Floor Statements

Mr. President, I wish to speak briefly in response to the comments of my colleague and friend from South Carolina, Senator Graham, about the amendment which I intend to offer at an appropriate time on the Defense authorization bill.

I say, in all respect to the Senator from South Carolina, he has totally misread the amendment. He has totally mischaracterized it. This amendment does not, as he said, require the Government to either release everyone at Guantanamo or charge those individuals.

It is very clear in the amendment. It starts out by saying, ``Except as provided in subsection (b),'' and then it goes on to say:

Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of the

law, an alien who is detained by the Secretary of Defense

shall, consistent with applicable law, be charged or

repatriated or released.

But then obviously the exception is what we start out with there. It says the exception under paragraph (b) is that with respect to an alien described in the first section, subsection (a), who is not charged or repatriated or released within this 180 days, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of the Congress a detailed report as to each such alien that includes, and then it specifies the information that needs to be included.

Essentially, it says the Department of Defense shall go ahead and charge these individuals with criminal activity or it shall repatriate them to their home country, an appropriate country, or it shall release them, or it shall give us a report and explain what its plans are with regard to these individuals and why it is not taking one of the previous actions. That is not the characterization or the description that the Senator from South Carolina just went through.

This amendment does not require that any enemy combatant be released. It is clear in its language that it does not require that. It does not require the release of people ``en masse,'' which was the language the Senator from South Carolina used. It does not require us to release people who are then believed to have the motivation of getting, as the Senator from South Carolina said, back into the fight.

This does not in any way restrict what the Department of Defense does. It just says the Department of Defense has various options, but we are going to begin to understand what action the Department of Defense is taking with these individuals.

It can charge them with a crime, it can repatriate them to their home country, it can release them, or it can tell us, the Congress, the appropriate committees of the Congress, what it intends to do and what action and what factors cause it to not want to take one of those previous actions. That is a very straightforward amendment.

I think anyone who is opposed to that amendment basically says we, the Congress, have no responsibility for oversight, the appropriate committees of the Congress have no responsibility to concern themselves with what is being done with these prisoners at Guantanamo, and I think that is a very unfortunate message for us to send.

The amendment goes on to provide that in the report to the appropriate committees of the Congress, if the Department of Defense wishes to submit part or all of that in classified form, it can do so. To the extent it is not required to be in classified form, it would, of course, be a public report.

This is a very modest amendment. In fact, the criticism I have heard from people who have generally been aware that I might offer this amendment is: Why does this amendment give the Department of Defense an out? It says with regard to each of these individuals, either charge them with a crime, repatriate them, release them, or tell us what your other plan is, if you have some other plan that you believe is required under the circumstance. That is the very least that this Congress should be doing with regard to these individuals.

I, frankly, do not want to ask this Congress to resolve the question of the legality of what is going on at Guantanamo. Some of that is being determined in the courts, as it should be determined in the courts. But, clearly,

this Congress has some oversight responsibility. This Congress should be insisting that the Department of Defense specify what action it intends to take, go ahead with whatever action it intends to take in the next 180 days, and at the end of that time report to the Congress as to any detainee for whom it does not intend to go ahead or for whom it has not gone ahead and brought charges against or decided to repatriate or decided to release.

So let me just stop with that. I am glad to discuss the amendment further, but I know that my colleague from Connecticut who has a separate amendment dealing with Guantanamo wishes to speak and describe his amendment, and I also see that my colleague from Alabama is on the Senate floor and wishes to speak perhaps on the same issue as well.

So, Mr. President, at this point I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague for bringing this amendment to the Senate for consideration. I understand he is not offering it at this moment but will at a later point. I wish to speak briefly about some of the points he has made and make a few others.

There is a philosophical argument which has raged around the world for a long time about whether it is appropriate to have a minimum wage. I am certain that when this Congress decided in 1938 that the United States should have a minimum wage, there was a substantial amount of debate on that philosophical issue. So I concede that to start with.

They are having a similar debate in Mexico today. They have a Presidential election coming up in Mexico in a couple of weeks. One of the issues in Mexico is whether they should raise the minimum wage. The minimum wage in Mexico is $4.50 a day. The question is, Should we have a minimum wage and, if so, should it be a minimum wage that actually helps people to stay out of poverty or to work their way out of poverty? That is the issue which the Senator from Massachusetts is raising for consideration today.

I believe very strongly that we should have a minimum wage. I believe very strongly that we should change that minimum wage as necessary to keep up with the cost of living and with the poverty rate, as we have determined it, so that people who do work full time for a minimum wage can stay above the poverty line. That would be the ideal.

In fact, when we look at the chart that was referred to by the Senator from Massachusetts, which I think is an excellent chart, it points out that beginning about 1980, the minimum wage began to drop precipitously relative to the Federal poverty line. It remains very low and is declining even further today because of the refusal of this Congress and this administration to take action to deal with it.

I fear, while very few today would argue that we should have no minimum wage, in fact, that is where we are headed with the policy this administration has adopted. We are continuing to resist efforts to change the minimum wage. The minimum wage is becoming less and less a support for the low-paid workers of this country, and clearly we are way behind in trying to deal with this issue.

There is one other issue which I wish to particularly call to my colleagues' attention, and that is the question of whether or not, if there should be a minimum wage, should it be set at the national level or should it be set at the State level or the local level? In fact, we made a decision in 1938 to have a minimum wage set at the national level. Now since the Federal Government has refused in the last 9 years to take any action to moderate or adjust that minimum wage, more and more communities, more and more States are acting to fill that vacuum, and that is what we are seeing all over my State.

Let me point out that in my State in 2003, the Santa Fe City Council passed the highest minimum wage increase in the country. In January of 2004, the minimum wage increased to $8.50 per hour. In January of this year, the minimum wage went to $9.50 per hour. It is scheduled to go to $10.50 per hour in 2008 in the city limits of Santa Fe, NM. According to the mayor of Santa Fe, approximately 9,000 families received a raise because of that city ordinance that changed the minimum wage. Believe it or not, the Santa Fe economy did not crumble. In fact, according to a University of New Mexico study that was released last year, job growth in Santa Fe was 3.5 percent the first year

that the $8.50 wage was in effect. It was ahead of the 2.1-percent growth in jobs for our State as a whole. Overall, employment increased in each quarter after the living wage went into effect, and it has been especially strong for hotels and restaurants, which have the most low- wage jobs.

Yes, I will be glad to yield.

Mr. President, I do think my strong impression is there have been many of the positive benefits the Senator cited that we have realized in Santa Fe and other communities in my State where there has been an increase in the minimum wage.

One other I would mention is that the number of families in need of temporary assistance has declined significantly since we moved to a higher minimum wage in Santa Fe, and that has been another benefit to the community.

Yes, I will be glad to yield.

Mr. President, I agree entirely with what the Senator from Massachusetts has said. In fact, the governmental assistance programs that are required and that are in place do not have to do the job of filling in the gap between this poverty line and the minimum wage as we have allowed it to exist. So there is a serious issue here.

I wish to mention one other aspect of this issue.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I thank my colleagues. I thank the chairman of the committee, Senator Warner. Let me just make one additional point and then yield the remainder of the time to Senator Kennedy to conclude the argument.

The other point is I find the positions of many of the employers who have come in to see me and talk to me about this issue of minimum wage has changed very dramatically over the last year or two. For a long period of time, I found that the owners of hotels and restaurants and other businesses in my State would come to town each year and lobby me against an increase in the minimum wage, believing that increasing the minimum wage would make it more difficult for them to compete. The truth is, now the local communities such as the community of Santa Fe, the community of Albuquerque, and other local communities around the country have begun to change the minimum wage and to essentially take action where the Federal Government has failed to take action. I am finding that these same employers are now coming in and saying: Would you please adjust the Federal minimum wage? Would you please take what is the normal course and keep the Federal minimum wage at a reasonable level so that we do not have every community in the country feeling under pressure to pass an ordinance on the subject? I think that is a reasonable position for them to take.

So those same businesses that used to lobby me against increasing the minimum wage are now lobbying me in favor of increasing the minimum wage because they believe very strongly that this is a national issue, that we ought to have a national minimum wage, it ought to be reasonable, and it ought to be adjusted as the cost of living goes up and as the Federal poverty line requires.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment when it actually gets offered. I thank my colleague for allowing me to speak on this issue.

Mr. President, when it is appropriate, I would like to offer an amendment to the Defense authorization bill, and I have provided that amendment to the chairman of the committee and to the ranking member. I would like, obviously, to get a vote on that at whatever time is convenient to them and the orderly processing of that legislation. I am told that right now is not the right time, and that I

should go ahead and speak as in morning business and explain the amendment, which I am glad to do.

This is amendment No. 4317. It has been filed. It is at the desk. I would just explain to people this is an amendment that would propose to expedite the processing of individuals who are being held in Guantanamo.

Let me take a brief moment and describe more specifically what the amendment does. With respect to individuals currently held at Guantanamo, the amendment would require that the Government charge, repatriate, or release those prisoners within 180 days of the enactment of this legislation; that is, the completion of the signing by the President of the Defense authorization bill. However, if for any reason the Government has not charged or repatriated or released the individuals within that timeframe provided in the amendment, then the Department of Defense would be required to provide a report regarding why they have not done so to the appropriate committees of the Congress, and this report could be submitted in classified form, if necessary, or in unclassified form.

Nothing in the amendment would require the Department of Defense to release any individual who is a threat to the security of the United States. Also, to make it perfectly clear, this amendment does not state that the Guantanamo facility would be closed within 180 days. The amendment merely provides that within that period, which I believe to be a reasonable timeframe, the United States will make a determination regarding what it intends to do with the individuals currently being held there. For example, if an individual is charged and tried before a military tribunal, there is nothing in the amendment that prevents the Government from continuing to detain that person at Guantanamo, either while they are awaiting trial or after they are sentenced, if a sentence is imposed and they are found guilty. My amendment is simply aimed at moving this process along, not at closing the facility.

The amendment also provides the Government with flexibility regarding the appropriate venue if it decides to bring charges against an individual. The Government could file charges in a United States district court, in a military tribunal, or in an international criminal tribunal. On June 9, President Bush stated that he believes that those held at Guantanamo ``ought to be tried in courts here in the United States.''

Several days later, on June 14, he said that the best way to ``handle these types of people is through our military courts.''

Frankly, whether they are tried in our military courts or in domestic courts is not of great consequence, as long as the trial is conducted in accordance with due process. What is important is that the individuals whom we believe have committed a crime are brought to justice and those who are not a threat to this Nation are released. This is one of the fundamental premises of our traditional notion of justice, and it is time that we restore our adherence to this important principle.

Serious questions have been raised with respect to the military commissions that are currently being used in the few cases where individuals have been charged. In fact, the Supreme Court is expected to rule within the next week or so regarding the legality of such commissions. However, the amendment that I am offering does not favor any one venue over any other venue, should the United States decide to try an individual. The amendment simply states that a person may be charged in a ``military tribunal.'' This could include court martial proceedings under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or military commissions.

The amendment does not provide the Government with any new authority, nor does it restrict the ability of the Government to bring charges in an appropriate military tribunal. Regardless of what the Supreme Court rules in the Hamdan case, the amendment still maintains flexibility with regard to such decisions.

Some may assert that under the laws of war there is no requirement that a person be charged with a crime and that individuals can be held until the end of hostilities. While I understand this argument, we have not applied traditional laws of war with respect to these people. Neither have we applied traditional notions of domestic criminal law.

Over the last several years the administration has been adamant that it would not apply the requirements of the Geneva Convention to these prisoners and that Federal courts have no role in providing judicial oversight of the detention of these individuals. The fact is that the administration has made up the rules that apply to these persons as they have gone along.

In addition, as the President likes to say, we are fighting an unconventional war of an indefinite duration. The threat of terrorism is not going to be resolved with some formal peace treaty. It is and will remain for some time one of the most significant challenges that you or our Nation will face.

It is time that we begin to close the legal black hole that has existed with respect to these individuals and begin to deal with them within some recognized legal framework. As the President stated on June 14 of this year, ``We better have a plan to deal with them in our courts.'' I agree with that. The amendment I am offering would help expedite this process and would ensure that the United States has such a plan. It would also reassert congressional oversight of the process.

Under the amendment I am offering, the Government could also send an individual back to his home country, so long as there are not substantial grounds to believe that the individual would be subjected to torture or, if appropriate, the Government could release the individual to a third party country. Nothing in my amendment biases what is done with these individuals. As I have said, the decision of whether a person is charged or repatriated or released is in the discretion of the Government and would be made in a manner consistent with our national security.

Some may argue that the 180 days provided under the amendment is not enough time to make such a determination. First, let's remember that many of the people we are talking about have been at Guantanamo for over 4 years. It is my understanding that no new prisoners have been sent to Guantanamo for over 21 months. Every person held at Guantanamo has already gone before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal to determine whether they are so-called enemy combatants.

As part of this process, the Department of Defense presents the evidence that it believes provides a basis for the continued detention of the individual. All of the prisoners have been interrogated repeatedly and the intelligence regarding their alleged wrongdoing has been thoroughly vetted. As such, the 6 months provided under this amendment is more than sufficient time to make a decision of what to do with these individuals. There has been plenty of time to gather the information necessary to make a determination of whether or not they should be tried for committing a crime or whether they should be sent to their home country or whether they should be released if they are not in fact a threat to the United States. But, as I mentioned before, if the Government is unable to comply or chooses not to comply, it is simply required at that point--the Secretary of Defense is required--to provide the relevant congressional committees with information regarding why this deadline was not met.

These are not earth-shattering proposals that are contained in my amendment. These are all options on which the President has said that he is moving forward. President Bush has stated on several occasions recently that he would like to close Guantanamo and that the individuals being held there should be tried in a court and repatriated or released.

This last May, while on a trip to Germany, the President said, ``I would like to close the camp and put the prisoners on trial.'' He has reiterated this position twice this month. He has also stated that the Government is in the process of repatriating certain individuals. According to the Department of Defense, there are about 120 prisoners who have been determined to be eligible for transfer or release.

Unfortunately, despite the statements that progress is being made in processing these individuals, the facts are clear. There are currently approximately 460 prisoners that remain in a

state of indefinite imprisonment with little prospect of either being held accountable for their actions or being allowed to prove their innocence. Since the United States began sending people to Guantanamo in 2002, only 10 individuals have ever been formally charged with any wrongdoing.

From a diplomatic standpoint, the continued indefinite detention of individuals at Guantanamo has damaged our own country. As President Bush said on June 14:

No question, Guantanamo sends a signal to some of our

friends--provides an excuse, for example, to say the United

States is not upholding the values that they are trying to

encourage other countries to adhere to.

The President is right. I strongly believe that the prolonged indefinite imprisonment of persons without charges is inconsistent with the traditions and values of the United States and that it will continue to cause difficulty in our relations with other nations, including the allies that we rely upon in confronting the threat of terrorism. Frankly, it is embarrassing that when our leaders travel the world they have to constantly respond to questions about why the United States is indefinitely imprisoning people and whether it is engaging in interrogation methods that amount to torture.

Where the United States was once a champion of due process and an advocate for the humane treatment of prisoners, we are now subjected to almost universal criticism throughout the world community over our violation of these principles. Our handling of these individuals has not only resulted in serious doubts by our allies about whether we are a nation that respects the rule of law, but they have also given the terrorists around the world an opportunity to use this resentment to advance their goals.

In July 2003, almost 3 years ago and over a year and a half after the first person was sent to Guantanamo, I introduced a similar amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would have required the Secretary of Defense to simply report to Congress regarding the status of individuals held at Guantanamo and whether it intended to charge or repatriate or release such individuals.

The amendment was aimed at encouraging the Department of Defense to make decisions as to what it intended to do with the individuals and to provide for basic congressional oversight. Opponents of the measure argued that even a report on the administration's intentions placed unwarranted pressure on the administration to make decisions and that additional time was needed to investigate those individuals and to exploit useful intelligence. Since that time, these persons have been interrogated, have been investigated at length, and any useful intelligence information has been gathered.

Once again, I anticipate there will be those who say that we need to wait, we need to do nothing, we need to let the process work itself out in the courts or within whatever timeframe the executive branch believes is proper. As Senators, I believe our responsibility is not to sit back and watch as another several years roll by. The time to act is now. Reasserting congressional oversight of this process is long overdue.

We have been holding people at Guantanamo for over 4\1/2\ years. The time has come to begin to close this chapter in our Nation's history. It is time for the Senate to provide a clear message that the United States takes seriously its obligation to uphold the rule of law.

I have no doubt that we will look back at the Guantanamo experience as an aberration, as a mistaken endeavor that has taken us away from our historic commitment to the rule of law and respect for basic human rights. However, I also believe that we are at a transition period. We have before us an opportunity to change course. I hope my colleagues will support this important measure when I do offer it as an amendment to the Defense authorization bill.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am introducing legislation today with Senators Snowe, Cochran, Cantwell, Domenici, Lincoln, Jeffords, Collins, Murray, Harkin, Landrieu, Obama, Salazar, and Sessions entitled the ``Rural Equity Payment Index Reform Extension Act of 2006.'' The legislation would extend a provision that was included as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and came from my original legislation, S. 881 in the 108th Congress, with Congressman Doug Bereuter of Nebraska to ensure that the work component of the Medicare physician payment formula is set to ensure that no geographic region is paid less than the national average.

The Medicare physician payment formula, known as the Medicare Resource-Based Relative Value Scale, or RBRVS, is based on three components of each service: work, practice expense, and professional liability insurance. The relative value of each service is then multiplied by a geographic adjuster for each Medicare locality, which is known as the Geographic Practice Cost Indices, or GPCIs.

Prior to the enactment of this provision as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the physicians in States that have the worst workforce shortages were being paid far less than their counterparts in States with adequate or even an oversupply of physicians due to the GPCI adjustment. For the ``work component'' in particular, which accounts for about 55 percent of the total Medicare physician payment, an adjustment based on geographic adjustments made little sense. An office visit to a rural physician is no different in time, effort, or workload compared to an office visit to an urban physician.

As National Rural Health Association president Dr. Wayne Myers said on January 7, 2003, prior to the legislation's passage, ``An office visit to a rural physician is no different than an office visit to an urban physician. The idea that physicians are reimbursed for their work and their skills at a lower rate simply on the basis that they choose to practice in a rural area and serve our rural communities is completely ludicrous.''

In addition, since Medicare beneficiaries pay the same premium for all Part B services, inequitable physician fee payments result in substantial cross-subsidization from people living in low payment States to people living in higher payment States.

Congress determined that such extensive geographic disparities were unfair and, as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, language from my bill was included that brought all geographic areas up to the national average for the calculation of this piece of the Medicare physician payment formula.

It is important to highlight that the importance of this formula extends well beyond Medicare. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics in its February 8, 2006, update on the Medicare payment formula, ``. . . over 74 percent of public and private payors, including state Medicaid programs, have adopted components of the Medicare RBRVS to reimburse physicians, while many other payors are exploring its implementation.''

Furthermore, Medicare Advantage plan payments are based in large part on fee-for-service payments made in various geographic locations. Disparities in Medicare Advantage payments are also caused, in part, by such geographic adjustments made to physician payments.

Unfortunately, these disparities will increase if the ``work component'' in the physician payment rate is allowed to once again fully adjust based on geography. The provision bringing payment levels up to the national average for every geographic area was in effect for 2004-2006 and is set to expire at the end of this calendar year. As a result, physicians, who already face a potential reduction in their overall Medicare payment rate, might also see their payment rates further reduced unless this legislative extension is passed.

According to the November 21, 2005, Federal Register notice, if payment rates were not brought up to the national average, there would be reductions in physician payments to the following States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia outside of Atlanta, Idaho, parts of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland outside of Baltimore region, Michigan outside of Detroit, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, most of New York outside of New York City and suburbs, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon outside of Portland, Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas outside of Houston, Dallas, and Brazoria, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington outside of Seattle, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Lack of equitable reimbursement is a critical factor leading to the shortage of physicians in many rural areas, including the State of New Mexico. The extension of the Rural Equity Payment Index Reform Extension Act of 2006 will ensure that the disparity in physician payments between states such as New Mexico and other geographic areas does not once again widen.

I urge prompt passage of this important legislation and ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am introducing legislation today with Senators Snowe, Cochran, Cantwell, Domenici, Lincoln, Jeffords, Collins, Murray, Harkin, Landrieu, Obama, Salazar, and Sessions entitled the ``Rural Equity Payment Index Reform Extension Act of 2006.'' The legislation would extend a provision that was included as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and came from my original legislation, S. 881 in the 108th Congress, with Congressman Doug Bereuter of Nebraska to ensure that the work component of the Medicare physician payment formula is set to ensure that no geographic region is paid less than the national average.

The Medicare physician payment formula, known as the Medicare Resource-Based Relative Value Scale, or RBRVS, is based on three components of each service: work, practice expense, and professional liability insurance. The relative value of each service is then multiplied by a geographic adjuster for each Medicare locality, which is known as the Geographic Practice Cost Indices, or GPCIs.

Prior to the enactment of this provision as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the physicians in States that have the worst workforce shortages were being paid far less than their counterparts in States with adequate or even an oversupply of physicians due to the GPCI adjustment. For the ``work component'' in particular, which accounts for about 55 percent of the total Medicare physician payment, an adjustment based on geographic adjustments made little sense. An office visit to a rural physician is no different in time, effort, or workload compared to an office visit to an urban physician.

As National Rural Health Association president Dr. Wayne Myers said on January 7, 2003, prior to the legislation's passage, ``An office visit to a rural physician is no different than an office visit to an urban physician. The idea that physicians are reimbursed for their work and their skills at a lower rate simply on the basis that they choose to practice in a rural area and serve our rural communities is completely ludicrous.''

In addition, since Medicare beneficiaries pay the same premium for all Part B services, inequitable physician fee payments result in substantial cross-subsidization from people living in low payment States to people living in higher payment States.

Congress determined that such extensive geographic disparities were unfair and, as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, language from my bill was included that brought all geographic areas up to the national average for the calculation of this piece of the Medicare physician payment formula.

It is important to highlight that the importance of this formula extends well beyond Medicare. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics in its February 8, 2006, update on the Medicare payment formula, ``. . . over 74 percent of public and private payors, including state Medicaid programs, have adopted components of the Medicare RBRVS to reimburse physicians, while many other payors are exploring its implementation.''

Furthermore, Medicare Advantage plan payments are based in large part on fee-for-service payments made in various geographic locations. Disparities in Medicare Advantage payments are also caused, in part, by such geographic adjustments made to physician payments.

Unfortunately, these disparities will increase if the ``work component'' in the physician payment rate is allowed to once again fully adjust based on geography. The provision bringing payment levels up to the national average for every geographic area was in effect for 2004-2006 and is set to expire at the end of this calendar year. As a result, physicians, who already face a potential reduction in their overall Medicare payment rate, might also see their payment rates further reduced unless this legislative extension is passed.

According to the November 21, 2005, Federal Register notice, if payment rates were not brought up to the national average, there would be reductions in physician payments to the following States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia outside of Atlanta, Idaho, parts of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland outside of Baltimore region, Michigan outside of Detroit, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, most of New York outside of New York City and suburbs, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon outside of Portland, Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas outside of Houston, Dallas, and Brazoria, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington outside of Seattle, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Lack of equitable reimbursement is a critical factor leading to the shortage of physicians in many rural areas, including the State of New Mexico. The extension of the Rural Equity Payment Index Reform Extension Act of 2006 will ensure that the disparity in physician payments between states such as New Mexico and other geographic areas does not once again widen.

I urge prompt passage of this important legislation and ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in opposition to the legislation before us today, H.R. 8, which would make the repeal of the estate tax permanent starting in 2010. Without so much as a hearing, debate, or markup in the Finance Committee, the majority is bringing the largest tax bill that will be before us this Congress with the clear intent of not allowing the minority any reasonable opportunity to amend it. The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that repeal of the estate tax will require roughly $370 billion in debt financing through 2016, although a more accurate cost of 10 years of enactment is closer to $1 trillion when interest on the debt is calculated into the equation. At a time when interest rates are being raised steadily to address inflationary fears, it is hardly the time for our Government to be adding to our national debt in this magnitude for tax relief that only benefits the wealthiest in our country.

In 2001, in my State of New Mexico, there were only 200 people dying with any estate tax liability. This left roughly 98 percent of New Mexican estates entirely untaxed. If the exemption had been $2.5 million, as will occur in 2009 under current law, 99.7 percent of people dying in New Mexico would have owed no estate taxes. At a time when gas is over $3 a gallon and many businesses are telling me that they can no longer afford to offer health insurance to their workers, I cannot in good conscience support repealing the estate tax--an act that provides a benefit to only about .3 percent of New Mexicans.

The effort to permanently repeal the estate tax is a continuation by the majority of giving tax breaks to a small minority of Americans-- those who need it least. Just a couple of weeks ago, the President signed the reconciliation tax bill into law which added 2 additional years of tax relief for those receiving dividends and capital gains. Slowly but surely, the majority is creating a society where those who work for a living will be paying taxes while those who are fortunate enough to have investments or inherited wealth will either avoid taxation or be paying at a significantly lower rate. The result will be a United States that has slid back to economic disparity not seen since the Gilded Age where extreme wealth accumulated in the pockets of our Nation's wealthiest while the average working family was left behind. At a time when gas prices are climbing, the cost of electricity is growing, and health care costs are exploding, it is simply unacceptable that this Congress is devoting time and our children's resources to providing another tax break to the wealthiest among us. Instead this Congress should be looking at ways to reduce the tax

burden on folks who only have earned income--and generally not enough of it.

I would remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that the impact of deficit spending is immense and one that will be borne not only by us in the coming years but by future generations who have no say in our current financial irresponsibility. Since this administration took over and Congress has been controlled solely by one party, we have seen our Nation's economic security drop precipitously. In order to pay for unaffordable tax cuts, we have become a beggar nation, forced to go to foreign countries with our hat in hand asking them to buy our debt. Many of these countries, such as China and Japan, are the very same countries that are becoming more and more competitive with our Nation for high-tech and higher salaried jobs--a fact that is not unrelated. As interest rates continue to rise to combat inflationary pressures, it is costing this Government more and more to sell our debt to our foreign competitors. At the same time, we are facing demand pressures to offer a higher rate of return to attract these wary investors, as they gradually accumulate more of our debt than most economic models would indicate is prudent. The only prudent course of action would be to tighten our belts and balance our budget thereby returning control of our economic prosperity to us instead of leaving it in the hands of our foreign competitors. But instead of coming up with rational tax policy that rewards the majority of Americans who work for a living, we are foisting on these families the delusion that estate tax relief benefits them and handing out further tax cuts to those who have seen their wealth grow at historic rates in the past several years.

Mr. President, we owe it to our children and grandchildren to provide them with the opportunities we inherited from our parents. The real ``death tax'' is the one we are leaving for our children to pay when we are gone. With the passage of the Deficit Reduction Act in 1993, we were able to correct years of irresponsible tax policy and head our Nation back in the right direction. By maintaining fiscal discipline, we were able to have our first surplus in decades. It is shameful that we are considering legislation today that, in many senses, is the final nail in the coffin of fiscal responsibility by providing additional tax cuts to the richest in our Nation to the detriment of hard-working American families. This is not the act of a Government that is supposed to represent all of the people in our Nation--a nation that was founded on the belief that the opportunity for prosperity is to be shared by everyone. This legislation is another step toward creating an America that I was not elected to represent by my fellow New Mexicans--the vast majority of whom earn their living by going to work every day. I hope my colleagues will join me in opposing this legislation.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4131 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, the purpose of my amendment is to put some type of limits on the number of new legal permanent residents we approve each year in this country, and that is the question. It is sort of a philosophical question and a practical question: Should we limit this number or should we leave it unlimited as the current bill provides?

We have two large categories under which we approve new legal permanent residents in this country. Let me put one chart up here to show these two categories.

One is called family preference. That is essentially where if a person is already a legal resident in the United States and wants to bring in family members, that is family reunification, and we think that is a good thing and we provide in the law so that can occur. Each year, there can be 480,000 people who gain legal permanent residency in our country under that proposal, and that is right here in the bottom half of this chart.

The other main category we use for establishing legal permanent residency is what we call employment-based, and that is where an employer essentially brings someone to this country to work, along with their family. We have always had a limit on that. The limit in the law today is 140,000.

Let me go through some of the history of where we have been on this issue.

In the law that is applicable today, we allow 140,000 legal permanent residents to be approved each year under the employment-based system. The bill Senator Kennedy and Senator McCain proposed last May, on which I compliment them--they put a great deal of work into it--that bill said, let's increase that number from 140,000 to 290,000, and I think that makes some good sense. The 290,000 was to include the workers and their families, just as current law was to include the workers and their accompanying families.

Then, 2 months ago, when the Judiciary Committee began its deliberations, the chairman presented his chairman's mark, and it said: OK, the 290,000 is a good number, but let's only apply it to workers, and then any accompanying family will be extra and not count. So on this chart, you can see that this area at the top is the estimated number of family that might actually come to the country.

Now, the estimate is that there would be 1.2 family members accompanying each worker, and that estimate came from the Congressional Research Service. They said they didn't

really know because it is a very different mix of people we would have immigrating into this country under this legislation than under current law. But historically, it has been 1.2 people per employee, so let's just assume that, and that gets you up to 638,000, was the Congressional Research Service's estimate of the number of employment- based visas that would be offered under Senator Specter's chairman's mark in the Judiciary Committee.

Well, then, of course, we had some additional deliberations here, and we now have the Hagel-Martinez bill. The Hagel-Martinez bill said the 290,000 figure is wrong; let's go to 450,000. And of course the Congressional Research Service said, OK, let's make the same calculation here: 1.2 family members will accompany each of those 450,000 workers, so you add those in and that gets you to 990,000. That is for the first 10 years. After the first 10 years, this legislation calls for that number to drop back down.

At this point, let me pause and make a point about this assumption which is built in here. Let me show one other chart. This is a very different group of immigrants we are approving to come into the country under this legislation than is currently approved under existing law. If, in fact, there are more family members who accompany these workers, then these numbers go up pretty dramatically. If, for example, instead of 1.2 people--a spouse and two-tenths of a child--coming in with each worker you had a spouse and 1 child coming in with each worker, then it is 1,350,000. If, in fact, there were 2 children, the spouse and 2 children, it would be 1.8 million people under the assumptions that are built into this legislation.

So all I am saying is, we don't know. Under the legislation pending, we don't know whether there are going to be 500,000 employment-based visas issued or a million employment-based visas issued for legal permanent residency or 1.5 million. I think we ought to fix that. My amendment says, let's pick a number.

Let's go back to this other chart, and I will show you how we came up with the specific number in the amendment. The number in the amendment tries to be a rounded-off number from what the Judiciary Committee started with and says, look, if they had kept a cap in the Judiciary Committee, as I believe they should have--we have had a cap in this country, a cap on the number of legal permanent residents historically--if we kept a cap, then it should be about 650,000. That is the estimate we came up with.

Some people say that is a very high number. That is a high number. That is over four times what we currently permit. It is more than twice what Senators Kennedy and McCain recommended in their legislation, the McCain-Kennedy bill or Kennedy-McCain bill. We have tried to be generous in this and say we should have a lot of new immigrants transferring over to legal permanent status, but we should have some limit on those.

The real question for each Senator is going to be whether you agree there ought to be a cap. Do you agree there ought to be a limit? I believe very strongly we should have a limit. I believe the limit we have chosen here is a generous one. To leave this bill with no cap at all would be a mistake. To send this bill out of the Senate without knowing whether we are increasing the legal permanent residents under the employment-based system 4 times or 8 times or 12 times, which is very possible, I think would be a very big mistake. So we need to get some certainty into this. We need to try to be somewhat prudent in what we are doing.

Let me just mention one other thing. Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, let me just mention that this cap I am trying to put on is just for one of the categories vailable for people who want to become legal permanent residents, and I need to underscore that.

There is still the opportunity to become a legal permanent resident as part of this family preference category. That is 480,000 per year, and we are not in any way affecting that with my amendment. There is still the opportunity, if you are already here in this country and you have been here 2 years under this legislation and you are undocumented, you can go through the earned legalization provisions in the bill and become a legal permanent resident. We are not in any way affecting any of that or trying to limit that. If you are an agricultural worker, there are 1.5 million blue card agricultural workers who are provided with an opportunity to become legal permanent residents in this bill, but we are not in any way affecting that. There are various categories in the bill for highly skilled workers who are able to become legal permanent residents without being subject to any numerical cap. I have supported those provisions. I am not suggesting we put a cap on those provisions. These are highly skilled workers, in many cases people involved in science and engineering and other skills that are important to our economy.

Of course, there is provided in the bill an additional estimated 141,000 visas which have been recaptured from the last 5 years because they were unused. We are not doing anything to affect that. That is fine. I have no problem with that.

All we are saying is that this large category that we call employment-based legal permanent residents, we should have an annual limit on that. We have had one for over 100 years. We have always limited that. Every country in the world limits that. We should not be the only exception in the world to this general, prudent rule as I see it.

We can argue about exactly what the right limit ought to be, but I don't think we should give up on having any cap at all, and that, unfortunately, is what the present bill provides.

How much time remains, Mr. President?

I see my colleague from Arizona wishes to speak. I yield the floor and reserve my time.

Mr. President, I was seeking recognition to ask the Senator from Arizona--he says this is unfair to low-income, low-skilled workers because we are putting a cap of 650,000 on this employment base. His proposal, the McCain-Kennedy bill, limited it. It had a cap of 290,000. I am proposing more than twice the admissions under the employment-based system than his proposal had. I don't understand why mine is unfair to anybody whereas his 290,000 was appropriate. He was proposing 290,000 as a limit on the number of people who could transition to legal permanent status, and that is when the guest worker program was being proposed at 400,000 per year. We have now reduced the guest worker program to 200,000 per year, and I am saying legal permanent residents should not exceed 650,000 per year under the employment-based system, in addition to the family preference, in addition to all the other ways that you can become a legal permanent resident. So I don't think this is that unfair. It is more than twice what he and Senator Kennedy proposed and more than four times the current law.

But it does impose some cap. I understand there are people, particularly inside the beltway, who do not want any cap. A lot of the immigrant groups have indicated very clearly they are opposed to any cap, any limit in this category. Of course, the Chamber of Commerce is opposed to any limit in this category. They would prefer to be able to bring in anybody without limit. I think that is not a responsible course, and for that reason I have offered this amendment.

I reserve my time.

Mr. President, can I respond? First, on the last point Senator Kennedy makes about fair distribution, I am accepting the distribution that is in the Hagel-Martinez legislation, the distribution that was in the chairman's mark, the distribution that was in the McCain-Kennedy bill. I am not changing that in any respect. I am not proposing to make any change in that. Whatever the distribution was that they thought was appropriate, that is exactly what I accept. My amendment doesn't affect that.

Let me make this other point because Senator Kennedy made a point that somehow or other the Hagel-Martinez legislation caused the need for no cap in this area, and for the very large number we are, in my amendment, excluding--we are saying, in calculating this 650,000, we are excluding such visas as are issued to anyone under this 245-B and - C program, which is all of those people who are going to come in under this deferred mandatory departure system, the people who have been here at least 2 years but not a full 5 years, or not more than 5 years.

We are saying let's not count those people. Those folks are home free. Anyone who has been here over 2 years is home free. They are on their way to legal permanent status and I have supported that aspect of the bill and I continue to support that aspect of the bill.

All I am saying is that once you exclude that group and say, OK, they are home free, then you still have the question: How many new employment-based legal permanent residents are we going to admit each year? Senator McCain, Senator Kennedy said it ought to be 290,000. I am saying let's make it 650,000, but let's put on a cap. Let's not leave it the way the bill now stands, which is totally uncontrolled.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I will reserve my time at this point.

Mr. President, I am glad to respond. I can't give assurance of that. But I can say they are much more likely to get the green card under my proposal than they were under McCain-Kennedy. McCain-Kennedy

contemplated 400,000 guest workers every year coming in and said the total number of green cards we are going to issue to these people is 290,000, including family.

What I am saying is, we should increase that to 650,000, including family, since we have half as many guest workers coming in each year under the bill that we have agreed to on the Senate floor.

I think my proposal, frankly, is much more generous in giving green cards to people who have come here legally than was McCain-Kennedy. It is more than twice as generous. It is more than four times as generous as current law. But I am saying we ought to have some cap. We should not just leave it uncapped entirely.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from North Dakota.

Mr. President, I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. President, how much time remains on the two sides?

Thank you, Mr. President.

Let me respond to that point which was just made by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. There is nothing in my amendment that limits the ability of families to accompany workers. All my amendment does is to say there should be a cap on the total number of workers with accompanying family, just as there is today, just as there was under the McCain-Kennedy proposal. We are saying there should be some limit. It should not be open-ended, as the current bill pending on the Senate floor provides.

We are saying this limit should be 650,000. Now, why did we choose that? Because that is what the Congressional Research Service says they estimated would actually be happening under Chairman Specter's proposed mark to the Judiciary Committee when they started. To do something other than what we are proposing in this amendment is to leave it totally unknown as to how many people we are going to have coming in under this employment-based legal permanent residency program, how many green cards we are going to be giving out. It could be 500,000. It could be 1 million. It could be 1.5 million. This is every year I am talking about. That is not an acceptable arrangement.

Now, I want to make clear this one point, which I said before; that is, this amendment in no way limits the number of people who can come in and become legal permanent residents under the family preference. That is 480,000. It does not affect the number of people who can have their situation, their status changed under the undocumented earned legalization provisions. That is 11 or 12 million. It is left alone. It does not affect the 1.5 million blue card agricultural workers. It does not affect the shortage occupation groups and other high-skilled workers. It does not affect the 141,000 visas that we are bringing back from the last 5 years.

This amendment will improve the bill. It is not an effort to undermine the bill. It is an effort to improve the bill. I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I rise today in strong opposition to the amendment being offered by my colleague from Alabama, Senator Sessions. As drafted amendment would prevent legalized workers and guest workers from receiving the earned-income tax credit even though these same workers are required to pay both income and payroll taxes. I remind my colleagues that, under current law, illegal workers are not entitled to the earned-income tax credit and S. 2611 does not change that. Instead, this amendment denies people who are paying both income and payroll taxes a tax credit that other similarly situated taxpayers receive simply because these people are legalized workers and guest workers and not naturalized citizens. This is distinction that should have no relevance for purposes of receiving the earned-income tax credit. To deny these legalized taxpayers the right to the earned-income tax credit is unjustified and grossly inequitable.

It is my understanding that CBO recently estimated that the workers affected by this amendment will be paying more than $62 billion in taxes over the next 10 years. This will result in a net of more than $33 billion in revenue after the costs associated with all refundable credits are taken into account. Mr. President, we haven't seen a $33 billion revenue raiser in this Chamber in quite some time.

Earlier this month, we passed a tax cut that provides a significant tax cut to the wealthiest in our country. The reconciliation bill was passed in spite of the fact that it provides little to no tax relief to the majority of the families in our country while raising our Nation's debt by roughly $70 billion. The proponents of this legislation were quick to defend this bill even though it employed a series of budget gimmicks that would make Enron proud. Those of us who spoke out in opposition of this bill were repeatedly told that allowing the capital gains and dividends tax cuts to expire amounted to a tax increase--one that would surely cripple our economy if not passed this year even though the provisions didn't expire until the end of 2008. I find it truly astonishing that a few short weeks later, we are debating an amendment that denies hardworking taxpayers a tax break that they so desperately need and are entitled to under current law. Clearly those who argued that allowing the capital gains and dividends tax cuts to expire is essentially the equivalent of raising someone's taxes, have to agree that taking away the earned-income tax credit from a working taxpayer is a tax increase. Unfortunately, the target of this tax increase is on hard working, lower income families--people who truly need this tax break to get by.

The eanred-income tax credit is one of the few remaining tax provisions in our code that provide significant tax relief to working families. As my colleagues know, it is one of the greatest tools we have to fight poverty and allow working families to have a roof over their head and food on their table. It is a way to ensure that those earning minimum wage jobs are able to put clothes and shoes on their children so that they can go to school. This is not a hand out. In order to get the earn-income tax credit, you have to work. Pure and simple. To deny this credit to legalized workers and guest workers who pay income and payroll taxes is not what this country is all about. It is certainly not in keeping with the bipartisan way this Chamber has defended the earned-income tax credit and its recipients from misguided attacks.

I hope that all of my colleagues will join me in defeating this amendment.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce ``The United States Direct Investment Act of 2006'' with my colleague from Indiana, Senator Lugar. This legislation is a necessary step towards making our country more competitive in encouraging multinational businesses to expand or open new offices, facilities or plants in the United States instead of in another country. While the United States continues to be the premier place in the world to locate a business, we can no longer rely on our inherent advantages alone. This legislation will refocus the Administrations efforts so that we do a better job of reaching out to businesses around the world and convince them that they should expand their current operations or open new facility in the United States instead of somewhere else overseas.

Our legislation creates the United States Direct Investment Administration, USDIA, the Commerce Department to be lead by an Under Secretary. This new administration shall be responsible for collecting and analyzing data related to foreign direct investment flows. They shall create an annual Investment Report and an annual Direct Investment Agenda to be reported and sent to Congress. They will then assume responsibility as the lead agency for advocating and implementing strategic policies to encourage more investment in the United States from abroad. This new administration will manage an investment zone program for communities that have been negatively impacted by trade but want to attract international companies to locate in their area. Finally, this new administration will be empowered to create ten new ``renewal communities'' as currently defined under the Internal Revenue Code.

Many countries, particularly those in Europe, have committed significant resources and energy to recruiting foreign direct investment. In many cases, they have offices in the United States where they meet with U.S. companies to encourage them to consider their country for their next expansion. Right now our country does not have any comparable operation. We leave these efforts to our states, region and cities through economic development agencies and offices. Unlike other countries, we don't provide a Federal umbrella organization to help these people recruit more effectively. Because of their limited resources, this means that many of these economic development agencies are unable to effectively target potential businesses that might be an ideal fit for their city or State. In some cases, these areas may be going through an economic downturn due to the closing of a plant or factory making their limited resources even more scarce. This legislation would give these agencies the assistance and guidance they need to be more successful and effective in their recruiting efforts.

It is important that we focus not only on how to get businesses to stay in this country, but also on how we encourage overseas businesses to come here. In both cases, the end result is the same--more jobs for U.S. workers. Our first responsibility needs to be encouraging companies to stay in the United States, but we need to be cognizant of the fact that we will not always be successful. If we have a robust effort to encourage overseas companies to move facilities to our country we will be able to neutralize any unavoidable losses. Many of the pieces are already in place. We already collect much of the data and have an effective matrix of State, regional and local economic development entities. What this legislation does is put these pieces together in a way that accomplishes the primary job at hand--creating jobs in the United States.

I ask for unanimous consent the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, on behalf of the Democratic leader, I have been requested to object, and I do object.

Mr. President, I want to speak briefly this afternoon about two amendments that I intend to offer, and I hope can be favorably considered by the Senate before this bill is completed. The first will just take a moment. It relates to forestry workers.

This is amendment No. 4055. It would make H-2B guest workers who are invited here to work in our forestry sector eligible for limited legal aid. I believe this amendment should be noncontroversial. Under current law, agricultural guest workers are eligible for legal aid with respect to employment rights provided for in their H-2A contract. This amendment would provide H-2B forestry workers with the same eligibility for legal aid. We have had hearings in our Energy Committee on the issue. We had a recent hearing where we heard that making H-2B forestry workers eligible for legal aid is the single most effective thing Congress could do to address the problem of exploitation of forestry workers.

These guest workers have been asked to come to the United States because of a labor shortage that was certified by our Government. They are here legally. They pay U.S. taxes. Currently, the law prohibits legal-services-funded organizations from providing them with any legal aid to enforce their rights under their guest worker contract. The amendment would correct this issue, and I hope that this amendment can be adopted when it is appropriate to take action on it.

Mr. President, I also want to talk about another amendment which goes to the issue of the number of employment-based immigrant visas admitted each year--the number of employment-based immigrants that we admit each year under the current version of this immigration bill as it stands in the Senate today. Let me first describe the big picture as I see it, as far as people becoming legal permanent residents under our laws.

First, let me preface this entire discussion by saying that none of what I am talking about relates to the people who are here on an undocumented basis today. There are other provisions of the law that apply to them and that give them rights under this proposed legislation to adjust their status and become legal permanent residents at some stage down the road. So that is separate. I am not in any way talking about that. I know that has been a subject of great controversy in the Senate and in the Congress in general, but that is not the purpose of my proposed amendment.

When you talk about people who are not here illegally today, there are basically two major ways that a person can become a legal permanent resident under our immigration laws. The two ways are through the family-based visa program or through the employment-based visa program. This chart shows the numbers that have been admitted into the country up until the end of 2004 through the family-based and employment-based programs combined, under both of those. You can see that those two together--it comes out to somewhere around 800,000. That is a total annual figure I am talking about for people coming and getting legal permanent residency through both of those major avenues.

Now, this legislation we are talking about would, according to the Congressional Research Service, substantially increase those numbers. You can see that their projection--and this is an estimate because, in fact, we are eliminating some caps that have been in the law previously, and I will discuss that in a minute. But these estimates from the Congressional Research Service are that we will get closer to 2 million legal permanent residents that we are accepting each year under this legislation. So that is the overall picture.

The amendment I am talking about does not try to deal with this entire picture. It just looks at the employment-based legal permanent resident visas.

Let me go to a different chart in order to describe the concern I have. Current law says there is a cap of 140,000 persons, or 140,000 visas, that can be issued under the employment-based LPR categories of our laws. That has been the case now for some time--140,000 per year. This includes family. These are people who come here and seek legal permanent status in order to take work. But it also includes their families. Each member of the family, of course, uses a visa as well. So the total number of employees under this system, and family, spouse, and children, does not exceed 140,000. That is what the law currently provides.

Now, when Senators McCain and Kennedy--this is my understanding of the history, and I am sorry that neither Senators McCain or Kennedy are here so they could correct me in case I misstated anything, but my understanding is that they concluded that we needed to reform the law, and part of the reform that we should adopt was to clear out the backlog and make more room for additional immigration under this employment-based LPR system. I agree with that. Clearly, that is one of the purposes of this legislation and one of the effects of this legislation.

They set out to do this in several different ways. Let me mention the three main ways that they set out to do it. First of all, they said let's clear out the backlog. By that, it is meant in the legislation that any visa that was available to be issued in the last 5 years that was not issued because the immigration service could not get the processing done--that any of those visas would be once again made available. And the estimate we have from the Congressional Research Service is that there are about 140,000 of those.

So we are going back for the last 5 years and saying: OK, are there visas that should have been or could have been issued? Let's bring those forward and issue them and make them available again. Clearly, I support doing that.

They also said: OK, in order to help clear out the backlog, we need to encourage some groups to come here and exempt them from any of this cap. This idea that we only allow 140,000 people to come should not apply to people we are particularly interested in bringing to this country, for whatever reason. One idea is to allow students who come here to be exempted from the cap so they can remain here and become legal permanent residents--scientists, technicians, engineers, people with careers in mathematics. We need those people to create a strong economy. Let's allow them to come.

They said also let's eliminate some of these schedule A groups; that is, people who have specialty occupations we

need to bring here. So let's take them out from under the cap. Again, I have no problem with that approach.

The one other thing they said, which is a major change in the law-- this was the bill they introduced last May, the McCain-Kennedy legislation--is that we should raise the cap, that we have outgrown that. Let's raise it to 290,000, so the total number of people who are being allowed to come each year--employees and their spouses and children--will be 290,000, in addition to the ones permitted to come because of our bringing these visas forward from previous years and in addition to the people who come not subject to any cap at all.

That is how the McCain-Kennedy legislation was introduced. Frankly, my own reaction was that it sounded like a fairly reasonable approach. Then the Judiciary Committee decided to proceed with legislation, and the Judiciary Committee began to mark up the chairman's bill--Senator Specter's bill--and as I understand what occurred there, and in reading the record of those hearings, the Specter bill agreed with the effort to clear out the backlog that I have described, agreed with the effort to exempt certain groups from the 290,000-person cap. It agreed to keep the number 290,000, but they changed the definition of what the 290,000 applied to.

Under McCain-Kennedy, it had been a cap on the number of workers, along with their accompanying family members. Under the Specter legislation, it was defined as a cap on the workers themselves, and there was to be no cap on the spouses and family members.

If you look at this chart, you can see the progression. Current law is the first column. The second column is S. 1033, which takes it up to 290,000. Then the third column is the one that is the chairman's mark that was marked up and reported by the Judiciary Committee, and that is the one that keeps the 290,000 but says: OK, on top of that we are going to allow spouses and family members.

On this chart, you see an estimated 638,000. The reason I put that in is because the Congressional Research Service was asked how many spouses and family members they expect to come along with these people? They said, looking back at past history, they estimate perhaps at least 1.2 people per employee. So you would be talking about 638,000, roughly, under that legislation. But that is an estimate. This is the first time we have not had a cap. We have an estimate instead of a cap. So the obvious question we have to deal with is whether that is the right level.

As we all know, the legislation that came through the Judiciary Committee was changed once it got to the floor, and we then began to work on what is called the Hagel-Martinez legislation. That is the legislation pending today. That is the legislation about which we are having a great deal of discussion.

Let me recount what the Hagel-Martinez legislation does. That is the fourth of these columns. The Hagel-Martinez legislation says that we agree with the proposal to clear out the backlog, just as McCain- Kennedy did. They are saying they agree with the proposal to exempt certain categories from the cap. That was also in the McCain-Kennedy proposal. And they agree with the Specter proposal that the definition of who should be covered should not include spouses and family members. But they also believed the 290,000 was too low a figure, and they raised it to 450,000. What we have now is 450,000 workers permitted to come and no limit on the number of spouses and family members who can accompany them. That is the legislation pending before us. That continues under the bill, as it is before us, for a 10-year period, through 2016. After 2016, for the period from then on, it drops back to 290,000, plus their spouses and family members, rather than the 450,000.

Why did Hagel-Martinez insist upon going to this 450,000 instead of 290,000? That is the obvious question. They did it for a very logical reason. They did it because they were providing that a certain group of those who are currently in the country--that is, people who have been here at least 2 years and fewer than 5 years--that group of individuals would have to go through this same system, so they had to increase the amount of that cap as they saw it.

What I am suggesting we ought to do first and what my amendment will propose, once I have the opportunity to offer my amendment, is we should put a cap on the total number of people we are allowing into the country under this employment-based legal permanent residency visa program.

We have always had a cap on the number of immigrants coming into this country on an employment-based system. We have done that now for well over half a century. I think we have done it for over a century. I think it would be a fairly radical change for us to say we are giving up on having any cap on this group and instead we are going to an open- ended system, and we will work on estimates.

Part of the debate we have had in the Senate, frankly, is the result of the fact that we don't have a hard cap for how many people will actually be admitted each year. I believe that is not good public policy. It is not fair to the Immigration Service, which has to plan for the number of employees they will need and the number of applications they will receive each year. We are much better off having a cap.

I also believe we should make it clear that whatever cap we have on this group excludes those aliens who are adjusting their status because they have been here from 2 to 5 years. If they are in that category, they should not be counted in the numbers we calculate.

My amendment would try to exclude that group and would basically otherwise take the numbers that are estimated by the Congressional Research Service and say: OK, let's go ahead and put a cap, and let's make it a 650,000-person cap each year. That is slightly more than the Congressional Research Service estimated would be required or would be expected to apply. It is a substantial increase over current law, more than four times, nearly five times the current level. It is substantially more than twice what Senators McCain and Kennedy proposed in their legislation.

I think, frankly, it would be a major liberalization of our laws. I know there are those who will argue that we shouldn't have any cap at all, but I think that is not a wise course. This legislation will be improved if we can assure our constituents that we have a cap on the number of people who are coming in under this employment-based system. That is what the amendment will do.

I hope to be able to explain it further when we get closer to actually offering the amendment. I am told we cannot offer an amendment today. This would be a very useful change and improvement in the pending legislation.

I hope my colleagues will take the time to look at this issue and will educate themselves on what the effect of the current proposed legislation would be and the reasons we should put some cap on that number. I believe it would be a wise course to follow.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, Senator Kennedy.

I have been trying to figure out what is, in my mind, objectionable to the Inhofe amendment. I think it comes down to a very basic point; that is, the Inhofe amendment, the language, the operative language of the Inhofe amendment, is:

. . . no person has a right, entitlement or claim to have

the Government of the United States or any of its officials

or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide

services, or provide materials in any language other than

English.

That is the operative provision. And then it says there are ``exceptions.'' The exceptions are where we have specifically written laws which allow that or which provide for the providing of information or communication in a language other than English.

Why is that objectionable? It is objectionable to me because it is directly contrary to the constitution of my State, the thrust of the constitution of my State.

When New Mexico came into the Union in 1912, we had many more people in my State speaking Spanish than we had speaking English. People were very concerned that the right of individuals in the State to speak either language would be preserved and that no one be discriminated against by virtue of their inability to speak English.

We wrote a provision in our constitution which says that the right of any citizen of the State to vote, to hold office, or to sit upon juries shall never be restricted, abridged, or impaired on account of religion, race, language, color, inability to speak, read, or write the English or the Spanish language except as may otherwise be provided in the constitution. So the presumption is directly opposite to the Inhofe amendment.

The general rule in my State and in my State's constitution is that people shall not in any way be discriminated against in their dealings with the Government by virtue of their inability to speak English. And the Inhofe amendment says that the general rule is people have no right to speak any language or communicate with their Government in any language other than English unless we write a law saying they can. I think that is an unfortunate change in emphasis and change in the law, which I cannot support.

Obviously, we have many court cases. And, I gather, under one of the exceptions to the general rule that the Inhofe amendment contains, this might be covered. But it has been well recognized, I believe, in our courts for a very long time that it is a denial of due process to non- English-speaking persons if they are denied services and communication and interpretation in their own language when they are in criminal proceedings.

We have a provision, again, in my own State constitution which I think is pretty close on this issue. It says: In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall have the right to appear and defend himself in person, and by counsel, to demand the nature and cause of the accusation, to be confronted with the witnesses against him, to have the charges and testimony interpreted to him, and in a language that he understands.

Now, I know there is a Federal law that says the same kind of thing today. So it falls under one of the exceptions that is provided for in the Inhofe amendment.

Mr. President, I am glad to yield.

Right.

Mr. President, let me reclaim my time and indicate I said that very thing. I am not disagreeing with the Senator from Oklahoma. He has pointed out there are legal provisions that make an exception to his general rule, and the exception in this case is that you are entitled to have the Government provide interpretation when you are accused of a crime and you are trying to defend yourself in court.

All I am saying is, why are we writing into law a general rule that you are not entitled to communicate with your Government or have your Government communicate with you in any language other than English, except where we provide for it? I think that is a mistake. It is directly contrary to what my own State constitution does. It is directly contrary to the sentiment behind my State constitution.

We have the Native American Languages Act where Congress specifically found that there is convincing evidence that student achievement and performance and community and school pride and educational opportunity are tied to respect for the first language of the child or the student. And we talk there about that Native American languages shall not be restricted in any public proceeding.

Well, you can say: OK, now, we have already written a law that protects the rights of Native American languages to be used in public proceedings. So that is not a problem.

I do not know that I want to have to have this Congress write a law to cover every circumstance that might arise where an American wants to communicate with his or her Government in some language other than English. I think it is a bad precedent for us. I think it is contrary to the history of my State. It is certainly contrary to that.

I hope very much we will resist this amendment. I think this is a nonproblem. I do not know why we are spending most of the day debating an issue of this type, except to say to people who do not speak English: You are not going to be entitled to the full rights that other citizens are entitled to.

Clearly, that is true economically. We all know that. We all know you cannot succeed economically in this country in a full way unless you can speak English, and probably speak English with adequate proficiency. But I do not think as a legal matter we need to be writing statutes into the Federal law that say if you are not speaking English, you are entitled to fewer rights, you are entitled to fewer legal rights than other citizens are, and we want to remind you of it.

In fact, as to this amendment, it is very interesting, because it says: Look, even if you fall under one of these exceptions--this interpreter's exception or the Native American exception; the language where we have written a specific law--it says, if exceptions are made, that does not create a legal entitlement to additional services in that language or any language other than English.

So we are saying: Look, the general rule is, you have to speak to your Government and communicate with your Government in English. We acknowledge there are exceptions where we will allow you to use other languages, or the Government will agree to communicate with you in other languages, but

we are going to be specific about what those are. But let's also remind you--this last sentence says--by making an exception and allowing you to have an interpretation into a language you can understand, we are not giving you a legal entitlement. We are not, in any way, committing ourselves to do anything more.

I do not know that is a very welcoming message to all these immigrants we are welcoming into our country as part of this legislation. I think my State is a State that has a great tradition of cooperation between the Native American community, the Hispanic community, and the Anglo community. And we have been able to maintain that sense of cooperation by respecting each other's languages, by respecting the right of each person, each group, to use his or her language in whatever way they feel is appropriate. I believe this amendment by Senator Inhofe would change that dynamic substantially. So I hope my colleagues will agree with me, will oppose this amendment, will support the Salazar amendment, and then I hope we can get on with more substantive matters.

There are a great many substantive matters involved with this immigration bill. This is an enormous, complex piece of legislation which we ought to be trying to understand and deal with separate from this discussion about English as the national language.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I am introducing a bill with Senators Hutchison, Feinstein, and Boxer entitled the Border Health Security Act of 2006. This bill addresses the tremendous health problems confronting our nation's southwestern border.

The United States-Mexico border region is defined in the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission authorizing legislation as the area of land 100 kilometers, or 62.5 miles, north and south of the international boundary. It stretches 2,000 miles from California, through Arizona and New Mexico to the southern tip of Texas and is estimated to have a population of 12 million residents.

The border region comprises 2 sovereign nations, 25 Native American tribes, and 4 States in the United States and six States in Mexico.

Why should we provide some focus to this geographic region? The situation along the border is among the most dire in the country. In the past, we have recognized problems with other regions, through the Denali, Delta, and Appalachian commissions, and have provided targeted funding to those areas. The U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, legislation I sponsored

with Senators McCain, Simon, and Hutchison, was created for the same reasons and annually receives about $4 million in funding that is matched by $1 million from the Mexican Government for administrative purposes to improve international cooperation and agreements to tackle health problems in the region. However, we need to take the next step and provide resources to address the problems.

In the border region, 3 of the 10 poorest counties in the United States are located in the border area, 21 of the counties have been designated as economically distressed, approximately 430,000 people live in 1,200 colonias in Texas and New Mexico, which are unincorporated communities that are characterized by substandard housing, unsafe public drinking water, and wastewater systems, very high unemployment, and the lowest per capita income as a region in the Nation.

In a report earlier this year by the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties Coalition, the Coalition found that, if the border were a State, it would rank second with respect to the uninsured, last with respect to access to health professionals, including doctors, nurses and allied health professionals per capita; second with respect to tuberculosis, third with respect to hepatitis; and fifth with respect to diabetes.

The result is a health system that confronts tremendous health problems with little or no resources.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data reported in September 2005 for the three-year average of 2002 to 2004, the states of Texas and New Mexico rank first and second as the states with the highest uninsured rates in the country with rates of 25.0 percent and 21.0 percent, respectively. California and Arizona are not much better and had uninsured rates of 18.7 percent and 17.1 percent, respectively.

However, the figures along the border are even worse, as the rates of uninsured are higher still than that in the four states overall. Uninsured rates in many border counties are estimated to be above 30 percent and as high as 50 percent in certain communities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's small area health insurance estimates, SAHIE, the three New Mexico border counties had an uninsured rate of 29.4 percent compared to the statewide average of 23.7 percent and more than twice the United States rate of 14.2 percent.

As the U.S.-Mexico Border Commission notes, ``The border is characterized by weaknesses in the border health systems and infrastructure, lack of public financial resources, poor distribution of physicians and other health professionals and hospitals. Moreover, the low rates of health insurance coverage and low incomes puts access to health services out of reach for many border residents and thus keeps the border communities at risk.''

The U.S.-Mexico Border Commission has identified and approved of an agenda through its Health Border 2010 initiative, which seeks to, among other things: reduce by 25 percent the population lacking access to a primary provider; reduce the female breast cancer death rate by 20 percent; reduce the cervical cancer death rate by 30 percent; reduce deaths due to diabetes by 10 percent; reduce hospitalizations due to diabetes by 25 percent; reduce the incidence of HIV cases by 50 percent; reduce the incidence of tuberculosis cases by 50 percent; reduce the incidence of hepatitis A and B cases by 50 percent; reduce the infant mortality rate by 15 percent; and, increase initiation of prenatal care in the first trimester by 85 percent.

However, the U.S.-Mexico Border Commission lacks the resources that are needed to address those important goals. The bipartisan legislation I am introducing today with Senators Hutchison, Feinstein, and Boxer would address that problem by reauthorizing the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission at $10 million and authorizing additional funding to improve the infrastructure, access, and the delivery of health care services along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

These grants would be flexible and allow the individual communities to establish their own priorities with which to spend these funds for the following range of purposes: maternal and child health, primary care and preventative health, public health and public health infrastructure, health promotion, oral health, behavioral and mental health, substance abuse, health conditions that have a high prevalence in the border region, medical and health services research, community health workers or promotoras, health care infrastructure, including planning and construction grants, health disparities, environmental health, health education, and outreach and enrollment services with respect to Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program,

Mr. President, today I am introducing a bill with Senators Hutchison, Feinstein, and Boxer entitled the Border Health Security Act of 2006. This bill addresses the tremendous health problems confronting our nation's southwestern border.

The United States-Mexico border region is defined in the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission authorizing legislation as the area of land 100 kilometers, or 62.5 miles, north and south of the international boundary. It stretches 2,000 miles from California, through Arizona and New Mexico to the southern tip of Texas and is estimated to have a population of 12 million residents.

The border region comprises 2 sovereign nations, 25 Native American tribes, and 4 States in the United States and six States in Mexico.

Why should we provide some focus to this geographic region? The situation along the border is among the most dire in the country. In the past, we have recognized problems with other regions, through the Denali, Delta, and Appalachian commissions, and have provided targeted funding to those areas. The U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, legislation I sponsored

with Senators McCain, Simon, and Hutchison, was created for the same reasons and annually receives about $4 million in funding that is matched by $1 million from the Mexican Government for administrative purposes to improve international cooperation and agreements to tackle health problems in the region. However, we need to take the next step and provide resources to address the problems.

In the border region, 3 of the 10 poorest counties in the United States are located in the border area, 21 of the counties have been designated as economically distressed, approximately 430,000 people live in 1,200 colonias in Texas and New Mexico, which are unincorporated communities that are characterized by substandard housing, unsafe public drinking water, and wastewater systems, very high unemployment, and the lowest per capita income as a region in the Nation.

In a report earlier this year by the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties Coalition, the Coalition found that, if the border were a State, it would rank second with respect to the uninsured, last with respect to access to health professionals, including doctors, nurses and allied health professionals per capita; second with respect to tuberculosis, third with respect to hepatitis; and fifth with respect to diabetes.

The result is a health system that confronts tremendous health problems with little or no resources.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data reported in September 2005 for the three-year average of 2002 to 2004, the states of Texas and New Mexico rank first and second as the states with the highest uninsured rates in the country with rates of 25.0 percent and 21.0 percent, respectively. California and Arizona are not much better and had uninsured rates of 18.7 percent and 17.1 percent, respectively.

However, the figures along the border are even worse, as the rates of uninsured are higher still than that in the four states overall. Uninsured rates in many border counties are estimated to be above 30 percent and as high as 50 percent in certain communities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's small area health insurance estimates, SAHIE, the three New Mexico border counties had an uninsured rate of 29.4 percent compared to the statewide average of 23.7 percent and more than twice the United States rate of 14.2 percent.

As the U.S.-Mexico Border Commission notes, ``The border is characterized by weaknesses in the border health systems and infrastructure, lack of public financial resources, poor distribution of physicians and other health professionals and hospitals. Moreover, the low rates of health insurance coverage and low incomes puts access to health services out of reach for many border residents and thus keeps the border communities at risk.''

The U.S.-Mexico Border Commission has identified and approved of an agenda through its Health Border 2010 initiative, which seeks to, among other things: reduce by 25 percent the population lacking access to a primary provider; reduce the female breast cancer death rate by 20 percent; reduce the cervical cancer death rate by 30 percent; reduce deaths due to diabetes by 10 percent; reduce hospitalizations due to diabetes by 25 percent; reduce the incidence of HIV cases by 50 percent; reduce the incidence of tuberculosis cases by 50 percent; reduce the incidence of hepatitis A and B cases by 50 percent; reduce the infant mortality rate by 15 percent; and, increase initiation of prenatal care in the first trimester by 85 percent.

However, the U.S.-Mexico Border Commission lacks the resources that are needed to address those important goals. The bipartisan legislation I am introducing today with Senators Hutchison, Feinstein, and Boxer would address that problem by reauthorizing the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission at $10 million and authorizing additional funding to improve the infrastructure, access, and the delivery of health care services along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

These grants would be flexible and allow the individual communities to establish their own priorities with which to spend these funds for the following range of purposes: maternal and child health, primary care and preventative health, public health and public health infrastructure, health promotion, oral health, behavioral and mental health, substance abuse, health conditions that have a high prevalence in the border region, medical and health services research, community health workers or promotoras, health care infrastructure, including planning and construction grants, health disparities, environmental health, health education, and outreach and enrollment services with respect to Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program,

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Pennsylvania, the chairman, for yielding to me.

I ask consent to bring up Senate amendment 3981.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, as we all know, the immigration bill creates a new temporary guest worker program aimed at providing an equal and orderly process for individuals to come to this country and to work in sectors of our economy where there is a shortage of available workers.

We had good debate in connection with the Dorgan amendment with regard to that guest worker program. Everyone who listened to that debate understands this is a new program which is being added to our immigration laws, one which is not available today for anyone to use.

Specifically, the bill pending before the Senate allocates 325,000 temporary visas for the first fiscal year, and in each subsequent year the numerical limit is flexible.

If the cap is reached--that is, the full 325,000--the number of available visas would increase. It could increase by 10 percent, it could increase by 15 percent, it could increase by 20 percent in the next fiscal year, depending upon how quickly those visas were used or taken.

In essence, what the bill provides--the bill pending before us--is for an open-ended automatic-increase mechanism that has the potential to significantly increase the number of visas we are making available. When I say an automatic-increase mechanism, we have all heard about compound interest. Everyone who has a checking account knows the power of compounding interest. What we have here is not compounding interest, it is compounding immigration, because the 20-percent increase over the previous year's level continues indefinitely into the future. You start with 325,000, plus 20 percent; then you take the new figure, plus 20 percent; then you take the new figure, plus 20 percent; and it goes on and on.

My amendment, which Senator Feinstein is cosponsoring, would simply put in place, instead of that, a hard cap of 200,000 on the number of visas available each year under this program. Of course, in addition to this program, we all understand there are many other programs that people can use to gain legal access into our country.

Let me show a chart. This chart: guest worker visas issued under S. 2611. Now, the olive-colored wedge down at the bottom represents the number of visas that would be issued over the next 6 years under my amendment. That is 200,000 per year, each year, for 6 years, or a total of 1.2 million visas under the guest worker program.

If the Senate were to defeat the amendment I am offering and just go with the bill as it currently pends before the Senate, then it could take any of a number of courses. If there is a 10-percent increase, because of the speed with which people apply for these visas, it would go up to 2.725 million visas by the end of 6 years. If it is a 15- percent increase, it gets you to 3.222 million visas by the end of 6 years. And if, in fact, there are enough applicants for these visas to get you a full 20-percent increase, then you get to 3.8 million immigrant visas issued over this 6 years.

Now, why did I stop this chart at 6 years? The truth is, this legislation has no sunset. This legislation continues indefinitely until Congress changes the law again. So this chart could just as easily have been for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. And if you really want to see the power of compound immigration, just like the power of compound interest, we should have developed a chart that takes us out 10 or 15 or 20 years. So the chart exemplifies how the number of guest workers may increase over this 6-year period under these different scenarios. The chart could have been made for a longer period.

If the 325,000-person cap is reached within the first 3 months of the fiscal year, we will have added almost 4 million guest workers over this 6-year period. If the cap is reached in the second quarter of the fiscal year, we will have added just over 3 million. And if the cap is hit in the third quarter of the year, we will have added a little under 3 million workers under this particular program.

In addition, it is important to note that although these visas are issued only for up to 6 years, these workers have the right to petition to become legal permanent residents within 1 year if the employer files for them or within 4 years if they self-petition.

Frankly, I believe we need to be a little more judicious with respect to the number of visas we are allocating under this program. This is a brandnew program. Under my amendment, which sets the numerical limit for such visas at 200,000, there would be no more than 1.2 million guest workers admitted over these first 6 years.

We need to recognize that guest worker programs, if they are not properly implemented, can impact on American workers. Senator Dorgan made the case, I believe very eloquently, that many economists have

spoken about the downward pressure on wages that results when you increase the labor supply. We need to recognize that our success with regard to the temporary worker program we have now, such as with regard to agricultural workers, has been mixed. We should not make a mistake here by erring on the side of extravagance in allocating these visas or authorizing the issuance of these visas until we know how this program is going to impact American workers.

I did not vote for Senator Dorgan's amendment to eliminate the guest worker program, but I do believe we need to be judicious about the extent of the guest worker program that we authorize. We definitely should not be signing on to some kind of automatic compounding of the number of workers eligible for legal entry into this country under that program. There are a variety of jobs that may be filled by these guest workers--from construction jobs to hotel service jobs--but we should not be placing American workers in these sectors of our economy in the position of competing with virtually an unlimited number of guest workers, which is what I fear we are putting in the law if we leave the law the way it now pends in this pending legislation.

The underlying bill does create a temporary guest worker task force. This task force is charged with assessing the impact of the guest worker program on wages and on labor conditions and the employment of American workers and with then making recommendations about whether the numerical cap should be lowered or raised. But then you go on with the legislation, and the increase mechanism is not in any way tied to the recommendations of the task force. The overall number of visas could significantly increase automatically, regardless of whether the program is determined, by this temporary guest worker task force, to be hurting American workers.

So if Congress wants to raise the caps, we have the authority to do that every year. We meet here every year. We can raise the cap. But we should not provide for an automatic increase in the number of temporary visas irrespective of how that increase is affecting American workers.

Just to be clear, reducing the number of guest worker visas to 200,000 a year is not a drastic measure that undercuts the bill's goal of providing a more realistic framework for immigrants to legally come into this country. According to the Congressional Research Service, under this overall bill, we will at least be doubling--here is a chart that shows what is going to happen to the projections for employment- based legal permanent residents coming into this country under this legislation. We will at least be doubling the flow of legal permanent immigration under the bill in the first year. We increase family- and employment-based numerical limits, and we exempt categories of individuals from these caps.

Overall, the bill does provide for many legal avenues for individuals to legally come into the United States and to work. For example, as this chart shows--this is a chart based on the Congressional Research Service report--we are significantly increasing the number of employment-based legal permanent residents under the bill.

I strongly believe the amendment I am offering with Senator Feinstein is a reasonable approach. It ensures that an unlimited number of guest workers are not admitted under this program. I hope my colleagues will agree with me that this is a good change. This amendment would improve the legislation, would allow us to maintain a guest worker program, which the President has strongly endorsed maintaining, but would improve the program by limiting it to a level we can understand and manage in these first few years.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent that it be equally divided between the two sides.

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

Mr. President, how much time remains on my side?

Seventeen and a half?

Mr. President, I yield 12 minutes to the Senator from California.

First, I thank the Senator from California for her strong support for my amendment. Particularly because of her role in the development of the legislation in the Judiciary

Committee, she pointed out very well the reasons this amendment is meritorious. I hope people, even some Members on the Judiciary Committee with Senator Feinstein, will look at this favorably and consider it an improvement to the bill.

I ask unanimous consent that Senator Alexander from Tennessee be added as a cosponsor of the amendment.

I know we have one other Senator who has indicated a desire to speak in favor of the amendment. Let me point out to my colleagues that both myself and Senator Alexander are Members who voted against the Dorgan amendment that was just tabled. I cannot speak for Senator Alexander, but from my perspective, I am persuaded that there is value in having a viable guest worker program. I support that part of the legislation. My concern is with the magnitude of it, particularly since it is a new program.

For us to start it at 325,000 per year and then have an automatic escalator in the law and have no sunset on it at all, so that we all understand that this is permanent law, unless Congress comes back and changes the law 10 years from now, we will still be taking the previous year's total and be able to increase it by 20 percent. That gets to a point where American workers are going to have a very legitimate complaint. I favor allowing an opportunity for people to come here and take jobs that Americans don't want. But I do not favor allowing people to come here to bid down the price of labor to such a point that Americans are unwilling to take jobs for the very meager salaries that employers are able to pay.

It is a straightforward amendment. I hope my colleagues will support it. I know we do have one more speaker. I believe the Senator from California would like 2 minutes. I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from California.

May I ask my colleague, is it his intent that I should close my argument now and then we would have a vote?

Mr. President, I thank my colleague for that concise answer.

Let me say that I have great respect for the chairman and his efforts to put together a bill that he believes makes sense. As he says, it accommodates the market. That is an interesting concept, accommodating the market. The amendment I am offering, along with Senator Feinstein and Senator Alexander, is an amendment that would say that we need to go at this in a prudent fashion and limit the number of people who are going to be able to come into the country and apply through this new program that we are defining for the first time in law as part of this bill.

Some of the arguments I have heard in favor of the guest worker program relate to the workers themselves, the workers who are trying to get into this country to make a better life for themselves. I have empathy for those workers as well. But, quite frankly, there is a virtually unlimited supply of people who would like to come here and work and improve their life by doing so. We need to make judgments about how large a group we are going to allow in each year. That is why I am proposing the amendment.

As far as employers are concerned, there are a lot of employers who, given the option of signing a contract to bring in workers from another country who they know will be in many respects less likely to complain about working conditions, less likely to raise

any concerns about their employment situation, would find that attractive. And accordingly, you could see a great demand by some employers to go ahead and meet their employment needs through this device.

As I said before, I favor a guest worker program. It makes sense to have a guest worker program.

But I think it also makes sense for us to do it in a more reasonable way than the bill currently calls for and not to build in some kind of automatic escalator that will occur regardless of what we determine the impact is going to be on American workers. I think we can come back and raise the cap again if we decide in 2 years or 5 years, or whatever, that we want to do that. But we should not build into this legislation an automatic escalator that will make it extremely likely that the number of workers will substantially increase in coming years by virtue of this legal provision that we put in the law.

Mr. President, I urge the support of my amendment, and I hope my colleagues will see this as a way to improve the legislation rather than an undermining provision of the legislation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Madam President, I thank my colleague, Senator Baucus, for his leadership and for yielding me time to make a few points. I know my colleague from Connecticut is here, ready to make some additional points. I will try to be brief.

I wanted to point out some of the reasons why I am strongly opposed to this reconciliation bill. I don't think it is responsible for us go forward with debt financing of another tax cut for the wealthiest while, as I see it, we are ignoring the need to reduce the deficit. We are ignoring many of the country's other needs. We are not following through on earlier efforts we made to create an energy plan for the country. I want to focus on that since I have been involved in some of the legislation that put that plan in place.

A few weeks ago, the majority held a press conference announcing a variety of initiatives to deal with our energy problems. One of them, of course, was to have a $100 check that would be sent to each taxpayer. The public reaction was pretty swift. It was pretty clear that the public thought this was a gimmick. They thought this was irresponsible, particularly given the size of the deficit. The majority essentially decided, then, that that was not a part of their energy plan with which they wanted to proceed.

Now they are bringing to the floor a tax bill which does virtually nothing for most of these people who previously were in line to get the $100 tax rebate. The question is probably coming back to some of these people now that if we can afford to give the kind of tax relief that is provided for in this bill to those who are better off, those who are wealthier, maybe we should go ahead and send $100 to everyone, sort of as a consolation prize, so that they, too, can participate in this tax- cutting effort. We ought to think of this in the context of what we have been doing in the last few weeks around here.

It is estimated that in my State of New Mexico, there are about 18 percent who will, in fact, receive any benefit at all from the reconciliation bill before the Senate. If we look specifically at the bottom 60 percent of working New Mexico families, their average tax cut is $15. In contrast, the top 5 percent in my State would get 64 percent of the tax cut. This is at a time when the price of gasoline is very high, the price of educating a family's children is very high, and when the price of health care is extremely high. Obviously, there is a ring of unfairness about the allocation of these tax benefits which strikes everybody.

I wanted to talk a minute about the provisions related to energy. An important part of the Energy bill we passed last year was to provide tax incentives that would move us away from dependence on foreign oil. We passed a variety of those. Let me put up a chart that lists a few. Of course, there was an R&D tax credit which has already expired. There was an electricity from alternative fuels tax credit. There was a home energy efficiency tax credit, where you would get a credit if you wanted to put a solar heating system on your house, for example. There was a credit for fuel cells for microturbines, an electric car tax credit, clean renewable energy bonds, a hybrid vehicle credit. We put a lot of those in the law. Unfortunately, because of the fiscal situation of the country, we said: They are going to expire at the end of 2007.

That date is approaching. Frankly, the way we wrote it, we said: You cannot get the tax credit we are writing into law unless you have put your project, you have built it and put it into service prior to the expiration of the tax credit. Well, the expiration of the tax credit is about 18 to 19 months away. A lot of people are beginning to say: Wait a minute. Let's hold off on any additional investment in alternative energy. We can't proceed with the wind farm, the solar power installation because these tax credits are going away.

We ought to be addressing that. Instead, we are saying: Let's add a couple years, out to 2011, to the tax provisions that assist the most wealthy. That is misplaced priorities.

It is important that the Congress try to follow through on what we did last year. We have a very short attention span in the Congress. Two weeks ago, everyone was holding press conferences about how we are going to solve our energy problems. Here we are now, using up any ability we have to extend the tax credits that were part of the solution to our energy problem down the road. We need to think about that, and I hope we will.

Let me talk about one other issue that I believe is so egregious, it needs to be focused on before the vote on this conference report. This came to my attention, quite frankly, when I was getting a cup of coffee this morning. I said good morning to one of the people who works in one of our offices here, a friend of mine. And she said: Good morning. Another beautiful day in the land of make believe.

I thought, that sounds right. And I started questioning, as I was going back to my office, exactly why we all agree that this is the land of make believe, this Congress, this Capitol Hill is the land of make believe. Then it became clear to me when I focused on this provision. Under current rules in the Senate, we can't consider this bill as a reconciliation bill under special procedures, if it, in fact, would make the deficit worse outside the budget window. That means after 2010, outside the 5-year period. It is clear to everyone who is willing to look at it that this bill does add to the deficit after 2010. But the folks who put this bill together have found a very ingenious offset which they claim will allow them to extend these tax cuts for the wealthiest without, in fact, adding to that deficit outside the budget window.

You ask: What is that ingenious offset? The ingenious offset is a provision that allows couples with incomes over $160,000 to convert their individual retirement accounts from regular conventional accounts into Roth IRAs and pay whatever tax is due in accomplishing that which would be some tax. Of course, once they have made that conversion from the IRA to the Roth IRA, then they have paid any tax that is due, and any future earnings on those funds is protected from any future obligation. That is why, when we wrote the Roth IRA into law, we made provision and said: We are only going to give this kind of a tax benefit to people whose incomes are not too high. If a couple has over $160,000 in income, they are not eligible for a Roth IRA. That was what we determined. We said: Of course, you can't convert a regular IRA into a Roth IRA if your income is too high.

In this bill we are saying that is no longer the case. In this bill we are saying: If you are Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or whoever you are, if you have

a regular IRA, you are welcome to and encouraged to convert it into a Roth IRA, pay whatever tax is due. And then, of course, from then on there is no tax due. Why would we stick this in? This is another tax break for the wealthiest. Why would we stick this in? We stick it in because it results in some additional revenue coming into the Federal treasury over the first 3 years that it is in effect. So while people are making these conversions and paying the tax they have to to make those conversions, the Treasury is earning money. And we can use that money to offset the large deficit increase that otherwise would be occurring after this budgetary window, so to speak.

Of course, after the Federal Treasury receives that revenue for 3 years, it starts losing revenue because of this very provision. As our Vice President would say: It loses revenue big time after that. So we will lose $4.5 billion in revenue over the 10-year period and substantially more in the future after that. So who benefits from this offset provision that was put into this conference report? I will tell you who benefits from it: 99.4 percent of the benefit goes to the top quintile of income.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Let me conclude by saying that there are many reasons why people should vote against this reconciliation bill. It is bad fiscal policy. It is bad priorities as far as what extensions we ought to be focused on at this time, if we can afford extensions. It also has in it some of these provisions that are bad policy and egregious in the effect they have. I hope my colleagues will reject the bill when it does come to final vote.

I yield the floor.