Floor Statements

Reserving the right to object.

Mr. President, it is my intention that I be heard tonight concerning some of the amendments to be voted on tomorrow. It is my understanding further that Senator Enzi from Wyoming has the time between 5:30 and 6 o'clock. I request that I be recognized for 15 minutes during that timeframe.

What time will that be approximately, right after the vote or before?

Before. No objection.

I ask unanimous consent, to get an order so we know what we are doing after we hear from the Senator from Florida, Mr. LeMieux, and then the words from the Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Lautenberg, that I then would get my 15 minutes from this side to run consecutively from the 15 minutes I would get from the distinguished Senator from Hawaii.

Let me ask if I could extend my time by 5 minutes. Is there objection?

Mr. President, first of all, I appreciate the fact no one objected to my unanimous consent request that I will be taking my 15 minutes from this side and 15 minutes from the other side and run them together. I appreciate that very much.

Let me say, before getting into this subject, something really great happened today in a bipartisan nature. We have a new Governor who will be coming in to Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, who used to serve over in the House. In fact, I flew her around in my airplane and helped her campaign, and she won handily.

She made her first--she is still Governor-elect, but she made her first commitment today, and I was very excited about it. We have a guy in Oklahoma named Gary Ridley who has been the highway director and then the secretary of transportation in the State now for years and years and years. I was so proud that today she said she was going to reappoint him.

I can remember 8 years ago when Governor Brad Henry, who is a Democrat, was elected. I called him up and I said: I only have one request, and that is you keep Gary Ridley because he's the best there is in the Nation, and I really believe that. Now, 8 years later, she has done this.

I remember when I was critical of President Clinton in 1998 when he took $8 billion out of the highway trust fund and put it into deficit reduction. It was something that was the wrong thing to do, and Gary Ridley stood by my side for 8 years before we were able to correct that. So we are going to have a great road program and hopefully we will be able to get into some of these things. After all, that is what we are supposed to be doing.

In a minute I am going to kind of identify myself as a different type of person than you have been hearing from on the floor. I happen to have the distinction of being the only Republican who objected in our conference a couple weeks ago to the ban on earmarks, as they define it. I just had no problem doing that at all. But it is something that is not a fun thing to do.

Something happened tonight that went completely by everybody. It was a total change in the Republican position, and it is a good change when Senator McCain and Senator Coburn both talked about authorization. I have often said that authorization is the only discipline on appropriations, and I believe that, and that is true. So we have a situation where I have been saying--not for months but for years--that if you will just define an earmark as an appropriations that has not been authorized, I am with you. I heard them tonight say that. Unfortunately, that is not what the bill that we are going to have before us says.

I would just like to do away with the whole word ``earmarks'' or else define it in such a way as I just described it. Now it seems as if everybody would be in agreement with it, and maybe that is going to be the road we will be taking.

Let me, first of all, before I surprise a lot of people, give my conservative credentials. I have always been ranked as one of the most conservative or the most conservative Member of the U.S. Senate, the National Journal's most conservative Senator for 2009. That is the last one they gave out: ``The only Senator with a perfect score on 99 key votes.'' I have also been voted the ``most outstanding U.S. Senator'' by Human Events.

So I am a conservative. I am a conservative but a conservative who loves the Constitution. I have also been waiting for a long time. I love these guys. Certainly the author of this, Senator Coburn, is a brother and I love him. And brothers do fight sometimes. This fight is going to be over with and we are going to have a happy ending.

I have been waiting for years for this Tea Party thing to happen, for conservatives, anti-establishment people to come in, and I just get very excited when I see what we are looking at. Yet we have an administration with a majority in both Houses that we have had

now for quite some time: spend, spend, spend. When they talk about George W. Bush, look, it is this administration with the increase in the debt to the amount it is now, which is a greater increase in debt than we have had collectively with every President, every administration from George Washington to George W. Bush.

All the time, they have been talking about earmarks that totally distract people from the real problem. That is not the problem. I have been listening on the floor now for the last 2 years. Every night we go through the same thing. They talk about earmarks, earmarks, earmarks. What they do not do is pay attention to the fact that during that discussion this President, with his majority in both Houses, was able to give my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit in 1 year. It is mind-boggling that this could happen. But we hear the President say: Spend, spend, spend. And he has used the words quite often: We need to give the people what they desire. It reminds me of the story of the guy who went in the department store and there was a beautiful, young, voluptuous saleslady who came up and said: Sir, what is your desire? He said: Well, my desire is to pick you up after work and go to a fine restaurant, have dinner, and buy a bottle of champagne, go to my place, and make mad passionate love. But I need a pair of socks.

Now, what we are going to have to understand is, there is a difference between desire and need. That is what I am here to try to do. To think we could actually have said today--now, the bill does not do this, but it was said that authorizing is kind of a lost art. Senator McCain said that. Frankly, I do not quite agree with that because we have an authorization committee in Armed Services of which he is the ranking member, and I am the second ranking member, and it is something on which we have done a pretty good job. But in other areas we have not. Keep in mind, authorizing is the only discipline that there is to appropriating.

Now, I have a family picture I show you in the Chamber. These are my 20 kids and grandkids. I have to tell the occupier of the chair that I was so proud to have all of them at one table on Thanksgiving. How many people are blessed that way? Not many. But this little guy here--where is Jase Rapert. Here he is down there on the picture, the football guy.

He came up to me one time--this is some time ago--and he said: PopI-- ``I'' is for ``Inhofe.'' So MomI and PopI. He said: PopI, why is it you do things no one else will? I said: That's the reason, because no one else will.

I am reminded of 9 years ago when everybody--I am talking about Democrats and Republicans--all said global warming is coming. The world is coming to an end. It is manmade gases that cause global warming. I looked into the science. At that time Republicans were in the majority. I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee that has that jurisdiction. I looked at that and I found out they were cooking the science, that it was not true.

Then we had the McCain-Lieberman bill and all these things that would pass a cap and trade which would constitute the largest tax increase in the history of this country. We beat them one at a time. The last one was Waxman-Markey. But, again, this has been something that has finally evolved, that that one, my voice in the wilderness 10 years ago, is now the prevailing thought. That is why I said to my little grandson, Jase Rapert, that I do it because no one else will.

So let me just say this. How much more fun it would be to come down here and do the politically correct thing and say: yes, earmarks are bad, earmarks are bad, earmarks are bad. We are going to do away with earmarks, and let everyone applaud before they realize what it really is.

I hear the staffers right now telling their Members: You know, you have the greatest opportunity. You can vote for this amendment to ban these earmarks and you can make people think you are conservative, No. 1. No. 2, you can make President Obama happy because he is publicly supporting this. This is what he wants because this means, as has been said by Senator Lautenberg, Senator Harkin, and several others, if we do not do it, that goes to the President. I want to explain how that works in just a minute.

We could also be politically correct, so there would be a lot of them thinking: What an opportunity this is. People will think, if I vote for this amendment, I am a conservative. Obviously, I can make our President happy. That will do me no harm, and I can be politically correct.

Well, it has been demagoging now for so many years. Let me define what Webster's Third New International Dictionary says about demagogy. The definition of demagogy: ``Political leaders who seek to gain personal or partisan advantage through specious, extravagant claims, promises and charges.'' That is what we have been listening to now for at least the last 2 years, on a regular basis.

The big problem I have with all the demagoging that has been going on every night for the last 2 years is that people are just not paying attention to the real problem. The real problem is not earmarks. The real problem is that during that 2-year period--when everyone is concerned about a few dollars--we found out we have increased the debt more than it has been increased in the history of this country, and we have given my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit in just 2 years. I thought that was not possible. I never believed that could happen. But that is what has happened here. They have distracted people. Get this thing behind us so we can start working on this and not make people think we are doing something great for them when we really are not. It would be nothing short of criminal to go through all the trouble of electing great, new anti-establishment conservatives, only to be politically correct and have them cede to Obama their constitutional power of the purse. That is exactly what would happen.

I want these new people coming in to tackle the three issues to really save America, in my opinion the deficit, the debt, and Obamacare, and not be distracted by the bogus issue of earmarks. I say ``bogus.'' It is kind of a strong word. Why is it bogus? It is bogus and unconstitutional, but the bogus part shows the definition of what we are saying. The House of Representatives Republicans--not the Democrats, the Republicans--took a moratorium, a 1-year moratorium banning earmarks in that period of time. How did they define it? They said:

Resolved, that it is the policy of the Republican

Conference that no Member shall request a congressional

earmark, limited tax benefit, or limited tariff benefit, as

such terms are used in clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of

the House. . . .

What is clause 9 of rule XXI? It applies to every appropriation or authorization. In other words, they have said: we will neither appropriate nor authorize for a whole year. Now, the Democrats are going to do it. The President is going to do it. But they say they are not going to do it.

Of course, the authors of this amendment, they all agreed with and praised the House for doing this. But let's go ahead and see what the Constitution says, article I, section 9. Several people here have talked about the Constitution. It is times like this that I miss Bob Byrd. Senator Byrd, talking about the Constitution right now, would be really outraged. It is so plain what we are supposed to be doing here. But article 1, section 9 says:

No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in

consequence of appropriations made by law.

Law, that is us. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution. That is not the President.

I would just say if you are looking at the Senate language, it says the term ``congressionally directed spending'' means a provision primarily at the request of a Senator providing expenditures, and so forth, to an entity targeted to a specific State or with any-- everything is with or to an entity. In other words, they say--again, they are talking about all appropriations, all authorizations. We are not going to do that anymore. We are going to let the President do that. That is what this whole thing is about.

I was so excited when I heard for the first time them agreeing with me. By the way, it is not appropriate for me to tell this group or to say publicly what goes on inside a conference. In a Republican conference, I can say what I said, and I said to my colleagues when they were trying to get us, and they

did, I went up in 2008 and I went ahead and voted for a ban because I was told they would define it as an appropriation that has not been authorized. Now, all of a sudden--they didn't do it then, and all of a sudden they are talking about doing it, and I think I know why and I will tell you in a minute why I think it is.

So we are having this situation now where we are saying we are not going to authorize, we are not going to appropriate. There are two reasons to ban Senate spending by either definition. It cedes constitutional authority to the President and also gives cover to big spenders.

Let's go back to that article I, section 9 chart. The Constitution restricts spending only to the legislative branch and specifically denies that honor to the President. We take an oath to uphold article 1, section 9 of the Constitution. Now, maybe there is some doubt about this. If you think there is some doubt, let's go back and see what the Founders of this country said. Let's see what the authors of the Constitution said. Let's look at James Madison. He said:

The power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the

most complete and effectual weapon with which any

Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the

people for obtaining redress of every grievance.

The two reasons he did, if you studied the Federalist Papers, they said they wanted Congress to do the spending because if they do it wrong--first of all, they know the needs of the people of their State or their--whatever the unit was at that time. If they do it wrong, they can fire them. Look what happened on November 2. That is exactly what happened. Alexander Hamilton said:

The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes

the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen

should be regulated.

That is what we are supposed to be doing.

Mr. President, I have talked about Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Probably the guy who was most knowledgeable on the Constitution was Justice Joseph Story, back in the early 1800s, when he actually said in his commentary:

It is highly proper that Congress should possess the power

to decide how and when any money should be applied. If it

were otherwise, the executive would possess an unbounded

power. Congress is made the guardian of the Treasury.

I say all this to impress upon any impartial patriot that the legislative branch--which is us--has the power to spend money. How does a ban on earmarks cede our authority to the President? This is something that is heavy lifting, but I think it is very important people understand why and how this happened. This is how it works. This is the way things work here and have for many years. The Constitution is very clear.

The President submits a budget to the House and Senate--us. There is an overall budget, but within the budget he says how much is going to be spent to defend America, for roads and highways, for water and infrastructure, all these things. We have these top lines under which we are operating. So let's take this as an example. I happen to be the second ranking member on the Armed Services Committee. In his budget last year, he had, I think, $330 million set aside for a launching system called a box of rockets. It is a good program, something we need. But with limited funding, we on the Armed Services Committee--and Senator McCain talked about this--have experts who look at our missile defense system and say: How can we best defend America? The President doesn't know this. They can say that comes from the Pentagon, but that is not so. That is the reality. Instead of this launching system for $330 million, we decide to spend that same amount of money and buy six new, shiny FA-18 fighters or things that we knew we needed at this time. It didn't cost any more money. We are taking that money he wanted to spend on something else and we are exercising our constitutional prerogative. If we substitute our appropriation for his budget item, it would be an earmark by any definition. If we pass this, that means we have to take whatever the President wants to spend on America, and we would not do anything we wanted to. So we said six new FA-18s were what we needed, and it didn't cost 1 cent more.

In other words, we would be letting the President do what James Madison wanted us to do. If you look at this in the Armed Services Committee, the unmanned aerial vehicles, right now we have 36 of them flying around Southwest Asia over areas where there is combat, feeding information to our kids in the field there. We would not have unmanned aerial vehicles if it weren't for earmarks. We took something the President wanted and put that same amount of money into these unmanned aerial vehicles. Also, we would not have our improved armored vehicles and add-on armor. Why do you think we on the committee spent so much time on Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world on that? We do it to find out our needs. Then we know more than the President knows about the needs.

We are doing what Hamilton, Madison, and Story wanted us to do. That is what we are supposed to do. I don't know how many of our young men and women in uniform would be dead today if it hadn't been for that. We wouldn't have Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. That was a congressional earmark. We wouldn't have had $14.2 million for the detection of landmines and suspected bombmakers and IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was my earmark on the Armed Services Committee. It didn't cost another cent. We merely canceled an equal amount of money that the President wanted to spend on something else and we exercised our Constitutional right. It didn't cost anything additional.

Eliminating earmarks wouldn't allow us to change anything in the Obama budget and would allow President Obama to perform our constitutional duties. As I said, constitutionally that is where we are and that money would be transferred, for all practical purposes, to President Obama. Second, it gives cover to big spenders. Under the current definition, let's look at two of the four largest earmarks in 2008. Using the Senate definition ``expenditures with or to an entity,'' the following qualified as earmarks. But rather than arguing as to whether they are earmarks, I will put them up to get a perspective. These are two of them in 2008. The TARP is one that I think--I know people get upset when I say this, but 10, 15, 20 years from now, historians will say the most egregious vote ever cast by the Senate was on the $700 billion bailout. You know where that went--AIG, Chrysler, and the General Motors bailout. That $700 billion was given to an unelected bureaucrat to do what he preferred.

Next was the PEPFAR bill, $50 billion. The author of this amendment, Senator Coburn, voted for both of these. I voted against them. This is something I wish all Members would do. This is called the Inhofe factor. I know I am not as smart as a lot of guys around here. When I see billions and trillions of dollars, I have to put it somehow into a perspective that I know what this costs my people in Oklahoma.

In 2009, $2 trillion in taxes was paid by individuals across the country, and $18 billion came from Oklahomans, which is about 1 percent of the Federal total. The average Oklahoma individual's tax return was $11,100 that year. Therefore, the average Oklahoma taxpayer is responsible for providing the percentage shown here of the total Federal revenue. For every $10 million in spending, Oklahomans pay about a nickel--not all the State but each taxpayer who files a tax return in Oklahoma. So that is what we have.

Put the next chart up. We see how that works in reality. If you take the amount and use the same factor to those two bills, the TARP bill, the $700 billion bailout, and the $50 billion PEPFAR bill, that is $750 billion, and you apply that factor, each of my tax-paying families in Oklahoma would have to have an obligation of $3,500 that year. That is what it would cost. Someone might argue that they didn't spend the whole $700 billion, that some of that came back in. That is true. But they authorized it and said you can do it. They were willing to have each taxpayer in Oklahoma spend $3,552 in taxes. The total amount of requests that I had--in other words, earmarks--were some $80 million, and that was mostly in the area of defense. Using the same factor for each family in

Oklahoma to get to the $80 million, because we are trying to defend America, it would cost them 40 cents. Those are earmarks--40 cents versus $3,552 that the author of this amendment we are talking about would have to spend. You know, I think at some point you have to look and see what this cost is.

If you go back to the chart No. 4 there, several things have been said today that were not true. I am not saying they intentionally misrepresented the truth, but they did it inadvertently while being caught up in this thing. The statement was made by a Senator--it might have been the occupant of the chair. The statement was made that, as earmarks are going up, this is causing spending to go up. That is not what is happening. If you take the total amount of earmarks in 2010, according to OMB, that would have been $11 billion. If you look and see what happened each year, it goes down in the amount. It started at $18 billion 5 years ago and went down to $15 billion and then to $12 billion and now to $11 billion. So it is coming down. That is why we have to look at this in reality.

I notice my good friend, Senator DeMint, from South Carolina, has been active in this, and the last time I spoke on the floor I pointed out that Senator DeMint had all these different earmarks that he has been able to get for his State, and I don't know how you can talk about eliminating earmarks and yet do that.

The platitudes that are used--it is interesting when you don't have the facts on your side, you don't have logic on your side, but you have a population who has been led to believe earmarks are bad--that means appropriations are bad, authorizations are bad unless they are done by the President; those individuals say earmarks are a gateway drug that needs to be eliminated in order to demonstrate that we are serious about fiscal restraint. There is only one problem with that. It is not true.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, again, and the Federal spending watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste, earmarks have dramatically decreased over the last several years. I mentioned 2005, $19 billion; 2008, $16 billion; 2009, $15 billion; 2010, $11 billion. So while the total number of earmarks and all dollars of earmarks have declined, the Obama deficit has ballooned to $3 trillion in 2 years. So obviously they are not a gateway drug, but it sounds good. But these are the platitudes.

When they say it is symptomatic of all this garbage, we are talking about real dollars here. And we can't get down to doing something about real spending until we quit demagoguing this issue.

I am going to give an easy way to correct this problem in just a minute, but if you need further proof, in 2009 the Senate performed a rare action of considering many appropriations bills individually rather than doing the irresponsible thing we are talking about doing now and lumping them all into one bill to consider at the end of the year. The value of considering these bills individually is that it gives Senators the opportunity to exercise some oversight in government.

In 2009, Senators could offer amendments to both cut spending and strike particular earmarks if they desired, and they did desire. Between the months of July and November of 2009, there were 18 votes specifically targeting earmarks. Now, they failed, but if they had passed, it wouldn't have saved one penny. Instead of putting the money back into the pockets of the American people by reducing spending or shrinking the deficit, these efforts to eliminate earmarks would have put the money into the hands of President Obama by allowing his administration to spend the money as it saw fit. At the end of the day, none of the money would have been saved. President Obama wins, the American people lose.

In another case, Members offered an amendment to strike funding out of a program called Save America's Treasures, for specific art centers throughout the United States, but the money was simply shifted to allow the Obama administration to do it. The same thing happened with the transportation projects. Several Members offered amendments to strike a variety of transportation projects in many States, and they were unsuccessful. So what happened? That money went back to the bureaucracy controlled by President Obama. Not one of these actions saved a dime, but it made President Obama happy because it went back to his coffers.

We have clearly demonstrated two points. First of all, spending is the exclusive obligation of the Senate and, secondly, killing an earmark doesn't save a dime; it merely gives money to President Obama.

It reminds me of what I went through 10 years ago when I couldn't get anyone to understand how they were cooking the science and why we should not pass a cap and trade. Everybody thought the world was coming to an end, and I was that one person. Granted, that was 10 years ago, but now it is the prevailing thought here in Congress. In fact, the United Nations, which started the whole concept of global warming, is having their big annual party next week and not even one--none--of the media is going to show up. Hardly anyone is going to show up to the thing because people realize it was a phony issue. It was, in fact, the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. I said it, and everyone got mad at me and even hated me. So I do not mind being the only one, and I am the only one on this.

A couple of good things have happened, though. It has been mentioned by several of those who were the most adamant in opposition to earmarks. In the case of Rand Paul, from Kentucky, our new Senator-- whom I am so happy to have with us--has said he would argue for things for the State of Kentucky. And Senator Mike Lee said:

I wouldn't say there's a mandate to stop spending for roads

or any other general purpose like that.

Another House Member, Michele Bachmann, said--and I think this has already been stated by one of the other Senators:

I don't believe that building roads and bridges and

interchanges should be considered an earmark.

Great. I agree. That is my whole point. So we are seeing these people now coming around and saying: Well, we do have a job to do.

Senator Chambliss said:

There are times when crises arise or issues come forth of

such importance to Georgia, such as the Port of Savannah,

that I reserve the right to ask Congress and the President to

approve funding.

Well, there it is. So I would say those individuals who are on the other side realize that is the wrong side. But let me say something else. I am very proud of some of the talk shows. I am on quite a few talk shows. And when you get a chance to talk, the way I am now, and explain to people what the situation is--I am looking now at I think 12 major talk show hosts in America who now pretty much agree with what I am saying tonight: Mike Gallagher, Mark Levin, Dennis Prager, Scott Hennen, Janet Parshall, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Crane Durham, Lars Larson, Jason Lewis, Rusty Humphries, Jerry Doyle, and quite a few others. And it was not easy for them to say: Maybe Inhofe has a point, so let's look at this a little closer.

So let me just say there is a solution. And I have to give credit where credit is due. These are not my thoughts. This is what I did. We have eight great Americans and the conservative groups they head up, and I am talking about Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste; Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethnics in Washington; Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for Common Sense; Craig Holman, Public Citizen; Jim Walsh, Rich Gold, Manny Rouvelas, and Dave Wenhold. Thanks to them, we can put this whole earmark issue to rest because they authored ``The 5 Principles of Earmark Reform.'' There they are, the five principles of earmark reform. These are all the conservatives who said we really need to do something about this and at the same time preserve our constitution. So I introduced, a couple of weeks ago, S. 3939, and what I did is I took everything they had and I put that into a bill. And there it is. So take it a section at a time.

No. 1 of the five principles: To cut the cord between earmarks and campaign contributions, Congress should limit earmarks directed to campaign contributors--exactly what S. 3939 does.

Section 2:

No earmark beneficiary shall make contributions aggregating

more than $5,000.

The second principle: to eliminate any connection between legislation and campaign contributions. That is the second. The third principle: To increase transparency, Congress should create a new database of all congressional earmarks. And it goes on, and they elaborate and say this is all something you can find, but you can't get your hands on it. It is too complicated. So consequently we put in our bill, in section 4, the following:

The Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House

shall post on a public Web site of their respective houses, a

link to the earmark database maintained by the Office of

Management and Budget.

Every one of these things--and I could go through each and every one--is answered in S. 3939. So if you really want to do something about it, pass that bill and you will have solved the problem and you will have kept our constitutional duties intact.

We did one more thing because it goes one more step. This is very important. There was an oversight, but they all agree with this now. This goes a step further. It says that the administration--President Obama, the bureaucracies--will have the same transparency as senatorial earmarks. So Senator McCain talked about lobbying these bureaucracies. Sure, they are doing it, because if we don't do the spending or the appropriating and authorizing, then the President does it. So the bureaucracy is doing that. So we have a section in this bill that subjects them to the same thing.

Do you remember when Sean Hannity came up with the 102 most egregious earmarks? This is just some of them. There were 102, and I read them all on the floor from this podium, and I did it to make sure people understood what he had found out. I said at the end of reading all of these earmarks--look at some of these: $300,000 for helicopter equipment to detect radioactive rabbit droppings--that all 102 have something in common: not one of them was a congressional earmark. They were all bureaucratic Obama earmarks. So that is the reason for that. And if you want reform, that is how to get it.

I know there will be some Members who will not be able to resist the fact that they can have a great opportunity with one vote. They can make people think they are conservative and give President Obama what he wants, and they can be politically correct. But, again, we have a solution to the problem. That solution will come.

Mr. President, in that conference I mentioned about 30 minutes ago, I said that if you want to do something to do away with the earmark and all this, all you have to do is define an earmark as an appropriation that has not been authorized. Authorizing committees are the discipline for appropriations. A lot of our appropriating friends won't like this idea, but that would do it. We heard several of the Senators, including my junior Senator, the author of this amendment, and Senator McCain, saying this is good, we have done away with authorizing. We need to authorize these things.

In the Armed Services Committee, we have experts in every field. One of the experts is a group of people who look at our missile defense system. Right now, we are in very serious problems in this country by taking down the site in Poland that would stop the ground-based interceptor site. That is something we should be doing. We need to have redundancy. We know we can hit a bullet with a bullet, and we should do that. We have the experts who know how to do that.

So I would say we have an opportunity. We can reform this. We can subject the bureaucracy to the same transparency to which we are subjected. We should do away completely with terms such as ``earmarks'' as people are thinking of them in their minds and go to having them redefined as appropriations that have not been authorized. I know it is a hard concept and one that not many people want to believe, but it is much easier to oversimplify it and say that all earmarks are bad. Well, if you define them properly, I agree they would all be bad. Anything that is appropriated that is not authorized, in my opinion, is bad and should be done away with.

So with that, this one voice in the wilderness, one conservative is saying this is the true story. If you really do want to cede our constitutional authority to President Obama, you can do it by passing this amendment. This allows them to get the authority we have. And if you really believe that is the thing to do, after looking at the Constitution and what Justice Joseph Story and Hamilton and Madison all said we are supposed to be doing here, let's seriously consider that and resolve this problem, put it behind us so we can quit distracting from the big spending going on today that has given us a $3 trillion deficit in 2 years.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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U.S. natural gas supplies are abundant and will increase our Nation's energy security. There is an estimated 2,000 trillion cubic feet of U.S. natural gas reserves found in shale gas plays across the U.S. As countries around the world move aggressively to secure oil resources, U.S. natural gas reserves can play an important role in enhancing our energy security.

The significant U.S. reserves of natural gas provide the opportunity to reshape our energy future. A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, states that natural gas will provide an increasing share of America's energy needs over the next several decades, doubling its share of the energy market from 20 percent today to 40 percent.

The increase in our natural gas reserves is creating economic opportunities for American workers and communities around the country. In 2008, natural gas companies directly employed roughly 622,000 Americans and indirectly sustained almost 2.2 million additional jobs. The industry contributed $385 billion to our Nation's economy in 2008 alone. Representing Oklahoma, I recognize the benefits of the natural gas industry all too well. One in seven jobs in Oklahoma is directly or indirectly supported by the energy industry. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oklahoma ranks third in the country in natural gas production.

One of the key techniques for natural gas production is hydraulic fracturing. I have spoken on this floor many times over the past 2 years about the value of this production method. Hydraulic fracturing, coupled with horizontal drilling, has not only aided in the production of both oil and natural gas from more than a million wells over the past 60 years, production from thousands of wells is dependent on hydraulic fracturing. First used in 1947, hydraulic fracturing allows previously inaccessible reserves of natural gas to be recovered with a relatively small footprint. A mixture of pressurized water, sand and additives--less than 1 percent of the overall mixture--is used to create small fissures in the shale rock which releases the natural gas, allowing it to flow up the wellbore to be collected.

As natural gas development assumes a more prominent role in our Nation's energy supply, some Members of Congress and the administration are looking at ways to have the federal government regulate the natural gas industry. Natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing is regulated effectively at the State level. Legislation has been introduced in Congress, the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009, FRAC Act, to impose new Federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing which would only add unnecessary regulations on this vital industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, is considering how to construct its study of fracking, which was ordered last year by Congress after the agency's 2004 study, that declared the technology safe, was criticized by some groups as being as flawed. The EPA's Science Advisory Board recently released a list of candidates for its panel to assist with the review of its Hydraulic Fracturing Study Plan. This panel is to provide technical and scientific advice to the EPA as it crafts the study plan.

This is a great practice by the EPA to seek advice from knowledgeable experts and sound science to develop policy. These panel members must be above reproach. Sadly, several of these candidates have a troubled history, including questions about expert scientific credentials, error-laden research on the issue of hydraulic fracturing, and questions of objectivity based on previous research and statements regarding fracking.

One nominee is an environmental activist who also happens to be a scientist. A chemist by trade, she consults and advocates against various industries, including the petrochemical and natural gas industries. Her activist roots color her professional judgments. In fact, her expert testimony was once excluded from trial. If her so- called expert judgment was inadequate for a court of law, how can it be adequate for our nation's top environmental agency?

Another nominee issued a draft report concluding that natural gas production specifically using hydraulic fracturing negates the clean burning attributes of natural gas. However, the report contained so many errors that the author was forced to withdraw it shortly after it was released.

It is clear that these nominees are simply opposed to natural gas development and have already rendered a judgment regarding hydraulic fracturing, which raises serious questions about their ability to objectively assess scientific data on this issue and remain impartial. Clearly, they are not impartial.

But more troubling are the questions raised about their scientific credentials and quality of their academic research. Having testimony thrown out by a court of law and being forced to withdraw research on this subject because of errors should disqualify an individual from serving on the Agency's panel of advisors.

EPA record for accepting comments on the nominees to assist the Science Advisory Board will soon close. I know that the EPA has received a wide variety of comments, and I urge the EPA Administrator and the Science Advisory Board to carefully consider these comments so that this study may be above reproach and not be affected by anti- natural gas political agendas.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized as in morning business for such time as I shall consume.

Mr. President, as Mark Twain might have characterized where we were a short while ago, reports of the death of cap and trade have been greatly exaggerated.

It is true we defeated all the bills. This was after the Kyoto Treaty, which failed to even get recognized for discussion, let alone ratified. We had all the bills--the McCain-Lieberman bill, the Lieberman-Warner bill, the Waxman-Markey bill, and all of the others, and they were all killed.

I can remember way back 8 years ago when I was the only bad guy, the one everybody hated. That is when I made an honest statement at the time that perhaps what they were trying to do with the global warming was the ``greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.''

As time went by, more and more people agreed. A lot of things have happened. Just in the past year, we have had the revelation of Climategate, the failure in Copenhagen, the admission of the futility of unilateral climate action, the year of the skeptic, and the vindication at the ballot box that took place November 2.

With all this, one might be tempted to declare victory, and I have to admit that for a short while I did. It was a year ago today that I gave a speech right here on the Senate floor, at this same podium, noting that the tide turned decisively against global warming alarmism. The year of the skeptic took place.

Just 2 days later, Climategate exploded into view as thousands of e- mails were released that showed, at a minimum, the very scientific spokesmen for alarmism were scheming to block open and honest assessments of their work. Behind the veil of e-mail, they showed their true colors: They weren't acting as scientists but as political hacks. They were scientists defending a political agenda. The agenda would virtually shut down America.

A lot of people realize and recognize that fossil fuels are necessary to run this machine called America. Right now, 53 percent of our energy is generated from coal. Coal is necessary. We have clean coal technology, and the releases are much less than they used to be. Oil and gas are both fossil fuels. It is necessary. You cannot run this machine called America without them.

The damage has been done in terms of what was going on at Copenhagen. I think the chapter on the climate science wars has closed. Climategate scientists and the allies want to keep fighting. They are particularly begging us to bring them before committees to question their work. But we will not because they are now irrelevant. The time to talk about this science is over.

I will say this: Five years before Climategate, I gave a speech in the Senate and talked about what they were trying to do to cook the science. Instead of talking about science, we are talking about the economics of what is happening now. We are talking about jobs, about competitiveness, and manufacturing and small businesses and real people who have to pay more for electricity, food, and gasoline. What do I mean? Even with all of the progress we have made--and while cap and trade is dead, bureaucratic cap and trade is alive and well--what is happening in this country is that we have an administration with a majority in Congress who tried to pass this legislatively, tried to pass cap and trade. The cost of cap and trade, we were finally able to convince the American people--if you look at it not from what Senator Jim Inhofe says but what the economists say, what they said at MIT and what they said at Wharton, if you pass any of these cap-and-trade schemes, the cost to the American people will be in the range of $300 billion to $400 billion a year. That is what they decided they were able to do legislatively. They thought we will do this--because we control EPA, we will do it through the regulations.

What Senator Reid said may be true for the massive 1,000-page bills filled with mandates, taxes, regulations, bureaucracy, and not much else. But it is not true for the more subtle strain of cap and trade now moving through the EPA.

That is right; this backdoor cap and trade hidden behind an administrative curtain. I can hear already what my friend, the EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, would say: Senator Inhofe, you know we are regulating in broad daylight, and we are inviting public comment and we are providing guidance. It is all aboveboard and out in the open.

That may be true, and I trust that Administrator Jackson wants the EPA to be transparent. Unfortunately, this bureaucracy has gotten to the point where transparency is virtually impossible.

The reality is that backdoor cap and trade is hidden behind acronyms such as PSD, BACT, SIPs, FIPs, BAMM, GHGRP, and the like and arcane legal provisions in the Clean Air Act. It is all a great muddle for bureaucrats and lawyers, but it is a profound disaster for jobs and small businesses in America.

Make no mistake, the intent and ultimately the effect is no different than Waxman-Markey, which is to eliminate fossil fuels and impose centralized bureaucratic control over America's industrial manufacturing base. Unless we stop them, that is what they will achieve.

Of course, President Obama would say we could have avoided all this if we passed cap and trade. That is true. If we had done that, we also know it would not have preempted what EPA would be doing.

That is wrong on two counts. First, what kind of a deal involves accepting a bad bill in place of bad EPA regulations? That is no deal at all. Secondly, the supposed deal wasn't an either/or proposition. Waxman-Markey didn't fully eliminate EPA's ability to regulate under the Clean Air Act. President Obama and cap-and-trade supporters wanted both options--cap and trade including regulation under the Clean Air Act.

Keep in mind we are talking about something that is very massive--the largest single tax increase on the American people. When you talk about $300 billion or $400 billion a year, you have to bring that down and say: What does that mean to me?

To the taxpayers in Oklahoma, it would mean over $3,000 a year. What do they get for it? Nothing. One thing I like about Administrator Lisa Jackson, the Administrator of the EPA, is she is honest in her answers. I asked her the question: If we were to pass something like this, pass Waxman-Markey and do something legislatively, how would it affect worldwide emissions of CO2. She said it wouldn't have much of an effect at all. The reason is we can't do that in the United

States: This isn't where the problem is. It is in China, India, Mexico, and other places around the world. As we tighten our availability of power, they have to go someplace--our manufacturing base--to find power. Well, now they would be going into areas where we have less controls. So that could very well have--by banning it here, it would have an increase in the effect of CO2 emissions. Most people understand and agree with that.

We have a long, difficult fight ahead. It goes back to December of 2009 when EPA promulgated the endangerment finding that CO2 endangers public health and welfare. We know that finding is wrong and based on flawed science.

Before I went to Copenhagen last December--first of all, what Copenhagen is, that is the annual big party that the U.N. puts together--and they have done it for 15 years now--and they always have it at exotic places. Next month it will be in Cancun. Last year, before I went there, I asked Administrator Jackson the very question: What does your endangerment finding--the way it happened, I say to you, was that we had a hearing, a public hearing, live on TV, and Administrator Jackson was in our hearing room.

I said: I am getting ready to be the one-man truth squad in Copenhagen. I have a feeling when I leave, you are going to have an endangerment finding. What would that be based on? The IPCC.

To make sure everybody understands, that is the U.N. That is what started this thing way back in the 1980s. And so now that is established and we know the science on which an endangerment finding is based, we go to Copenhagen. It was almost the next day that climategate broke. Oddly enough, the timing couldn't have been better--I had nothing to do with it; I was as surprised as anyone--because they came out and talked about the flawed science that was there and the fact they were cooking the science.

I have to say this. Five years ago this week, in 2005, I gave a speech on the Senate floor talking about how they were cooking the science at the United Nations--the IPCC--to make people believe that greenhouse gases--anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane--were causing catastrophic global warming. That was their mission. They started with that conclusion and they tried to get science to support it. Well, all that was exposed.

The list of IPCC errors is so long I won't repeat it here, because I did so in my speeches before. We know the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was off by about 300 years. What is important now is that the endangerment finding triggered regulations that will eventually reach out into every corner of the American economy. This will be the greatest bureaucratic intrusion into American life we have ever seen.

Let us put some specifics on that. We are talking 6.1 million sources subject to EPA control and regulations. With regard to EPA control and regulations, I don't think I have to tell you how onerous that would be, what that would be doing to all these institutions that would be affected. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has put together a list as to who would be affected by these new regulations and that thousands and thousands and thousands of new bureaucrats would be crawling all over in America. The list includes 260,000 office buildings, 150,000 warehouses, 92,000 health care facilities--that is hospitals and so forth--71,000 hotels and motels, 51,000 food service facilities, 37,000 churches and other places of worship, and 17,000 farms.

The EPA understands the political peril of regulating all these sources so they decided to change the law without congressional authorization to exempt many of the sources I have mentioned, but that is a front. It sounds good, and they will stand up and say, no, we are not talking about 250 tons of CO2. But the Clean Air Act specifically says that the major sources are those that have the potential to emit 250 tons or more of given pollutants. All the farms, all the churches, as I mentioned, are going to be in that category.

Two hundred fifty tons of, say, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide is a good deal of pollution. But when it comes to CO2, it is not. Lots of facilities emit that amount and more. We are talking schools, nursing homes, restaurants, even individual residential sources, mind you, that were never contemplated to be regulated when Congress passed the Clean Air Act.

So what did EPA do? Well, they promulgated something called the tailoring rule. This gets in the weeds here, but it is something they created to say, well, no, we are not going to use 250 tons of emissions, we are going to use 75,000 tons. That means we are talking only the giants--the refineries and some of these groups. Well, the problem with that is that is not what the Clean Air Act says.

Sources emitting above those amounts have to get permits that require so-called best available control technology to reduce CO2. Of course, we don't know what that is. It has never been defined. The EPA issued draft guidance on what they call the BACT--best available control technology--last week, but it provided no help, just more confusion and uncertainty on what the requirements would be.

Of course, they talk about the EPA has a law in front of it that says clearly the major sources are those that have the potential to emit 250 tons or more. Yet it says the new number is 75,000 tons or more. So now the EPA can conveniently say that schools, hospitals, and the like won't be regulated, at least not until 2016, when the agency says it will consider whether to regulate such sources.

There is the catch. This supposed exemption through the tailoring rule only lasts for a few years, not to mention the fact that it blatantly violates the Clean Air Act, which subjects it to litigation. On that last point, the tailoring rule, along with the endangerment finding and other greenhouse gas rules, is being litigated, so we will know eventually whether the tailoring rule survives. I think it will be thrown out, but the fact it can be thrown out should be enough for us to be honest with the American people and say we are going to regulate everything that falls within the 250 tons--all the residences, the churches, and the farms I mentioned before.

Again, I want everyone to understand: The regulation of global warming by EPA, backdoor cap and trade, begins on January 2. It is here, a month away. I am not the only one concerned about it. On February 19, Senator Rockefeller, joined by seven of his other Democratic colleagues, wrote Administrator Jackson. Keep in mind, this is coming from the Democrats here in this Chamber. He wrote:

We write with serious economic and energy security concerns

relating to the potential regulation of greenhouse gases from

stationary sources under the Clean Air Act. We remain

concerned about the possible impacts on American workers and

businesses in a number of industrial sectors, along with the

farmers, miners and small business owners who could be

affected as your agency moves beyond regulations for vehicle

greenhouse gas emissions.

We need to address this, because employers and small businesses are afraid to hire and expand right now, in large part because of the EPA's global warming regulations. They do not know what to expect. They are looking at the Clean Air Act, that has a very small threshold. Yet statements are being made that this is going to affect everyone and they don't know what to do.

I want my colleagues and the American people in general to know that EPA is moving in all directions, beyond just implementing job-killing global warming regulations. EPA is threatening jobs on a host of fronts. A few months ago, I released an oversight report examining the thousands of jobs at risk. And by the way, this is a good report. It talks about four major areas of concern, and they are all on my Web site at inhofe.senate.gov. Read them over, if you want to be scared. But here is what I found:

The new standards for commercial industrial boilers, for example, put up to 798,000 jobs at risk. The revised National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone puts severe restrictions on job creation and business expansion in hundreds of counties nationwide. New standards for Portland cement plants put up to 18 cement plants at risk of shutting down, threatening nearly 1,800 direct jobs and 9,000 indirect jobs.

I think we should be concerned enough about the unemployment rate that we have right now without exacerbating that problem, which is what we do with these rules. I think everyone knows that. Where are these rules

going to hurt the most? In the heartland. By that I mean Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana. Of course, my own State of Oklahoma is feeling the brunt, and others will as well.

Here is the bottom line. Backdoor cap and trade is alive and well. It is moving forward. The fight over the future of America's industrial base is under way. I want to put the administration on friendly notice that I will investigate these rules vigorously in my capacity as the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. I do this to expose their impact on jobs, energy prices, competitiveness, small businesses, energy security, and the true extent of their environmental benefits.

It is my sincere hope the EPA will pull back, revise, reform, and balance its regulatory agenda to protect jobs as well as the environment. If the EPA persists on moving down a more extreme path, then our 9.6 unemployment rate will be even worse in 2012.

In an attempt to stem the impending economic harm facing thousands of small businesses, the EPA has developed its so-called tailoring rule. I don't want to elaborate on this. I will only say that the tailoring rule is to make people think we are only going to be regulating those entities that emit 75,000 tons or more, when the law clearly says 250 tons or more.

In some cases, these rules will have no meaningful environmental benefits. Consider EPA's rules to regulate greenhouse gases. They would reduce global temperatures by 15 one-hundredths of 1 degree by 2100. That same figure goes all the way back to the consideration of Kyoto. This is back in the 1990s. I remember at that time it was Vice President Al Gore's own scientist--Tom Prigley, I believe his name was--who came out and the question was if all of the developed nations were to comply with Kyoto's emission requirements, how much would it reduce the temperatures in 50 years. The answer was 7 one-hundredths of 1 degree Celsius. So you can talk about all the sacrifice we are making and nothing good can come from it.

I want to conclude, because there are a lot of people here wanting to speak, saying that the Administrator of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, talks about the fact that what we do unilaterally, here in the United States, is not going to have a major impact on emissions nationwide, yet we know what it is going to cost. I want to say we are going to quit talking about the science. We understand how the science is not on their side; that the things we said on the floor of the Senate 5 years ago were verified with climategate. They have been cooking the science, and it is very convenient.

Lastly, I went to Copenhagen, as I mentioned earlier. That is the big U.N. party each year. That was probably the most productive 2\1/2\ hours of my life, the 2\1/2\ hours I was on the ground in Copenhagen. I was preceded by Senator Kerry, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and several others--Nancy Pelosi--and they were all assuring the other 191 countries present that we were going to do something about cap and trade. I went there to make sure they knew we were not. I will always remember that, because we had 400 people and the 120 cameras were zeroing in on me. I say to my good friend from Virginia, they all had one thing in common: They all hated me.

That is behind us now and we have to now look at the regulators. This regulation would put America out of business.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized in morning business for such time as I shall consume.

Thank you, Mr. President.

(The remarks of Mr. Inhofe pertaining to the introduction of S. 3939 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. President, I need to tell Molly I have reduced the length of my speech from 1 hour to 30 minutes because of something I totally did not expect. However, I think it is going to have a happy ending.

I think the bottom line in all this discussion of earmarks--or however you want to word it--is that we have to do something about excessive spending. It is something we cannot continue. It is not sustainable. I think everyone agrees with that.

It is interesting for me when I see the President and the passage of such things as the $787 billion stimulus and all that to say we are going to form a commission to see how we can keep from spending so much money. Well, that is how you do it: You do not do things like that.

Let me say, first of all, after this election, the Tea Party did play a big part in this thing. I have to say I was very excited about it early on. I think I might have been the first Republican anyway to go to Marco Rubio and support him in his efforts down in Florida and several of the others. I think it is clearly a good thing, a change, and I think the American people have clearly spoken.

In spite of what you might have heard in the media, let me clear up one thing. Never have I once had any indication of trying to influence anyone from voting for or against a ban on earmarks. You will find out in just a minute how I can come to this conclusion and why it would not be necessary, and it does not make all that much difference.

But before I do, to make sure people understand, you are hearing these comments not from any Member of the Senate but from someone who probably, I would have to say, has been declared as the most conservative Member of the body more times than anybody else has, most recently by the National Journal, and so you are hearing this from someone who is a conservative and someone who is also lonely.

I go back quite a ways, but I can remember my two favorite Senators. My mentors, I guess I should say, were Jesse Helms and the Senator from Nebraska, Carl Curtis. Both of them are deceased. It has been quite some time since Carl Curtis was serving, but, nevertheless, I remember I was in the State senate--this was many years ago--and I was recognized as a conservative at that time. Carl Curtis was

serving here from Nebraska, and he is the guy, you might remember, who consistently, year after year after year, introduced the budget balancing amendment to the Constitution.

Well, he called me one day--this is back in the 1970s--and he said: Inhofe, I know you and I share the same philosophy. But I can never get this up for a vote. The excuse the liberals use is that you will never be able to get three-fourths of the States to pass a resolution ratifying a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

So his idea was kind of ingenious. What he said was: I will go ahead and get started and stand behind you, and we will find you and enough other States to make up three-fourths of the States, and we will preratify a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

I did not understand how it would work, but we talked about it for a while. So I said: Well, let me try it. So I did. In the State senate we preratified a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It was kind of fun because after that I started going around to other States and getting them to do the same thing. We got up to within, I think, four States of being able to do it before it started to unravel.

But a guy named Anthony Harrigan--he was a syndicated columnist from down South someplace--wrote an editorial or an op-ed piece that got published, and it was called ``A Voice in the Wilderness.'' He said: Way out in the State of Oklahoma there is one State legislator who is going to balance the Federal budget. So that was kind of the beginning of the kind of lonely ride I have had.

Since that time, I remember serving in the House of Representatives. John Nance Garner--this is 80 years ago--was the Speaker of the House. John Nance Garner devised a system. Here is the problem he had. People were getting more and more informed on how people were voting in America. So he had all his west Texas Members, and they did not want to vote for the liberal agenda of the Democratic Party. Can you see anyone from west Texas voting for gun control? It is not going to happen. So he devised a system--it was kind of ingenious, corrupt but ingenious-- and that was a discharge petition so that in the House of Representatives if you want to take up a bill, you have to have it either come out of a committee or, if it is in a committee, you have to have a discharge petition, sign a discharge petition to force it to come out. He wanted his Members to be able to say that they signed the discharge petitions, yet they wouldn't sign them, so the bills would never come out.

They kept the discharge petitions in a locked drawer, just like the Presiding Officer has, right up there in front of the whole House of Representatives, and you couldn't open the drawer unless you were signing a discharge petition. You couldn't copy down the names of anyone else. What I did was set up a system where I had people go up and memorize names, and then I went ahead and just disclosed all of this. Anyway, it is a much longer story than that, but the bottom line is that the punishment for doing what I did was to be expelled from the House of Representatives. I said: OK. That is fine. I will go ahead and do it anyway. They can expel me. I will run. Who is not going to vote for someone who was expelled because they shed light on the system? And it worked. It was declared by several publications as the greatest single reform in the House. Again, it was lonely, but it is something that worked.

Then along came global warming. We all remember the Kyoto Treaty back then. In fact, back during the Clinton-Gore years when it first came up, everybody thought it was something that would be ratified until they looked at it to see what it would cost to do it, and the cost was somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. So I looked at that. We all looked at it and we thought, do we really want to ratify this? Well, as it turned out, we didn't. One reason we didn't was Senator Byrd was the primary mover of a motion to stop it from happening unless the developing countries had to pay the same price as the developed nations. Of course, they didn't do it, so it didn't happen. Then several people said: Well, let's just do it unilaterally.

We had the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003 and 2005. At that time, I was enjoying being in the majority. The occupier of the Presiding Officer's chair today has never been in the minority, so he may not know what I am talking about. But in the majority, you can do a lot more things than you can as a minority. So I chaired the committee called the Environment and Public Works Committee. That committee had jurisdiction over all the energy issues and a lot of other things but also over this global warming issue.

I have to confess that I assumed back then--and this is back in about 2002--that catastrophic global warming was a result of anthropogenic gases, manmade gases, CO2, methane and such, and I assumed that was the case until the Wharton School came out with a study that concluded that if we were to pass--at that time it was the McCain- Lieberman bill--it would end up costing between $300 billion and $400 billion.

So my effort then as chairman of that committee was, to look to see where the science was. That is when we got to the realization that it all started with the United Nations. They developed the IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--and consequently they were going to do all this, and that was the science behind it. But we kept getting complaints because I would make statements on the floor questioning the science. Then scientists starting coming out, and the bottom line is this: After a period of time, up until a year ago right now, it looked as if people recognized that it wouldn't do any good if we did unilaterally pass it. Why is that? Even Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that they would be--that if the United States alone passed something to stop the different emissions, CO2 emissions, it wouldn't have any effect globally because that is just the United States doing it. In fact, one could argue it would have just the opposite effect because companies seeking power would have to go to countries where they didn't have these restrictions and it could actually increase CO2.

Anyway, the bottom line was that I made the comment--this has been now 8 years ago--that the idea that catastrophic global warming is a result of manmade gases is probably the greatest single hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Back then, everybody hated me, and now it looks as if we have pretty much won that argument.

I mention this because I am very much concerned--I understand the argument on both sides of the whole thing about the earmarks. I have-- Kay and I have 20 kids and grandkids. This little guy right here came up to me, and he said: PopI--``I'' is for Inhofe--he said: PopI, why is it you do things nobody else does? And I said: That is the reason-- nobody else does. So that is kind of a little bit of the background as to why I got into this very difficult issue.

I have to say that it is something that needs to be talked about today because something is going to happen this week, and I think we can turn this thing into something that is very good. The tea party people came in. My concern has been over the last 2 years and longer than that, that all we have heard about is people quite frankly demagoguing this whole thing on earmarks, saying ``Earmarks, earmarks, earmarks,'' and all the time that happened, what happened? We ended up with the President and the majority increasing the debt to $13.4 trillion in America--and that is a larger increase than all Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush combined--and at the same time giving my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit. So we were trying to look at this thing and say: How can we take care of this situation? The increase in the debt is something that is not sustainable. I think we all understand that. I was going to try to accomplish two things--to stop the demagoguing and to solve the problem.

Today, for that purpose, I have introduced--and it is at the desk right now--S. 3939. Now, I grant you that Senator McConnell's announcement changed the way in which I was going to present this, but the bottom line is this: It would be nothing short of criminal to go to all the trouble of electing great new antiestablishment conservatives only to have them cede

to President Obama their constitutional power of the purse, which is exactly what would happen, as has been pointed out, with the moratorium on earmarks.

I wish to read one statement out of Senator McConnell's remarks that I think is worth repeating.

With Republican leaders in Congress united, the attention

now turns to the President. We have said we are willing to

give up discretion. Now we will see how he handles spending

decisions. If the President ends up with total discretion

over spending--

That is what he would have--

we will see even more clearly where his priorities lie. We

already saw the administration's priorities in the stimulus

bill, and that has become synonymous with wasteful spending.

True. That borrowed nearly $1 trillion for administration

earmarks such as the turtle tunnels and the sidewalk that led

to the ditch and all this stuff about which we have been

hearing, which I will elaborate on in just a minute. But

nonetheless, I think that is important, and we have to look

at that.

Now, why I thought that was wrong--let's put up chart No. 1--was I think that anytime you want to eliminate something, you have to define it first. The problem was that there was no definition until the House came along--and this was about a year ago. The House Republicans--not the whole House but the Republicans--and resolved that:

It is the policy of the Republican conference that no

Member shall request a congressional earmark, limited tax

benefit, or limited tariff benefit, as such terms are used in

clause 9 of Rule XXI of the House rules.

Well, if you look up that rule, that applies to appropriations. So what they were saying at that time is that they were not going to appropriate anything. But there is one problem with that.

Chart 2 is article I, section 9 of the Constitution. That is what we are supposed to be doing here. I will elaborate on that a little bit because I think it fits in this debate pretty well. Chart 2. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution makes it very clear that we in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are the ones who are supposed to be spending money: ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.''

All three of these people who were driving this thing--the Senators, by the way, who were involved in the earmark thing, giving proper credit or blame depending on how you look at it--the first one who went back the furthest was Senator McCain, then Senator Coburn, and then more recently Senator DeMint. They all embrace the House definition of earmarks. I have a chart that shows that, but it is not necessary to do it. I think everyone realizes that.

Let's go back to the Constitution. We have it right here. The Constitution restricts spending to only the legislative branches and specifically denies that honor to the President.

We take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. That means we take an oath of office to uphold article I, section 9 of the Constitution. It is important that we elaborate on that Constitution because a lot of people--if you get this in your mind, if there is any doubt that we are supposed to be doing it and not President Obama or the executive branch, then listen to this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:

It is the duty of the President to propose and the

privilege of Congress to dispose.

James Madison said:

The power over the purse in fact may be regarded as the

most complete and effectual weapon with which any

Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the

people, for obtaining a redress in every grievance . . .

Now, why is this? He went on to explain in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that the reason--they called them the direct representatives. At that time, I guess they didn't have Senators, but the direct representatives should do the spending for two reasons. No. 1 is that they are the ones who know their own State or province or area better than the President does--particularly back in those days but it is also true today. The second reason is that if they don't like the way they are doing it, they can immediately go ahead and vote them out of office. Look what happened November 2. That is exactly what did happen. So that was Madison.

Alexander Hamilton said:

The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes

the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are

to be regulated . . .

Now, there is no wiggle room in that. It is supposed to be us. The Supreme Court Justice--I was talking with someone with the Investor's Business Daily, and I said: You probably never heard of this guy Joseph Story, the Supreme Court Justice, and he said to me--I wish I could remember his name because this is kind of interesting--he said: Oh, no, I live out here now, but when I lived in Washington, I went to a weekly meeting, It was the Joseph Story Fan Club or something like that.

Anyway, in his commentaries on the U.S. Constitution in 1833, he states--this is Justice Joseph Story:

It is highly proper that Congress should possess the power

to decide how and when any money should be applied . . . if

it were otherwise, the executive would possess an unbounded

power . . . Congress is made the guardian of the Treasury . .

.

I say all this to make sure to impress upon any impartial patriot that the legislative branch--that is us--only the legislative branch has the power to spend money, according to the Constitution.

How does a ban on earmarks cede authority to the President? This is significant. Although Senator McConnell didn't mention it this morning, let me say what he would have said had he had time, I believe. I will also show how this can be impacted by S. 3939. It couldn't be a more appropriate time to introduce this.

President Obama--this is the way it is for any President--submits a budget to Congress which Congress either accepts all or part of or rejects all or part of. If it is rejected, we substitute what the Obama requests are with what we think is better for America. The cost is the same.

I have often said that stopping an earmark doesn't save any money. Not many people understand this, but it doesn't because all we are doing is taking what the President would have spent on an item and changing it to something else. For example, in his military budget--and I know President Obama doesn't feel the same way I feel about the priorities of defending America. That should be our No. 1 priority. I don't think he believes that. Nonetheless, in his budget he asked for $300 million and something, plus or minus, for a launching system that is a good launching system. It was called a bucket of rockets, and it is one that I would like to have.

When we went to the Armed Services Committee--keep in mind, these committees, such as the Senate Armed Services Committee, are staffed with professionals. A lot of them are former military people, scientists, people who really understand how we can best, with limited resources, defend this country. So we took the $300 million for that system and put that same $300 million--canceled the launching system and put in 6 new F-18 fighters. They are actually FA-18EF model fighters. This is what we all decided would be best. Now, if we substitute our appropriation for his budget item, it would be an earmark by any definition. If we place a moratorium on earmarks, we would have to accept Obama's original request. This is a concern I have, but it doesn't lead to a happy ending, as you will find out in a second.

Therefore, we would not have any additional F-18s. Still there is no money saved. In other words, we would be doing what James Madison wanted us to do. So the Senate is taken out of the process and cedes its power to President Obama. Speaking of systems we would not have if we had ceded that authority previously, we would not have unmanned aerial vehicles. The Air Force, right now, is currently operating at least 36 continual combat air patrols in Southeast Asia. That was a congressional earmark. We would not have that. We would not have improved armored vehicles and add-on armor. That was a congressional earmark. We would not have Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. We would not have them. They have saved lives. We would not have had $14.2 million for detection of landmines and detection of suspected bomb makers and IED makers in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was a congressional earmark. Actually, it was mine. We would not have had that.

We can see that a moratorium would not allow us to change anything in the

Obama budget. It would allow the President to perform our constitutional duties. In a minute, I will give you a solution. Meanwhile, we cannot continue to do the big spending. I think a ban on earmarks has at least focused on this problem for right now.

Here is another chart. I mentioned before that there are two problems I had with a ban on earmarks. One of the problems with a ban is that it cedes to the President our constitutional duties. The other is that it gives some protection to people who are big spenders.

Put up chart 4. I was going to say--technically, by the definition, this would be true. I was going to say these are the four biggest, largest earmarks in 2008. They can argue they are not earmarks, that this wasn't the intent, nonetheless. By the definition I showed you in the House and Senate, these are earmarks. First is the TARP. I was one who opposed that $700 billion we gave to an unelected bureaucrat with no oversight whatsoever. There was the mortgage bailout of $300 billion, the Pelosi-Bush stimulus check of $150 billion; PEPFAR, a program that does some good but not expanded to the point it is right now in sending money to foreign countries to fight AIDS. If we total that up, that is $1.2 trillion.

I am not as smart as a lot of the guys in this Chamber. So when I see the millions and billions and trillions, my head starts to spin. I am not sure how this affects us.

Put up chart 5. What I have developed in Oklahoma--and nobody here is aware of this, but they are in Oklahoma--is known as the Inhofe factor. I will use 2009. In 2009, $2 trillion in taxes was paid by individuals across the country, and $18 billion came from Oklahomans, which is about 1 percent of the Federal budget. The average Oklahoma individual tax return for that year, 2009, was $11,100. Therefore, the average Oklahoma taxpayer is responsible for providing--I have the percentage of total Federal revenue. For every $10 million in spending in Washington, Oklahomans pay a nickel in terms of how much each family--I am taking every family in Oklahoma that files a tax return. That is what it amounts to.

Let's see the next one. By the way, I say to some of my friends from other States, other Senators: You are not going to deviate too much from that because Oklahoma is not that much different from other States. What did it cost you for the four largest earmarks? If you apply that to Oklahoma--each family in Oklahoma who filed a tax return--it would cost each family $5,683. That is each family who files a tax return.

In earmarks, the total of all projects requested by me in 2008 was $80 million. Most of them were military projects, some of which I just talked about. If you apply the same factor to $80 million, it would cost each family in Oklahoma 40 cents. I hope you look at this--each family, 40 cents as opposed to the four largest things, $5,683.

I said that because I think it is important that we look at these things and see how much--quit talking in terms of billions and trillions and know what it is for each family. Even though I am ranked as the most conservative member by many organizations, I am a big spender in three areas: national defense, infrastructure--roads, highways, and bridges. We have a crumbling infrastructure throughout America. I think we all understand that. The Governor of Pennsylvania and I have talked about that. He is a far leftwing liberal, and I am a conservative. Yet we agree that infrastructure is very important. The third area where I could be considered a big spender is unfunded mandates. I was a mayor at one time. As I often tell my friends in the Senate: If you want a hard job, become a mayor because there is no hiding things when you are a mayor. So if there is a problem and they don't like the trash system, it ends up in your front yard. It did. I was there.

If we go back to chart 4, we have to follow this carefully. OMB stated that our earmarks for 2010 were $11 billion. They have their definition of an earmark, and people are saying that is a good definition. These four obligations--say they are not earmarks, but they could be defined as that. That would be $1.2 trillion. If we take the $11 billion and do the math, we would find that earmarks are one one- hundredth of just these four spending bills. In other words, the total amount of the 2010 earmarks were only 1 percent of these huge spending bills. Of the three drivers of the earmark wagon, Senator McCain voted for all four of these, or supported them. Senator Coburn, my junior Senator, voted for half of them, $750 billion. Senator DeMint and I opposed all four of them.

My point is, the public has been focusing so intently on earmarks, that 1 percent figure, they overlook the huge bills that spend 100 times more than all the earmarks, and we ended up with the $13.4 trillion increase in the debt. My 20 kids and grandkids have to pay for $3 trillion of the deficit increase.

That left out Senator DeMint. I say this in love, but I think it is very important to understand there is a commitment on behalf of every Senator, all 100 Senators, to help people in the States. I have that as well as he does. Let's talk for a minute about Senator DeMint.

In 2004, Republicans were in the majority. I was chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. That takes care of all the transportation, roads, highways, infrastructure, and that type of thing. At Senator DeMint's request, I flew to South Carolina to support his commitment to highway earmarks. He said: I am not only supportive of I-73 and other projects, but I have a good working relationship with people who can get it done.

I guess that was me. He got 13 earmarks in places such as Myrtle Beach, Beaufort County; engineering design and construction of a port access road, $15 million; and $10 million for improvements in Beaufort and Colleton County to improve safety, and the list goes on.

I tell you what. It actually gets better as we look into it because on September 30, 2009, there was a vote on a $2.5 billion amendment to add 10 additional Charleston, SC, based C-17s for $2.5 billion. The Citizens Against Government Waste listed this as the single largest defense earmark of 2009. Senator DeMint voted for it, and South Carolina was very appreciative. It was the single largest defense earmark then.

Last week, Senator DeMint told the Greenville News that he wants to reform the harbor maintenance trust fund to ``get back the money South Carolina contributes.'' He is going after specific funding of $400,000. Whether the money comes from the Corps of Engineers or the harbor maintenance trust fund, it is still an earmark under anyone's definition. He wants to put that money into a fund to study and deepen the channel, rather an O&M. He should do that. He is doing what the Constitution tells him to do. He is looking after the needs of the people of South Carolina. I look after the needs of the people of Oklahoma. I am not sure that if we left this up to President Obama he would be very generous to South Carolina and Oklahoma. So he is entitled to do this. That is why Madison gave the power to spend to the legislature.

All those earmarks--and you might say that Senator DeMint is adaptable. It reminds me of the guy who had been out of town for 2 years and called up his dearest friend, and he said to his friend: Well, Mary, how are you doing? This is Tom.

She said: Tom, it is so good to hear from you. It has been 2 years.

Tom said: How is old Jim getting along?

She said: Didn't you know? Jim is dead.

He said: No, what happened?

She said: He went down to the garden to pick some peas for dinner and leaned over and had a heart attack and fell on his face dead.

He said: You poor thing, Mary. Whatever did you do?

She said: There is only one thing we could do. We had to open a can of peas.

You see, there is nothing wrong with being adaptable. I think Senator DeMint is. I think we are talking about not a can of peas but a can of worms.

The government has a function to provide infrastructure, roads, highways, and all of this. I will bring this out because--I will mention a couple of others, but people are concerned about their States. There is one significant fact that needs to be elaborated on now. One of the arguments that was

not sound was that they said earmarks are a gateway drug that needs to be eliminated in order to demonstrate that we are serious about fiscal restraint. There is one problem with that; it is not true.

According to the OMB and Citizens Against Government Waste, the earmarks have dramatically decreased over the past several years. OMB said in 2005 total earmarks were $18.9 billion. In 2008, they were $16.6 billion. In 2009, they were $15.3 billion. In 2010, they were $11.1 billion. Why do you suppose they are reducing every year? It is because we are demanding more light so that people can know what they are spending money on.

I say that earmarks are hardly a gateway drug, a symptom of Federal funding run amok, or even an underlying cause to our fiscal problems. Why? Because we have shed light on earmarks. Let's add why a shining light can be a first step.

In 2009, the Senate performed the rare action of considering many appropriations bills individually rather than irresponsibly lumping them into one like we are doing today, lumping them into one vote at the end of the year. The value of that--considering them individually-- is it gives Senators the opportunity to exercise oversight of government programs and to monitor how Federal departments spend money. So in 2009 Senators could offer amendments to cut spending and strike particular earmarks if they desired.

From July until November of that year, 2009, there were 18 votes specifically targeting earmarks. All the amendments failed. Had they succeeded, it would not have reduced the overall amount of money the Federal Government is spending by a dime.

Instead of putting money back into the pockets of the American people by reducing spending or shrinking the deficit, these efforts would have put the money into the hands of President Obama, by allowing his administration to spend the money as he saw fit. At the end of the day, no one would have saved money. President Obama is the winner and the American people are the loser.

In another case Members offered amendments to strike funding from the program called Save America's Treasures for specific art centers throughout the United States. They offered amendments to strike it. Did it save any money? No. That went back to the unelected bureaucrats at the National Park Service to spend. That is the Obama administration. He calls the shots there. It didn't save a cent.

In another case, a Member offered an amendment to strike a variety of transportation projects in quite a few States only to redirect spending to the Obama administration and the unelected bureaucrats in the Federal Highway Administration. Not one of these actions saved a dime but made President Obama happy because it all went back to his coffers.

Now I point this out because there is a solution. We have clearly demonstrated, and we have made a point here, and the point is: No. 1-- and no one can deny this--that spending is an exclusive constitutional right of the Senate and the House, and killing earmarks doesn't save a dime but can be the first stop in a real solution.

That gets back to S. 3939. I am very proud of that, and I wish to say there is a happy ending to this story mostly because of that Senate bill. I would like to take credit for that but I am not going to do it because I can't. I wasn't that smart. But there are eight great Americans--and let's put that chart up, if you would, Luke--eight great Americans and the conservative groups they represent--Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste; Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for Common Sense; Craig Holman, Public Citizens; Jim Walsh, Rich Gold, Manny Rouvelas, and Dave Wenhold--and thanks to them we can put the earmarks issue to rest. They authored the ``5 Principles of Earmark Reform,'' and I will list these. The chart shows what they are, starting at the top.

I have to say that S. 3939 will address all of these specifically. There are people in Washington who go through a lot of work making a lot of studies, and they assume we never read these things or care about them. But if you believe that, you are wrong because I listened, and this is the result--the five principles of earmark reform.

What we are saying here is that we know--and it doesn't matter what you do in having a ban on earmarks, because Members are going to be voting and supporting things in their States; everyone is. I can assure you that is going to happen, by the Senator from Oregon and everyone here. This is going to happen. But principle No. 1 says to cut the cord between campaign contributions, Congress should limit earmarks directed to campaign contributors. Limiting total contributions from the earmark beneficiary and its affiliates to no more than $5,000 would help restore public confidence. This came from those eight great groups that evaluated as to what we could do to clean up this system. Well, S. 3939, just introduced, does exactly that. Section 2 says:

No earmark beneficiary shall make contributions aggregating

more than $5,000 to any requesting candidate with respect to

such earmark beneficiary.

So that first one is met. The second principle is to eliminate any connection between legislation and campaign contributions, legislative staff should be barred from participating in fundraising activities. The attendance of legislative staff at fundraisers suggests a connection between campaign donations and earmarks.

So we handled that with S. 3939. It does just that under section 3. Subsections (a) and (b) state:

Limits on staff attendance of Member fundraisers. Except as

provided in subsection B, an employee of the personal staff

of a Member of Congress should not attend a political

fundraiser on behalf of the Member of Congress for whom they

are employed. A Member of Congress may designate one employee

who shall not be subject to the provisions of Subsection A.

I think people know there may be a situation where someone would need to drive a Member or there could be threats and they may need to have some security.

The third thing they came up with to increase transparency is, Congress should create a new database of all congressional earmarks. They went on to say:

Information about lawmakers' earmark requests is scattered

across hundreds of web sites in a variety of formats with

differing levels of details. The funding levels for each

earmark award are listed in a chart at the end of each

spending bill. While the data is technically available, it is

virtually impossible to collect, understand and analyze all

of the earmark information. Congress should create a unified,

searchable, sortable and downloadable database on the public

website.

S. 3939, which I introduced an hour ago, does exactly that. Section 4 reads:

The Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of

Representatives shall post on a public website of their

respective houses, a link to the earmark database maintained

by the Office of Management and Budget.

Done.

No. 4. The fourth concern is to ensure taxpayer money has been spent appropriately, the Government Accountability Office should randomly audit earmarks. Because oversight is essential to maintain integrity in the earmarking process, the Government Accountability Office should develop and implement a system to audit and report to Congress regularly on programs and projects funded through earmarks.

This does that, and I am going to read our section 7. This is a more difficult one, but it is air tight.

Not later than December 31, 2011, and each year thereafter,

the Comptroller General shall submit a report to Congress

that uses the OMB database--(1) to randomly select a

percentage of each of the programs and projects funded

through earmarks in a preceding fiscal year; (2) to conduct

an audit on each selected program or project reporting on the

amount, purpose, term, requesting Member and the present

state of completion of the program or project; and (3) if the

earmark contributes to an already existing program or

project, to provide a detailed accounting of how the earmark

contributed to each program or project.

That was the request, and we came up with the section that, as I say, is air tight in solving the problem.

No. 5, to promote congressional responsibility without stifling innovation, Members should certify earmark recipients are qualified to handle the project. The last language we had on that was section 6:

And a certification that the recipient is qualified to

handle the project, if applicable.

You might say that is great, we have resolved all of the problems that are

out there. This was a combination of the intellects of all the people I have mentioned a while back. They looked at all the problems that are there and how we could resolve those problems. But one thing was overlooked, so we have a section in S. 3939 where we go one step further. It demands--listen to this, Mr. President--the same transparency to Obama bureaucratic earmarks as it does to Senatorial earmarks.

Well, that is kind of neat, if we do that. I will read section 5:

Not later than July 1, 2011, the head of each department

and agency of the Federal Government shall post on the public

website of that department or agency a link to a searchable

database that lists each contract, grant, cooperative

agreement, and other expenditure made by the department or

agency listing with respect to the expenditure, the amount,

purpose, term and office making such expenditure.

Why is that necessary? I can remember Sean Hannity, about 6 months ago, came out with a series one night where he talked about the 102 most egregious earmarks that were brought up. Here is something that is interesting about that. I was so excited when I saw these that I read them all. I came down and stood right here on the Senate floor and I went over them all and described all 102 earmarks. We have a chart that shows some of those. Look at some of the things we are talking about here: $3.4 million to construct an echo passage for turtles--that is nice; $450,000 to build 22 concrete toilets in the Mark Twain National Forest; $300,000 for helicopter equipment to detect radioactive rabbit droppings; $500,000 for a grant to a researcher named in the Climate- Gate scandal--I wish we had another hour, I would like to talk about that--and $325,000 to study the mating decisions of female cactus bugs.

After reading all 102--and this is five of them--I asked the questions: What do all these have in common? What they have in common is that not one of them was a congressional earmark. They were all earmarks that were put in there by the Obama administration.

So here is the problem you have. If you ban congressional earmarks, you are going to have more of this. Because as you restrict what Congress can do, that same amount of money goes back into the administration, whether it is the Department of the Interior, the Corps of Engineers, the EPA, or any of the rest of them. So is there any question why President Obama embraced the ban on the earmarks? No, because he wants the money to go to him.

But S. 3939 is going to curb that. I think this actually could have a very happy ending, because the five principles of earmark reform assembled by the eight individuals I mentioned is an ingenious document. Even the Tea Party people recognized that we have an obligation to our States.

Let me congratulate Senator Rand Paul for his statement on Sunday, November 7, wherein he stated that he told the people of Kentucky that he will work through the committee process to get things done for Kentucky, but it has to be under a particular overall budget. I agree. I am with him. I have had the same conversation with Marco Rubio. I am with him. They recognize the President does not have the knowledge of each State's needs.

With the passage of S. 3939, it resolves the whole earmark dilemma and puts it to rest. The one good thing about the ban is that we have to tackle the deficit. As long as we continue, as we did in the last 2 years, to stand on the floor of this Senate and go hour after hour after hour talking about the earmark problem, which is 1 percent of the total discretionary spending, we are not going to be able to address the real problem, and that is the increase of the debt to $13.4 trillion--the largest increase in the history of America. It is larger than any of the other increases, all the way from George Washington to George W. Bush, and saddling my 20 kids and grandkids with $3 trillion of extra spending.

That is the problem we have. I would have to say, as I learned in my successful battle against cap and trade, the truth eventually triumphs. Winston Churchill said:

Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance

may deride it, malice may destroy it, but there it is.

I believe that is what we are getting closer and closer to. The end result will be that a Senator will be able to continue to work for the needs of the States, as Senator DeMint is doing, and I am doing right now. But first, all of the reforms necessary to clean up the process will occur; and, secondly, we can limit President Obama or any future President from claiming or from taking our constitutional rights by subjecting him to the same transparency.

I think this is very significant. I believe after all this talk, over all these years, particularly in the last 2 years, we are now at the point to satisfy everyone. If they want to ban earmarks, fine, ban earmarks. But at the same time, put the clarity and the transparency in the system that will clean it up, and I believe that is what is going to happen. I guess you can say we can have it both ways, and it looks as if we are going to be able to do that.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I need to tell Molly I have reduced the length of my speech from 1 hour to 30 minutes because of something I totally did not expect. However, I think it is going to have a happy ending.

I think the bottom line in all this discussion of earmarks--or however you want to word it--is that we have to do something about excessive spending. It is something we cannot continue. It is not sustainable. I think everyone agrees with that.

It is interesting for me when I see the President and the passage of such things as the $787 billion stimulus and all that to say we are going to form a commission to see how we can keep from spending so much money. Well, that is how you do it: You do not do things like that.

Let me say, first of all, after this election, the Tea Party did play a big part in this thing. I have to say I was very excited about it early on. I think I might have been the first Republican anyway to go to Marco Rubio and support him in his efforts down in Florida and several of the others. I think it is clearly a good thing, a change, and I think the American people have clearly spoken.

In spite of what you might have heard in the media, let me clear up one thing. Never have I once had any indication of trying to influence anyone from voting for or against a ban on earmarks. You will find out in just a minute how I can come to this conclusion and why it would not be necessary, and it does not make all that much difference.

But before I do, to make sure people understand, you are hearing these comments not from any Member of the Senate but from someone who probably, I would have to say, has been declared as the most conservative Member of the body more times than anybody else has, most recently by the National Journal, and so you are hearing this from someone who is a conservative and someone who is also lonely.

I go back quite a ways, but I can remember my two favorite Senators. My mentors, I guess I should say, were Jesse Helms and the Senator from Nebraska, Carl Curtis. Both of them are deceased. It has been quite some time since Carl Curtis was serving, but, nevertheless, I remember I was in the State senate--this was many years ago--and I was recognized as a conservative at that time. Carl Curtis was

serving here from Nebraska, and he is the guy, you might remember, who consistently, year after year after year, introduced the budget balancing amendment to the Constitution.

Well, he called me one day--this is back in the 1970s--and he said: Inhofe, I know you and I share the same philosophy. But I can never get this up for a vote. The excuse the liberals use is that you will never be able to get three-fourths of the States to pass a resolution ratifying a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

So his idea was kind of ingenious. What he said was: I will go ahead and get started and stand behind you, and we will find you and enough other States to make up three-fourths of the States, and we will preratify a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

I did not understand how it would work, but we talked about it for a while. So I said: Well, let me try it. So I did. In the State senate we preratified a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It was kind of fun because after that I started going around to other States and getting them to do the same thing. We got up to within, I think, four States of being able to do it before it started to unravel.

But a guy named Anthony Harrigan--he was a syndicated columnist from down South someplace--wrote an editorial or an op-ed piece that got published, and it was called ``A Voice in the Wilderness.'' He said: Way out in the State of Oklahoma there is one State legislator who is going to balance the Federal budget. So that was kind of the beginning of the kind of lonely ride I have had.

Since that time, I remember serving in the House of Representatives. John Nance Garner--this is 80 years ago--was the Speaker of the House. John Nance Garner devised a system. Here is the problem he had. People were getting more and more informed on how people were voting in America. So he had all his west Texas Members, and they did not want to vote for the liberal agenda of the Democratic Party. Can you see anyone from west Texas voting for gun control? It is not going to happen. So he devised a system--it was kind of ingenious, corrupt but ingenious-- and that was a discharge petition so that in the House of Representatives if you want to take up a bill, you have to have it either come out of a committee or, if it is in a committee, you have to have a discharge petition, sign a discharge petition to force it to come out. He wanted his Members to be able to say that they signed the discharge petitions, yet they wouldn't sign them, so the bills would never come out.

They kept the discharge petitions in a locked drawer, just like the Presiding Officer has, right up there in front of the whole House of Representatives, and you couldn't open the drawer unless you were signing a discharge petition. You couldn't copy down the names of anyone else. What I did was set up a system where I had people go up and memorize names, and then I went ahead and just disclosed all of this. Anyway, it is a much longer story than that, but the bottom line is that the punishment for doing what I did was to be expelled from the House of Representatives. I said: OK. That is fine. I will go ahead and do it anyway. They can expel me. I will run. Who is not going to vote for someone who was expelled because they shed light on the system? And it worked. It was declared by several publications as the greatest single reform in the House. Again, it was lonely, but it is something that worked.

Then along came global warming. We all remember the Kyoto Treaty back then. In fact, back during the Clinton-Gore years when it first came up, everybody thought it was something that would be ratified until they looked at it to see what it would cost to do it, and the cost was somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. So I looked at that. We all looked at it and we thought, do we really want to ratify this? Well, as it turned out, we didn't. One reason we didn't was Senator Byrd was the primary mover of a motion to stop it from happening unless the developing countries had to pay the same price as the developed nations. Of course, they didn't do it, so it didn't happen. Then several people said: Well, let's just do it unilaterally.

We had the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003 and 2005. At that time, I was enjoying being in the majority. The occupier of the Presiding Officer's chair today has never been in the minority, so he may not know what I am talking about. But in the majority, you can do a lot more things than you can as a minority. So I chaired the committee called the Environment and Public Works Committee. That committee had jurisdiction over all the energy issues and a lot of other things but also over this global warming issue.

I have to confess that I assumed back then--and this is back in about 2002--that catastrophic global warming was a result of anthropogenic gases, manmade gases, CO2, methane and such, and I assumed that was the case until the Wharton School came out with a study that concluded that if we were to pass--at that time it was the McCain- Lieberman bill--it would end up costing between $300 billion and $400 billion.

So my effort then as chairman of that committee was, to look to see where the science was. That is when we got to the realization that it all started with the United Nations. They developed the IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--and consequently they were going to do all this, and that was the science behind it. But we kept getting complaints because I would make statements on the floor questioning the science. Then scientists starting coming out, and the bottom line is this: After a period of time, up until a year ago right now, it looked as if people recognized that it wouldn't do any good if we did unilaterally pass it. Why is that? Even Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that they would be--that if the United States alone passed something to stop the different emissions, CO2 emissions, it wouldn't have any effect globally because that is just the United States doing it. In fact, one could argue it would have just the opposite effect because companies seeking power would have to go to countries where they didn't have these restrictions and it could actually increase CO2.

Anyway, the bottom line was that I made the comment--this has been now 8 years ago--that the idea that catastrophic global warming is a result of manmade gases is probably the greatest single hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Back then, everybody hated me, and now it looks as if we have pretty much won that argument.

I mention this because I am very much concerned--I understand the argument on both sides of the whole thing about the earmarks. I have-- Kay and I have 20 kids and grandkids. This little guy right here came up to me, and he said: PopI--``I'' is for Inhofe--he said: PopI, why is it you do things nobody else does? And I said: That is the reason-- nobody else does. So that is kind of a little bit of the background as to why I got into this very difficult issue.

I have to say that it is something that needs to be talked about today because something is going to happen this week, and I think we can turn this thing into something that is very good. The tea party people came in. My concern has been over the last 2 years and longer than that, that all we have heard about is people quite frankly demagoguing this whole thing on earmarks, saying ``Earmarks, earmarks, earmarks,'' and all the time that happened, what happened? We ended up with the President and the majority increasing the debt to $13.4 trillion in America--and that is a larger increase than all Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush combined--and at the same time giving my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit. So we were trying to look at this thing and say: How can we take care of this situation? The increase in the debt is something that is not sustainable. I think we all understand that. I was going to try to accomplish two things--to stop the demagoguing and to solve the problem.

Today, for that purpose, I have introduced--and it is at the desk right now--S. 3939. Now, I grant you that Senator McConnell's announcement changed the way in which I was going to present this, but the bottom line is this: It would be nothing short of criminal to go to all the trouble of electing great new antiestablishment conservatives only to have them cede

to President Obama their constitutional power of the purse, which is exactly what would happen, as has been pointed out, with the moratorium on earmarks.

I wish to read one statement out of Senator McConnell's remarks that I think is worth repeating.

With Republican leaders in Congress united, the attention

now turns to the President. We have said we are willing to

give up discretion. Now we will see how he handles spending

decisions. If the President ends up with total discretion

over spending--

That is what he would have--

we will see even more clearly where his priorities lie. We

already saw the administration's priorities in the stimulus

bill, and that has become synonymous with wasteful spending.

True. That borrowed nearly $1 trillion for administration

earmarks such as the turtle tunnels and the sidewalk that led

to the ditch and all this stuff about which we have been

hearing, which I will elaborate on in just a minute. But

nonetheless, I think that is important, and we have to look

at that.

Now, why I thought that was wrong--let's put up chart No. 1--was I think that anytime you want to eliminate something, you have to define it first. The problem was that there was no definition until the House came along--and this was about a year ago. The House Republicans--not the whole House but the Republicans--and resolved that:

It is the policy of the Republican conference that no

Member shall request a congressional earmark, limited tax

benefit, or limited tariff benefit, as such terms are used in

clause 9 of Rule XXI of the House rules.

Well, if you look up that rule, that applies to appropriations. So what they were saying at that time is that they were not going to appropriate anything. But there is one problem with that.

Chart 2 is article I, section 9 of the Constitution. That is what we are supposed to be doing here. I will elaborate on that a little bit because I think it fits in this debate pretty well. Chart 2. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution makes it very clear that we in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are the ones who are supposed to be spending money: ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.''

All three of these people who were driving this thing--the Senators, by the way, who were involved in the earmark thing, giving proper credit or blame depending on how you look at it--the first one who went back the furthest was Senator McCain, then Senator Coburn, and then more recently Senator DeMint. They all embrace the House definition of earmarks. I have a chart that shows that, but it is not necessary to do it. I think everyone realizes that.

Let's go back to the Constitution. We have it right here. The Constitution restricts spending to only the legislative branches and specifically denies that honor to the President.

We take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution. That means we take an oath of office to uphold article I, section 9 of the Constitution. It is important that we elaborate on that Constitution because a lot of people--if you get this in your mind, if there is any doubt that we are supposed to be doing it and not President Obama or the executive branch, then listen to this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:

It is the duty of the President to propose and the

privilege of Congress to dispose.

James Madison said:

The power over the purse in fact may be regarded as the

most complete and effectual weapon with which any

Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the

people, for obtaining a redress in every grievance . . .

Now, why is this? He went on to explain in the Federalist Papers and elsewhere that the reason--they called them the direct representatives. At that time, I guess they didn't have Senators, but the direct representatives should do the spending for two reasons. No. 1 is that they are the ones who know their own State or province or area better than the President does--particularly back in those days but it is also true today. The second reason is that if they don't like the way they are doing it, they can immediately go ahead and vote them out of office. Look what happened November 2. That is exactly what did happen. So that was Madison.

Alexander Hamilton said:

The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes

the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are

to be regulated . . .

Now, there is no wiggle room in that. It is supposed to be us. The Supreme Court Justice--I was talking with someone with the Investor's Business Daily, and I said: You probably never heard of this guy Joseph Story, the Supreme Court Justice, and he said to me--I wish I could remember his name because this is kind of interesting--he said: Oh, no, I live out here now, but when I lived in Washington, I went to a weekly meeting, It was the Joseph Story Fan Club or something like that.

Anyway, in his commentaries on the U.S. Constitution in 1833, he states--this is Justice Joseph Story:

It is highly proper that Congress should possess the power

to decide how and when any money should be applied . . . if

it were otherwise, the executive would possess an unbounded

power . . . Congress is made the guardian of the Treasury . .

.

I say all this to make sure to impress upon any impartial patriot that the legislative branch--that is us--only the legislative branch has the power to spend money, according to the Constitution.

How does a ban on earmarks cede authority to the President? This is significant. Although Senator McConnell didn't mention it this morning, let me say what he would have said had he had time, I believe. I will also show how this can be impacted by S. 3939. It couldn't be a more appropriate time to introduce this.

President Obama--this is the way it is for any President--submits a budget to Congress which Congress either accepts all or part of or rejects all or part of. If it is rejected, we substitute what the Obama requests are with what we think is better for America. The cost is the same.

I have often said that stopping an earmark doesn't save any money. Not many people understand this, but it doesn't because all we are doing is taking what the President would have spent on an item and changing it to something else. For example, in his military budget--and I know President Obama doesn't feel the same way I feel about the priorities of defending America. That should be our No. 1 priority. I don't think he believes that. Nonetheless, in his budget he asked for $300 million and something, plus or minus, for a launching system that is a good launching system. It was called a bucket of rockets, and it is one that I would like to have.

When we went to the Armed Services Committee--keep in mind, these committees, such as the Senate Armed Services Committee, are staffed with professionals. A lot of them are former military people, scientists, people who really understand how we can best, with limited resources, defend this country. So we took the $300 million for that system and put that same $300 million--canceled the launching system and put in 6 new F-18 fighters. They are actually FA-18EF model fighters. This is what we all decided would be best. Now, if we substitute our appropriation for his budget item, it would be an earmark by any definition. If we place a moratorium on earmarks, we would have to accept Obama's original request. This is a concern I have, but it doesn't lead to a happy ending, as you will find out in a second.

Therefore, we would not have any additional F-18s. Still there is no money saved. In other words, we would be doing what James Madison wanted us to do. So the Senate is taken out of the process and cedes its power to President Obama. Speaking of systems we would not have if we had ceded that authority previously, we would not have unmanned aerial vehicles. The Air Force, right now, is currently operating at least 36 continual combat air patrols in Southeast Asia. That was a congressional earmark. We would not have that. We would not have improved armored vehicles and add-on armor. That was a congressional earmark. We would not have Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. We would not have them. They have saved lives. We would not have had $14.2 million for detection of landmines and detection of suspected bomb makers and IED makers in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was a congressional earmark. Actually, it was mine. We would not have had that.

We can see that a moratorium would not allow us to change anything in the

Obama budget. It would allow the President to perform our constitutional duties. In a minute, I will give you a solution. Meanwhile, we cannot continue to do the big spending. I think a ban on earmarks has at least focused on this problem for right now.

Here is another chart. I mentioned before that there are two problems I had with a ban on earmarks. One of the problems with a ban is that it cedes to the President our constitutional duties. The other is that it gives some protection to people who are big spenders.

Put up chart 4. I was going to say--technically, by the definition, this would be true. I was going to say these are the four biggest, largest earmarks in 2008. They can argue they are not earmarks, that this wasn't the intent, nonetheless. By the definition I showed you in the House and Senate, these are earmarks. First is the TARP. I was one who opposed that $700 billion we gave to an unelected bureaucrat with no oversight whatsoever. There was the mortgage bailout of $300 billion, the Pelosi-Bush stimulus check of $150 billion; PEPFAR, a program that does some good but not expanded to the point it is right now in sending money to foreign countries to fight AIDS. If we total that up, that is $1.2 trillion.

I am not as smart as a lot of the guys in this Chamber. So when I see the millions and billions and trillions, my head starts to spin. I am not sure how this affects us.

Put up chart 5. What I have developed in Oklahoma--and nobody here is aware of this, but they are in Oklahoma--is known as the Inhofe factor. I will use 2009. In 2009, $2 trillion in taxes was paid by individuals across the country, and $18 billion came from Oklahomans, which is about 1 percent of the Federal budget. The average Oklahoma individual tax return for that year, 2009, was $11,100. Therefore, the average Oklahoma taxpayer is responsible for providing--I have the percentage of total Federal revenue. For every $10 million in spending in Washington, Oklahomans pay a nickel in terms of how much each family--I am taking every family in Oklahoma that files a tax return. That is what it amounts to.

Let's see the next one. By the way, I say to some of my friends from other States, other Senators: You are not going to deviate too much from that because Oklahoma is not that much different from other States. What did it cost you for the four largest earmarks? If you apply that to Oklahoma--each family in Oklahoma who filed a tax return--it would cost each family $5,683. That is each family who files a tax return.

In earmarks, the total of all projects requested by me in 2008 was $80 million. Most of them were military projects, some of which I just talked about. If you apply the same factor to $80 million, it would cost each family in Oklahoma 40 cents. I hope you look at this--each family, 40 cents as opposed to the four largest things, $5,683.

I said that because I think it is important that we look at these things and see how much--quit talking in terms of billions and trillions and know what it is for each family. Even though I am ranked as the most conservative member by many organizations, I am a big spender in three areas: national defense, infrastructure--roads, highways, and bridges. We have a crumbling infrastructure throughout America. I think we all understand that. The Governor of Pennsylvania and I have talked about that. He is a far leftwing liberal, and I am a conservative. Yet we agree that infrastructure is very important. The third area where I could be considered a big spender is unfunded mandates. I was a mayor at one time. As I often tell my friends in the Senate: If you want a hard job, become a mayor because there is no hiding things when you are a mayor. So if there is a problem and they don't like the trash system, it ends up in your front yard. It did. I was there.

If we go back to chart 4, we have to follow this carefully. OMB stated that our earmarks for 2010 were $11 billion. They have their definition of an earmark, and people are saying that is a good definition. These four obligations--say they are not earmarks, but they could be defined as that. That would be $1.2 trillion. If we take the $11 billion and do the math, we would find that earmarks are one one- hundredth of just these four spending bills. In other words, the total amount of the 2010 earmarks were only 1 percent of these huge spending bills. Of the three drivers of the earmark wagon, Senator McCain voted for all four of these, or supported them. Senator Coburn, my junior Senator, voted for half of them, $750 billion. Senator DeMint and I opposed all four of them.

My point is, the public has been focusing so intently on earmarks, that 1 percent figure, they overlook the huge bills that spend 100 times more than all the earmarks, and we ended up with the $13.4 trillion increase in the debt. My 20 kids and grandkids have to pay for $3 trillion of the deficit increase.

That left out Senator DeMint. I say this in love, but I think it is very important to understand there is a commitment on behalf of every Senator, all 100 Senators, to help people in the States. I have that as well as he does. Let's talk for a minute about Senator DeMint.

In 2004, Republicans were in the majority. I was chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. That takes care of all the transportation, roads, highways, infrastructure, and that type of thing. At Senator DeMint's request, I flew to South Carolina to support his commitment to highway earmarks. He said: I am not only supportive of I-73 and other projects, but I have a good working relationship with people who can get it done.

I guess that was me. He got 13 earmarks in places such as Myrtle Beach, Beaufort County; engineering design and construction of a port access road, $15 million; and $10 million for improvements in Beaufort and Colleton County to improve safety, and the list goes on.

I tell you what. It actually gets better as we look into it because on September 30, 2009, there was a vote on a $2.5 billion amendment to add 10 additional Charleston, SC, based C-17s for $2.5 billion. The Citizens Against Government Waste listed this as the single largest defense earmark of 2009. Senator DeMint voted for it, and South Carolina was very appreciative. It was the single largest defense earmark then.

Last week, Senator DeMint told the Greenville News that he wants to reform the harbor maintenance trust fund to ``get back the money South Carolina contributes.'' He is going after specific funding of $400,000. Whether the money comes from the Corps of Engineers or the harbor maintenance trust fund, it is still an earmark under anyone's definition. He wants to put that money into a fund to study and deepen the channel, rather an O&M. He should do that. He is doing what the Constitution tells him to do. He is looking after the needs of the people of South Carolina. I look after the needs of the people of Oklahoma. I am not sure that if we left this up to President Obama he would be very generous to South Carolina and Oklahoma. So he is entitled to do this. That is why Madison gave the power to spend to the legislature.

All those earmarks--and you might say that Senator DeMint is adaptable. It reminds me of the guy who had been out of town for 2 years and called up his dearest friend, and he said to his friend: Well, Mary, how are you doing? This is Tom.

She said: Tom, it is so good to hear from you. It has been 2 years.

Tom said: How is old Jim getting along?

She said: Didn't you know? Jim is dead.

He said: No, what happened?

She said: He went down to the garden to pick some peas for dinner and leaned over and had a heart attack and fell on his face dead.

He said: You poor thing, Mary. Whatever did you do?

She said: There is only one thing we could do. We had to open a can of peas.

You see, there is nothing wrong with being adaptable. I think Senator DeMint is. I think we are talking about not a can of peas but a can of worms.

The government has a function to provide infrastructure, roads, highways, and all of this. I will bring this out because--I will mention a couple of others, but people are concerned about their States. There is one significant fact that needs to be elaborated on now. One of the arguments that was

not sound was that they said earmarks are a gateway drug that needs to be eliminated in order to demonstrate that we are serious about fiscal restraint. There is one problem with that; it is not true.

According to the OMB and Citizens Against Government Waste, the earmarks have dramatically decreased over the past several years. OMB said in 2005 total earmarks were $18.9 billion. In 2008, they were $16.6 billion. In 2009, they were $15.3 billion. In 2010, they were $11.1 billion. Why do you suppose they are reducing every year? It is because we are demanding more light so that people can know what they are spending money on.

I say that earmarks are hardly a gateway drug, a symptom of Federal funding run amok, or even an underlying cause to our fiscal problems. Why? Because we have shed light on earmarks. Let's add why a shining light can be a first step.

In 2009, the Senate performed the rare action of considering many appropriations bills individually rather than irresponsibly lumping them into one like we are doing today, lumping them into one vote at the end of the year. The value of that--considering them individually-- is it gives Senators the opportunity to exercise oversight of government programs and to monitor how Federal departments spend money. So in 2009 Senators could offer amendments to cut spending and strike particular earmarks if they desired.

From July until November of that year, 2009, there were 18 votes specifically targeting earmarks. All the amendments failed. Had they succeeded, it would not have reduced the overall amount of money the Federal Government is spending by a dime.

Instead of putting money back into the pockets of the American people by reducing spending or shrinking the deficit, these efforts would have put the money into the hands of President Obama, by allowing his administration to spend the money as he saw fit. At the end of the day, no one would have saved money. President Obama is the winner and the American people are the loser.

In another case Members offered amendments to strike funding from the program called Save America's Treasures for specific art centers throughout the United States. They offered amendments to strike it. Did it save any money? No. That went back to the unelected bureaucrats at the National Park Service to spend. That is the Obama administration. He calls the shots there. It didn't save a cent.

In another case, a Member offered an amendment to strike a variety of transportation projects in quite a few States only to redirect spending to the Obama administration and the unelected bureaucrats in the Federal Highway Administration. Not one of these actions saved a dime but made President Obama happy because it all went back to his coffers.

Now I point this out because there is a solution. We have clearly demonstrated, and we have made a point here, and the point is: No. 1-- and no one can deny this--that spending is an exclusive constitutional right of the Senate and the House, and killing earmarks doesn't save a dime but can be the first stop in a real solution.

That gets back to S. 3939. I am very proud of that, and I wish to say there is a happy ending to this story mostly because of that Senate bill. I would like to take credit for that but I am not going to do it because I can't. I wasn't that smart. But there are eight great Americans--and let's put that chart up, if you would, Luke--eight great Americans and the conservative groups they represent--Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste; Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for Common Sense; Craig Holman, Public Citizens; Jim Walsh, Rich Gold, Manny Rouvelas, and Dave Wenhold--and thanks to them we can put the earmarks issue to rest. They authored the ``5 Principles of Earmark Reform,'' and I will list these. The chart shows what they are, starting at the top.

I have to say that S. 3939 will address all of these specifically. There are people in Washington who go through a lot of work making a lot of studies, and they assume we never read these things or care about them. But if you believe that, you are wrong because I listened, and this is the result--the five principles of earmark reform.

What we are saying here is that we know--and it doesn't matter what you do in having a ban on earmarks, because Members are going to be voting and supporting things in their States; everyone is. I can assure you that is going to happen, by the Senator from Oregon and everyone here. This is going to happen. But principle No. 1 says to cut the cord between campaign contributions, Congress should limit earmarks directed to campaign contributors. Limiting total contributions from the earmark beneficiary and its affiliates to no more than $5,000 would help restore public confidence. This came from those eight great groups that evaluated as to what we could do to clean up this system. Well, S. 3939, just introduced, does exactly that. Section 2 says:

No earmark beneficiary shall make contributions aggregating

more than $5,000 to any requesting candidate with respect to

such earmark beneficiary.

So that first one is met. The second principle is to eliminate any connection between legislation and campaign contributions, legislative staff should be barred from participating in fundraising activities. The attendance of legislative staff at fundraisers suggests a connection between campaign donations and earmarks.

So we handled that with S. 3939. It does just that under section 3. Subsections (a) and (b) state:

Limits on staff attendance of Member fundraisers. Except as

provided in subsection B, an employee of the personal staff

of a Member of Congress should not attend a political

fundraiser on behalf of the Member of Congress for whom they

are employed. A Member of Congress may designate one employee

who shall not be subject to the provisions of Subsection A.

I think people know there may be a situation where someone would need to drive a Member or there could be threats and they may need to have some security.

The third thing they came up with to increase transparency is, Congress should create a new database of all congressional earmarks. They went on to say:

Information about lawmakers' earmark requests is scattered

across hundreds of web sites in a variety of formats with

differing levels of details. The funding levels for each

earmark award are listed in a chart at the end of each

spending bill. While the data is technically available, it is

virtually impossible to collect, understand and analyze all

of the earmark information. Congress should create a unified,

searchable, sortable and downloadable database on the public

website.

S. 3939, which I introduced an hour ago, does exactly that. Section 4 reads:

The Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of

Representatives shall post on a public website of their

respective houses, a link to the earmark database maintained

by the Office of Management and Budget.

Done.

No. 4. The fourth concern is to ensure taxpayer money has been spent appropriately, the Government Accountability Office should randomly audit earmarks. Because oversight is essential to maintain integrity in the earmarking process, the Government Accountability Office should develop and implement a system to audit and report to Congress regularly on programs and projects funded through earmarks.

This does that, and I am going to read our section 7. This is a more difficult one, but it is air tight.

Not later than December 31, 2011, and each year thereafter,

the Comptroller General shall submit a report to Congress

that uses the OMB database--(1) to randomly select a

percentage of each of the programs and projects funded

through earmarks in a preceding fiscal year; (2) to conduct

an audit on each selected program or project reporting on the

amount, purpose, term, requesting Member and the present

state of completion of the program or project; and (3) if the

earmark contributes to an already existing program or

project, to provide a detailed accounting of how the earmark

contributed to each program or project.

That was the request, and we came up with the section that, as I say, is air tight in solving the problem.

No. 5, to promote congressional responsibility without stifling innovation, Members should certify earmark recipients are qualified to handle the project. The last language we had on that was section 6:

And a certification that the recipient is qualified to

handle the project, if applicable.

You might say that is great, we have resolved all of the problems that are

out there. This was a combination of the intellects of all the people I have mentioned a while back. They looked at all the problems that are there and how we could resolve those problems. But one thing was overlooked, so we have a section in S. 3939 where we go one step further. It demands--listen to this, Mr. President--the same transparency to Obama bureaucratic earmarks as it does to Senatorial earmarks.

Well, that is kind of neat, if we do that. I will read section 5:

Not later than July 1, 2011, the head of each department

and agency of the Federal Government shall post on the public

website of that department or agency a link to a searchable

database that lists each contract, grant, cooperative

agreement, and other expenditure made by the department or

agency listing with respect to the expenditure, the amount,

purpose, term and office making such expenditure.

Why is that necessary? I can remember Sean Hannity, about 6 months ago, came out with a series one night where he talked about the 102 most egregious earmarks that were brought up. Here is something that is interesting about that. I was so excited when I saw these that I read them all. I came down and stood right here on the Senate floor and I went over them all and described all 102 earmarks. We have a chart that shows some of those. Look at some of the things we are talking about here: $3.4 million to construct an echo passage for turtles--that is nice; $450,000 to build 22 concrete toilets in the Mark Twain National Forest; $300,000 for helicopter equipment to detect radioactive rabbit droppings; $500,000 for a grant to a researcher named in the Climate- Gate scandal--I wish we had another hour, I would like to talk about that--and $325,000 to study the mating decisions of female cactus bugs.

After reading all 102--and this is five of them--I asked the questions: What do all these have in common? What they have in common is that not one of them was a congressional earmark. They were all earmarks that were put in there by the Obama administration.

So here is the problem you have. If you ban congressional earmarks, you are going to have more of this. Because as you restrict what Congress can do, that same amount of money goes back into the administration, whether it is the Department of the Interior, the Corps of Engineers, the EPA, or any of the rest of them. So is there any question why President Obama embraced the ban on the earmarks? No, because he wants the money to go to him.

But S. 3939 is going to curb that. I think this actually could have a very happy ending, because the five principles of earmark reform assembled by the eight individuals I mentioned is an ingenious document. Even the Tea Party people recognized that we have an obligation to our States.

Let me congratulate Senator Rand Paul for his statement on Sunday, November 7, wherein he stated that he told the people of Kentucky that he will work through the committee process to get things done for Kentucky, but it has to be under a particular overall budget. I agree. I am with him. I have had the same conversation with Marco Rubio. I am with him. They recognize the President does not have the knowledge of each State's needs.

With the passage of S. 3939, it resolves the whole earmark dilemma and puts it to rest. The one good thing about the ban is that we have to tackle the deficit. As long as we continue, as we did in the last 2 years, to stand on the floor of this Senate and go hour after hour after hour talking about the earmark problem, which is 1 percent of the total discretionary spending, we are not going to be able to address the real problem, and that is the increase of the debt to $13.4 trillion--the largest increase in the history of America. It is larger than any of the other increases, all the way from George Washington to George W. Bush, and saddling my 20 kids and grandkids with $3 trillion of extra spending.

That is the problem we have. I would have to say, as I learned in my successful battle against cap and trade, the truth eventually triumphs. Winston Churchill said:

Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance

may deride it, malice may destroy it, but there it is.

I believe that is what we are getting closer and closer to. The end result will be that a Senator will be able to continue to work for the needs of the States, as Senator DeMint is doing, and I am doing right now. But first, all of the reforms necessary to clean up the process will occur; and, secondly, we can limit President Obama or any future President from claiming or from taking our constitutional rights by subjecting him to the same transparency.

I think this is very significant. I believe after all this talk, over all these years, particularly in the last 2 years, we are now at the point to satisfy everyone. If they want to ban earmarks, fine, ban earmarks. But at the same time, put the clarity and the transparency in the system that will clean it up, and I believe that is what is going to happen. I guess you can say we can have it both ways, and it looks as if we are going to be able to do that.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I read an article from the October 2010 edition of the Defense Technology International this morning that discussed military and other technology advances. Entitled ``Big Guns: China muscles up artillery punch,'' this article details China's efforts in the development of artillery and rocket systems and the associated doctrine they have created. Specifically, it addresses Chinese efforts in research and development in areas such as computer- based fire control, digital communication, and command capabilities, use of sophisticated radars and jammers, and the development of ramjet powered and stealth coated artillery shells, to name a few key areas. Though not necessarily new items of research and development for the United States, China's efforts in these areas tells me one thing: China is pursuing modernization and development initiatives that, based on our recent history of research and development specific to artillery and rockets, may be superior if they are not at least equal to our efforts

Now let me shift same gears to another potential peer country: Russia and its fifth-generation fighter development. In the same context as China's efforts in artillery and rocket capability, Russia is pursuing the deployment of a fifth-generation fighter, known as the PAK FA advanced tactical frontline fighter. Russia has publicly stated that this aircraft is the peer to the F-22. This aircraft, together with upgraded fourth-generation fighters, will define Russian Air Force potential for the next several decades and will challenge our aviation efforts without question. And don't think that China isn't developing their own fifth-generation aircraft; they are. It is called the JA-12 it is also going to go head to head with our F-22.

The point to this is not a comparison of capabilities or numbers but a public reinforcement of an assessment I have maintained for a long time. We, the United States of America, are not taking our future national security seriously, because we are failing to focus on maintaining the edge that we have had for the last several decades.

So where is the United States in terms of future military hardware necessary to maintain that edge? Did you know that the oldest combat vehicle in the Army inventory is the M109A6 Paladin howitzer and we are on the sixth version of this vehicle which is built around a refurbished chassis circa 1963? The Army's answer to artillery modernization has been the Crusader, which was supposed to replace the Paladin, the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon as part of FCS, the Non-Line-of- Sight Launch System, another FCS related system, and now the Paladin Integrated Management, or PIM program, which is a modification of the Paladin to a Bradley chassis. All but the PIM program have been cancelled in the last 8 years or so, and the PIM program has been delayed in production.

Current Army fleets of armored personnel carriers, tanks, wheeled vehicles, and helicopters were developed and procured 30 to 60 years ago. DOD and the President's answer to that: cancel FCS, with no viable replacement options, and continue to ``upgrade'' current fleets of Bradleys an Abrams tanks until the next-generation ground combat vehicle can be figured out.

Our strategic bomber fleet of B-52s, B-1s and B-2s vary in age from 10 to 30 years. The SECDEF has publicly stated in the press and in Congress that 2020 will be the first time we see a new bomber, which means that current airframes will have to remain in service until at least 2040.

One of our two fifth-generation aircraft, the F-22, the peer to the Russian's PAK FA and Chinese JA-12, has had the production line cancelled with only 187 aircraft built out of a requested 750, pulling us in a ``high risk'' state for air dominance. The other fifth- generation aircraft, the F-35, will not be ready until at least 2015, has suffered significant cost and timing problems, and will be 250 aircraft less than the requested 1,240.

Our Ohio class Trident submarines, the ones that deliver ballistic missiles from the sea, are an average of 20 years old. Replacement builds don't start till 2019 and won't be finished until 2028. As well, the administration remains opaque about plans for replacement of the 30-year-old air-launched cruise missile which is a critical component of our nuclear and long-range conventional strike capability. This is the same for our Minuteman ICBM, which is decades old as well.

I am convinced well beyond any reasonable doubt that we are heading down a slippery slope due to a shortsighted and dangerous strategy from our current administration. The litany of programs cancelled, modified, or mismanaged over the last two budget periods is minf-boggling--FCS, F-22, F-35, NLOS-C and LS, PIM, missile defense, nuclear stockpile, surface and submarine ships, strategic bombers--the list is overwhelming.

I, for one, will not let this happen. I will continue to voice my concerns over this issue. I will continue to fight for a flat expenditure of at least 4 percent of GDP spent on defense to ensure that this country continues to have the best military in the world. I will continue to press the administration to do more for the future of our national security.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article ``Big Guns'' to which I referred.

Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes today to speak about the importance of oversight.

As you may recall, on April 22, 2010, EPA's new lead-based paint, the lead, renovation, repair and painting rule, went into effect. At that time, offices on the Hill were inundated with intense public outcry from constituents--from homeowners to contractors to landlords to plumbers--all trying to get more information about a rule that, in most cases, they had just learned about. People were confused about the implications of the rule.

This rule affects anyone who owns or lives in a home built before 1978 and looking to do a renovation. Specifically, the rule requires that renovations in these homes that disturb more than six square feet must be supervised by a certified renovator and conducted by a certified renovation firm. In order to become certified, contractors must submit an application--with a fee--to EPA, and complete a training course for instruction on lead-safe work practices. Those who violate the rule could face a fine of $37,500 a day.

In my role as ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, prior to implementation, I sent several letters to EPA expressing concern with the rate of training. I wrote on two separate occasions warning EPA that it seemed badly unprepared to properly implement the rule. In both cases, EPA said they were ready.

In a June 3, 2009 letter responding to my concerns, EPA wrote:

I agree that both EPA and the regulated community have a

great deal of preparation in front of us as we approach next

April's deadline. I am confident, however, that the ten

months between now and April 2010 will allow us to meet this

deadline....We are confident that all renovators subject to

the requirements of the rule will be able to find a provider

in advance of our deadline.

In a letter dated December 1, 2009, EPA wrote:

we are confident there will be enough training providers to

meet the demand. EPA does not plan to revise the April 2010

effective date of the RRP rule....Currently, the capacity for

training is in excess of the demand as several training

courses have been cancelled for lack of attendance.

On implementation day, April 22, 2010, EPA had only accredited 204 training providers who had conducted just over 6,900 courses, training an estimated 160,000 people in the construction and remodeling industries to use lead-safe work practices. That number fell far short of the total number of remodelers who would be working on pre-1978 homes.

Let me say it again: on implementation day, EPA had only trained an estimated 160,000 people in the construction and remodeling industries to use lead-safe work practices.

I suspected that there wouldn't be enough contractors to even meet EPA's estimate of certifying 186,811 renovators by April 2010. So I sent a bipartisan letter to OMB requesting that they delay implementation of the rule until there was enough time for more people to be certified. Additionally, I spoke to Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB, and was joined by some of my Oklahoma contractors, who relayed the difficulties they were facing. I appreciate Mr. Sunstein listening to the concerns of my Oklahoma constituents. He told us he recognized the economic impact of the implementation of the rule and explored ways to provide a 60-day delay, but, by April 23, we simply ran out of options.

The rule was in place, there were not enough renovators, and EPA argued that a delay in the rule would delay

protection for children and their families. But because the Federal Government failed to meet the demand for certified contractors, the Federal Government was already delaying the implementation of the rule.

I was proud that the Senate intervened to send a clear message to EPA. The Senate passed the Collins-Inhofe amendment, S. 4253, to the supplemental appropriations bill, H.R. 4899, by a vote of 60 to 37.

This amendment prevented supplemental funds from being used to implement the rule. The vote showed overwhelming bipartisan concern about EPA's disastrous implementation of the lead-based paint rule.

Fortunately, EPA got the message. On June 18, 2010, EPA's enforcement office issued a memorandum extending the lead rule deadline for renovators to enroll in training classes to September 30, 2010. Furthermore, it has extended the deadline for contractors to complete training to December 31, 2010, and most importantly, the agency agreed to work to provide additional trainers in areas of need.

EPA's concerns about extending additional time for renovators to become certified never materialized; in fact, instead of people continuing to delay signing up for classes, people flocked to them. EPA's most recent training numbers show that as of September 23, 2010, EPA has accredited 364 training providers who have conducted more than 21,400 courses, training an estimated 476,700 people in the construction and remodeling industries to use lead-safe work practices.

From just 160,000 people in April, to 476,700 people in September, more time has meant greater ability to take classes and come into compliance.

The delay has allowed another 160 training providers to be certified; an additional 14,500 courses to be held; and 316,700 people to receive training in lead safe work practices.

Unfortunately, we did not have one oversight hearing on this rule. There were numerous opportunities prior to the rule going final, but they were never taken. Nonetheless, I am pleased to have worked with Senators Collins, Alexander, Vitter, Coburn and others to highlight this important issue and provide additional time for renovators to attend training classes.

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

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

Madam President, I released today a minority staff report of the Senate committee on Environment and Public Works. When Republicans were in the majority I chaired the committee and now I am the ranking member, minority member. We have been concerned for quite some time now that the heavyhanded overregulation we are getting from the Environment and Public Works Committee is taking its toll on American jobs. So we released this and documented a report that examines the impact on jobs and the economy from all these EPA rules and EPA regulations.

We are covering four areas. The focus is on the boiler MACT regulations, the revised National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ozone--we are all concerned about that--I notice the new cement MACT regulations, and the endangerment findings. These are just four rules that are costing us a lot of jobs.

There are many others we could be talking about, in fact we are going to be talking about in the near future: standards for cooling water intake structures at powerplants, National Ambient Air Quality Standards for dust and particulate matter--actually, they are talking about doing one now for farm dust. I am from Oklahoma. A lot of people back here don't understand when you grow something you have to grow it in dirt. When the wind blows that is dust, but you can't regulate it. But they think they can--the new source performance standards for coal- fired powerplants and refineries, and the rules governing disposal of coal combustion waste.

What does it all mean? The American Forest and Paper Association estimates, and I am quoting them:

. . . about two dozen new regulations being considered by

the Administration under the Clean Air Act, if all are

promulgated, potentially could impose on the order of $17

billion in new capital costs on papermakers and wood products

manufacturers in the next five to eight years alone.

That is just for one industry. You have all the other industries that will be affected.

Before I begin, let me say the Clean Air Act was a success. I have always been a supporter of the results of the Clean Air Act. We now have cleaner air from cars, from factories, and powerplants. It has been very successful. In fact, when we were a majority and I chaired that committee, we had the 3P regulations, we had the Clear Skies regulations we tried to promulgate--we have been attempting to do this for a long period of time. However, if we are going to be competing with other countries, this overregulation is going to do nothing but send our jobs to places such as China and India and Mexico.

Of the four areas I mentioned, the first is the boiler MACT. The MACT means maximum achievable control technologies. Forget about that, just call that regulation.

The first one, the regulations, would be the boiler MACT. It would impose stringent emission limits on monitoring requirements for 11 subcategories of boilers and process heaters.

The proposed rule covers industrial boilers used in manufacturing, processing, mining, refining, as well as commercial boilers used in malls, laundries, apartments, restaurants and hotels.

The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, which represents companies with 750,000 employees, said they are ``enormously concerned that the high cost'' of the boiler regulations will leave companies no recourse but to shut down the entire facility, not just the boilers.

This is what the econometrics firm IHS-Global Insight found in its analysis of the EPA's proposal, just the one proposal. They concluded that the proposal could put up to 798,000 jobs at risk. Moreover, they said every $1 billion spent on upgrade and compliance costs will put some 16,000 jobs at risk and reduce the U.S. GDP by as much as $1.2 billion.

The EPA's pending boiler regulations also threaten my home State of Oklahoma. We have one group, a company called Covanta Energy, which in 2008 reopened the Walter B. Hall Resource Recovery Facility, a waste- to-energy plant.

This happened, actually, when I was mayor of Tulsa many years ago. We had two great needs: one to dispose of waste and the other to create energy. So we did one of the first waste-to-energy plants in America. It was done back in the early 1980s when I was mayor of Tulsa. This is something that has been working out and working successfully. But they are saying it could threaten the viability of this operation, and it is not just in my State of Oklahoma but all over the country.

These concerns are shared by 40 of my colleagues, including 18 Democrats, who wrote Lisa Jackson--she is the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency--a letter. Keep in mind, half of these are Democrats.

As our Nation struggles to recover from the current

recession, we are deeply concerned that the pending Clean Air

Act boiler MACT regulations could impose onerous burdens on

U.S. manufacturers, leading to the loss of potentially

thousands of high-paying jobs this sector provides. As the

national unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent, and

federal, state and municipal finances continue to be in dire

straits, our country should not be jeopardizing thousands of

manufacturing jobs.

That is a quote from a letter, half Democrats, half Senators, 40 of us, to Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Just in the area of boiler regulation, one of the four I am going to talk about, potentially 1 million jobs could be lost. This is the problem we are having with the overregulation in this country. We have two major problems: overregulation and the fact we are not developing any power anymore, we made it so difficult. We have not had a new coal- fired powerplant in this country for quite some time. Yet China is cranking out two of them every week. This is our competition over there.

The second area is ozone. On January 6 of this year, for the second time in less than 2 years, the EPA proposed tightening the NAAQ standards for ground level ozone. Specifically, the EPA is proposing to strengthen the 8-hour ``primary'' ozone standard. The EPA estimates that setting the primary standard within its proposed range will cost between $19 and $90 billion. That is the EPA's estimate. This proposal comes at the heels of the 2008 ozone standard, which created a serious problem. The CAA, Clean Air Act, only requires revision at least 5 years. That was just 2 years ago. Now they are talking about doing it again. So the EPA is not required to revise the status quo.

Meanwhile, States are in the midst of trying to meet the 2008 requirements while some communities are not in compliance with the 1997 standards, the time they did it before.

EPA announced it is delaying the new standards until late October. Guess what. We are there. My guess is they will be delaying it until after the election because they don't want to know what hardship they are imposing upon the American people before the election. It is not hard to see why. Whatever level EPA ultimately picks, it will dramatically increase the number of so-called nonattainment areas nationwide.

Based on the 2008 air quality data, we could see as many as 608 new nonattainment areas, with many of them highly concentrated in manufacturing regions, in States relying on coal for electricity.

What does the nonattainment mean? For local communities, such as my communities in Oklahoma, it can mean loss of industry and economic development, including plant closures; loss of Federal highway and transit funding; increased EPA regulation and control over permitting decisions; increased costs for industrial facilities to implement more stringent controls; and increased fuel and energy costs.

In my State of Oklahoma, at least 15 counties would face new restrictions right now, under the 2008, and there are two counties that would be out of attainment. All these things would happen. You can't go out and recruit industry, they close down a lot of industries there now. I have listed in these remarks that will be part of the Record 15 counties in my State of Oklahoma that could be facing these new restrictions.

We all support cleaner air, but here is where the Obama EPA and I disagree. It should not come at the expense of people's jobs or the economy. Apparently, I am not the only one thinking this way.

On August 6, 2010, a bipartisan letter--this is the third one I am mentioning now--was sent to the EPA Administrator on the Agency's ozone reconsideration. It was signed by Senators Voinovich, Bayh, Lugar, Landrieu, Vitter, McCaskill, and Bond. That is an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. They said:

While we believe we can and should continue to improve our

environment, we have become increasingly concerned that the

Agency's environmental policies are being advanced to the

detriment of the people they are intended to protect. That

is, these policies are impacting our standard of living by

drastically increasing energy costs and decreasing the

ability of our states to create jobs, foster

entrepreneurship, and give manufacturers the ability to

compete in the global marketplace.

Again, that was just one of these four areas.

The third one would be the Portland cement regulations. This third rule is another regulation having to do with cement. According to the EPA, ``a projected 181 Portland cement kilns will be operating at approximately 100 facilities in the United States by the year 2013.'' EPA's new emission standards under section 112 of the Clean Air Act will apply to 158 of that 181. About 7 kilns will be subject to the EPA's new source performance standards under section 111 of the Clean Air Act.

The cement industry is essential to America's economy. According to a study by the Maguire Energy Institute at SMU, the cement manufacturing industry in 2008 produced $27.5 billion in GDP, $931 million in indirect tax revenues for State and local governments, and sustained 15,000 high-paying jobs.

In addition to those 15,000 direct jobs, the industry has an ``induced employment'' effect, which helps create and

sustain an additional 153,000 jobs. ``Importantly,'' the Maguire Energy Institute noted ``these are primarily high-wage jobs generating about $7.5 billion annually in wages and benefits.''

According to the Portland Cement Association, EPA's regulation puts up to 18 cement plants at risk of shutting down, threatening nearly 1,800 direct jobs and 9,000 indirect jobs, accordingly. I might add, one of these would be in my State of Oklahoma. These jobs in cement production would go to China. That is what a professor from King's College in London said about the EPA's rule--coming from London:

So rather than importing 20 million tons of cement per

year, the proposed [rule] will lead to cement imports of more

than 48 million tons per year. In other words, by tightening

the regulations on U.S. cement kilns, there will be a risk

transfer of some 28 million tons of cement offshore, mostly

to China.

Senators Voinovich and Lincoln wrote a bipartisan letter to Administrator Jackson, sharing these concerns back in February, saying:

In a very real sense, if a reasonable standard is not

adopted in this matter, we anticipate that substantial cement

capacity may move overseas to the detriment of industrial

employment. . . .

And the detriment of hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.

The fourth is my favorite. To give just a little bit of background, way back when we had the Kyoto treaty in the 1990s, there was an effort at that time to say we have catastrophic things happening, global warming and all that, as a result of primarily man-made gases. They tried through the years to pass legislation. We had the 2003 and 2005 McCain-Lieberman bills. Then we had the Markey bills and the others. I think one was a Boxer-Sanders bill. All of them were essentially doing the same thing; it was called cap and trade. It was something I characterized as the largest tax increase in the history of this country.

As a matter of fact, during the consideration of all of these bills, they estimated--and this was several--MIT, CRA, and several other institutions said that the cost to America would be somewhere between $300 and $400 billion a year.

The rule discussed is the endangerment finding. As I have documented on the Senate floor before, the EPA promulgated its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases in December of 2009, which I said could lead to the greatest bureaucratic intrusion into the lives of the American people. It would trigger costly, time-consuming permitting requirements for new and modified stationary sources for greenhouse gases such as powerplants, factories, and refineries.

So the problem with this is that when the Obama administration saw that Congress was not going to pass these very punitive tax increases called cap and trade, they decided they were going to try to do it through regulation. That is what this is all about. This is just one- fourth of the minority report we have out there that we introduced today.

The rule, in order to do this--and I will never forget because right before I went over to Copenhagen in December, we had a hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, and we had Lisa Jackson--I have a great deal of respect for her--before the hearing.

I said: Madam Administrator, I suspect that when I leave for Copenhagen tomorrow, you are going to have an endangerment finding.

An endangerment finding is a finding that will allow them to promulgate rules to do what they failed to be able to do in legislation.

I said: And to do that, it is going to have to be based on some science. What science would that be based on?

She said: Primarily, the science that came from the United Nations.

And the IPCC--since that time, there has been Climategate--told the truth about how they have been trying to cook the science over that period of time. So this is one that is really very serious.

But the U.S. Chamber found that if they are able to go ahead and use the emissions, it would affect 260,000 office buildings, 150,000 warehouses, 92,000 health care facilities, 71,000 hotels and motels, 51,000 food service facilities, 37,000 churches and other places of worship, and 17,000 farms. That is because they would be falling under the category--the 250 tons of emissions of CO2 per year.

The greenhouse gas regulations will mean higher energy costs for consumers, especially for minorities and the poor.

I had the Catholic Charities in my office today. We had, actually, the man, who I learned just died this last week, with the Ohio Catholic Charities down for hearings when we were talking about all the things they were trying to do through the various bills on cap and trade. His testimony was--and these individuals were in my office today--that it disproportionately hurts poor people. For example, if someone is in poverty, there are just some things that person has to have--heating the home in the winter, transportation costs, costs that are necessary. If you are a wealthy person, that might constitute maybe 5 percent of your expendable income, but it could be 100 percent of the income of someone who is poor. So it disproportionately hurts the poor people.

This is why, on February 19, recognizing that he was going to lose a lot of jobs, Senator Rockefeller, joined by seven of his Democratic colleagues, wrote--again, this is the fourth letter--to Administrator Jackson on their concern with the endangerment finding.

We write with serious economic and energy security concerns

relating to the potential regulation of greenhouse gases from

stationary sources under the Clean Air Act. We remain

concerned about the possible impacts on American workers and

businesses and a number of industrial sectors, along with the

farmers, miners and small business owners who could be

affected as your energy agency moves toward the regulations

for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

You know, as bad as things are right now, we are supposed to be able to knock down and the President said we are going to bring unemployment down to somewhere around 6 or 7 percent, and it is still right up there at 10 percent. These regulations haven't even gone into effect yet. So that is going to cause the unemployment figures to be much higher.

So I think it is important to recognize right now, before it is too late, that something can be done about this overregulation right now, and I really believe this is the opportunity that we have.

This report we just released today is on my Web site, inhofe.senate.gov, and we have now been able to get this around the country so that people know that as bad as the unemployment and overregulation is that is costing American jobs, it could be a lot worse if these four regulations get into full effect. I think it is our job here in the Chamber to recognize that we have a very serious unemployment problem in this country, a very serious overregulation problem in this country, and we can now do something about it.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado.) The clerk will call the roll.

Mr. President, I will stay within the time given me. We have all had to reduce our time on this side. We have many Members who wish to speak.

Let me cover a couple of points and respond to statements made by the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

I was around in 1993. Actually, it was the last year I was serving in the House, and I was on the House Armed Services Committee. I remember very well when the gay lobby started becoming active during that time during the Clinton administration. They said: We want to change the policy. That is why they went through this policy called don't ask, don't tell, which allows people to serve regardless of what their conditions are, their preferences are, but they do not talk about it. They do not use the military as a forum to advance their liberal agenda.

It seemed to work. In the law--and it is still the law today--section 571 reads--this was passed in 1993, 17 years ago:

The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate

a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would

create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale,

good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the

essence of military capability.

I was one who applauded Secretary Gates--this is back on February 10--when he said we are not going to be doing anything to change it until we study it and, most important--and this is the whole issue, I believe--we hear from those in the field, we hear from the troops in the field. These are the guys who have gone through this. They understand what it is all about. And they were told they would be heard. That is the whole idea, that we would not do anything until December 1 when all the results were in.

I am a product of the U.S. Army. I served proudly in the U.S. Army, and I can tell you right now, there are some reasons in the military why this would not work.

Senator McCain covered the statements that were made by the service chiefs, but they are worth looking at again. It is very significant that these service chiefs were outspoken in their opposition to changing this policy or to repealing don't ask, don't tell. It is difficult for a general in the armed services to go against a President.

I remember in 1998 when GEN John Jumper was strong enough to stand up and say what was happening in the Clinton administration in terms of downsizing of the military. It took a lot of courage. But the other thing that is--and a lot of things have been said about Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen, but they will be the most instrumental in this. Here is what their philosophy was. This is a statement I will read, and I want everyone to listen carefully. This is from the Secretary of Defense--Gates--and Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They said, jointly:

We believe, in the strongest possible terms, that the

Department must, prior to any legislative action, be allowed

the opportunity to conduct a thorough, objective, and

systematic assessment of the impact of such a policy change.

What they are talking about is the study we said was going to take place. But then, wait a minute, something happened. Three things happened 1 month later. This statement was made April 28. Then 1 month later, on May 27, three things happened. What are those three things? First of all, Gates and Mullen agreed to this compromise and then totally reversed their position of just 1 month before. Now, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee was talking about their position. This was their position, and yet they reversed it at the same time on the same day--May 27--that the House voted to repeal don't ask, don't tell. There were a couple of conditions there, and the Senate did the same thing, with one exception--one Senator in the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was right down party lines. In other words, every Republican Senator but one opposed this idea of repealing this without going through the study. The study is the critical thing. We have to go through the study before we would be in a position to know what those in the field want to do. I think this is very critical because it is not a matter of what you want to do with this, it is a matter of hearing from the troops in the field.

Let's put up the next chart. People are saying: Well, don't worry about it. The Senator from Michigan just said: Don't worry about it because, first of all, it has to be certified that there is no negative impact on readiness. It is going to be certified by Mullen and Gates and the President.

But wait a minute--certified? They have already made up their minds.

Look, here is the most important--Admiral Mullen said:

Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself, it is my personal belief

that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the

right thing to do.

He is the one who is supposed to certify this. He has already certified it. It is right here. When they say that 60 days after the first of December, that certification has to take place, it has already happened.

Secretary Gates says:

I fully support the President's decision. The question

before us is not whether the military prepares to make this

change, but how we best prepare for it.

There you have it. Both of them are saying the same thing. They are saying: Well, we have already made up our minds. They are the ones certifying. And the third party, of course, is the President, and the President's position is very well known on that issue.

So I think this whole thing is so phony when they talk about this certification, but the reason I want to get in as much as I can in the limited 10 minutes is to let you know that it is not the only thing that happened on May 27. I call it black Thursday because not only did they vote to repeal the policy that has worked so well for the last 17 years in terms of gays in the military, but they also passed an abortion amendment that allows abortions in military hospitals.

Now, very quickly, this has been going on--it has been changed for many years. In 1970, an Executive order allowed abortions in DOD hospitals. In 1984, Bob Dornan--remember B-1 Bob? A lot of us remember him. He changed it and tried to limit the abortions in government hospitals. In 1988, DOD hospitals barred abortions from the military facilities. President Clinton changed that and relaxed the laws. Then in 1996 the authorization bill reversed Clinton, and therefore they were not able to have abortions in military hospitals. Now, that is the law as it is today. But there is an amendment--and we have not even talked about this amendment--that is going to open the military hospitals for abortions.

I had the honor of addressing this Values Summit last Friday, and I can tell you right now that the people there, when they heard about all of this that was in this bill, were pretty shocked. And the question came up, Why is it that we keep hearing over and over what is in this bill?

Let's get the next chart up there. Why are they so anxious to get this thing on the floor when we are not going to be able to have amendments? We all know what the rules are around here. To my knowledge, since I first came to Congress, this is the first time we will have an authorization bill where we will not have a chance to amend it, where we won't have a chance to offer amendments. Normally, there are 100 or so amendments. A lot are agreed to, and our positions are heard. Not this time.

First of all, I think this is a political mistake. It is a dumb thing to do, to try to use the Defense authorization bill in times of war to advance a liberal agenda. What is that liberal agenda? That agenda is to have open gays serving in the military, it is taxpayer-funded abortions in our military hospitals, and it is amnesty for illegals. I think they are making a mistake. I agree with the Senator from Arizona that it is totally political. It is all set up for the November 2 election. And I can assure you that all of America is watching, and they don't think the Defense authorization bill, in times of war, is the appropriate thing to do to advance a far-left liberal agenda--an open gay policy in the military, taxpayer-funded abortions, and amnesty for illegals.

With that, Mr. President, I have used my 10 minutes, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I believe by unanimous consent we have an order of speakers, and I think the next one is--well, I will let Senator McCain speak.

Madam President, today I pay tribute to retired U.S. Air Force LTG Thomas Patten Stafford, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut and the first U.S. general officer to travel into space, being one of only 24 people to fly to the Moon. A command pilot in both the Air Force and NASA, General Stafford gave a lifetime of service to the Nation in space exploration, logging multiple flights into space to further our understanding and capabilities in space exploration. As one of the pioneers of our country's space program, General Stafford established protocols, procedures, and even a few records, that are still present in today's contemporary space programs and operations. He has been a national treasure and an unsung hero, willingly taking on the challenges associated with our innate fascination with what lay beyond our terrestrial home.

General Stafford graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1952 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. He attended pilot training at Connally Air Force Base, Waco, TX, in 1953 and after completing advanced interceptor training was assigned to his first tactical duty station at Ellsworth Air Force Base, Rapid City, SD, as a pilot with the 54th Flight Interceptor Squadron with the mission of planning for and executing the air defense of the United States. It was in 1955 that General Stafford received an overseas assignment to Hahn Air Base, Germany, where he joined the 496th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, at the tip of the spear as part of the United States defense of Europe during the Cold War. At the time, the 496th flew F-86D model aircraft, known as the ``Sabre Dog.'' It was a transonic jet, all-weather interceptor designed to intercept Soviet attack and bomber aircraft. It was during this time that General Stafford developed and honed his flying abilities and understanding of flight operations and performance testing, which would prove vital to his influence over our Nation's space program and guarantee many successes in those endeavors.

In 1962, General Stafford was selected among the second group of astronauts to participate in Projects Gemini and Apollo, the two fabled national space programs that epitomize our country's tremendous quest for space exploration. In December 1965, General Stafford piloted Gemini VI, the first rendezvous in space, thus developing and proving techniques for space rendezvous that would be critical for future operations. In June 1966, he commanded Gemini IX and demonstrated a rendezvous technique that would be used in the Apollo missions to the Moon. And because of this expertise, he headed the mission planning analysis and software development responsibilities for the astronaut group for Project Apollo.

The most pivotal piece to this was his development and implementation of the techniques a pilot would use to manually fly the Saturn booster into orbit and the descent and ascent to and from the Moon's surface. All of this culminated with his command of the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969, when General Stafford personally performed the first lunar module rendezvous around the Moon and the entire lunar landing mission except for the actual landing.

It was with this expertise that General Stafford assumed the role of Deputy Director of Flight Crew Operations at the NASA Manned Space Flight Center, where he was responsible for the planning and implementation of programs for the astronaut group and all aircraft operations. General Stafford's time with NASA culminated with his fourth space flight as the Apollo commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in 1975. This was a joint space flight with the Soviet Union that culminated in the historic first meeting in space between American Astronauts and Soviet Cosmonauts.

General Stafford was the first member of his Naval Academy Class of 1952 to pin on the first, second and third stars of a general officer. He flew six rendezvous in space, logged over 507 hours in space flight and wore the Air Force Command Pilot Astronaut Wings. In his life time he has flown over 127 different types of aircraft and helicopters and four different types of spacecraft. And in his later years in the Air Force, General Stafford was personally involved in the development of two of our most critical Air Force stealth aircraft: the F-117A Stealth Fighter and the B-2 Stealth Bomber.

Though General Stafford retired from the Air Force in 1979, his efforts in our country's space program continued. In his post retirement period, General Stafford continued to influence our efforts in space, chairing independent think tank teams focused on developing a 30 year roadmap for both Presidents Bush and Clinton for returning and inhabiting the Moon and extending our exploration efforts to Mars. And he currently sits as the Chairman of the NASA Advisory Council Task Force on International Space Station Operational Readiness and the cochairman

of the Stafford-Covey Space Shuttle Return to Flight Task Group.

General Stafford is a true American hero; an amazing testament to the spirit and the selflessness of the American public servant. There are very few that have obtained the level of historic influence as he has, leaving behind a true legacy for all of us to follow. General Stafford celebrates his 80th birthday this Friday, September 17, 2010. There is a lot to be said for 80 years of life that have seen some two-thirds of that spent in the service to our Nation. I, for one, take my hat off to a great national icon and applaud him for what he has done for this great nation. On behalf of Congress and the United States of America, I thank General Stafford and his family for their lifelong commitment, sacrifice, and contribution to this great Nation and I wish him a happy 80th birthday with many more to come.

Mr. President, I ask for the regular order.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized as in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. President, with all the talk about the small business bill and about the fact that we have an administration, with a majority in the House and the Senate, that has amassed unbelievable debts, raising it up to $13 trillion, and a deficit of $1.4 trillion in just 1 year, the first year, people have forgotten other things that are going on.

I am very much concerned, being the second-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, about the national defense authorization bill, which we have passed every year in all the years I have been here. Generally speaking, it is one we can bring out on the floor, Members can offer amendments, and normally it takes 2, 3, sometimes 4 weeks, and longer, to pass it. But certainly, particularly during times of war, it is the most important piece of legislation we have.

I do not know what the majority is going to do. I just keep hearing rumors that they may very well not be wanting to bring it up or may bring it up by ``filling the tree,'' a little technical term, so Republicans would not be able to have amendments on the bill.

Well, this is very much a concern of mine. I think it puts them in a position where they can say: Oh, Republicans certainly are going to vote for the Defense authorization bill. In times of war, we have to do it. Well, we do. But there is a limit as to what they can put in there that is purely right down party lines.

There are a couple issues I wish to talk about in the Defense authorization bill that ended up being right down party lines. One is the issue of don't ask, don't tell. But before doing that, I would like to suggest that in May, in the final meeting we had of the Senate Armed Services Committee, we passed this out, and two amendments were added on the very last day by the Democrats, and they were passed virtually by all the Democrats right down party lines. One was opening our military hospitals for abortions, and that is something we need to talk about, but the other one was one we need to talk about more right now because this is the issue that so many people are not aware of. That is the repeal of don't ask, don't tell.

I remember back in 1994, I was in the House, running for the Senate, and one of the three issues that was very prominent in that race, which I won, concerned gays in the military. At that time, there were some efforts saying: Well, we want to acknowledge gays in the military so they can be open in their practices and all that. Well, a compromise was reached that I did not think at the time was all that good of an idea. But that was 1993, I guess, the latter part of 1993. It has worked for--what--17 years. It was called don't ask, don't tell; that is, if someone wants to serve who is a gay person, a man or a woman, in the military, that person can do it if that person is not out in the open. The whole idea of this thing was so they could not use the military as a forum to advance very liberal causes.

I am a veteran. I can remember when I was in the U.S. Army, and anyone who is a veteran knows the problems that would be associated with the practice of repealing don't ask, don't tell so people are openly gay in the military. You are going to have all kinds of billeting and other problems.

So I think when the discussion came up that we were considering doing this, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Gates, did the right thing on February 2 of 2010. He said: Let's go ahead and have a study. Let's have an independent study as to how unit cohesion and readiness would be impacted if we repealed don't ask, don't tell.

In addition to the study, this is also going to conduct a survey of military members, people who are out there, in asking: Well, what is your feeling? You are out there in the fields, in many cases, out in the foxholes. What is your feeling about having open gays in the military?

So they were all getting ready to respond to this when a surprise took place, when the Democrats, almost straight down party lines, came out and said: Well, we are going to go ahead and repeal it anyway. They worded it in such a way that we will repeal it, but, of course, that will not take place until after the study is complete. The study was to be completed in December of this year. It was going to be a 12-month study. All the Members of the military were going to participate in that.

I can remember as recently as April 28 Secretary Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, said--and this is a joint statement:

[We] believe in the strongest possible terms that the

Department must, prior to any legislative action, be allowed

the opportunity to conduct a thorough, objective, and

systematic assessment of the impact of such a policy change.

Well, I was all for that. They were right, along with all the rest of the chiefs of the military and all the troops in the field. Of course, they obviously changed their minds. But if you want to know the effect, you need to go and talk to the troops in the field, and then you need to talk also to the chiefs of the military.

I am going to go ahead and quote, so I can get it in the Record now, exactly the feelings of those Chiefs of the four services and what they are recommending. I am so sick and tired of having the administration make those decisions without any consultation of the people in uniform. We are going through that right now in some of the things that are going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The policy should be: The people in uniform know what to do. Quit trying to dictate their behavior.

Well, anyway, General Casey, the Chief of the U.S. Army, said:

I remain convinced that it is critically important to get a

better understanding of where our Soldiers and Families are

on this issue, and what the impacts on readiness and unit

cohesion might be. . . .

He said:

I also believe that repealing the law before the completion

of the review--

That is the one that is supposed to be completed in December--

will be seen by the men and women of the Army as a reversal

of our commitment to hear their views before moving forward.

That is exactly what we are saying. We are saying: All right. We wanted your views, but we are not going to listen to your views now.

Admiral Roughead of the U.S. Navy said:

We need this review to fully assess our force and carefully

examine potential impacts of a change in the law. My concern

is that legislative changes at this point, regardless of the

precise language used, may cause confusion on the status of

the law in the Fleet and disrupt the review process itself by

leading Sailors to question whether their input matters.

Obviously, their input does not matter now because they have already made that decision.

General Conway, of the U.S. Marine Corps--he is the Commandant--said:

I encourage Congress to let the process the Secretary of

Defense created run its course. Collectively, we must make

logical and pragmatic decisions about the long-term policies

of our Armed Forces--which so effectively defend this great

nation.

General Schwartz, of the U.S. Air Force, said:

I believe it is important, a matter of keeping faith with

those currently serving in the Armed Forces, that the

Secretary of Defense commissioned review be completed before

there is any legislation to repeal the don't ask, don't tell

law. Such action allows me to provide the best military

advice to the President, and sends an important signal to our

Airmen and their families that their opinion matters. To do

otherwise, in my view, would be presumptive and would reflect

an intent to act before all relevant factors are assessed. .

. .

Well, I agree with all that. These are the guys in the field. They are the ones who are making this decision. Yet, on May 27, both Gates and Mullen, who had already stated they should wait until after this study is completed--that would be in December--on May 27, they had what they called a compromise. Basically, the compromise is saying: Well, we are going to go ahead and repeal it. That was the motion that was in the last day before we passed the Defense authorization bill out of the House, and the same thing, the Defense authorization bill of the Senate.

Why did they change? Why did Gates and Mullen change? Gates and Mullen answered to the President. The President, I truly believe--and I hate to throw this into it--but, obviously, this is something the vast majority of people in America would like to see happen the way we had said it was going to happen, so we could evaluate the effect on readiness and the effect on our troops in the field, the effect on the war that is taking place right now. Yet they went ahead and reversed that, and, again, that was right down party lines.

There are so many other things having to do with this that are critical. Obviously, current chaplains are not able to be heard. But we have a letter from 41 of the retired chaplains stating that ``normalizing homosexual behavior in the armed forces will pose a significant threat to chaplains' and Servicemembers' religious liberty.''

So we have this that is taking place right now.

I know a lot of people are concerned, as I am concerned, with a ruling that came from a district court out in California. This ruling came out and said: We think it is a violation of the first amendment rights of homosexuals not to be able to express their preferences in any way they want.

However, the military is different. It is my understanding--and I am not a lawyer--this ruling may not have any effect. In fact, there is an article. It was on FOX News this morning: ``Pentagon: No Plans To Change `Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Policy After Court Ruling.'' Well, that was good news to me because I thought maybe it was all over once the courts ruled.

But the only thing they would go through now with the compromise, they call it, that they passed, is that you would have to have Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense Gates, and President Obama making the statement as to what they prefer. That is why I say this is over and done with, unless we have an opportunity to bring out the Defense authorization bill and to offer amendments on the Defense authorization bill. I have to tell you, there are several Democrats now who have joined Republicans in wanting to stop the repeal of don't ask, don't tell or at least to wait until this study is completed.

But if you do not think the three I just mentioned have already made up their minds, I will go ahead and read their statements.

President Obama:

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to

finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to

serve the country they love because of who they are.

Secretary Gates:

I fully support the president's decision. The question

before us is not whether the military prepares to make this

change, but how we best prepare for it.

Admiral Mullen:

Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself . . . it is my personal

belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would

be the right thing to do.

So you have to ask the question, Why? What was wrong with waiting until December? I will tell you what is wrong: because there is an election that is taking place November 2 and the gay lobby is a huge lobby. I think we all know that. All these people who think they have not been liberal enough, I cannot imagine there is anyone in America today who thinks this administration has not been liberal enough. But these individuals are the ones who want to have this done before the November 2 elections. I can think of no reason at all that they would take this stand other than the political reason.

So here is what I believe. I think we are going to have to make a decision. I would certainly hope the majority leader and the Democrats who have this policy will allow this to come up and come up as soon as possible and allow a full and open debate, as we have always had. There is not a time in the history of this country that we have brought up a Defense authorization bill, particularly in time of war, without allowing everybody to get in there and to offer amendments. Perhaps it could be argued this is the most important bill of the year.

So I am hoping people start talking about it. That is why I am bringing it up today. The fear I have is this is going to be shoved down our throats by the majority, and we cannot let this happen.

Right now, we have a lot of men and women over in the various areas of combat. I have had the honor of being over there many times. I have worked with these individuals. We have more than our share in my State of Oklahoma. Our 45th is going to be going back over there. I would like to make sure these guys and gals know we are listening to them.

A lot of people criticize me and others for spending so much time over there, but there are so many things we find out when we are over there--things we can't get in hearings back here. I am talking about finding out, as we did over there, about the need for

the MRAP and some of the other capabilities we need to have so we can come back and make sure our kids who are over there fighting have everything they want. The very least we can do is keep our word, when we promised them that we are not going to do anything until we hear back from our military, our soldiers in the field, as to what they feel about the repeal of don't ask, don't tell. It is a very significant issue and it is one we are going to have to talk about this week.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, with the passage of the 2007 energy bill (EISA), Congress doubled the corn-based ethanol mandate despite mounting questions surrounding ethanol's compatibility with existing engines, its transportation and infrastructure needs, its economic sustainability, and numerous other issues. Then, as now, I argued it was just too early to significantly increase the mandate and that the fuels industry and engine manufacturers needed more time to adapt and catch up with the many developing challenges facing corn-based ethanol. From everything we have witnessed over the past 2\1/2\ years, I was right. These mandates allow no room for error in a fuels industry already constrained by tight credit, dwindling capacity, environmental regulation, and volatile market conditions.

The corn ethanol mandate has also led to consumer backlash in parts of the country. In my home state of Oklahoma, one convenience store chain experienced a 30 percent drop in fuel sales once they began selling fuel blended at E-10 levels. The consumers didn't want it. In 2008, the New York Times reported this growing consumer discontent from Oklahoma City:

Why Do You Put Alcohol in Your Tank? demands a large sign

outside one gas station here, which reassures drivers that it

sells only ``100% Gas.''

``No Corn in Our Gas,'' advertises another station nearby.

Along the highways of this sprawling prairie city, and in

other pockets of the country, a mutiny is growing against

energy policies that heavily support and subsidize the

blending of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, into gasoline.

Many consumers complain that ethanol, which constitutes as

much as 10 percent of the fuel they buy in most states, hurts

gas mileage and chokes the engines of their boats and

motorcycles.

Despite this consumer backlash, corn advocates are today pushing Washington to require higher consumptions of ethanol. The most pressing issue facing corn ethanol is the so-called ``blend wall'' of 10 percent. EISA mandated 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol by 2015. But here is the problem: Federal regulations require that a gallon of gasoline should contain no more than 10 percent ethanol. So there will soon be more corn ethanol production than the amount of ethanol allowed in gasoline.

So what is the solution? Corn ethanol advocates have the wrong approach. Rather than rethink EISA's corn mandates, they are lobbying for higher, mid-level ethanol blends in gasoline--higher than E10. Sounds like a simple solution, except its consequences would be dire, with potential damage to agriculture, the environment, and engine equipment manufacturers.

Many on-road and non-road engines, vehicles, and equipment are not specifically designed to run on ethanol blends of E10, let alone blends as high as E15. The available evidence indicates that lawnmowers, chainsaws, snowmobiles, recreational boats, motorcycles, and non-flex- fuel cars and trucks produce higher evaporative and engine exhaust emissions using mid-level ethanol blends. Also, mid-level ethanol blends are more corrosive on certain metals and plastics used in many fuel systems, and cause many gasoline-powered engines to run hotter and at higher RPM levels. In turn, this results in adverse impacts on starting, durability, operation, performance, and operator safety, due to the degradation of critical components and safety devices.

The American Lung Association has noted that degradation of catalyst efficiency, caused by increasing the ethanol content in gasoline, ``can have a major impact on emissions.'' These higher blends of ethanol can also cause NOX emissions to increase up to 25 percent. In short, we need to be careful that the rapid ramp-up in ethanol use doesn't result in the degradation of our country's air quality.

And many consumers complain about decreased fuel efficiency. Corn Ethanol is 67 percent of the BTU content of gasoline. According to EPA, vehicles ``operating on E85 usually experience a 20-30 percent drop in miles per gallon due to ethanol's lower energy content.'' These results were seconded by a Consumer Reports study that found E85 resulted in a 27 percent drop in fuel efficiency.

In my home state of Oklahoma, ethanol's blendwall has eliminated consumer choice. Where consumers could once choose to purchase clear gas, the blendwall is now forcing motorists to buy E10. The fuel blenders and gas station owners have no option but to sell ethanol blended gasoline despite strong consumer demand for clear gas.

Today I am introducing a simple three-page bill that responds to the increasing call for more consumer choice in the ability to purchase ethanol-free gasoline. Simply put, my bill allows a State to opt out of the corn ethanol portions of the renewable fuel standard. To do so, a State must pass a bill, signed by the governor, stating its election to exercise this option. The opt-out would be recognized by the administrator of the EPA, who would then reduce the amount of the national corn ethanol mandate by the percentage amount of the State which chooses to opt out. The bill also provides for the generation of credits to hold harmless the refiners who would produce clear gasoline sold in an opt-out State.

This legislation would allow a State to opt out of only the corn ethanol mandate. It would not affect other portions of the renewable fuel standard such as the cellulosic or advanced biofuels volumetric requirements.

I believe Congress blundered in pushing too much corn ethanol too fast. This bill will merely allow for fuel producers to respond to market demands when and where consumers prefer clear gas. Right now they can't do that.