Floor Statements

Madam President, I wish to address amendment 1274, which would clarify what I believe is existing law that the President has authority to continue to detain an enemy combatant under the law of war, following a trial before a military commission or an article III court, and regardless of the outcome of that trial. Let me explain what I mean.

As I said yesterday, even under the law of war the President has the authority to detain an enemy combatant, a prisoner of war, a captured enemy soldier, a belligerent. The President can detain him through the duration of the hostilities. The President is not required--the Commander in Chief is not required to release an individual whose sworn duty it is to return to his military outfit and commence hostilities again against the United States. That individual could be killed on the battlefield, but if captured, you are not required, under all laws of war that I am aware of and certainly the Geneva Conventions--you can maintain that individual in custody to prevent him from attacking you. But you can also try an individual who has been captured if that individual violated the rules of war.

For example, a decent soldier from Germany--many of them were held in my State of Alabama. They behaved well. They made paintings of American citizens, they did a lot of things, and did not cause a lot of trouble. They were in uniform and they complied with the rules of war and they were not tried as illegal enemy combatants.

But many of the terrorists today do not wear uniforms, deliberately target innocent men, women, and children, and deliberately violate multiple rules of war. Those individuals are subject, in addition to being held as a combatant, as an unlawful combatant. They can be prosecuted and they should be prosecuted. In World War II a group of Nazi saboteurs in the Ex parte Quirin case were let out of a submarine off, I think, of Long Island. They came into the country with plans to sabotage the United States. They were captured and tried by military commissions. Several were American citizens. A number of them--most of them, frankly--after being tried and convicted, were executed. The Supreme Court of the United States approved that procedure.

But recent cases demonstrate the potential problem we have today. One Guantanamo Bay detainee has already raised the question I have discussed before the military commission where he is being tried. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, was arraigned before a military commission on November 9. He was held not only as an al-Qaida, or a belligerent against the United States, but he was charged with a violation of the rules of war.

This was a group that sneaked into the harbor pretending to be innocent people and ran their boat against the Cole, killing a number of U.S. sailors.

I remember being at a christening of one of the Navy ships at Norfolk not long after this. I walked out of that area and I heard one of the sailors cry out: Remember the Cole. The hair still stands up on my neck when I hear it.

We have an obligation to defend our men and women in uniform. When they are out on the high sea or they are in a neutral port, they expect to be treated according to the laws of war and then they are murdered by an individual such as this.

This individual's lawyers filed a motion asking the military judge to clarify the effect of an acquittal, should the commission acquit him. He argued that the members of the committee had a right to know what would happen if he were acquitted because they might object to taking part in what he called a show trial if it turned out that he would continue to be detained at Guantanamo Bay.

There is another case in which the administration was almost confronted with the problem a year ago, in the case of a former Guantanamo detainee, an al-Qaida member named Ahmed Ghailani, who was responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of us remember those early al-Qaida bombings against our embassies in Africa.

After the Justice Department chose to prosecute Ghailani in an article III civilian court and directed the United States Attorney not to seek the death penalty--I am not sure why that ever happened; we don't know--but the jury acquitted him on 284 out of 285 counts. Luckily, he received a life sentence on the single count of conspiracy, for which he was convicted.

But what if he had not been convicted? What if there was insufficient evidence to prove he committed a crime, but not insufficient evidence to prove he was a combatant against the United States? Al-Qaida has declared war against the United States, officially and openly. The U.S. Congress has authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida, which is the equivalent of a declaration of war.

What if he had received a modest sentence after being convicted and had credit for time served? What if he had been acquitted on all 285 counts? Would the President have been required to release him into the United States, if the government could not get some country to take him? That would be wrong. He was at war against the United States. He was a combatant against the United States. Like any other captured combatant, he can be held as long as the hostilities continue.

By the way, let me note, military commissions are open. If they decide to try one of these individuals--not just hold him as a prisoner of war but hold him and try him for violation of the laws of war--they get lawyers, they get procedural rights. The Supreme Court has established what those rights are. Congress has passed laws effectuating what the Supreme Court said these trials should consist of, and a mechanism has been set up to fairly try them.

But enemy combatants are not common criminals. If a bank robber is denied bail, he remains in jail awaiting a trial, a speedy public trial, with government-paid lawyers. Enemy combatants are not sitting in Guantanamo Bay awaiting trial by a military commission, or by an article III court. They are held in military custody precisely because they are enemies, combatants against the United States. They should continue to be held there as long as the war continues and as long as they do not remain a threat to return to the battlefield against the United States.

This is an important point, considering that 27 percent of the former Guantanamo detainees who have been released--161 out of 600--have returned to the battlefield, attacked Americans. This Nation has no obligation to release captured enemy prisoners of war when we know for an absolute fact that 27 percent of them have returned to war against the United States. How many others have but we do not have proof of it? That is what the whole history of warfare is.

Lincoln ceased exchanging prisoners with the South after he realized they had more soldiers in the South. It was not to his advantage to release captured southern soldiers who would return to the fighting, so he held them until the war was over. Under the laws of war, the President has the authority to prevent an enemy combatant from returning to the battlefield. That is consistent with all history.

This amendment--please, Senators, I hope you would note--would make it clear that the President simply has authority to continue to detain enemy combatants held pursuant to the rules of war, even though they may have been tried, regardless of where that trial would be held and what the outcome was, as long as, of course, they could prove they were an enemy combatant and violating the rules of war.

I would note one thing.

I see my friend, the Senator from California, is here and probably is ready to speak.

On the question of citizenship, can a citizen be held in this fashion? The Supreme Court has clearly held they may. But the Senator is offering legislation that might change that. My amendment does not answer that question. It simply says a combatant should be able to be held under the standard of a prisoner of war, a combatant, even if they had been prosecuted for violation of the laws of war and acquitted.

It is common sense. I believe the courts will hold that, but it is an issue that is out there. I think Congress would do well to settle it today.

I urge my colleagues to do so.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. I note the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I join with Senator McCain in support of Senator Cornyn's amendment. Taiwan has been a strong ally of the United States. Senator McCain said we would provide them military aircraft, but, in truth, they would buy it. They are our allies. They are friends. They are prepared to purchase from an American company legitimate military equipment that they could use to help maintain the freedom they have cherished on the island, and it is hard for me to understand how that would be objected to.

I just wish to say, as someone who has looked at these issues for some time as a member of the Armed Services Committee, I do believe Senator Cornyn--also a member of that committee--is correct, and I strongly support the amendment and urge my colleagues to vote for it, if and when we can get a vote.

I thank the Chair, yield the floor, and note the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask that I be allowed to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. President, our country is facing a very serious financial crisis.

We have seen what happened in Europe. We had some numbers on the stock market for a while. But if I understand what happened, there was a very real crisis facing the Europeans, and at the very last moment they took some action that was received positively.

But they are not out of the woods yet and neither are we. Our debt is surging. We have gone from 5 years ago a $161 billion deficit to a $450 billion deficit in President Bush's last year to $1.2 trillion in President Obama's first year, $1.3 trillion in President Obama's second year, $1.2 trillion this year, and over $1 trillion predicted in deficits next year.

We are going to have a proposal that comes before us to provide a payroll holiday, and it is sold as avoiding a tax increase. That is what the President says it is; we are avoiding a tax increase. So we ought to ask ourselves exactly how that is so and if it is so. Let me just say, I don't think that is accurate.

Two years ago, there was an employer payroll tax holiday that went only to the employer. It cost the Treasury $7.6 billion. Last year, as part of the final compromise, a bipartisan compromise, it was agreed that there would be a 2-percent tax holiday for working persons. So instead of paying 6-plus percent on your withholding tax, you would pay 4. That cost $111 billion for that year.

So the President said: If we don't extend that, we are going to have a tax increase. But is he accurate? No, not really. This year's proposal would be to reduce not the 4 percent but the 3.1 percent, cutting the 6.2 withholding to 3.1 for the employer and for the employee, and it would cost in 1 year $265 billion--$265 billion that would not be going into the Social Security trust fund so that those who retire would have the retirement funds they have been promised. It would not go there. It weakens Social Security, the integrity of the system, in my opinion.

But we are told not to worry, the U.S. Treasury will replace this $265 billion with Treasury money. But the problem is, the Treasury doesn't have any money. The Treasury is already in debt. The Treasury is going to add another $1 trillion to the deficit this year. So now it is going to be added to--$265 billion more in one fell swoop, in one bill, right here at the end of the session. If you don't vote for it, the President says, you are raising taxes on the American people. That is not an accurate statement.

In an economic sense, in my opinion, the real essence of this is the U.S. Treasury will borrow $265 billion. Then, it will direct the Social Security Administration to send that money out in the form of a reduced withholding amount to be paid by workers. It is a direct borrow and it is a direct delivery of money and it uses Social Security trust fund moneys as a vehicle to transfer the money. In an economic sense, it borrows $265 billion to spend.

How much is $265 billion? The supercommittee, the committee of 12, was trying to find $1,200 billion in savings over 10 years--not 1 year, 10 years. This one bill, this one proposal of $265 billion would be spent this 1 year.

To achieve the committee of 12's goal, they would simply have needed to have cut $120 billion a year for 10 years out of the entire Federal Government. They failed. Immediately now, the President and our majority leader are demanding this Congress pass an expenditure-- unexpected, not before

done; nothing like such a large expenditure ever has come out of Social Security--to spend another $265 billion. How will we ever get our house in order? I wish I could figure out a way to be supportive. I don't see how I can be.

I am pleased the Republicans are trying to work up a bill that would not cost as much as $265 billion and some way to pay for it. But, in truth, if we are going to be able to cut spending to pay for any kind of new expenditure, wouldn't we be better to do what the committee of 12 tried to do: cut spending to reduce the debt? Shouldn't we be seeking ways, if we are going to raise taxes, to use those taxes to pay down the debt, instead of taking 10 years under the President's plan in a new tax that takes 10 years of that tax to pay for this 1 year's expenditure? That is what the proposal is.

I would say to my colleagues, this goes beyond partisan politics. This gets to the point: Are we in control of the Treasury and the spending of the United States of America? Can we defend what we are doing?

Don't think that is the only thing that is going to come up. I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee. We look at these numbers. This also will be taken care of in December, count on it: We are going to deal with the alternative minimum tax. That is going to cost $50 billion. We are going to deal with unemployment insurance, an additional $70 billion to extend those payments beyond 90-some-odd weeks. We are going to fix the doctors payment, because we have to. We can't cut the doctors that much, $21 billion. We are going to extend most, if not all, of the tax extenders we call them, $90 billion. The total is $500 billion.

Some of this we have been expecting to take care of. But we weren't expecting or planning in any way to have a continuation of the payroll holiday that is going to cost $265 billion. I just would say to my colleagues, when are we going to think more rationally about it?

I just heard: How are we going to pay for the AMT, unemployment insurance, doctors payments, and the tax extenders? Somebody said: We are going to count the savings from the war. The Congressional Budget Office will show a decline in expenses for the Iraq and Afghanistan war will be a savings. We can spend that. That is fraudulent, that is a gimmick, and it should not be acceptable.

Everybody knows the war costs are going to be coming down and we have been planning for that. We can't assume that money is available to spend willy-nilly. We were bringing the war costs down to bring the debt down, not to fund new spending. We need to bring the war costs down to try to reduce our debt and our deficit, not to fund new spending. But that is how they are going to do this, I have been told. I am not surprised because there is no other way they are going to do it.

I just would share that. We will be voting in a little bit on this issue. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know how to fix our problems, but I know one thing. We remain in denial. Our country is in greater debt crisis than we realize. Mr. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson of President Obama's debt commission say we are facing the most predictable financial crisis in our Nation's history as a result of our debt, and we need to get serious about how to fix it.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this amendment is crafted to simply clarify and affirm what appears to be the law, and logic tells us should be the law today.

If an individual is apprehended as a prisoner of war, they are detained under the laws of war until the conflict ends. But if, after being detained or when they are detained, it is determined they have committed crimes against the laws of war, they can be tried for those crimes.

There is a slight ambiguity. I think it is pretty clear the military would have a right to continue to detain them as a prisoner of war if they were not convicted of the much higher burden crime against the laws of war.

So the essence of this is simply to say what the judge said in the case involving the African Embassy bombing, the Ghailani case. The guy was acquitted of 284 out of 285 counts, and the judge said: You probably would be detained under the laws of war. So this would clarify that.

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

I would ask that I be notified after 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I have offered an amendment that clarifies--although that is not exactly the right word--the fact that an unlawful combatant or a combatant who is held by the U.S. military for being an enemy of the United States, a combatant against the United States, or an unlawful combatant, is not therefore entitled to be released if the U.S. military or the civilian courts choose to prosecute him and he is acquitted or after he serves his sentence but before hostilities have ended. These are entirely different matters.

There are two questions: Are you an enemy combatant of the United States? These are the kinds of prisoners of war in World War II, Germans, for example, who were kept in Aliceville, AL. They stayed in a prisoner-of-war camp until the war was over, and they went home. They didn't violate the rules of war; they weren't prosecuted for any crimes. They simply were not released so that they could go and rejoin the battle in an attempt to kill more American service men and women. But they were lawful. They wore uniforms, they complied with the rules of war, and they were not able to be prosecuted.

But when a person sneaks into the country with an intent to murder women and children and innocent noncombatants, does not wear a uniform, and violates other provisions of the rules of war, then they can be not only held as a combatant but they can be held and tried for commission of crimes against the United States. That is the classic standard of the law of war.

I believe it is clear that if a person is captured and tried for a crime and, let's say, acquitted--whether in a civilian court or a military commission--they are not entitled to be released. To that end, I would quote a number of statements to that effect. But I believe the legal system would be a lot better off if we spoke clearly on that matter today so there is no doubt whatsoever.

President Obama, on May 21, 2009, said this:

But even when [the prosecution] process is complete, there

may be a number of people who could not be prosecuted for

past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the

security of the United States.

In other words, they remain prisoners of war who are likely to join the enemy if they are released. He goes on to say:

These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the

United States. As I said, I am not going to release

individuals who endanger the American people.

I think that is consistent with all rules of war, and I think the President was right in that statement.

Attorney General Eric Holder, in November of 2009, before the Judiciary Committee, said:

I personally think that we should involve Congress in

[ensuring that the Executive Branch has the authority to make

that decision], that we should interact with . . . this

committee in crafting a law of war detention process or

program.

In other words, he was calling on us to work with them in developing statutes. But, historically, I think the law is clear at any rate.

Jeh Johnson, General Counsel to the Department of Defense, who came from the New York Times as general counsel for the New York Times--not a career Department of Justice defense attorney--said this before the Senate Armed Services Committee:

The question of what happens if there's an acquittal is an

interesting question . . . I think that as a matter of legal

authority, if you have the authority under the laws of war to

detain someone, and the Hamdi decision said that in 2004,

that is true irrespective of what happens on the prosecution

side . . . as a matter of legal authority, I think we have

law-of-war authority, pursuant to the authority Congress

granted us with AUMF, as the Supreme Court interpreted it, to

hold that person provided they continue to be a security

threat, and we have the authority in the first place.

So, again, he is saying if they are not convicted, they can still be held if they continue to be a threat.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on ``Meet the Press'' November of last year:

MR. GREGORY: But my question is, are we committed with

these terror suspects that if they are acquitted in civilian

courts, they should be released?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, no. . . .

Senator Jack Reed, our West Point graduate and a member of the Armed Services Committee--I am proud to serve with my Democratic colleague-- this is what he said the November before last:

There are no guarantees [of conviction], but under basic

principles of international law, as long as these individuals

pose a threat, they can be detained, and they will. . . . I

do not believe they will be released . . . under the

principle of preventive detention, which is recognized during

hostilities.

I believe this is legislation that would do nothing more but, importantly, will affirm the classical understanding of our laws of war, and as a result, the people who are charged can be tried, and if they are not convicted of a crime, they can still be detained.

I would note that an individual American soldier or German soldier or Japanese soldier who is lawful and released has a duty to report back to their military unit and commence hostilities until the war is over.

Senator Graham is here, a current JAG officer in the U.S. Air Force who has studied these matters very closely and has been engaged in this debate so eloquently. I am delighted to have him here and to have his support on this amendment. Perhaps he has some comments?

I will be pleased to.

That is correct.

That is certainly true.

That is the law as I understand it.

That is correct.

I certainly agree with the Senator that an American citizen can join in a war against the United States.

That is correct.

That is correct.

That is correct.

Absolutely. It is up to the detaining authority whether they believe a person has committed a crime.

Absolutely.

That is correct.

I asked to be informed at 10. I see Senator Sanders is here.

That is a very important purpose of that.

That is correct.

Absolutely not. It focuses on punishment for a crime already committed, normally.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. In fact, we specifically tell people arrested that they have a right not to provide any intelligence, and it indicates it is clearly not the primary function.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I certainly believe it is.

Absolutely. Someone may not be willing to talk today, but as time goes by they might be willing to completely change and be forthcoming.

That is certainly true.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. That would undermine one of the functions of the U.S. military in dealing with enemies of the state.

There is no doubt. No war has ever been lawyered to the degree this has.

They do, and to a large degree that is different from any other war in our history.

Absolutely.

Yes.

We have not done that before, yes.

I believe so, yes, consistent with the language in the recent Supreme Court opinions--recent opinions--and perhaps it even goes further than what the Supreme Court requires.

Yes.

That is done every day, yes, with judicial oversight.

Absolutely it is. And just for the fact of my amendment, it does not require people to be held. It only gives the government the authority to do so if they deem it appropriate for the defense of America.

Yes. It is extraordinarily disappointing, actually, and against projections of many of those advocating for early release.

They certainly have.

Yes.

So well said. I agree.

Mr. President, with regard to the question of citizenship, I would just say to my colleague that this in no way deals with that. Whatever the courts, whatever the bill and other laws say about citizenship will apply here. It does not change that status at all. I do believe the legislation is clearly consistent with the statements and testimony of President Obama; Attorney General Eric Holder; Jeh Johnson, counsel of the Secretary of Defense; Secretary of State Clinton, and others.

I urge acceptance of my amendment and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have been working for some time to wrestle with this question of the right number of military forces we need in Europe. It is an issue that has given me some pause. I thought we had an agreement several years ago to make some noticeable changes in that force structure. Some changes have indeed been made and others were in the works and they apparently have been put on hold and altered.

So I just wished to share some thoughts about it. I thank Senator Levin and Senator McCain for working with me to develop an amendment to this bill that helps call attention to this problem with the Department of Defense.

We have had a long and historic relationship with Europe and our European allies. They remain the best allies we have in the world. We have large numbers of troops still in Europe. But there are not nearly as many as there have been in the past. But the numbers are still extraordinary. We have, at this time, 80,000 U.S. troops in Europe, and I do not believe military threats justify that large a troop presence. Our historic even larger number was based on the Soviet threat, the Fulda Gap, the weakness of our European allies after World War II and their lack of strength and the bond that NATO meant. We stuck together and transformed the entire North Atlantic region in a positive way.

A book called ``Paradise and Power'' has been written about where we are today. It is a pretty significant book, frankly. The essence of it is that the Europeans are in a paradise protected by American power, and they do not feel any need to substantially burden themselves with national defense because the United States is there.

We have a nuclear presence, we have 80,000 troops, and we have the fabulously trained, highly skilled military with the lift capability of moving to a troubled and dangerous spot at any time. I do think it is fair to say they have become a bit complacent.

As part of a CODEL I led in 2004, we visited Europe, because the United States was going through a BRAC, a reduction of U.S. basing, and we did not have the same type policy with regard to international bases. We visited--Senator Chambliss and Senator Enzi and I--bases in Europe, particularly bases we felt would be enduring, such as Rota, Spain, Sigonella and Vicenza and other bases--and Ramstein in Germany.

But there are others, lots of others. So part of the NATO commitment is that each nation in Europe would invest and spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. We have been 4 percent--sometimes over that recently-- in recent years. So our NATO members, however, are falling below that. Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, is at 1.2 percent of GDP on defense, and they spend a large portion of that on short-term, less than 1 year, military training of young people in Germany.

The fact is, a 9-month trainee is not someone in the modern world we can send into combat. They are just not sufficiently trained. Many military experts believe this is a waste of money. So even the money they are spending, in many ways, is not effectively and wisely spent to create the kind of modern military they have to have to be successful in a serious manner.

We do, though, believe Europe is not facing the kind of threats we had. I think it is appropriate for us to talk to our European allies and say we want to proceed with a drawdown, where possible. This Nation is borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend. The Defense Department, under the sequester that will occur as a result of the failure of the committee of 12 to reach an agreement, will be facing dramatic cuts in spending, over $1 trillion based on President Obama's projected budget over 10 years. We need to look for every reasonable savings we can.

The Defense Department is taking too heavy a cut in my opinion, far more than any other department of government. However, we cannot sustain that. I do not support that large a cut, but it will be reducing spending by a significant amount. So I believe we should think about our foreign deployments. The National Defense Authorization Act represents a vision for defense spending. We are now down from $548 billion spent on the Defense Department last year, $527 billion this year, an actual reduction in noninflation dollars of over $20 billion.

As a matter of fact, the Budget Control Act agreement calls for a reduction of total spending in the discretionary account this year of $7 billion; whereas, the Defense Department is taking $20 billion. Other departments therefore are receiving increases to get the net 7 that is claimed. Unfortunately, that is not an accurate number because we do not achieve even the $7 billion promised.

Since 2004, the Defense Department had a plan to transfer two of its four highly trained combat brigades in Europe back to the United States as part of the larger post-world war realignment. However, in April of this year, the Department of Defense announced it would maintain three combat brigades and not bring the fourth one home until 2015.

I have asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, at the Armed Services hearing, and I asked Admiral Stavridis, our European EUCOM commander, and they had no good explanation for why we are altering the plan that has been in place.

So my amendment has been agreed to on both sides and would require three things from the Department of Defense: No. 1, assessment of the April 2011 decision to station three Army brigade combat teams in Europe; No. 2, an analysis of the fiscal and strategic costs and benefits of reducing the number of forward-based military personnel in Europe to that recommended by the 2004 Global Posture Review; and, No. 3, to describe the methodology used by the Defense Department to estimate the current and future cost of U.S. force posture in Europe.

So is Europe more threatened today than before? I do not think so. The United States has a tougher financial condition today than before? Yes. I believe we need to look at this carefully. I thank Senator McCain and Senator Levin for working with me to recommend an amendment they believe is consistent with the goals I am seeking without micromanaging the Department of Defense.

I thank the Chair. I am pleased this amendment will be considered, and perhaps we can make some progress to analyzing more properly the deployment of forces in Europe. Finally, I would say there is no doubt in my mind that the economy of the United States is benefited if a brigade is housed in the United States, and the costs of support and family are in the United States strengthening our economy rather than transferring the wealth of our Nation to a foreign area.

I hope we will consider that as we deal with this issue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment No. 1185 be modified with the changes at the desk.

This amendment would simply require the Department of Defense to include the discussion of the feasibility and advisability of establishing a missile defense site on the east coast of the United States in its Homeland Defense Hedging Strategy Review.

I hope my amendment can be accepted by voice vote. I thank Senator Levin and Senator McCain for working with me to get language I believe all can agree to.

Mr. President, I do believe the Defense authorization bill has been moved in the way more legislation needs to be handled in the Congress. I am confident that is in large part due to the leadership of Senator Levin, who is a professional, skilled lawyer, who knows the big picture and the small details of the legislation. It has been a pleasure to work with him over the years. I have learned a great deal about our defense from him and how legislation is enacted. So I want to express my appreciation for that.

And I thank Senator McCain, who brings a vast knowledge of defense and military issues, and who is courageous in defending what he believes the legitimate interests of the United States are. That has been a real pleasure.

I will join Senator Levin in thanking Senator Ayotte for her leadership. Her contributions to our committee have been immediate, and that is reflected in the fact that Senator McCain has asked her to manage the floor today for him. I also appreciate the Senator's work on the budget and the effort we have made there.

Amendments Nos. 1182, 1183, 1184, 1185, and 1274 en Bloc

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to temporarily set aside the pending amendment and call up the following amendments en bloc: amendment No. 1182, dealing with Army brigade combat teams; amendment No. 1183, dealing with the nuclear triad; amendment No. 1184, dealing with naval surface vessels; amendment No. 1185, dealing with missile defense; and amendment No. 1274, dealing with the detention of enemy combatants.

Mr. President, I wish to share a few general comments about where we are. All of us have been confronting, whether we want to or not--I think some of us more realistically than others--the debt situation this Nation faces. We are, indeed, borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend. That is an unsustainable path. We have already had 3 consecutive years of deficits exceeding $1 trillion, and we are projected to have another trillion-dollar deficit next year.

The debt under President Obama has now increased by 42 percent in the first 3 years of his term in office. It is an unsustainable course. We have to do better.

The National Defense Authorization Act represents our committee's vision for defense in the future. We have done something about the spending problem America has. As we calculate the numbers, we are down from $548 billion--in actual money spent on the Defense Department last year--to $527 billion this year, an actual reduction, in noninflation- adjusted dollars, of over $20 billion, which represents about a 5- percent reduction, a 4-percent reduction in defense spending.

That is what all of our accounts should be doing. But, indeed, that is not happening. In the other aspects of discretionary spending-- defense being the largest portion of discretionary spending in the Congress--the other agencies and departments are not showing a reduction at all. Indeed, they are showing an increase, even after nondefense discretionary spending increased 24 percent in the first 2 years under President Obama.

Some think the base defense budget has been surging--and it has been increasing over the last decade--but it has increased 84 percent over the past decade. I will note that Medicaid, for example, has increased over 100 percent. Food stamps are now up to $80 billion this year. It is four times what it was in 2001, from $20 billion to about $80 billion.

So defense has not been surging out of proportion, I would suggest, to the other spending programs in our government. In fact, it has been increasing, even in this decade long of war against terrorism, at a rate that is not excessive, in my view. It has been a pretty significant increase under realistic controls and not out of proportion to what we are concerned about. However, it is looking to be hammered a great deal more in the future, disproportionate, again, to what is happening in other spending accounts.

The Defense Department now is working on a total reduction in spending of $489 billion more, which is about 10 percent of what we would expect to spend in the next 10 years. That is because of the Budget Control Act we passed in August that required reductions in spending in discretionary accounts. The choices so far have been to reduce defense spending far more than the other accounts.

In addition, if the deficit committee--the 12 supercommittee members--if they do not reach an accord, we all need to understand there will be an automatic sequester. Many people thought--and I think Senators probably thought--if that were to be done, it would be done across the board in an equal way. Not so. If that happens, $600 billion additional would be taken out of defense, and items such as food stamps, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit, Social Security--all of those would have no reductions. So it would amount to almost a 20- percent reduction in the Defense Department in real dollars over 10 years.

It should not have been that way. The agreement should not have targeted the Defense Department in such a Draconian way. We cannot allow that to happen.

All accounts need to be tightened. Every agency and department has to tighten its belt, including the Defense Department, but not disproportionately so.

Admiral Mullen said, if this were to occur, it would ``hollow us out,'' it could break the Defense Department and our military; so did Leon Panetta, President Obama's Secretary of Defense. He said it was basically an unacceptable situation, and he agreed with Admiral Mullen, who was sitting beside him at the time of that testimony, and in response to questions I asked of him.

When I asked him about it--the hearing was on another subject--he responded with passion, Secretary Panetta did, and expressed deep concern about the course of our Defense Department if these cuts were to take place.

I will quote former Secretary Robert Gates, who served President Bush and President Obama. Recently, he said this:

I think, frankly, the creation of this supercommittee was a

complete abdication of responsibility on the part of the

Congress. It basically says, ``this is too hard for us. Give

us a BRAC. Give us a package where all I have to do is vote

it up or vote it down and I don't have to take any personal

responsibility for any of the tough decisions.'' So now we're

left with this sword of Damocles hanging over the government,

hanging over defense, and if these cuts are automatically

made, I think that the results for our national security will

be catastrophic.

That is what the former Secretary of Defense, a most respected Secretary, said not long ago. So I think that is fundamentally correct, that we are proceeding on a path that disproportionately impacts the Defense Department and would be damaging in a way that is not necessary and should not happen.

A lot of these other programs have been surging out of control with problems after problems--whether it is Solyndra loans that were made, apparently knowing the company is going under--those kinds of things we need to focus on. To suggest they cannot have any cuts, and all the cuts have to fall on defense, or a disproportionate number of them, is a mistake.

I am a firm believer that the Defense Department, and every department of our government, has to tighten its belt, and we cannot continue with business as usual, and we should be having reductions in spending in every single bill that is coming before us. But I am afraid the only bill that will actually show an actual reduction in spending is the Defense bill, when we have men and women in harm's way right now on guard to defend our country.

I feel we need to get our act together. I am hopeful this committee of 12 can reach an accord that would not hammer the Defense Department additionally from the huge cuts they are already being asked to make over the next 10 years. Maybe they can help us begin to get on a path to fiscal responsibility. But I am doubtful they are going to make a big change. Hopefully, they will make some agreement, but it does not look hopeful we will have the kind of financial alteration of spending in America that is necessary to get our country on the right path.

After all, Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year that the greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We are already seeing how it impacts us when you see these cuts being discussed and being threatened.

I want to thank Senator Ayotte--a former prosecutor, attorney general of New Hampshire--for jumping in right away into the very critical issue of detainees and how they should be treated in the United States. In the short time she has been here, she is making a big difference on that.

I was involved in it on the Judiciary Committee. I have been involved in it on the Armed Services Committee. I am basically exhausted with it. I remain flabbergasted. I think you are right, Senator Ayotte. This is progress I believe you have made in these negotiations, but I think we have gone too far in many of these ideas already. It does not make common sense.

Let me say a couple of things about it. When a person is at war against the United States and they are captured in combat activities against the United States, they are able to be detained. They do not have to be tried. They do not have to be given Miranda rights. They have to comply with the Geneva Conventions about food and the right to communicate, and, within limits, they can be interrogated. All of those things are part of the Geneva Conventions. And they are to be detained until the war is over. That is so fundamentally logical. Why in the world would a person who is fighting an enemy and could have killed the enemy at one moment and captures them the next moment then be required, while the war is still ongoing, to release them so they can shoot you again and attack you again?

This is perfectly logical. It is part of the history of war, and it has long been established that when you capture enemy combatants, you can detain them until the conflict is over. But we have had this obsessive desire and attack by some that the people who have been captured need to be released, and they insisted that they be released. So they started with the least dangerous members, and they have released, I guess now, a majority of the people who have been detained. And among the least dangerous members who have been released, as Senator Ayotte says, we now have 27 percent who have been identified as in the war, attacking us now, and one of them is one of the top leaders in al-Qaida. This was never necessary.

Guantanamo is a perfectly logical place to hold these individuals, and how it became such a political issue--and President Obama campaigned on it, and Attorney General Eric Holder was out there complaining about it. Then he gets in as the Attorney General of the United States, and they commence to make some serious errors, in my opinion.

One of the biggest errors was to create a presumption that somebody who has been apprehended attacking the United States should be treated in civilian courts. I know Senator Ayotte

just said this earlier, but people need to know. If you are going to try someone in civilian court, you have to give them the Miranda immediately because when they come before the judge, if they made an admission without Miranda, it cannot be used against them. And you have to tell them immediately that they are entitled to a lawyer. When you capture people in a war, you don't give them lawyers. That has never been a part of the rules of war. And they are guaranteed presentment, the right to speedy trial in Federal court within 70 days. They are entitled to a preliminary hearing. So all of the other bad guys and terrorists now have an opportunity to know that you have captured their co-conspirator, perhaps, and are aware of the circumstances and may scatter in a way that you would not want to occur.

So these are realistic things. So if there is a presumption--first of all, I would say all of the cases should be tried in military commissions, if they are tried, and not in civilian court. But certainly the presumption should be that they would be in military commissions because if the presumption, as Attorney General Holder has declared, is that it is civilian, then you have to do the warning.

I remember in one of my hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham, a JAG officer in the Air Force--still trains as a reservist--grilled I believe it was Attorney General Holder and asked him: Well, what would happen if bin Laden were captured? Would you give him Miranda rights? And he could not answer the question. He would not answer the question because under his presumption, if Osama bin Laden were apprehended, he should be given Miranda rights.

So that is the nub of the problem we have been wrestling with, and we have had a lot of political rhetoric, in my opinion, attacked President Bush time and time again. They did not conduct everything perfectly, but many of the attacks on President Bush, his Department of Justice, and his military were unfair.

Do you know that not a single person in Guantanamo was ever waterboarded, that the U.S. military never participated in that? These were intel interrogations done under limited circumstances to a very few people. Whether they should have been done or not, we can all argue and disagree, but the idea that the U.S. military, the Defense Department, was systematically torturing and abusing prisoners is absolutely untrue. No military under such difficult circumstances has performed so well.

Another subject. One of my amendments deals with a subject I have had an opportunity to be engaged in for some years. Around 2002, 2003, or 2004, I led a congressional delegation to Europe dealing with the extent of our forces in Europe, how many we have deployed there, and the opportunity we had and maybe the need we have to bring home some of those forces.

We were going through a BRAC process in the United States, closing bases and consolidating bases. That process did not apply officially to Europe and bases around the world. And a number of us were engaged in that. I recall that Senator Saxby Chambliss and Mike Enzi traveled with us to Europe, and we examined--went to Germany and Italy and Spain, and we saw the bases that were important to the United States, bases that we really needed and we had good support from our allies on and that would be enduring bases. And there was a plan in place to reduce the deployment in areas where it was less important.

So as a matter of background, I would share these thoughts. Since 2004, the Defense Department has had a plan to transfer two of its four combat brigades in Europe back to the United States as part of a larger post-Cold War realignment. However, in April of this year---April of this year--the Department of Defense announced it would maintain three combat brigades and the fourth would not leave Europe until 2015.

Earlier this year, Admiral Stavridis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that roughly 80,000 troops remain in Europe. Moving a brigade combat team back to the United States would have cut U.S. forces by 5,000 personnel.

A 2010 plan developed by a congressionally appointed committee found that cutting one-third of the U.S. military presence in Europe and the Pacific would save billions of dollars over 10 years. I do believe significant cost savings can be realized. In addition to these savings, stationing these troops in the United States would have a stimulative effect on State and local economies, with these soldiers and families living in their local economies and being able to stay with their families more easily and reducing the number of extensive movements of personnel and families to deploy in different places around the world. So I believe we need stay on track with this plan.

A February 2011 GAO report found that DOD posture planing guidance does not require the EUCOM--the European Command--to include comprehensive cost data in its theater posture plan. As a result, DOD does not have critical information that can be used by decision-makers as they deliberate posture requirements.

The GAO analysis showed that of the approximately $17 billion obligated to the services to support installations in Europe between 2006 and 2009, approximately $13 billion--78 percent--was for operation and maintenance costs. Now, those countries want our people there. It brings American money to their economy--just like we would like to have a brigade combat in Alabama, New Hampshire, or some other places. It is good for the economy.

NATO and European allies, however, are not meeting their defense spending obligations. Many of our allies do not meet the EU standard. The United States should not be continuing to subsidize NATO and European allies' defense spending. They need to participate some more.

I believe there are significant savings that could be found by bringing both of these brigade combat teams to the United States, as has been planned.

I would ask, is Europe more threatened today than it was 2, 3, 4, 6 years ago? I do not think so. They do not think so. Europeans committed to 2 percent of their GDP to be committed to defense, but many of those nations are down to 1 percent. They are not even fulfilling their 2 percent goal. The United States is at 4 percent of GDP on defense, almost.

I think the Europeans need to be prepared to understand that they cannot live off the United States. There is a great book by Kagan called ``Paradise and Power.'' It is very insightful, a very insightful book. It says, in a sense: Europeans are comfortable. Why? Because they are under the umbrella of American power. They have been comfortable with that. They do not feel threatened. They are not paying their fair share of the defense burden. And they do not like it when we want to bring home troops. Give me a break. It is time to do something about that.

I believe all of our allies around the world, whether in the Pacific or in Europe or in other areas of the globe, ought to work with us in partnership so that we can be most effective in providing some stability around the world. But the idea that the United States can unilaterally fund a security force for the whole world is unrealistic. It can't be sustained.

I just cannot possibly see how we need this many troops in Europe at this point in history. I believe it would be good for our economy to have those troops back home in the United States. You can have the bases there that we could surge and meet any challenge in short order. I believe that is the right approach.

I see my friend, Senator Enzi. We traveled together on that trip to Europe a number of years ago to examine the bases that we felt should be permanent and the ones that should be closed.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to allow CDR Mike Moore, my defense legislative fellow, floor privileges through final passage of S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act.

Mr. President, I will say how much I have appreciated Commander Moore's contributions to our effort to preserve and protect and defend this country, and he is going to be returning to the full naval service before too much longer. It has been a great asset to have him on board.

Mr. President, once again we find ourselves in a too familiar position. Secret meetings over the financial future of our country are being held as we head toward the final hours--really final minutes as has been the pattern around here--of an agreement that will be produced for us and expected to be passed by a committee of 12. It is less than a week until the deadline and no language has been made public.

The American people should be able to make their voice heard before the committee votes because the truth is, once that vote happens there will be no opportunity to change their product. It will be up or down, the train will have left the station. The bill will, hopefully, be a good bill that can pass but we will not have any opportunity to amend it.

That is not the way Congress was set up to work. I happened to catch, this morning, a statement by former Secretary of Defense under President Bush and President Obama, Robert Gates. This is a statement he made in an interview:

I think, frankly, the creation of this supercommittee was a

complete abdication of responsibility on the part of

Congress. It basically says, ``This is too hard for us. Give

us a BRAC. Give us a package where all I have to do is vote

it up or vote it down and I don't have to take any personal

responsibility for the tough decisions.'' So now we are left

with this Sword of Damocles hanging over the government,

hanging over defense, and if these cuts are automatically

made, I think the results for our national security will be a

catastrophe.

That is what the former Secretary of Defense said recently.

Admiral Mullen, when asked about this in response to a question I asked him at the Armed Services Committee--the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, if this sequester takes place:

It has a good chance of breaking us and putting us in a

position of not keeping faith with this all volunteer force

that has fought two wars. . . . It will impose a heavy

penalty on developing equipment for the future, and it will

hollow us out.

One of the reasons I am here this morning is to issue a warning and call attention to some matters that I believe are important. People will make many promises about what this deal will be about if it passes and they reach an agreement. Hopefully they will reach an agreement that is one that can be honestly defended and we

will all be happy to vote for it. But what we have seen so far indicates that secret deals, while they remain secret, are promoted to be far better than they are when you begin to see what is in them. The devil will always be in the details.

Yesterday on the floor I spoke about the Budget Control Act disaster funding gimmick. Over 10 years, the cumulative cost of this gimmick will be about $140 billion to the Treasury, including interest. Done with just a few words tucked into the bill, people did not understand the effect of disaster provisions. It came out in the eleventh hour into the final agreement and people voted on it without fully understanding what it meant. So just a few words can dramatically alter the future fiscal situation of our country.

The record of broken promises is long, improvident promises about what a bill would do. Many deals have been proposed that have promised serious spending cuts and minimal tax increases only for the reverse to be actually true.

Let me run down a brief list: The President's budget, submitted earlier this year, was accompanied with the President's claim that it ``does not add to our debt.'' Clearly, one of the most dramatic, erroneous, blatantly false statements ever issued by a President of the United States. The reality is, that budget would double the debt of the United States in 11 years. That budget would have as its lowest single annual deficit, according to CBO, an annual deficit of $724 billion with deficits in the years 8, 9, 10 up to $1 trillion again. It increased spending, it increased taxes, and it increased the debt more than if we had done nothing.

Then the Senate Democrats talked about a budget I called a phantom budget. We have not had one in the Senate for 932 days. So they talked about a budget, and they made some claims, but we never saw it in detail--never saw the detail. But they claimed it had $2 trillion in spending cuts and $2 trillion in tax hikes, $1 of tax hikes for every $1 of spending cuts.

The President, earlier this year, acknowledged that we should have $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. Of course, that has been abandoned now. But the reality was that the phantom budget was talked about but never produced--but an outline was produced--actually added, we think, $2 in tax hikes for every $1 in spending cuts.

Then, Senator Reid, during the effort to raise the debt limit, his revised proposal claimed $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction. The reality was they were counting $1.1 trillion in savings from war costs because the CBO assumes that war costs would be the same for 10 years. It was never going to be the same for 10 years. We are always going to bring the war costs down as soon as possible. It is a phony claim that we should reduce spending by $1 trillion by claiming credit for war costs that we are on a steadfast path and have been to reduce.

The President's supercommittee proposal that he submitted to this committee of 12 claims $2 in cuts for every $1 in taxes. But the reality, as we see it, there are no real cuts and 100 percent of the reduction will come from more taxes, more spending, more debt so far. So if this committee proposes a solution and asks us to vote for it, here are some things we should look for and not be happy with, if they are in the bill. The pattern has been--I would say for the promoters of these agreements--to spin them to sound better than they are.

One of the things we should look out for are claims of spending reductions that occur by setting a cap on war spending, as I indicated. The money was never going to be spent. Some are claiming $1 trillion in savings from that and it should not be counted. Another thing we would look at are front-loaded promises, front-loaded revenue increases, tax increases that occur now along with back-loaded promises of spending cuts in the future--in the outyears then they claim these savings. But the pattern around here is that once a tax increase is passed, it is there, but a promise of a spending cut in the future very often does not become a reality. We know that. That is the pattern that has put us in such a desperate financial condition today, just that kind of activity. So whatever happens this time, this cannot be part of the process.

We need to watch for a plan that would rely on directions to standing committees in the House and Senate to, at some point in the future, produce legislation that might reduce entitlement spending and/or would raise revenue.

These committees have not followed through on that in the past, and the supercommittee's directions to them, we have to know, are not likely to occur based on history around here. That is the historic reality. Just directing a committee to raise taxes or cut spending does not at all mean they are going to do it.

Another thing we need to watch out for is if the committee makes unrealistic cuts to programs without reforming those programs, such as the current assumed annual cuts that are in law today to health care providers, doctors, and hospitals to cut their reimbursement rates. Congress knows we cannot go forward with those cuts, and they have been avoided every year by borrowing money to pay to avoid very serious cuts to our providers that, if not paid, would quit doing Medicare and Medicaid work. Doctors don't have to do that. It is just at a point we cannot cut providers anymore.

Another thing we need to watch out for is a plan that assumes unrealistic changes to the Congressional Budget Office baseline. One of the things is to assert overly optimistic economic growth projections for the next 10 years. More and more we are hearing that coming out of this recession is going to be a long, tough, slow slog. If we want to spend more money and claim to have a budget that improves our financial situation, one way to do it is to just assume more growth than is actually going to occur, that the experts don't believe will actually occur. If we do that, that is phony accounting. Our numbers may look better today but not as the years go by. That is the kind of thinking that has gotten us in the deep debt hole we are in today.

Another thing to watch out for is the claim that interest savings derived from tax increases are spending cuts. Interest expense--and it is substantial for our country--is a byproduct of spending and taxes. If you drive up debt, our interest payment will go up. If we raise taxes and reduce the deficit, then interest rates drop. We can't count the interest reduction as a spending cut. That is not cutting any real spending. That is just avoiding a future interest growth that would have occurred if we haven't done it. I don't think we should count--and we must not count--interest reductions either from tax increases or spending cuts as a spending cut.

I would also like to talk about the Defense cuts, briefly. Majority Leader Reid said this just yesterday, I believe:

If the committee fails to act, sequestration

That is, automatic cuts--

is going to go forward. Democrats are not going to take an

unfair, unrealistic load directed toward domestic

discretionary spending . . . and take it away from the

military.

In other words, take the cuts away from the military. The automatic cuts that would fall on the military, which are, as Admiral Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, will hollow us out.

These automatic cuts are odd. Many programs with rising costs are protected from any cuts. Cuts are prohibited against the Medicaid Program and the surging Food Stamp program, but the Defense Department, which is already slated to take $450 billion in cuts, is facing another $600 billion in cuts, according to the Department of Defense. It would be a nearly 20-percent net reduction in Defense over the next 10 years. It would be the most severe hammering of the Defense Department, while protecting other programs from any cuts. It is not legitimate. Yet the majority leader is pushing back and saying this is perfectly legitimate. He is not going to have cuts in non-defense discretionary spending. He wants them to fall on the military.

The majority leader's comments suggest that the Defense increases have increased faster than domestic discretionary spending, but nothing could be further from the truth. From fiscal year 2008 to 2011, the Defense budget increased--base budget--by just 10 percent. Meanwhile, education spending surged 67 percent over the 2009 through 2011 period, compared to the previous three year period.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have one additional moment.

Mr. President, we are at a historic point. I believe this Congress has taken a great risk in turning over to a committee of 12 this responsibility. It is going to be difficult for them to reach an agreement. If they don't, damaging sequestration could occur. If they do reach an agreement, we have to be sure it is an honest agreement that actually achieves what they promised, which is--at a minimum--$1.2 trillion worth of deficit reductions. We need $4 trillion--as every expert has said--over 10 years in savings to begin to put this country on the right path. We are nowhere close to that.

I feel like the country is going to have to take some tough medicine. I hope the committee can help us get there. I do not approve of the process, but hopefully it will work and maybe we will not repeat it in the future.

I thank the Chair.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask to be notified after 5 minutes.

I appreciate the work of the sponsors on this difficult piece of legislation.

There is so much we would like to do. But every American knows that when they are in debt, they have to cut back on spending. But Washington remains in denial. This bill is a statement that Washington does not take seriously the extraordinary dangers imposed by our debt. It is bizarre that we passed on to a committee of 12 the job of achieving deficit reduction while at the same time working to increase the deficit with bills such as this one.

After the first 2 years of the Obama administration in which nondefense discretionary spending surged 24 percent--not counting the stimulus--it

should not be difficult for us to find reductions that can be achieved in these three bills that have been cobbled together as a mini omnibus. But instead of doing the hard work and finding things we can reduce the spending for and bringing this bill in with a reduction--a real reduction--in spending, we now have a piece of legislation that is moving forward with increases. In fact, what this amounts to and what we are seeing in the committee of 12, the supercommittee, in their secret work is apparently a demand by our Democratic colleagues that taxes be substantially increased to fund the spending level we have been on.

I recently also addressed some of the gimmicks I believe this bill uses to conceal more spending than is apparent. One of these gimmicks, creating the false appearance of cash savings in mandatory spending, was actually increased, in this current version of the bill, in conference. That is why I introduced the Honest Budget Act: to confront these continuing problems.

Senator Olympia Snowe and I believe these kind of gimmicks, such as on mandatory spending and claims of reductions that are not real, need to be eliminated from our process as they help cause the great deficit we are in.

I think it is particularly offensive that the bill is being represented as a spending cut, even though that was the most minute spending cut of $1 billion, when, in truth, it clearly increases spending. We need real cuts, not minuscule cuts and certainly not increases.

With the President at the helm of the ship of State, Washington is continuing to steer toward financial disaster. We must get off this path. The American people know it. I believe they spoke clearly last November. We still have not gotten the message. We still remain in denial.

Some say: Oh, the tea party. You shouldn't pay attention to them. They were angry people. I think they were deeply frustrated people and, yes, somewhat angry. Why should they not be when the people they have elected to Congress, they now discover, are spending billions and billions of dollars day after day, week after week, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that is spent? How can we defend that? How can we defend to any American citizen our behavior that has allowed such a debt situation to occur? We have had three consecutive trillion-dollar deficits, and this fiscal year we are expecting to have another trillion-dollar deficit. It is an unacceptable course.

I will oppose the legislation and urge my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

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

During the summer, Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as Americans well remember, had a big fight over trying to reduce spending as we approached the Nation's debt limit.

As we know, the product of that fight was a leadership-brokered deal that promised long-term savings in discretionary spending of around $900 billion over 10 years, not just in 1 year. It also created the Supercommittee, which has been meeting in secret to find another $1.2 trillion in possible savings. We hope they do and they should, frankly, find more in savings. Whatever they come up with must be voted on in the Senate without any amendment and cannot be altered in any way. This is concerning to me. Virtually every deal we have seen this year has been filled with promises of savings, but when we analyze them, the savings are not nearly as real as promised. So we do not need another plan with tax hikes that never go away and promises of spending cuts that do not materialize or are not continued.

Indeed, the debt limit deal, which produced the Budget Control Act this summer, claims to contain a spending cap, but that is not accurate. It is a phony cap. The cuts that matter most are, in many respects, those that of course take place right away. But, after all of the bickering and drama, we ended up with a deal that cut discretionary spending by only a paltry $7 billion from the fiscal year 2011 discretionary budget. To put this number in perspective, the total outlays for 2011 are $145 billion greater than 2010, and our deficit is nearly $1.3 trillion--$1,300 billion deficit. We are talking about promising a $7 billion reduction in spending. Nevertheless, $7 billion in discretionary cuts, at least, is real and a small step, in the right direction; right?

We are supposed to spend $1,043 billion this year. That is $7 billion less from the $1,050 billion in discretionary spending from last year. Unfortunately, this is one more empty promise, because the legislation was rushed through--this Budget Control Act--in the eleventh hour at the fifty-ninth minute. Nobody, at that time, knew there was a gimmick in it.

Here is how it worked: The Budget Control Act created a cap adjustment for disaster relief funding. It took a 10-year average for emergency spending and estimated that to be $11.3 billion for 2012. But, this $11.3 billion in the Budget Control Act is a new fund, and it is spent by regular appropriations, not by 60 votes--as in the past for emergency spending--and it is above the $1,043 billion figure. So the truth is, the bill is not and never was $1,043 billion, as promised, a limit on spending to that amount, but $1,054 billion. Therefore, spending for discretionary accounts this year will be larger than last year.

The writers of the Budget Control Act went even further. They changed the Senate rule in this bill that was passed at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour to eliminate the 60-vote rule even for emergency spending, creating another loophole. So a 60-vote point of order--which has been used here over the years to challenge a designation as emergency spending--has been stripped as part of a bill denominated as a Budget Control Act, so the new fund can be spent--this $11.3 billion--at any time as a normal appropriation, as if it were within the budget and without a 60-vote requirement. This eliminates the pressure to stay within the budget to offset annual disaster spending as a number of us have been attempting to do in recent years.

For instance, if you have $2 billion in disaster spending as part of a specific appropriation, instead of eliminating $2 billion in waste somewhere else in order to keep your total spending within the budget, you have free access to the $11 billion fund and do not have to worry about offsetting a penny. You also do not need a vote for disaster funding approval. As a result, this little offset issue has grown as a tribute to the effectiveness of Senator Tom Coburn, who has been fighting to offset so-called emergency spending designations. The 60- vote requirement to pass the emergency bill gave him some leverage and ability to challenge the spending and challenge the appropriators in order to find offsets for the new spending. Instead of calling this the Budget Control Act, we should call it the Coburn control act. This is not a step forward for us.

The real spending cap now is $1,054 billion, $4 billion more than we spent last year. You only need to go through an emergency designation process if you want to spend even more than that, but you do not need 60 votes even for that. The irony here is that there was widespread belief, in this Chamber, that we needed to tighten the emergency spending designation, because it was being abused.

To give one unbelievable example, the Senate counted $210 million in the routine funding for the census as emergency spending. The census is in the Constitution and is required to be conducted every 10 years. How in the world can we say this is unexpected emergency spending? It is as routine as anything can possibly be. It was done because otherwise spending would be needed to have been cut by $200 million somewhere else. The Budget Control Act has succeeded in actually weakening the standard for emergency spending and creates one more loophole for the spender.

Again, the effect of the $11 billion fund is that it effectively nullifies the cap we were promised. The appropriating committee will have no incentive to achieve savings when they can spend every penny of the $1,043 billion base budget all while knowing there is still another $11 billion to be spent when they exhaust the first allotment. The evidence of this is before our very eyes. To date, in one form or another, seven appropriations bills have come before the Senate floor. Four of them have been voted on and passed. The Energy and Water bill is before us this week. We should have been considering each of these bills individually and doing our due diligence, but we haven't. They have been moved through in groups. But, I am glad this legislation, the Energy and Water bill, will be considered on its own, and not bundled with others as a mini-bus or omnibus as the Washington parlance goes. The bad news is that the seven bills we have seen on the floor have already increased spending by $9 billion. We are well on our way to using every cent of the $11 billion fund, with no effort to achieving savings elsewhere to stay under budget.

The Energy and Water bill on the floor now increases spending by $1 billion. That may seem small in Washington terms, but it is the reason we are going broke. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it is a great deal of money. If we can't, honestly, even reach the paltry goal of $7 billion in savings, how on Earth can we tackle our $15 trillion debt?

Or consider food stamps. Federal welfare spending is now about $700 billion a year. It is more than $900 billion a year when you count state obligations or contributions to the same programs. Food stamps are the fastest growing major item in the welfare budget. They have quadrupled in 10 years. The Food Stamp Program is one of 18 federal nutritional support programs in the budget--1 of 18. The number of people receiving food stamps has climbed from about 1 in 50, when the program went national, to almost 1 in 7 today.

Some of the more than 45 million people receiving food stamps exceed the program's eligibility requirements. They have higher income or higher assets than you are supposed to have to qualify. But, they received the benefits because they get them as a reciprocal benefit for other Federal benefits they get. If they qualify for one program, they are then categorically entitled to the Food Stamp Program even though they do not meet the basic requirements. And reports of fraud and abuse are widespread.

We were promised recommendations by the chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, Senator Stabenow, for how the supercommittee could achieve savings in the agriculture budget of which food stamps is the largest component of the entire agriculture budget, by far, dwarfing other expenditures, such as aid to farmers. They were supposed to arrive, the Senator promised, by November 1, but as of now, we are still waiting.

The sad truth is our Democratic-led Senate has not met its responsibility to help this Nation confront its most serious threat, and that is the debt we have. It is the greatest economic danger of our time, as we have repeatedly been warned. If we ultimately fail to control Federal spending, which has nearly doubled in 10 years, we will experience a debt crisis that leads to loss of jobs, loss of growth, and loss of economic opportunity. Such a crisis will hurt those with less income the most. It is our duty to stop the occurrence of this very preventible tragedy.

Instead of the irresponsible spending favored by the political class, it is time for Washington to be more accountable, to focus on the middle class. That means creating jobs through the private sector, producing more American energy, keeping our wealth at home, making the government lean and productive, a servant of the American people, confronting our dangerously rising debt, which threatens our economy and jobs, adopting a globally competitive tax code, upholding the rule of law and trade, eliminating unwise, damaging regulation, and finally, delivering the good people of this country the honest and responsible budget they deserve.

We have a long way to go. I am disappointed we cannot even comply with the intent of the Budget Control Act passed this summer.

I thank the Chair.

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

Mr. President, I am pleased to support Senator Paul's work to avail himself of and make use of the Congressional Review Act which establishes a process for Congress to review and nullify unwarranted Federal regulations.

The Congressional Review Act process is rarely used--only successfully on one other occasion since it was created in 1996--but it is a legitimate process, and it is of increasing importance today. This is an opportunity for Members of Congress, who are concerned that regulations are taking over the country, to try to see some of those unwarranted regulations pulled back. It is an opportunity for people to prove they mean what they say when they say that.

The Heritage Foundation published a chart identifying the ``Obama Regulation Tsunami.'' Heritage identified 144 new regulations that were pending in 2011--this year. All of those were expected to cost more than $100 million--all of them. In 2006, there were 69 such regulations pending. The average number of rules over $100 million pending during 2001 through 2006 was about 72. Now, during this administration, the average number is not 72; it is about 130. That is an 80-percent increase in the number of pending regulations with costs over $100 million. So this is a tsunami of costly regulations falling on our economy.

Senator Paul's resolution seeks to nullify just one of the EPA rules aimed at reducing the use of affordable coal-fired powerplants in 27 specific States, including my State of Alabama.

The rule will increase power bills for people and businesses. There is a range of other new EPA rules that will raise the price of electricity in addition to that rule. This increases the cost of doing business, and it makes our businesses less competitive and results in job losses.

Higher energy costs make American businesses less competitive and less able to create jobs and more likely to invest in other countries than in this country. In an EPW hearing--the Environment and Public Works Committee--last month, we heard testimony that over 180,000 jobs will be lost each year--each year, 180,000 jobs--from 2012 through 2020 as a result of just 4 EPA rules that impact the electric utility sector--just the electric utility sector. One of those four rules is the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that Senator Paul's resolution addresses. This is net jobs lost. The evaluation takes into account alleged job gains from the four rules.

Together, the four rules would result in $21 billion in annual compliance costs and raise residential energy prices by 12 percent in Alabama and even more in other States. A 12-percent increase in residential energy costs is significant. These are working people. If your bill is $150 a month, it is now

going to be $168 a month. If it is a $200 bill, it is going to be $224 a month. That is real money and for gaining not one thing that adds to the productivity of a business or a residence. It is a really significant cost.

Do not think it does not fall on people. We have gotten our mind set in Washington that we can impose a rule and it has costs on businesses but it does not cost us. But in truth, it is the equivalent of a tax. For example, if the government wanted to clean up the air, we could tax the American people, use that money to go to all the powerplants, add extra costly techniques to it, and clean up the air that way. That would be a tax. We would have to defend that to the American people. We would have to justify that this cost we have extracted from them through increased taxes was worth the benefit. But we can wash our hands of it, the way we do business today. We simply pass a law that mandates that these businesses do that, and we pretend it does not impose costs. But the experts say these rules will result in a 12- percent increase in utility rates in Alabama alone. Those are my people--working-class people, middle-class people, poor people who have to have electricity.

An analysis of all the new EPA rules impacting the electric utility sector is even more astounding. Southern Company, which operates in the Southeast, estimates that the capital costs of complying with the full range of proposed EPA rules for coal-fired electric generation would be between $12 billion and $15 billion. Costs for Alabama Power, which provides electric power for much of our State, are estimated to be between $5 billion and $7 billion. Alabama's general fund budget, not counting education, is $2 billion. This adds to one power company $5 billion to $7 billion in costs. The President and Senate Democrats like to talk about raising taxes on the rich, but their regulations are, in effect, a huge tax increase on everyone, poor and rich alike, in the form of higher energy prices and fewer job opportunities. With unemployment at 9 percent, we need to ask ourselves, Can we afford this kind of increase now?

Nucor Steel pointed out in recent testimony that a 1 cent per kilowatt hour increase in the electricity they buy to make steel would add $120 million in costs to their company. That was the testimony they gave a few weeks ago at an EPW hearing.

But let's talk for a moment about the specific rule Senator Paul's resolution would nullify. The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule mandates that 27 States reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2012 and nitrogen oxide, NOX, emissions by 50 percent by 2014. Remember, we already brought down emissions of NOX and sulfur dioxide significantly. Our air is cleaner in virtually every city in America than it was just a few years ago and much cleaner than it was 20 or 30 years ago. We can be thankful that Congress mandated that. And there certainly were objections raised at that time. It did impose costs, as said, but it also has helped clean our air. That is a fact. But I would just say this to you: The lower hanging fruit has already been achieved. America's electric utility industry is operating more efficiently and more effectively today than ever. But a 50-percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions by 2014? An additional 20-percent reduction of sulfur dioxide by next year? Utilities will be forced to either install expensive technologies such as scrubbers or shut down their units.

This rule, in combination with other new EPA rules, will be the nail in the coffin for a lot of coal-fired powerplants. They will just close. It will also close coal mines where we produce American energy-- not imported energy, American energy. In Texas, one of the State's largest power producers, Luminant, has said the rule would result in 500 job losses due to the closing of units at one of its coal-fired plants and the closing of three nearby coal mines.

There are serious concerns about the new Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Over 70 parties have challenged it in Federal court, including Alabama's attorney general, Luther Strange, a fine attorney general who works hard every day for the people of Alabama. So have his colleagues in Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Many labor unions are opposing the rule. They know it will hurt jobs.

Before concluding, let me say this: EPA is too often using scare tactics and statistics to push its regulatory agenda. I think that is dangerous. One reason we have seen such a surge in EPA regulations is because in 1 year they got a 35-percent increase in their budget--more than virtually any other agency in Washington.

EPA claims their Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, for example, is necessary to prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths per year--34,000. EPA is actually claiming that without this rule, 34,000 people would die each year. But EPA's basis for this assertion is fundamentally flawed.

First, EPA assumes in its baseline that existing rules are not in place to protect public health. That is absolutely not true. The Bush administration issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule that requires reductions in the same emissions targeted by this new rule. I am told sulfur dioxide emissions are already down more than 40 percent over the last decade. The same is true for NOX emissions. This new Cross-State Rule would add even more layers of requirements on top of existing protections and rules, but EPA does not acknowledge that when they do their analysis of the casualties they find. That is the first way they overstate the benefits.

Second, EPA assumes in its baseline that 320,000 deaths per year in the United States are attributed to particulate matter pollution from sources like powerplants. That would be more than 10 percent of all deaths in the United States in a year. Are we to believe that 10 percent of all U.S. deaths are attributable to pollution from powerplants? We have taken extensive testimony in the EPW Committee on this topic, and it is clear that EPA is playing fast and loose, and they are manipulating data, it seems to me pretty clearly. EPA is overstating the benefits of their rules.

Third, EPA does not seem concerned about establishing any direct cause-and-effect relationship; they just rely on statistical relationships. A simple statistical correlation alone does not support a causal connection. For instance, a statistical correlation between ice cream sales and heatstroke does not mean there is a causal connection between them. On hot days, more ice cream is consumed. More people have heatstrokes on hot days. That does not mean there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.

So let me conclude by saying this: This administration is overregulating our economy. It is raising the price of energy. These costs and regulations are costing us jobs.

They are using scare tactics to justify their rules with dubious statistics. I know my colleagues will say these statistics are accurate, but I do not believe that these statistics that are coming out of EPA, our government environment and protection agency--the agency we depend on for honesty and integrity--can be defended as accurate. They are exaggerated, and it will be shown sooner or later that is a fact.

I know we want to have cleaner air. We are on a path to having cleaner air. We have been reducing NOX and SOX and particulates for years. We can continue to do that. But to talk about a 50-percent reduction in NOX by 2014 and a 20-percent reduction in SOX by next year--these are huge changes. After the low-hanging fruit has already been achieved, I do not believe that is justified, and I do not believe it should be pressed down on the brow of an economy that is struggling mightily to get off the mat and begin to grow again.

I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER addressed the Chair.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for 30 seconds?

Senator Boxer has done a great job of moving the legislation in committee. I have enjoyed her leadership in committee and the collegial way she has conducted the committee.

I will say to Senator Boxer that the 320,000 number is not correct. EPA should not be using it. We will challenge that. I intend to look at that more, and if they are wrong, I will expect them to acknowledge they are wrong. I believe they are wrong.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, Senator Shelby, a University of Alabama graduate and also a University of Alabama law graduate. I am a law graduate myself from the University of Alabama.

It was a fabulous spectacle this weekend. There were 103,000 people in that fabulous new stadium that has been expanded with all the colors and the band and the noise. Truly, I doubt any of us will live to see a game which is any louder than that game was. It was a spectacular event and an unusual, special event that happens in the Southeastern Conference.

So we believe in being winners. Alabama played every single play--and so did LSU, with every single play--committed to winning the football game. At the end of it, after all had been said and done, it was 6-6. I think the two best teams in the Nation clearly proved they were the two best teams in the Nation. But we had to have an overtime.

So to my colleagues, Senator Landrieu and Senator Vitter, congratulations. I am not really proud but I am honored and willing to wear the tie of the team that beat the University of Alabama.

We look forward to celebrating with you that fabulous game and to also having some fresh Alabama gulf coast seafood. Let the whole world know that our gulf coast seafood industry is back strong, better than ever. So congratulations.

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

Mr. President, I see the Senator from West Virginia in the Chamber. Is he prepared to speak? I do not want to take advantage of the Senator from West Virginia. I was going to speak for about 5 minutes, if I could.

Mr. President, the plan that has been introduced to the Senate today is an affront to common sense, the plan presented by Senator Reid. It is an affront to the financial condition this country is in. I am working and hope to be able to support a highway bill that will have a modest increase in highway spending that is paid for that does not increase the debt. We can do that. It is not that hard.

Apparently, it is hard because nobody wants to make any tough choices. They do not want to set priorities. So then it becomes very hard. We just want to keep everything going at the same rate. But we do need to invest some money in our infrastructure to maintain it, our highways, bridges, roads, and expand certain highways that need to be fixed. I think we should do that.

Senator Reid comes in with a tax increase plan, a big spending plan, totaling, I think, $60 billion. We are supposed to pass this, and we have not yet found the money to pay for the fundamental highway bill this Congress is supposed to be working on. I believe it is wrong. I do not believe it can be justified by any stretch of the imagination.

They say: Don't worry. We are raising taxes to fund this new transportation infrastructure program. Only a small portion of it is the infrastructure bank. This country is spending enough. We are wasting enough money now. It would be a mistake for the American people to allow Congress to extract more money from them to spend today on even a new program while we are doing nothing about the surging debt that is running on in our country, while we are doing nothing about the Solyndra-type loan programs that are wasting money in huge amounts. That loan failure alone amounts to as much money as Alabama gets from the general fund, the highway bill, and infrastructure bill, period-- one loan. So we need to get our act together, and I do not believe it is legitimate.

I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee. I am looking at these numbers, and I am astounded. So we raise taxes. One time they said we have to raise taxes to reduce our debt. Now we raise taxes to increase spending on a new program, and we still do

not have the basic $12 billion that is being looked at to be found to fund the basic highway bill.

I am flabbergasted. I do not believe it is right. I think it is some sort of clever gimmick that political thinkers got together and conjured up, that they could imagine: This will be a fun thing. We will bring it up on the floor. It has no chance of passage. We will bring it up on the floor. Republicans will oppose it, and we will accuse them of being against highways. We will accuse them of giving tax breaks to millionaires. That is what we will do. That will be clever. That will be fun.

Sometimes we have to get serious about this debt. For the third year in a row--we have just completed the fiscal year on September 30--we have had over $1 trillion in debt. Forty percent of the money we are spending is borrowed. If we ever have to raise taxes--and that would be the last thing--it ought to be done only after we have squeezed every wasteful dime out of spending in this country before we go back and ask the American people to give more money to a Congress that plays games with their money, that has allowed the deficits to be maintained at a rate beyond anything this Nation has ever seen before and are projected to continue indefinitely under plans that are out there from the budget the President submitted to us, which, fortunately, is not going to be accepted.

We have a real problem. I wish to be on record as saying I do not believe this is a responsible way for us to proceed. I know there are a lot of politics around here. But we are at a point where we need to be thinking about a responsible way to find the funding to maintain a good highway program, and that is not going to be easy. To have this bill thrown in here that is going to be dead as a doornail is not a good approach to it. We need to be worrying about that problem rather than a huge new spending program, allowing a bunch of bureaucrats to pick and choose where they want to send the money. That is the way the progressives like to do it: We give them money and let these smart people decide where to pass it around. They probably will not give any to West Virginia and Alabama. They have bigger projects in their minds than that.

I wanted to share those thoughts, and I thank the Presiding Officer. I hope my colleagues will oppose the Reid idea that will be coming up later today.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Senator Thune deserves a lot of credit for pursuing this issue tenaciously and seeing his prediction validated now by President Obama's own Secretary that this cannot be a viable program. But he is exactly correct. One of the greatest financial misrepresentations in history, if it continues to be on the books, will be the contention that this health care bill would actually create money for the U.S. Treasury, actually produce a surplus.

They used a 10-year scoring model; $70 billion, 60 percent or so of the total savings this bill is alleged to produce--not savings, actual revenue, net revenue increase--was this program. Now it is gone.

As Senator McCain correctly said, Judd Gregg deserves great credit for it because he put in the bill that the Secretary had to certify that this was a sound program. So after all the political smoke had been going on, after the bill had been passed, while they were defending it as a viable CLASS Act program that would actually produce revenue for the government, when she had to certify it, I suppose, under penalty of perjury--she could go to jail if she didn't do it correctly--she said she could not do so.

It was never possible this bill was going to be a moneymaker for the U.S. Treasury. They double-counted, maybe $300 billion, $400 billion, $500 billion in money that is Medicare money also counted as income to fund an entirely new bill. That is going to come out also.

As Senator Barrasso has noted, their estimates have been wildly inaccurate concerning the ability to bend the cost curve down, to actually reduce health care costs. This was something a lot of people thought was a good idea. This was going to produce a reduction in our insurance premiums, and since the bill was passed they have gone up dramatically, just the opposite of what was promised.

I think this is a death knell for the entire health care concept. This is just one more example of it. I thank the Senator.

If I recall, Senator Thune quoted the Chief Actuary, Richard Foster, in his statement that this would collapse during the debate on the floor. This was talked about, but the administration and our Democratic colleagues refused to listen. They continued to repeat the idea that they would have this large surplus. They counted this money as surplus money in justifying voting for passage of this bill when common sense told us in a host of areas, including this one, it was not going to produce a surplus. It goes to mean something systemic about our problem and why this Congress now going into the third year will be borrowing 40 percent of the money the United States spends. It is because the politics here is that we want to pass the bill. When somebody shows it is not actuarially sound and it is going to cost money in the outyears, they don't

worry about that; somebody will take care of that in the outyears. It is that kind of mentality that I think has helped overrule commonsense budgeting.

We have not had a budget now in over 900 days in this Senate. So this is not the kind of responsible approach to managing the taxpayers' money.

I know Senator Barrasso raised this repeatedly, that this should not be counted, but did we hear Secretary Sebelius at that time? Back in 2009 she wrote to Senator Kennedy and said to express the administration's support for inclusion of this bill, calling it an innovative bill. They were supporting it, promoting it, totally ignoring the critics and, as a result, they got the bill passed on a straight party-line vote. As a matter of fact, I believe had Senator Brown from Massachusetts taken office 2 weeks sooner, there would not have been the 60 votes necessary to pass it. There would have only have been 59 and the bill would not be law today.

I thank both Senators for their consistent, steadfast explanation of the financial danger of this legislation and their willingness to continue to carry on that fight. I hope we learned something throughout our whole budgetary and financial process here. We cannot continue to play games with the American people's money. We have to be honest with them--honest about our budget, honest about what things are going to cost, and only then can we get the country on a sound footing.

I would say a couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal, after all of this happened, wrote that ``including this CLASS Act was a special act of fiscal corruption.''

If a private business said: Invest in our company; I have a plan that is going to be sound and it is going to make money in the future, trust me, invest your money with me, vote for me, yet they knew and had evidence in their files and their own employees were saying it was not sound, it was actually going to cost money, I wonder what would happen to them.

Let me say a more accurate explanation of how this happened. The Congressional Budget Office scored this as a surplus, indeed, over 10 years. And, as Senator McCain said, the benefits only come out after 5 years and these are people paying in, so the real benefits and payments take place in outer years.

The question is, Is the plan sufficient to be actuarially sound for the distant future when the payouts occur? So what happened was, Mr. Orszag had been CBO Director. He said it was not a gimmick and not a Ponzi scheme. In one sense, he was telling the truth. He was using a window score from the Congressional Budget Office over the first 10 years, when it didn't pay out any benefits and had a surplus, to claim that this was going to make the bill itself financially sound. In a sense, to me, it is these kinds of gimmicks that might keep somebody from being prosecuted and sent to jail if they were a private person.

This ought to end in the Congress. I think the American people are crying out for honesty in budgeting. They want us to be responsible. They want us to tell them the good news but to also tell them the bad news financially that we face.

They know we can't do things we would like to do if we don't have the money. They know we don't have the money to keep taking on new obligations. So I feel as though this is not healthy.

When Secretary Sebelius came along and had to certify that they had a 75-year actuarially sound program, there was no way she could do it. It knocks a gaping hole into the entire scheme, this health care bill.

I think it is a lesson for all of us. On every vote we do, we need to be sure we are honest not only in the short-term window but in the long-term window also.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Vitter for those comments. We are going to look forward to being very hospitable to the fabulous LSU fans who will be in Tuscaloosa for the ``Titanic tussle in Tuscaloosa,'' the game of the century, many are calling it, the match of the millennium, between Alabama and LSU. It is always a big game, and it is going to be a big game especially this year.

While we have a minute on the floor and there is no other business being conducted, I just wish to celebrate college football, particularly in the Southeastern Conference. When we go to those games and see the color and the crowd and the enthusiasm and the roar for the home team, it is a thrilling event. It is very special. The fans in Tuscaloosa are very sophisticated. They know this is a big game, one of the biggest games in the history of the University of Alabama, and they know when good plays are good and bad plays are bad. It is going to be exciting. They know LSU is consistently one of the great teams in America.

So Alabama is doing pretty well: Eight and zero, their all-star defense is No. 1 in scoring and No. 1 in total defenses. They also have their No. 1 rushing defense in the country, allowing only 44 yards per game, a historic number that ranks better than Alabama's national championship game in 1992 and the undefeated and untied 1966 team. So it is going to be a special time.

Our university is a great university. The University of Alabama has been growing in strength for years now. It has one of the greatest presidents in America: Dr. Robert D. Witt, who was my high school classmate, and Judy Bonner is the provost there, sister of Congressman Jo Bonner. So it is an exciting time in Alabama in general. Academically and otherwise, the University of Alabama is doing great-- one of its best years in its history.

I wish to also point out and thank the LSU fans and chefs John Folse and Rick Tramonto, along with Bob Baumhower and Steve Zucker from Alabama, for sponsoring the LouisiBama Gumbo Bowl to benefit tornado victims in Tuscaloosa. That shows true class in both of the schools' fan base. For all the talk going on this week, I hope to see the kind of respect this partnership indicates among all our fans.

While I don't think it will happen, should Les Miles and his team somehow manage to get out of Tuscaloosa with a victory, I would love to treat Senator Vitter and Senator Landrieu to some of the finest gulf seafood there is, healthy and straight from the Gulf of Mexico, which my colleague knows is fresher and cleaner and finer than it ever has been, and maybe we could garnish it with some of the best grass that marks the field at Bryant Denny Stadium. I understand Les Miles is a fan. I would also be more than happy to bring my friend, Senator Vitter, an Alabama tie on the Monday after the game, which I think would look good if he were to wear it on the floor of the Senate.

I thank Senator Vitter for his friendship and good service in the Senate. We work on so many things together. But college football is special, and I think the game this weekend will be one of the great games in college history. I am so excited about it. I know the fans in both our States, and throughout the country, are excited about it.

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

Mr. President, earlier today my friend and colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin, came to the floor and criticized-- wrongly, I believe--my State of Alabama and the State of Arizona for something that I would think we would all want every State and locality to do; that is, cooperate in the enforcement of Federal immigration law.

Alabama and Arizona are undertaking a legitimate effort in attempting to help enforce the laws of the United States when this administration too often has failed to do so. The American people and the rule of law in our country have suffered as a result.

This administration has flatly refused to enforce our national laws-- generous immigration laws that they are--despite the fact that there is on the books extensive and a fair code of laws designed to facilitate substantial, legal immigration into our country. Moreover, the Obama administration is systematically going after States that attempt to assist--Arizona, Alabama, now South Carolina, and Indiana next. Even more egregious is that the administration has refused to take any action against States and localities that affirmatively, proactively, and intentionally impede the immigration enforcement in the United States. These jurisdictions include San Francisco County, Santa Clara County, Washington, DC, and perhaps the most egregious example: Cook County, IL, which recently passed an ordinance--passed an ordinance directing local Illinois law enforcement officials to ignore U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers.

The detainers are sent to local jails, and they request that officials at those jails detain illegal aliens for an additional 48- hour period, statutorily provided, after that local jurisdiction's business with that immigrant ceases so that an ICE officer may place an alien into Federal custody. This is done on all kinds of crimes throughout the country. People are arrested in Alabama; Georgia has charges against them, and they send a detainer. If someone is arrested in Illinois and the Federal Government has a charge against them, they place a detainer. So when they are finished in that trial or with their sentence, before they are released out on the street, they are turned over to the other jurisdiction. Maybe it is a murder charge. Maybe it is a serious felony charge. This happens every day in America. It is common practice. If it were to cease, law enforcement in this country would be dealt a devastating blow.

Cook County has decided that it gets to decide who gets deported from the country and when, and acting in this way directly undermines Federal law enforcement. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said, incredibly, that she has had no contact with Cook County and has had no discussions with the Attorney General of the United States on this issue.

So today Senators Grassley, Cornyn, Coburn, and I sent a letter to Secretary Napolitano, and we requested that she and others in the administration consider taking action against Cook County and other local jurisdictions that purposefully and deliberately undermine the laws of the United States and offer sanctuary to illegal aliens who have broken our laws by entering the country illegally. Is there no consequence to that in this country now? If that is so, aren't we, in fact, putting up a sign on our borders that says: Just get by the border and you are home free, nothing will ever happen to you. Isn't that a magnet to more illegal immigration? Isn't that a mixed message to the world? Don't we need to be sending a good and decent message; that is, we believe in immigration. We are a nation of immigrants. We have the most generous immigration laws in the world, but you must comply with them. We can't accept everybody who would like to come whenever they would like to come. We have to ask people to file applications, meet certain qualifications, and come when your time has come to come to America.

That is what law is all about. That is why people want to come to this country, frankly, because in their countries they have no law, and they don't have the opportunity to earn something and be able to keep it.

Since the implementation of this ordinance in Chicago, over 40 suspected illegal aliens arrested on felony charges have been released from Cook County jails. Last week, the Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations at the Federal Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, told my staff that Cook County presents a major problem for immigration enforcement efforts. In fact, he said that Cook County, IL, is the most egregious example of sanctuary city policies and is ``an accident waiting to happen.'' Yet the head of the Department of Homeland Security stands silent, and the Justice Department is too busy prosecuting States that are trying to cooperate and uphold the law of the United States.

Senator Durbin said that no State is above the law, but it is these sanctuary jurisdictions, such as Cook County, and not States such as Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, and Indiana that need to remember they are not above the law.

The truth is that this is yet another example of a longtime trend in Chicago

of elected officials placating immigration law breakers while thumbing their noses at Federal law enforcement, jeopardizing public safety, and pretending that what they do is honorable and good and for the taxpayers who elected them. But releasing dangerous criminals is a dangerous thing to do. Releasing dangerous criminals--it could be a person who goes and murders someone, as we have seen time and time again.

The Cook County commission passed this order less than a month after Chicago-based open-borders group National Immigrant Justice Center sued the Department of Homeland Security, challenging the constitutionality of these ICE detainers--things that have been done by every State, city, and county throughout America for decades, hundreds of years-- since the founding of our Republic, I suppose. The lawsuit undoubtedly influenced the Cook County commission. They decided they would be open about it in voting in favor of this ordinance. So if one of those illegal aliens arrested on felony charges and released by Cook County commits a crime now, Cook County officials are to blame for it.

We should not release someone when the Federal authorities place a detainer on them. They do not do that very often. They do not do it nearly enough, frankly. So there will be a good reason for sure if they place a detainer on them, and to ignore that is really stunning.

So sanctuary jurisdictions such as Cook County, IL, undermine the ability of law enforcement personnel to enforce the laws that are on the books now and represent a threat to our security. These jurisdictions cannot choose if and when they will turn over illegal aliens charged with a crime and wanted by ICE.

So if we are going to talk about who is and who is not above the law, I suggest that my good friend--and we have worked together on a number of things, some of them criminal justice issues--the Senator from Illinois needs to clean up his own backyard rather than casting unfounded criticisms on States that are taking up a valuable effort to see that our immigration laws actually are enforced, to help end the lawlessness that has caused so much disruption in our country and upset the American people.

The American people are not anti-immigrant. We are a nation of immigrants. The American people are not opposed to people being able to come to our country. The American people do not dislike people who are here. Their anger is basically addressed to those of us in authority who are failing to maintain a lawful system of immigration, one that we can be proud of, one that is consistently enforced throughout the country. I believe that is what we should be striving for in our Nation, and if somebody wants to change the law and allow more people to come or fewer people to come, let's vote on it and have it right here on the floor of the Senate, and maybe we can have some changes.

But, fundamentally, it is the duty of Homeland Security, it is the duty of the Department of Justice to enforce the laws as they exist. They do not get to make the laws and enforce them. It is the duty and responsibility of Cook County to participate with the Federal Government in fulfilling its basic duties, such as honoring detainment. When you do not have that, we have a real problem in our country.

So I would suggest that the Attorney General take a little timeout from his lawsuit against Arizona or Alabama or other States and focus a little bit of his attention on a major jurisdiction such as Cook County that is willfully and deliberately acting to undermine Federal law enforcement.

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

Mr. President, I thank the Republican leader for his comments and would just say that the time we can borrow from the future to spend today in order to create some sort of sugar high that creates jobs is past. We have tried that. The debt has now reached a level where the debt itself is a threat to our economy. It is a cloud over our economy. It is slowing growth and job creation. I truly believe that. We need to move out of these difficult financial times we are in, but I think the debt itself now is a threat to us.

I wish to speak about the minibus appropriations bill that is before the body and its effect on the budget we have. As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I do believe it is my responsibility to present, as I am able, a straightforward, honest figure about the spending bills that come before our Senate.

H.R. 2112 is the first of several minibus bills that apparently will be used in lieu of the normal appropriations process. This minibus is so named because it contains three appropriation bills put in one--not one as we normally see before the Senate: the Agriculture bill, Commerce-Justice-Science, and the Transportation and Housing bill, all cobbled together in one.

The Democratic majority contends this package will save taxpayers money, but this is just more Washington accounting. We have crunched the numbers and discovered that these bills will not cut spending but will actually increase spending by $10 billion over last year. So I wish to take a moment to explain because this is very important. We had an agreement that we would begin the smallest of reductions this year in spending--not nearly enough, but we reached that agreement, and we should honor that at least. So this is the first appropriations bill the Senate has considered after the discretionary spending caps were established as part of the recent debt limit negotiations.

The Budget Control Act, as you remember, was passed to raise the debt ceiling. As an exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, as President Obama asked, Congress insisted that there be some curtailment of spending so we wouldn't hit the debt ceiling again so soon. So the Budget Control Act, as the bill was pretentiously named in August, requires that discretionary spending be brought down this year from $1,050 billion to $1,043 billion in fiscal year 2012, an alleged total spending reduction of a paltry $7 billion throughout the entire year. Presumably, the other $6 billion that was required to be saved under this agreement will be saved in other bills to come before the Congress. We haven't seen them yet.

Does the bill that is before us move us toward even this minor goal? That is the question. The majority party says it does. They contend that the bill, the minibus, spends $128 billion--which is $1 billion less than last year when it was $129 billion--a reduction of less than 10 percent, and they are very proud of this. But, remember, as an aside, nondefense discretionary spending alone in the first 2 years of President Obama's Presidency went up 24 percent. So to take a $1 billion reduction is basically to hold in place this surge in spending at a time when this Nation has never, ever faced such a severe debt threat to its future.

Going through the bill and thinking it through, the Budget Control Act also created a new category of spending. The Budget Control Act, if you remember, was cobbled together in the dead of night and brought up on the floor on the eve of a financial crisis and it was demanded that it be passed, and hardly anyone had a chance to read it. Unknown to most of us, it allowed spending above the $1,043 billion limit for disaster assistance. The debt limit deal provided an allowance for disaster spending equal to the average of the 10 prior years of disaster spending, which can be assessed or spent simply by providing the proper words in the appropriations bills that come forward across the floor, as these three do. But the majority contends this money should magically not be counted when you decide how much is spent by the bill. Why? Well, it is a disaster, and disaster spending doesn't count. Don't you know?

As amended on the Senate floor 2 weeks ago, the bill now contains $3.2 billion in new spending above the caps for disaster relief, a further increase of 20 percent to the disaster assistance. Two additional amendments were adopted last week adding to the amount that the committees had produced as disaster assistance.

While there are arguments that the $3.2 billion should not be counted as an expenditure, the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, our official scorekeeper, includes it as an expenditure. It is included as an expenditure in the CBO score, $3.2 billion. No one has challenged them because it appears they are plainly correct to count the

$3.2 billion as spending. Only in Washington can it be asserted that the government can spend $3.2 billion and it not count. The bill's sponsors contend that the discretionary spending portion of the bill, as I indicated, has gone down from $129 billion to $128 billion, but CBO says it went up to $131 billion. The disaster funding represents a 2-percent discretionary increase, at a time when spending is supposed to be going down.

Further, the bill's sponsors say you should not count the mandatory spending programs that are contained in the bill. They insist that mandatory spending is not under the control of the appropriators. Again, this is logic that only exists in Washington. In truth, it is not unusual for the Appropriations Committee to take actions that impact mandatory programs, and it can be done. But, of course, it was not in this bill.

For example, food stamps, the largest mandatory program by far in this bill--actually larger than any other program in the bill--amounts to 75 percent of total Agriculture appropriations spending. Seventy- five percent. Most people think agriculture programs are bailing out farmers. Those benefits to farmers have been reduced steadily over the years. Now 75 percent of the Agriculture bill is the mandatory programs, food stamps being the largest. And this program, under the legislation before us today, is set to increase by 14 percent next year, $10 billion more than last year, a $10 billion increase in the Food Stamp Program. But that doesn't count, it is contended.

This spending increase results in a doubling of the food stamp budget over the past 3 years--doubling the budget in 3 years--and then quadrupling it four times over the last 10 years. We have got to look under the hood of this program and find out what is happening to it. But nothing is seriously being done. Like welfare reform, responsible changes to the way government operates this program will improve outcomes, help more needy people achieve the goal of financial independence, not dependence, and stop fraud, which most Americans know is pretty common in the Food Stamp Program.

When I offered an amendment to save a modest $10 billion over the next 10 years, a reform that would not have reduced eligibility for any of the needy but only require that the recipients meet the minimum legal requirements of the program--actually be needy and qualify for the program by reducing fraud and abuse--the amendment was defeated right here on the floor of the Senate. It would have saved $10 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by making sure that people make actual, formal applications for their food stamps and sign a document saying they actually qualify for it. Is that too much to ask?

Senator Stabenow, the agriculture authorizing committee chair, rose to explain that we are not to worry because, while we are increasing food stamp funding now, at some other time her committee will recommend and produce a bill perhaps that will reduce it by $23 billion over 10 years. But if that promise were to be fulfilled, the effect on the fiscal year 2012 budget would be that food stamp spending would increase this year approximately $8 billion--or a 10-percent increase-- rather than $10 billion, a 14-percent increase. The program has indeed doubled since 2008.

But now we are hearing in reports that this $23 billion in savings is not even in the Food Stamp Program, or most of it is not. We are hearing that 19 percent of it is a further reduction of aid to farmers, and only $4 billion of the reduction in savings would be from food stamps.

Here is the bottom line. When discretionary and mandatory spending are scored in this bill, the overall spending compared to last year went up by $10 billion, or a 4-percent increase, not a cut. Relative to the amount Senators approved for these three bills last year, we are being asked to increase spending, not decrease spending. I believe that is a fair and honest analysis of the bill that is before us. If you were to exclude the mandatory spending, ignore that huge increase in the Food Stamp Program, the SNAP program, and even say disaster assistance should be ignored, the so-called reduction in spending would be only a paltry $1 billion on these three bills combined.

It is time to get serious. Denial in this Congress must end. You can't borrow your way out of debt. We are spending money we do not have. Forty cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed, on which we pay interest every year. It is digging us deeper in a hole. It cannot be contended that this is serious work toward reducing our deficit. It just cannot be.

Our deficit in fiscal year 2011, which ended September 30, was just shy of $1,300 billion. A spending cut of $7 billion for this year is a mere pittance in comparison. In no way is it even close to a significant reduction of the projected deficit we are going to have in this fiscal year, which began October 1. We are now at Halloween. We still haven't passed the appropriations bill for the year we are in. Congress is not performing responsibly. It is not.

We haven't had a budget in over 900 days. The majority leader, Senator Reid, said it would be foolish to have a budget. No wonder the American people are unhappy with us. How can this be? We are responsible people. We are proposing to spend next year $1,043 billion, and act as though we are proud to have reduced the spending by $7 billion when we will have over $1,000 billion in debt, $1 trillion plus, next year?

But it gets worse. The bill also contains a number of Washington accounting tricks to sweep new spending under the rug. It is full of the typical gimmicks used to shove more spending into a bill that has already reached its spending limit. We have reached our limit. I remain amazed at the creativity used by spenders to defeat budget limits. Were they to use such creativity to control spending, would we not be so much better off?

I have already talked about the new authority granted by the Budget Control Act to designate an item as a disaster outside and above the budget--it doesn't count if you call it a disaster--and to spend the money without a formal vote by the Senate to declare it a disaster. Indeed, until the Budget Control Act passed, you had to have 60 votes to declare something a disaster to go above the budget. That has been eliminated. That was changed in this Budget Control Act that reduced control of the budget. It reduced the power of the budget to contain spending by eliminating this end run. At least you used to have 60 votes to spend above the budget by calling it a disaster. Now you do not.

When they first floated this idea that they were going to put disaster spending in the budget and it was going to be averaged out with what we normally spend, I thought that was a good idea. We know on average we have been spending this much for disasters. Let's put it in the budget and only spend above that if it meets that standard we have traditionally had. The idea was to arrange the amount of disaster spending and put it in the budget, but in the shell game that is Washington, that is not what the fine print did. The Budget Control Act establishes in effect now a slush fund to spend money above the budget limits, eliminating the 60-vote requirement for emergency designation. There is $3.2 billion in spending under this new authority that is in this bill, the first of multiple minibuses we will see. At the rate we are going, the ceiling of $11.3 billion for disaster established under the Budget Control Act will be exhausted and more emergency spending will be needed to further address legitimate disaster needs, but there will be no need for 60 votes to do so. That vote has been eliminated.

In addition, the bill uses another gimmick to rescind discretionary appropriations provided in prior years that, for one reason or another, can no longer be spent for their intended purposes. That is, the bill rescinds budget authority that CBO estimates will not result in any cash savings over the next 10 years. Rather than letting the appropriations lapse and saving this money and being thankful we got the project done at less than normal, less than the projected cost, this bill, as has been done before, pretends to be responsible and rescinds that money which is then used to pay for the spending that will in fact result in cash expenditures from the Treasury. This one gimmick in this bill would add $131 million in off-the-books spending.

Finally, the bill finds savings in mandatory programs that game the government's cashflow and score as savings

for this bill, but does not actually reduce the cost to the taxpayers. These so-called CHIMPS--we have a name for it now, changes in mandatory program spending--total $8.5 billion in this bill. Of that amount, an astonishing 88 percent, or $7.5 billion, results in no net spending reduction over 10 years.

Some of these CHIMPS have been going on year after year. One example is the Crime Victims Fund. Every year Congress says that the crime victims will get the funds they are due under the law next year which, unfortunately for the Crime Victims Fund, has not yet arrived since the annual deferral began in fiscal year 2000. In other words, it is done every year and there seems to be no prospect that this will not continue. Meanwhile, the appropriators get the amount deferred over and over again, enabling ever higher amounts of discretionary spending. It would be like a family delaying a single $500 home repair for 10 years, and then counting it as $5,000 in savings, $500 for every year the repair did not take place. In this case, over the past 3 years the gimmick used in this bill has enabled $14 billion in higher spending.

I thank the Chair and ask for 1 additional minute to close.

I am unable to support this bill. By its own standards it fails. It represents everything that is wrong with Washington today. It crams three bills, which should have been considered individually, into one, creating a process that curtails debate on spending at a time when we need more debate, not less. Further, it does virtually nothing to address the fiscal crisis threatening this country. It treats spending caps established earlier this summer as the most that can be saved, not as the starting point for savings, and then uses gimmicks to spend over and above that advertised limit. It is not a serious response to the explosive growth in Federal spending and falls short of the commitment we must make to handle taxpayer dollars honestly and responsibly. It is business as usual. The American people deserve better.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I want to take a minute to say I am pleased that one of my amendments to eliminate the categorical eligibility for food stamps concept has been called up.

I also look forward to calling up an amendment that's been referred to as the Medco amendment, which has real strong bipartisan support. It was an amendment that many people felt they needed to vote against when the patent bill came forward because they believed the bill would then be required to go back to the House. So, it failed on a 51-to-47 vote.

But I am confident that there is an overwhelming number who would prefer to vote for this amendment now, if we can get it accepted. It would not take a long time for us to consider it. I think it's an issue our members are familiar with. So I want to share my thoughts that it is very important to me, and I think perhaps it might have a majority vote on both sides of the aisle.

Basically, my amendment would say we want to prohibit the PTO from using any funds to implement a provision of the patent reform bill that would have the effect of deciding an ongoing civil litigation that is on appeal now to the court of appeals. The merits of the matter are being argued. I believe it is the kind of matter that clearly should be allowed to stand in the courts. But this law firm that apparently failed to follow the statute of limitations--and the courts ruled in their favor--is seeking to have the Congress overrule or shortcut the appellate process in this matter.

I wanted to say I look forward to debating the question of categorical eligibility for food stamps, where if you are approved for a number of other Federal programs, you don't have to make a formal application to qualify for food stamps. CBO has indicated that it could save as much as $10 billion over 10 years if that hole in the program is closed.

And I would note that food stamps are the fastest growing major item in the budget by far. There is nothing close to it. It has doubled in the last 3 years. It has gone from $20 billion to $80 billion in the last 4 years, a 400-percent increase. One in seven people are now receiving food stamps. Originally, it was 1 in 50 when the program started. Nobody wants to deny people food, but the program has not been looked at. We have not looked under the hood. I believe in this one reform that says if you want to get thousands of dollars in food benefits from the government, you ought to at least fill out a form and qualify according to the standards the Food and Nutrition Service sets. That is basically all it would do. Some of the programs, if you qualify for them, are now automatically accepting food stamp recipients. They have a lower qualification than food stamps do. For example, one person won the lottery and that was counted as an asset to the person rather than income to the person. He called and said: Do I still get food stamps, since I won a $2 million lottery? They said: Yes, the money you received is an asset, and we don't count assets under this other mechanism. But they should count assets under the Food Stamp Program.

I thank the Chair, and I thank the Senator from Delaware, who is moving the bill and allowing me to share these thoughts. I do hope we can get agreement and move forward on the Medco amendment, along with the categorical food stamp amendment.

Excuse me.

I thank the Chair. She is correct. She has allowed the food stamp amendment to be pending, and I am talking with staff on this side and the Senator from Maryland is not objecting at this point to that amendment. So I hope that will happen.

I just wished to emphasize that there are a number of Members who feel very strongly that this is a matter we have an opportunity now to fix; that is, we shouldn't be moving forward to intervene in an ongoing lawsuit. Under our rules, there is a way to get a special relief act, if somehow there is a miscarriage of justice that occurs in our American system--an individual special relief act. But it has certain procedures, and one of the key prerequisites of that is that your litigation must be exhausted. Then, if the courts can't give you relief, we might consider it under certain procedures.

So this litigation is ongoing, and that is why I am hopeful we can fix it.

No, I am talking----

No, the Medco amendment. It was voted on in the House twice, and on the second vote the amendment passed by a narrow margin. Our Members did not want to amend the House bill, even though many opposed that particular amendment. So this would give us an opportunity to vote on it, and it would be germane.

I think that is basically correct.

Fair enough. I just wanted, for the record, to indicate I was urging our leadership to make this matter pending.

I thank the Senator.