which is an oil State, and it varies from State to State. Louisiana deposits are found at a different level than ours in Oklahoma. Recently, people think of all these deposits being located in the West. However, the Marcellus discoveries that have been made are actually in New York State and Pennsylvania, so their local regulations are much more applicable than it would be if you did it at the Federal level.

I invite cosponsors. Here we are in the United States with more recoverable reserves in oil, gas, and coal than any other country in the world. We can be completely self-sufficient from the Mid Eastern oil if we get politics out of the way and use our own resources. We are the only country in the world that doesn't develop its own resources. This is the answer to the problem--the answer to the price of gas at the pump. It is one more option. We need to get out of the way of this process called hydraulic fracturing.

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

Does the Senator wish to continue?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from New Mexico, I be recognized for up to 25 minutes.

Mr. President, we are going to have a vote this afternoon. It is going to be a procedural vote. Some will be voting different ways. There is a substance behind the issue at large.

Last week, President Obama visited Cushing, OK. It may have been the first time he has ever been to Oklahoma. I do not know. He claimed that under his watch, he said, ``America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last 8 years.'' It seems that in the midst of $4- to $5-a-gallon gasoline, he is trying to convince the American people he is not one to blame. Clearly, he is the one to blame.

That is why I think it is important to set the record straight. After all, it was Obama's Energy Secretary Steven Chu--we cannot forget this--who said: ``Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'' That was his Energy Secretary who was speaking on behalf of President Obama.

So the motive is to raise the price of gas. Right now, we are almost over halfway there. We all remember the President's statement during the 2008 campaign when he said: ``Under my plan, electric rates will necessarily skyrocket.'' His policy agenda has been in lockstep with this goal.

President Obama has had a 4-year war on fossil fuels, and now we are paying for that at the pump. As to the oil and gas taxes, nowhere has the President been more resolute in stopping oil and gas development than in his tax proposals, every budget since he was sworn in. Now we are talking about four budgets this President has presided over. Keep in mind, when a budget is designed by a President, whether he is a Democrat or Republican, it is the President, not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the House, not the Senate, it is the President who is responsible for that budget.

In every budget the President has called for the elimination of all tax provisions made available to the oil and gas industry. This year these tax increases totaled about $40 billion over 10 years. So while the President was going around the country last week trying to convince everyone he is actually pro oil and gas, he laid the groundwork for Senator Menendez to push a bill through the Senate to raise taxes on the industry.

Senator Menendez's bill, S. 2204, proposes to either modify or outright cancel the following tax provisions for major integrated oil and gas firms. First, the section 199 manufacturer's tax deduction; secondly, intangible drilling costs, sometimes referred to as IDC; third, the percentage depletion; and, four, the foreign tax credit for oil and gas firms.

Last time we actually had a vote in the Senate on these provisions was in June of 2010. I remember it very well because that was when the distinguished Senator from Vermont Mr. Sanders offered an amendment that would have raised taxes on oil and gas producers by $35 billion over 10 years by repealing section 199--same thing he is trying to do-- percentage depletion and IDC.

While the Menendez bill is a little different, it applies to the larger companies, those with substantial production levels. It is important to point out that the Sanders amendment--and I led the opposition to the Sanders amendment--was defeated almost 2 to 1, 35 to 61.

The President insists these tax and accounting provisions are actually subsidies, but nothing can be further from the truth. This has not been done yet, to my knowledge--been explained. It is so important people understand what these provisions are.

Section 199 is the manufacturer's tax deduction. Section 199 was added to the Tax Code as a part of President Bush's 2004 tax law. It was designed to support domestic manufacturing, and it did this by providing a 9-percent tax deduction for manufacturers, effectively lowering their tax rates from 35 to 32 percent.

The provision was phased in between 2005 and 2010. But, in 2008, something strange happened. The oil and gas industry was singled out so it could only claim a portion of that deduction. In other words, all other manufacturers of all other goods in America could claim that deduction, except oil and gas.

The Menendez proposal would repeal section 199 from major integrated oil companies. In the President's budget, a similar proposal was scored at $11.6 billion. I am going to add all these in a minute and let everyone know why we are paying so much at the pump. What is most interesting to me about the section 199 tax deduction is that it is available to any company in the United States that creates any kind of manufactured goods here at home.

Firms that build and sell refinery equipment, airplanes, washing machines can all claim the deduction. It may be surprising, however, that the deduction is also available for movie producers--not oil and gas producers but movie producers. That is right. The American film industry can claim a deduction for making movies. So President Obama and Senator Menendez are putting their Hollywood friends and movie stars ahead of an industry that makes us less reliant upon oil imports from the Middle East. There is no surprise there.

The next thing is--that was section 199. That is a manufacturer's deduction, applies to all, and benefits all manufacturers to encourage domestic manufacturing.

The second thing is intangible drilling costs, IDC. This is a little bit more complicated. But the intangible drilling costs are expenses oil and gas firms incur when they drill and prepare new wells. These costs often total between 60 and 80 percent of a well's cost. They are generally not recoverable and include things such as site preparation, labor, design.

Intangible drilling costs are firmly grounded in sound accounting principles. Every basic accounting course discusses the principles of cost recovery. It is safe that businesses should be allowed to write off their expenses from the revenue they earn to account for the cost of doing business. That is logical. No one is going to disagree with that.

When purchasing substantial capital equipment, depreciation is often used to recover the costs of an investment over its useful life. But things such as wages are nearly always deducted immediately because once a company has paid an employee for work, it has no lasting value. To retain the value, they have to keep paying the employee. Hence, it is an immediate expense, and it is deducted from the revenue when determining the net profit.

The IDC deduction has been on the books since 1913. This is not anything new. We have lived with it for almost a century.

Most of the costs associated with the preparation of new wells should be classified as an immediate expense--things such as labor. The expenses of IDCs make sense. To claim it is a subsidy is totally dishonest. Every company, regardless of whether it is an oil or gas firm or any other company, is allowed to recover costs associated with their investments in business operations. If this is going to be labeled a subsidy for the entire economy, then we have big problems.

Current law allows most oil and gas firms to write off these expenses as an

alternative to capitalizing their costs into the total value of the asset being developed and then depreciated. But at some point along the way, the law was changed so that major integrated oil firms are required to capitalize 30 percent of their IDCs and amortize them over a 60-month period.

The Menendez bill would eliminate this option and require oil and gas firms to capitalize all of their IDCs. A similar proposal was in the President's budget scored as a $13.9 billion tax increase. We are going to add that up in a minute. Together with the repeal of section 199, an IDC should compromise 10 percent of America's oil and gas production capacity by 2017. This translates into a potential loss of 59,000 jobs, 600,000 barrels of oil a day in domestic production, and the loss of $15 billion in capital expenditures in 2012, and potentially $130 billion over the next 10 years.

Percentage depletion is very similar. It has been with us. Since 1926, small producers and millions of royalty owners have had the option to utilize percentage depletion to both simplify their tax filing and to account for the decline in the value of the minerals produced from their properties. Current law allows small producers to take a 15 percent deduction from the gross income from a given producing property in lieu of a complicated depreciation deduction. This tax provision is particularly important for the production of America's nearly 700,000 low-value, marginal wells, making it essential to Oklahoma.

Even though the small marginal wells only produce about two barrels a day, they account for 28 percent of the total production. We are one of the, if not the, largest marginal States out there. These are truly the little guys, and the President wants to go after them and destroy the incentives that keep the older wells producing by repealing percentage depletion. If he were able to do this, it would increase taxes on the industry by $11.5 billion.

What is most interesting about the Menendez proposal is that it only applies to major integrated oil companies, which are not even allowed to claim percentage depletion, proving that 2204 is nothing more than political theater.

As to the modification of the foreign tax credit for dual capacity taxpayers, the United States is one of the only developed--I think it is the only developed country in the world that has a global corporate tax system. This means the IRS and Uncle Sam reach all over the world to tax profits made by U.S. companies outside of our borders.

When we combine this with our 35-percent corporate tax rate, which is one of the largest and highest on Earth, our corporate tax policies are the worst in the world.

The global corporate tax system works like this: When a U.S. firm is operating overseas, they pay taxes on those profits in the country in which they are operating. For example, a U.S. company makes a product in South Korea, sells it to the South Koreans, and they make a $1 million profit. Because their corporate rate is 22 percent, as opposed to ours at 35 percent, the firm pays $220,000 in taxes. That makes sense.

If a U.S. firm has made the same product and profit in the United States, it would be subjected to a 35-percent tax, which would be $350,000 in corporate taxes. This also makes sense except it is too high. However, because of our global corporate tax system, if a firm does this same thing in Korea, they have to pay the differential between 22 percent and 35 percent when they bring the money back into the United States.

Wait, we want to bring the money back. We want to stimulate our economy. Why would they have a disincentive to bring that money to invest in America? In this example, a U.S. firm would have to pay an additional $130,000. They would be doing a great thing for foreign countries but certainly not for us. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Senator Menendez's bill makes this awful policy even worse by limiting the ability of major integrated oil firms to account for the taxes they pay in other countries when they calculate what they owe the United States.

The President made a similar proposal in his budget this year, and if enacted it would raise taxes by about $10 billion over 10 years. You would pay for more of this at the pump. Instead of making the corporate tax system even less competitive than it is today, we should aim to completely reform it so we move to a territorial system that doesn't reach outside our borders to collect more taxes.

Those are the major provisions of the Menendez-Obama bill. If they were enacted to the extent proposed by President Obama's budget, they would be a tax hike of $47.1 billion.

Again, that relates to the cost of gas at the pump. The President claims he is doing this in the name of forcing the oil and gas industry to pay its fair share. He claims it would not harm domestic oil production. But this claim rejects the well-known process companies follow when making investment decisions. Successful oil and gas companies, like those in all industries, are faced with seemingly endless opportunities. To sort through the opportunities they have to have a way to rationally decide which projects are in the best interest of their investors and which are not. Most companies do this by determining which investments will give the highest rate of return given the risk.

Taxes play an incredibly important role in this matter. If taxes increase, then cash flow from the project decreases. Therefore, taxes in the United States increase; the competitiveness of domestic projects decreases significantly relative to the opportunities available abroad.

When the rubber meets the road, this means the U.S. oil and gas firms--especially the big ones--targeted by the Menendez-Obama bill will be more likely to select international projects than U.S.-based projects, and this is bad for our economy.

As to the other ways Obama is killing oil and gas, the taxes aren't the only thing the President is doing. They are significant. I mentioned four of them that are significant. But look at the Keystone Pipeline.

I just got back from Oklahoma, a visit there. It is another example of why he was in Cushing, OK, the central part of Oklahoma. For those who are not familiar with it, that is sort of the intersection of all of the pipelines. He said he was going to expedite the permitting of the southern leg of Keystone. That would be the leg going from Cushing, OK, down to the Houston area. What he didn't say is that this is the part he doesn't have any control over.

In other words, he has no control over the southern half. The reason he does over the northern half is because that crosses a country boundary from Canada to the United States. But he doesn't have a say in this. He could not stop it if he wanted to. Obviously, he would want to because he has demonstrated that. Moreover, his action to block the northern leg is preventing the immediate creation of over 20,000 jobs and up to 465,000 jobs by 2035. I don't think anybody argues with that analysis.

The President's effort to stop hydraulic fracturing is another example. Much of today's renaissance in oil and gas production is the result of the advancements in this technology. He has done everything he can to paint a nasty and suspicious picture of it. He has 10 Federal agencies, including the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Bureau of Land Management looking at ways to regulate hydraulic fracturing at the Federal level. In addition, he has also kept millions of Federal lands off-limits to oil and gas.

As far as the hydraulic fracturing, I know a little about that; we had the first hydraulic fracturing that took place in Duncan, OK, in 1949. There has not been one documented case of ground water contamination using hydraulic fracturing. The only reason he is opposed to it is that this is part of his war on fossil fuels. If he can stop hydraulic fracturing, he will stop all of these types of production, and everybody knows that. We have already done that.

So we have the tax problems, the pipeline, and hydraulic fracturing. In addition to that, his attempt has been to stop production on Federal lands and make Federal lands off-limits to oil and gas exploration, and even through some lease-sales conducted during the Bush administration, citing the need for more environmental review.

Today--and this is significant--83 percent of Federal onshore lands are

inaccessible or restricted to drilling. No drilling is allowed on the entire east and west coasts. No drilling is allowed in ANWR, in Alaska, and very limited drilling is in the gulf.

Oil and gas production is skyrocketing in States such as North Dakota and Texas simply because the President has very little control over the drilling there. That is not Federal land. This is in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. The Congressional Research Service concurs, stating in a recent report that about 96 percent of the increase in oil and gas production since 2007 took place on nonfederal lands. In other words, it has happened in spite of the President's efforts. The President imposes all of these punitive taxes because he doesn't have control over private lands. He tries to say: In my administration we expanded production. That has happened in spite of his policies.

At end of the day, all of President Obama's oil and gas policies make it harder for U.S. firms to justify projects at home. This is to the detriment of our economy. Just look at the increase in taxes, the killing of the pipelines, the stopping of hydraulic fracturing, making drilling off-limits. To let you know what States are missing out on, a Friday New York Times front-page article ran about oil and gas development going on in west Texas describes how this helped the local economy, saying new-found wealth is spreading beyond the fields in nearby towns.

Petroleum companies are buying so many pickup trucks that dealers are leasing parking lots the size of city blocks to stock their inventory. Housing is in such short supply the drillers are importing contractors from Houston. The hotels are leased out before they are even built. Two new office buildings are going up in Midland, a city of just over 110,000 people--the first in 30 years--while the total value of downtown real estate has jumped 50 percent since 2008, with virtually no unemployment.

Restaurants cannot be found. They cannot find people to work because they are fully employed. One of the individuals from Oklahoma, a great producer, went up to North Dakota. He is up there right now. I talked to him yesterday and he said: The biggest problem we have is that we cannot hire anyone. It is full employment. Things are great.

That is what the rest of the country is missing out on. When we make the United States less competitive for U.S. oil and gas firms, as the President's tax policies propose, this sort of red-hot growth goes to places such as Azerbaijan and Nigeria instead of Midland, TX, and Oklahoma City. Rather than help our economy, the President's tax policies make us more reliant on foreign oil imports from unstable regions of the world.

I don't know about you, but I would rather see pickup truck dealerships running out of vehicles to sell in Cushing, OK, than in Caracas, Venezuela.

The President will not admit this, but we have seen what punitive tax hikes do to the oil and gas industry. They hurt our economy. President Carter, way back in the early eighties, confirmed this with the windfall profits tax. He was going to punish the bad oil companies. As a result of that, it decreased domestic production by 3 to 6 percent, which increased American dependence on foreign oil sources by 8 to 16 percent. Almost all of it was from the Middle East. It doubled our dependence by putting taxes on the oil industry here. A side effect was also declining, not increasing, tax collections.

Since we know what happens when we do this sort of thing, we don't need to try the experiment again. Regardless, the President and most on the left insist that taxpayers are subsidizing oil and gas firms. But, apparently, they have not been reading the facts.

The Tax Foundation recently estimated that between 1981 and 2008, oil and gas companies sent more money to Washington and State capitols than they earned in profits for shareholders.

The administration's own Energy Information Administration reported that the industry paid about $35.7 billion in corporate taxes in 2009.

The oil and gas industry sends $86 million per day to Federal and State governments, and their effective income tax rate is over 41 percent, which may be the highest of any industry in America. But the President and congressional Democrats want them to pay more.

In addition to these tax increases, Secretary Salazar recently told Congress his department is planning to raise the onshore royalty rate by 50 percent. These are the royalty rates to ensure taxpayers get a fair return on the development of oil and gas leases on public lands. If what we are trying to do is raise more revenue, we should get it by growing the economy.

We have used the figure over and over that with each 1 percent increase in economic activity that translates into about $50 billion in new revenue. We can do that by unlocking more domestic supply for development, and this will lower prices at the same time. We have plenty of it. The CRS report recently stated we have the largest combined oil, natural gas, and coal recoverable reserves on Earth--more than any other country, more than Saudi Arabia, more than any other country. This means we have a 50-year supply of oil in present consumption in the United States, for 50 years, just exporting our own development or 90 years' supply of natural gas.

At the end of the day, this bill, and the rest of the President's proposals, will only make U.S. oil firms less competitive compared to their international peers. It will raise the cost of energy by restricting global prices. It will force us to become more reliant on others, which will make us more vulnerable from a defense and economic security perspective. The only way to resolve this problem and to do something about reducing the price at the pump is to start developing our own resources.

A minute ago I talked about what is happening in Midland, TX, and North Dakota, and what is happening in some areas in Oklahoma. I can remember when I was a little kid I worked on cable-and-tool rigs. That was very difficult at the time.

A man by the name of A.W. Swift had 18 cable-and-tool rigs. At that time, instead of rotaries, they would pound down. Sometimes I would work two shifts. One night I was working the second shift, and the well blew up. The owner had one son named Burt. Burt was killed and I wasn't. When I stop to think about the prosperity in those days of the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma, I think about the nearby town of Pawhuska, where people had to wait in line to pay their lunch bill. It was full employment and not an empty storefront. But up until we started producing again in Oklahoma, it was very much almost a ghost town.

Now things are coming back, and we can take advantage of that. In spite of the tax policies of President Obama, we are coming back, and we can do this throughout the United States. The most important thing we can do is make sure the Menendez-Obama bill to increase taxes on the oil and gas companies in the United States is defeated. We hope we have the opportunity to do that.

With that I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time on each side be equally divided during the quorum calls.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, first of all, I will make this very brief. I appreciate the comments of the majority leader. It was not necessary, but it is very meaningful to me personally.

Also, about Senator Boxer, she and I are at opposite extremes on many issues. I have always said that conservatives should be big spenders in two areas: national defense and infrastructure. We have to look at this in the future so that we don't have to go through it again. I thank all of those on her side and on my side who helped to move this forward.

I thank Ruth VanMark, who has been with me for 22 years. She is now getting off of probation.

Again, I thank all of you for your cooperation.

Mr. President, I didn't want to take a lot of time before the vote because I knew we were anxious to get it done, and certainly we have been through this so many times--passing a transportation bill and a reauthorization bill. I was asked by one of my Republican Members: We have done so many of these extensions, what would be the difference between an extension and a short 2-year bill? I commented: You can't get any of the improvements. You can't do any of the planning.

I would also like to say this to my Republican friends: I regret some of them voted against it, not being fully aware of some of the great reforms we have in the bill. I appreciate the fact that Senator Boxer was agreeing to some aspects that she didn't agree with

philosophically, such as some of the streamlining and enhancements. We have now resolved the enhancement problem so decisions can be made by the States. So I think that was good.

I wanted to at this point mention our staff, even though I already mentioned Ruth VanMark earlier. I was kidding when I said she is off of probation. She has been loyal to me for 22 years and been through several of these bills with me. Let me also mention James O'Keeffe, Murphie Barrett, Kyle Miller, Dimitri Karakitsos, and Alex Renjel. So we have a great team over here, and, of course, they have a great team also on the Democratic side, with Bettina Poirier, David Napoliello, Andrew Dohrmann, Grant Cope, and Tyler Rushforth from Senator Boxer's office.

So, Mr. President, some good reforms have taken place, and we need now to get serious about what we are going to do in the next short while in preparation of a much longer and better and more robust highway reauthorization bill. Of course, first is to get with the House Members, get into conference and see what we can accomplish.

Again, I thank all the staff, all the people working on this bill, Senator Boxer, and, of course, the majority leader, Harry Reid, as well as Mitch McConnell.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 30 seconds.

Mr. President, I have had rankings as the most conservative Member of this body many times, and I have often said there are two areas where I am a big spender: one is national defense, one is infrastructure.

We desperately need this bill. It is interesting to me that so many of my good friends--and they are friends, including the Senator from Tennessee--will vote as they did back in 2008 for $700 billion for a bailout and then something such as this comes up and somehow this is an excuse to kill the bill. You can kill the bill and we can go back and start all over again. I wish and I think the Finance Committee is going to come up with something that is going to allow us to get this done by the time we get into conference.

I urge my conservative friends particularly to go ahead and vote for the highway bill.

I would note--

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

We do not have Senator Thune here, who is doing a great job in the Finance Committee. Unfortunately, his mother died and he is not here. We would be able to sit down and solve this problem and not delay this bill. Right now it is set up so we can have a highway bill.

This could kill it. I hope folks will talk to their people at home. You cannot do it before this vote, but afterwards I might suggest you do that.

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

I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized as in morning business.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act.

A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT.

MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars.

My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place.

The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all.

The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs.

So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules.

Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected.

Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels.

You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said:

If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can.

It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a

cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily

skyrocket.

When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry.

The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas.

But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that.

When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas

would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year.

What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico.

I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country.

So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year.

Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue.

On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline.

I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline.

So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true.

In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world.

Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that.

What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done.

So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday:

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined

a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and

develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear

power is an important part of that blueprint.

Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for.

We see this over and over again.

What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth.

I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it.

The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits.

Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely

failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2.

Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment?

That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants?

The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that.

Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions?

There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back.

I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us.

I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years.

As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted.

That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act.

A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT.

MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars.

My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place.

The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all.

The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs.

So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules.

Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected.

Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels.

You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said:

If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can.

It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a

cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily

skyrocket.

When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry.

The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas.

But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that.

When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas

would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year.

What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico.

I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country.

So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year.

Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue.

On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.''

Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline.

I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline.

So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true.

In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world.

Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that.

What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done.

So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday:

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined

a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and

develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear

power is an important part of that blueprint.

Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for.

We see this over and over again.

What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth.

I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it.

The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits.

Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely

failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2.

Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment?

That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants?

The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that.

Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions?

There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back.

I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us.

I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years.

As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted.

That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

Mr. President, I am not sure, I say to my good friend Senator Boxer, she is going to be too excited about some of the things because what I wish to do is establish what is unique about this bill.

There is a committee in the Senate. It is not like any committee in the House. In the House, they have two separate committees. It is called Environment and Public Works. So it is two almost unrelated committees. Our committee has more jurisdiction than any other committee in the Senate, but it handles things that are totally different.

I will sound a little partisan right now, but I am very concerned about President Obama and what he has done to this country in terms of the deficit. A lot of people do not realize that the budgets actually come from the President--not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the House and the Senate. Those budgets have had deficits of around $4\1/2\ trillion. I have been very upset about that.

I am upset about what the President is doing with the military right now. If we have to go through the sequestration as is planned, we are going to lose about $1 trillion in defense spending over the next 10 years. The third area is in energy. We have the opportunity to be totally energy self-supporting just by developing our own resources, but the problem is a political problem. The fourth area is over regulation.

I say this because my good friend, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, would disagree with me in all those areas because we do not agree. I look at the regulations and the fact that, in my opinion, they are driving our manufacturing base overseas. I see the crown jewel of all regulations is cap and trade. They tried their best to do it. They had the McCain-Lieberman bill in 2003 and again in 2005. We had the Boxer bill--several Boxer bills that Senator Boxer was involved in--certainly Waxman-Markey.

We defeated them all, and now what the President is trying to do is do through regulation what he could not do through legislation. I only say that because I am in agreement with the chairman of the committee, Senator Boxer, on most of what she just said

because of the significance of this. I am going to repeat what I said yesterday, I guess it was, or the day before. When rankings come out, historically since I have been in the House and the Senate--I came to the Senate in 1994--I am always ranked among the most conservative Members.

My good friend Senator Boxer is ranked among the most liberal Members--progressive, liberal. But what I appreciate about her is that she is a sincere liberal.

She understands that. In her feelings, she believes government should be involved in more things than I do. I hasten to say this again, that while I have been historically considered the most conservative Member, I am a big spender in two areas. One area is national defense--I am very concerned about what is happening in national defense--the other area is infrastructure.

Way back when I was in the House and on the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, at that time we worked very hard for a robust bill, for reauthorizing the transportation system. We were successful. That was back in the good-old days, I say to Senator Boxer, when we always had surpluses in the highway trust fund.

The highway trust fund probably goes down as the most popular tax in history because people know, since 1953, it has been a trust fund where people pay their 18 or so cents per gallon, and it goes to maintaining those roads they are driving on. So it is directly related to the gasoline purchased.

Then some things happened. First of all, I can remember when we had surpluses. So everybody who had their own deal wanted to get in on surpluses, and they started expanding the highway trust fund expenditures beyond just maintaining and building roads. That was one of the problems. Then along came a lot of the changes. When they talk about electric cars, whether one is for them or against them, and mandating gas mileage, that reduces the proceeds dramatically. In the beginning, I think they probably should have had the highway trust fund geared to a percentage instead of cents.

Now fast-forward to recent times and we have a deteriorating system. I was proud of the Environment and Public Works Committee I have been talking about. In 2006, prior to the last election, I was chairman because the Republicans were in the majority. At that time, we did the 2005 highway reauthorization bill, and it was $286.4 billion--a very robust bill. Yet we could pretty much document that we didn't do anything new in that bill. We just maintained what we had. It expired in 2009. Since then, we have been operating on extensions.

This is significant. Before I get on to operating on an extension, I will mention what we are talking about, Senator Boxer and I. Our Environment and Public Works Committee has the jurisdiction over the highway title of the bill. Some things are controversial. Not many. I don't know of anything controversial in the highway title. The Commerce Committee with Senator Rockefeller as chairman and Senator Hutchison as ranking member, the Finance Committee with Senators Baucus and Hatch, and the Banking Committee--that is Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby from Alabama--have done their work now.

Ours is the highway title. In my State of Oklahoma, because of the condition of the bridges and highways--the last time I looked, I think Missouri and Oklahoma tied at dead last in the condition of our bridges--we had a young lady--and I have told this story many times; this is most compelling. This young lady--a mother of three small children in Oklahoma City--drove under one of our bridges and a chunk of concrete dropped off and killed them. These are serious matters. So bridges have dropped, just as one did in Minnesota and down in south Texas.

We have had so many times when crumbling infrastructure has given way. I remember when they considered Oklahoma--since we became a State in 1907, we are one of the newer States--people didn't think we had infrastructure problems. They thought that was just confined to California, New York, and the older parts of the country. That is not true anymore because in many of those older parts the infrastructure has been rebuilt while some of the newer States have been ignored. That is why in Oklahoma it is critical.

People say they don't want earmarks. Senator Boxer said: We don't have earmarks.

I would like to discuss that because I am a strong believer as opposed to the people who don't want us to do what we are supposed to be doing when we were sworn to uphold the Constitution, article I, section 9--we should be the ones, the House and Senate, to do the appropriating and the authorization. By saying we are not going to do it and defining earmarks as appropriations and authorization, I can see why Democrats lined up to do away with earmarks in a recent vote because that turns it over to President Obama, and he was very supportive of that.

Some Republicans are going to talk about that again. This is not something that is a problem with this bill. In this bill, we have things that come from the needs of our States. We have a secretary of transportation in Oklahoma who has been before our committee numerous times because that secretary of transportation has been in that job for many years now. Before that, he was director of transportation for, I think, 30 years. There is nobody who is more knowledgeable on that issue.

So we checked--and I do--with the department of transportation in Oklahoma on their prioritizing of projects. We have a system--and I wish all States had this system. We have transportation districts and chairmen of the districts. They can use the same criteria throughout Oklahoma, and they determine what should be fixed and where the money should be spent. So it is not a political decision, a decision where we are doing what most people consider to be earmarks and trying to help our friends. That is not what we do in Oklahoma. This system, frankly, works very well.

So now we go back to the extensions. Here is the problem with extensions. Our 2005 bill expired in 2009. We have now gone through eight extensions. The problem we have with extensions is that we cannot do anything creative. We cannot change, reform the system. We just have to take the money that is available and try to use it as best we can. But we cannot not reform a system that needs to be reformed.

I have said some things that were not all that complimentary about my partner--in this case, Senator Boxer. We have served together for years in trying to overcome these obstacles. On the highway title of the transportation bill that we are going to be voting on, we have done a good job. When I think about the reforms--and I compliment Senator Boxer. She has been in a real tough position with some of the more liberal members of her party and in some of the things to which she has agreed. We sat down and worked out the differences in a lot of these problems.

State flexibility, we have that in this bill, which we have never had before. I have always been a believer that we are the guys who are in the best position to determine the needs of the States.

I have often said I have served on the State level of government; I have been mayor of a major city. I believe the closer you get to the people, the more responsible government is. I believe that to be true. That is what we have done. We have done that in the flexibility that we have given the States in our program.

Senator Boxer mentioned that we cut down the number of programs by two-thirds. We are down to one-third in the number of programs we had before. That is major reform.

NEPA: We have done streamlining, which is something we have tried to do for a long time. Let me mention the one area of reform that I want everybody to listen to because this is significant. We have had a friendly disagreement, Senator Boxer and I, on transportation enhancement. These are things we could argue do not affect transportation directly. I have always believed these things we spend money on that comes from the highway trust fund should go into transportation projects. But they have not. Two percent of the highway funding is required to go to enhancements. That equates to 10 percent of the surface transportation money.

So we can use 10 percent or 2 percent, depending on which one we are applying it to. If we take 2 percent of the total funding, that is a lot of money. Enhancements are things people criticize us for. I think that criticism is just.

How did we handle this situation and get a highway bill in the highway title

portion? We sat down and worked out something right here on the floor of the Senate and said there has to be an answer. In Oklahoma, we don't even want enhancements. How can we handle this? We worked out an agreement that a State, at its own decision level, is able to use this 2 percent of the total highway funding that would go to enhancements in any way they want to do it, and primarily in taking care of some of the unfunded mandates, the requirements there, where the government is saying to people in Oklahoma that this is what they have to do--some endangered species stuff and those things, they can use it this way.

In my State, we cannot have any of the 2 percent going to enhancements. Other States feel differently. This is not one size fits all.

So we have the opportunity that they can do what they want. These are reforms. We never had reforms like those before. I am proud we are able to do it. I compliment the chairman of the committee for being willing to do this, for taking the time to talk to her colleagues and say: All right, the choice is not do we want a perfect bill for Democrats or do I want one for Republicans. I think we have a pretty near perfect bill for Republicans on the highway title. I am very proud of what we have come up with. Nonetheless, it has been heavy lifting. I applaud the chairman of the committee.

I want to go back to this extension. If we were to continue to operate on extensions, the amount of money we would be spending on highways would reduce by about 34 percent, about one-third. If we talk to Gary Ridley in Oklahoma as to what that would do in terms of our program that we already have online, we would have to default on some contracts. We would have to be in a situation where we are not able to do the things that are in our 5-year plan in Oklahoma. We think things out in Oklahoma. We go over the State and make determinations. It is done outside of the political system by people charged with different transportation districts. I can tell you now that it will be--it is a life-threatening issue. If we are dropping down by 34 percent, it will be a serious problem.

I suggest to every Member of the Senate, before they make final decisions on the bill, call their director of highways in their States and talk to them. Talk to your State legislators, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike. This is the one area where they will agree. In Oklahoma, they are in agreement. They want to have a highway bill. They look to constituents and say this is life threatening and we have to do a better job. This is a partnership thing. We are going to have more flexibility for State programs, streamlining, and are not going to be encumbered by mandatory enhancements. I don't know of one member of the Oklahoma House or Senate who doesn't want this.

What is wrong with doing what the people at home want? I used to work as mayor of the second largest city in Oklahoma. My phone rings off the hook about programs that need to be completed in our highway system in Oklahoma. I sometimes look at people who demagog the issue and talk about: Oh, no, we don't want to spend all this. There is one area where conservatives and liberals alike should be spending--two areas-- national defense and infrastructure.

I remember when Congresswoman Bachmann was talking around the country about the spending during the earmark argument. They got back to Minnesota and talked about the needs for transportation. She said, ``I am not talking about transportation.''

That is the point we need to get across. Of course, I throw in national defense, but that is not in this discussion. Transportation infrastructure is something we have to do. In Oklahoma, we are going to do our part, do everything we can to get with the bill. It is not going to change anything except for the fact that it is going to be able to handle that.

Oh, I didn't see--but I am managing the time.

By the way, I want to comment, Mr. President----

Maybe I am not.

We are both doing it. All right.

What I am saying is that shouldn't really be a Democrat-Republican management here because there are a lot of Democrats who agree with me and a lot of Republicans who agree with Senator Boxer. But we do have the junior Senator from Kentucky here who wants to be heard.

No. I just wanted to say that this should be very visible to everyone. How could you and I agree and feel so strongly about infrastructure in America when we have such diverse opinions philosophically? My case rests.

Will the Senator yield for a question.

Even though we haven't ironed out how to handle time, we have a Senator who wanted to speak 20 minutes ago, and if we could, I would love to get back into the dialog.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the junior Senator from Kentucky be recognized for up to 7 minutes. He has been trying to get on for quite some time. I think that is agreeable with everyone.

Mr. President, I see the junior Senator from Connecticut in the Chamber. If he wishes to speak, it is my understanding this is Democratic time now. If he wishes to go before me, that is perfectly all right. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of his remarks I be recognized in morning business because I do want to talk about the transportation bill that is coming up.

Mr. President, we are going to be considering today--and I think the rest of this week, and probably into next week--one of the most significant things we are supposed to be doing here.

I wish to start off by saying--in endorsing and encouraging a highway reauthorization bill--I want people to know this is coming from someone who is a conservative. I think there are a lot of conservative organizations out there that have mistakenly thought of this as being a big spending bill without realizing this has been, since its inception back during the Eisenhower administration, an approach to building roads, highways, infrastructure that is necessary in this country, and to have that as a top priority.

There are some problems that have come up with the highway trust fund, and I want to share that with my colleagues but, first of all, make sure everyone knows, who might be watching--and particularly some of the organizations that are conservative organizations--that these words are coming from me. I have probably been recognized as the most conservative Member of this body as much as anybody else has, maybe more. Yet, I have always said--even though I am a leading conservative--there are two areas where I am a big spender. One is in national defense and one is in our infrastructure.

For that reason, I say to the Presiding Officer, when I was first elected back in 1994, I selected two committees to be on. One was the Armed Services Committee, where I could try to keep a strong national defense. The other was the Environment and Public Works Committee. I am now the second ranking member on the Armed Services Committee and the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Back when the Republicans were a majority, I was actually the chairman of that committee. That is when we did our last bill.

Our last highway reauthorization bill was in 2005. It was one that went through the process and was very successful. Conservatives and liberals alike joined and said this is a major function of America. This is what we are supposed to be doing here.

A strong defense and our infrastructure system are not going to be done by anybody else. It is going to have to be done by us. If we want to make sure we maintain a strong national defense, which this President has not been doing with the cuts he has made--actually, we could have as much as $1 trillion in cuts in our defense budget over the next 10 years, all due, quite frankly, to one person. That is President Obama. So he does not care that much about defending America in putting the resources there. Here is a President who, in his own budget, has proposed a deficit each year, for four budgets, of over $1 trillion each year.

You would think, with these huge deficits, we would not be having a problem in defense spending, as well as in our roads and highways, in coming up with a bill that would be a transportation reauthorization bill. The transportation reauthorization bill for 2005--where I was the sponsor of it because I was chairman of the committee--was a $286.4 billion bill. It was one that even at that time barely maintained what was out there already. Certainly I do not have to tell the occupier of the chair from West Virginia that I have been through his State and there is a lot of room for improvements in the road system, and I know he is a strong supporter of this. This is certainly true

in my State of Oklahoma. It happens that my State of Oklahoma is tied, the last time I checked, with Missouri as being dead last in the quality of our bridges.

We have actually had deaths in Oklahoma. We had a lady not too long ago in Oklahoma City, the mother of three small children, who was driving and a chunk of concrete came off a bridge and killed her. This is serious stuff. This is what we are supposed to be doing here.

So we had this bill back in 2005. Since that time, we have been operating on extensions. We have done eight extensions. It is kind of complicated, but I want to explain how this works. The proceeds of the highway trust fund come from the gas tax. About 18 cents, when you buy gas at the pump, goes to maintenance of the highways and bridges in that program.

The problem has been that in recent years--it started about 10 years ago--we had surpluses in the highway trust fund, and with other people who wanted to get their deal in on the highway trust fund, we have things that have nothing to do with transportation that are there. That is one of the problems we have.

But the other problem we have is that through the efforts to encourage people to use electric cars and get better mileage and all that, we do not have the proceeds we had in years past. I think probably if we had been smart initially, we would have had the highway trust funded by a percentage as opposed to a ``centage.'' If it is 18 cents, it does not make any difference, it is going to be 18 cents. But if the price of fuel goes up, if it had been a percentage, then we would not be faced with the situation we have today. So that is what we have.

I applaud, I thank Senator Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate, for wanting to give it the attention, the priority in getting it on the floor so we can talk about it. In a minute, I will also be very complimentary of Senator Boxer from California.

This is something that is kind of interesting that is unique in transportation only. Here I am ranked always as one of the top three most conservative Members. Senator Boxer from California is a very proud liberal. One thing: I do not mind people being liberals if they are proud liberals and admit it. Well, she does. She is a liberal. She feels the government should have greater control of some of the things we do. Consequently, she is doing essentially the same thing as the current chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee as I would be doing if I had still been chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee; that is, coming up with a highway bill.

Well, we are looking at it right now. I have to share with my colleagues on the right--the Republicans, the conservatives--what we are looking at. A lot of people do not realize the bill that is coming up is a bill of compromise. We actually passed this out of the committee unanimously. All the Republicans and all the Democrats voted for it. It is a bill where, I have to say, Senator Boxer worked very closely with us. We have reforms in here.

Going back to my comment about extensions, if we do not pass a bill, we have to operate on extending the current legislation, the current bill, the remnants, I might say, of the 2005 transportation reauthorization bill.

Now, if we do that, we do not get any reforms. So one of the things we did in this bill that gained the support of the Republicans on the committee, and most of the Republicans here, was the reforms we had.

For example, in this bill we gave--the bill that is up for consideration now--more flexibility to the States. I have long believed--and I served many years ago in the State legislature--the closer you get to home the more responsible government is. And I can tell you right now, giving the flexibility to the States to make these determinations--who are we to say that we, in our infinite wisdom and knowledge in Washington DC, are smarter than they are at the State level? We are not. Certainly, we do not know the needs like the States know the needs.

So we have the situation in this legislation where we are giving more flexibility to the States. We are reducing the number of programs. This is a big thing. I cannot tell you exactly how many programs there are because I do not have that in my notes. But I do know we have reduced the number by eliminating and consolidating programs that might be duplicative of each other by two-thirds. In other words, we only have one-third of the programs we had before. That is in this bill. That is a major improvement.

Now, looking, also, at the streamlining of project delivery, we have something called NEPA. NEPA looks after the environmental concerns when we are building roads and bridges. This bill expands the number of categorical exclusions available under NEPA and allows for steps within the lengthy NEPA process to be combined so we can get things done.

You have heard the stories--I am sure you have--of problems with everything from endangered species to other environmental concerns that cause these things to drag on and on and on, and the expense is so much greater. Well, we are eliminating a lot of those categorical exclusions. We are increasing the number so that we will be able to get that much more done.

Another thing in this law--this is very complicated--is called enhancements. I opposed it back years ago when they started putting enhancements on the highway bill. I have always said it is a moral issue. When people pay their 18.4 cents a gallon, and it goes into the highway trust fund, they are led to believe that money is going to be going to transportation, for improving the roads and the bridges. That is not quite true because other deals have kind of moved in so that they are involved with it. So they passed this thing called enhancements where 2 percent of the total highway funding would have to go to what they called transportation enhancements.

A lot of people say 10 percent. It is 10 percent of the States' surface transportation funding or 2 percent of the total highway funding. I would like to do away with the enhancement program altogether. Unfortunately, that means we could not get a highway bill.

Working with Senator Boxer and with the Democrats in the committee, we came up with the perfect solution. We do not have to eliminate enhancements because the solution under this bill will allow the States to make the determination as to how they are going to spend that 2 percent of their total highway funding. Instead of using it for museums and other things that have nothing to do with transportation, we are, under the provisions of this bill that we are talking about, able to use that money for any other requirements for unfunded mandates--and there are plenty of them there, such as endangered species mitigation, storm water runoff, wetlands mitigation. They are a part of every project. So we can take that 2 percent, and instead of applying it to enhancements, we can offset the requirements that are there.

So for all practical purposes, like in my State of Oklahoma, we are not going to have any of that 2 percent for enhancements. It is not there. We have solved the problem. But we put that in the hands of States. So there will be amendments that would want to do away with enhancements. I would say we do not have to do that now because we have reformed that process.

It is a little bit complicated because we are merely saying that we have a block of money which constitutes 2 percent of the total highway funding, and instead of that going to things that we hear about that have nothing to do with transportation, we do not have to do that anymore. That will be up to the States. However, some States may feel differently. If they do, that is not their problem; that is not my problem.

So that is the type of thing we are doing in this bill that has not been there before. If we do not do it, we would be cutting highway spending down to the highway trust fund receipts. That calculates into a 34-percent cut to the States' road and bridge funding. Right now--to put this into perspective so that people will, hopefully, understand and listen--we need, and we are in the process of getting, an additional $7.2 billion in order to be able to fund this bill as we passed it--$7.2 billion.

Stop and think about that. If we go back to the $800 billion stimulus bill that President Obama had--I know Senator Boxer agreed with me-- more of that should have gone to highway funding. Only 3 percent of it--3 percent--went to highway funding. So we

are talking about $800 billion which was spent. We are trying to come up with $7.2 billion.

I have to say this and bring it up. We all remember the $700 billion bailout. A lot of Republicans ended up voting for that, and right now we are down to--the cost is probably going to be leveling out at $130 billion. That is the bailout that was passed.

Well, $130 billion, when all we are looking for now is $7.2 billion, we cannot say it is not there. As I said when I opened, this President, in his budget, has had over $1 trillion in deficit each year for 4 years. Again, that is not the Democrats, not the Republicans, it is not the House, it is not the Senate. That is President Obama. That is his budget. That is the way it works.

I have often said when we look at the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars--and yet one of the prime functions we have is roads and highways, and we are just $7.2 billion short. I think they have come up with it. I applaud the Finance Committee which has been working on this and recognized it in terms of priority that we ought to be able to do it.

They have come up with a package now that--again, this is not in my end of it; this is the Finance Committee. A lot of people think the highway bill is all in the Environment and Public Works Committee. It is not. We have the Commerce Committee, the Budget Committee, the Finance Committee, and our committee. But that end of it is in the Finance Committee. They have worked diligently. I appreciate the hard work that has came from the Democrats and the Republicans on that committee.

Now, in the event that we do not do this, we are going to go back--it will be our ninth extension. When we have an extension, none of these reforms I just talked about, none of them will end up being done. It will just be major cuts in programs.

I would only ask this: I would ask any Member of the Senate, before you draw yourself into a box where you are going to be opposed to this, what you need to do is call your State departments of transportation. Talk to them about it. Talk to the chambers. Talk to the labor unions back in your States. See what they think. This is one of the few issues where they are all in agreement--labor, chambers, all of them. They realize we have to have infrastructure in America.

I know my State is not the only State that has road problems. But I am more familiar with them because that is where I live and raise my 20 kids and grandkids. So I would hope that we look at the opportunities that we have in what is called MAP-21. That is the transportation reauthorization bill that we have under consideration at this time, and that we will do the responsible thing.

If we do rely, by the way, on extensions, our highway trust fund will be totally depleted by this next summer. Then we are going to have to do an extension or be forced to bail out the highway trust fund. We do not want that to happen. We can preclude that from happening. All we have to do is be responsible today.

Again, this is one of the few areas where back home organized labor as well as business is all for it. Here we have the extremes, such as Senator Boxer from California and myself. We both agree this is one of the two primary functions of government. This is our opportunity to do it. I hope there will not be people on the outside looking at this and completely disregarding these hundreds of billions of dollars that, in my opinion, have been wasted and not pay attention to one of the prime functions of government; that is, doing the infrastructure for the United States of America.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tester.) The clerk will call the roll.