Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for yielding.

I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. President, after weeks of the global warming scandal--and we talked about it on the floor, what happened with climategate just prior to the Copenhagen convention--I had the opportunity to visit and to uncover some of the things we had suspected were going on for a long period of time. Five years ago, I had occasion to give a speech on this floor, where I outlined, from information that had come through the backdoor to me from scientists, how bad the science was and how it had been, in fact, cooked. Then, of course, along came climategate.

After weeks of the global warming scandal, the world's first potential climate billionaire is running for cover. Yes, I am talking about Al Gore. He is under siege these days. The credibility of the IPCC is eroding, EPA's endangerment finding is collapsing, and belief that anthropogenic global warming is leading to catastrophe is evaporating. Gore seems to be drowning in a sea of his own global warming illusions. Nevertheless, he is desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive.

It is my understanding that tonight he is having a high-level meeting of all his global warming alarmists around the country to see how they can resurrect this issue and regroup.

Consider Gore's nearly 2,000-word op-ed piece that recently appeared in the New York Times. It is a sure-fire sign of desperation. Gore's piece was about China, solar and wind power, globalization, rising sea levels, big polluters, melting glaciers, and cap and trade. One searches in vain for any explanation of the IPCC's errors and mistakes or of Phil Jones, the former director of the Climate Research Unit. That is in East Anglia. We heard a lot about him. He was the one who was actually assembling a lot of the science--or so-called science--or creating the science, I should say, to support the position of those who believe anthropogenic gases cause global warming.

Seven years ago, I believe this month, I had occasion to study on the floor and find out that, in fact, we had spent so much time on this issue that everyone was believing this to be true. When we realized the science was not there, I made the statement that the notion that anthropogenic gases are causing catastrophic global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

What is Gore's take on the climategate scandal? Climate scientists, he wrote, were ``besieged'' by an ``onslaught'' of hostile information requests from climate ``skeptics.'' That is it, nothing else. Even the IPCC announced last week an independent review of its process and procedures.

You see, former Vice President Gore was saying: Oh, that was nothing; that was just a few comments. I might add, one of the largest and most respected publications in the UK, which is called the UK Telegraph, said this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation.

The Atlantic Monthly, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and Time and many others are saying this is a legitimate scandal and reform of the IPCC is absolutely essential. Let's keep in mind, IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the United Nations. They put this together back in 1988 to try to scare people into changing our policy in this country.

By the way, I mentioned Time magazine as one of the many magazines and publications that have now said, looking at climategate, this investigation

should be there. This is the same Time magazine--and I don't blame them for doing this; I would have done the same thing--that back in 1975, on the cover they had: Another Ice Age is coming, we are all going to die. A couple years ago, you might remember the last polar bear standing on the last cube of ice and it said: Global warming is coming; we are all going to die. Anyway, the publications are coming around.

When it comes to reform, openness, transparency, and peer review, when it comes to practicing good science, Gore stands alone. He wants the world to put its head in the sand and pretend nothing is happening.

It reminds me of the story of the two boy ostriches chasing two girl ostriches through the woods, and they were catching them. One girl ostrich said to the other, when they came up to a clearing: What do we do? Well, let's hide. Each of the girl ostriches stuck their heads in a respective hole, and the boy ostriches came galloping up to the clearing and one looked at the other and said: Where did the girls go?

That is what we are looking at here. They are hiding their heads in the sand. Then Gore is writing in this op-ed piece, even if all these disasters will not happen, we still have to deal with national security risks and energy independence. Of course, Gore fails to mention that the United States leads the world in technically recoverable resources of oil, coal, and natural gas. According to a recent release from a report from the Congressional Research Service, America's combined recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal endowment is the largest on Earth. America's recoverable resources are far greater than those of Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada combined, and that is without including America's absolute immense oil shale and methane hydrate deposits.

It is always kind of humorous when people say: We have to get rid of our oil and gas and our coal. Yet those are the things which we are using to generate the energy necessary to run America.

They say: Well, we have to become independent. But they want to do away with all of that. We have enough oil and gas and coal--and now nuclear, which we are expanding--to take care of our needs so we wouldn't have to be dependent upon any foreign country for any of our energy. The problem is a political problem. Democrats will not allow us to go ahead and explore our own resources and exploit them. We are the only country that doesn't do that.

Gore has to know the edifice of alarmism is starting to crumble, so he is swinging for the fences, hoping for a home run to change the game. But Gore is striking out, as he loses his support almost daily in Congress and from the American people. Let's face it; Gore's side of the argument is collapsing. He and his allies are running short on facts, and Gore's criticism of recent events rings hollow. For example, after the climategate scandal broke, Gore was asked by an online publication called Slate as to what he thought of it.

Gore's response: Well, I haven't read all of the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. Obviously, of course, that is not true because they go all the way up to 2009. So all he is left with is a two-pronged fork of anger and attack. Just read the New York Times op-ed piece.

By the way, I was told his op-ed piece in the New York Times was three times larger than that which they normally will receive. He wrote that those who question climate alarmism are members of a ``criminal generation.'' That is me--a criminal? Is Roger Pielke, Jr., a criminal? How about Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama, Richard Lindzen of MIT, Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center? No, they haven't committed any crimes. They just want honest, open scientific debate.

I might add that thus far the only scientists who commit crimes are those at the CRU. Again, that is the collection point of all the science that the United Nations has put together in this thing called IPCC--those involved in climategate, according to findings of the UK's Information Commissioner.

The Weekly Standard recently placed Al Gore on its cover--we have that right here--showing that the emperor has no clothes. The cover story, by Steven Hayward, of the Weekly Standard is entitled, ``In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign.''

Hayward writes a compelling narrative of climategate and its consequences. This story is a must read for anyone interested in the recent implosion of global warming alarmism.

Let me mention this: If you look at the movie ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' the one where he made, I guess, most of his money, the last sentence says, I believe: Are you willing to change the way you live?

Well, we thought that was probably a good idea, so let's put that up here. It has now been 1,009 days since we have invited Al Gore to sign this pledge. Here is what it says:

As a believer that human-caused global warming is a moral,

ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival; that

home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;

that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will

lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and that leaders on

moral issues should lead by example; therefore, I pledge to

consume no more energy for use in my home, my residence, than

the average American household 1 year from today.

Well, it hasn't been a year; it was 3 years ago. It was 1,009 days ago.

Then, of course, there is always the question: What if we are wrong? What if we should do something? Since the Kyoto treaty failed--and we came this close, Mr. President. You weren't in your current position at that time, but this is how close we came to actually signing on and ratifying the Kyoto treaty. We didn't do it.

Then along came Members of Congress in 2003, where we had the McCain- Lieberman bill--cap-and-trade bill--and in 2005 we had the McCain- Lieberman bill, then the Warner-Lieberman bill in 2008, we had the Boxer-Sanders bill in 2009, and now it looks as if we are going to have the John Kerry and Lindsay Graham bill that is up. What do they all have in common? It is all cap and trade.

Mr. President, I have some respect for James Hansen. But the one thing I really respect is that he has made this statement about cap and trade. He said cap and trade is a devious way of getting away from the issue. The main issue is that we have to do something about greenhouse gas emissions, anthropogenic gas, CO2. Well, why not just go ahead and have a tax on them? There is a good reason the cap and traders don't want a tax. Because then the American people would know what it is costing them.

What is the cost of cap and trade? With any of these bills I just mentioned, it is approximately the same because cap and trade is cap and trade. You have to somehow make everyone think they are winners and everyone else is a loser. So we had the ranges come from the Wharton School of Economics, from MIT, from the CRA, and the range is always somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. Now, that is significant--$300 to $400 billion a year.

Mr. President, if you are like I am, it is kind of hard to relate to billions and trillions of dollars. So what I try to do is relate it to what it would cost the average family that pays taxes in my State of Oklahoma. How much would this cost that family? It comes out to be a little over $3,000 a year. Now, $3,000 a year is an awful lot of money.

What do we get for that? Let's get the other chart up here. I had occasion the other day to hear from Lisa Jackson, who is President Obama's Administrator of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency-- a fine lady whom I think an awful lot of--when she was testifying before us. Now, this chart--and people are not questioning this chart's reliability--reflects what would happen: U.S. action without international action will have no effect on world CO2. It just stands to reason. And these are the bills that have been introduced that I mentioned before--the McCain-Lieberman bill in 2003, McCain-Lieberman in 2005, Warner-Lieberman in 2008, and some of the rest of them. It reflects what would happen if we had passed those and what would happen if we don't pass them. The chart shows nothing.

I asked the question of Lisa Jackson, President Obama's Administrator of the EPA. I said: This chart up here, is this an accurate chart? In other words, to put it in plain words, to better understand it, if we were to pass--at that time it might have been the Markey bill. I am not sure which one it was, but it doesn't matter because cap and

trade is cap and trade. If we had passed that bill or any of the Senate bills we have talked about, how would that have reduced CO2 worldwide?

Her response: Well, it wouldn't really reduce it because we are doing that unilaterally in the United States of America.

What happens when we take away our ability to have energy in America? We have to manufacture it somewhere, and they have estimated how many thousands of manufacturing jobs if we were to pass any of these bills.

Those are polar bears, by the way, and they are all smiling in case you can't see that too well, Mr. President.

We would lose our manufacturing jobs to countries such as China and Mexico and India. Right now, in China, they are cranking out two new coal-fired generating plants every week. Some people are saying: Oh, they are going to follow us and our example and start restricting their CO2. No, they are not. They are preparing right now to be able to generate the electricity necessary as the people start coming in. So that is what is happening right now.

I would say this, though. I don't want you to feel--even though his world is crumbling, don't feel sorry for Al Gore because he is doing all right. There is actually an article that just came out--this is the National Review--at the same time a New York Times article did, and I have kind of put together things from both of them. This from the New York Times says:

Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a

winner last year when a small California firm sought

financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture

capital firm where Al Gore is a partner. The company, the

Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to

make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr.

Gore's firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon

Valley's top venture capital providers, looking for $75

million to expand its partnership with utilities seeking to

install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and

businesses.

Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and

in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr,

another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate

advisers. The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last

week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in

smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went

to utilities with which Silver Spring has contacts.

Wait a minute, we are talking about Silver Spring, the company with which Al Gore is connected.

Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could

recoup their investment many times over in the coming years.

Silver Spring Networks is a foot soldier in the global

green energy revolution Mr. Gore hopes to lead. Few people

have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and

the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes

energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy

as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this

green transformation if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly the political right and among global

warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the

world's first ``carbon billionaire,'' profiteering from

government policies he supports that would direct billions of

dollars to the business ventures that he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from

Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore

stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate

policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

Mr. Gore says that he is simply putting his money where his

mouth is. ``Do you think there is something wrong with being

active in business in this country?'' Mr. Gore said. ``I am

proud of it. I am proud of it.''

In an e-mail message this week, he said his investment

activities were consistent with his public advocacy over the

decades. ``I have advocated policies to promote renewable

energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution

for decades, including all the time I was in public

service.'' Mr. Gore wrote: ``As a private citizen, I have

continued to advocate the same policies. Even though the vast

majority of my business career has been in areas that do not

involve renewable energy or global warming pollution

reductions, I absolutely believe in investing in ways that

are consistent with my values and beliefs. I encourage others

to invest in the same way.''

Mr. Gore has invested a significant portion of the tens of

millions of dollars that he has earned since leaving

government in 2001 in a broad array of environmentally

friendly energy and technology business ventures, like carbon

trading markets, solar cells, and waterless urinals. He has

also given away millions more to finance the nonprofit he

founded, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and to another

group, the Climate Project, which trains people to present

the slide show that was the basis of his documentary ``An

Inconvenient Truth.'' Royalties from his new book on climate

change, ``Our Choice,'' printed on 100 percent recycled

paper, will go to the alliance, an aide said.

Other public figures, like speaker Nancy Pelosi and Robert

F. Kennedy, Jr., who have vocally supported government

financing of energy-saving technologies have investments in

alternative energy ventures. Some scientists and policy

advocates also promote energy policies that personally enrich

them.

As a private citizen, Mr. Gore asked not to have to

disclose his income and assets, as he did--

as I do, as others do in this Chamber

in his years in Congress and the White House. When he left

government in 2001, he listed assets of less than $2 million,

including homes in suburban Washington and in Tennessee.

Since then his net worth has skyrocketed, helped by timely

investments in Apple and Google, profits from books and his

movie, and the scores of speeches for which he can be paid

more than $100,000 . . .

a speech. I suggest now that price may be going down a little bit for Al Gore.

Mr. Gore's spokeswoman would not give a figure for his

current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in

a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment

Group. . . .

It goes on and on. I ask unanimous consent to submit the rest of this for the Record because it is pretty good reading.

``Marc Morano, a climate change skeptic who was recently a top aide to [me], Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said that what he saw as Mr. Gore's alarmism and occasional exaggerations distorted the debate and also served his personal financial interests.''

I say don't feel sorry for Al Gore. He is doing fine right now.

Last, on this subject, my wife and I have been married for 50 years. We have 20 kids and grandkids. They are achievers. They are great people. All 20 of them, all but 6, live within walking distance of my home in Tulsa, OK. Not many people can say that. The one who doesn't is the family of six of my daughter Molly, her husband, and four children.

It happens one of these children you can't see very well right here, Zegita Marie, actually was one we found in Ethiopia. My daughter adopted her. Molly only had three boys and always wanted a girl so she adopted this cute little girl. This little girl, by the way, is 9 years old. She is reading at college level. She came up to Washington to speak to a group I sponsor every year. It is called the African Dinner, about 400 or so of them.

Anyway, when they are up here, I say to my friend in the chair, they found, because of the global warming problem we had, we had all these snowstorms and blizzards and consequently the airport was closed and they were stuck here. What do you do with a family of six when they are stuck? They went out and built, of all things, an igloo. They are kind of engineering oriented. This is not an igloo. It sleeps four people with ice bricks and all that. On top of that they put ``Al Gore's New Home.'' It is right next to the Library of Congress. This is a picture of it. I thought that was fun.

I regret to say one of the real liberal stations, Keith Olbermann, declared my daughter's family as ``The Worst Family in America.''

One last subject here I want to address. I want to compliment Sean Hannity for something I saw last night. I happened to get in at the last of it, so I found out what this guy is up to. What he has done is he has taken--there is a lot of wasteful, stupid spending in America. He has taken 102 of the ridiculous things that we spend money on around here and he has listed them. He started several days ago.

No. 102: Protecting a Michigan insect collection from other

insects--$187,00O;

No. 101: Highway beautified by fish art in Washington--

$10,000.

It goes on and on.

Over those last few evenings he listed these. Last night was the last 20 of them. Let me quickly run over these in reverse order.

No. 20: Researching how paying attention improves

performance of difficult tasks in Connecticut.

That was just $850,000.

No. 19: Kentucky Transportation Department awarded

contracts to companies associated with the road contractor

accused of bribing the previous state transportation

secretary--$24 million.

No. 18: Amtrak losing $32 per passenger nationally but

rewarded with windfall--$1.3 billion.

No. 17: Widening an Arizona interstate even though the

company that won the contract has a history of tax fraud and

pollution--$21.8 million.

I am going to submit this for the Record. To get on down to the last items--

No. 9: Resurfacing a tennis court in Montana--$50,000;

No. 8: University in Indiana studying why young men do not

like to wear--

I will not say that.

No. 7: Funds for Massachusetts roadway construction, to

companies that have defrauded taxpayers, polluted the

environment, and have paid tens of thousands of dollars in

fines for violating workplace safety laws

--in the millions of dollars.

No. 6: Sending 11 students and 4 teachers from an Arkansas

university to the U.N. climate change convention in

Copenhagen, using almost 54,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from

air travel alone--$50,000.

No. 5: Storytelling festival in Utah--$15,000.

No. 4: Door mats to the Department of the Army in Texas--

$14,000;

No. 3: University in New York researching young adults who

drink malt liquor and smoke pot--

that is only $389,000;

No. 2: Solar panels for a climbing gym in Colorado--

$157,800;

No. 1: Grant for one Massachusetts university for

``robobees''--miniature flying robot bees.

That was $2 million.

I want to ask you, Mr. President, what do you think all 102 of these projects have in common? Do you think they are congressional earmarks? A lot of people probably believe they are. They are not. The one thing they have in common is they are all done by the President, President Obama. He said back when they passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, there would not be one earmark in this bill. Everything you are looking at there was all in this bill. That was not done by Members of Congress, that was done by unelected bureaucrats.

The inconvenient truth is that we do have a problem with earmarks in America, but it is not congressional earmarks. I was distressed, the other day, last Thursday, when I saw my fellow Republicans over in the House did something they should not have done. They actually said we are going to stop, we are going to put a permanent moratorium on all earmarks that we in the Republican Party have over there.

Let's stop and think about that. One of the things people do not understand is if you kill what they call--what people think is a Congressional earmark, it does not save a penny. What happens to it, because it is part of an underlying bill, is it goes to the bureaucracies, the unelected bureaucrats, the President, President Obama. I suggest there is a serious problem with what the House did. They resolved that it is the policy of the Republican conference that no Member shall request a Congressional earmark, limited tax benefit, and so forth, all in conjunction with clause 9, rule XXI of the Rules of the House of the 111th Congress.

Let's see what that is. Clause 9 of rule XXI applies to all legislation in the House of Representatives, whether it be authorization, appropriation, tax or tariff.

That is what we are supposed to be doing here, and then said we are not going to do it. I think that is rather interesting because we all, everyone in this room who serves here--I have done it four times--takes an oath of office. In that oath of office we solemnly swear we will support and bear true allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.

Here they have come out and said we are not going to do that. This is mind boggling, that this can take place. It is something that will have to be reversed. When you go back and look at the Federalist Papers, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, made it very clear. He is the one who coined the phrase ``power of the purse.'' That is what we do here in the Constitution. In article I, section 9 it says what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to do the appropriations and spend the money that comes in. That is what we are supposed to do. That is our constitutional responsibility.

We have a serious problem in this, what they are talking about, the moratorium. I think there are some of those who want the Senate to do it. I am hoping we will not follow that course. I respect my friends over in the House but they made a mistake and we do not want to march down that same path. I think it is very important for us to understand earmarks, what they call appropriations over here; that is what an earmark is, if you want to define it. They do not save any money. That money merely goes to the bureaucracy so they can spend it. All 102 of the things I mentioned were bureaucratic earmarks. Not one of them was a congressional earmark.

We have this as a very serious problem right now. One of the reasons I have always said I do not like the idea of the earmark discussion is that people do not understand. They think they are something if you eliminate you save money. You don't save a cent. By the way, earmarks of the spending that takes place are discretionary, not mandatory spending. It constitutes 1.5 percent. I am concerned about the 98.5 percent. For that reason I have introduced a bill that is very similar to something President Obama said. Everyone rejoiced during the State of the Union Message when he stood up and said I am going to freeze nondefense discretionary spending at the 2010 level. Everyone applauded. They thought that was a great statement to make until I went back and I looked and found out that this nondiscretionary spending had increased between 2008 and 2010 by

act of this President, Obama, by 20 percent. So what he is saying is we are going to increase discretionary spending by 20 percent and then we are going to freeze it. I do not want to freeze it. I want to bring it back down. So I have taken the same bill and said we are going to freeze that at 2008 levels.

I encourage my friends, we have now about 40-some cosponsors of that legislation. That being the case, I hope we will look very carefully and consider not just what people are thinking out there but do them a great service and tell them in fact what the real issue is on earmarks.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for such time as I shall consume.

Mr. President, let me respond to a couple of the remarks of my good friend from Illinois. I listen to this all the time, people talking about during the Bush administration, the costs that have gone up, the deficits and all this stuff. I appreciate the fact that the Senator from Illinois did state that the situation was a little different when President Bush came into office because, of course, 9/11 happened and we ended up in a couple wars. But that is understating the situation.

Right after the Clinton administration--I remember it so well--I was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee at that time and actually was a member of the House Armed Services Committee when President Clinton first came in. The euphoric attitude everyone had at that time was that the war is over. Remember we talked about the peace dividend and all this stuff. The war is over and we no longer need to have a strong national defense. That is what they were saying, though they used different words. They started cutting our defense system. I have a chart that shows what happened to--the demise of our ability to defend ourselves during the Clinton administration. We went through the same thing back during the Carter administration. People remember the hollow force at that time.

During the Clinton administration, we started degrading our military. It was reduced by 40 percent from what it was when he took office during those 8 years. When I say 40 percent reduction, I am talking about end strength, military expenditures. The problem President Bush had when he came into office was not just that two wars broke out, but they broke out when we had a defense system that had been reduced by 40 percent.

The second thing that happened during that time--and this is by admission--I remember Senator Gore had made the statement prior to that that the recession actually started in March of the previous year before the second Bush administration started. It is kind of an interesting thing. People forget that for every 1 percent drop in economic activity, that translates into about $40 billion of lost revenue. Turning that around, for every 1 percent increase in economic activity, that increases revenues about $40 billion when that happens.

Of course, we started out with a reduced military, negotiating two wars, and with a recession at the same time. Obviously, that had very adverse effects.

Before I get carried away with the remarks of the Senator from Illinois, that he voted against going into the Iraq war, let me remind my fellow Senators that I happened to have been privileged, right after the first gulf war--that was when Saddam Hussein--all the atrocities had taken place, and we had what we called the first freedom flight. That is when we went back into Kuwait to see what the situation was in Kuwait. It was so close to the end of the war that the Iraqis didn't realize the war was over. They were still fighting. You remember they were burning the oilfields and the wind would shift. All of a sudden, it would be daytime, and it would turn into night. I remember going back there. I was with nine other people. There were some Democrats. Tony Coelho, former whip of the House, was there. Alexander Haig, a man we revere, the man I always thought should have been President, was there. We were watching and looking to see the remnants of the first gulf war.

I had a young girl with me who had fled Kuwait. She was a royalty. She was going back. She wanted to see if a palace on the Persian Gulf was still there. When we got there, we found out that it had been used by Saddam Hussein as one of his headquarters. She wanted to go up in her bedroom. She was 7 years old, and she wanted to see if her animals were still there. They had used her bedroom for a torture chamber. There were body parts stuck to the walls. A little kid had his ears cut off because he was caught carrying an American flag.

I can remember the mass graves. We looked at the mass graves where Saddam Hussein had tortured these people. When he had them sentenced to death, some begged to be dropped--eased into the acid vats head first so they would die quicker. I mean, this is the type of thing that was taking place. Here is a guy who had actually murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people up in the Kurd area by the most painful way of dying. So to suggest we should not have gone back in to finish him off I think is unacceptable.

Before I finish responding to the comments made by the Senator from Illinois, I would only mention, when he talked about how George W. Bush came into office and he cut taxes for the rich and all that, I recall one time in history--actually, it has happened several times in history; it happened right after World War I--they passed tax increases to support the war and when the war was over, they said, we can now repeal the taxes. They repealed the taxes, and it didn't reduce revenue, it increased revenue. That is something that was kind of forgotten until one of the great Presidents came along, John Kennedy.

During the Great Society days he said we are going to have to have increased revenue to pay for all of these Great Society programs. He said the best way to increase revenue is to decrease marginal rates, so he did. Remember, he dropped them down from I think 90 percent to 70 percent or something like that, and during the next 6 years taxes went down and we had the increase in the revenue, which was phenomenal. The last time I checked, President John Kennedy was a Democrat, not a Republican. So I don't know how they forgot that along the way.

We saw when Reagan came into office, he actually made those dramatic cuts as well. I remember--I am going from memory now--but the amount of money that came in from marginal rates in 1980 when President Reagan took office was $244 billion. When he left office, it was $488 billion. It doubled in that period of time, the largest tax reductions in history. Revenues increased when tax reductions went down. Anyway, that all ended when the Clinton administration came in. We all remember the 1993 tax increases, the greatest tax increases in about four decades. That is when they increased them on everything.

The bottom line is, yes, he did cut taxes and that had the effect of increasing revenues. I think when we talk about the deficit, as the Senator from Illinois mentioned, that was inherited by this President, President Obama, we have to remember that the deficits during the Bush administration, if you add them all up, were a little bit more than the deficit in the first year of the Obama administration.

As far as his comments about the $787 billion stimulus bill, that wouldn't have been that bad of an idea. I opposed it, of course, but it didn't stimulate. It had all of this social engineering in there, all of the equal distribution of wealth, yet I tried to add an amendment on there which was cosponsored by Senator Boxer to increase, quadruple the amount of money that went into roads and highways. It didn't work. They defeated it. So it could have had the opportunity to do something.

The last thing I would say about the government-run system is I thought it was interesting when the Senator from Illinois talked about the wonderful opportunities I have and he has in choosing from the private sector good coverages. I think what he is describing is what we have today. I agree with what he said in that respect. But when you talk about a system that is very similar to the Canadian system, all you have to do is go up in the northern part of the United States, go to Mayo Clinic and look at the number of people there who have come down from Canada because they can't get the health care they want in that kind of government-run system. So I would agree with my friend from Alabama when he was talking about describing what we are up against.

That is not why I came to the floor this evening. I have come to introduce a bill.

(The remarks of Mr. Inhofe pertaining to the introduction of S. 3095 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to announce the introduction of a bill, S. 3095. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Act of 2010. It spells HELP. It is the HELP Act of 2010.

On February 1 of 2010, President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget with a funding request of $3.8 trillion. In it he announced a 3- year freeze on discretionary spending for all nonsecurity-related agencies at the fiscal year 2010 levels, which amounts to a total spending level of $460 billion each year for those agencies. Nonsecurity spending is defined as all agencies except the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of State, and one of the national security-related agencies in the Department of Energy. The administration's Office of Management and Budget estimates this initiative will save $250 billion over the coming decade. Keep in mind, that is $250 billion from where it started, which I will address in a minute.

On the surface, this proposal gives the President the appearance of being fiscally prudent--something the American people have been demanding of their government, especially in recent months. But when you look closely at the numbers he has presented, it is clear as day why he is able to offer this spending freeze without batting an eye. For one, discretionary spending has increased by 20 percent in 2 years. Secondly, the massive $787 billion stimulus package provided a substantial spending cushion for nearly every agency, making a spending freeze such as the President's inconsequential.

Let's stop and look at that. We are talking about $787 billion in a stimulus bill, but we are also talking about having increased from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2010 by 20 percent. So what he is doing here is raising it 20 percent and then freezing it. What he ought to do, if he had to raise it 20 percent, is start bringing it down.

Additionally, this spending freeze proposal does too little to improve the long-term fiscal aspects of our Nation. We all know we stand at the edge of disaster. Doug Elmendorf, who is the Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, recently testified about our Nation's fiscal outlook before Congress and he didn't deliver very good news. I will tell my colleagues what he said. He said that last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion. Remember, just a minute ago I said if you add up all of the--well, let's say that is actually more than all of the last 6 years of the Bush administration deficits. That amounts to less than the $1.4 trillion. So he said last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion, which represented

about 10 percent of the total economy. He expects 2010's deficit only slightly lower at $1.3 trillion or 9.2 percent of GDP.

Looking further out, the average deficit between now and 2020 is forecast to be $600 billion per year. This is all coming from Elmendorf. This is the CBO we are talking about. Additionally, CBO estimates the amount of debt held by the public will skyrocket to $15 trillion by 2020. If it sounds like a staggering number, that is because it is. When you consider the amount of interest we will be paying to China and Japan and others, it is embarrassing: $700 billion each and every year until 2020 and beyond if we do nothing about our rising deficit levels. In other words, if we keep on what we are doing right now with this administration, with the help of the Democratic legislators in both Houses, it is going to be $700 trillion.

Let's do the math and put that in perspective. If $700 billion of interest were paid evenly by every household in the United States today, it would amount to more than $6,000 per household. That is kind of interesting. I always try to do my math. When I was fighting the effort by this administration to have a cap-and-trade bill which would have been somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion, whether you are talking about the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill of 2003 or the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2005 or the bills of 2008, or later on the Boxer-Sanders bill, or even going back to Kyoto, it is going to cost somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. I understand when we talk about billions and trillions of dollars what we are really talking about. So I do my math all the time and say, How much is this going to cost my average taxpaying families in my State of Oklahoma? It amounted to $3,100 a year. This would have been, if they had been successful in passing a cap-and-trade bill--it is all dead now. They are not going to do it. I don't care what Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John Kerry say, it is history now. People are not going to pay that kind of thing to get nothing for it.

Back when we were talking about the $700 billion interest that would be paid every year, that is what is going to happen by 2020 with this administration if we let it continue. That would cost each tax-paying family in the United States of America $6,000 per household each and every year after 2020.

Put another way: The entire financial industry bailout--remember the famous bank bailout? I know Republicans were partially responsible for that too. That happened. That vote took place in this Senate on October 1 of 2008. It was back during the Bush administration. It was back when Hank Paulson came in and told everybody that he was going to save our Nation and so Republicans bought into it and many of my good conservative Republican friends voted for a $700 billion bailout. I did not and a few others didn't, but a vast majority did. That is kind of interesting because that $700 billion is the same figure we are using right now that it will cost people by the year 2020--just the interest alone. But the $700 billion that we could spend on interest in 2020 happens each and every year. We don't get anything for it. It is the cost of living having this much debt in the first place.

At this rate, it will become more and more difficult for the government to fund priorities we truly think are important, such as national security and infrastructure spending. For some reason, nobody around here wants to spend money on infrastructure. I know I get criticized. I am considered to be a conservative. I have been rated the No. 1 most conservative Member of the Senate some time ago by the American Conservative Union and just last week by the National Journal. So you are looking at a conservative, but I am a big spender on some things. One is protecting America. That is what we are supposed to be doing around here. The other is infrastructure. We have a crumbling infrastructure system. Look what happened with some of the bridges crumbling down. I guess that was in Minnesota. People died up there. Our infrastructure is crumbling. It is aging. We need to do something about it, but I can't find anyone who wants to spend money on infrastructure. Instead we are spending money on social engineering.

To combat this, several proposals have been recently introduced that I support. In the House, Congressman Pence and Congressmen Hensarling introduced a constitutional amendment that would cap the Federal spending at 20 percent of the economy--20 percent of GDP. It is one way of doing this. I think it is a good idea. I am all for it. Additionally, Senator DeMint introduced an amendment requiring a balanced budget. I am all for that. Some of my colleagues are supporting a year-long earmark moratorium. That is kind of phony. It was reported on Monday that Speaker Pelosi has suggested a year-long earmark moratorium as well. My colleagues need to consider a couple of issues in talking about earmarks.

One, an earmark moratorium does nothing to combat the increasing government spending. In other words, if you have a moratorium on earmarks, it doesn't save a cent. Funding that would have been spent in earmarks will simply be spent by the Obama administration, by their bureaucrats. I suppose it should come as no surprise that Speaker Pelosi supports the Democratic administration fully funding its own priorities.

Secondly, last year's earmarks accounted for only 1.5 percent of discretionary spending--1.5 percent. Where is the focus on the other 98.5 percent? Where is the focus on what I call bureaucratic earmarks? Here is what happens. If you stop earmarks--if you read the Constitution, article I, section 9 of the Constitution, it says what we are supposed to be doing here in the House and in the Senate. We are supposed to be making priorities. We are supposed to be doing the spending, and our Founding Fathers recognize that we do a better job knowing what our needs are in the local communities than the central government does.

If we let the President and the President's budget dictate everything and then we try to make changes within that, people will say, Oh, that is an earmark. Well, wait a minute. If you don't do that, then you are having the unelected bureaucrats in government in the Obama administration do the earmarking. So the President earmarks too. If you don't believe it, look at the Appropriations Conference Report, where the focus is on the vast majority of discretionary spending which is doled out every year by unelected bureaucrats.

I wish more people would understand this, because I find that a lot of the people who hammer and demagog the earmark mantra are the ones who are the biggest spenders and it is a nice way of deviating from your behavior. I think something needs to be done immediately and seriously.

So today I am introducing the HELP Act, as I mentioned. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Program Act of 2010. The bill does three things. One, it places caps on nonsecurity discretionary spending which I define exactly as President Obama's budget does. I do this because I wish to show the similarities between what he said he wants to do and what I want to do. The second thing is it enforces the caps by sequestering any spending above the cap through across-the-board cuts, a process that currently applies to mandatory spending, but not to discretionary. Three, it disallows Congress from evading the sequestration cuts through a 67-vote point of order against any attempt to exempt new spending from this legislation. That is going to make it pretty tough to get through.

Rather than simply freezing the spending as the President wants to do at the 2010 levels--let's keep in mind, first, he increased discretionary spending for a year by 20 percent, and then he wants to freeze it there.

Instead of doing that for 3 years and then allowing spending to explode again, which is what his proposal does, my bill would actually cut discretionary spending for nonsecurity agencies, the same exemptions he has, back to fiscal year 2008 levels. It is cutting it back by 20 percent of what he tries to do, about $400 billion a year. Spending would be frozen for 5 years--not 3 years but 5 years, through 2020. Rather than simply freezing spending levels for only 3 years and at an artificially high level, as the President's proposal does, my initiative would hold the Federal Government more accountable for the next

10 years by creating real, meaningful spending cuts and then placing the cap at reduced levels.

The difference in savings between my plan and President Obama's plan is clearly displayed on this chart.

If we look at the chart, the blue bars represent how nonsecurity- related discretionary spending levels will rise over the next 10 years if allowed to increase. This is according to OMB's numbers.

The red line illustrates the impact of Obama's plan and what will happen if spending is allowed to increase following the 3-year freezing on the estimates of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. They are nonpartisan, by the way, and very accurate. Clearly, the $250 billion in savings is not substantial when spread over a 10-year period. It really does not tighten the belt at all.

My proposal is represented in the green bars. These are the spending levels. Watch as they go down over the period of time from 2010 to 2020. We phase down spending levels from the high point in 2010 to a more reasonable level between 2011 and 2015 and then stay flat thereafter.

My plan, when compared to the blue bars of doing nothing, will save more than $880 billion over the next 10 years. Let me say that again. By reducing nonsecurity discretionary spending levels, using the same definition of ``nonsecurity'' as the President is using, to 2008 levels and then holding them there through 2020, our Nation can save nearly $1 trillion. When I compare my plan directly with President Obama's, my plan saves $634 billion more than his.

I have made my estimates using the methodologies of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are probably conservative. First off, if you look at the history of discretionary spending, annual increases are far greater than what they assume they are here. Second, we do not estimate how much we would be saving in interest by not having to borrow the spending we are cutting. Overall, this proposal will likely save much more than the nearly $1 trillion we estimate.

If we do nothing to curtail skyrocketing government spending or merely freeze it at an artificially high, elevated level for a few years, as the Obama administration is trying to do, we will find ourselves in a tragic situation. The clock is ticking. Congress is going to have to act.

Some of my colleagues will probably attack this proposal because the hardest thing to do around here is cut spending. Without cutting spending, we only leave one alternative, and that is massively raising taxes. That is not what the American people want, and it would harm our economic recovery.

Around these halls, we seem to forget. Most of the Members of the Senate have forgotten the recess last August when they had all the tea parties out there and people were yelling and screaming and people wanted to get involved. People were getting involved in politics who never had been involved before. They were concerned primarily about two issues. At that time, it was government-run health care and cap-and- trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in the history of this country.

Right now, the Obama administration is saying: I don't care what anybody says, we are going to stay with it; we are going to be tough; we are going to have this government-run health care system and bring back cap-and-trade. They have just completely forgotten what happened.

I have to agree with Senator McConnell. I hope people remember that all the way through the election because that is going to repeat what I remember in 1994.

Others may charge this proposal will harm the government's ability to help citizens in their time of need. But what is important to realize about this spending reduction is that it will have no impact on mandatory spending programs such as unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs are in need of reform, but this bill does not do that. This bill only affects the agencies identified by President Obama as nonsecurity.

My bill, the HELP Act of 2010, would take President Obama's proposed spending freeze and truly make an impact. Rather than merely freezing spending at the inflated 20-percent increase of the 2010 levels, this would bring it back down to 2008. I think this can be done.

I really do believe the American people are going to start getting involved. They have not forgotten. I was giving a speech in Florida. This particular group was actually Club for Growth. Their group is concerned about spending. I told them some of the things we could be doing, some of the things to watch out for. Watch out for those who say you can have a moratorium on earmarks and somehow affect--if you affected all of that, it would be something like 1.5 percent. My bill affects the other 98.5 percent.

We are going to have to do it right now. If we wait, each month that goes by--as I said, the budget he increased and his deficit was as much as the last 6 entire years of the Bush administration.

This is the HELP Act. It is one that will work, and it is one that has come along at the right time. Now is the time to act.

Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to announce the introduction of a bill, S. 3095. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Act of 2010. It spells HELP. It is the HELP Act of 2010.

On February 1 of 2010, President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget with a funding request of $3.8 trillion. In it he announced a 3- year freeze on discretionary spending for all nonsecurity-related agencies at the fiscal year 2010 levels, which amounts to a total spending level of $460 billion each year for those agencies. Nonsecurity spending is defined as all agencies except the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of State, and one of the national security-related agencies in the Department of Energy. The administration's Office of Management and Budget estimates this initiative will save $250 billion over the coming decade. Keep in mind, that is $250 billion from where it started, which I will address in a minute.

On the surface, this proposal gives the President the appearance of being fiscally prudent--something the American people have been demanding of their government, especially in recent months. But when you look closely at the numbers he has presented, it is clear as day why he is able to offer this spending freeze without batting an eye. For one, discretionary spending has increased by 20 percent in 2 years. Secondly, the massive $787 billion stimulus package provided a substantial spending cushion for nearly every agency, making a spending freeze such as the President's inconsequential.

Let's stop and look at that. We are talking about $787 billion in a stimulus bill, but we are also talking about having increased from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2010 by 20 percent. So what he is doing here is raising it 20 percent and then freezing it. What he ought to do, if he had to raise it 20 percent, is start bringing it down.

Additionally, this spending freeze proposal does too little to improve the long-term fiscal aspects of our Nation. We all know we stand at the edge of disaster. Doug Elmendorf, who is the Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, recently testified about our Nation's fiscal outlook before Congress and he didn't deliver very good news. I will tell my colleagues what he said. He said that last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion. Remember, just a minute ago I said if you add up all of the--well, let's say that is actually more than all of the last 6 years of the Bush administration deficits. That amounts to less than the $1.4 trillion. So he said last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion, which represented

about 10 percent of the total economy. He expects 2010's deficit only slightly lower at $1.3 trillion or 9.2 percent of GDP.

Looking further out, the average deficit between now and 2020 is forecast to be $600 billion per year. This is all coming from Elmendorf. This is the CBO we are talking about. Additionally, CBO estimates the amount of debt held by the public will skyrocket to $15 trillion by 2020. If it sounds like a staggering number, that is because it is. When you consider the amount of interest we will be paying to China and Japan and others, it is embarrassing: $700 billion each and every year until 2020 and beyond if we do nothing about our rising deficit levels. In other words, if we keep on what we are doing right now with this administration, with the help of the Democratic legislators in both Houses, it is going to be $700 trillion.

Let's do the math and put that in perspective. If $700 billion of interest were paid evenly by every household in the United States today, it would amount to more than $6,000 per household. That is kind of interesting. I always try to do my math. When I was fighting the effort by this administration to have a cap-and-trade bill which would have been somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion, whether you are talking about the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill of 2003 or the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2005 or the bills of 2008, or later on the Boxer-Sanders bill, or even going back to Kyoto, it is going to cost somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. I understand when we talk about billions and trillions of dollars what we are really talking about. So I do my math all the time and say, How much is this going to cost my average taxpaying families in my State of Oklahoma? It amounted to $3,100 a year. This would have been, if they had been successful in passing a cap-and-trade bill--it is all dead now. They are not going to do it. I don't care what Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John Kerry say, it is history now. People are not going to pay that kind of thing to get nothing for it.

Back when we were talking about the $700 billion interest that would be paid every year, that is what is going to happen by 2020 with this administration if we let it continue. That would cost each tax-paying family in the United States of America $6,000 per household each and every year after 2020.

Put another way: The entire financial industry bailout--remember the famous bank bailout? I know Republicans were partially responsible for that too. That happened. That vote took place in this Senate on October 1 of 2008. It was back during the Bush administration. It was back when Hank Paulson came in and told everybody that he was going to save our Nation and so Republicans bought into it and many of my good conservative Republican friends voted for a $700 billion bailout. I did not and a few others didn't, but a vast majority did. That is kind of interesting because that $700 billion is the same figure we are using right now that it will cost people by the year 2020--just the interest alone. But the $700 billion that we could spend on interest in 2020 happens each and every year. We don't get anything for it. It is the cost of living having this much debt in the first place.

At this rate, it will become more and more difficult for the government to fund priorities we truly think are important, such as national security and infrastructure spending. For some reason, nobody around here wants to spend money on infrastructure. I know I get criticized. I am considered to be a conservative. I have been rated the No. 1 most conservative Member of the Senate some time ago by the American Conservative Union and just last week by the National Journal. So you are looking at a conservative, but I am a big spender on some things. One is protecting America. That is what we are supposed to be doing around here. The other is infrastructure. We have a crumbling infrastructure system. Look what happened with some of the bridges crumbling down. I guess that was in Minnesota. People died up there. Our infrastructure is crumbling. It is aging. We need to do something about it, but I can't find anyone who wants to spend money on infrastructure. Instead we are spending money on social engineering.

To combat this, several proposals have been recently introduced that I support. In the House, Congressman Pence and Congressmen Hensarling introduced a constitutional amendment that would cap the Federal spending at 20 percent of the economy--20 percent of GDP. It is one way of doing this. I think it is a good idea. I am all for it. Additionally, Senator DeMint introduced an amendment requiring a balanced budget. I am all for that. Some of my colleagues are supporting a year-long earmark moratorium. That is kind of phony. It was reported on Monday that Speaker Pelosi has suggested a year-long earmark moratorium as well. My colleagues need to consider a couple of issues in talking about earmarks.

One, an earmark moratorium does nothing to combat the increasing government spending. In other words, if you have a moratorium on earmarks, it doesn't save a cent. Funding that would have been spent in earmarks will simply be spent by the Obama administration, by their bureaucrats. I suppose it should come as no surprise that Speaker Pelosi supports the Democratic administration fully funding its own priorities.

Secondly, last year's earmarks accounted for only 1.5 percent of discretionary spending--1.5 percent. Where is the focus on the other 98.5 percent? Where is the focus on what I call bureaucratic earmarks? Here is what happens. If you stop earmarks--if you read the Constitution, article I, section 9 of the Constitution, it says what we are supposed to be doing here in the House and in the Senate. We are supposed to be making priorities. We are supposed to be doing the spending, and our Founding Fathers recognize that we do a better job knowing what our needs are in the local communities than the central government does.

If we let the President and the President's budget dictate everything and then we try to make changes within that, people will say, Oh, that is an earmark. Well, wait a minute. If you don't do that, then you are having the unelected bureaucrats in government in the Obama administration do the earmarking. So the President earmarks too. If you don't believe it, look at the Appropriations Conference Report, where the focus is on the vast majority of discretionary spending which is doled out every year by unelected bureaucrats.

I wish more people would understand this, because I find that a lot of the people who hammer and demagog the earmark mantra are the ones who are the biggest spenders and it is a nice way of deviating from your behavior. I think something needs to be done immediately and seriously.

So today I am introducing the HELP Act, as I mentioned. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Program Act of 2010. The bill does three things. One, it places caps on nonsecurity discretionary spending which I define exactly as President Obama's budget does. I do this because I wish to show the similarities between what he said he wants to do and what I want to do. The second thing is it enforces the caps by sequestering any spending above the cap through across-the-board cuts, a process that currently applies to mandatory spending, but not to discretionary. Three, it disallows Congress from evading the sequestration cuts through a 67-vote point of order against any attempt to exempt new spending from this legislation. That is going to make it pretty tough to get through.

Rather than simply freezing the spending as the President wants to do at the 2010 levels--let's keep in mind, first, he increased discretionary spending for a year by 20 percent, and then he wants to freeze it there.

Instead of doing that for 3 years and then allowing spending to explode again, which is what his proposal does, my bill would actually cut discretionary spending for nonsecurity agencies, the same exemptions he has, back to fiscal year 2008 levels. It is cutting it back by 20 percent of what he tries to do, about $400 billion a year. Spending would be frozen for 5 years--not 3 years but 5 years, through 2020. Rather than simply freezing spending levels for only 3 years and at an artificially high level, as the President's proposal does, my initiative would hold the Federal Government more accountable for the next

10 years by creating real, meaningful spending cuts and then placing the cap at reduced levels.

The difference in savings between my plan and President Obama's plan is clearly displayed on this chart.

If we look at the chart, the blue bars represent how nonsecurity- related discretionary spending levels will rise over the next 10 years if allowed to increase. This is according to OMB's numbers.

The red line illustrates the impact of Obama's plan and what will happen if spending is allowed to increase following the 3-year freezing on the estimates of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. They are nonpartisan, by the way, and very accurate. Clearly, the $250 billion in savings is not substantial when spread over a 10-year period. It really does not tighten the belt at all.

My proposal is represented in the green bars. These are the spending levels. Watch as they go down over the period of time from 2010 to 2020. We phase down spending levels from the high point in 2010 to a more reasonable level between 2011 and 2015 and then stay flat thereafter.

My plan, when compared to the blue bars of doing nothing, will save more than $880 billion over the next 10 years. Let me say that again. By reducing nonsecurity discretionary spending levels, using the same definition of ``nonsecurity'' as the President is using, to 2008 levels and then holding them there through 2020, our Nation can save nearly $1 trillion. When I compare my plan directly with President Obama's, my plan saves $634 billion more than his.

I have made my estimates using the methodologies of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are probably conservative. First off, if you look at the history of discretionary spending, annual increases are far greater than what they assume they are here. Second, we do not estimate how much we would be saving in interest by not having to borrow the spending we are cutting. Overall, this proposal will likely save much more than the nearly $1 trillion we estimate.

If we do nothing to curtail skyrocketing government spending or merely freeze it at an artificially high, elevated level for a few years, as the Obama administration is trying to do, we will find ourselves in a tragic situation. The clock is ticking. Congress is going to have to act.

Some of my colleagues will probably attack this proposal because the hardest thing to do around here is cut spending. Without cutting spending, we only leave one alternative, and that is massively raising taxes. That is not what the American people want, and it would harm our economic recovery.

Around these halls, we seem to forget. Most of the Members of the Senate have forgotten the recess last August when they had all the tea parties out there and people were yelling and screaming and people wanted to get involved. People were getting involved in politics who never had been involved before. They were concerned primarily about two issues. At that time, it was government-run health care and cap-and- trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in the history of this country.

Right now, the Obama administration is saying: I don't care what anybody says, we are going to stay with it; we are going to be tough; we are going to have this government-run health care system and bring back cap-and-trade. They have just completely forgotten what happened.

I have to agree with Senator McConnell. I hope people remember that all the way through the election because that is going to repeat what I remember in 1994.

Others may charge this proposal will harm the government's ability to help citizens in their time of need. But what is important to realize about this spending reduction is that it will have no impact on mandatory spending programs such as unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs are in need of reform, but this bill does not do that. This bill only affects the agencies identified by President Obama as nonsecurity.

My bill, the HELP Act of 2010, would take President Obama's proposed spending freeze and truly make an impact. Rather than merely freezing spending at the inflated 20-percent increase of the 2010 levels, this would bring it back down to 2008. I think this can be done.

I really do believe the American people are going to start getting involved. They have not forgotten. I was giving a speech in Florida. This particular group was actually Club for Growth. Their group is concerned about spending. I told them some of the things we could be doing, some of the things to watch out for. Watch out for those who say you can have a moratorium on earmarks and somehow affect--if you affected all of that, it would be something like 1.5 percent. My bill affects the other 98.5 percent.

We are going to have to do it right now. If we wait, each month that goes by--as I said, the budget he increased and his deficit was as much as the last 6 entire years of the Bush administration.

This is the HELP Act. It is one that will work, and it is one that has come along at the right time. Now is the time to act.

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

Mr. President, I cannot express how frustrated I am with Washington politics, as a result of, I believe, irresponsible behavior on the part of Democrats and Republicans, in the House and in the Senate. The Federal Highway Administration shut its doors on Monday, furloughing 2,000 employees, putting projects across the country at risk and stopping the highway program from paying States the money they are owed.

I have been in constant communication with Gary Ridley, Oklahoma's transportation secretary--I think the best one in the country. He flew here this week to help resolve this crisis. He told me if it is not worked out by Friday, there will be very serious consequences in my State of Oklahoma. There will be jobs that will be shut down, work that has already been contracted out that will be under default. I understand some of the Democrats are trying to make political hay out of this, but I want to set the record straight that a lone Republican Senator is being singled out for the blame, but in reality there is plenty of blame to go around.

Last week the Senate passed a jobs bill that included a number of tax cuts and long-term extension for the highway program. The House Democrats were divided on the bill and their leadership could not pass the bill. Given the chaos in their caucus, they passed a 30-day extension of the highway bill late last week. Because of this 30-day extension, it would add about $10 billion to the outrageous $13.2 trillion national debt.

A Republican Senator said he would only agree to it if it was offset. Senate Democrats refused to offset the package. Nobody was willing to back down. We find ourselves in this situation today.

Not only is there ample blame to go around on why Congress allowed the highway program and the FHWA to shut down, I think there is equal blame to go around on why it has taken us 6 months to pass a long-term extension.

We tried on numerous occasions to pass the extension. Frankly, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. I have been sounding the alarm for this ever since last July. We learned in July that there are a couple of Senators who are, frankly, opposed to the Federal Highway Program and want to see it underfunded, as has been the case this fiscal year.

I often said--there is no secret to this, even though I am considered to be quite a conservative--in some areas I have been a big spender. One is national defense. The other is infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to be doing here.

On the last day of the fiscal year before the 2005 highway bill expired, Senator Boxer and I, right here on the floor, attempted to pass a long-term extension of the highway program. Unfortunately, we were not successful. The same group of Senators who opposed the highway program demanded that the bill be offset. They suggested unobligated stimulus funds, but the Democrats objected to this. The chairman, that is Barbara Boxer, and I were working hard to find offset. Senator Boxer got Democratic leadership to agree to use TARP as an offset.

I was very excited about this. I remember I thought that night--it was a Wednesday night, it was getting close to midnight. We had to do something or everything was going to fall apart. I thought we had it resolved. Unfortunately, many Republicans and some Democratic Senators object to this offset. As a result, we were stuck with a 30-day extension on the continuing resolution which funded the program at $1 billion a month more than 2009 levels.

I have to say--and I now blame Republicans for this--I have often said one of the bad things that happened to this Senate happened on October 1 of 2008, when they passed the $700 billion bank bailout bill. That is the TARP funds we are talking about. A lot of conservative Republicans objected to offsetting the TARP because that would be an admission that that money probably was not going to be repaid anyway. I think a lot of Republicans were trying to tell people back home--I didn't vote for this, by the way, but they did. Those who did--don't worry, everything is going to get paid back. It is all going to get paid back. I think we all should have known better. All you had to do was read that bill and that would have been the case.

So then it was the Republicans who refused to use that. The money was there. It could have been used and we wouldn't be facing this dilemma. We could have the 1-year loan extension. We would have time to put together a highway program, which is what we--we--want to do.

Unfortunately, some do not. So it is clear the only way to get a long-term highway extension done is for Senator Reid to dedicate a week of floor time to overcome the objections of two or three Republicans who opposed the highway program. To that end, all the chairmen and ranking members of the committees involved sent a bipartisan letter to Senator Reid pointing out the problem we were facing and asking for floor time to overcome the objections. Senator Reid ignored this request until 2 weeks ago when he abandoned the bipartisan Baucus- Grassley jobs bill in favor of his own bill that included a long-term highway extension. I wish to point out that this maneuver cost the highway extension the bulk of Republican support.

I wish to caution that it is very dangerous to turn a bipartisan issue such as this into a partisan one. Because the highway bill was included with a number of other issues, it got caught up in the House Democratic and second stimulus bill politics unrelated to the highway program. This just reinforces that it should have been done as a stand- alone measure.

Let me conclude by reading an excerpt of a Tulsa World editorial-- that is Tulsa, my hometown. It states:

What's up with those geniuses in Congress? First they

scurry around to get massive stimulus funding in the pipeline

in an effort to quickly jump-start the economy, and then they

fiddle around and let regular transportation funding that

would further aid the recovery lapse. Not a good recipe for

ensuring that the recovery will continue.

The editorial concludes:

Inhofe blamed the funding snafu on politics, which comes as

no surprise. Apparently it was just too much to ask of our

leaders to put politics aside for once in favor of rescuing

the economy and thousands of jobs.

Let me tell you that editorial was from October of last year. It is amazing that Congress has allowed the months to go by since that time.

Right now, what we are facing in my State of Oklahoma is about $415 million a week that is going to cost us. We have contracts that are already let, and we are in a dilemma now to know what to do. We are going to have to resolve this problem by, I would say, Thursday or Friday or it is going to be chaotic. I suggest it is not just my State of Oklahoma that has this problem; many other States do. I hope people set everything aside and try to get this thing done and do one of the things we are elected to do and do something about the infrastructure. Right now, it is in crisis. We are going to have to resolve it.

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

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

Madam President, this afternoon it is my understanding we are going to have one more vote. It is going to be on the Travel Promotion Act. I have opposed this in the past. I have already voted against it three times. I am not going to hang here and waste the whole day just to vote against it a fourth time.

I ask unanimous consent that I make a very brief statement and it be printed in the Record immediately following the vote that takes place this afternoon.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have no real strong feelings about this bill other than that I do not think this country needs to create another corporation, a corporation that would be authorized to impose an annual assessment on U.S. members of the travel and tourism industry represented on a board of directors of the corporation established in the Department of Commerce, Office of Travel Promotion. I do not believe we need another office in this bureaucracy, so I will be voting against this bill. I voted against it on June 22 of last year, September 8 of last year, and September 9 of last year, so my vote would have been the same this year.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce The Small System Drinking Water Act of 2009. This is the third Congress that I have introduced this bill which would assist water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Mike Crapo, James Risch, John Barrasso and David Vitter as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce The Small System Drinking Water Act of 2009. This is the third Congress that I have introduced this bill which would assist water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Mike Crapo, James Risch, John Barrasso and David Vitter as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request.

I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from New Hampshire, I be recognized for up to 3 minutes.

Mr. President, when the Senator from New Hampshire talks about what we can and can't do to our children, I remind my fellow Senators, I happen to be blessed with 20 kids and grandkids. I am probably more concerned than anyone else here about future generations. Let me say, to redeem myself in advance, I am a conservative. I have been ranked No. 1 by the ACU, Man of the Year by Human Events. Yet I think we are supposed to be doing something when we come here to Washington. I have always said, when I run for office, that the two main things we are supposed to do are defend America and infrastructure. Yes, I am the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee. I was the sponsor of the bill in

2005, and I am proud of it because we had to do something about infrastructure. I don't know, maybe there aren't any roads in New Hampshire, but I can tell you, don't buy into the argument that this is all debt. We are talking about $12 billion.

This bill actually does two things. It has some very good reductions in taxes. I remember so well that John Kennedy, when he was President, said we have to raise more revenue. The best way is to reduce marginal rates. From 1961 to 1968, it went from $94 billion to $153 billion. That is in this thing. But the main thing here I am concerned about is we keep doing nothing about roads and highways and infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to do.

I know the Senator is sincere when he comes up with this, but where was his concern back when he voted to give an unelected bureaucrat $700 billion? That wasn't offset. We can say that was a loan, but we all know better.

There are some things we are supposed to be doing in America, and the second most important thing, in my view--I know others don't share this view--is to do something about infrastructure. This bill does it. This carries it on to the end of the fiscal year, about 11 more months. If we don't do it, it is costing about $1 billion a month by inaction. If we try to do this by extending it month by month, each one of us in this body is going to lose a lot of money that goes to roads and highways and infrastructure.

Last week had a crumbling bridge in Oklahoma where no one was killed, but it came very close to that. We saw what happened up in Minnesota. We have to do something, instead of spending all of our money, as this administration is doing, on social engineering. We need to start building bridges and roads and repairing them.

Mr. President, first, let me identify and agree with the remarks of both the Senators concerning Iran and consider myself as part of that program.

I believe it is already the order, but in the event it is not, I ask unanimous

consent that I be recognized for up to 25 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, today I want to highlight several recent media reports uncovering very serious errors and possible fraud by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

First of all, let me define what we are talking about here, because it has been around for a long time but a lot of people have forgotten. Way back in 1988, the United Nations formed the IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The whole idea was to try to determine whether manmade gases--anthropogenic gases, CO2, and methane--caused global warming, and if in fact global warming is taking place.

It is hard on a day such as today, and the last few days, to be talking about global warming. I often say: Where is it when you need it? But nonetheless, you need to know three things about the IPCC: No. 1, the Obama administration calls it the gold standard of climate change science; No. 2, some say its reports on climate change represent the so-called consensus of scientific opinion about global warming; and No. 3, the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel prize in 2007 for ``their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change.''

Put simply, what this means is that in elite circles the IPCC is a big deal. So when ABC News, The Economist, Time magazine, and the Times of London, among many others, report that the IPCC's research contains embarrassing flaws and that the IPCC chairman and scientists knew of the flaws but published them anyway--well, you have the makings of a major scientific scandal.

In fact, when Climategate first came out and it was discovered that they had been cooking the science at the IPCC, the UK Telegraph said: This is very likely the greatest scientific scandal of our generation.

So where to begin? Well, how about with the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It is not true. That is right; it is simply false. Yet it was put into the IPCC's fourth assessment report. These assessment reports come out every year, and that is what the media normally get. They are not scientific reports, they are assessments that are made for policymakers. Here is what we know:

According to the Sunday Times, the claim about the Himalayas was based on--keep in mind we are talking about their statement that by 2035 the glaciers would melt--that claim was based on a 1999 story in a news magazine which in turn was based on a short telephone interview with someone named Syed Hasnain, who is a very little-known Indian scientist.

Next, in 2005, the activist group World Wildlife Fund cited the story in one of its climate change reports. Yet despite the fact that the World Wildlife Fund report was not scientifically peer reviewed, it was still referenced by the IPCC. It was still in their report.

Third, according to the Times:

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high

altitude that most glaciologists believe it would take

several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are

actually growing and many show little sign of change.

Lastly, when finally published, the Sunday Times wrote:

The IPCC report did give its source as the World Wildlife

Fund study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the

glaciers melting was ``very high.''

The IPCC, by the way, defines this as having a probability of greater than 90 percent.

So there you have that. But there is more. According to the Times:

The chairman [Rajendra Pachauri] of the leading climate

change watchdog was informed that claims about melting

Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit.

We all remember that Copenhagen summit in the middle of December. I was there for 2 hours; many were there for 2 weeks. Now to continue to quote from the Times article:

. . . [he] was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear

by 2035 was wrong, but he waited 2 months to correct it. He

failed to act despite learning that the claim had been

refuted by several leading glaciologists.

So why was the Himalayan error included? We now know from the very IPCC scientist who edited the report's section on Asia that it was done for political purposes. It was inserted to induce China, India, and other countries--this was at Copenhagen--to take action on global warming. According to the UK's Sunday Mail, Murari Lal, the scientist in charge of the IPCC's chapter on Asia, said this:

We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact

policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some

concrete action.

In other words, that is the motive she did it for. In other words, the Sunday Mail wrote that Lal ``admitted the glacier alarmism was indeed purely to put political pressure on world leaders.''

This is what we have suspected and has been documented in the recent Climategate scandal. But there is still more. The glaciologist, Dr. Hasnain, who originally made the alarmist 2035 claim, works for Dr. Pachauri at his think tank in India. According to ABC News:

The glaciologist now works at the Energy and Resources

Institute in New Delhi, whose director is none other than

Rajendra Pachauri. Could this explain why Pachauri suppressed

the error in the Himalayan passage of the IPCC report for so

long?

Specifically, after the meeting in Copenhagen. So what has the IPCC done to correct this fiasco? I went into the IPCC report to see if a correction had been made. Well, the 2035 claim is still there. It is still there now. It has been denied, but it is still there. There is a note attached that says the following:

It has, however, recently come to our attention that a

paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to

the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated

estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance

of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question,

the clear and well-established standards of evidence,

required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.

I had to read this twice to understand what it said. The IPCC says the glacier alarmism came about because of poorly substantiated estimates. Well, that is one way of putting it. To me, from what we know now, the leadership of the IPCC lied about the Himalayas. They knew it was false, but for political purposes they kept it in.

I could go on and on, but let me cite a few more examples. The UK Telegraph recently uncovered more problems. This is the entity that said that is probably the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. The IPCC's report from 2007 found observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa--all caused, of course, by global warming. In an article entitled ``UN Climate Change Panel Based Claims On Student Dissertation and Magazine Article,'' the Telegraph reported the following:

One of the sources quoted was a feature article published

in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on

anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they

were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other

was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying

for the equivalent of a master's degree at the University of

Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain

guides in the Alps.

So that is the source they had. The article further reveals:

The IPCC report made use of 16 nonpeer reviewed WWF

reports. One claim, which stated that coral reefs near

mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers

than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article

on the WWF website. In fact, the data contained within the

WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the

respected Journal Nature. In another example a WWF paper on

forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced

rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from

another Nature paper published in 1999.

On top of this, we find that the IPCC was exaggerating claims about the Amazon. The report said that 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest was endangered by global warming. But again, as we have seen, this was taken from a study by the WWF--the World Wildlife Federation--and one that had nothing to do with global warming. Even worse, it was written by a green activist.

That is the statement they made--40 percent of the Amazon rain forest was

in danger. So again, we have the gold standard of climate research and a body that was awarded the Nobel prize of 2007. How can the world's preeminent climate body fall victim to such inaccuracy and, it must be said, outright fraud? I am sure for many in this body this information is shocking, but for me I am not at all surprised.

Five years ago, I sent a letter to Dr. Pachauri specifically raising the many weaknesses in the IPCC's peer-review process, but Dr. Pachauri dismissed my concerns. Here is how Reuters reported his response:

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

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

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

main argument is that the IPCC comprises both scientists and

more than 130 governments who approve IPCC reports line by

line. That helps ensure fairness, he says.

Here is Dr. Pachauri defending it.

Given the significance of the reports, Dr. Pachauri should come clean and respond directly to the numerous charges made against himself and the IPCC. And given that Dr. Pachauri has testified before Congress, including the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, we should hear directly from him as soon as possible as to how he can salvage the IPCC's vanishing credibility.

How did we get to this point? I have been documenting deceit of this kind for several years now. But I must say that a great turning point occurred just a few months ago, when thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, or CRU, were leaked to the media. The CRU is one of the world's most prestigious climate research centers. The e-mails appear to show some of the world's preeminent climate scientists manipulating data, violating information disclosure laws by deleting e-mails, and blocking publication of research contrary to their own. They published only the research that would verify their positions interms of global warming, in other words.

This revelation sparked several investigations, including one by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office. The office recently concluded that the CRU broke the UK's Freedom of Information Act. However, as the Times of London reported:

The Information Commissioner's Office decided that UEA

failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not

prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too

late . . . The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow

prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months

after a breach.

It is a little late but none the less a good change to make. The Times further reports on the details, noting:

In one e-mail, Professor Jones [former director of the CRU

who has now stepped down because of the scandal] asked a

colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also told a

colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to

ignore information requests under the act from people linked

to a Web site run by climate sceptics.

Climate skeptics, so you understand the terminology that is used here, those are people like me who have looked at this and realize the science is cooked. I think most people agree with that now.

As we know, Climategate is just the beginning. Time magazine reported--let's keep in mind, this is Time magazine; the same magazine about a year ago that had a picture of the last polar bear standing on the last ice cube saying: It is coming and you ought to be real worried about it.

As we now know, Climategate was just the beginning.

Time magazine reported that `Glaciergate' is a ``black eye for the IPCC and for the climate-science community as a whole.'' In the article posted online from Thursday, January 21, 2010, Himalayan Melting: How a Climate Panel Got It Wrong, Time reports:

The mistake is a black eye for the IPCC and for the

climate-science community as a whole. Climate scientists are

still dealing with the Climategate controversy, which

involved hacked e-mails from a major British climatology

center that cast doubt on the solidity of evidence for global

warming.

The Economist newspaper, which had accepted the IPCC climate ``consensus,'' essentially claimed that it had been duped by the IPCC. Here's the Economist:

The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by

2035--glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia--

is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an

outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of

climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including

this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there

is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news

(within limits) for Indian farmers--and bad news for the

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized as in morning business for 15 minutes.

Mr. President, last week I came to the floor to talk about an issue that has kind of been drowned out by a lot of other things that are going on, other conflicts and disasters around the world. This is having to do with northern Uganda. It is something I have been on the floor talking about for several years now, and I have had occasion to be there several times.

For over two decades, a guy named Joseph Kony has led what they call the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army, in violence all throughout northern Uganda, in that whole Great Lakes Region of east and central Africa. They have killed tens of thousands--little kids--displacing over 1 million, and terrorizing and kidnapping over 30,000 little kids, forcing them to fight. It is this child soldier thing a lot of people are aware of, but not nearly enough people are aware of it.

With all the problems there are in Africa--people are more concerned about Zimbabwe. They hear about that. They have heard about Somalia, Sudan. Everyone knows about that. But nobody says anything about the Lord's Resistance Army and what they have been doing in that area of Africa for 25 years.

I have been there. I have been all the way up there to Gulu in northern Uganda. Let me share the problem that exists up there.

This madman, kind of a spiritual leader, by the name of Joseph Kony has taken advantage of all the unrest and the disasters by going into villages and kidnapping, taking young people and training them to be soldiers. We are talking about little kids, little boys. They are from 11 to 14 years old. Once they train them to be soldiers, they actually give them AK-47s. I do not have my chart now, but I have pictures of that. They train them to be soldiers, and then they have to go back to their villages and murder their parents and their siblings. If they do not do that, then they will dismember them. They will cut their noses off, cut their ears off, cut their lips off.

This has been going on for a long period of time. Quite frankly, I have gotten to know President Museveni in Uganda quite well, President Kagame in Rwanda, and President Kabila in Congo, and all of them agree that we need do something about this monster Joseph Kony. It happens that two of the three Presidents I mentioned--President Museveni from Uganda and President Kagame from Rwanda--are Presidents who have really come to power in the bush. They are warriors. These are people who really are reluctant to admit they cannot go after one guy and get him. Well, they have finally all gotten together.

What we are trying to do--well, we have already introduced it; the author of the bill is Senator Feingold of Wisconsin--is to go after these people, and this bill provides about $35 million to help these kids who have been brutalized, as well as to give whatever assistance we have to give to these different countries in order to bring this guy to justice.

During one of the trips I made up to northern Uganda, to Gulu, I ran into three young men. They are college-age types--Bobby Bailey, Lauren Poole, and Jason Russell. They have started a documentary on Joseph Kony. They have gone around to universities, and we now have thousands--tens of thousands--of young people who are rallying around this thing, trying to get us to do something as a nation. These young people have become very effective.

This week, this Senate has an opportunity to act in unison to shine the light on this forgotten place and to begin to bring relief to these children.

The Great Lakes Region in Africa has suffered from years of devastating fighting between tribes, and as a result the area is home to massive numbers of displaced people who are vulnerable to this type of treatment. So those are

the conditions that allow Joseph Kony and his LRA rebels to thrive. Kony preys on the weak. He gets little kids who cannot defend themselves. He gets young girls. He sells them to be sex slaves and these kids to become murderers.

In December of 2008, the Government of Uganda, Southern Sudan, and the DRC--that is the Democratic Republic of the Congo--launched a coordinated offensive against the LRA. It was called Operation Lightning Thunder. During the operation, over 300 rebels were killed, over 40 were captured, and more than 500 kids who were abducted were rescued. So we are making some headway in doing this.

According to estimates by the U.N., between September of 2008 and June of 2009, the LRA killed over 1,300 civilians, abducted 1,400 more boys and girls, and displaced nearly 300,000 others.

I know something about this because I took the time to go to--you hear a lot about western Congo--Kinshasa and the problems there. This is eastern Congo that butts up against Rwanda and then, further north, Uganda.

In going to Goma, we thought that was where Joseph Kony was at the time. We thought we had an effort that could get him, but we barely missed him. He went north on a tirade, after that, going up toward Sudan and murdered thousands of people during that short period of time. It averages out, he murders or mutilates about three kids a day. That is why this is important. We can get this guy. We cannot do it if we just try the way we have tried it before because it has not worked and it is not going to work.

Well, anyway, we have watched this take place. It is spreading now to other areas. I would anticipate before too long, if left unchecked, it would go not just to the Central African Republic but also maybe back into Sudan and maybe even Ethiopia. So it is very serious.

In 2009, a total of 186 people were killed by the LRA just in Southern Sudan. One survivor describes his experience and the murders of his family at the hands of the LRA. This is a quote. This is actually what this person said:

We were eating dinner outside of our hut when several LRA--

That is the Lord's Resistance Army--

rebels appeared and told us in broken Lingala--

This is their local language--

to get inside of our hut. They looted our food, locked us

inside our hut and burned it. There were 10 of us; my whole

family was inside. When I realized they were burning us

alive, I started to push against the door, forcing it open.

One rebel standing outside of the door tried to hit me with a

heavy club but I dodged it and ran in the bush. They shot

after me but missed. Apparently they shot or hit everyone

else in my family who tried to come out. Except for one other

person, everyone else was burned alive.

This is the type of thing we have documented that has been happening for a long period of time.

What we are trying to do with this--as I mentioned before, the cost is not great. This, by the way, is not any appropriation. This is an authorization bill, to authorize probably what the CBO says is about $28 million to get this done. It is not offset. When the bill first came out, it was offset by a reduction in certain types of military expenditures. I disagreed with that, so it is not offset at this time. But of all the efforts out there right now, this is something that absolutely has to happen.

Just by contrast, we had a bill, the other African bill, just a couple years ago, called the PEPFAR bill. That was one that actually had about $35 billion--much larger than this--and it sailed right through. So I would say, if we were willing to do that, we ought to be willing to do this.

By the way, we have a lot of cosponsors now. I do believe we are going to be successful in getting this bill passed, and I will be bringing this up, I am guessing, probably either Wednesday or Thursday.

So with that, I will yield the floor and hope that any of the other Members of this body who are not already a cosponsor to this bill--it is S. 1067--we would like to get a few more cosponsors on here if at all possible.

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