Floor Statements

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Madam President, I say to the Senator, I do not want to disrupt your line of thinking because I agree so much with you. But every time I hear people talking about ANWR, and I hear people talking about stopping any drilling or exploration in ANWR, it occurs to me, here you are, the senior Senator from Alaska. You have been here for a long time, and I have gone with you up to the area in which you

are talking about drilling. I have heard people compare that to a postage stamp in a football field or something like that. It is a tiny area up there.

The question I have is twofold. First of all, why is it that as near as I can determine, people who live there all want to explore and resolve this problem we have in this country by drilling and exploring in ANWR? Who are we down here to tell them up in Alaska what is best for them? That would be the No. 1 question.

Then, the second thing is, what I have observed, I say to the senior Senator from Alaska, who has been here longer than I have, is that every time this has come up--I came from the House to the Senate back in 1995--now, on October 27, 1995, we voted 52 to 47, right down party lines, to go ahead and start exploring in ANWR. All the Republicans supported it. All the Democrats opposed it. Then, again, on November 17, 1995, the same thing happened: We voted to explore, the Democrats voted against it.

Then, after all that work was done, the President--then-President Clinton--on December 6, 1995, vetoed the bills that had this authority we had given them to drill. Then the same thing--I could go on and on-- but in 2005, the same thing happened. The Senate voted on an amendment to the budget resolution to strike the expansion of exploration in ANWR. It failed by a vote of 49 to 51, right down party lines.

I guess the second question I would ask the Senator is, why is making us self-sufficient a partisan issue? Why do the Democrats oppose it and the Republicans support it?

Well, Madam President, I will only respond to say that is my observation. I have not been here as long as the Senator has, but every year since I have been here, we have had this vote, and the people up there want us to drill, to explore, to produce.

I remember the argument against the Alaska pipeline. They said: Oh, it is going to destroy the caribou. What it has done, if you go up there, as I have been with you at any time during the summer months, the warm months, the only shade the caribou can find is the pipeline. You see them all out there. It has actually had the effect of increasing the breed.

But anyway, I keep thinking, if we had followed through with what we are talking about doing back in the middle 1990s, we would now be producing our own energy, producing our own oil, and we would not have these high prices at the pumps.

Madam President, first of all, let me thank the Senator from Alaska. This is a frustration I have felt for so long: that it is not just that right down party lines we are not able to produce in ANWR, but also it goes offshore. We have tried, on the Republican side, to do something about increasing the supply--by drilling in Alaska, by going at the tar sands, and I am sure the Senator from Colorado will talk a little bit about shale out in the western part of his State and in my State of Oklahoma, trying to give tax incentives for the production at marginal wells, which are wells that produce under 15 barrels of oil a day.

I can give a statistic that I do not have to back up because it has never been refuted. If we had all the marginal wells flowing today that have been shut down in the last 10 years, it would amount to more than we are currently importing from Saudi Arabia.

So I think it is very arrogant, when you have two hard-working Senators and one Member of the House from Alaska who want very much to do what 100 percent of the people want to do in Alaska; that is, to improve their economy by producing cheap oil for us domestically so we can bring down the price of gas, when they will not allow us to do it.

Let me make one comment. I am going to be joined by the Senator from Colorado. I want to touch upon one other area.

If we had been and would be successful in being able to drill more oil domestically so we can bring down the price of gas, no matter how much we produced, it can't go into the gas tank until it has been refined. So refining capacity is something that is very critical in this country. Again, right down party lines, they have prevented us from having that refinery capacity.

Three different times I had on the floor a bill called the Gas Price Act. All it was was a bill to start building refineries in America. It has been 30 years; 1976 was the last refinery we had in America. What we need to do is start building refineries. Well, with the BRAC process--and for those of you who come from States that don't have any military operations, you may not know what this is, but the BRAC process is the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. That is where you go through an independent entity to determine which of the military installations should be shut down. Of course, when you shut down a military installation, it is economically devastating to the adjoining communities.

With the Gas Price Act, what we have done is provide that if you have been shut down as a military installation, we could provide assistance through the Economic Development Administration for cities--if they are so inclined--to make applications so that they can turn these closed bases into refineries.

I thought when we developed this thing that it wouldn't be a problem at all because no one should be against it. Everyone knows we have to increase our refining capacity. We offered amendments on this bill to streamline the process.

Also, if people changed their minds in communities, they would be able to stop this from taking place. States have a significant, if not dominant, role in permitting existing or new refineries. Yet States face particularly technical and financial constraints when faced with these extremely complex facilities. So my Gas Price Act requires the administrator to coordinate and concurrently review all permits with the relevant State agencies to permit refineries. This program does not waive or modify any environmental law and consequently should not have had anyone in opposition to it.

Now, we brought it twice to the floor--three times to the floor and twice we had votes--and right down party lines, every Democrat voted against the Gas Price Act. All we wanted to do, along with the local governments and local communities, was to build refineries so that we could refine what will hopefully be someday an increase in capacity so we will not be reliant upon foreign countries for our ability to run this machine called America, but we would be able to produce our own energy.

I think it is important that every time we talk about increasing production, which we just have to do, we also have to talk about the refining capacity. We are all ready to go, I say to my good friend from Colorado, with the Gas Price Act if we are able to move in that direction.

I believe that over the Memorial Day recess, when everybody is out there driving and people are much more sensitive to the price of gas, they are going to look back and say: You know, maybe the Republicans were right all of those years; maybe we should be increasing our supply, as the Senator from Alaska put it, of gasoline and oil produced in America.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, first of all, I agree wholeheartedly with the comments and the legislative ideas my friend from Colorado has. Again, it is a great frustration that we have tried so hard for so many years to expand our supply here in this country. Hopefully, now, one of the benefits we will get from the high price of fuel is the recognition that we have to start producing our own energy in this country. That is what we should be doing.

Hopefully, after this holiday, when we get back, enough people will have spent enough money driving around and there will be enough political pressure that we can get people to agree to start drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore, drilling in the shale area, and experimenting in some of these areas where we could become totally self-sufficient in America.

Madam President, I wish to address a little-known secret, a secret to the media and therefore a secret to the American people; that is, we are winning the war in Iraq.

Yesterday, I read an article--I think it was maybe the day before yesterday--in the New York Post by Ralph Peters. It was called ``Success in Iraq: A Media Blackout.'' In it, he writes:

As Iraqi and coalition forces pile up one success after

another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines. Want

a real ``inconvenient truth''? Progress in Iraq is powerful

and accelerating.

I think he hit the nail on the head. When this war got tough, the cut-and-run defeatist provisions started making their way into bills and amendments. Those provisions send a powerful message to our troops and to our enemies: America is not committed to this fight.

But America has remained committed, and through that commitment we continue to attain success. I have been to Iraq, and I have watched the tide turn. I believe I have been there many more times than any other Member. I am on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and I spend time there. I see, month after month, the changes in what has happened since the acceleration.

My visit in June 2006 was in the wake of Zarqawi's death. Iraqis were operating under a 6-month-old parliament. Al-Qaida continued to challenge coalition forces throughout Iraq. In response, coalition forces launched 200 raids against al-Qaida, clearing out the strongholds. The newly appointed Defense Minister and I discussed the current situation in Iraq, the violence brought to that country by al- Qaida, and the transformation beginning in Iraq. I saw the emergence of a sense of what Iraq could be.

Fast forward to May 2007. I returned to Iraq and visited Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad, and several other areas. Ramadi went from being controlled by al-Qaida and hailed as a capital under control of the Iraqi troops--by the way, this was at a time when Ramadi was being declared as the potential terrorist capital of the world. We saw neighborhood security watch groups identifying the IEDs with orange spray paint. We saw joint security stations. Things started accelerating and improving over there. Increased burden-sharing was taken on by the Iraqis. Fallujah came under the control of the Iraqi brigade. We had our marines there going door to door World War II style. At that time, I observed--in May 2007--that all of the sudden it was under their own security. Al Anbar changed from a center of violence to a success story. In Baghdad, sectarian murders decreased 30 percent, and joint security stations stood up, forming deep relationships between coalition and Iraqi forces and civilians-- ``brotherhood of the close fight,'' as General Petraeus put it. You have to be there to see it and witness personally the excitement that is demonstrated by the Iraqis and the pride they have that they are now in a position to do things for themselves that they were depending on us for before.

On July 30, 2007, 2 months after I returned from Iraq, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times. It was interesting because we had never seen anything positive about our troops or about the war effort in the New York Times. This one talked about troop morale, that it was high, with confidence in General Petraeus's strategy; civilian fatality rates were down roughly a third since the surge began; the streets in Baghdad were coming back to life with stores and shoppers. I can remember that. When I am over there, I will go into a shopping area and go up to someone carrying a baby and talk to them through an interpreter. That is where you get to people who are excited because there could be a new life in the young person. They noted that American troop levels in Tal Afar and Mosul numbered only in the hundreds because the Iraqis stepped up to the plate. More Iraqi units were well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. Local Iraqi leaders and businessmen were cooperating with embedded provincial reconstruction teams to revive the local economy and build new political structures.

I returned to Iraq on August 30, and the surge continued its success. I traveled to the contingency operating base in Tikrit, Patrol Base Murray, south of Baghdad, and visited with Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus, who gave his wonderful testimony this morning to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

I saw again on July 30 a significantly changed Iraq. Less than half of the al-Qaida leaders who were in Baghdad when the surge began were still in the city. They either fled, have been killed, or have been captured. The U.S. troop surge in Iraq threw al-Qaida off balance and produced dramatic results. There was a 75-percent reduction in religious/ethnic killings in the capital. They doubled the seizures of insurgents' weapons caches. There was a rise in the number of al-Qaida kills and captures. There was the destruction of six media cells-- degrading al-Qaida's ability to spread propaganda. Anbar incidents and attacks dropped from 40 per day to less than 10 a day. This is between the two times I had been there. The economy grew and markets were open, crowded, stocked, selling fresh fruit, and running as you would expect them to. A large hospital project in the Sunni Triangle was back on track The Iraqi Army performance was significantly improving. Iraqi citizens formed a grassroots movement called Concerned Citizens League. Most of the cities in America, including my cities in Oklahoma, have neighborhood watch programs, where the neighborhoods and people who live there are watching to prevent crimes. That is what is happening in Baghdad and throughout Iraq.

You now see Baghdad returning to normalcy. You see kiddie pools, lawns cared for, amusement parks, and markets. The surge provided security, and security allowed local populations and governments to stand up. Basic economics took root, and Iraqis began spending money on Iraqi projects.

In September, a month later, Katie Couric was there. If there is one who has been a critic of anything in this administration, our troops, or anything happening in Iraq, it is Katie Couric. She said:

Well, I was surprised, you know, after I went to eastern

Baghdad. I was taken to the

Allawi market, which is near Haifa Street, which was the

scene of that very bloody gun battle back in January, and,

you know, this market seemed to be thriving, and there were a

lot of people out and about. A lot of family-owned businesses

and vegetable stalls, and so you do see signs of life that

seem to be normal . . . the situation is improving.

Madam President, that is not Senator Inhofe talking, it is Katie Couric, who has been probably the worst critic of things over there. So people are realizing that good things are happening.

Despite these successes, the truth about what our troops and the coalition have accomplished in Iraq, it is hidden by the mainstream media. In a recent report of the Media Research Center, it shows that as the improvements took place--this is the timeframe I was talking about, in late 2007. There were this many stories in 2007, and as things improved, it went from 178 in the month of September, down to 108 in October, down to 68 in November, and it shows the media bias that is out there.

As Ralph Peters put it in the article I quoted a minute ago:

The basic mission of the American media between now and

November is to convince you, the voter, that Iraq's still a

hopeless mess.

I returned to Iraq on March 30 of this year, just about the same time Prime Minister Maliki kicked off his Basra campaign. I was at Camp Bucca, right next to Basra, when they took the initiative. I was there working with Major General Stone and saw what his task force is doing now for detainees.

Before I talk about detainees, let me say how proud their troops were that, for the first time in a major surge, they came into Basra to take care of their own province. We were there.

I have been disturbed about the representation as to how our detainees have been treated. I stopped down at Camp Bucca, the largest detainee camp anywhere in all of Iraq. They separated the extremists and were arming the moderates with education and job skills. We found out that most of them--the vast majority of those who were detainees were actually working before they became detainees, and they were fighting because there is total unemployment there. The only place they could get a job was with the military.

What General Stone has done such a great job of is retraining these people--training them to be carpenters and masons. It is very successful, truly turning bombers and criminals into productive Iraqi citizens and sending them back into the population. Out of 6,000 released, only 13 were rearrested. That kind of tells us the success story. These people are integrating in and working on our side, working in neighborhood groups.

We are now seeing the lowest violence indicators since April 2004. The Iraqi people are turning away from violence. The Government of Iraq is asserting more control, searching out militia and insurgent strongholds.

Operations in Basra and, more recently, in Sadr City have shown the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces and the will of Iraqi leadership. I wish you could have been at the hearing this morning. You could have seen and listened to the progress being made in Sadr City. The Iraqi people are just taking back their streets.

As Ralph Peters said in his article, instead of the media even mentioning the positive role the Iraqis are taking in fighting this war, they focus on a small fraction of Iraqi soldiers choosing not to fight. Mr. Peters, I agree with you that ``our troops deserve better, the Iraqis deserve better, and you, the American people, deserve better. The forces of freedom are winning.'' That is what he said, and I agree.

Iraq is at a decisive turning point in its journey toward democracy. The surge created opportunities that the Iraqi people have not taken for granted. The ``awakening'' is spreading from Al Anbar to Diyala Province. ``Concerned Citizens Leagues,'' through coalition support, are now taking back Iraqi streets from the insurgents. The once turbulent and violent Al Anbar Province has returned to Iraqi control. They are actually doing these things themselves.

The surge enabled the Government of Iraq to meet 12 out of the original 18 benchmarks set for it, including 4 out of the 6 legislative benchmarks. That means their Government is starting to put it together.

Iraq has also conducted a surge, adding well over 100,000 additional soldiers--these are Iraqi security forces--and police to the ranks of its security forces in 2007 and is slowly increasing its capability to deploy and employ these forces.

It is anticipated that Iraq will spend over $8 billion on security this year and $11 billion next year. Iraq's 2008 budget has allocated $13 billion for reconstruction, and a $5 billion supplemental budget this summer will further invest export revenues in building the infrastructure.

What I am saying is that the reconstruction in that country is now being paid for by the Iraqis. One of the chief criticisms we have had by people whom I call the cut-and-run folks was that they are not paying their own part.

One of the best programs we have is the Commander Emergency Relief Program, which allows our commanders to make determinations as to what needs to be done immediately. It is spending a small amount of money and will go a long way by doing it. How many people know that the Iraqi Government recently allocated $300 million for our forces to manage the Iraqi CERP? They are taking over their own responsibility.

The Iraqi Government has also committed $163 million to gradually assume Sons of Iraq contracts, $510 million for small business loans, and $196 million for a joint training and reintegration program. Oil reserves are being shared with the provinces.

Al-Qaida is a spent force in Iraq. Syria has ceased supporting foreign fighters in Iraq. The Saudis are cracking down on supporters of Islamic terrorists in their own country. Iran is becoming isolated.

We have to remain focused and realize that these successes will not continue until we, the people, become so informed that we recognize the successes.

The first thing I hear from the Iraqi forces on the many trips I have made there is that: The people of America don't appreciate what we are doing. Now they know more than before how much we do appreciate it, how critical it is that we stay with it.

I think--and I will wind up with this--Ahmadinejad made a statement, and inadvertently he was a great help to us because when all the surrender resolutions were entered in this body, the President of Iran assumed one was going to pass and America was going to leave Iraq--he made the statement that when America leaves Iraq, it is going to create a vacuum, and we are going to fill that vacuum.

Anyone who knows history in the Middle East knows there are no two groups who dislike each other more than the Iranians and Iraqis. That got the attention of the Iraqis. That is one of the many reasons, with the supernatural powers in intelligence and war capabilities of General Petraeus and General Odierno and some of the rest who are involved, that caused this whole thing to turn around.

The success story is well told in the article to which I referred. I ask unanimous consent to have that article printed in the Record.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to recognize Ms. Sandra ``Sandi'' J. Esty, one of our most distinguished civil servants who will retire from Federal service on June 7, 2008, after contributing over 35 years of dedicated service to our country. She serves as the Chief, Air Operations Division, Office of Legislative Liaison, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, the Pentagon, Washington, DC. She is responsible for managing, planning, developing and executing all facets of congressional travel matters for the Department of the Air Force. Ms. Esty also serves as the senior adviser and special assistant to the Director, Legislative Liaison and Air Force leadership with oversight of the Air Force Congressional Travel Program.

Ms. Esty left Syracuse, NY, in 1972 to begin her illustrious civil service career as a clerk-stenographer in the Office of the Air Force Reserve, the Pentagon. After demonstrating remarkable competence in working congressional constituent inquiries, she was selected to work Air Force constituent issues in the Secretary of the Air Force Legislative Liaison Inquiry Division, in 1975. She was promoted and served a short tour as the Administrative Assistant for the Secretary of the Air Force Space Systems, Budget Office before being asked to return to the Air Force Legislative Liaison Branch in 1981, this time as the Administrative Assistant to the Chief of Air Operations Division in Legislative Liaison. She was promoted in 1983 and served as Administrative Assistant to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Electronic Warfare. In 1985, she returned to Legislative Liaison as the Administrative Assistant to the Director of Legislative Liaison and then was assigned as an action officer in the White House Liaison Branch, Legislative Liaison, where she established herself as one of the top leaders of Legislative Liaison. In 1988, she was promoted and selected as the Deputy Chief, Air Operations Division, Legislative Liaison, and then, in 1997, she was promoted as a GS-15 and continued to serve in her current position as Chief, Air Operations Division.

During her tenure in the Air Operations Division, Ms. Esty was responsible for all the travel requirements of Members and staff of Congress arranged by the Air Force. Ms. Esty's calm, logical, thorough method of dealing with unique situations involved some of this country's most important citizens, its legislators. Her true dedication to ``doing it right,'' the absolute insistence on honesty and integrity, and the patience under extreme daily pressure are the standards that Ms. Esty leaves for all those who follow. She coordinated and executed over 10,000 congressional trips worldwide, to include the movement of approximately 70,000 Members and staff of Congress to 193 countries and 7 continents. I personally travelled on many of the trips with the Senate Armed Services delegations that Ms. Esty arranged, coordinated, and flight followed. Each was a complete success.

I join my colleagues in expressing our sincere appreciation to Ms. Esty who has provided many years of dedicated and professional service to the Congress and the U.S. Air Force and wish her well in all her future endeavors.

Mr. President, let me make one observation, that the guest pastor got his training at Rhema Bible College at Broken Arrow, OK. I was mayor of Tulsa, he reminded me, back at that time. So he had good training.

Mr. President, let me respond, firstly, if I can, to the assistant majority leader. First, it is easy to point the finger at oil companies. That is the easiest ``out,'' because everyone has this perception that all oil companies are doing great.

Here is the problem you have. If you were to take all profits from oil companies--let's forget about windfall profits; take it all, do not leave any at all for anything else, other than what they are putting into exploration--it would amount to 28 cents a gallon.

If you slashed their profits in half, as they are proposing to do, that would be 14 cents. Fourteen cents does not help a lot, at least my wife says it does not. And I think you know we are kidding ourselves. There are solutions to this problem, but that is not one of them.

Then as far as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, we are putting about 50,000 barrels per day in there right now. If we were to halt that, over the course of a year it would equal less than one day of U.S. consumption. That is not what I call a fix. Fourteen cents a gallon is not a fix, one day of time is not a fix.

But there are some things we can do. We do have an amendment, amendment No. 4720. It is by our leader, Senator McConnell, and by Senator Domenici. This actually was a bill. It was going to be the Domestic Energy Production Act of 2008, but we are offering it now as an amendment. This would handle a lot of the problems. First, if we had all of the production out there that we needed to take care of America's needs, we still could not do anything, because we do not have the refining capacity. Two years ago I introduced the Gas Price Act. I could not believe it went down right on party lines. The Democrats flat do not want to increase our refining capacity. This happened in the Environment and Public Works Committee. It was actually a pretty smart approach to it. We were taking a lot of the closed bases and using them and allowing EDA grants to take place so that adjoining communities could turn those into refineries, and also streamlining the process and all of that.

Well, it went right down on party lines. So this amendment we are going to be talking about is one that will do something about the refinery capacity. The one we introduced, the amendment, streamlines the permitting process so there would be a maximum on any new refinery of 360 days on a new refinery or an expansion of 180 days.

We have not increased our refining capacity. We have not had a new refinery in 30 years. Other countries are doing it. China is doing it. Mexico is doing it. But we are not. So that is the first thing we need to do, increase refining capacity.

Secondly, everybody hold on, because this is something I know is very foreign to our thinking nowadays, it is an old concept called supply and demand. We have a lot of demand for gas out there. We know that. We know when we go to the pump. The problem is the supply. I hate to say it. Is there a chance? I am kind of excited that the public now has the attention of the high prices and realizes we are going to have to do something besides the gimmicks the assistant majority leader talked about. That would be to increase our drilling capacity. We could do it on ANWR. People talk about the fact that this is pristine wilderness. First of all, I challenge anyone to look at this area. It is not a pristine wilderness. The main thing is, if you take that little area that we have, with huge reserves, we have been trying to do something with it. It compares as a postage stamp does to a football field. It is such a small amount. All the Natives there want it. All the Alaskans want it. It is their land. That would be the first thing we should do to increase our capacity.

We tried this. We passed this 10 years ago. Then President Bill Clinton vetoed it. If he had not, that would be flowing today. All the people who are complaining about that are the same ones who complained about the Alaska pipeline. They said it was going to kill all the caribou. Go up there now during the summer months, and they have increased the number of caribou up there primarily because in some parts of Alaska, the only shade they can find is the Alaskan pipeline. They are all lined up there. So it is not a problem.

The other major area of production potential would be to go offshore. It is interesting. One of the things in this amendment is to allow States to determine what they want to happen offshore. It is interesting, some of the States, such as Virginia, south of where we are standing right now, very much wants to. I have talked to Senator Warner. They are talking about allowing production offshore. Several other States have wanted to do that. It is a wake-up call we have right now that we are going to have to do some of these things. It is interesting that Canada allows offshore drilling in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Great Lakes. Cuba is also looking to expand drilling, which could occur 45 miles off parts of Florida. If this happened, they would be doing it with technology that is much less environmentally friendly than we have right now. So we have the possibility the Cubans are going to be doing something without any emission controls, without any environmental precautions, and we would be allowing it.

Another part of this amendment is to repeal section 526. This is something that should not have been in before. This was actually put in in the Energy bill that was passed in December of 2007. Section 526 prohibits Federal agencies from contracting to produce nonconventional alternative fuels that emit higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions than conventional petroleum sources. The scope of the fuels that could be prohibited is left wide open to interpretation, including fuels such as Canadian oil sands, E85 ethanol, the coal and natural gas-to-liquids fuels. This was an experiment I had something to do with, as did the occupant of the chair, in the Senate Armed Services Committee. We now have a B-52H bomber that is actually running on gas-to-liquid fuel. So we know this is something that works. We know it can help our situation.

What I don't have time to get into because I only had 5 minutes, but I wish to do it later, is the ethanol mandate that came with the December of 2007 bill. Right now we know that ethanol--and quite a few of the far-left environmental extremists were behind this thing to start with; in fact, former Senator Al Gore, Vice President Al Gore has stated he cast the deciding vote to allow ethanol in the first place-- is not environmentally sound. It is expensive. It is not good on engines, and it is competing. In my State of Oklahoma, our livestock people say we can't continue to have the biomass fuels competing with our feedstocks. Almost everything you see that is high priced now in the grocery stores you can trace back to the ethanol mandate. One of the things we will be wanting to do--and I will elaborate on it later-- is to exercise the part of that bill that gives the EPA the opportunity to be involved in a waiver of the ethanol mandate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as one of the Senate's commercially licensed pilots, I wish to talk about an issue near to my heart-- flying. As many in this Chamber know, I have flown thousands of hours, I attend the well-known AirVenture aviation event in Oshkosh, WI, every year, and I have even recreated Wiley Post's trip around the world.

Today, I am here to acknowledge a group of people who share my love of flying--volunteer pilots and nonprofit, charitable associations called Volunteer Pilot Organizations, VPOs, that provide resources to help these self-sacrificing pilots serve people in need. I have introduced an amendment, S.A. 4606, to provide much needed liability protection to these pilots and nonprofit organizations. My legislation is supported by the American Red Cross, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and many volunteer pilot organizations throughout the Nation.

Unfortunately, the majority has used a procedural tactic to restrict my ability to offer this amendment to the bill we are currently debating, the FAA Reauthorization Act. However, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss my amendment and to encourage my colleagues to join me in seeking to pass basic liability protection for volunteer pilots into law at the first opportunity.

There are approximately 40 to 50 VPOs in the United States--ranging from small, local groups to large, national associations. Air Charity Network, ACN, is the Nation's largest VPO and has seven member organizations that collectively serve the entire country and perform about 90 percent of all charitable aviation missions in the United States. ACN's volunteer pilots provide free air transportation for people in need of specialized medical treatment at distant locations. They also step in when commercial air service is not available with middle-of-the-night organ transplant patient flights, disaster response missions evacuating special needs patients, and transport of blood or blood products in emergencies.

ACN and its more than 8,000 volunteer pilots use their own planes, pay for their own fuel, and even take time from their ``day'' jobs to serve people in need. These Good Samaritans provided charitable flights for an estimated 24,000 patients in 2007 and their safety record is phenomenal. In more than 30 years of service, the pilots of ACN have flown over 250,000 missions covering over 80 million miles and have never had a fatal accident.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, ACN aircraft were the first to be approved to fly in disaster-response teams and supplies. Similarly, in 2005, ACN pilots flew over 2,600 missions after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, reuniting families torn apart by the disaster and relocating them to safe housing. Their service was invaluable to thousands of people.

My own State of Oklahoma is served well by a number of volunteer pilot organizations, including Angel Flight South Central and Angel Flight Oklahoma. On a daily basis, they selflessly serve my constituents by flying individuals to get surgeries and treatments.

I would like to share comments from two of my constituents with you. Angela Looney, from Norman, OK, says that, ``I could not have received the care I've gotten without Angel Flight. No one in Norman or anywhere in Oklahoma could perform my surgery. I had to get to M.D. Anderson.'' Tonya Dawson, from Broken Arrow, OK, travels with Angel Flight to treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. She reports, ``The pilots are great. I can't say enough good things.''

Despite this goodwill, there is a loophole in the law that subjects these heroes and charitable organizations to frivolous, costly lawsuits. Currently, although volunteer pilots are required to carry liability insurance, if they have an accident, the injured party can sue for any amount of money. It would be up to a jury to decide on an amount. If that amount is higher than the liability limit on a pilot's insurance, then the pilot risks being held personally responsible, potentially bringing him or her financial ruin.

Additionally, the cost of insurance and lack of available nonowned aircraft liability insurance for organizations since the terrorist attacks of September 11 prevents VPOs from acquiring liability protection for their organizations, boards, and staff. Without this insurance, if a volunteer pilot were to have an accident using his or her own aircraft, everyone connected to the organization could be subject to a costly lawsuit, despite the fact that none of those people were directly involved with the dispatch of the flight, the pilot's decisions, or the aircraft itself.

Exposure to this type of risk makes it difficult for these organizations to recruit and retain volunteer pilots and professional staff. It also makes referring medical professionals and disaster agencies like the American Red Cross less likely to tell patients or evacuees that charitable medical air transportation is available for fear of a liability suit against them. Instead of focusing on serving people with medical needs, these organizations are spending time and resources averting a lawsuit and recruiting volunteers.

In order to close this costly loophole, I have introduced Senate amendment 4606. My amendment expands the Volunteer Protection Act of 1997, which was passed into law to increase volunteerism in the United States, to protect from liability volunteer pilot organizations, their boards, paid staff, nonflying volunteers, and referring agencies, should there be an accident. It also provides liability protection for individual volunteer pilots over and above the liability insurance that they are currently required to carry.

My amendment will go a long way to help eliminate unnecessary liability risk and allow volunteer pilots and the charitable organizations for which they fly to concentrate on what they do best-- save lives.

I ask unanimous consent to have Senate amendment No. 4606 printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I would like to inquire as to how much time I have.

First of all, let me say to my friend from West Virginia, we have done a good job in the areas you are talking about because it was not too long ago that all the AIP concentration was going to big regionals. Due to our efforts, we now have given greater power to the State aeronautic boards, who have a better idea as to what the needs are in the State of West Virginia, my State of Oklahoma.

I think we have come a long way. I would certainly echo what you say. I am a little privileged to be the last active commercial pilot in the Senate, so I take a personal interest in these things.

But there is nothing that can help a community be more viable than a good general aviation airport, an airport that can serve the commercial community. In fact, you can look through our State and see where the communities are not doing well and tie that to the capacity they have-- air traffic capacity.

So I think we are going to be doing a good thing by addressing that this afternoon. That is not why I am here though.

Mr. President, we are in the midst of global food difficulties. You have been seeing it on television, and it is the result of decades of misguided environment and energy policies. As worldwide food availability decreases and prices continue to skyrocket, decades of ill-conceived planning by politicians and bureaucrats right here in Washington, afraid of expanding our energy supplies, are now bearing ugly fruit.

American families and the international community continue to suffer from these misguided policies, and Washington has to take the first step to begin to address these problems. I think we know what the problem is right now. We have mandated certain things to take place in terms of our fuels, it has had a result of increasing prices of food, but it has another unintended consequence; that is, it is diverting the use of corn to go to fuel as opposed to food.

Now, I am here today to demand two dramatic and necessary actions to help mitigate our current biofuel policy blunder. I have always supported all forms of energy, including biofuels, for a diverse and stable energy mix, but currently policy has skewed common sense and violated the principles of sound energy policy.

These effects are being felt in my home State of Oklahoma, where I am hearing concerns regarding ethanol.

Scott Dewald, with the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association, described one aspect of biofuel's unintended consequences on April 28. He said:

Cow-calf producers all the way to the feeding sector are

feeling the pinch of high corn prices. Today's biofuels

policies have completely ignored the costs to the

livestock sector.

Now, first, Congress has to revisit the recently enacted biofuel mandate, which can only be described as the most expansive biofuel mandate in our Nation's history. The mandates were part of last year's--it was December it was taken up--Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Congress has to have the courage to address this issue and to address it now, to recognize we made a mistake in December.

Second, the EPA--this is something people are not aware of, even though this is mandated. EPA has the Congressionally-given authority to waive all or a portion of these food-to-fuel mandates as part of its rulemaking process. The EPA has to thoroughly review all the options to alleviate the food and fuel disruption of the 2007 Energy bill.

A lot of people do not realize and did not think--at the time they thought, well, this is very helpful to the corn States. We all want to help the corn States. My State of Oklahoma also grows corn. But they did not think about the unintended consequences of the cost of all fuel and everything you see on the shelves in the grocery store.

Last summer, when I offered an amendment to the Energy bill that would have put in place a stocks-to-use mechanism to provide the EPA Administrator more flexibility in waiver authority in the instance of crop shortages, I was told by the majority whip my amendment was not necessary.

Incidentally, The Hill newspaper reported yesterday the same majority whip who said my amendment was not necessary now acknowledges that:

U.S. ethanol policies may be partly to blame for a global

food crisis threatening to leave millions hungry.

I am glad to have his support in this concern I am expressing today. During the 2007 floor debate, he said:

There is already a waiver provision in the bill that offers

protection to consumers if corn prices or availability become

unsustainable.

Last June when I offered this amendment, corn was trading at $3.70 a bushel. Less than a year later, corn is now trading at $6 a bushel. Corn prices and availability are now unsustainable. I ask my colleagues who opposed my amendment to now join me in calling for the EPA to exercise its waiver authority provided in the underlying bill.

I am working with my colleague from Texas, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, to urge the EPA to take action. Senator Hutchison also announced she is introducing legislation that will freeze the biofuel mandate at current levels, instead of steadily increasing it through 2022.

Senator Hutchison correctly noted this is a commonsense measure that will reduce pressure on global food prices and restore balance to America's energy policy. The whole world is now reacting to the consequences of overzealous biofuel mandates.

While I supported realistic mandates in the past, I continue to support the development of cellulosic ethanol. I was one of eight Senators who voted against the 2007 Energy bill, with its restrictive biofuel mandates, last December.

On Tuesday, December 4, I joined with several Senators, including Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Ben Cardin, Bernie Sanders, and Susan Collins, in writing a letter to the President to:

. . . urge the administration to carefully evaluate and

respond to unintended public health and safety risks that

could result from the increased use of ethanol as a general

purpose transportation fuel.

The letter noted the administration had called for a national effort to reduce consumers' demand for gasoline by 20 percent in 10 years, in part through increased use of renewable transportation fuels such as ethanol. Sadly, these onerous biofuel mandates, which would significantly increase renewable fuel use, particularly the use of ethanol over the next two decades, became law.

Since December, the world has been confronted with irrefutable evidence that our current biofuels mandates are having massive and potentially life-threatening consequences. Once again, we are reminded how restrictive Government mandates and ill-advised bureaucratic meddling produce unintended consequences. Trying to centrally manage and plan a global food distribution network and economy through clumsy, unrealistically high mandates has been a proven failure.

An April 28 article on our current biofuel mandates in the National Review, by Phil Kepren and James Valvo, detailed the mindset of bureaucratic planners.

Each new generation of central planners believes the

previous generation wasn't smart enough. Yet central economic

planning is forever doomed to failure since the approach

itself limits human freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and

innovation.

To put it in other terms, as Ronald Reagan said: ``The more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.''

A large auto manufacturer has erected a billboard for their lineup of so-called eco-friendly cars that run on ethanol that is currently being prominently displayed not far from the Capitol. This advertisement--I saw it yesterday--asks a simple question: ``Why drill for fuel when you can grow it?''

That sounds like a politically correct question, to which the auto company's marketing team must have thought was an obvious answer. Let me allow world leaders and mainstream media outlets, the UN, and former believers in mandated Government standards to further answer the billboard's marketing campaign in no uncertain terms; that is, what the question is: Why drill for fuel when you can grow it?

The answer is found in India's Finance Minister's statement he made earlier this month. He said:

When millions of people are going hungry, it's a crime

against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said:

Food prices were raising the specter of famine in certain

countries. A conflict is emerging between foodstuffs and fuel

. . . with disastrous social conflicts and dubious

environmental results.

The United Kingdom Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has called for a reevaluation of biofuels. He said:

Now that we know that biofuels, intended to promote energy

independence and combat climate change, are frequently energy

inefficient we need to look closely at the impact on food

prices and the environment of different production methods

and to ensure we are more selective in our support.

The Scotsman Brown also noted hunger is:

the number one threat to public health across the world,

responsible for a third of child deaths. Tackling hunger is a

moral challenge for each of us.

The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, has now called for:

an investigation into whether the push for biofuels is to

blame for rising food prices.

According to an article in the United Kingdom Register, the EU may:

cancel its target of requiring 10 percent of petro and diesel

to be biofuel by 2020.

That is what they are doing in the United Kingdom. Now they recognize they made a mistake. The article explained:

Recent weeks have seen riots over food prices in Egypt,

Haiti, Indonesia and Mauritania. Rice prices have hit record

levels this year and several countries have banned exports.

India has renewed a ban on all exports of nonbasmati rice.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned in April that high food prices could wipe out progress in reducing poverty and hurt global economic growth. The U.N. Secretary-General said:

This steeply rising price of food has developed into a real

global crisis.

He called for world leaders to meet on an urgent basis. You know, it is funny that I have been quoting the United Nations. I am probably the biggest critic of the United Nations in this Chamber. But I have also been very active over the years in Africa and doing the very thing we are trying to do now, to make sure that fewer people starve to death.

The head of the U.N. world food agency summed up global food difficulties this way. He said:

A silent tsunami which knows no borders is sweeping the

world.

On April 25, the U.N. food agency chief, Jacques Diouf, warned of possible civil war in some countries because of global food shortages.

I wish to pause a moment and note that some of the rhetoric by the United Nations and others may be a bit over the top and prone to hyped alarmism. I have taken to this Chamber many times to debunk so-called environmental crises and media manipulation of environmental issues.

I do not want to now be accused of overhyping our current global food situation. But please do not let over-the-top rhetoric obscure the fact that the world is currently facing a serious biofuel mandates problem and needs remedying.

Ironically, the anti-energy environmental left has spent decades worrying over various crises that never seem to materialize. You have to give the environmentalists credit, they may finally get their bona fide crisis, but alas, it will be one created by the very policies they advocated.

It is kind of interesting because we can recall the environmentalist community advocating the use of ethanol and the mandates and then not recognizing this creates a greater pollution problem as well as a starvation problem.

The most interesting is the mainstream news outlets have now turned on biofuels and, in particular, corn ethanol. Publications that normally uncritically parrot the leftwing environmental agenda are now among the biggest denouncers of our current biofuel policies.

The New York Times, for example, has stated:

Soaring food prices, driven in part by demand for ethanol

made from corn, have helped slash the amount of food aid the

government buys to its lowest level in a decade, possibly

resulting in more hungry people around the world this year.

Time magazine was blunt in an April 7, 2008, article titled ``The Clean Energy Scam,'' by reporter Michael Grunwald, who wrote that our current policies on corn ethanol are ``environmentally disastrous.'' ``The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started,'' Grunwald wrote.

Time magazine also featured Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney who said:

People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad.

But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that

store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less

carbon, it becomes obvious.

Time magazine also said the rising prices were ``spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon [rain forest] at an increasingly alarming rate.''

Former CBS newsman Dan Rather has also weighed in. Rather wrote on April 27:

When more acreage is devoted to corn for ethanol, less is

available for food production.

In this case I agree with Dan Rather. He said:

Here in the United States, food is less often a matter of

life and death, but it is putting an additional dangerous

strain on families who are already struggling to get by in a

faltering economy.

Rather added:

Already there are reports of charitable food pantries

unable to meet the needs of those they serve.

The New York Sun put it bluntly about the impact of our policies: ``Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World.'' That was an article on April 21.

A 2007 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels ``offer a cure [for oil dependency] that is worse than the disease.'' Other organizations have weighed in. The National Academy of Sciences conducted a study finding corn-based ethanol may strain water supplies. The American Lung Association has raised air pollution concerns from the burning of ethanol in gasoline. Cornell ecology professor David Pimental called our current ethanol policy a ``boondoggle.''

Pimental said:

It does require 30 [percent] more energy oil equivalents to

produce a gallon of ethanol than you actually get out, and it

causes a lot of severe environmental problems. This is very

significant. It takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce 1

gallon of ethanol.

No one ever talked about that last December.

Friends of the Earth has urged the UK to abandon its current biofuel targets, which I believe they are now doing. Food campaigner Vicky Hird from Friends of the Earth said:

[UK Prime Minister] Gordon Brown is right to be concerned

about the impact of biofuels on food prices and the

environment. Evidence is growing that they cause more harm

than good. Food production must be revolutionized to prevent

a global catastrophe.

Jane Goodall, the internationally famous primate conservationist, warned about biofuels and the impact on the rain forests in Asia, Africa, and South America:

We're cutting down forests now to grow sugar cane and palm

oil for biofuels.

She said this in September of last year.

The group, Clean Air Task Force, recently reported that nearly 12 million hectares of peat land in Indonesia has been converted to accommodate a palm oil plantation. The land was reportedly drained, cleared, and burned for conversion to a plantation.

Even Miles O'Brien of CNN, a man of whom I have been harshly critical, and yet a man I consider to be a good friend in spite of our honest differences of opinion, and I are together on this issue. He reported on CNN on February 21:

If every last ear of corn in America were used for ethanol,

it would reduce our oil consumption by only 7 percent.

He is right. O'Brien also reported:

Corn ethanol is not as clean, efficient, or practical as

politicians claim.

I agree with this. I am glad to find something on which my good pilot friend and I can agree.

Lester Brown, who has been dubbed ``the guru of the environmental movement,'' has added his voice in opposition to our current biofuels policies. Brown cowrote, on April 22:

It is in this spirit that today, Earth Day, we call upon

Congress to revisit recently enacted Federal mandates

requiring the diversion of foodstuffs for production of

biofuels.

Brown wrote that our current biofuel mandate was ``causing environmental harm and contributing to a growing global food crisis.''

Brown continued:

Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting

global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising in twice the

rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbook of lower income

Americans and people living on fixed incomes.

America must stop contributing to food price inflation

through mandates that force us to use food to feed our cars

instead of to feed people.

Brown concluded:

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel

mandates have failed. Congress took a big chance on biofuels

that, unfortunately, has not worked out. Now, in the spirit

of progress, let us learn the appropriate lessons from this

setback, and let us act quickly to mitigate the damage and

set upon a new course that holds greater promise for meeting

the challenges ahead.

I agree. Not very often do we agree, but I do agree with that because there is something we can do about this. When you have Lester Brown, Miles O'Brien, Dan Rather, Time magazine, the New York Times, the United Nations, and Jim Inhofe all in agreement on changing an environmental policy, you can rest assured the policy is horribly misguided. All of these publications and individuals now realize the pure folly of the Federal Government's biofuel mandate.

You might ask, how did we get here? I would say, when the Republicans were the majority party, I was the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. I worked successfully with my colleagues to create a comprehensive yet measured approach. The result of this work, the Reliable Fuels Act, was ultimately incorporated into the 2005 Energy bill. This original renewable fuels standard--that is, the RFS-- took a commonsense approach in that it prescribed just 4 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2006, growing to a feasible 5.5 billion gallons in 2012. This low rampup allowed time and flexibility for the many foreseen and unforeseen challenges likely to surface with the implementation of such a program. Under my leadership, the committee held at least 13 hearings on the RFS program, examining issues from the future of transportation fuels to the most recent and, unfortunately, last oversight hearing in September 2006 which highlighted the implementation of the RFS program.

However, despite the enormous amount of attention and the eventual legislative enactment of that now greatly expanded RFS program, the EPW Committee has failed to hold even one hearing on RFS this Congress.

This morning I challenged the chairman of that committee. I am still ranking member, but I challenged Chairman Boxer to hold such a hearing. Despite the EPW Committee's failure to conduct any oversight, by 2007 it had become increasingly clear that to double the RFS mandate into a shorter timeframe would prove reckless and premature. Yet many in Congress refuse to acknowledge the many warning signs.

The 2007 Energy bill mandated 36 million gallons of biofuels by 2022. Of this, 15 billion gallons are now required from corn-based ethanol by just 2015. Washington was abuzz last year with talk of energy independence, cutting our reliance on foreign sources of energy, increasing supplies of fuels, investing in biofuels, lowering the price of energy, especially prices at the pump--all fine goals. Yet this Congress's actions didn't meet its rhetoric. I believe a secure energy supply has to be grounded in three principles: stability, diversity, and affordability. Our policies have to promote domestic energy production, including oil, gas, nuclear, corn, as well as renewable fuels.

I have said this over and over. We need all of the above to meet the energy crisis in America. What the Democrats and the green movement failed to understand is environmental regulations are not free. They have a very real price. We should be producing more fuel at home. It is good for our security, good for jobs, good for consumers.

Working with Congressman Frank Lucas, I sponsored and secured Senate passage of the first national transitional assistance program to help farmers grow dedicated energy crops for cellulosic biofuels. This measure is vital to the development of cellulosic biofuels in the United States because it would encourage U.S. agricultural producers within a 50-mile radius of a cellulosic biorefinery to produce nonfood energy crops for clean burning fuel.

In addition, I am proud of the research taking place in my State of Oklahoma. It is being done by the Noble Foundation and its partners. By focusing on cellulosic ethanol, we can stimulate a biofuels industry that doesn't compete with other domestic agriculture. Since you can grow it all over the country--and that is not to be said about corn-- you avoid the transportation problems of Midwest-focused ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can increase both energy and economic security.

Washington has a long way to go to get energy policy right. The future of energy is going to require a wide variety of fuels and approaches. We all need to work together to achieve our common goals. The only way they can defeat us is to divide and conquer. We have seen examples of that recently. But we all need to work together. I call on all of my colleagues today to set aside our differences and work together for an abundant, secure, and environmentally sound energy policy.

It is worth repeating that when you have Lester Brown, Miles O'Brien, Dan Rather, Time magazine, New York Times, the United Nations, and Jim Inhofe all in agreement on changing an environmental policy, you can rest assured that the policy is horribly misguided. All of these publications and individuals now realize the pure folly of the Federal Government's current biofuel mandates. Once again, I call on Congress to revisit the enactment of this mandate.

Secondly, what we have to do--and I still am the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee which has jurisdiction over the EPA--is to call upon EPA to put a stop to the mandate now. It can be done while they are trying to determine what effect this has on our food supplies. The only way to do it is to stop the mandate while the review is taking place. People are starving to death because of this transfer from food to fuel.

As the ranking member of the EPW Committee, which has jurisdiction, I am going to ask for an immediate waiver to stop this mandate.

I yield the floor to my good friend from Kansas who agrees with everything I just said.

We are ready.

Madam President, I think we have talked enough on this bill. Everyone knows what it is. We have to get our road construction programs going. We cannot do it without an ``aye'' vote on this motion. I urge you to vote aye.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, I agree with the comments made by the chairman. It is my understanding we are down to maybe three amendments. I have talked to Senator Coburn, who has an amendment, as well as Senator Bond. It is my hope that Senator DeMint will be able to present his amendment. Then it is my understanding we will hold votes until early this afternoon and maybe try to get some of the others out of the way. Being a conservative, I want to make sure everybody understands: A technical corrections bill is always necessary when we have a major reauthorization of transportation. There are some things in here that are borderline. One case, in my State of Oklahoma, in Durant, I mistakenly said 200 yesterday, but it is $300,000 on a road program that the Department of Transportation came back and said: We thought we were ready for this, but we

are not. But we are, on down the road in Idabel.

It is common sense that that is where it should be done. It is the same amount of money. I agree with the principle behind the amendment of the Senator from South Carolina, but in this case we have to have the technical corrections bill in order to go forward with a lot of the projects that have been authorized since 2005. I am hopeful we will be able to proceed along those lines.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I will just be a moment. I see the Senator from Florida wants the floor. But let me, first of all, say that this is right. In my State of Oklahoma, we had some things for which it took 7 years for this bill to come into reality. The reauthorization is something we should do every other year, but we did not do it.

When you pass a bill of this magnitude--and, look, I have to say there is no one person in this body of 100 Senators who is more conservative than I am. That is what all the ratings say. ACLU has me as No. 1. So it is not a matter of conservative versus liberal. This is a matter of doing what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to defend America. We are supposed to work on the infrastructure. We have been doing it since the National Highway System came into effect back in the Eisenhower administration.

But I had two changes that were in my bill. I had a light signalization that was meant to take place in Tulsa, OK. This is a modernization, using new technology. However, in the original bill, it said ``Oklahoma.'' It did not say ``Tulsa, OK,'' when clearly that was our intent. So the Department of Transportation of Oklahoma said: Put in ``Tulsa'' so we know where that belongs.

The other one, which I have already mentioned, was the $300,000 for a project. Actually, it was a feasibility study in Durant, OK, in southern Oklahoma. Then they found out later that you are better off doing it down the road from there in Idabel. Consequently, if we are forced not to be able to make that technical correction, we would be forced to spend $300,000 on something we are not ready to do.

So the important thing to get across to people is that this technical corrections bill does not increase the total amount of authorizations that are taking place right now from the 2005 bill. It is the same amount. I do not want people to think it is not, because it is, and that is an irrefutable fact.

I kind of agree with the chairman of the committee when she talks about that this will kill the bill. It would if it went back and they could not move it, the House would not accept this. This is one of the most difficult things to deal with when we are doing the authorization bill because every time we finally get an agreement here, we have to go over there and get the same thing--Democrats and Republicans here and Democrats and Republicans there. I just don't want to put ourselves in a position where we send anything over there that could kill this bill because this is necessary to finally finish the implementation of the 2005 Transportation authorization bill.

So with that, I will yield the floor, and I will have more to say later.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I have 1 minute to respond.

Mr. President, we talked about this before. First of all, I am coming from a very conservative perspective. Looking at this and also looking at the infrastructure needs we have, we want to make sure the technical corrections bill is not killed because that will stop all the activity going on that is so desperately needed in South Carolina as well as the rest of the country.

There is no increase in the technical corrections bill in the amount of authorization. That is very important for people to know. We talk about projects and assume they are projects that were not considered before. The top line is an amount of authorization that is the same. It has not increased at all. So I contend, with all due respect to one of my closest friends and fellow conservatives, that the conservative position is to stay with the technical corrections bill.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the committee. This is something we have spent a long time on. I think it is very important for all of us on both sides of the aisle to understand that what we are considering here is not the transportation reauthorization bill of 2005. That was done. That is history. That is behind us. A technical corrections bill is common with every bill, every major piece of legislation that comes along. Sometimes in the case--I will go ahead and say in my case of Oklahoma, we had a major project that was about a $200,000 project in Durant, OK in which, according to our transportation commissioner and the Transportation Department of Oklahoma, that same amount

of money could be better spent doing the same project but at another location. Well, that takes a technical change. There is no difference.

I say to all of my good friends, there is no one who is more conservative than I am by all ratings in my last 22 years in both the House and the Senate. There are no new projects. There is no new spending. The amount of money that was authorized is the same amount of money that is authorized at the present time in the technical corrections bill. So it is not somehow getting some kind of an earmark or something else in it.

I have often said that of all of the systems we use in Washington to accomplish things, probably the transportation system is the best. I don't know of anyone who complains about paying into the highway trust fund when they get gasoline. They want to be sure it is going to go to building highways, repairing bridges. But what we do in the State of Oklahoma is we have eight transportation districts, eight transportation commissioners, all geographically located. They make recommendations. What I do with a transportation bill is I leave it up to them to make the determination as to where that goes. The States are making those decisions. The highway trust fund--there are some States where the money doesn't go straight into transportation. They have been robbing balances of the highway trust fund for as long as I know. We have corrected that problem in the State of Oklahoma. Instead of having it go to other causes, it goes to correcting the crisis we are in right now.

I wish to say that for those of us who are conservatives, this is something that works well. If there is any function of government that needs to be addressed and has to be addressed at the Federal level, it is our roads and highways. We have States such as Montana, big States that have very few people. You still have to get across them. You have the congested eastern States that have the opposite situation. That is why way back in the Eisenhower administration they decided to go in together and create this system we still have today. It is one that has worked fairly well. I don't want people out there to think this is something that has a bunch of projects and a bunch of earmarks in it. It doesn't. This is something we spent 2 or 3 years intensively working on prior to its passage in 2005. Now we want to make these corrections to make sure the rest of the projects get done.

Here is the dilemma we have right now. We have a lot of projects--not nearly enough but a lot of projects--that we authorized in 2005. If we don't have technical corrections, we are up against the wall now where we can't get anything more done, and we have given our word to people all throughout the country that we are going to improve bridges, we are going to try to save lives, and it has virtually stopped because we have certain corrections that need to be made.

What we dealt with on that very large, what was it, $286 billion over the period of 2005 through 2009, which is a lot of money, that doesn't do anything more--it doesn't even maintain what we already have. We don't even have a lot of new stuff in there. There is not a person in America who doesn't know we have a crisis. Some of these Members of this committee or this body, if you don't think it is a crisis, call your wife at home, or your husband, and they will tell you it is a crisis. It is worse every year. It is not something that we can make a decision today and all come to our good senses and get it done and it will be done tomorrow. It is a long lead time. It is a complicated process. But it is one of the things that has worked well.

I know there are a lot of people who want to satisfy some constituency that says you are spending too much money. You tell that constituency to go out and drive in the traffic for a while and see what kind of serious problems we have.

I have often said--and I have followed this myself--we all in this body have different priorities. That is what makes it a representative body. I have often said we need to, No. 1, take care of our Nation's security, have a military that can defend our country; No. 2, take care of the infrastructure we have and move forward with that; and No. 3, which is kind of a pet thing with me, and I think everyone who has previously been a mayor of a major city--unfunded mandates is another area that I feel this governing body should be paying attention to. But we have a bill. We have a bill that is working now. We are improving highways. We are adding lanes. But we have come to a stop. I think anyone who tries to keep this from becoming a reality doesn't want to address a serious problem we are faced with.

No one else is going to do it for us. The States can't do it. It has to be done by the Federal Government. We passed a bill. We are going to be coming up against another bill next year when this runs out in 2009. We are going to be reauthorizing for the next 5 years or 7 years or maybe even longer. But this has to be done and we need to get it done now.

We do have several amendments. I understand the concern of the Senator from South Carolina who has made his statements, and he has done so very eloquently. Frankly, I agree with almost everything he says. The only thing I disagree with is that this bill isn't creating new projects, isn't spending new money. We need, in his State as well as my State and in all 50 States, to get on with this. I hope people realize these are not new projects; it is not an increase in spending. It doesn't spend at all; it is an authorization bill.

Another amendment that is going to be pending is that of my good friend Senator Bond from Missouri. He has a special concern, and I encourage him to come down to the floor to bring it up, debate it, and let's vote on it and get that done. Then my junior Senator has a concern over something that is a process that happened--it didn't even happen here, but it happened in the other body. Now, I agree with him, it is something that was egregious and needs to be investigated. I think it should be. I think there are a lot of different ways of doing it. I want to join hands with him and get this done.

So we, to my knowledge, only have those three things that are out there that are holding this up. I would invite those three authors to come down. I think while we are not going to be having votes tonight, we can start debating these tonight, and tomorrow morning we could actually vote on some of these. But I agree with the chairman of the committee, Senator Boxer, and the majority and the minority leaders in this body that we need to get it done. We are not going to get it done until we get the amendments down here, debate them, and decide what is the will of this body. That is what we are supposed to be doing for a living around here. That is what happens.

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

Mr. President, today I wish to honor Jennifer Joy Wilson. For the past decade, Ms. Wilson has served first as the head of the National Stone Association, and then after the merger of two similar groups, as the president and CEO of the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, NSSGA. Based in Alexandria, VA, NSSGA is the world's largest mining association by product volume. Its member companies represent more than 90 percent of the crushed stone and 70 percent of the sand and gravel produced annually in the United States and approximately 118,000 working men and women in the aggregates industry. During 2006, a total of about 2.95 billion metric tons of crushed stone, sand and gravel, valued at $21 billion, were produced and sold in the United States.

This year Ms. Wilson has been given the distinguished honor of being selected as AggMan of the Year by Aggregates Manager magazine, one of the construction aggregates industry's leading trade publications.

During her tenure, the NSSGA led an effort to improve employee safety in the aggregate industry by developing new safety procedures, called Part 46, for the U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration, MSHA. The joint industry-labor effort produced a proposal ``that would apply better to our industry and provide managers and workers with effective means to prevent accidents and fatalities.'' By all accounts, Part 46 has shown remarkable success in reducing employee injuries.

On February 11, 2003, an alliance between NSSGA and MSHA was announced. Signed at the NSSGA's Centennial Convention in Orlando, FL, the agreement calls for the two bodies to work closely together on the promotion of safe working conditions, the development of effective miner training programs, and the expansion of the mine safety and health outreach and communication. ``For the first time ever, MSHA and an industry association have jointly agreed to adopt safety and health performance goals with objective measures,'' then MSHA Administrator Dave Lauriski said during that meeting. ``This alone is unprecedented . . . NSSGA is again showing its leadership.''

On the environmental front, Ms. Wilson led the industry in investing in a study ``righting an assumption we just didn't believe was right.'' Through the efforts of the association and its members, it was determined that the aggregates industry is not a major emitter of PM- 10--a particular type of air pollutant. The final regulations reflected the investment by the industry in recognizing that aggregate operations are not a major source of coarse particulate matter.

Considering almost half of all crushed stone, sand and gravel produced in the United States is used for building the Nation's transportation infrastructure, Ms. Wilson has led her members in establishing a strong grassroots presence connecting the industry's workforce with their elected officials while increasing their activity on Capitol Hill. Leveraging the association's resources, Ms. Wilson has also worked closely with industry coalitions to advocate for sound and sensible transportation policies.

Ms. Wilson has also worked to raise awareness of the public, legislators, and of regulators at all levels to the immeasurably important role aggregates play in maintaining America's high quality of life. She calls this effort ``romancing the stone'' which includes her leadership in establishing The Rocks gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and creating a permanent endowment to support the gallery, all totaling more than $3.1 million.

Many people have been able to take credit for industry accomplishments, but selection as AggMan of the Year denotes something not everyone can lay claim to--respect of one's peers. For this reason I stand here today to take a moment and congratulate a woman who has done so much for America and the good people in the aggregates industry all the while earning their respect.

Let me use some of the time for the issue at hand. First of all, I wish to talk about the technical corrections bill that is going to be voted on in about 15 minutes--not the bill but the motion to proceed to the bill.

The Transportation bill that we are involved in, that Senator Boxer and I were involved in back in 2005, that we passed August 10 of 2005, authorized $286 billion in transportation and infrastructure spending for fiscal years 2005 through 2009.

Now, let me say that as a conservative standing here, that is a huge

number. I think that may have been the largest nondefense spending bill at the time up to that time. But it is interesting that if we spend all of that, it is not going to even maintain what we have today.

That is why we put into the bill a committee to look into new ways of funding infrastructure, new ways of funding transportation. We have been doing it the same way since President Eisenhower, and it is time we tried something different.

I think there is a resistance to continuing to increase taxes as the only way of funding our infrastructure. Included in the bill are recommended technical changes from the Department of Transportation that address functional problems in implementing the bill, technical changes to safety products which will continue to be delayed from breaking ground due to simple drafting errors and descriptions.

Furthermore, universities and other transportation research entities will not receive their fully intended funding, and the States will be unable to use millions of dollars in transportation funds that were authorized 3 years ago.

Something that is interesting, the bill does not increase the overall size of SAFETEA. I have heard a lot of people say: Well, this is a big spending bill. First of all, it is not a spending bill, it is an authorizing bill. But the technical corrections are also an authorization.

Now, it is my understanding, and I believe it is true, that the total amount of authorization that was in the bill itself is not changed by the technical corrections bill.

A lot of people are implying it is. I do not believe it is. We have had staff and ourselves looking at it. It may change some of the priorities in the authorization, but the overall figure, the top line, is going to be the same.

Several of my colleagues have approached me recently with additional project fixes. In some cases, I have had to say no to their requests because they either submitted them too late to be considered in our negotiations with the House--the request went beyond the scope of a technical fix--or because the proposed fix was to a House project which the House objected to. Let's keep in mind, we have two Houses working on this. We have the Senate and the House of Representatives. This is a difficult type of legislation to get passed. But one thing you can't do is start making changes and anticipate that the House is going to go along with those changes, because I can tell my colleagues, they will not do it. Our House colleagues have passed this bill several times, but each time it comes over to the Senate it has been held up.

The bill before us, along with the manager's substitute amendment, is the commutation of negotiations between the House and the Senate. Any changes to the bill at this point will require the concurrence of the House or the bill will not proceed. Therefore, I ask my colleagues to understand that if they are planning on filing an amendment before the chairman and I can agree to it, we need to determine if our counterparts in the House would find it to be agreeable. I suggest they probably will not.

I heard about an hour ago, when I arrived in Washington, that it might be that the administration could have some objections. I am having a hard time understanding how that could be. First, they supported the bill. They signed the bill when it first passed in August of 2005. Technical corrections is a common thing. It does not have a net increase in authorizations. I can't see why it would be. I understand there would be one provision having to do with rapid transit that would not be in our committee. It was not in the committee chaired by Senator Boxer and formerly chaired by me. It is in the Banking Committee. So we want to look at that. If that is the objection, I certainly believe we can talk to the administration and keep them from opposing it.

We have some amendments that have been discussed. I have not been here long enough to find out this week if people are going to come forward with their amendments. My junior Senator, Mr. Coburn, makes a very good point on a project down in Florida called Coconut Road, that there have been some problems. Apparently, all those have been corrected. The only thing I wish to talk to my junior Senator about is if he wants to examine this, investigate this, that is a good idea. It is already being done. However, we have enough committees and commissions around this place, thousands of them. I am not sure we need another one. That is something we might want to debate. I know Senator Bond has an amendment that he has discussed. I look forward to visiting with him. Any of these amendments, yes, we want to talk about them. But keep in mind, we do have this commitment that we have a technical corrections bill that has to pass or we cannot implement those provisions that otherwise are going to allow us to correct some of the problems we have.

Again, here I am, a conservative, saying this is not adequate, what we have done today. We have another one that should be coming up next year. Hopefully, it will. Sometimes it doesn't happen like it should. But in the meantime, I want that committee that is supposed to be examining the way we have historically funded roads and highways and infrastructure to come up with some ideas. There are experiments in different States right now. But we will have to recognize the fact that this country has got to have infrastructure for it to survive.

In conclusion, I assure my colleagues that I appreciate their responsiveness to our numerous requests to advise the committee of their requests, thereby assisting us to help them. If we were unable to satisfactorily address their concerns in this bill, there will be additional opportunities do so when we reauthorize SAFETEA, and that reauthorization should be under way next year.

With that, I hope those who object to this will at least let us proceed to this bill. Then we can look at it and see if there are any of the amendments that we feel would not violate the agreement between the Senate and House and would have the effect of killing the whole bill.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a moment?

I neglected to mention that when we went through this long and arduous legislation initially, there are probably not two Members of the Senate who are more opposed to each other philosophically than the two of us, Senator Boxer and myself. But we recognize that the process we used is one that is fair. We developed criteria. There are projects in here that met the criteria. Some of them I would oppose personally, but nonetheless, you have to come up with a bill if you are going to have roads to travel and infrastructure to serve this great Nation.

I compliment Senator Boxer in working with me on some of the problems I had initially with this bill.

Madam President, let me say I do agree with what Senator Boxer says, although it is a little bit

more than that. Not only does it not spend more, it doesn't authorize more. I think that is very important for people to understand. There is some confusion from some things I have read in different publications that make it appear that we have increased the authorization. Some things have been moved around, but the bottom line is it has remained unchanged.

The other thing that is important to repeat is that as big as this bill was, the 2005 bill we are scheduled to get into again next year, in 2009, it still doesn't take care of the problem. We have a problem in this country with the $286 billion figure; it doesn't even maintain what we have today. That is critical. I am hoping the committee that was established for the purpose of exploring new ways of funding transportation will come up with something a little more creative than they have so far because we are not going to be able to do it just by redoing and expanding what Eisenhower started many years ago. So we need to have this bill in order to go ahead and finish the projects that we have authorized and that are paid for at this time, and we won't do it unless we can pass this bill.

So I hope anyone--I would agree with Senator Boxer--anyone with amendments, let's bring them down and talk about them, and I am available to talk, and I am doing that as we speak. I have spoken with a couple of Members who have talked about an amendment. So if you have any amendments, bring them down so Senator Boxer and I can visit with you about the amendments.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first, I associate myself much with the remarks of Senator McConnell. Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee and having been in that theater more than any other Member from the very beginning, it is so obvious to see what the cost of defeat would be. When you look at Iran and Ahmadinejad saying that if the Americans cut and run, ``there will be a void and we will fill that void,'' it would be a disaster for freedom and that would bring the fight from over there over to our soil. We cannot let that happen.

Mr. President, having returned a few days ago from my 14th trip in the area, I think it is particularly meaningful to remember the life and sacrifice of a remarkable young man, Army Staff Sergeant Christopher Hake. Chris died on the 23rd of March, 2008, of injuries he sustained when an IED detonated near his Bradley fighting vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq.

Chris grew up in Enid, OK, with two sisters, Shannon and Keri, and two brothers, Zachary and Skylar. I was in Enid yesterday. I looked around and I could see the area, the type of place where Chris grew up. He spent his time, as most Oklahoma boys did, attending school, playing ball, driving his car, spending time with family and friends, and going to church. His strong faith in Jesus matured during his time at Oklahoma Bible Academy. While there, he became very involved in his youth group and traveled to Mexico on a mission trip. Unsure of what he wanted to do after graduating from Oklahoma Bible Academy, Chris enlisted in the Army in 2000.

Chris excelled during basic training in Fort Benning and was selected to serve as a member of the ``Old Guard''--one of the oldest and most respected infantry regiments in the U.S. Army. As a member of the Old Guard, Chris was responsible for guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery and escorting deceased Army servicemembers to their final rest in the ``Garden of Stone,'' as Arlington is sometimes called. While serving in the Old Guard unit, the Pentagon was attacked on September 11. Chris was immediately called upon to clear the Pentagon after the attack. This solidified Chris's commitment to the fight for freedom in the world and to protect the people of America. He saw that opportunity in Iraq.

In 2004, Chris transferred to the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, GA. While home during the summer of 2004, he met Kelli Short and it was love at first sight. They married on 21 December 2004, and Chris deployed on his first Iraq tour in January.

Chris was disillusioned after his first tour, feeling many of the decisions being made back in DC were negatively impacting their ability to accomplish the mission. I know this is true because I talked to the troops when I was over there on the 14 trips I have made. As we speak, in the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Petraeus is telling us the truth about what is happening over there.

Chris returned to Fort Stewart after his year in Iraq, and on October 14, 2006, Kelli gave birth to Gage Christopher Michael Hake.

Chris was both a loving husband and a proud father. His focus and love was his family--spending time with them, playing games with them, sitting for hours just to be with them, working on their house together.

Chris returned to Iraq on his second tour in October of 2007. He fought back his emotions as he said goodbye to his 1-year-old son, but he knew what he had to do and why. He loved serving his country. Once in Iraq again, Chris saw a difference in the mission and what was happening with the Iraqi people.

During his second tour, Chris said he knew he should be there and talked of the love of the Iraqi people for him and the troops. Pete Hake, Chris's father, remembered him saying: ``You couldn't pay me to come home early.'' That is the kind of dedication Chris and so many others have.

On Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008, Chris Hake tragically died of injuries he sustained when an IED detonated near his vehicle in Baghdad. Three other soldiers of his battalion and under his command were killed alongside Chris. Chris's father recounted that Chris had said, ``They would die for each other,'' and they did. They gave the ultimate sacrifice in serving their country.

In a recent e-mail to his mom and dad, he said he wanted to dedicate his second tour in Iraq to becoming a closer follower of Jesus. Chris wrote:

If anything were to happen to me, Gage would always be able

to know that his father died so he could live in peace. I

know Jesus did the same for me, so it is comforting. I don't

have a nervous bone in my body this time. I am more at peace

than I have been my whole life.

On March 31, Chris returned to Oklahoma and was greeted by an honor guard from Fort Sill, members of the Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle group, Airmen from Vance Air Force Base, and a mass of fellow Oklahomans to honor this American hero. It was obvious he held the respect of so many, and he was a beloved son, father, and husband.

I read through some of the comments written in Chris's online guest book, and I would like to share a few of these with you:

Thank you for your sacrifice--my children will know what

men like you have done for them.

I am the mom of a soldier serving in Iraq and just wanted

to tell you how proud I am of your son, husband, and daddy.

Know that 1st Squad will always maintain and exceed the

standards you have set. We miss you.

I read through all of the entries and cried. I hope it is

comforting to know that there are so many of us praying for

you.

John 15:13--Greater love has no one than this, that he lay

down his life for his friends.

The ``Spartans'' will keep you close to our hearts forever

in time.

Thank you for being my son. Thank you for Gage, a little

copy of you. Thank you for fighting and making a stand.

Goodbye, my son, my baby boy, my U.S. soldier, my pride and

joy.

Today, we remember Staff Sergeant Chris Hake, a young man who loved his

family and loved his country. Chris was doing the Lord's work, and the Lord is richly blessing him now.

I yield the floor.