Floor Statements

Madam President, it is my understanding that I have 10 minutes as in morning business. I ask unanimous consent to use that time now.

Madam President, we are going to be voting on a bill this afternoon to dramatically increase taxes on America's oil and gas companies. I only suggest that it is not going to pass. I can recall when the Senator from Vermont, just a few months ago, had a bill that would have done essentially the same thing--pass tax increases on these oil and gas companies. I remember coming to the floor at that time and giving my argument against it. It ended up that we voted on it, and we had 61 votes against it, so it worked out that about 30 were for it.

Afterward--and I have to say this about Senator Sanders--Senator Sanders said that was probably one of the healthiest and honest debates he had seen during the years he has been in the Senate. I agreed with that. The idea that we can somehow tax these people and accomplish something--let me just say that the Congressional Research Service--and when I talk about

CRS, it is nonpartisan and nobody argues with them.

We in the United States have the largest recoverable reserves of oil, gas, and coal of any country in the world. There is no reason we cannot be completely independent of the Middle East. All we have to do is explore our own resources--oil, gas, and coal.

This same Congressional Research Service has looked at the issues and told us that raising taxes on energy companies will do two things-- decrease supply and increase our dependence on foreign countries. In other words, this vote we are going to have this afternoon, if it were successful, would decrease the supply and increase our dependence upon the Middle East.

In addition to the CRS, let's go back to the 1970s, under the Carter administration, when we had the windfall profits tax. The same exact thing happened. It decreased supply and increased our dependence on foreign competition. The interesting point is--and my wife is not the only one complaining about the price of gas, but she is certainly loud and clear in that position--nobody is saying that by increasing the taxes, with the vote we are going to have on oil and gas companies this afternoon, somehow that will have the effect of lowering prices at the pump. It will raise them. In fact, I think several Members have come down--Senator Menendez, the sponsor of the legislation, said:

Nobody has made the claim that this bill is about reducing

gas prices.

If it is not about reducing gas prices, then what is it for? The answer to that is, they say--as the Senator from Connecticut just stated, this is going to be something that is going to be reducing the deficit. Our problem is, President Obama and his Democratic support in the House and Senate--in the first 2 years, they had a large majority in the House and the Senate--in his 3 years of the budget, they have increased the deficit and budget by over $5 trillion. I can remember coming to the floor of the Senate during the Clinton years, in 1995, saying this is outrageous. This was a $1.5 trillion budget. That was to run the entire United States. This last budget by President Obama was an increase of $1.65 trillion--just the deficit. Let's do our math. That is 365 days a year, and it works out to be $4 billion a day.

We have a President and his majority giving us a $4 billion-a-day deficit, and this says it is going to cut the deficit by $2 billion. So we can tax all these oil companies to come up with enough money to reduce the deficit just by $2 billion. That is worth one-half day's deficit of this administration. I know the majority of people understand that, and they will not be duped into doing that.

By the way, I have to say that fortifying me was this morning's editorial in USA Today. They talk about how ludicrous this idea is that we can increase taxes on oil and gas companies. They say it is an example of the sort of political gamesmanship that substitutes for serious deficit reduction. It says:

But the initiative is also government at its arbitrary

worst, further complicating the tax code by singling out five

companies--ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and

BP--for special taxes not paid by smaller energy concerns. .

. .

So we have a little class warfare going along with it. Only yesterday, the same USA Today was criticizing me in their editorial policy because I don't want to pass a cap and trade--a tax increase. The same paper that yesterday was critical of a position I have taken is now strongly in favor of the position I have taken in avoiding any additional taxes on the energy companies or anybody else.

The last thing I will say--because I will stay within my timeframe is that people say if we want to do something about the deficit--and that is what they are saying they are doing--this is one-half day's deficit if they pass these tax increases, which they will not--they say there are only two ways to handle the debt; one is to decrease spending and another is to increase taxes.

I suggest there is a third way. That way is to go after all these regulations we currently are operating under as a result of this administration. We are talking about cap-and-trade regulations, greenhouse gas regulations, boiler MACT regulations, ozone, which could create over 600 nonattainment areas, and the cost of that is $90 billion. If we add all the costs of all these different regulations-- greenhouse gas, $300 billion to $400 billion; ozone, $60 billion to $90 billion; boiler MACT, $1 billion; and utility MACT, $184 billion--when we add that, it is $1 trillion. If we take the $1 trillion, that is 7 percent of the $14 trillion that we would say the GDP would amount to.

CRS says that for every 1 percent increase in economic activity or increase in GDP, that translates into revenue of $50 billion. This is 7 percent, so that would be $350 billion. If we want to go after the deficit, deficit spending, and the debt, go after the regulations too. But to think we can tax oil and gas companies and somehow come up with $2 billion to reduce the deficit, that is just one day's deficit under the Obama administration. This body is not going to pass that.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Small System Drinking Water Act of 2011. This is the fourth Congress that I have introduced this bill which would help water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Thad Cochran, David Vitter, John Boozman, James Risch, and Mike Crapo as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA.

My goal here is to ensure that small towns across the country have safe, affordable drinking water and that the

laws are fair to small and rural communities. Currently EPA assumes that families can afford water rates of 2.5 percent of their annual median household income, or $1,000 per household. For some families, paying $83 a month for water may not be a hardship but for so many more, it is nearly impossible. There must be some flexibility inserted into the calculation that factors in the ability of the truly disadvantaged to pay these costs. Forcing systems to raise rates beyond what their ratepayers can afford only causes more damage than good.

EPA needs to look more closely at how it determines affordability. My bill directs EPA to take additional factors into consideration when making this determination. These include ensuring that the affordability criteria are not more costly on a per-capita basis to a small water system than to a large water system.

In EPA's most recent drinking water needs survey, Oklahoma identified a total of over $4.1 billion in drinking water needs over the next 20 years. $2.4 billion of that need is for community water systems that serve fewer than 10,000 people. The $4.1 billion does not include the total costs imposed on Oklahoma communities to meet federal clean water requirements, the new Groundwater rule, the DBP II rule or the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule. Oklahoma continues to have municipalities struggling with the 2002 arsenic rule. Many of our small systems are having difficulty with the Disinfection Byproducts, DBP, Stage I rule, and small systems who purchase water from other systems and did not have to test, treat or monitor their water must now comply with DBP II. EPA estimates that over the next 20 years, the entire country will need $52.0 billion to come into compliance with existing, proposed or recently promulgated regulations.

My bill proposes a few simple steps to help systems comply with all these rules. First, it reauthorizes the technical assistance program in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The DBP rules are very complex and involve a lot of monitoring and testing. If we are going to impose complicated requirements on systems, we need to provide them with help to implement those requirements.

The bill creates a pilot program to demonstrate new technologies and approaches for systems of all sizes to comply with these complicated rules. It requires the EPA to convene a working group to examine the science behind the rules in order to compare new developments since each rule's publication.

Section 1412(b)(4)(E) of the SDWA Amendments of 1996 authorizes the use of point of entry treatment, point of use treatment and package plants to economically meet the requirements of the act. However, to date, these approaches are not widely used by small water systems. My legislation directs the EPA to convene a working group to identify barriers to the use of these approaches. The EPA will then use the recommendations of the working group to draft a model guidance document that states can use to create their own programs.

Most importantly this bill requires the Federal Government to pay for these unfunded mandates created by laws and regulations. In 1995, Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to ensure that the Federal Government pays the costs incurred by state and local governments in complying with Federal laws. My bill is designed to ensure that EPA cannot take an enforcement action against a system serving less than 10,000 people, without first ensuring that it has sufficient funds to meet the requirements of the regulation.

Since the 108th Congress, I have co-authored and cosponsored legislation to provide additional resources to communities through the State Revolving Loan Funds. Unfortunately, not much has changed. We still have too many regulations and not enough money to pay for them. Funding legislation is important but until that money becomes available, it is unreasonable to penalize and fine local communities because they cannot afford to pay for regulations we imposed on them. I thank my colleagues and look forward to their support of this commonsense proposal.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Small System Drinking Water Act of 2011. This is the fourth Congress that I have introduced this bill which would help water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Thad Cochran, David Vitter, John Boozman, James Risch, and Mike Crapo as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA.

My goal here is to ensure that small towns across the country have safe, affordable drinking water and that the

laws are fair to small and rural communities. Currently EPA assumes that families can afford water rates of 2.5 percent of their annual median household income, or $1,000 per household. For some families, paying $83 a month for water may not be a hardship but for so many more, it is nearly impossible. There must be some flexibility inserted into the calculation that factors in the ability of the truly disadvantaged to pay these costs. Forcing systems to raise rates beyond what their ratepayers can afford only causes more damage than good.

EPA needs to look more closely at how it determines affordability. My bill directs EPA to take additional factors into consideration when making this determination. These include ensuring that the affordability criteria are not more costly on a per-capita basis to a small water system than to a large water system.

In EPA's most recent drinking water needs survey, Oklahoma identified a total of over $4.1 billion in drinking water needs over the next 20 years. $2.4 billion of that need is for community water systems that serve fewer than 10,000 people. The $4.1 billion does not include the total costs imposed on Oklahoma communities to meet federal clean water requirements, the new Groundwater rule, the DBP II rule or the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule. Oklahoma continues to have municipalities struggling with the 2002 arsenic rule. Many of our small systems are having difficulty with the Disinfection Byproducts, DBP, Stage I rule, and small systems who purchase water from other systems and did not have to test, treat or monitor their water must now comply with DBP II. EPA estimates that over the next 20 years, the entire country will need $52.0 billion to come into compliance with existing, proposed or recently promulgated regulations.

My bill proposes a few simple steps to help systems comply with all these rules. First, it reauthorizes the technical assistance program in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The DBP rules are very complex and involve a lot of monitoring and testing. If we are going to impose complicated requirements on systems, we need to provide them with help to implement those requirements.

The bill creates a pilot program to demonstrate new technologies and approaches for systems of all sizes to comply with these complicated rules. It requires the EPA to convene a working group to examine the science behind the rules in order to compare new developments since each rule's publication.

Section 1412(b)(4)(E) of the SDWA Amendments of 1996 authorizes the use of point of entry treatment, point of use treatment and package plants to economically meet the requirements of the act. However, to date, these approaches are not widely used by small water systems. My legislation directs the EPA to convene a working group to identify barriers to the use of these approaches. The EPA will then use the recommendations of the working group to draft a model guidance document that states can use to create their own programs.

Most importantly this bill requires the Federal Government to pay for these unfunded mandates created by laws and regulations. In 1995, Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to ensure that the Federal Government pays the costs incurred by state and local governments in complying with Federal laws. My bill is designed to ensure that EPA cannot take an enforcement action against a system serving less than 10,000 people, without first ensuring that it has sufficient funds to meet the requirements of the regulation.

Since the 108th Congress, I have co-authored and cosponsored legislation to provide additional resources to communities through the State Revolving Loan Funds. Unfortunately, not much has changed. We still have too many regulations and not enough money to pay for them. Funding legislation is important but until that money becomes available, it is unreasonable to penalize and fine local communities because they cannot afford to pay for regulations we imposed on them. I thank my colleagues and look forward to their support of this commonsense proposal.

I thank the Senator from Virginia.

It is my understanding we are in morning business until 2 o'clock.

Mr. President, yesterday, I spent some time on the floor talking about the recoverable reserves in the United States of America. I was shocked so many Senators--first of all, I was shocked that many listened but more shocked they came up to me and said: We were not aware we have this opportunity.

I have, from the Congressional Research Service, a breakdown of where all of it is. I wish to share that breakdown and get it into the Record. I applaud Senator Murkowski and others for trying to open and fully develop the resources in the Gulf of Mexico. That is very significant. I applaud their effort, and I join them in their effort.

We need to go further than that because in the Gulf of Mexico are-- these are figures of the Congressional Research Service--undiscovered, technically recoverable resources. Our resources, according to CRS, are greater than any other country in the world in oil, gas, and coal. I am going to talk just about gas right now because one of the big issues, of course, not just with my wife but with others, is the price of gas at the pumps.

If we look at the undiscovered, technically recoverable resources just onshore, in the United States--some actually would be on public lands--it is 37.8 billion barrels of oil. Throw in Alaska and that would be 26.6 billion barrels; the Atlantic, 3.8 billion barrels; the Pacific, 10.5 billion barrels; the Gulf of Mexico, as I already said, 44.9 billion barrels. The total U.S. endowment--our endowment--of technically recoverable oil is 162.9 billion barrels.

We have talked about this before and talked about the fact that we have all these resources, but our problem is a political problem because the politicians will not let us reach these reserves. We are talking about the fact that they are hardly able to reach them in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and we know what has happened on the North Slope, ANWR. We have talked about that for a long time.

People do not realize public lands--90 percent--are off-limits, off- limits politically.

I have to correct some of the statements some people have made that conveniently misrepresented what our

reserves are. Instead of using ``recoverable reserves,'' they use ``proven reserves.'' That is a technical term. In order to prove a reserve, you have to drill and analyze and core and see how much oil there is. Obviously, if we will not let anyone drill, they cannot prove it.

When they say we only have 2 percent of the world's proven reserves, that is absurd because we have to drill to determine what that is. Other countries do not have that problem. We are the only country in the world that does not exploit our own resources.

People are going to have to realize that if you want to do something, it is such a simple thing to do deal with. It is supply and demand. There is not a person here or a person listening today who has not gone through the elementary experience in school of learning supply and demand. We have the supply in America and we have the demand. The politicians will not let us exploit our own resources. That is the problem we have. You do not have to overly complicate this issue.

It is interesting--and I hate to say it; I am not pointing fingers in a partisan way--when Democrats and the administration say: We are going to tax big oil, they say actually they are going to do away with some of the benefits big oil has. They are not benefits. These would be four huge tax increases the Democrats are doing on big oil. That is not big oil. That is oil, period. I will not go into the details of depletion allowances and percentages. It is not important.

The point is, they have the same benefit every other manufacturer has, and to single them out and say: We are going to punish big oil, all that is going to do is make the price at the pumps skyrocket. It gets right back to supply and demand.

By the way, those who are trying to use the argument that this somehow is going to produce revenue that is going to be used, I suggest even the White House's figures, the maximum revenue generated would be $4 billion. Keep in mind, they lose all the benefits, so that is not a net of $4 billion.

Take the State of Texas, for example. They do not have an income tax. They have the oil tax that has run that State very well for a long period of time. Senator Menendez made a statement and said taxing the oil companies is not going to bring down the price of gas. They are not even claiming it will. I just think that when one sees such an obvious solution to the problem--just exploit our own resources--we are very foolish not to do that.

We all talk about the solutions to the problem. We talk about the spending of this administration, more debt increases in just the first 2 years of the Obama administration than the entire debt since George Washington, in the history of this country, the huge spending, the $5 trillion in the President's three budgets of deficit--I remember coming down and complaining in 1995, at this very podium, when the Clinton administration came out with a budget for fiscal year 1996 and it was $1.5 trillion. I said: We cannot sustain that level. Now it is $1.5 trillion in each of the three budgets, just the deficit. That is more than the entire United States of America back in 1996.

I suggest that when people say there are only two solutions to this problem, either reduce spending, which would be my choice, or increase taxes, which I would not do, I say there is a third option. That option is to do something about the cost of regulation. Right now, if we just take what the EPA is doing in five--in fact, I will say three of the major overregulations we are going over right now--people in the Senate know we have defeated cap-and-trade legislatively by massive percentages five times since 2003. This administration says: If we cannot have cap and trade, we are going to do it, not legislatively, we will do it through the EPA. That is what is going on now with greenhouse gases.

If you add up what the administration is doing in terms of the cost of greenhouse gas regulations, that is between $300 billion and $400 billion; on ozone, if they choose--and they said they are going to choose--the 60-parts-per billion standard, that would be $676 billion; the boiler MACT would be something in excess of $1 billion. Throw in utility MACT and cement MACT, it comes to $1 trillion. This is what I am trying to get at. I used the figure that for every 1 percent increase in economic activity, it produces new revenue of $42 billion. That has changed. According to the Congressional Research Service--they are bipartisan, they are factual--for every 1 percent increase in GDP, it produces $50 billion additional revenues.

If we just take these regulations and add them up, all the increase of costs to GDP of the three regulations I mentioned, that is $1 trillion. If we take the fact it is $14 trillion GDP in a given year, this would be 7 percent of that $14 trillion. For each 1 percent, it would be $50 billion. We could generate new revenue of $350 billion just by taking this overregulation out of our society.

One can argue: Inhofe, that is not true because these regulations have not passed yet. That is right, so it would probably right now be about half that. When the Obama administration came in and announced these regulations were coming, the manufacturers, the producers, those who are driving the economic ship were the ones who said that because of the uncertainty of these regulations, we are going to slow down what we are doing. If we were to lift all these regulations, I assure my colleagues we would be approaching, at least by 1 year, $350 billion. That is without a tax increase. That is without reducing spending.

We need to look at this realistically because this is an opportunity we have. A lot of people remember back in the days of Ronald Reagan. I can say the same thing back in the days of President Kennedy. Of course, he was a Democrat. They felt overregulation and high taxation was an inhibiting factor to slow down revenue. Of course, in the case of Ronald Reagan, the total revenue coming from the marginal rates of 1980 was $244 billion. In 1988, it was $466 billion. That was at a time when we had the largest reduction of taxes and regulations in this society. It is shown to be true over the years.

My bottom line is this: People know about spending. People know about taxes. They do not know about regulations. The people who are affected directly--the manufacturers--understand it. The figures I am using are actual figures we have gotten with which no one argues. The fact that $50 billion of increased revenue comes from each 1 percent increase in GDP is a fact that is supported by the CRS.

I offer that, along with our opportunity to become totally independent from the Middle East, with regard to our ability to run this machine called America.

Before I yield the floor, I see the Senator from Alaska. I hope he was listening to what I was talking about because the opportunities in Alaska are tremendous--26.6 billion barrels of oil. I am sure he understands that. I wish to make sure everybody else does.

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

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

Madam President, it has been called to my attention that there are some people who are trying to respond to the fact that we have such high prices of gasoline at the pumps in a totally unrealistic way, in a way that is class warfare, in a way that doesn't make any sense to anyone, when we have a solution to this problem we have been talking about for a long period of time.

There are some who are trying to say we are going to have to do something about the subsidies that are given to oil companies, about what they have been doing over the years, and all of a sudden they are the ones who are responsible for the high price of gas at the pumps.

A CRS report was requested by my colleague, Lisa Murkowski, that grew out of frustration with the Democrats' refrain that ``America has only 3 percent of the global oil reserves.'' Therefore, under this view, more drilling and production at home is futile. As President Obama has said many times, ``with 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, the U.S. cannot drill its way to energy security.''

Well, it can, because it is not 3 percent. A CRS report came out later and showed--and this is something people don't want to believe, but it is out there and it is a fact--the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves of oil, gas, and coal of any country in the world--more than China, Saudi Arabia, or anyone else. Our problem is a political one--this administration. It goes down Democratic and Republican lines. The Democrats put 83 percent of America's Federal lands off limits to drilling. Of course, that is fine for the administration, because they have made some statements, which I will read in a minute, to demonstrate clearly that they want to increase the price of gas at the pumps.

On the idea that you can do this through regulation and through trying to further tax the oil industry, CRS stated that tax changes outlined in the President's budget proposal--I am quoting from CRS, which everyone knows is completely nonpartisan--``would make oil and natural gas more expensive for U.S. consumers and likely increase foreign dependence.''

I was very proud of a couple of Democrats--the only two who were outspoken. Senator Landrieu, from Louisiana, said:

The administration has put forward draconian taxes on the

oil and gas industry. . . . It seems very contrary to our

stated goal of being more energy sufficient in the United

States. Taxing this domestic industry will instead cut jobs

and increase our dependence on foreign oil. So I want you to

deliver that message again to the administration. We have

bipartisan opposition to increasing taxes on this industry.

Senator Mark Begich from Alaska said:

[The President's proposal] would cost thousands of jobs in

Alaska and across the country. Energy companies are among the

businesses investing and creating jobs at a time when our

country needs both. I will fight any measure to end these

incentives.

It should be obvious that without these two Democrats coming in--I appreciate the fact they did. We are not going to be able to reduce the price of oil at the pumps by further taxing the oil and gas industry. It is ludicrous to even think that anyone would suggest we could increase taxes on the oil industry and gas industry and somehow we are going to have energy more available and are going to reduce the cost of gas at the pump.

There is a way of doing this that I think is so simple. There is not a person in this country--certainly no one who serves in this body-- who, back during his or her elementary education, did not learn about supply and demand. Here we are in the United States of America sitting on more gas and oil than any other country in the world, and we are the only country that does not exploit its own natural resources. We are the only country. If we did, we would be completely independent from the Middle East. We would not have to go outside this continent to supply our needs.

People say: If you do that, you start developing. Then it is going to take a long time. It is going to be maybe 8 or 10 years. That would be fine. They were saying that 8 or 10 years ago, and we could have done it then. That is not quite true because the economists have said that if we announce we are going to areas where we are not exploiting our resources--I am talking about the gulf, the east coast, the west coast, the North Slope in ANWR, Alaska. I am talking about the public lands where 83 percent of our public lands are off limits for drilling. If we were to announce today that we were going to open drilling and exploration and production in the United States of America, that price would drop tomorrow. It would drop immediately because people would know we are going to use our own resources.

I hate to say this, but somebody has to say it. We have an administration that is so wrapped up in saying that one of these days, we are going to have to have all this green energy, and they themselves are on record saying they want to increase the price of oil and gas.

Let's look at what happened.

Alan Krueger with the Department of Treasury said:

The administration believes that it is no longer sufficient

to address our nation's energy needs by finding more fossil

fuels.

The Obama Treasury Department said:

To the extent the lower tax rate encourages overproduction

of oil and gas, it is detrimental to long-term energy

security.

Therefore, we want to do away with oil and gas.

Here is the best one. President Obama's Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:

Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of

gasoline to the levels in Europe.

We have an administration that wants to increase the price of gasoline at the pumps to be comparable to Europe, which is between $7.50 and $8 a gallon. Obviously, people know this is true. It was not long ago that President Obama gave his energy speech. In his energy speech, he said there is all this abundance of clean gas we can use. Then at the end of the speech he said: But we have some problems in getting the gas out of the ground. He is talking about natural gas in this case, not about oil. I happened to give a response on one of the TV stations. He said he wants natural gas. At the same time, he says he wants to end hydraulic fracturing.

Let me tell my colleagues about hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracturing started in the State of Oklahoma, my State, in 1948. It is a way of pumping fluids and water primarily into these tight formations. These tight formations mostly are down about 1 mile to 2 to 3 miles under the surface. That will allow them to go in and get the gas. We have enough natural gas to take care of our needs for the next 100 years; we just need to use these systems. If we do away with hydraulic fracturing, then that means we are not going to be able to get any of the natural gas. We cannot produce 1 cubic foot of natural gas without using hydraulic fracturing. What did we find out last week? Secretary Chu is going to be in charge of a study to see how dangerous hydraulic fracturing is. This is the same guy who said that somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.

I will only say this. We actually have three problems. We have the problem of, we have this abundance of resources we are not going after, and hydraulic fracturing. Then keep in mind that what we get, we have to refine. That is where the EPA comes in.

I have stood at this podium for 9 years talking about the problems we have with cap and trade, the fact that we can't have a cap-and-trade system that is going to have the effect of costing the American people--the estimates are between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. That is supposedly for greenhouse gases.

We had the Kyoto treaty back in the nineties, and then they tried seven different times on the Senate floor to pass legislation that would have the same type of cap and trade we would have had if we had become a party to and ratified the Kyoto treaty. The problem with that is, even if there are people out there--and there are. A very large percentage of the people in America, some 40 percent, believe that somehow greenhouse gases are causing catastrophic global warming. Even if that were true, which it is not, but if it were true, it does not make any difference what we do in the United States of America.

I admire the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who was appointed by President Obama. Yes, she is way off in the leftwing. She is liberal and all of that. When you ask her a direct question, she gives an honest answer. She gave honest answers. I asked a question--I think at that time it was the Markey bill. It was one of the cap-and-trade bills. I said: In the event we were to pass a cap-and-trade bill in the United States, would that reduce emissions? Her response was, no, it will not, because that would only affect the United States of America.

That is not where the problem is. The problem is in India, Mexico, and China. Right now, China is cranking out two coal-fired generating plants every week. It is going to continue there. In fact, one could argue that it would even be more expensive or more polluting--if one calls CO2 a pollution--because our jobs would go to places such as China where they do have this problem. They do not have any emissions control.

We have the problem of refining the gas once we get it. I see my good friend is on the floor and is going to be speaking perhaps to the same issue. I only want to mention one thing. With regard to the cap-and- trade agenda, since they are not able to get it passed, they are trying to do it through the Environmental Protection Agency through regulations.

Lion Oil, based in El Dorado, AR, recently testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that it commenced a $2 million expansion of its El Dorado refinery in 2007, with 2,000 construction jobs, but its completion has since been stalled. As Lion Oil vice president Steve Cousins explained:

The uncertainty and the potentiality of prohibitive costs

associated with possible cap-and-trade legislation and EPA's

greenhouse gas regulations were a critical factor leading us

to delay the completion of the expansion.

What I am saying is, if we are--and I believe we are--going to break down this barrier and overcome this mentality that we should not be developing our own resources, then we also have to have a way of refining it. We can do it. It is within our reach. We can bring down the price of oil and gas and certainly gasoline at the pump by tomorrow. If we were to announce we were going to stop being the only country in the world that does not exploit its own resources, if we go after the oil and gas that is available in the gulf, the east coast, west coast, our public lands, as well as the North Slope of Alaska, we could be independent from any dependency on the Middle East. I believe the American people understand that point. It goes right back to our elementary school education. It is supply and demand. We have the supply in the United States of America. We have to open up that supply so we can use it, and obviously that would lower the price of gas at the pumps.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to bring to the Senate's attention The Lake Thunderbird Efficient Use Act of 2011.

This bill allows the Central Oklahoma Master Conservancy District to import and store non-project water into Lake Thunderbird, if the Secretary of the Interior determines there is enough capacity to do so. Allowing additional water to be stored at Lake Thunderbird would help increase municipal and industrial supplies for the cities served by the District, which include Norman, Midwest City, and Del City.

There is no cost associated with this bill. Any additional infrastructure needs will be the responsibility of the non-Federal establishment contracting with the Secretary.

This legislation does not change the capacity of Lake Thunderbird and will help increase water supplies in a growing metropolitan area. Over the last decade, the Norman area grew by 15 percent making it one of the fastest growing areas in the State. As the area continues to grow, and as Tinker Air Force Base requires a growing water supply, there will be a greater need for access to the water supplies of the Lake Thunderbird reservoir.

Mr. President, I would like to bring to the Senate's attention The Lake Thunderbird Efficient Use Act of 2011.

This bill allows the Central Oklahoma Master Conservancy District to import and store non-project water into Lake Thunderbird, if the Secretary of the Interior determines there is enough capacity to do so. Allowing additional water to be stored at Lake Thunderbird would help increase municipal and industrial supplies for the cities served by the District, which include Norman, Midwest City, and Del City.

There is no cost associated with this bill. Any additional infrastructure needs will be the responsibility of the non-Federal establishment contracting with the Secretary.

This legislation does not change the capacity of Lake Thunderbird and will help increase water supplies in a growing metropolitan area. Over the last decade, the Norman area grew by 15 percent making it one of the fastest growing areas in the State. As the area continues to grow, and as Tinker Air Force Base requires a growing water supply, there will be a greater need for access to the water supplies of the Lake Thunderbird reservoir.

Would the Senator yield for a question?

I was scheduled to be speak at 4 o'clock. At the conclusion of the Senator's remarks, would the Senator request that I be recognized as in morning business for up to 30 minutes?

No, sir, I could not. I have to have 30 minutes. The floor has been pretty empty today.

Madam President, let me thank my good friend from New York for allowing me to have this time. I do appreciate his generosity. I have to say, I don't agree with what he said, but that comes as no surprise to my friend from New York. I will only make one comment. One statement I heard him say toward the end of his remarks was that every other country in the world would do it this way. That is the whole crux of it right there. I often wonder if you look at the other countries, they are all trying to get to our system. They all envy America for its system of freedom, of health delivery. We wonder sometimes if government-run health care is bad--and that is what this is; that is what the Obama administration is trying to do--if it is better, then why doesn't it work anywhere? I have often looked at this. It doesn't work in Canada, Denmark, the UK. It doesn't work in any of the other places. Yet they always say: It will work here. A lot of my liberal friends say: If I were running it, it would work. We have a great system.

I guess a little class warfare is healthy now and then, and we had a little bit of that in the last few minutes.

Madam President, I am going to be very offensive right now to a lot of people, certainly to the Ouattara group, the rebels taking over in Cote d'Ivoire. I am going to be offensive to the United Nations. I am going to be offensive to the French and to our own State Department.

This little girl is named Zegita Marie Rapert. Zegita is an Ethiopian name. It means God's grace. This little girl we found. She is only 2 days old. I happened to be in Ethiopia. She was an orphan. And my daughter Molly--in fact, I should hold this up. These are my 20 kids and grandkids. My daughter Molly had nothing but boys. So she adopted Zegita Marie. She came up to me the other day, that little girl--she was 2 days old when we first saw her. She is now 10 years old. She reads at a college level. She is a brilliant little girl. She came up to me the other day and Pappi--let me explain that. I is for Inhofe. That is me. So it is Momma and Pappi. She said: Pappi, why do you things nobody else would do. I said: That is why I do it.

Zegita Marie got her answer, and that is the reason I am talking today. I happen to be familiar with Africa. I have been for quite some time. I am on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I think they consider me the point man for Africa. We started working with Africa back at 9/11. At 9/11 we made a decision that while the squeeze in terrorism in the Middle East is going down through Djibouti and the Horn of Africa, we need to help the Africans build African brigades, supply them, help send their officers to the United States to train. It was a good program. I sometimes kind of joked around by saying, since I was the only member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who knew where Africa was, I took it on.

Anyway, I do have a background in Africa. For that reason, I am going to speak for the fifth time on the crisis. Cote d'Ivoire is a West African country. We have been reading about it. It is sub-Sahara Africa. Nobody cares about sub-Sahara Africa. They do care about Libya but not sub-Sahara Africa. Anyway, the news is reporting that President Gbagbo and his wife Simone were captured yesterday by the French military forces acting with the rebel forces of Alassane Ouattara. There is a videotape of both the President and First Lady in custody. According to the BBC and Reuters, after the U.N. and the French helicopters repeatedly attacked the Presidential palace, French special forces stormed the building with up to 20 French tanks and armored vehicles. They took them both from the Presidential palace to the Golf Hotel, killing untold hundreds or thousands of people.

This right here is a picture that was taken. This is a helicopter, a United Nations helicopter. It was encouraged to be used by the French. The French said: We authorize you. We are going to send our troops in there with you. We are going to do whatever they are doing. This is the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, where they are hitting targets. That is an area where they have a lot of their ordinance. I have been there. I have seen it. They are all scattered. You have little huts with galvanized steel roofs over them with countless, hundreds and hundreds of people.

They are all dead. They have to be. They can't live. There it is. That is a picture of it. To give you an idea of what is happening, there it is. They were peppering the entire town.

I don't know why. Here I am a Member of the Senate, and I can't get even our State Department to look into how many people they murdered that night. That was Monday night. A week ago tonight is when that happened. We don't know. But they were murdered. I am thankful that both the President and the First Lady are still alive, but they have been brutally mutilated. I condemn, however, the use of so-called peacekeeping forces, made up of United Nations and French forces, in the attacks on Abidjan and the Presidential palace. These forces have caused countless deaths in the densely populated city of Abidjan, a city of 4 million people. I hope every President of sub-Sahara Africa is watching right now. What happened there could happen to any country in sub-Sahara Africa.

Africa has 52 countries. I think 41 of those are sub-Sahara Africa. The multiple firings of United Nations and French missiles into downtown Abidjan are like firing missiles into downtown New York City. You don't know how many people are dead and won't know for a long time. Who knows how many hundreds if not thousands of innocent people were killed as a result of the U.N. and the French bombing a week ago tonight. This is not peacekeeping. This is war making. This is not the role of the United Nations. I question why the French are participating in this battle.

The African Union has also condemned this foreign military intervention. Why don't we listen to Africa. Africa for many years was used. They were abused. They were abused by colonialism. Certainly no one was worse or more offensive than the French. But they don't listen to Africa.

I called up a good friend, President Museveni of Uganda, and asked him what he thought. He had the courage to put something down in writing which I will read. This is from President Museveni, an east African country, not West Africa like Cote d'Ivoire.

He said:

I have not been happy with the way the United Nations and

International Community, especially the French, have

responded to the events of the post election Ivory Coast. I

desired that it would have been ideal for a thorough

Investigation into the alleged election rigging and it be

done by a credible and independent body under the African

Union leadership and guidance instead of violently forcing

the Laurent Gbagbo out of power without a hearing. I am not

pleased with the way the international community can sanction

a situation of blood bath in the domestic affairs of African

Countries.

I am halfway through reading what he said here. Why aren't we listening to Africans. He is not the only one. I think every African President would agree with what I am reading right now.

He went on to say:

I would prefer a peaceful intervention by an African Union

committee that would investigate into the matter, give the

parties a fair hearing and come out with a workable

recommendation that can promote peace and stability in the

region. The recommendation would include the possibility of a

peaceful and conciliatory settlement toward a power-sharing

deal as was done in the case of Kenya and Zimbabwe.

We all know about that.

At this point, I believe he would be happy to have a team

of capable African leaders chosen under the auspices of the

African Union to work on a peaceful end to the conflict in

the Ivory Coast. I believe that the African Union must be

given the opportunity to handle the matter in-house. I am of

course not pleased with the way the U.N. and International

Community has directly thrown their weight in support of

Alassane Ouattara and now recognizing him as president.

This is the from the President of Uganda. I have talked personally to many other presidents. I could be quoting all of them right now, but essentially that is a statement to which they all agree.

I have been informed that this reflects the current sentiment of the African Union too, actually including the current AU Chairman Obiang, who condemned the foreign military intervention in Cote d'Ivoire saying that ``Africa does not need external influence. Africa must manage its own affairs.''

That is what the Africans said. That is President Obiang. President Obiang is the President of the African Union.

The Kenyan Prime Minister Odinga, who happens to be here, and I will be meeting with him in a few minutes, was quoted yesterday as saying President Gbagbo:

has been captured and I say that he should not be hurt. I

have actually already sent word to Mr. Ouattara saying that

Gbagbo should not be hurt. If he wants to go out into exile

he should be allowed to go into exile but he needs to be

treated humanely.

That is all I am asking our State Department and the United Nations to do. And they won't do it.

I have warned the U.N. and the French on the floor four times in the past week that they would have blood on their hands if they continued supporting the rebel forces of Alassane Ouattara and continued the bombing of the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, Abidjan and did not agree to an immediate cease-fire.

That is what has happened over the last the week, 10 days. I said on April 4--I am quoting myself now. On the floor, standing right here at this podium I said:

I think we can avert a real tragedy, something maybe

comparable to what happened in 1994 in Rwanda with that

genocide.

We all remember that. We also remember that we were warned--we weren't warned but the United Nations was, the Secretary General, we now know, was warned that the genocide was going to take place in 1994 in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were hacked to death with machetes. The world stood idly by. That is sub-Sahara Africa. Nobody cared.

I called for a cease-fire in Abidjan. No one responded. This was 8 days ago.

I wonder sometimes why is it nobody cares about sub-Sahara Africa. I remember back in 1998, when, under President Clinton, they were going to send troops into Kosovo and the excuse they were using at that time was ethnic cleansing. I said on this Senate floor, why is it we are all concerned about ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. For every one person in Kosovo who has been ethnically cleansed on a given day, 100 in any one country in sub-Sahara Africa have. But nobody cares about sub-Sahara Africa. Why is there no outcry for these millions of people who are being brutally murdered in other places in the world?

I have to say this--and I know I am repeating what I said in 1998 on the floor--and I know it is very unpopular, but I will quote a guy whose name is Roger Wilkens, professor of history and American culture at George Mason University. He said:

I think it is pretty clear U.S. foreign policy is geared to

the European American sensibility which takes the lives of

white people much more seriously than the lives of people who

are not white.

What is he saying there? I think I know what he is saying.

But no one mobilized on behalf of perhaps 500 people who

were shot, hacked and burned to death in a village in eastern

Congo, in central Africa, around the same time. No outrage

was expressed on behalf of many other innocents who had the

misfortune to be slain. . . .

I read this because I knew this was going to happen. It was only 5 days ago when I warned this was going to happen. So anyway, on April 5, I said Ouattara has tried to deny his involvement in the slaughter of up to 1,000 innocent people. This was on April 5, a little over 1 week ago. There it is, folks, as shown in this picture. That town is called Duekoue. It is in Cote d'Ivoire. It is a small community: the western town of Duekoue. His forces took the town earlier last week after the Gbagbo forces had gone. They were already gone--they had to be--the Gbagbo forces. We know now these people were shot, macheted, and burned to death by the Ouattara forces.

You may remember me quoting on the floor just a few days ago a BBC report back last week that quoted a BBC reporter, Andrew Harding, who said of the Duekoue massacre--this is it now, folks, just a little over 1 week ago--he said:

I spot four pigs eating something dark in a charred

courtyard. Standing by a newly dug mass grave, a UN soldier

from Morocco is choking with rage and grief. I ask him if any

of the dead [that the hogs are eating] are children. He nods

and begins to sob, quietly, into his facemask.

I pointed out that the Guardian, a British newspaper, quoted the U.N. mission which said that ``traditional hunters, known as Dozos, fought alongside Ouattara's forces and took part in killing 330 people in the western town of Duekoue, and that Guillaume Ngefa,

deputy head of the human rights division of the UN mission in Ivory Coast, blamed at least 220 of the deaths on pro-Ouattara forces.''

I repeat, this massacre was not caused by Gbagbo forces but by Ouattara forces that had taken the town. The Gbagbo forces had left 1 week earlier. There they are. Look at them: mutilated bodies, chewed up, burned. That was in Duekoue, a very small community in the western part of Cote d'Ivoire.

I repeat, this massacre was not caused by Gbagbo forces. I think we all know that. I, again, called--this was last week--for a cease-fire, and no one responded. That was just 1 week ago.

On April 7 and 8, I pointed out that the United Nations and the French were bombing downtown Abidjan, near the Presidential palace, where hundreds of young supporters of President Gbagbo had circled the Presidential palace making a human shield from the bombing. This is what they did--all these kids. All they had were baseball bats and 2 by 4s in a circle surrounding the palace to protect their President, President Gbagbo, and his family of about 17 who were there and his wife Simone.

You saw, 1 minute ago, in this one picture right here, that--do you think there is anything left of those kids who were surrounding the palace? No. They were all mowed down.

That was on the 7th and the 8th. Who knows how many of them were killed. I cannot imagine any of them lived through it.

I also pointed out, on April 8, there were roving death squads--there they are right there, folks; they are Ouattara people--roving deaths squads who are disappearing--this is the word they use: ``disappearing''--supporters of President Gbagbo. That means they are killing them.

I called again for an immediate cease-fire, and no one responded, not our State Department, not the United Nations, certainly not the French.

I also pointed out that I believe massive vote fraud occurred in the November 28, 2010, Cote d'Ivoire Presidential election between President Gbagbo and the rebel leader, Alassane Ouattara, from up north. That is the Muslim part of Cote d'Ivoire.

I submitted evidence in two letters to the State Department that showed that massive voter fraud allowed Ouattara to steal the election. In one instance, it showed that in the first round--here we would call this a primary and then a primary runoff. In the first round, in one of the five districts in the north, they miscounted, they tabulated them, and just added 95,000 additional votes. I documented all this. If we had 95,000 additional votes in each one of the five northern districts, then clearly President Gbagbo won reelection.

In another case, if you look at what they had in what we call primaries, in the first round President Gbagbo got thousands of votes-- thousands of votes--in the northern five districts. When they did the runoff, he got zero--zero--votes. That is a statistical impossibility.

What did our State Department do? Nothing. I did not receive--I finally received a response to my two letters saying they think this is all fraudulent. They have not changed their minds. This is Sub-Saharan Africa. Do they truly care? I can only conclude that our State Department is engaging in a whitewash of any credible investigation into my allegations.

So I call again on the U.N., French, and Ouattara forces to halt all the violence, including that being done against President Gbagbo and the First Lady. They will be held responsible if any more harm comes to them. I call for an independent investigation--this is what the Africans want--into all the atrocities committed by all military forces involved in the fighting in Cote d'Ivoire. I call on the U.N., French, and Ouattara forces to halt immediately the death squads roving around the streets of Abidjan ``disappearing'' supporters of President Gbagbo.

I had a call from one friend down there whom I certainly would not identify. They would murder him overnight. He was talking about how he could not go out. He could see bodies, corpses in the street. This was 2 days ago. They could not go out there because they had snipers and they would mow them down.

They are led by soldiers of Ouattara's rebel army, supported by the French and the United Nations, and have already killed more than 400 people, in addition to, perhaps, the thousands killed in the bombing we have already looked at.

Right now, I have several friends who give me these reports. They are saying: Isn't there anything you can do now--just, if they go in now, after they have killed all these people? I call upon, again, the United Nations, the French--which I know are not going to do it--and certainly the Ouattara rebels and our State Department to go in and stop it. We could do it in no time at all.

There is all this concern about Libya and all these things going on. This is just as bad, but nobody cares. Keep in mind, this is Sub- Saharan Africa.

So the streets are filled with the stench of rotting bodies.

I renew my call for hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the bombings and killings by the U.N., the French and the Ouattara rebels and the strong evidence of massive voter fraud in the November Presidential election.

I appreciate chairman John Kerry's willingness to hold such hearings, and I look forward to setting a date--the sooner the better.

I have talked to the chairman of the subcommittee--that is Chairman Coons and Ranking Member Isakson--and they have agreed to have these hearings.

I am anxious to get into this so all the world can see it. Maybe we can stop this from happening again. I do not know.

I also suggest that the United States step in to help and examine the possibility of seeking a place of exile for the Gbagbos outside of Cote d'Ivoire. The United States has performed such a role before when, in 1986, under the Reagan administration, Haiti's ``Baby Doc'' Duvalier was sent into exile in France. So it has happened before. There is nothing wrong. The American Government did this before. I am asking them to do it again: take these people, who are being maybe murdered at this moment--we don't know; we know they are being tortured--and allow them to go into exile.

This could be an important step toward beginning a process of reconciliation that the people of Cote d'Ivoire so dearly deserve. This is not about the Gbagbos. It is about the modern day return to French colonial imperialism, and this time, with the help of the United Nations, they were doing this.

Here is what my concern is: Cote d'Ivoire has had a hard enough time trying to break free from the yoke of French colonialism. From the days of President Houphouet-Boigny in 1960 through Bedie in 2000--then Gbagbo was elected in the year 2000--up to that time, the French had actually owned all the Presidents. They were all right there with France.

All you have to do is go through the streets of Abidjan--what streets might be left now; I doubt there are many--and you will see that is happening. It is not just the Gbagbos. Any President on the African Continent in Sub-Saharan Africa should know this could just as well happen to them and their Ministers and their friends. That is what is happening right now.

I am going to show you something that I hesitated doing, but this is the happy face of President Gbagbo, as shown in this picture. This is the face I know. This is the President who has been President since 2000. He has gone through a lot of these same problems, but he stood up against the French and against the Ouattara in the north. Now he has been captured, and I will show you what he looks like today. This is 3 days ago.

This is today. His face is beat in from the side. He is there. He is being held on this side by someone while they are mashing his face.

Then there is Simone, his wife. I happen to know her very well. I will now show you a picture of her.

In my State of Oklahoma, we had--he is not there anymore--a great Congressman named J.C. Watts. He is an African American. I just talked to him today. He was at a hearing I testified in today. J.C. Watts is an African American who served in the House.

When Simone came over one time--this is Simone Gbagbos--she said: Would you try to let me get introduced to J.C. Watts, Congressman Watts. I

said: Yes, I would be glad to do it. I did not know why. I went over and took her to the House of Representatives. We are in the Senate. That was in the House. He was in a hearing. He came out, and I said: I want to introduce you to someone who is the First Lady of Cote d'Ivoire. She then put her arms around him and started crying. He did not know why she was crying. She said to him: Will you forgive us? J.C. Watts said: Forgive you for what? She said: Because we are the ones who sold your brothers into slavery.

In the United States of America, people walk around guilty--and they should be--about the slavery we had. But in Africa, and particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and west Africa, where most of the slave trade came from, such as Cote d'Ivoire, they realize they are the ones who sold their brothers into slavery. Here is Simone begging J.C. Watts to forgive her for selling them into slavery.

She was an elected member of Parliament from her district. She was leading the way for developing a center to care for orphans in her district. At the national level, Simone Gbagbo, the First Lady, worked to have a nationwide program for women to get their products to market. No name for that program is yet found, but that is what the program is. On a continental level, she was the head of the Organization of African First Ladies against HIV/AIDS, a forum created to establish a role for African First Ladies in dealing with the HIV needs of women and children. That is who Simone is. Isn't she pretty? That was 1 week ago.

Let's see what she looks like today. You cannot see it now. They have held her and pulled her hair out by the roots. They went out into the streets and said: This is the hair of Simone Gbagbos. I don't know what else they did to her. Use your own imagination--brutally murdered.

Who are these people? They are the Ouattara forces. Do you think we made that up? Here is another picture. There they are. All of these are identified leaders of the Ouattara forces holding her. See what that they are doing to her, beating her and pulling her hair out. That is what is happening today.

So I only will say--I will conclude with this--our State Department has to wake up. You cannot assume the United Nations is doing something that is right. We have to understand there is this half of a continent called Sub-Saharan Africa, and those people--their lives are worth just as much as they are worth in Kosovo or Bosnia or the United States or any of the other places we go and try to save lives.

Again, I would say to any of our friends and any of the Presidents of any of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, what has happened right there could very well happen to the Presidents or First Ladies of your countries.

I only ask three things. No. 1, stop this. Stop the firing that is going on right now. People are being murdered as we speak. Stop it. We can do it. We have the power to do it. Our State Department can ask the United Nations to make it happen in spite of what the French might want.

No. 2, send them into exile. Give them the dignity of living someplace else in Sub-Saharan Africa so these people, so the people of Africa will know--can you imagine what the people of Cote d'Ivoire will be thinking and doing in the near future if they allow this to go unanswered? That is my appeal to the U.S. State Department, to the United Nations, and to the French.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, there is no one else in the Chamber now. They said they had other speakers lined up, and when they come in, I will be glad to yield the floor to them. In the meantime, let me make a couple of comments about the discussion today that everyone is addressing, Democrats and Republicans.

I have been here for a number of years. I have seen different administrations come through. I think this is the first time the American people have finally awoken to the fact that we have finally gotten to a point where we can't continue to do what we have been doing.

When President Obama came into office, he came out with his first budget and then his second budget and then his third budget. If we add up these budgets, what he has done successfully, since he had total control of the House and the Senate, is passed these budgets. He has added more to our national debt in 2 years than every President throughout--in the history of this country, every President from George Washington to George W. Bush.

I can remember coming to this floor and I was outraged back in 1995 when then-President Clinton came up with a budget, and that budget was a $1.5 trillion budget. This budget President Obama has come out with is not just $1 trillion, not $1.5 trillion, it is $3.5 trillion, and the deficit alone for this 1 year is greater than the budget was for the entire year of fiscal year 1996. It can't happen. We can't continue to do that.

Consequently--and I criticized some of my Republican friends when a lot of them voted for the $700 billion bailout back in October of 2008. Of course, none of the Republicans voted for the $800 billion stimulus package. Right now, we are quibbling over, well, can we really cut $60 billion from the budget. Yet they passed an $800 billion stimulus package--spending. It had never been done before in the history of this country. It has to stop now.

I watched what Paul Ryan is doing over there. That is heavy lifting, that is tough, and he is talking about something that is very real.

I see my good friend from Utah has come in.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, I wish to compliment my good friend, Senator Coons from Delaware, for something he has done recently along with Senator Isakson as the chairman and the ranking member of the African Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They have responded to my request to have a hearing on the tragedies and

what is taking place right now in Cote d'Ivoire.

Let me mention, there is only one thing I take issue with in the letter that has gone out to make the request. One sentence says:

Mr. Gbagbo has sought to forcefully thwart the will of the

Ouattaran people and his forces, reportedly, including

mercenaries, who have targeted innocent civilians, including

women, as well as United Nations missions.

I only want to get into the Record--I have already done this. I have given three very lengthy speeches about what is happening over there. I have been there, I am sure, more than any other Member of the Senate. I would say that if you read the Guardian, the British Guardian, in their--I am quoting now--two big slaughters have taken place, one in a small western town called Duekoue and another in Abidjan, the capital. The article says:

The UN mission said traditional hunters, known as Dozos,

fought alongside Ouattara's forces.

Let's keep in mind who we are talking about here. The President, who has been now for the last 10 years, has been President Gbagbo, Laurent Gbagbo, and the person who had run against him 10 years ago, and then this time, and who was declared to be winning the election, is Alassane Ouattara. Anyway, they are talking about Ouattara in this case.

The UN mission said traditional hunters, known as Dozos,

fought alongside Ouattara's forces and took part in killing

330 people in the western town of Duekoue.

Then the Red Cross weighed in and they came in with a new count. They said they are responsible for 800 who have been killed. Recently--and I certainly want my friend from Delaware to know this--I have talked to close friends of mine who are in Abidjan now. Abidjan is where the bad things are happening. I hope anyone who questions the fact that it is Ouattara's forces that are creating the problems in Abidjan access my Web site and pull up the YouTube video that was taken of what happened on what I call ``Black Monday,'' Monday night, when they went out with helicopters and they mowed down thousands of people. We don't have a death count of how many people have been murdered in the last 5 days.

This could not have been the former President--or maybe he is still the President--in fact, he is, since he has not been replaced, President Gbagbo. It is factual that he had no one in the field, so as of an hour ago, I have had reports that these forces, Ouattara's forces, are going around knocking on doors and murdering people, stealing everything in the houses and then burning them down. Yet no one can go out and even move bodies out of the streets because they will get shot by snipers. Are those President Gbagbo's people? No. He doesn't have anybody. He is hunkered down in the basement trying to save the lives of himself and I think 15 of his relatives along with his wife Simone.

I only want to say while I am very happy we are going to have the hearings, it is going to be necessary--I have witnesses. I have one witness whose name is Mel Phiodore. Mel is actually the head of the opposing party to Gbagbo.

He is the one who actually ran against him for President one time and lost. He is currently a Parliament member. Yet he is defending him, saying he is the one who is right in this case and they stole the election. This needs to come out.

I will make one comment. I am equally troubled. I tried to explain to people in Oklahoma how all these billions and trillions of dollars we talk about really affects the people who pay the taxes. Back during the time we spent on the floor trying to defeat the efforts of the EPA in their cap-and-trade efforts, the costs put on there were between $300 billion and $400 billion. I recommend particularly to some of the new Senators to count the number of tax returns the families file in their States, and then do the math. In that case, that would have cost--if they had been able to continue, and right now they are trying to continue, or if any of the legislation had passed cap and trade, that would have cost each family who files a tax return in Oklahoma $3,100 a year.

When we start equating that to some of the numbers floating around, it is just--I remember so well coming here and standing at this podium in 1995 when Bill Clinton was President. He came out with his budget for fiscal year 1996, I think. It was a $1.5 trillion budget. I was outraged and said we can't do that, it is not sustainable. Yet this last budget from the Obama administration has deficits that are higher than $1.5 trillion. In other words, the deficits are higher than the amount it took to run the entire country of the United States of America in 1996.

It is something that everybody knows is not sustainable. We looked at these large numbers, and we know it will be difficult. My major concern, as second ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, is our troops. We have an opportunity to do something right now with our troops, help them to be funded. I think this offer from the House is good. I opposed the last three that came over. This one I am supporting. Why? Because not only does it have cuts--and it is also only 7 days, and I understand that--but it takes the innocent defense and all of our troops there in harm's way out from under all this foolishness going on on the floor of the Senate now and funds them through the rest of the fiscal year. It funds them at a low level.

With all the high spending coming out of the Obama administration, DOD funding has remained level, while the rest of the funding has averaged an increase of 25 percent. So they have already taken a hit. Let's at least make sure we can make the payroll, that we can support our troops and, to do that, we can take up the House bill and pass it. It is only for 7 days. If somebody doesn't like it, they can try something else. It takes care of our military.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know we are rotating back and forth. I am the only one on the Senate floor, I think, who is requesting time. I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for, let's say, 15 minutes. I probably will not use that much time, but I ask that unanimous consent.

Mr. President, let me, first of all, speak in response to what the Senator from Texas talked about. This is very significant. I happen to be maybe one of the few who voted against the last three extensions that were requested--these 1-week extensions. That is no way to run government. I understand that.

But this one is different, and I rejoiced when I saw we had an opportunity to pass a 1-week extension that would do three things: No. 1, substantial cuts--not these just imaginary things we have been talking about--No. 2, continue the funding for what we must do in Israel for the end of this fiscal year; but, most importantly--and I say this as the second ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee--this would be a huge help to our military so there would be certainty, they would know what we are going to be doing between now and the end of this fiscal year. That absolutely has to be done.

It is unimaginable to me that in the middle of what I call two, maybe three conflicts right now that we are not lining up and making sure we have the funding that is necessary for what is going on in Afghanistan and other places where we have our troops in harm's way. It is something that is inexcusable, and I just cannot believe there is going to be a veto.

In spite of the veto threat, this is our opportunity to have time to be fiscally responsible, and I hope we are.

That is not why I am here, however. I want to be sure that something I have been talking about over the last days has now come to a peak where we must do something.

I have been concerned about what is happening in Cote d'Ivoire, in west Africa. I am very close to the situation. I have had occasion to be there over the last few years nine different times. I know the President is there, the current President and his wife, Laurent and Simone Gbagbo. I was familiar with the election that came around, so I have been on the floor talking about what I believe should happen there, that we should call for a new election. Unfortunately, the United States and our State Department--I will be very critical of them--have joined with the United Nations and with France in taking the side of Alassane Ouattara from the north who was the challenger, who has been challenging this administration now for at least 10 years that I know of.

I got a scathing reply from the Ambassador to the United States from France. I am not going to read it. I am not going to enter it into the Record. It doesn't make any sense. I only wish to respond to a couple of things in that letter. First of all, they talk about the fact that this was a legitimate election and it was certified properly and it was in accordance with the Constitution of Cote d'Ivoire, and I don't believe that. I will respond to that by saying the independent electoral commission did not fulfill its constitutional mandate to announce the final provision vote tallies within 3 days. That is what the Constitution says in the country of Cote d'Ivoire and west Africa. It announced then, almost 16 hours after it was constitutionally mandated, to report them to the Constitutional Council. It is my understanding it is the Constitutional Council of Cote d'Ivoire and not the electoral commission which certifies and declares the winner of Presidential elections.

On three occasions now I have talked about this election and the abuses that were taking place. In one case we had information that was given to me by members of the opposing party to President Gbagbo where they submitted that in one of the five regions in the north--let's keep in mind the challenger, Ouattara, is from the north, a Muslim area up there. They had, in five of these regions--in one of them--149,598--and I showed how it was calculated. I showed the actual results that were there from the electoral process, and this was just one of five northern cities. But when the total was officially reported in the total vote column, Ouattara received 244,000 votes, a difference of almost 95,000 votes.

If you do your math and you say this happened in all five of these areas in northern Cote d'Ivoire, that would be more than enough to declare--enough mistakes that would take the election away from the duly reelected President, President Gbagbo. If you don't want to get into the weeds that far, all you have to do is look at the results they had. In that election they came out with the results that said Gbagbo in those northern precincts--we call them precincts, they call them something else--that they actually had thousands and thousands of votes in what we would call the primary, but when the primary runoff came up, he got zero votes. That is a statistical impossibility. So I have given all those things to our State Department, and I haven't gotten any positive response.

In the accusations in the letter the French say he refused to accept--he being Gbagbo--refused to accept proposals by the African union, a high-level group, while these proposals have been formally accepted by President Ouattara. It is not true, just flat not true. As late as March 27 the African Union sent former Cape Verde Foreign Minister Jose Brito to mediate between Ouattara and Gbagbo. Gbagbo accepted the mediation, Ouattara didn't.

I have a whole list of the accusations that were made and my response to these accusations, and I am going to be submitting them at this portion in my presentation in lieu of reading them at this time. I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.

I came to the conclusion that on Wednesday, April 6--that marked the 17th anniversary of the terrible thing that happened in Rwanda, the genocide--and we have information that actually Secretary General Kofi Annan had knowledge of that. It wasn't shared. We didn't have warning, and we all know 800,000-plus people were brutally murdered in Rwanda during that genocide.

What I wish to do now is make sure we are on record in warning the United States, France, and the United Nations what is going on right now.

First of all, if we look--they say it is all decided, everyone has made up their minds, yet President Obiang--President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. He is also the current President of the African Union, or the chief of the African Union. He is on record saying that Africa must be allowed to manage its own affairs, and this is a quote:

Africa does not need any external influence. Africa must

manage its own affairs.

This is the President who is the head right now of the African Union.

President Sarkozy has said--so there is no doubt about whether he has authorized his troops to go in there and participate in these raids that have taken place, two of them that I will describe in a minute. French President--this is reported on BBC News--Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement he had authorized 1,600 strong French Licorne forces in the country.

That shows definitely, and I don't think anyone is questioning that. Here is another one:

One source said soldiers from a 1,000-strong French Licorne

force--

This is a very strong force--

in the Ivory Coast has been deployed in Zone 4, in the south

of the city.

I think also it is important to see that France has authorized its military--and I am reading now from the same report:

France has authorized its military to participate in a

United Nations operation in the Ivory Coast to protect

civilians against escalating violence there. The Elysee

Palace said the operation aimed to neutralize heavy weapons

belonging to troops loyal to President Gbagbo.

So he is talking about sending them in. Of course, I think most of us--I will go ahead and read one more thing here that I think is significant: ``French helicopters opened fire on a military camp in Abidjan on Monday.''

That is going to go down in history as ``Black Monday.''

If anyone wants to see what was happening with helicopters and rockets firing on all kinds of targets near the palace in the residence in Abidjan of Ouattara, go to my Web site. We have pictures of that.

Earlier, French President Nicholas Sarkozy said he had

authorized France's military to join a U.N. operation against

forces loyal to Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo.

So, clearly, they are the ones who had--I want to say this: There are two major assaults on Cote d'Ivoire. I mistakenly thought that the French were involved in the one in a city called Duekoue. I find out later that they weren't. They were supporting, of course, Ouattara--the forces that were there, but they did not have a direct participation in it. A man named Guillaume Ngefa, who is the head of the United Nations mission in Cote d'Ivoire, said that Ouattara's forces had carried out the killings in Duekoue, and we have pictures--I am quoting them now:

We have pictures. We have evidence. This is retaliation.

That is what the deputy head of the mission in Cote d'Ivoire of the United Nations mission said.

Then: ``We have credible reports of serious abuses being committed by Ouattara's side.'' That came from Corinne Dufka, a Human Rights Watch researcher based in Dakar, Senegal. It is raising very serious concerns.

Then further quotes. It goes on and on. I will enter all of these quotes into the Record.

But the bottom line here is that Ouattara's forces are the ones that were involved in Duekoue when they--the estimate they have right here is that--it comes from Patrick Nicholson, a spokesman for the Catholic aid agency Caritas, saying that an agency team in town last week on a routine aid mission had found a lot of dead bodies. ``We estimate between 800 and 1,000 dead,'' Nicholson said in a telephone interview from Rome.

They are primarily killed by gunshot, though some of the

wounds were made by machetes. I don't think they were killed

in crossfire.

It is interesting, because the forces of President Gbagbo had left that area of Duekoue a week before all of that happened. So that had to have happened with those forces that were Ouattara's. Well, anyway, I am still quoting from this, which was printed in the Washington Post:

Ouattara's forces have also been accused of carrying out

reprisal killings and extrajudicial executions of prisoners

during their march to the capital.

Gbagbo's forces had vacated a week before.

We have pictures showing the French flags that were on the major massacre that took place and that was the one that took place on Monday night. I have already said all of this on the floor. We have talked about this and the problems.

One thing I haven't mentioned is one of the first things Ouattara did when he marched on Cote d'Ivoire in the south and on Abidjan is to turn to release all of the prisoners in one of the major Abidjan prisons-- that is some 5,000 prisoners--and military sources loyal to the incumbent leader Gbagbo said the doors of the MACA prison--that is the big prison in that area--were opened by forces loyal to the President, Presidential claimant Alassane Ouattara, in the midst of an offensive aimed at Gbagbo.

Afterwards, they go into detail as to hearing the gunfire; in other words, releasing prisoners to fight against the sitting President.

Residents near the jail said thousands of youths streamed out of the prison, which had the capacity of 3,000 prisoners, but was believed to be holding over 5,000, into the neighborhood in Abidjan.

We heard gun fire early this morning and afterwards the

doors of the prison were opened and prisoners were left

shouting for joy.

That is something I have not had in the Record before.

One of the things I have to repeat that I have stated before--let me ask the Chair how much time I have remaining.

I request an additional 10 minutes.

I wish to speak about one of the testimonials in Duekoue.

I spot four pigs eating something dark in a charred

courtyard. Standing by a newly dug mass grave, a UN soldier

from Morocco is choking with rage and grief. I asked him if

any of the dead are children. He nods and begins to sob,

quietly, into his facemask.

This is something that has been happening again. We talked about this before. I don't want to abuse the time we have, but a few minutes ago I got a notice from somebody I happen to know and he says:

I must admit that it was very difficult. This day too--

we are talking about in the last few hours--

has been very confusing with the rebels parading in the

streets stealing and dispossessing people of their goods.

This is what makes it very dangerous because it is a no law

zone. Hundreds of people have started leaving town avoiding

the danger in Abidjan.

That is what is happening right now. The report we have now recently is that the Ouattara rebel army is deploying death squads, and I will read from this because I think it is very important that we get this down right, because I am going to make some accusations here that maybe have never been made in recent history on this floor.

I have just received devastating news about the situation

in Cote d'Ivoire.

I have been told that there are ``death squads'' roving

around the streets of Abidjan ``disappearing''--

they used the word ``disappearing''

supporters of President Gbagbo.

Do they kill the supporters of President Gbagbo? Probably so, but they use the word ``disappearing'' because there is no accounting of it.

These death squads are led by soldiers of Ouattara's rebel

Army. They have already killed 400 people in the last few

hours.

I am talking about contemporary, right now.

If we do nothing, this soon will include the murder of

President Gbagbo and his wife Simone. Ouattara's armed rebels

are supported militarily by the United Nations and the French

government. I call on UN Secretary General Ban Kee Moon and

French President Sarkozy to condemn and halt immediately

these ``death squads.'' If they do not, I charge that they

are complicit in allowing these death squads to operate

freely on the streets of Abidjan.

It also calls for immediate cease-fire.

I will conclude and say that I remember well, because I was around when this happened, and when we knew--some people knew, we didn't know in advance, what was going to happen in Rwanda. President Kagame didn't know what was going to happen in Rwanda. Kofi Annan of the United Nations apparently did know what was going to happen and elected not to say anything about it, so that they weren't warned and 800,000 mutilations later, we know what the genocide was all about. We know now. We know the death squads are there. The death squads have already killed, according to these reports, some 4,000 people in the last few hours.

If we don't do anything about it, I have in my own mind--I feel very certain that those death squads run by Ouattara's rebel army will reach the hiding place of President Gbagbo and his wife Simone and their family, and they, too, will be murdered. If we don't do anything, we have been warned that can happen. We can intervene and stop the death squads roaming around in Abidjan in the country of Cote D'Ivoire.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized as in morning business until such time as somebody else comes in and wants the floor.