Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for the time. This is a critical subject she is dealing with right now, but the thing in common is the problem we are having right now with regulation. I think we are going to be talking about that this afternoon.

I only wanted to get one thing in, and that is about something the Chair is fully aware of because he was there all morning. Something very significant happened this morning. In our Environment and Public Works Committee we passed out a highway reauthorization bill. We have not done this since 2005, and this morning we did. This is one where we sat down--one of the few times that Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, can get in a room and hammer out their differences and get things done. I wish the committee would be successful in doing that as we were this morning in getting a highway bill. So we are going to have a highway bill at the current spending level which, if my colleagues remember back in 2005, it was $286.4 billion, and that was for a 5-year bill. That spending level right now would be, to sustain that, somewhere between $40 billion and $42 billion a year for 2 years. This is a 2-year bill, and the 2-year bill cannot pass until we locate an additional $12 billion to make this happen. I think a lot of us don't want to take what would constitute a 34-percent cut in funding for our roads and highways and bridges throughout America and be able to sustain that. This is a life-and-death type of issue.

I wanted to say how proud I am of the staff and of every Democrat and every Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee who made this happen this morning. So while we have much more we are concerned about, I think it shouldn't go unnoticed at this time that we have now started that ball rolling and that is good news.

One last thing I wish to say about overregulation. When we talk about the jobs bill--and we always are talking about revenue and jobs and all of this--we seem to forget that the overregulation is costing us a lot. I can remember fighting the cap-and-trade bills ever since back during the Kyoto convention, and impressing upon people that the bills being offered would cost between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. That is every year, not just the first year. Right now, since they have not been able to pass that here, they are trying to do that with regulations through the Environmental Protection Agency. Congressman Fred Upton over in the House and I had legislation that would take away the jurisdiction of the EPA to get this done. I think this is going to be offered as an amendment this afternoon. I think it is very critical that we pass that.

I thank the Senator from Texas for giving me this time.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, after the vote today, I think that any effort to pass a bill such as the ones we just voted on would be very difficult. But something good does happen from that; that is, we had the vast majority of people in the Chamber recognizing that we need to do something that would be stimulative to the economy--something unlike the stimulus bill we had before, where only 3 percent of the money actually went to building roads, highways, maintenance, and that type of thing.

I do appreciate the fact that we are now in a position where I think, with this behind us, we can be looking at a good, legitimate highway transportation reauthorization bill. I have been working very closely with Senators Boxer, Vitter, and Baucus--we are considered the ``big four'' in the Environment and Public Works Committee--to come up with something. I have to say that we have worked very hard, and I am talking about hours and hours. Anytime you can get Senator Barbara Boxer from California and me to agree on something, you know we have gone through a lot of work--and we have. We have gone through a lot of give and take.

Senator Boxer and I, along with Senators Vitter and Baucus, recognize that we desperately need to have a transportation reauthorization bill, and we need to do it the right way. All these things we have been doing with extensions don't work. There is not a Member of this Chamber who doesn't go back every week and talk to his transportation director and say why can't we quit these extensions and get a good bill.

We have a good bill, and we are talking about reforms. It is our intention next week, I believe, to mark up this bill. We are looking forward to that. I have a very strong bias toward transportation. For the years I was in the House, I was on that committee. We didn't have these problems then. We had a highway trust fund that always had a surplus because we were very aggressive at that time and, of course, a lot more people were purchasing gas at that time and revenues were up. So we had a surplus.

Unfortunately, this always happens in Washington, DC. Members came along and looked at the surplus, and that was a target. Everybody wanted in on it, so they put their deals into the highway trust fund. That is partly why we got to where we are today.

I appreciate the conversation we have gotten from the President. He talks about how he wants infrastructure, and he has a picture of where he was standing in front of a bridge making a speech about creating jobs. But he doesn't have anything in his program that does anything with infrastructure. Our problem is that President Obama has been talking the talk, and he has spoken more about infrastructure than any other President since Eisenhower proposed the Interstate Highway System. But when you get up to the $800 billion stimulus bill, in doing the calculations, only 3 percent--about $27 billion of that--was in highway construction or maintenance. Senator Boxer and I made an effort on the floor--a bipartisan effort--to try to raise the percentage. I wanted it up to 10 percent or higher, but we were unable to do it. The President was not on our side on that.

I think the good news is that today's votes, of both Democrats and Republicans, showed that they are very interested and supportive of a highway bill. We have gotten a lot of that out of the way and we can concentrate on a highway bill. I think both parties are trying to create jobs and economic growth through the building of highways and bridges.

Most Americans are unaware of how damaging regulations are. When I stop and think about proposing a massive program, which is what we are talking about now--reauthorization program--it is massive in that the funding level would probably stay the same as it has been since the highway authorization bill of 2005. But when they talk about that, we are always faced with the regulation problems. We are trying to address in this bill the regulation problems that are out there to try to have some shortcuts, to try to get some things done that otherwise would take a lot longer. Regulations have been a huge problem.

EPA Regulations

This administration's Environmental Protection Agency alone has an unprecedented number of regulations, and they are destroying jobs. The results are there. I will mention the five most expensive regulations of all the regulations that have come out.

First is the greenhouse gas regulation. I think we all know what that is. That is them trying to do something through regulations they were unable to do through legislation.

Second, ozone, the national ambient air quality standards. That would be about a $678 billion loss in GDP by 2020.

Incidentally, I failed to mention the greenhouse gas regulations, which would be in excess of $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

The boiler MACT regulations--that would be a $1 billion loss to GDP. Utility MACT--MACT is maximum achievable technology. In other words, one of the problems with all these MACT bills coming out of the administration is that there is no technology available to carry out the mandates on emissions. Cement MACT is another, with $3.5 billion in compliance costs.

Fortunately, in September, President Obama withdrew the EPA's proposed toughened ozone standards. There is good reason for that, and one is that ozone standards are supposed to be predicated upon new science. This was on the same science that the last ozone changes were based on. I think when people caught on to that and recognized what it would cost--in Oklahoma, we would be looking at some 15 counties that would be out of attainment, and there is nothing more dreadful that could happen to a State than have your counties go out of attainment so that you are not able to recruit jobs, or even keep the jobs you have. We would be talking about around 7 million jobs throughout the United States. Because of that, politically, he postponed that. Frankly, I think he is postponing it until after the next election. If he should be reelected, I can assure you we will see that again.

Democrats always say we need to have tax increases and that is the best way to grow. I look at this sometimes. Recently, the Office of Management and Budget came up with a calculation that is consistent with one I have been using for 20 years: For each 1-percent increase in economic activity in this country, or 1-percent growth, that equates to about $50 billion of new revenue. Interestingly enough, this is all a Republican idea. President Kennedy, who was a Democrat, said we have to raise more money for the Great Society, and the best way to raise money is to reduce marginal tax rates. He did it and it worked. We saw what President Ronald Reagan did in the years that followed that. During the 8 years he was in office, the proceeds for marginal rates went from $204 billion to $466 billion. That was at a time when rates were reduced more than any other 8-year period in history. We are looking at other opportunities to reduce regulations and all that so we can resolve the problem.

There is one thing that is very important--and I know there is nobody in this Chamber who doesn't recognize the concern I have expressed over the

years about the legislation proposed ever since the Kyoto treaty on legislative cap and trade. Every time there is an analysis made-- whether by MIT, or by the Wharton School, Charles Rivers, or any of the rest of them--the range of the cost of cap and trade legislatively is always between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. We found out that if you do it by regulation, it is going to be far more than that. These are Democrats who are on record as saying that. Lisa Jackson, for whom I have a great deal of respect, is the Obama-appointed Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Every time I ask her a question, she gives me an honest answer. She said:

I have said over and over, as has the President, that we do

understand that there are costs to the economy of addressing

global warming emissions, and that the best way to address

them is through a gradual move to a market-based program like

cap and trade.

Yes, they would cost a lot of money. Nobody refutes the $300 billion to $400 billion figure.

John Kerry said this:

If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate

change, the administration will use the Environmental

Protection Agency to impose new regulations.

These regulations would be more expensive. I think the EPA

admitted that if they were able to accomplish this through

regulations, they would need to hire an additional 230,000

employees and spend an additional $21 billion to implement

its greenhouse gas regime.

All of this economic pain is for no gain. As EPA Administrator Jackson also admitted before the EPA committee, these regulations will have no effect on the climate. I want to mention that. That is significant. A lot of people disagree with me in terms of the impact of CO2 emissions and all of that.

Let me say this. Two things having to do with that issue are very important. One is that if we were to pass legislation or do something through regulation that would be aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, would this have an effect on the reduction of emissions worldwide? I asked that question to Lisa Jackson, and her answer was ``no.'' Obviously, the problem is not here in the United States, it is in China, India, and other places.

In looking at it that way, I have to also mention that we all know what happened with climategate. We all know, when we went in and started an endangerment finding, it was based on the science that came from the IPCC, which has now been totally discredited. When I have more time, I will go into the details as to how that was discredited. For example, this was such a great scandal, the Daily Telegraph said:

This scandal could well be the greatest in modern science.

So that is what was happening. They were cooking the science at the United Nations and the IPCC. Now we are at the point where we asked for an inspector general opinion as to whether the EPA had followed the proper guidelines in trying to regulate greenhouse gases, and, in fact, they did not follow the right guidelines.

So I would only say that the inspector general's investigation uncovered that the EPA failed to engage in the required record-keeping process leading up to the endangerment finding decision, and it also did not follow its own peer review procedures to ensure that the science behind the decision was sound science. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson readily admitted the science that was used was flawed, the science used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So I would say this: We are concerned about what is going to happen now. We are concerned about the overregulations. We are concerned about the process that has been used and how regulations are used to support an agenda the President has.

I will mention one last thing, and that is a regulation I didn't mention before. Of the five most expensive regulations, this isn't one of them, but it could end up costing the most. We know for a fact that the United States of America--we have a report now that shows that with all the findings and with all the good things that are happening in the shale throughout the United States and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, we could be totally free from dependency on any other country if we would just get politicians out of the way and develop our own resources.

We have enough natural gas to meet America's demand for 90 years and enough oil for 50 years, but in order to do this, they have to use a process called hydraulic fracturing. Ironically, that was started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949 and has been used ever since that time, and there has never been a confirmed case of groundwater contamination. Nonetheless, right now we see that they are going through this process of saying: We are going to take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing from the States and place it with the Federal Government. I have to be suspicious that there is motive behind that, and that motive is to restrict the use of hydraulic fracturing.

We could open the east coast, the west coast, the gulf coast, the northern slope, and everything else, but if we can't use that process, we will not be able to achieve energy independence, which we can do. We don't have to use anything new that is out there other than oil, gas, and coal. With what is happening right now with hydrogen, we have an opportunity to become self-sufficient.

With that, I will yield the floor so my good friend can make his comments.

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

Madam President, I apologize to the Chair. I had a misunderstanding as to where we were, and I only wanted to try to get the point across, which I think I failed to do, regarding the cost of these regulations.

I think I used as an example the five--I mentioned, actually, six when you consider hydraulic fracturing also as one of the regulations. By far, the one that is the most expensive is the regulation that would be for the greenhouse gases. I think we have pretty much established the cost to do a cap-and-trade bill and the range being from $300 billion to $400 billion. The quotes I used, which I won't repeat now, were from Administrator Jackson and Senator Kerry and others stating that doing it through regulation would be far more expensive. So I think we need to be looking at it in terms of about $400 billion a year. This would be a tax on the American people. This would be the cost to our GDP.

I remember back in 1993 when we had the Clinton-Gore tax increase. It was the largest one in four decades at that time. It was an increase in the death tax, an increase in marginal rates, an increase in capital gains--an increase in almost all taxes--and it was a $30 billion tax increase. What we are talking about here is a tax increase that is 10 times that great--10 times. We are using the figure now of $400 billion because we know that through regulation, it will cost more.

Again, I go back and repeat the quote we had from Administrator Jackson of the EPA, who said in response to my question, live in our committee, if we were to pass legislation--at that time, I think it was the Waxman-Markey bill, although it doesn't really matter because cap and trade is cap and trade--would that reduce overall emissions, and she said no because it would only apply to the United States.

I would carry it one step further. If we were to pass or do anything through regulation here, all it will do is cause our manufacturing base to go out and find the energy necessary to operate. And where do they go? They go to places such as China, India, and Mexico--places that have almost no emission standards. So if there is a pollution problem, it becomes much greater, not less, in terms of overall emissions.

Another situation I often talk about is the time before I left to go to the Copenhagen United Nations event, where they were going to try to convince the rest of the world that we were going to pass legislation that would be cap and trade and impose this tax on the American people.

In a committee hearing, I said to Administrator Jackson: I have a feeling that as soon as I leave town, you are going to have an endangerment finding.

Sure enough, that is what happened.

I said: When you have an endangerment finding, it has to be based on science. So what science would you be using?

She said: By and large, it would be the science developed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Ironically, right after that, climategate came up and really destroyed the legitimacy of the IPCC.

I have read some of the quotes that were given by different people when they talked about climategate. One of them is a British writer George Monbiot, who is known for his environmental and political activism, and he is on the other side of this. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He said:

Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to

make it go away.

Here, he is referring to climategate and the fact that they were cooking the science.

Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with

technicalities.

Again talking about the participants in IPCC.

We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality,

apologizing where appropriate and demonstrating that it

cannot happen again.

I also mentioned the Daily Telegraph in the UK. Quoting from it:

This scandal could well be the greatest in modern science.

Then the Atlantic Magazine, which generally is editorializing the other side of this issue, said:

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science,

their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a

preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of

intellectual corruption is overpowering.

That was the loss of credibility of the whole idea of the science that was put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. But to make it even worse, we requested that the inspector general do a study and report back as to the science and how the science was developed by the IPCC and whether it followed the guidelines that were necessary. They came back just 1 week ago with a report that says the EPA has failed to follow the responsible guidelines. In fact, even before the scope of the study was finalized today, the EPA was already collecting data samples at the undisclosed fracking sites, so they are going in now to using the same type of flawed science and going after other parts of their agenda. In this case, it would be hydraulic fracturing, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago, is an attempt to stop our ability to develop our own resources.

In the course of this overregulation, I think we have to keep in mind and to keep talking about these six greatest and most costly regulatory problems that we have out there and how much it is going to cost the American people. Again, the one that is the most serious right now is trying to regulate and do a cap-and-trade through the regulations as opposed to doing it through legislation.

We are going to keep talking about that. It is not going to go away. People think time will make people forget. But we don't forget something of that magnitude.

I did a calculation in my State of Oklahoma; as I always do, I get the number of families who file a tax return each year. When something comes along that will cost something, I do the calculation and I do the math and then I go back to the American people and say: Get ready. This is what it is going to cost.

If we were to have passed any of the bills that were like the Kyoto Protocol, and the last one being the Waxman-Markey bill, the cost would have been at least $300 billion. If we take that annual cost, that would cost my tax-paying families in Oklahoma in excess of $3,000 a family, and they get nothing for it.

We can do an awful lot of talking about the deficits and the spending of this administration. Let's don't overlook perhaps the most expensive thing to the American people; that is, the overregulation that makes us noncompetitive with the rest of the world.

With that, I yield the floor.

First, let me thank my good friend, the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, for speaking because I asked her to do it. A lot of people are surprised on how well we get along.

The committee she chairs is called the Environment and Public Works Committee and I am the ranking member. When Republicans were in the majority, I was the chairman. I look forward to being chairman again, but that is another conversation for another day.

But the reason I wanted to speak is, because we do. A lot of people are surprised to see this. We get along very well. Right now, we are doing everything we possibly can to get a highway reauthorization bill. She prides herself on being a very proud liberal and I pride myself on being a very proud conservative. Yet we both know that one of our primary functions here is to do something about infrastructure.

I have often been ranked as the most conservative member of this body, the Senate. I often have said I may be conservative, but I am a big spender in two areas: national defense and infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to be doing.

Right now, we have the most deplorable problem in the condition of our roads and highways and bridges. My State of Oklahoma goes back and forth being dead last or next to the last behind Missouri as having the worst conditions of our bridges.

We had a lady not too long ago in my State of Oklahoma, in Oklahoma City, the mother of two small children, who was driving under one of the big interstate bridges and a block of concrete fell off and it killed her. She was the mother of two small children. We have people dying every day on the highways because of the condition of the highways. For that, I applaud Senator Boxer for joining me to put together this coalition.

I don't want to say anything that would be improper at this time, but it is my expectation--not just hope but expectation--that we are going to be able to come up with a highway reauthorization bill, and it is going to be one that is at least holding the current spending level.

If we are to have to go back to the level of the proceeds of the highway trust fund, that would be about 34 percent less than what we are spending today. I defy any one of my fellow Senators from all the 50 States to tell me one State that isn't having just as serious a problem as my State of Oklahoma is having.

I think that it is important we recognize there are some things the government is supposed to be doing and some things that bring us all together. Again, that is what is going to happen.

I can remember back, the last reauthorization bill we had was 2005. At that time, I was the chairman of the committee. We all worked together. We came up with a $284.6 billion, 5-year bill. Yet as robust as that was, that did very little more than just maintain what we have today--no new bridges, all these new things we need to have.

I think a lot of the people who are my good friends, and primarily over in the House, who came under the banner of the tea parties and all that, they recognize, yes, they can be a conservative. But when they got home, they said: Wait a minute. We want to not be spending on these big things, but we weren't talking about transportation. So we have to single out transportation for my friends to recognize there is a place we need be spending more money, not less money.

So I look forward to that, and I hope we will have an announcement to make, as one of the most liberal and one of the most conservative members joining and coming up with a highway reauthorization bill. There is not unanimity in what it will look like, other than the spending level should remain where it is today and it should be something that is going to address these problems.

There will be a lot of sacrifices along the way. I know that when we mark up a bill there are going to be a lot of things in it that I don't like and that Senator Boxer doesn't like and we are going to have to give up some of these things.

I have made it very clear that back in the early days, when I was actually serving in the other body, we always had surpluses in the highway trust fund and we were able to take care of these needs. Then, as typical as politicians are this way, they see a pot of money and they want in on it. So we had all these groups, and a lot of them were environmental groups that wanted to have their own agenda attached to it. We are going to have to get serious and make this a highway bill.

By the way, this would also be certainly the biggest jobs bill we have had during this administration, since this administration has done a lousy job of providing jobs.

But having said that--and I said that because I want to draw a contrast. We are about to consider and vote on the President's nominee, John Bryson, to be Secretary of Commerce. He is President Obama's choice, and there is a clear indication he has no indication of backing down on his job-killing war on affordable energy.

But I have to say this. With John Bryson, this isn't Van Jones we are talking about. This is a guy who is a nice guy, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I have been contacted by people who are friends of mine who are friends of his, and clearly he is a person who is well received in terms of being a good person. But he is dead wrong on the issues that will provide jobs for America.

At a time when unemployment is sky high, President Obama chooses the founder--and I will characterize it differently than my friend from California did--of one of the most radical, leftwing, extreme environmentalist groups, the National Resources Defense Council. It is a leftwing organization which, in the name of global warming, seeks to cut off access to our natural resources and increase drastically the price of electricity and gasoline across America.

We know this is true, because we know that if they would merely develop the resources we have today in the United States of America, we wouldn't have to be dependent upon the Middle East for one barrel of oil, and we wouldn't have to worry about our supply of gas and coal, because as I will explain in just a minute and document, we have the largest recoverable resources in coal gas and oil of any country in the world.

Mr. Bryson once called the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill moderate. This particular cap-and-trade bill was probably the most liberal of all the cap-and-trade bills that were there.

By the way, I have to say this one thing. I understand I am the last speaker tonight. What do all the speakers who are in favor of this have in

common? They are all supporting cap and trade, with the exception of Senator Hutchison, and she is retiring. But stop and think about it: Boxer, Feinstein, Rockefeller, Kerry, McCain, they are all strong supporters of cap and trade. That is what I am going to talk about tonight because I know where John Bryson is on cap and trade.

He told some students at the University of California Berkeley last year that ``cap-and-trade has the advantage politically at sort-of hiding the fact that you have a major tax.''

To me, the fact that they are supporting something that is a major tax increase on the American people is bad enough. But when they say one of the good things about cap and trade is you can hide the fact that it is a major tax increase--and we know now what this would cost. Cap and trade is cap and trade. It doesn't make any difference if it was back during the Kyoto days. It doesn't make any difference if it was in any of the bills that were passed. Still, the analysis is that the cost of a cap-and-trade bill would be between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.

Again, this is legislation that would cost the taxpayers $300 billion to $400 billion a year and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and hurt families and workers by raising the price of gasoline and electricity. Yet the nominee for Secretary of Commerce believes that was a moderate bill, the Waxman-Markey bill.

The Secretary of Commerce should have a record of promoting, not stifling, economic growth. John Bryson's career shows he has a clear record of the latter, and it makes no sense to have the Secretary of Commerce who is against commerce.

I am not the only one who thinks so. Let me just share. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal states:

President Obama nominated John Bryson to head the Commerce

Department on Tuesday, praising the Californian as a business

leader who understands what it takes to innovate, to create

jobs, and to persevere through tough times. That's one way of

describing someone with a talent of scoring government

subsidies.

We keep hearing--and I think they hit the nail on the head there and they answered the question. People say: This man has been very successful for 18 years. He ran one of the major utilities out in California, and one of the interesting things about it is this utility out there is not one that is using coal; it is using renewables. Obviously, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out: If they have the very heavy expenses and they raise the price of energy, it doesn't hurt the utilities. They pass it on. They pass it on to the consumers who ultimately have to pay for it.

Quoting the Washington Examiner:

But there is another side of Bryson, one that fits squarely

in the tradition of radical Obama appointees like green jobs

czar Van Jones, a self-proclaimed Marxist; Medicare head

Donald Berwick, who swoons over Britain's socialized National

Health Service; and National Labor Relations Board member

Craig Becker, the former labor lawyer who never met a union

power grab he couldn't back.

Here is Investors Business Daily:

The nominee for commerce secretary founded an anti-energy

group and believes in redistribution of wealth to help poorer

nations. At this rate, we will be one of them. If personnel

is policy, there can be no better choice to help implement

President Obama's anti-growth energy policy and

redistribution of wealth plans than his choice to be the next

Secretary of Commerce, John Bryson.

Again, that is the Investors Business Daily.

The ACU came out and said: ``Putting John Bryson in charge of the Commerce Department is the dictionary definition of putting the fox in charge of the hen house.''

That is exactly what it is, and that is one reason I would prefer we not have this vote tonight. I would like to have all of us go back for this 1-week recess and let the people know this is about to be voted on, and I think that is one reason they are going to be doing it tonight.

By the way, I am not critical of the leadership, certainly not the Democratic or Republican leadership. In fact, I went to them and said: As long as you give me a 60-vote threshold, I would waive going through all the loops of filibustering and having cloture votes and all that. So I appreciate that. But my intent was to wait, and I still would ask formally if they would change this UC under which we are operating and allow this vote to take place when we come back from this 1-week recess.

The choice of Bryson is also part of President Obama's green energy jobs push. In fact, the President said he specifically nominated-- listen to this--he specifically nominated Bryson because he is a ``fierce proponent of alternative energy.'' But with more than 9 percent unemployment and the complete collapse of the solar company Solyndra, the President's green agenda is clearly not creating jobs. In the end, Solyndra is more than just a bankrupt company, it is a metaphor for the failure of Obama's war on fossil fuel jobs.

I have already called for hearings in the Senate on Solyndra and I hope it will not be long before they occur.

President Obama has received the message loudly and clearly that his global warming green agenda no longer sells, but that doesn't mean he has given up trying to implement it. Bryson is just one figure in Obama's green team. He follows in the footsteps of Carol Browner and Anthony Van Jones, who also supported increasing taxes on America's energy, as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu. You remember Stephen Chu, the President's Energy Secretary, who said, ``[s]omehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels of gasoline in Europe.'' That is about $8 a gallon.

It is the intention of this administration to raise gas prices, to either force them into some other type of energy or to stop people from having the freedom of driving as we have always had in this country. That was Energy Secretary Steven Chu who said we have to bring our price of gasoline at the pumps up to that of Europe.

Then we have also Alan Krueger. His nomination by President Obama to be the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers is yet another example. During his time at the Department of Treasury under President Obama, Mr. Krueger made clear his opposition to the development of traditional domestic energy. He even went so far as to say ``the administration believes it is no longer sufficient to address our Nation's energy needs by finding more fossil fuels. . . .''

I am still quoting Alan Kreuger. This is when he was in the Treasury Department. He is the nominee now for the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, the advisory council. He even went so far as to say:

The administration's goal is to have resources invested in

ways which yield the highest social return.

That is the current nominee to be Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for the President. He doesn't need that advice, he is already doing it.

The Congressional Research Service reports America has the largest recoverable resources of oil, gas, and coal in the world. The Obama administration's failure to appreciate this fact is one of the many reasons why they are not making progress in creating jobs and improving our economy.

This is a key here. When this discovery was made, the Congressional Research Service--nobody has denied this. That was less than a year ago when they said America has the largest recoverable resources of oil, gas, and coal in the world. That means we could be totally self- sufficient. All we have to do is develop our own resources.

I defy anyone on this floor to tell me there is any other country that does not develop its own resources. We are the only one. So we have 83 percent of our non-shore public lands off limits. We have these huge reserves out there but we cannot go after them.

Then there is Rebecca Wodder, who President Obama has chosen to be the Assistant Secretary for the Fish and Wildlife Department. That would be for the Department of Interior. As CEO of American Rivers, which works actively to shut down energy production in the United States, she--Rebecca Wodder--is a strong advocate for the Federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing, a process which is efficiently and effectively regulated by States.

This is interesting. It was not long ago that President Obama was lauding the virtues of natural gas, and at the end of his speech he said we have to do something about hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracturing started in my State of Oklahoma in 1948. I can't quantify the hundreds of thousands of wells that have been hydraulically

fractured, but it has been in the hundreds of thousands--maybe 1.5 million. I have heard that figure. With the exception of one well back in 1986, where somebody actually went into an aquifer, there has not been one documented case in over a million hydraulic fractured wells where it has contaminated groundwater. Yet they are using that, knowing full well if you kill hydraulic fracturing you kill all the oil and gas in tight formations because you cannot get it without that.

The selection of Ms. Wodder is a clear departure from her predecessor, Tom Strickland, who in testimony before the EPW Committee, our committee, said we should actively and aggressively develop our energy resources. Unfortunately, Ms. Wodder's support for regulation and advancement suggested she would do the opposite, which exposes the reality of President Obama's agenda of increasing energy prices and destroying jobs.

These nominations--of course we are talking tonight about another nomination of a person who is a good guy and all that, but John Bryson, to be in a position to follow all the rest of these who are doing everything they can to kill fossil fuels, and when you kill fossil fuels, we know, and the President admitted, it would cause the price of electricity in America to skyrocket.

These nominations are not surprising when you remember that President Obama said himself that he wants electricity rates to skyrocket. As he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008, ``If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them. . . .''

That is what the Obama EPA regulations intend to do.

The EPA is moving forward with an unprecedented number of rules for coal-fired plants and industrial boilers that have now become known as the infamous train wreck for the incredible harm they will do to our economy. They are set to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and significantly raise energy prices for families, businesses, and farmers--basically anyone who drives a car or flips a switch.

The President himself has now publicly acknowledged this. When we stopped the Agency from tightening the national ambient air quality standards for ozone, his statement couldn't be more clear: The EPA rules create regulatory burdens and uncertainty.

Just last week, EPA also pulled back on its plan to tighten regulation on farm dust, undoubtedly due to bipartisan concern that it would cause great harm to our farmers.

I have given the speech on the floor, and I am not going to repeat it tonight, about what all the regulations this President is trying to put forth will cost, in terms of his maximum achievable control technology. He has the refinery MACT, he has the boiler MACT, he has the farm dust MACT. These are the things he is trying to do where the technology is not even there.

I found out something the other day in Broken Arrow, OK. I can't recall the name of the company now. They make platforms for hydraulic fracturing. I don't know if the Senator from California has ever seen one of these platforms. I have seen a lot of them. They make a lot of them in Oklahoma. This young man who is the president of this company showed me these platforms. These platforms are about--you could put maybe four of them in this Chamber, that is how big they are.

On these platforms, to do hydraulic fracturing, they have a great big diesel engine. This diesel engine is necessary to do hydraulic fracturing of oil wells. They came out with a regulation the other day I didn't even know about. They said, after a certain date--exactly where it was, in the next couple of months--that you would not be able to use the diesel engine on your platform that does hydraulic fracturing unless it is a tier 4 diesel engine.

Here is the problem. They don't make them. They are on the drawing board. They are making them but they are not on market yet. So they are shutting down the people who are building the platforms to do hydraulic fracturing through regulations.

Every day we run into new regulations. I can remember on the farm dust regulation, I had a news conference in the State of Oklahoma. In Oklahoma we went back--I had people coming out from Washington, DC, who had never been west of the Mississippi. We went down southwest in the town of Altus, OK. I said in my news conference, when the cameras were rolling: This President is trying to do something to regulate farm dust. Let me explain something to you. If you look down here, that brown stuff down there, that is called dirt. If you look at that round green thing down there, that is cotton. Put your finger in the air, that is called wind. Are there any questions?

What I am saying is they all realized there is no technology to regulate farm dust. Yet they are trying to do it. Right now the major farm organizations such as American Farm Bureau, they are the ones who are saying that is the No. 1 concern right now, what they are trying to do to shut down farms in America. The EPA continues to push regulations to harm the economy, the Cross-Air State Pollution Rule, the so-called utility MACT--rules that are poised to destroy jobs.

Let's not forget the economic ramifications of global warming.

But before we leave the utility MACT, we have right now utilities that are notifying coal producers, saying if this goes through we are not going to be able to honor our contracts to buy coal from you. That is how serious it is. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of employees.

Let's go to the big one now, the economic ramifications of global warming, regulations imposed by Obama which cost American consumers between $300 and $400 billion a year. The reason I want to mention this is because there have been attempts since the Kyoto treaty--of course we didn't ratify the Kyoto treaty for a good reason, and that is it would cause extreme economic harm to the United States of America. It would only affect the developed nations such as the United States and some of the European nations, but not the developing nations. It would not have any effect of reducing CO2 if you wanted to reduce

I have a parliamentary inquiry.

It is my understanding that the last 10 minutes would be equally divided, but perhaps the Senator from Arizona has already used maybe 2 of those minutes. Is that correct? I just want to be recognized for, say, 6 minutes in opposition.

Well, let me clarify. It doesn't make any difference to the Senator from Arizona or to me how much time I have. I need to have about 5 minutes to clarify a couple of things.

I think the appropriate time is here.

First of all, I disagree with the Senator from Washington for a different reason than the Senator from Arizona disagrees with her. I think his amendment goes too far--not just far enough but too far--and I think it is very important that people understand.

Let me talk to the conservatives, let me talk to the Republicans, because this is certainly misunderstood. It wasn't drafted that way to carry out the intent of the Senator from Arizona, I am quite sure. This amendment doesn't eliminate the mandate that States have to spend 10 percent of their surface transportation funds on transportation enhancements.

Now, for clarification purposes, the 10 percent really is not represented properly. It really should be 2 percent. It is 2 percent of the State's total highway program. That happens to equal 10 percent of the Surface Transportation Program. But let's go ahead and use the 10 percent.

There are currently written into the law 11 eligible transportation enhancement activities. There is not room to put them all up, but we will put up this

chart. What the Senator from Arizona is saying is that you still have to spend 10 percent of your surface transportation money on transportation enhancements, but he is saying the States have to use it on his transportation enhancements. Those are the bike and pedestrian facilities, the bike and pedestrian safety, rails to trails. The bikers are going to be very happy with this. They are the only ones coming out ahead should this be passed.

Now, environmental mitigation in our law is restricted specifically to wildlife, bridges and tunnels, and to stormwater runoff enhancements. Now, stormwater runoff is taken care of anyway; these are the enhancements.

So what this amendment is saying is that we are going to have to spend this 10 percent on bicycles and on various types of wildlife, bridges, and tunnels so that the turtles can get under the highways and not get run over, and that is not what I know the Senator from Arizona wants.

In other words, we are taking the flexibility away from the cities, away from the States, and saying to them: You have to spend your 10 percent, and you have to spend it on these four things. I would just suggest to you that in my State of Oklahoma, these are not the four things on which we would want to spend it. I come down here all the time, and there is this mentality that we have in Washington: No idea is a good idea unless it comes from Washington. Well, in my State of Oklahoma, we have a great highway program. I want them to have the latitude to decide what is really best.

Now, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Boxer, and I have disagreed on environmental issues tooth and nail. We have fought with each other more than any two people on the floor of the Senate. She knows I have done everything within my power to do away with all transportation enhancement requirements. I have done this.

If this amendment had eliminated the mandate that States spend 10 percent of their Surface Transportation Program funds on all transportation enhancements, I philosophically would have supported it. If the McCain amendment had said that we want to do away with all transportation enhancements, I would have philosophically supported it. The problem with that is we would not be able to get a highway bill done.

I often say that I have been actually ranked as the most conservative member of the Senate probably more than anyone else, but I have also said I am a big spender in two areas: No. 1 is national defense and No. 2 is infrastructure. That is what I think we are supposed to be doing here--roads and bridges.

I am sure my colleagues will recall that during the debate on the extension of the highway bill last month, Senators Boxer, Coburn, Reid, and I worked out an agreement that reforms the Transportation Enhancement Program which would be included in the next highway bill that the EPW Committee will be marking up next month. I hope we will be marking this up next month. These reforms would allow the States to make a determination as to how they want to spend their funds.

To go back to this 10 percent, the idea behind this is this would increase what we are able to do and let the States have the discretion, so they can totally eliminate all enhancements. The States can do that. But they also would be allowed to use the 10 percent of the surface transportation funding on the various programs that are out there having to do with endangered species and the burying beetle and all that. That is where the problems really are.

So I don't think we should mistakenly vote for the McCain amendment and say to the people in this country: You have to spend 10 percent of your surface transportation funds on these four things. And again, the bikers would love the bike trails and all that, but I don't believe that is what we should be doing here.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I would ask the Chair how much time I have remaining.

I ask unanimous consent that I have 30 seconds remaining.

I only want to say that I agree with everything the Senator from Arizona is saying in terms of the bridges. I have fought for the bridges and highways.

I have tried my best to get rid of all the enhancements--all of them. But to have an amendment that says to my State of Oklahoma: You still have to spend 10 percent of your surface transportation funds, but you have to spend it on bike trails and turtle bridges, I think that is wrong.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, in a few minutes, I want an opportunity to, for clarification, talk about the LRA, troops who have gone over to northern Uganda, including Rwanda and south Sudan. I will wait now because a lot will want to speak subject to these amendments.

I wish to mention something I think is significant because nobody is talking about it. People have heard me talking over the years about the overregulation being pursued by this administration in every area and what it is costing in terms of jobs.

I know I talk about this quite often, but this time I am talking about a different area of overregulation. Most of the time I am talking about what the EPA is doing to destroy businesses in this country. I do that because I am the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over the environmental regulations and the EPA.

When we see what they are doing, it is something that is more serious--or at least as serious as all the deficits that are coming out of this administration because it is chasing jobs overseas. We will talk about that. This is a different area altogether.

We talk about the overregulation that comes from the EPA in the EPW Committee, where we have jurisdiction. Today, I want to mention what is going on in the USDA. In the 2008 farm bill, the USDA was instructed to revisit and update the marketing regulations authorized to the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921. That particular act is governed by the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration, or GIPSA, as it is referred to. That is all within the USDA.

The agency is supposed to regulate and deal with the marketing practices within the livestock industry. I am from Oklahoma, and it is a huge industry in Oklahoma. This provision of the farm bill was heavily debated and amended when it was considered and, ultimately, the USDA was instructed to provide regulations for a few explicit objectives. Among them were broader contract cancellation rights for livestock growers; the disclosure of foreseeable future necessary capital investment required for contract growers within their growing contracts; and criteria for GIPSA to determine whether producers are treated with unreasonable preference or advantage. The House already considered this. In fact, they have done their Agriculture appropriations bill.

Several months after the farm bill was enacted--the one I referred to--GIPSA released its preliminary rule,

and the rule they published went far beyond the requirements that were explicitly stated in the law.

One of the biggest problems with the rule is that it would allow GIPSA and the USDA to punish livestock producers and buyers for engaging in practices it considers unfair or unjust, even when there is no proof that their practices are actually harming competition within the industry. They want to do this in the name of leveling the playing field, which we hear a lot about around here, and that playing field would be between the packers and livestock producers, but what they are doing is regulating this industry in a way that would prohibit any real innovation or differentiation among companies in the industry. It forces a one-size-fits-all approach to running the livestock industry.

For one, the new rule would require packers and stockyards to keep written documentation justifying any differentiation in price that one pays to different livestock producers. Can you believe this? The USDA wants stockyards to justify every pricing decision they make. If that isn't big government, I don't know what is. The USDA wouldn't require this if they didn't intend to review these documents to determine whether the stockyards provided this justification. When doing this, the USDA bureaucrats will have the power to punish and fine stockyards that it believes are behaving unfairly. This is government determining whether they are behaving unfairly.

My question is this: In what other industry would this be considered acceptable or even appropriate? Can we imagine Walmart being forced to send the Federal Government justification for every price it negotiates with its suppliers? No. That would be ridiculous, and we all understand that.

The livestock industry is no different. This is American business, capitalism, and the individuals participating are doing so voluntarily. No one is forcing anyone to be in the livestock business. Negotiating prices--where some folks get higher and some folks get lower prices--is part of the deal. Some get advantages and some disadvantages, but it isn't government making that determination. That is the way it should be.

Another problem with this rule is that it would ban packer-to-packer sale of livestock. I don't know why the USDA wants to do this. Who cares if one stockyard sells or buys from another? It is none of their business. It seems perfectly American to me. But this will have a particularly negative impact in Oklahoma.

Right now, we only have one pork packing plant of any size in my State of Oklahoma, and the next closest plants are in Iowa, Missouri or probably Nebraska--I am not sure--maybe hundreds of miles away. If packers or entities owned by packers are no longer allowed to sell hogs to other packers, it will force Oklahoma producers to ship hogs out of the State to get them to market. This would increase operating costs, it would be prohibitive, and it would take them out of the market. Even if Oklahoma pork producers chose to ship hogs out of State, the prohibition of packers to sell animals to other packers would force producers to incorporate a middleman to eliminate the direct sale between packers. All this would do is increase the cost of production. That would make us in Oklahoma less competitive.

Let's keep in mind that the Oklahoma pork industry only took off after the construction of a pork processing plant. In 1987, before this plant was constructed, the annual cash receipts for pork producers were $33 million. That was it. The pork processing plant was constructed in the mid-1990s, provided necessary infrastructure to our State to do this. However, since then, the pork industry's annual cash receipts have risen more than tenfold to $555 million in 2007. So making this processing plant less capable of serving the needs of Oklahomans and our pork producers will undoubtedly hurt our industry and our consumers.

Unfortunately, these are only a few examples of the bad provisions of the new GIPSA rule I have heard about extensively from my livestock producers, and I am sure everyone else from agricultural States has heard about the concerns their States have. They believe that if this rule is finalized, it will force them to completely change the way they conduct business, and no government rule should force private businesses to do this, especially when the industry practices they have developed have been very effective at safely bringing meat products to the market.

Another problem with this rule is that the USDA has not publicly released the study it did to determine its economic impact. And we know why they haven't. It is very expensive. Several private studies have been done, and one of them estimated that the rule would reduce U.S. economic activity by $14 billion and would result in the loss of over 100,000 jobs. The USDA needs to release the economic impact analysis it did. There is no justification for their not doing this. So we have made that request, and we are waiting for that to happen.

There is a nominee for Secretary of Commerce--a very nice person, a fine person named John Bryson--whom I oppose. The reason I oppose John Bryson is he has been very active in this whole movement on cap and trade. We all know what that is. We have talked about it for 10 years. We had the Kyoto Convention that we did not become a part of, and there have been several efforts to have bills on the floor to have cap and trade, supposedly to stop catastrophic greenhouse or global warming. Now people know the science has been debunked. It is not real. Yet they are going ahead and doing it. But if the President is able to pass these regulations, it will cost the American people between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.

Now, I would say this. There are a lot of people out there saying: Well, it doesn't hurt to pass a tax increase of $300 billion if it is going to do something about global warming. Even President Obama's EPA nominee and choice, Lisa Jackson--now confirmed--has gone on record. In response to the question, if we were to pass any of these bills, whether it would be the McCain-Lieberman bill or the Waxman-Markey bill, any of these cap-and-trade bills that would be passing on a $300 billion to $400 billion tax increase, if that happened, would that reduce emissions, her answer was no.

Just logically look at that. If we do that in the United States, it will not change the emissions because this isn't where the problem is. The problem is in China and India and in Mexico.

So the cost of these regulations is unbearable for our economy, and here we are with over 9 percent unemployment. We are very fortunate in my State of Oklahoma because we have diversified, and our unemployment rate is down to 5\1/2\ percent. But nationally it is a disaster. So regulations are a very important part of this.

I want to make sure we make it very clear that it is not just the regulations that come from the Environmental Protection Agency because these regulations we are talking about are going to be from the USDA.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor, unless there is no one waiting.

I would like to, and I would be happy to yield the floor to anyone else who comes to offer an amendment, if the Senator would alert me to that.

All right, I will.

U.S. Troops in Northern Uganda

Mr. President, I know there is a lot of confusion, and a lot of people are blaming President Obama for sending 100 troops into northern Uganda.

First, I want to make sure everyone knows I am not a fan of President Obama. He is responsible for all these regulations that are driving out American businesses. He is responsible for the deficit. Actually, his three budgets have had deficits each year of $1\1/2\ trillion, and he is up to almost $5 trillion in deficits. It is coming not from the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the House or the Senate, it is coming from President Obama. And I disagreed with his position with Libya, sending our troops in there the way he did.

I am on the Armed Services Committee, the second ranking member, and I am very much concerned about what is happening right now and what this President has done to our military

in reducing our capability to the extent he has. But having said that, let me say that the criticism he has received for sending 100 American troops into northern Uganda is not justified, and let me explain what I am talking about.

This picture here is of a guy whose name is Joseph Kony. Joseph Kony is a monster. For 25 years, he has been in northern Uganda, but he has been in other countries too--Rwanda, now the new country of South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Congo. Those five countries are where he has been.

This is what he does. Many people don't know about him. In fact, 3 or 4 days ago Rush Limbaugh was commenting that nobody knows what the LRA is; that is, the Lord's Resistance Army, and so I am here to tell you and tell you why these troops were sent over. It was not President Obama; it was I who did this. We passed a law requiring that to be done. Let me explain why.

I have been active in Africa for many years. Fifteen years ago, I was in northern Uganda, in an area called Gulu, and I found out there is a guy up there by the name of Joseph Kony.

This is Joseph Kony. He is a spiritual leader. What he does is he goes into the villages and he abducts hundreds and thousands of young kids, usually between the ages of 11 and 14, and then he takes the girls and sends them into prostitution, but he trains the boys to be soldiers. We are talking about kids 11 to 14 years old. So he teaches them how to use AK-47s, and when they graduate, these kids have to go back to the villages from where they were abducted and kill their siblings and kill their parents. If they do not do it, they come back-- and this is significant--and they are then mutilated.

These are all kids. See, they are holding their AK-47s and all that.

This next chart shows what happens if one of these kids comes back and he doesn't kill his parents or do as Joseph Kony says. He mutilates the kids, and the way he does it is he cuts off their ears, cuts off their noses, their lips, or cuts off their hands. This guy here, John Ochola, his hands were cut off and his nose and ears were cut off. This one just went through it, and he is still bleeding.

These are kids. These are kids, 12 and 14 years old. This is what he has been doing to thousands of kids for 25 years now. So having sympathy for that, I came back and talked to some of my colleagues here, and I said: We have to do something about this. At that time, we were not allowed to send troops in. This has nothing to do with sending combat troops into an area. Certainly this has nothing to do with what the President did in Libya. But we passed a law that said that we are sending assistance into northern Uganda and the other four countries, but they are specifically precluded from entering into combat. In other words, the 100 troops who went in cannot even carry a weapon. They cannot be involved by law. I put that in the law. Those words are there. So what we are doing is we are able to go in and assist them in intelligence, maybe loan them a helicopter or whatever they need to take this guy out or to bring him to the international court. That would probably be better.

But this is what this guy has been doing for 25 years, and you have to go see it to really appreciate it--these mutilated little kids.

Well, anyway, I will say this. Those who are critical of me for supporting sending our troops over are ill-founded in their criticism for two reasons. First of all, we already have troops all over the world in places such as Africa. In the continent of Africa, we have several thousand American troops in a program called Train and Equip. It is specifically called 1206 and 1208 funding. That means we go into these countries and we help train the African nations to prepare for when the squeeze takes place in the Middle East and the terrorists come down through Djibouti and the Horn of Africa and spread out through the African Continent. We are building five African brigades. We are training them so that when something happens, as it did happen in the countries where we are currently in battle, we don't have to send our troops in because we are training them so they can take care of their own problems. That is essentially what is happening.

I was in this brandnew country the other day, South Sudan. We have all heard about Sudan and Khartoum and heard and been told about all the atrocities that are committed there, and it just makes you cry when you see what is happening. Well, they now have split off, so South Sudan has a separate country. I was there last week. I was the first one there in terms of Members of the Senate just to cheer them on.

I had 25 members of the Parliament of this new country called South Sudan with me for a period of 2 hours. Do you know what they said, Mr. President. They said: If you really want to do something about terrorism, get this growing force that Joseph Kony has and help us take him out.

This question was asked of me today on a talk radio show: Why is it we can't get Uganda or Congo or Rwanda to do this?

I would suggest that the Presidents of these three countries came from the bush. President Museveni was a warrior in the bush, and he doesn't like to admit he can't take care of one monster named Joseph Kony by himself. The same is true with Paul Kagame, who is President of Rwanda. Remember 1994 when they had the genocide? And he came from the bush. He is a tough warrior, but he doesn't want to admit he would have to have help to take care of that. Joe Kabila, from the Congo, the same thing.

Well, I was able to get the three of them together, and they agreed they would work together with each other, and they asked if they could have some support from the United States in the way of intelligence and maybe a helicopter or two, and I said yes. So we passed the law. This law we passed was right here in the Senate. There was not one Senator who voted against it. I had 64 cosponsors--the largest number of cosponsors on any bill addressing a problem in Africa in the history of this Senate. So we are all in accord.

A lot of Members are not courageous enough to tell the truth about this. A lot join in saying: Oh, we are not going to send more troops over. Let me assure you, these troops are going to go over and save lives. And they could very well be saving American lives because if this terrorist movement is allowed to continue, then we will have another terrorist movement in that part of the world that should be getting a lot of our attention.

So with that, just to repeat two things, first of all, we already have troops over there in Training and Equip. These same troops will be doing that while there. Secondly, there won't be one American troop in harm's way in northern Uganda, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Rwanda, or any of the other places where Joseph Kony might be leading his reign of terror.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from Tennessee, I be recognized in morning business. What I am going to do is try to clear up some of the misunderstanding about the troops who have gone into Uganda and other areas on the LRA, Lord's Resistance Army.

Mr. President, I asked for unanimous consent to be recognized following the remarks by the Senator from Tennessee. It has been called to my attention that the Senator from Virginia would like to have the floor at this time, so I renew my unanimous consent request that I be recognized at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, I am here today to clear up a lot of misunderstandings that are floating around the country concerning the decision to have some of our troops--not combat, but some of our troops--go into sections of Eastern and Central Africa to cooperate with about five countries that have been trying, for 25 years, to eradicate the Lord's Resistance Army and their leader whose name is Joseph Kony.

It has disturbed me quite a bit over the years that not many people care about Africa. I can remember back when President Clinton was in office that at that time I objected to sending troops into Bosnia and Kosovo because he was using as a reason to do that ethnic cleansing, and I said at that time, here at this desk on the floor: Why is he concerned about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia when on any one given day in any one country in Africa--at that time it was mostly in west Africa, and I used Sierra Leone as an example--in any one day there are 100 people more who are being ethnically cleansed in Africa than there are being ethnically cleansed in the same day in Bosnia or in Kosovo. But nobody cared.

Fortunately, that changed when 9/11 came and people realized there was a serious problem. When our country was attacked, it became evident that we needed to take action against terrorists in the Middle East. As the Middle East was squeezed many of the extremists would move south through Djibouti, through the Horn of Africa. So, wisely, we decided-- and it was mostly the decision by the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which I serve--we would assist Africa in developing five African brigades located north, south, east, west, and central. That has been undertaken, not as rapidly as I wish it were, but, nonetheless, that is happening. The recognition there is, as terrorism goes down through Africa, if they are prepared--and I am talking about the Africans--to handle that terrorism and to stop that terrorism as it comes in, then we will not have to send our troops in.

That is essentially what happened last week when the President decided to send these troops into the north central part of Africa to address the problem with the Lord's Resistance Army, or the LRA, and Joseph Kony.

The past few days have been kind of interesting, Rush Limbaugh yesterday talked about this issue, and somebody brought it to my attention. Even though I disagreed, I do not disagree with him as often as some on the other side do. But he made a statement. I am quoting now:

Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the

Lord's Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them.

Well, it is not true.

Have you ever heard of [them]?

He talked about it with three people who are always in his studio: Dawn and Brian and Snerdley.

Have you ever heard of [the] Lord's Resistance Army, Dawn?

``No.''

How about you, Brian?

``No.''

Snerdley, have you?

``No.''

You never heard of [the] Lord's Resistance Army? Well, that

proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it,

and here we are at war with them.

Let me clarify, and in a minute I will talk about what their mission is there. We are not at war with them. In fact, we are specifically precluding our troops from any kind of combat in that area. But I wish to put it in proper context as to the significance of this.

I have had an opportunity to spend a lot of time in Africa--more than any other Member of this U.S. Senate, or any other Member of any other Senate even before this. I have had many conversations over the last 15 years with President Museveni of Uganda and his First Lady Janet about the problem.

It all started in northern Uganda. In the 1980s Alice Lakwena had a dream in which she was told to overthrow the government of Uganda. Alice founded the Ugandan ``Holy Spirit Movement'' and led a group of rebels against the government. Eventually, Alice was exiled and, her cousin, Joseph Kony took over her group. What happened was, Joseph Kony, who fancies himself a spiritual leader, has gone in and started building--you can call them a number of different things: a children's army or the ``invisible'' children--but to go in and build this massive army of young people--I am talking about kids from the age of 12, 13, 14 years old; young kids--he goes out and abducts them from villages. Then they come in, and they teach them how to operate AK-47s, how to join this army he has put together. If they do not do it, or if they fail in their training, then they are mutilated.

I will show you a chart in the Chamber with a series of pictures. These are young kids. These pictures give you an idea of how young they are: 11, 12, 13 years old, with AK-47s. That is what their army looks like. See that little kid there, he is 11 years old. This one in this other picture is 12 years old. They are carrying heavy weapons.

For the ones who do not do what he tells them to do, they mutilate them. Here is another chart with more pictures. As you can see, they do it by cutting off their nose, cutting off their ears, cutting off their lips--that is a big thing they do--cutting off their hands.

You see this picture right here. His name, by the way, is John Ochola. He is one we have seen before. They have taken his ears off, his nose off, cut off both of his hands.

Here is another picture up here, and one down here. This is a young child. His lip is cut off, his nose is cut off, and his ear is cut off. You can see that. That had just happened. They bandaged him up.

Once they are in this army, to go back to their villages and murder their siblings, and murder their parents. If they do not do it, this is the price they pay.

Anyway, we have made the decision to go and help them--and we also have a program that is called train and equip, which I will talk about in a minute--but to go in and actually be of assistance to these countries; in this case, taking out this particular maniac who has been there for 25 years.

It is not just in Uganda. I went up to Gulu. Gulu is in the northern part of Uganda. Senator Mike Enzi was with me at this time. We went up and we saw a lot of these kids who came back who had been mutilated. We went down and talked to President Kagame, the President of Rwanda. You might remember, Rwanda, in 1994, is where the greatest, the most devastating murder by genocide in recorded history in Africa took place, killing 800,000 people, using machetes, torturing them to death. They had the same problem down there.

Then, if you go over to the DRC, Democratic Republic of the Congo, that is Joe Kabila. Joe Kabila is one who is very much concerned. Of course, Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, is way over on the western side, and it is several time zones over to the eastern side where Joseph Kony was killing these kids at that time. In fact, the major city over there is Goma. We were in Goma shortly before Kony escaped and went north to the Central African Republic, and then back up to South Sudan.

I had occasion to be in South Sudan last week. That is a new country. It was an exciting thing to go into a new country and sit down with their members of Parliament. We talked for a good 2 hours. We had 25 members of the Parliament of the brand new country, South Sudan, and they told me one of their major concerns right now is getting this guy Joseph Kony. He has now

been making runs up into South Sudan and getting these people. So this is a major thing that many of these countries have joined in to try to do something about Joseph Kony.

Well, anyway, last year, I got a little bit concerned that nothing was happening. One of the reasons--I have to say this, Mr. President-- nothing much was happening is because if you take these countries--like President Museveni and President Kagame, these Presidents came out of the bush. I think when they feel they are not able to get one renegade group such as this, they feel it is kind of a blow to their ego. Finally, I was able to get the three of them together--that was Joe Kabila, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and President Museveni of Uganda--and we were able to get them all to agree to do something to eradicate this monster. So they are now in a position to do that.

That is another reason why our forces serve in a non-combat role. For the U.S. to capture or kill Kony would be a slap in the face to our allies. I respect them too much to do so. In 2009, I led a bipartisan group of Senators to pass into law S. 1067. It was called the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009. We had 64 cosponsors. This is the largest number of cosponsors on any kind of bill affecting Africa in history. We had these Senators cosponsoring the bill, and they all were very excited about it.

Let me tell you what the law says. It directs the administration to develop a regional strategy to ``apprehend or remove'' Joseph Kony, his top LRA commanders, disarm and demobilize the LRA fighters through political, economic, military, and intelligence assistance, and protect civilians from further attacks.

The law is kind of interesting because it specifically precludes us from entering into any kind of battle. I think that is the most important thing to talk about today because almost everyone who is reporting on this, including my good friend Rush Limbaugh, is talking about that our guys and gals are going to go into combat. No, they are not going to. They are specifically precluded from doing that. So it is not as it is in Libya. It has nothing to do with the War Powers Act because these are troops that are precluded from attacking except in self defense.

The Senate Armed Services Committee reported out the FY12 Defense Authorization Act, and we specifically--I know this because this is my language that we put in--prohibit the U.S. military forces from participating in combat operations to ``apprehend or remove'' Kony and the LRA. This is my language I put in the bill. So not only are they not going to be in combat, but they are precluded from being in combat. That is what we have right now, and it is before us today.

By the way, some people have mistakenly said this guy Kony is a Christian, and I want to make sure everyone knows he officially was disavowed by the Catholic Church in Uganda. I will read what a Catholic sister of the Comboni Catholic group said, who spent 15 years in Gulu-- that is a place where I was some 15 years ago--in northern Uganda. I quote. This is a Catholic sister. She said:

I was in Gulu, North Uganda, when Joseph Kony took the

leadership of this group that became famous for its

atrocities. I saw people whose lips, mouth, ears, nose, were

mercilessly cut without provocation. I still remember the 6

men who came to our premises in Gulu crying, asking for help

as 3 of them had their right hand cut off--

As we saw a minute ago.

and the other three the right foot [cut off by machetes].

It was all done by the LRA. I am going on, still quoting this Catholic nun:

. . . people cut into pieces with the machete, burnt alive

after smearing their bodies with palm oil, small children

locked in the hut and set fire on it [burned alive], babies

pounded in the container used to pound the maze. Let us not

forget women and girls raped, killed or abducted as sex

slaves. . . . a Congolese lady on Christmas Day 2008 lost 17

members of her family who had gone to church for prayer, all

killed with the machete.

This is brutality we have never seen anything like before.

I think the other thing that is important to understand is we have several programs that affect Africa and other places around the world. One is called train and equip authorized by sections 1206, 1207, or 1208. What we do with train and equip is send people in to teach them how to train people, in this case Africa. We have over a thousand U.S. forces right now doing essentially what these 100 who the President sent over are there to do. Our military-to-military programs include counterterrorism, border security, maritime surveillance, and all this, but not combat.

As I say, No. 1, the thing to remember is, we are already doing this. What we are doing with the 100 people who are sent over to Africa--we have a thousand there already doing this.

Then, secondly, it is something that is very significant in our fight against terrorism in that area. We are not going to have any of our troops in combat. But this type of thing you see in these pictures right here--to see this guy here with his nose cut off, his ears cut off, his hands cut off--all of this--this is going on today, right now, at this moment, as we are speaking.

I stand behind the President in his decision. I do not very often stand behind this President, but I do in this case because we passed it without a dissenting vote. Every Member in here--there is not one who voted against it. So let's keep that in mind, that is the truth about what is happening now with the LRA. Joseph Kony and the LRA are responsible for one of the longest, most violent, and costly conflicts ever on the continent of Africa.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for up to 20 minutes as if in morning business.

Let me make one comment to the Senator from Illinois. I am glad he said what he did. It is very significant. People don't look at Iran as seriously as they should. It is not even classified that Iran is going to have the capability of a weapon of mass destruction and a nuclear warhead and a delivery system by 2015. That was the very reason they were going to have a ground-based interceptor in Poland, so we can defend against something coming from that direction, since all our ground-based interceptors are on the west coast in Alaska and southern California.

When we see things such as this, and the fact that they are coming out and doing things they haven't done before, that just tells me our expectations of their nuclear capability are very true and it is very serious

Jobs Bill

That is not what I want to talk about. In the wake of the defeat of President Obama's jobs bill, I wished to give a couple thoughts here and then talk about something we better look out for in the future. That jobs bill failed by a large margin, and we heard the President say: Pass the bill, pass the bill, pass the bill. We didn't pass the bill. I can see why the President wants to consider passing some kind of jobs bill right away, when we stop and remember what he did with the last one. The last stimulus bill was $825 billion. This package was rammed through the Congress shortly after he entered office. The Recovery Act, as it was called, had only $27 billion out of $825 billion for roads and highways. The occupier of the chair is very well aware of my concern over infrastructure in America.

I remember when that bill was on the floor and Senator Boxer, from California, and I had an amendment to increase that amount. It was only 3 percent of the total of $825 billion that would go to roads, highways, maintenance, bridges, and this type of thing--only 3 percent. We were trying to raise that to 30 percent. If that had happened, then look where we would be today. We would have the jobs, we would have all the shovel-ready jobs throughout America.

In my State of Oklahoma, our portion of that would have been well spent just distributed in the way that we had the formula after the 2005 highway reauthorization bill. Anyway, that actually was only 3 percent. It was only $27 billion out of $825 billion. The one we just defeated was a $447 billion stimulus bill. It only had $27 billion in roads, highways, construction, maintenance--the things that provide jobs and the things this country needs.

I have been ranked as the most conservative Member of the Senate seven different times in the past. Yet I readily say I am a big spender in two areas: One is national defense and the other is infrastructure. I think that is what we are supposed to be doing here. We are in a desperate situation with our infrastructure around the country.

So one might say, well, the President had the $825 billion stimulus package and only $27.5 billion went to roads and highways. What happened to the rest of it? Well, the rest of it, in spite of what he said--I am going to read what he said--right after the passage of the bill, when he was signing the bill, the $825 billion stimulus bill, he said:

What I'm signing, then, is a balanced plan with a mix of

tax cuts and investments. It's a plan that has been put

together without earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending.

It's a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented

level of transparency and accountability.

Well, stop and remember as I tell my colleagues what this actually went for. It is clear the most recent example was this loan guarantee with Solyndra. Everyone here is aware of what happened with Solyndra. We know it was a firm that was producing supposedly green energy. We know the people who were behind this loan guarantee of $535 million were big contributors to the administration, and they went ahead and were able to get bailed out--not bailed out, but get their loan guarantee--costing the taxpayers $\1/2\ billion, and that is part of what was in this bill. That is where the money was. The genesis of that was the $825 billion stimulus bill.

I am reminiscing a little bit about what happened back in the middle 1990s, back when Bill Clinton was President of the United States, when we had a very similar thing happen at that time. There is a company called the Loral Corporation. The Loral Corporation is headed up by Bernard Schwartz. Bernard Schwartz was one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic national party and to Bill Clinton. Bernard Schwartz, the company, the Loral Corporation, built a guidance system for a missile so that missile could be more accurate. Even though China wanted to have that system so they would be able to guide their missiles more accurately, for obvious reasons we didn't want them to have it. So it took a waiver signed by the President of the United States. President Bill Clinton did it. He signed the waiver and they got the money. I see similarities in here. I think, again, everyone is familiar with that.

How did they get the money? Where did it come from? The $825 billion in the stimulus bill.

Let's look. Since the President gave that statement, which I will read again--he said:

What I'm signing, then, is a balanced plan with a mix of

tax cuts and investments. It's a plan that has been put

together without earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending.

What do we call the Solyndra thing? It is porkbarrel spending.

What about the earmarks? This is a confusing thing for most people because my well-meaning conservative friends in the House of Representatives a couple of years ago put a 1-year moratorium on earmarks, and earmarks would be defined, of course, as appropriations or authorizations. By doing that, it totally contradicts what the Constitution, article I, section 9, says we are supposed to be doing here. It says we are supposed to be doing the appropriations and the authorizations. That is specifically precluded from the President in the article of the Constitution. So it is one that was very obvious. We find out later that the person who was behind that was none other than President Obama.

There is a reason for this. Because most people don't understand there are two different kinds of earmarks. One is congressional earmarks. That is when

a Congressman, a lot of times in the dark of night, will try to put something down that maybe is not in the best interests of the United States but helps his district. That occasionally happens. It shouldn't happen. Under our system, it won't happen if we require all appropriations to be authorized. But the other kind, in addition to the congressional earmarks, are bureaucratic earmarks. That is what the President can do.

I will give an example. I am on the Armed Services Committee. The President's budget comes out. He says what we should spend money on to defend America. A couple of years ago, before this moratorium the Republicans put on in the House, one of the lines he had in his budget was $330 million for a launch system called a bucket of rockets. It was a good system, and I would like to have that system for defending America. But we thought in our committee that the same $330 million would be better spent on buying six new FA-18E/F model strike fighters for our Air Force. Well, we could do that, except that would be called an earmark. When we destroy an earmark, we don't save any money, we just say, Mr. President, we are not going to do it, so you go ahead and you do it. Consequently, we were able to take the $330 million and put it in the FA-18s, but after that would pass, that would be called an earmark, and so the President would have all the power.

If we look back at the $825 billion stimulus bill, we can look at some of the things that were in there. He said he wasn't going to have any earmarks. These are Presidential earmarks: $219,000 to study the hookup behavior of female college co-eds in New York; $1.1 million to pay for the beautification of Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard; $10,000 to study whether mice become disoriented when they consume alcohol in Florida; $712,000 to develop machine-generated humor in Illinois; $259,000 for foreign bus wheel polishers in California. It goes on and on.

There is $150,000 for a Massachusetts middle school to build a solar array system on its roof; $1 million to do research on fossils in Argentina. Here is a good one. I will not attribute this to my two good friends who are Senators from Wyoming, but $1.2 million to build an underpass for deer in Wyoming.

That is what the President put in. Those are all earmarks. Consequently, I think what we are trying to get to here is if he had been successful in the $447 billion stimulus bill earlier this week, then we could anticipate the same type of thing happening.

I want the conservatives of America to wake up to the fact that the problems we have, when they talk about earmarks, are not congressional earmarks, they are bureaucratic earmarks.

It wasn't long ago that Sean Hannity on his show had a feature, I think it took him several nights to do it. It was the 102 most egregious earmarks. He named all of these earmarks, one after another, and went on and on and on. I came down to the Senate floor the morning after that and I read that same list. There were 102 earmarks, very similar to what I read. The interesting thing about it--and I said this on the Senate floor at that time--what did these 102 earmarks have in common? Not one was a congressional earmark. They were all bureaucratic earmarks.

We are going to be attempting to do something about this, because it is something that almost everyone would agree needs to be done. What we are going to introduce and the bill I am working on now, and I am gathering some cosponsors, is legislation that will bring real transparency and accountability to this process. It would do this by involving Congress in the grant-making process.

Right now, agencies are required to disclose a lot of information about grant awards, but not until after they are already awarded. We don't know about them. Even we here in this Chamber don't know about them until some unelected bureaucrat actually makes these what I would refer to as bureaucratic earmarks. So it is setting up a system very similar to the Congressional Review Act.

The Congressional Review Act lets us look at the regulations and have a process by which we can stop the bureaucrats from passing regulations that we may think as elected Members, elected by the people, are not good. This will do essentially the same thing the CRA does for regulations, it would do for these earmarks. So it is something we will be active in. I think back now, if we had not defeated that $447 billion stimulus bill the first part of this week, we would be looking at right now, and I am sure they would be putting together, their list of earmarks.

I think we have an opportunity now to do two things. No. 1, when the President--and I say when, and not if--when the President comes up with another jobs bill, let's look at it very carefully to make sure we have everything specifically in there if it is going to be deserving of our votes. I say that to each individual, Democrat and Republican, in this Chamber.

The second thing is make sure we don't open the door for him to be able to come up with another several hundred billion dollars of earmarks as we did in the $825 billion stimulus bill 2 years ago.

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

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

Madam President, since there is no one seeking time right now, even though I have used my time, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized again for up to 10 minutes.

Madam President, I heard a report today from Senator Murkowski. Apparently, the Energy Committee had a hearing on the 90-day shale gas report. I think this is very significant. I am sure she will come down and talk about it in detail. I didn't even know about it until noon today when she gave her report and I happened to be there, but it is something that is very significant.

In this country we talk about energy and the fact that we have enough energy we can produce domestically in the United States of America to run this country for 100 years in terms of gas, with present consumption, and 50 years as far as oil is concerned, and we are dependent upon oil, gas, and coal to run this country, and those are something--a lot of people are saying we have to do away with fossil fuels. Every time I hear people say that, it is kind of laughable, when they say we have to do something about our dependence on foreign oil by doing away with our own production in this country.

Our problem is not that we do not have the amount of coal, oil, and gas that we need to be totally independent from anybody. We do. But, politically, we have obstacles. There is not one other country in the world where the politicians will not let that country develop its own resources except for the United States of America.

It is kind of interesting. It was not too long ago when President Obama, who is very much in line with some of the far-left environmentalists who want to do away with fossil fuels, was realizing people were catching on, and people knew that with all the shale deposits that are out there--and every week that goes by, we find another great big opportunity for shale; this is both oil and gas--and the President said gas is plentiful, and we need to use more gas, and all that. But at the end of his speech, he said: We have to do something about that procedure called hydraulic fracturing.

Anyone who understands energy knows that to get at all of these deposits--these shale deposits of gas or oil--you have to use a procedure called hydraulic fracturing. It happens we know something about it in my State of Oklahoma because in 1948 the first well was cracked, and we have not had one documented case in 60 years of ground water contamination as a result of hydraulic fracturing. So it is something that does work.

But those individuals who want to make people think they are wanting us

to develop our own resources then turn around and say we are going to stop or have the Federal Government regulate hydraulic fracturing. It is totally inconsistent, and I think it is a direct effort to misinform the people.

So in this meeting today, Senator Murkowski did a handout, and I am going to read a couple of the quotes from some of the people who had previously testified before the committee. Keep in mind, this is after a 90-day shale gas report. They talked about hydraulic fracturing and all of that.

One quote is from Dr. Daniel Yergin, who is chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and he is a bestselling author. He said:

There's a gap in perception--this idea that oil and gas is

not regulated. We were all impressed by the quality and the

focus, the long experience of the states in regulating oil

and gas. . . . There's a strong backbone to it and that is

not as well recognized in some circles. So I think there is a

very strong fabric here.

Here is a quote. This is from Kathleen McGinty. I remember her from when she was an aide to Al Gore. She was chair of the Council on Environmental Quality during the Clinton administration. She said:

We didn't come up with any conclusion--

This is the 90-day shale report--

that the deck chairs need to be shuffled around. . . . There

was nothing in the testimony that we heard or in the

substance that we focused on or in the ``what'' needed to be

done that led to a glaring conclusion that there was an actor

missing from the scene.

Well, this is someone who comes from, completely, the other side. So I think it is very important. The more times you look at this thing, the more there is an awareness of the people--that is heightened almost on a daily basis--that we have all this opportunity, and we are not doing it just because of the political obstacles.

Dr. Stephen Holditch is the petroleum engineering department head, Samuel Roberts Noble chair, and professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. He said:

Local control, local understanding of best practices is

really the best way to go. . . . There's nothing broken with

the system now.

My State of Oklahoma is an oil State. A lot of our stuff is pretty shallow. On the other hand, in the Anadarko Basin, we have some of the more deep things. But if you look, for 60 years the States have regulated hydraulic fracturing, and it has worked very well. It is not one of these one-size-fits-all because in some States--when you get in New York and Pennsylvania, now, and the Marcellus Shale, the stuff is pretty deep, but it is abundant. Well, the regulation there would be different than it would be in my State of Oklahoma or in Louisiana or in New Mexico or any of the other oil States.

I was really glad to see this come out, and I am glad Senator Murkowski is now letting people become aware of it because we have enough oil, gas, and coal to be totally independent, if we can just get the obstacles out of the way. One of the techniques used in being able to recover this, of course, is hydraulic fracturing. So that is why a lot of the people who are trying to shut down fossil fuels are trying to shut down that process.

I had an experience--I wish I could remember the name of the company, but it was in Broken Arrow, OK--during the recess, where I was calling on different people, and there was a young man who started a company. He had been with a larger one. He is making platforms for hydraulic fracturing. Now, a platform is about one-fourth of the size of this Chamber I am speaking in right now. It is a very large thing. On the platform, so they can hydraulically fracture these wells, they have a very large diesel engine. A regulation came through--I was not even aware of this until I sat down with him; this is less than 1 month ago--he said the regulation was that you can no longer build platforms and use them for hydraulic fracturing unless you have a tier 4 engine.

Well, we went to check, and he was right. There is no tier 4 engine. It is on the drawing boards, but it is not available commercially now. So that is just another way through regulation they are trying to do away with hydraulic fracturing.

So we have to be on our toes, and we have to have a wake-up call for the American people. If we want to have good, clean, abundant, cheap energy, we have it right here in the United States of America, and we need to knock down the political obstacles and develop our own resources like everybody else does.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks by the senior Senator from Ohio I be recognized.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent at the conclusion of my remarks that Senator Harkin be recognized.

Mr. President, recently both the majority leader and the minority leader came down to the floor to talk about the President's jobs bill. There was an effort to bring up this bill by the minority leader, and it was objected to by the majority leader. And I understand that, but all we have heard from the President from the very first time he introduced this was ``pass the bill, pass the bill, pass the bill.'' I know there is some reason he keeps using that phrase over and over. It has probably been tested and is one that I think he believes will move a lot of people. Frankly, I don't think it will because too many people remember what happened the last time he had a stimulus bill. That is something which has not been really discussed on the floor in consideration of what he refers to as the jobs bill. So I can see why he keeps talking about passing the bill, because he doesn't really want to talk about it.

His new proposal reminds me so much of that $825 billion stimulus package he rammed through Congress shortly after entering office. It is almost the same thing. The Recovery Act is the $825 billion act. It included only $27.5 billion in highway spending, which was the stimulus portion of that bill. We are talking about 3 percent of the $825 billion.

I am particularly sensitive to this since I have in the past been the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and I am now the ranking member. We have a Transportation reauthorization bill we are trying to get up and get up on a bipartisan basis.

Back during the consideration of the Recovery Act, the $825 billion, I tried to pass an amendment on this floor to increase that to about 30 percent instead of 3 percent of the bill. If that had happened, we would not be in the situation we are today. We would have a lot of jobs out there that would be under construction and good things would be happening.

In the case of this $447 billion bill, which is kind of the Recovery Act lite, there is only $27 billion in highway spending, and it is not conceivable that he didn't learn his lesson from the first go-around that that is the main reason people are upset with it right now. That is the reason he keeps saying: Pass the bill, pass the bill.

The proposal includes a few different things, but much of it will be sent to the President to spend however he wants. Now, you may be wondering, will Congress tell the President where to spend the money? To a very limited extent, that is right. When Congress does not tell the President exactly what he is to do with each dime he gets, the President gets to decide what to fund.

This administration has a history of making incredibly poor spending decisions with the money appropriated to it. The biggest example I can think of is the $825 billion stimulus package. When the President signed this bill in February of 2009, he said--and I want you to hold this thought--he said:

What I'm signing, then, is a balanced plan with a mix of

tax cuts and investments. It's a plan that's been put

together without earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending.

It's a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented

level of transparency and accountability.

That is what he said. That is a direct quote. For those of you who are watching, I have news for you: Despite the President's remarks, the spending was not balanced, and it had a tremendous amount of porkbarrel earmark spending even though there were no congressional earmarks. This is a distinction not many people make. I tried to get this point across back when the Republicans very foolishly talked about having a moratorium on earmarks. I said: Those are congressional earmarks. That is not where the problem is. The problem is in bureaucratic earmarks.

The clearest and most recent example of a huge earmark is the loan guarantee that was given to Solyndra. We have been reading about this and hearing about it recently. It is now a bankrupt solar panel manufacturing company. We have heard about that. Solyndra was a politically connected firm from California that was able to lobby the White House to obtain a loan guarantee of $535 million to fund its green jobs pipedream. This happened despite the fact that some in the administration were warning the White House to give them more time to evaluate the company's finances. It seems they were concerned about the company's long-term viability. But these warnings were ignored by the White House. They wanted to fund the project anyway. Why? I think it was for two reasons: First, the White House has a fascination with green energy; second, political gamesmanship. Some of Solyndra's biggest investors are big fundraisers and have been big fundraisers for President Obama. We now know they made repeated visits to the White House. That is not just a coincidence.

Another question is this: How did the White House have the authority to give the loan guarantee to Solyndra in the first place? The short answer is Obama's stimulus package. That was the $825 billion stimulus package. It significantly expanded the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program, and with this expansion the White

House was able to select Solyndra for a loan guarantee.

While the stimulus package did not include any porkbarrel spending in the way that most people think about it--congressional earmarks--this provides clarity to the fact that when Congress does not explicitly state where taxpayer funds should go, the money is handed over to the administration to spend however they want. They get to earmark every last dime.

In the case of Solyndra, the President handed it over to his political buddies who were in favor of the green energy projects. If that isn't a porkbarrel project, I don't know what is. Now the damage has been done, and the taxpayers are going to be on the hook for as much as $535 million in losses.

Sadly, Solyndra is just one of many examples of porkbarrel spending in the stimulus bill. We are talking about the first stimulus bill, the $825 billion bill. Not too long ago, Sean Hannity had on his program--I think it took him two programs to get it through--the 102 most egregious earmarks that are recorded. It is really kind of interesting. In fact, I have the whole list here, and I am going to ask that it be made a part of the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

I would love to be able to name all of these. These are just ridiculous. There is $219,000 to study the hookup behavior of female college co-eds in New York; $1.1 million to pay for the beautification of Los Angeles, Sunset Boulevard; $10,000 to study whether mice become disoriented when they consume alcohol in Florida. It goes on and on. Again, there are 102 of these. These are the most egregious.

What is interesting is that the day after Sean Hannity exposed these earmarks--102 of them--I came to the floor and I read all 102 of them. I said: What do these 102 earmarks have in common? The answer: Not one is a congressional earmark. They are all bureaucratic earmarks. They all came from the $825 billion.

Remember I said a minute ago that he said there will be no earmarks in this package? It is the same thing he is saying about this second go-around for the jobs bill he is talking about today. The administration took $825 billion that Congress gave it and chose to spend it on stupid things such as the ones I just listed, but there are 102 of them. I hope he will take the time, since it will be in the Record, to read all 102 of them.

What does this have to do with the jobs bill? To me, the jobs bill is simply the President coming back to Congress to ask for more money to spend however he wants on porkbarrel projects such as these. No one has talked about this on the floor. They have talked about the problems they have with this spending bill and why it is really not a jobs bill, but no one is talking about the fact that this is exactly what he did before. I don't know why we are not talking about this and featuring this because if he said before that there were going to be no earmarks and then he had 102 egregious earmarks, why would he not do the same thing now? The answer is, he would do it. He would like to hand this out to his cronies in ways that would best benefit him.

You may remember the President's State of the Union Address from earlier this year. In it, he promised, and I quote, ``If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.'' Well, you have a promise from the President that unless Congress gives him all of the authority to determine how money is spent through the bureaucratic earmark process, he will veto the bill. In other words, he will veto a bill unless he has total authority on how to spend it, and he can spend it on his own earmarks in spite of the fact that he said there will be no earmarks. So for any jobs bill to be considered, Congress is going to have to let the President decide how all the money is being spent. It is a hard concept to get ahold of.

``Earmarks'' has become a dirty word, and people assume that when you say ``earmarks,'' you are talking about congressional earmarks. That is not the problem. I have legislation I am going to be talking about that will correct this and better inform the public as to what is really going on. So we are finding ourselves in the same situation again.

What is worse is the fact that the problem of bureaucratic earmarks is not limited to special stimulus packages. It is a normal course of business. On any given day, the administration is making thousands of decisions on how to spend money it has appropriated. Congress first passes laws authorizing the executive branch to do certain things, and then we appropriate the money and go and do it. But unless Congress gives specific instructions as to where to spend the money--a process many people decry as congressional earmarks--the administration gets to decide where to spend the money. In other words, the bureaucracy does the earmark or President Obama does it.

I serve on the Armed Services Committee. We are staffed with experts in defending America. We have experts in missile defense, experts in lift capability, all of that. The way it has always happened before is the President--whether it was President Bush or Clinton or any other President--designs a budget, and that budget, the parameters, goes to Congress. Then we in the authorization committees decide if we agree with the President and how he wants to defend America.

A good example of that is that right before the prohibition on earmarks came in, the President sent his budget down--I think that was his first budget--and in that budget was $330 million for a launching system. It was called a Bucket of Rockets. It was a good system. It was something I would like to have for defending America. But when we analyzed it, we looked and we thought, with what is happening right now, our greatest need is to expand our F-18 program and buy six new F- 18s. So we took the $330 million he would have spent on the rocket- launching system and spent it on six new F-18s, and it was a wise thing to do. You can't do that now because the President has to make all of the decisions because that would be called a congressional earmark.

Earmarks don't increase spending at all. All they do is say: All right, Mr. President, you go ahead and spend it the way you want to. A recent example of this comes from the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior.

While I could talk for hours about whether the management of Federal lands is appropriate for government to do, that is not what I want to bring your attention to. That is another discussion for another time. What I am concerned about is how carefully the Bureau of Land Management works to keep its actions aligned with the authorization and power it has been given by Congress. We write laws for a reason. We say the bureaucracy can do certain things and not do certain things. When we do that, we are limiting the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy's authority. We are not saying they can interpret the law in any way they choose, but generally that doesn't stop them from trying.

One thing the Bureau of Land Management is authorized to do by a statute is to enter into contracts and cooperative agreements to manage, protect, develop, and sell public lands. In managing public lands, title 43 authorizes the BLM to, among others things, preserve the land's historic value.

A few days ago, as I was searching through the government's grants database--by the way, this database is something we put in when Republicans were a majority in our committee. The Environment and Public Works Committee has a database which will show people, if they care to wander through, just what the bureaucracy is spending money on.

I was looking through the grants database, and I came across one that shocked me. On September 9 of this year, just a few days ago, the BLM announced its intent to award a grant of $214,000 to the Public Land Foundation to fund a research project to describe in detail why the Homestead Act of 1862 had a significant impact on the history of America. When I asked them to justify that, they started talking about how important history is.

Today, my question is this: What part of this grant has anything to do with today's actual public lands? This is not a grant to dust off the historic landmarks at national parks. This is a research project to study history, which may be a noble task, but nonetheless that is what it is for.

What the American people need to understand is that this sort of thing happens all the time. The bureaucracy is completely numb to the fact that we have a $1.5 trillion deficit just in this year alone, and while this should inform the way it spends money and help to prioritize accordingly, it doesn't. The bureaucracy takes the money given to it by Congress and spends it on porkbarrel projects that are important to the President. Right now, there is no way around this. There is no accountability or transparency built into it in any way. The bureaucracy earmarks its funds.

I believe this needs to be changed, and I am currently drafting legislation that will change the way the bureaucracy makes funding decisions. My legislation will bring true transparency and accountability to the process, and it will require the administration to state explicitly which laws authorize its grant awards. It will also provide a way for Congress to weigh in and challenge the administration's thinking. This is not just for the current administration; it is for any administration.

With trillions of dollars in deficits, we cannot afford to give the President another $447 billion to spend on whatever he wants because that is what it would be. We need to reduce spending, but we also need to ensure that the spending we are doing is justified by the laws Congress passes. Because of this, we need to bring more light and accountability to the bureaucratic earmarking process.

Further, I warn my colleagues to not be fooled into the idea that whenever we pass money off to the administration, it is in safe hands. The opposite is true, and I urge my colleagues to oppose more blank check stimulus spending because of it.

Again, after President Obama stated on February 17, 2009, there will be no earmarks in his $825 billion stimulus bill, it contained more than 100 very egregious, offensive earmarks. I could--again, I am not going to read off the list, but it will be a part of the Record following these remarks I am making now.

He will do it again. If we pass another $450 billion stimulus bill, we can be sure it will be full of earmarks as bad as the ones he put in the initial stimulus bill.

This is our second blank check for the President. He fooled us once. Do not let it happen again.

With that, I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

Bureaucratic Earmarks in the Stimulus Bill

102. Protecting a Michigan insect collection from other

insects ($187,632)

101. Highway beautified by fish art in Washington ($10,000)

100. University studying hookup behavior of female college

coeds in New York ($219,000)

99. Police department getting 92 blackberries for

supervisors in Rhode Island ($95,000)

98. Upgrades to seldom-used river cruise boat in Oklahoma

($1.8 million)

97. Precast concrete toilet buildings for Mark Twain

National Forest in Montana ($462,000)

96. University studying whether mice become disoriented

when they consume alcohol in Florida ($8,408)

95. Foreign bus wheel polishers for California ($259,000)

94. Recovering crab pots lost at sea in Oregon ($700,000)

93. Developing a program to develop ``machine-generated

humor'' in Illinois ($712,883)

92. Colorado museum where stimulus was signed (and already

has $90 million in the bank) gets geothermal stimulus grant

($2.6 million)

91. Grant to the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance to

support the traditional arts apprenticeship program,

gathering and festival ($30,000)

90. Studying methamphetamines and the female rat sex drive

in Maryland ($30,000)

89. Studying mating decisions of cactus bugs in Florida

($325,394)

88. Studying why deleting a gene can create sex reversal in

people, but not in mice in Minnesota ($190,000)

87. College hires director for project on genetic control

of sensory hair cell membrane channels in zebra fish in

California ($327,337)

86. New jumbo recycling bins with microchips embedded

inside to track participation in Ohio ($500,000)

85. Oregon Federal Building's ``green'' renovation at

nearly the price of a brand new building ($133 million)

84. Massachusetts middle school getting money to build a

solar array on its roof ($150,000)

83. Road widening that could have been millions of dollars

cheaper if Louisiana hadn't opted to replace a bridge that

may not have needed replacing ($60 million)

82. Cleanup effort of a Washington nuclear waste site that

already got $12 billion from the Department of Energy ($1.9

billion)

81. Six woodlands water taxis getting a new home in Texas

($750,000)

80. Maryland group gets money to develop ``real life''

stories that underscore job and infrastructure-related

research findings ($363,760)

79. Studying social networks, such as Facebook, in North

Carolina ($498,000)

78. Eighteen (18) North Carolina teacher coaches to

heighten math and reading performance ($4.4 million)

77. Retrofitting light switches with motion sensors for one

company in Arizona ($800,000)

76. Removing graffiti along 100 miles of flood-control

ditches in California ($837,000)

75. Bicycle lanes, shared lane signs and bike racks in

Pennsylvania ($105,000)

74. Privately-owned steakhouse rehabilitating its

restaurant space in Missouri ($75,000)

73. National dinner cruise boat company in Illinois

outfitting vessels with surveillance systems to protect

against terrorists ($1 million)

72. Producing and transporting peanuts and peanut butter in

North Carolina ($900,000)

71. Refurnishing and delivering picnic tables in Iowa

($30,000)

70. Digital television converter box coupon program in D.C.

($650,000)

69. Elevating and relocating 3,000' of track for the Napa

Valley Wine Train in California ($54 million)

68. Hosting events for Earth Day, the summer solstice, in

Minnesota ($50,000)

67. Expanding ocean aquaculture in Hawaii ($99,960)

66. Raising railroad tracks 18 inches in Oregon because the

residents of one small town were tired of taking a detour

around them ($4.2 million)

65. Professors and employees of Iowa state universities

voluntarily taking retirement ($43 million)

64. Minnesota theatre named after Che Guevara putting on

``socially conscious'' puppet shows ($25,000)

63. Replacing a basketball court lighting system with a

more energy efficient one in Arizona ($20,000)

62. Repainting and adding a security camera to one bridge

in Oregon ($3.5 million)

61. Missouri bridge project that already was full-funded

with state money ($8 million)

60. New hospital parking garage in New York that will

employ less people ($19.5 million)

59. University in North Carolina studying why adults with

ADHD smoke more ($400,000)

58. Low-income housing residents in one Minnesota city

receiving free laptops, WiFi and iPod Touches to ``educate''

them in technology ($5 million)

57. University in California sending students to Africa to

study why Africans vote the way they do in their elections

($200,000)

56. Researching the impact of air pollution combined with a

high-fat diet on obesity development in Ohio ($225,000)

55. Studying how make and female birds care for their

offspring and how it compares to how humans care for their

children in Oklahoma ($90,000)

54. University in Pennsylvania researching fossils in

Argentina (over $1 million)

53. University in Tennessee studying how black holes form

(over $1 million)

52. University in Oklahoma sending 3 researchers to Alaska

to study grandparents and how they pass on knowledge to

younger generations ($1.5 million)

51. Grant application from a Pennsylvania university for a

researcher named in the Climate-gate scandal (Rep. Darrell

Issa is calling on the president to freeze the grant)

($500,000)

50. Studying the impact of global warming on wild flowers

in a Colorado ghost town ($500,000)

49. Bridge build over railroad crossing so 168 Nebraska

town residents don't have to wait for the trains to pass ($7

million)

48. Renovating an old hotel into a visitors center in

Kentucky ($300,000)

47. Removing overgrown weeds in a Rhode Island park

($250,000)

46. Renovating 5 seldom-used ports of entry on the U.S.-

Canada border in Montana ($77 million)

45. Testing how to control private home appliances in

Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts from an off-site computer

($800,000)

44. Repainting a rarely-used bridge in North Carolina ($3.1

million)

43. Renovating a desolate Wisconsin bridge that averages 10

cars a day ($426,000)

42. Four new buses for New Hampshire ($2 million)

41. Re-paving a 1-mile stretch of Atlanta road that had

parts of it already re-paved in 2007 ($490,000)

40. Florida beauty school tuition ($2.3 million)

39. Extending a bike path to the Minnesota Twins stadium

($500,000)

38. Beautification of Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard ($1.1

million)

37. Colorado Dragon Boat Festival ($10,000)

36. Developing the next generation of supersonic corporate

jets in Maryland that could cost $80 million each ($4.7

million)

35. New spring training facilities for the Arizona

Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies ($30 million)

34. Demolishing 35 old laboratories in New Mexico ($212

million)

33. Putting free WiFi, Internet kiosks and interactive

history lessons in 2 Texas rest stops ($13.8 million)

32. Replacing a single boat motor in a government boat in

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

Madam President, I wanted to come to the floor today because 2 days ago I got the results of an inspector general's report that I requested 18 months ago having to do with the endangerment finding of the EPA. While it is a little bit complicated, I will go back and put this in perspective.

Back in the 1990s, we were asked by the then-Clinton administration to ratify a treaty called the Kyoto treaty. This was a treaty that was aimed at the reduction of greenhouse gases--anthropogenic gases and this type of thing. Well, it didn't pass. It went down 95 to 0 because of two reasons: We all declared in this body we weren't going to ratify any treaty that, No. 1, was damaging economically to the country; and, No. 2, we would treat developing countries differently than developed nations. Of course this missed on both those criteria.

After that happened, it became popular by some of the more radical environmentalist groups who enjoy the overregulation we have so much of in this country to seek the introduction of different bills. We had the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003 and again in 2005. We had the Warner- Lieberman bill and several others--the Sanders-Boxer bill--and then, I guess, the last one was a House bill called the Waxman-Markey bill.

Anyway, these bills were all aimed at what we can do in this country in order to restrict our use of CO2. Obviously--and there is no disagreement on this--if we in the United States unilaterally reduce our CO2, it will not affect the CO2 emissions worldwide because this isn't where the problem lies.

Even when I asked Lisa Jackson, the Obama-appointed Administrator at the EPA, for whom I have a great deal of respect, if we were to pass any of these bills I just mentioned--that would have the effect of the Kyoto treaty but only on the United States in reducing anthropogenic gases--would this have the effect of reducing CO2 emissions, she said, no, because, as I pointed out, this would only affect the United States.

I would take the argument one step further and say it would have the effect of increasing, not decreasing, emissions because, as our manufacturing base has to find power to generate itself, they have to go where that is. Anyway, I only wanted to bring that up because that effort is still going on today.

With all these bills that have been before us--and at the time of most of them the Republicans were in the majority and I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee which had jurisdiction over this subject--I was the one who stood on the floor of the Senate to defeat these bills, and it became easier as each bill came along because people recognized that while the science is in question, the economics are not.

It had been determined by a number of sources--including a branch of the Wharton School of Economics, MIT, and CRA, or Charles River Associates--that the range of the cost of a cap-and-trade bill is always in the range of between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.

It is confusing when we talk about these large numbers. Peoples' eyes glaze over. They do not understand, and even I have a hard time understanding how this affects me and my 20 kids and grandkids out in Oklahoma. So I have a system--and I recommend it to my friends in the Senate--that I take the number of family income tax returns that are filed each year--get a current figure--and then I do my math. So this range between $300 billion and $400 billion, when we reduce it down to what it would cost each family, is in excess of $3,000 a year. Even if we were to pass something like this, it still wouldn't reduce the emissions, and that is what we need to get over.

Anyway, when President Obama saw this, he saw there was no way in the world the Senate or the House would pass a cap-and-trade bill. So he decided to do it just by regulation, and we have been talking about overregulation in the Senate. Sometimes we are inclined to think the antibusiness attitude of this administration is just in overtaxation and this type of thing. That is not true. Overregulation is also a killer. In this case, we are talking about the overregulation of something we cannot sustain.

So in order for the President to be able to do through regulation what he could not do through legislation, he had to have what they call an endangerment finding; that is, the Environmental Protection Agency had to come up with a conclusion that CO2 is dangerous to our health. It is called an endangerment finding.

I was getting ready to go over to a meeting in Copenhagen they have every year. These people who are promoting these programs have these meetings, and I was getting ready to go over there, and we had Administrator Jackson before our committee. I remember looking at her and saying: I am leaving for Copenhagen tomorrow. Shall I assume you are going to have an endangerment finding as soon as I leave town? She didn't answer, but she smiled. She smiles a lot. Anyway, that is what happened when I left.

An endangerment finding has to be based on science, and that is where this inspector general's report came in. Again, this is new stuff, just 2 days ago. I had requested 18 months ago that they look into the endangerment finding to see if this, in fact, is based on science. Of course, they came out with

this report, which was just released. It confirms the endangerment finding, which was the very foundation of President Obama's job- destroying regulatory agenda, was rushed--and I am using their words, ``rushed, biased and flawed.'' It calls the scientific integrity of the EPA's decisionmaking process into question and undermines the credibility of the endangerment finding.

Keep in mind, we have to have an endangerment finding before we can start regulating all this stuff. Well, the inspector general's investigation uncovered the EPA's failure to engage in the required recordkeeping process leading up to the endangerment finding. That is a requirement by law. So they did not comply with the law at that time. It also did not follow its own peer review procedures. Peer review is something that is required, and they didn't do it.

Administrator Jackson readily admitted way back in 2009 that the EPA had outsourced its scientific review to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Now, this is interesting because they are going back to say: All right, you guys. You do the peer review on the very thing you have developed. Well, it doesn't work that way, and I think at that time we were complaining about that. So the EPA still refused to conduct its own independent review of the science, as the EPA inspector general found. Whatever one thinks of the U.N. science, the EPA is still required by its own procedures, by law, to conduct an independent review.

Of course, I have long warned about the IPCC process and what they have been doing in the past. In fact, it was 6 years ago that I sent a letter to Dr. Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, specifically raising the many weaknesses of the IPCC's peer review process. But Dr. Pachauri dismissed my concerns, and here is what Reuters said in their article on how Dr. Pachauri responded to my request. I am quoting now from Reuters:

In the one-page letter, [Pachauri] denies the IPCC has an

alarmist bias and says ``I have a deep commitment to the

integrity and objectivity of the IPCC process.'' Pachauri's

main argument is that the IPCC comprises both scientists and

more than 130 governments who approve IPCC reports line by

line.

Now, that is what he said, as reported. As I predicted, it all came apart for the IPCC. On the Senate floor last year I highlighted several media reports uncovering serious errors and possible fraud by the IPCC. This is the United Nations we are talking about. They are the ones that started all this.

ABC News, the Economist, Time magazine, and the Times of London-- among many others--reported that the IPCC's research contains embarrassing flaws--using their language--and the IPCC chairman and scientists knew of the flaws but published them anyway. Media reports uncovered a number of non-peer-reviewed studies that the IPCC used to make baseless claims, including that global warming would--and listen to this; this is the IPCC stuff that has totally been rebuked--melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Didn't happen.

It had 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest endangered by global warming. It didn't happen.

Melt mountain ice in the Alps, Andes, and Africa. It didn't happen.

Slash crop production by 50 percent in North Africa by 2020. It is something that is not even going on.

These embarrassments led to a number of these same publications to demand that the IPCC come clean on the review process of the IPCC.

I am going to read this to let everyone know how serious this is.

The Financial Times, talking about the IPCC:

Now it is time to implement fundamental reforms that would

reduce the risk of bias and errors appearing in future IPCC

assessments, increase transparency and open up the whole

field of climate research to the widest possible range of

scientific views.

Time Magazine has always kind of been on the other side of this issue. We might remember, Time Magazine had on their cover this last polar bear standing on the last cube of ice and we are all going to die. Time Magazine, when they talked about the glaciers all melting, said:

Glaciergate is a black eye for the IPCC and for the climate

science community as a whole.

The Economist:

This mixture of sloppiness, lack of communication, and

high-handedness gives the IPCC's critics a lot to work with.

Newsweek came out:

Some of the IPCC's most-quoted data and recommendations

were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures,

newspaper articles, and corporate reports--including claims

of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising cost of

warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been

refuted by academic studies. Just as damaging, many climate

scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the

integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and

reasoned arguments.

That was in Newsweek. So their analysis was that they are doing all this stuff, and they resort to name-calling and this type of thing because they don't have a logical response for it.

Last year--and keeping in mind this is after I requested the inspector general's report and before; and still 1 year ago in a speech I made right here I said:

There is a crisis of confidence in the IPCC. The challenges

to the integrity and credibility of the IPCC merit a closer

examination by the U.S. Congress. The ramifications of the

IPCC spread far and wide, most notably to the Environmental

Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gases from mobile

sources endanger public health and welfare. EPA's finding

rests in large measure on the IPCC's conclusions--and EPA has

accepted them wholesale, without an independent assessment.

At this pivotal time, as the Obama EPA is preparing to enact

policies potentially costing trillions of dollars and

thousands of jobs, the IPCC's errors make plain that we need

openness, transparency, and accountability in the scientific

research financed by the U.S. taxpayers.

That was a year before the IG report came out, and it is almost exactly what the IG report said just this last week.

Two months before that speech, I asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to delay the EPA endangerment finding based on Climategate. She told me--and I have a lot of respect for her, by the way. I have professed that many times. She is one whom normally I will ask her a question, and she will come out and give an answer, even though it may be an unpopular answer with her boss, President Obama. She said:

I do not agree that the IPCC has been totally discredited

in any way. In fact, I think it is important to understand

that the IPCC is a body that follows impartial and open and

objective assessments.

She is saying essentially the same thing:

Yes, they had concerns about e-mail. I do not defend the

conduct of those who sent those e-mails.

Here, they are talking about Climategate. We all remember those secret e-mails going back and forth between the principals to somehow fraudulently manipulate the science. She goes on to say:

There is peer-review, which is part of the IPCC process.

There are numerous, numerous groups of teams and independent

researchers all a part of coming up with IPCC findings, such

that even the IPCC has said that while we need to investigate

and ensure that our scientists are to a standard of

scientific conduct that we can be proud of, we stand behind

our findings.

So they are all whitewashing the work of the IPCC--again, that was before the IG report came out--but it didn't work because there are magazines throughout the world, publications which generally were on the other side of this argument or their side of the argument. The Guardian, for example, talking about Climategate and how they are a disgrace, said:

Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to

make it go away.

The Daily Telegraph said:

This scandal could well be the greatest in modern science.

This is what they are talking about with Climategate.

The Atlantic Monthly:

The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.

Let's remember, the economic ramifications of global warming regulations imposed upon the EPA under the Clean Air Act will cost American consumers somewhere in the range of $300 billion to $400 billion a year. This is not to mention the absurd result that EPA readily admits they need to hire 230,000 additional employees and spend an additional $21 billion to implement its greenhouse gas regime if they are not given wide discretion to circumvent the law, and all this economic pain is

for nothing--no gain at all. As the EPA Administrator admitted before our committee, it would have no effect on the overall release of anthropogenic gases.

Also, of note, what happened to the EPA's vow in 2009 that the Agency would commit to high standards of transparency because ``the success of our environmental efforts depends on earning and maintaining the trust of the public we serve'' or Obama adviser John Holdren's promise that the administration would make decisions based on the best science possible because, as the President said, ``the public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public decisions.'' Given what has come to light in this report, it appears the Obama EPA cannot be trusted on the most consequential decision the Agency has ever made.

I have already called upon the committees in the Senate--this would be my committee of which I am the ranking member, the Environment and Public Works Committee--to have an investigation. My gosh, I don't ever recall in the years I have been here an IG report coming out where there weren't numerous hearings to find out and to probe into why they came up with the decisions they made.

I have tried for 10 years now to pursue this thing with the various bills that were introduced to do legislatively--to implement the requirements. Then, when we see they are unable to do it--and if we look around this Senate, there are only about 30 votes now. They don't have half the number of votes to impose cap and trade. They don't have it. It is not here. That is why the President is trying to do it through regulations.

It is kind of interesting, if we put this in perspective. This supercommittee they keep talking about, the 12 people--6 Democrats, 6 Republicans, 3 from the House, 3 from the Senate--their goal is to find $1.5 trillion in 10 years. We have a President in his own budget--and this isn't Democrats or Republicans or House or Senate. This is the President. His three budgets he came out with have just under a $5 trillion deficit. That is inconceivable.

I can remember coming down here in the mid-1990s, when President Clinton was in power. The first $1.5 trillion budget we had, I complained this is not sustainable. Now it is $1.5 trillion over and above what it costs to run America. Obviously, that can't be done.

So when we stop to think about the fact that it should be fairly easy to find $1.5 trillion, that would just be his deficit for 1 year to find $1.5 trillion.

This is kind of hard to follow. But if they were successful in implementing what they could not do by legislation and have a cap and trade, that would cost a minimum of $300 billion a year; or, multiply that by 10, that would be $3 trillion.

So we have this supercommittee out there trying to find $1.5 trillion; at the same time, they are advocating increasing the cost to America by $3 trillion. It is not believable.

I think it is very important, and I am on the floor now trying to gather support for having a hearing. We can't have an IG report talking about the flawed product of the EPA, of the IPCC, of the United Nations and not have some kind of investigation. I hope we will be able to do that.

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