Floor Statements

I understand. I am proud of the commitment the Senator from Oklahoma has made and totally recognize it.

Mr. President, I appreciate so much Senator Coburn's leadership on this very important matter. I think we are at a defining moment. I take offense for those who say we have no interest in extending unemployment insurance. My State has high unemployment. We were doing very well, and it has doubled now from where we were in unemployment.

My home area is one of the worst in the State. I am well aware of that. Members of the Senate on this side of the aisle strongly favor extending unemployment insurance and actually extending other benefits, too, such as the doctors fix that we need to do, the COBRA and FMAP and matters of that kind which are in the legislation and we believe should be passed into law. There is just one thing that I would raise, and that is that we want it to be in a way that does not increase, again, the debt because here we go again.

Our colleagues passed an amendment, passed the pay-go law a few weeks ago, and within a few days they were violating it. This violates it again. What we need to ask ourselves, then, is how we are going to help people who are in need. Are we going to do it in a responsible way or will we take the easy way out, pass the debt on to our children and grandchildren without the least concern, it seems, about how we are going to pay for it?

My colleague just recently said we should call it an emergency. Unemployment insurance is fundamentally one of our established government programs, he said, because that allows us to provide this benefit without an offset. That is precisely what the deal is, you understand. He was quite honest about it. We do not have to pay for it; we don't have to look for money; we don't have to cut waste, fraud, and abuse; we don't have to reach into the stimulus bill that we passed, which was announced to be for unemployment insurance as one of its primary motives and use that money that is unspent--and $100 billion or $200 billion still remains unspent. Why don't we use that money? It would not then increase the debt larger than we now have.

We proposed a number of other offsets, offsets that our Democratic colleagues have utilized in legislation they have offered. We have suggested to our colleagues, what other containment of spending would you propose, and we would be willing to consider if you would use that to pay for this. But the day of just continuing to increase our debt is passed.

This Senate needs to face the truth, and the truth is we will double the entire debt of the United States in 5 years, ending 2013. We will triple the entire debt of the United States in 2019. In 2019 the interest on the debt that we will be paying in that 1 year will be $800 billion. Just last year the interest on the total debt of the United States was $170 billion. We cannot continue this. Every economist who has ever testified before our Budget Committee has said repeatedly this is unsustainable. When do we stop if it is unsustainable? Members of our Senate say it is unsustainable, on both sides of the aisle. When do we stop?

Senator Coburn had the courage to say: Now, we can pay for this. We have moneys unspent that we can use to pay for the extension of unemployment insurance, and we will not agree that we will just add more to our debt.

I have in my pocket, I just happened to notice, pictures of three of my grandchildren. I have had three--one born in November, one born 2 weeks ago, one born Sunday. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that they are going to have to pay off.

It is an addiction and a habit that we must break. This is $9 billion added to the debt. I hope and pray this courage by Senator Coburn that calls us to account and says let's face the music and let's be honest with ourselves is respected, as I respect it. I think the American people respect it. When I am out talking in my townhall meetings and in my communities and in the airplanes, they tell me: You guys are spending recklessly. We can't believe it. What has happened?

The American people understand we cannot do this. There is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Somebody pays, and we cannot just spend and take the easy way every time without facing the consequences of a debt that we create. When we spend more than we take in, we borrow the money. We borrow it on the open market and we pay interest on the debt.

I want to say my Democratic colleagues are at it again, spending more and not paying for it. Have the Republicans failed in their responsibility when they had the Presidency and a majority in the Senate? Yes, we should have done much better. But we have never seen the deficits we are seeing today--never, ever.

President Bush had a record deficit of $450 billion his last year in office. This year, ending September 30, it was $1.4 trillion--$1,400 billion--three times. This year, when September 30 arrives, our budget experts tell us our annual deficit for this 1 year will be $1.5 trillion, and we will average $1 trillion a year for the years to come, more than twice the highest deficit we have ever had. We cannot do that. This is serious business.

I hope and pray the stimulus package will give us some benefit. I know it will. When we spend $800 billion, every penny of it is borrowed, to be paid back someday, or the interest paid back by our children or grandchildren. This stimulus package, hopefully, will give us some lift, but we will carry the debt.

Do you know what the Congressional Budget Office told us when they analyzed the $800 billion stimulus package? They said: Yes, it will provide a benefit for a few years. You will get a lift in the economy. But over 10 years, just over 10 years, it will have a net negative to the economy, a slight negative because you have to carry this debt, and it is crowding out private sector borrowing because the government borrowed it first. The government has to pay interest to all these people around the world who loan us this money.

There is no easy way out of this. It is time for us to be mature and grown up and make good decisions. It is time to say no to this legislation unless it is paid for, and we can pay for it. There are plenty of places in our budget it can be paid for.

I thank colleagues for allowing me to share these thoughts. I thank Senator Coburn for raising this important issue, for his courage in saying it is time to do better. We can do better. We can do this in the right way. We came close tonight to getting it done, I thought, in a paid-for way--so close. If we stand in there, maybe in a week or 2 we will be able to take care of the unemployment insurance and pay for it in a sound way.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, today I pay tribute to William (Bill) Satterfield, counsel for Balch & Bingham LLP in Birmingham, AL.

Prior to his position at Balch and Bingham, Bill served as the general counsel of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and as the Associate and Deputy Solicitor of the U.S. Department of Interior in Washington, DC.

Bill has extensive experience with environmental, natural resources, energy, and public utility law on both the Federal and State levels and has been fighting the good fight for the State of Alabama on a myriad of environmental issues for over three decades. He has used his knowledge of the laws, regulations, and political climate to provide direction on environmental and natural resource issues to individuals, small businesses, and large corporations in Alabama.

In a big part of this work, he has been a great advocate for port and waterways issues in Alabama, serving as counsel to Alabama-Tombigbee Rivers Coalition. This organization is made up of 34 members and composed of business, trade associations, and state agencies in Alabama and Mississippi, and it led the charge to challenge the Fish and Wildlife's proposed listing of the Alabama sturgeon as an endangered species.

He is also the secretary and counsel of the National Waterways Conference, which focuses on commonsense water resources policies that maximize the economic and environmental value of our inland, coastal and Great Lakes waterways.

During his tenure as legal counsel for the National Waterways Conference, a volunteer position, he invested countless hours to ensure that the constitution and bylaws of the organization were preserved to ensure the ongoing integrity of the National Waterways Conference as the only water resources association representing the full spectrum of water resources stakeholders, and thanks to his tireless efforts, the National Waterways Conference continues to prevail as our Nation's leading multifaceted water resource organization.

The National Waterways Conference, which was founded in 1960, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and bestowed on Bill Satterfield the title of Counsel Emeritus of the National Waterways Conference on March 9, 2010.

Through his work with the National Waterways Conference, he embodied the spirit of our nation's frontiersmen on many occasions. In the ceremony naming him counsel emeritus, he was presented a bronze statue with the following quote:

This bronze statue of ``The Trooper on the Plains'' by

Frederic Remington is symbolic

of the attributes Satterfield exhibited in every situation he

encountered throughout his career: Bravery, quick action,

strength, courage, and endurance. With a yank of the reins,

the rider in this statue is galloping full speed ahead

through dangerous territory with a pistol pointed across his

torso. The feet of his horse, in this scene, never touch the

ground, as he is always moving. He charges towards the enemy

camp, fearless and undaunted, with great courage and

resolution. His one goal: Achieve the aims set forth by his

commanding officer, and win ultimate victory for his army.

Colonel Bill Satterfield is a true ``Trooper of the Plains.''

Bill is a great lawyer, a proven professional, a superb public servant, a man of high principle who understands and loves this great Republic which we serve and a good friend. I extend my heartiest congratulations upon his receipt of this special and most deserved honor.

Madam President, I wish to express my appreciation to Senator McCaskill, who is a person of courage and conviction and made a decision that we need to do better in our country about spending. As she said, is a simple truth. Our amendment is a small but significant step. It is a statement that we are going to take some action that will have some benefit in containing the growth, not requiring cuts but containing the growth of spending in our country.

Unfortunately, as we have gotten so close to having it passed, now an organized effort appears to be underway to try to see if they can pull back a growing number of votes that have been cast for it. We started out with 56 votes, then went to 59 votes. Every Republican and 18 Democrats voted for it. We just need one more vote and we will be able to take this significant step of having a statutory cap on spending.

The level of spending we are limiting it to is the level in the Democratic budget that passed this year. The amount is not anything other than what the budget already calls for that was passed by a Democratic majority. It is the kind of numbers we probably could do better on and we probably could and should cut some programs.

Regardless, what we are saying is, one of our big problems is we do not stick to whatever budget we have. We constantly violate the budget. Republicans have done this too. The debt now is spiraling out of control to a degree we have never ever seen in the history of our country. It is not responsible, and we have to stop it.

I say this about my colleague from Arkansas--we were celebrating a bipartisan effort just last night when he and I and others worked on balancing the crack and powder cocaine penalties so they are more fair and more realistic. That was a good bipartisan step.

I think we are on the way to a bipartisan bill. I am disappointed we now have what can only be referred to as a cover amendment that does not have the teeth or the strength of the amendment we have offered. It provides an opportunity for people to vote for it and say they have voted to contain spending: I was all for it; I didn't vote on the McCaskill-Sessions amendment, but I voted on this other amendment, and it is just as good.

It is not just as good, and it does not have as much ability to contain spending. It does not. It should not be substituted.

The American people are frustrated with us. The polling numbers for Congress are perhaps as low as we have ever seen in this country. One of the reasons is, they are tired of us manipulating and maneuvering to try to make ourselves look good and the interest of the country takes the hindmost. People are tired of that and in my view they are correct.

Some of our colleagues say that is populist; they are just angry; they will go away. Americans have a right to be concerned about what we are doing and how these activities are occurring on the floor of the Senate.

The Democratic leadership obviously decided this amendment might be in a position to pass. They didn't want it to pass. They conjured up what we call a cover amendment. It should not be what we adopt.

I note the caps are higher in this amendment than the budget resolution passed by Congress--the Democratic budget resolution just last year. It would allow about $38 billion more in nondefense spending over 3 years than what was in our fiscal year 2010 budget resolution. The side by side, the cover amendment, does not follow the President's proposal to freeze nondefense discretionary spending for 3 years. It waives the fiscal 2012 and 2013 caps. It has only a 51-vote threshold.

I wish we could have talked some more about what Senator McCaskill and I have offered. Maybe we could have made some changes to the plan we have. Frankly, this will be the third time we made changes in the legislation to try to assuage concerns Members had that we thought were legitimate and worthy of putting in the bill. I would have liked to have made those changes.

The American people are unhappy about this situation. I know polling numbers are not supposed to be the end all in Congress, but we ought to understand we work for our constituents; they do not work for us. That is what I am hearing out there: You work for me, Sessions, and I am concerned about what you are doing up there. We want a better response from you guys.

This is a CNN opinion poll:

Which of the following comes closer to your view of the

budget deficit--the government should run a deficit if

necessary when the country is in a recession and at war, or

the government should balance the budget even when the

country is in a recession and is at war?

That is a pretty hard question. I think some people who are very frugal might worry about how to answer that question. But look at the numbers: 67 percent, two-thirds, of the American people said balance the budget. Only 30 percent said run a deficit.

I tell you, the American people have it right. The threat to our economy in the long run is one thing: debt--irresponsible, reckless, unsustainable growth in debt. If we would get that under control, the great American entrepreneurial spirit, the work ethic of our people, the exceptional capabilities of our business leaders will allow us to compete with anybody. But if we tax and spend ourselves into debt, we are threatening our future.

How big a threat is it? Look at these numbers. This is the debt. In 2008, it was $5.8 trillion. Since the beginning of the American Republic, we had accumulated $5.8 trillion in debt. It was projected by CBO that in 2013, it will be $11.8 trillion. In a little over 3 years, we will be doubling the total American public debt. Finally, by 2019, based on the budget we are operating in today and the laws that are on the books today, it will triple to $17.3 trillion. Consider the interest on that debt--we have to borrow the money. Does anybody understand that? We borrow the money. We are borrowing it on the world market. Interest rates are sure to surge in the years to come. Right now, with the economy shaky, people are willing to buy government bonds, even if they pay low rates. We are getting a bargain on interest rates right now. But this debt isn't going to be a bargain in the future--not a bargain for the good of the country.

This chart shows the interest that will be paid. In 2009, last year, we paid $187 billion in interest. In 2020, according to the President's budget analysis that he submitted, it will be $840 billion--$840 billion in interest in 1 year. The Federal highway bill is $40 billion a year. Does that give us some perspective? It is bigger than the defense budget.

These are stunning numbers. That is why every economist, Republicans and Democrats, the Heritage Foundation and Brookings Institution, former CBO

Directors and OMB Directors of both parties all say repeatedly we are on an unsustainable course.

The deficits continue to surge in the outyears. They are not coming down. People say: When are we going to pay it back? We are not paying it back. In these years, in the outyears, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, they are projecting steady but lower growth--but growth every year, no recessions. The deficits are going to be about $1 trillion a year. They are not going down. We are still going into debt $1 trillion a year.

I guess what I am saying is, what we need to do is focus on discretionary accounts, and this amendment is it. Some say only the mandatory, only the entitlements count. That is not so. As of this moment, this year, every penny of the surging debt--and this year's deficit will be $1.5 trillion--every penny of that debt will be the result of spending in the discretionary accounts, not Social Security and not Medicare.

Some say: Oh, that can't be so. Social Security and Medicare together are now still in net surplus. We take the money, that surplus, and we spend it and we give a bond back to Social Security and Medicare.

I guess what I am saying is, don't think the discretionary problem is not a big part of the problem. It is the problem today. In the future, it will be an actuarial challenge of monumental proportions because the expenses of Medicare and Social Security are going up and the revenue is going down and we are going to be in serious trouble. We need to deal with this now.

I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to share these remarks. I urge my colleagues to take a good vote. Vote for the Sessions-McCaskill amendment and oppose the Pryor amendment.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to briefly comment about the Pryor amendment that has been offered as an alternate, a side-by-side, or cover amendment to the Sessions-McCaskill amendment that would take the budget limits that were passed by this Congress and make those more difficult to violate by creating a two-thirds vote for it. I would say a couple of things about the Pryor amendment.

It is not good and we should not vote for it. It pretends to have good motives, and maybe it does have good motives. But in fact it would allow $62 billion more in spending over 3 years than the McCaskill- Sessions amendment. It would instruct the deficit commission to propose tax increases and entitlement cuts to pay for increases in discretionary spending. The deficit commission was not meant for raising taxes and cutting entitlements to pay for new discretionary spending increases. The whole purpose of that was to figure out a way to deal with the surging entitlements that are growing out of control and to contain their growth.

How are we going to do that? We are going to do it two ways, primarily. I suppose they will propose some sort of tax increases, increase in Social Security withholding or increase in Medicare withholding, and they will cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. That is what real life is.

But this would instruct the commission to cut entitlement benefits, Medicare, and Social Security, to increase taxes, and use it to fund more discretionary spending. That is not good. People should not vote for an amendment that would do that. We are going to have to wrestle with the entitlement commission. It does not have binding authority, it is a recommendation to us, and maybe they will have some recommendations we can all support. But it is not going to be fun. It is not going to be easy. There is no free lunch. Nothing comes from nothing. Somebody must pay to fix the entitlements. They are at the present time in surplus and the surplus they are producing from the revenue from Social Security withholding and Medicare withholding is being spent for discretionary spending. So to raise their income for those accounts and to cut spending in those accounts to allow even more spending on the discretionary side I think would be very unwise. Perhaps that is not what was intended but that is what appears to me to be pretty plainly what is going on in this amendment.

Second, the Republican counsel on the Budget Committee has advised that the amendment would not only abandon the two-thirds requirement that Senator McCaskill and I are proposing to violate the budget, but it actually would eliminate the point of order that currently requires 60 votes to violate the budget. Currently, if somebody proposes a spending amount that violates the budget, any Senator can object and it would take 60 votes to waive the budget to allow this extra spending to occur. The way we are reading this amendment is that it would dramatically weaken the existing law and eliminate this point of order that would even require 60 votes. That has not proven to be a very effective tool. The two-thirds vote would be better.

I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to share these remarks and urge my colleagues to resist the Democratic leadership's injunctions and pressures to vote against the Sessions-McCaskill amendment. I know 18 Democrats have already voted for it. It is a bipartisan bill. We worked at it together in a good way. It has the ability to take a significant, though not dramatic, but a solid step in the right direction. I am disappointed we are now proposing an alternative amendment that will not be as effective and that the leadership on the Democratic side is opposing. If Senator Reid and Senator Durbin said: Fine, you can vote for this if you like or: We are going to vote for it, do what you want, Senator, it would pass like that. But it is their leadership decision that has put us in a difficult position and makes it more difficult for us to get 60 votes. I hope we can, but it may not occur.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I say to Senator Kyl, you have worked on this issue for many years. You are one of the Senate's leaders, the assistant Republican leader, and a leader in the Finance Committee. Isn't it true we have known for some time that we are losing doctors who are declining to do Medicare work and that if we do not take action, they will have a dramatic 20-plus percent cut in their pay? Every year we have known that cannot happen, so we have found the money to put back into it. One of the announced purposes for the President's health care reform was to fix this problem.

First, I understand from your conversation with Senator Alexander that this problem has not been fixed in the bill at all. Then of course, when you figure out how much the bill costs, it does not reflect that we need, under the new estimates, $300 billion more. So if they are claiming the bill is going to create a surplus of $130 billion, you would have a $200 billion or so deficit on the doctor fix alone; is that correct?

I have one more question of the distinguished Senator.

The way this new benefit is funded, as I understand it, is through a $500 billion cut to Medicare and increased Medicare taxes. Wouldn't it be the correct thing for policymakers to take that money first and strengthen Medicare and pay the doctors whom we owe instead of starting an entirely new program, leaving the doctors unpaid, and raiding Medicare benefits?

Mr. President, I think 7 minutes.

Mr. President, I was pleased to listen to the remarks by my good friend and most respected Member of the Senate, Senator Carper, about his analysis of the health care reform bill that is before us. I would say I disagree on a number of areas.

First, I disagree that we do not have the best medical care in the world. Yes, we have people who are overweight. We have a higher homicide rate. We have other problems that affect health. But if you are treated, you get the best health care all over. Even in rural areas of Alabama you get well-trained physicians and nurses who can give you first-rate care. I reject that. But I do agree we pay too much. I hoped that would have been a basis for our bipartisan agreement as to how we can execute some changes that would help bring down the cost and create a more effective health care system. I certainly think we should go in that direction.

I do think it is important that the American people believe the process is legitimate. The President said--I suppose in his interview yesterday; I saw it this morning--basically: I don't care what the process is. Just do it, House. You can deem a piece of legislation that is not a part of the bill, and just make it law by deeming it without actually putting it up for a vote or amendment or a process. That is historic. They say it has been done before.

I am hearing from my constituents: I do not care what you have been doing before. We expect you guys to honestly bring up legislation, honestly vote on it, and not sneak it through in the dead of night without people having a chance to read it, without fully knowing what it means.

That is a legitimate request and demand from the American people that I am hearing. I think it is true all over the country. Even in Massachusetts, Senator Brown said: This bill is no good, and I am running against it. If you elect me as the Senator from Massachusetts, I am going to vote no. He was elected by a big margin in a stunning development. The American people are unhappy about this.

What I wanted to take a minute to talk about, and this is very important, the Speaker today, just a few hours ago, reiterated that this legislation would create a surplus. If it is going to ensure 30 million more Americans, if it is going to close the doughnut hole and is going to do all these things, how can that be? The American people are dubious at best about that claim. But they say the CBO says so.

With all due respect to my colleague from Delaware, that is not what CBO said. They have misrepresented the CBO's statement in one of the more dramatic flimflameries in history, I submit. I wrote the CBO. Right before I voted on December 24 I got a letter back that explained the details of how it could appear to be one thing when it is really another. I want to point that out right now.

This was a subsequent letter from them on January 22 of this year when asked about how to analyze the cost of this bill. I am quoting from a letter to me, Jeff Sessions, from the Congressional Budget Office, January 22, Doug Elmendorf, the Director--basically hired by the Democratic majority in Congress. He says:

Thus, the act's effects on the rest of the budget--other

than the cash flows from the HI trust fund, the Medicare

trust fund--would amount to a net increase in the federal

deficits of $226 billion over the same period.

A net increase in the deficit.

He goes on to say:

Thus, the resources to redeem government bonds in the HI

trust fund and thereby pay for Medicare benefits in some

future year will have to be generated from taxes or other

government income, or government borrowing in that year.

He goes on to say:

Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI

[Medicare] trust fund savings under the PPACA--

That is this health care reform bill--

would be used to pay for other spending and therefore would

not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future

Medicare benefits.

It goes on to say:

Therefore, enacting the PPACA--

The health care reform bill--

would increase debt held by government accounts more than it

would decrease debt held by the public and would thus

increase gross federal debt.

Here we have the Speaker of the House taking the floor again, repeating what the President and other colleagues are saying, that somehow this is creating a surplus. It is not. Let me tell you why and how they do it. Hopefully, I can take just a minute to do that.

Right before I voted in the Senate on December 21, President Obama said:

And Medicare will be stronger and its solvency extended by

nearly a decade.

Same statement, he says:

The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill

will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first

decade.

That is basically the number they were using this morning; basically the number that has been referred to on the floor earlier today. This is how it is done and why that is a total misrepresentation of the ultimate significance of what we are doing. This chart does it.

What happens? With regard to the Medicare account, we are increasing Medicare taxes. That brings more money into Medicare. If this passes, everybody--upper income Medicare payers--will pay more money. So it is going to increase taxes.

Second, there has been a substantial reduction in Medicare benefits paid from this account. So, therefore, it creates a saving, right? You increase taxes into Medicare, you cut Medicare expenses, Medicare looks to be in better shape. That is true if we use the money to maintain Medicare, if we use the money paid in by seniors all over this country so when they retire they can have Medicare, and if we use that money to strengthen Medicare. But we are not using it to strengthen Medicare.

What are we doing with it? We are shipping it over to the Treasury so the Congress can spend it on a new health care bill. Obviously, we have a problem there.

How do we get money out? You heard people refer to the Medicare trust fund--and there really is one--and a Social Security trust fund--and there is one. There are bonds out there that Social Security holds in West Virginia. The surplus in Medicare is given to the Treasury. But something else is not mentioned because it is an internal debt, an IOU to Medicare, a bond back to Medicare. The U.S. Treasury owes Medicare for the money they borrowed, and Medicare is heading into default.

So what is going to happen? They are going to call the notes, they are going to call the IOUs, and take this money back.

What is going to happen to the U.S. Treasury when that happens?

I ask unanimous consent to have 2 additional minutes.

I am entitled to ask the Presiding Officer for it.

As a result of the conventions of accounting, it may appear this money can be spent twice, as Mr. Elmendorf said is happening. But the truth is, we cannot spend the money twice. It is increasing the debt, and there is no doubt about it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time is left on this side?

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of my amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, we were within one vote of bipartisan legislation to help constrain the growth in spending and allow for growth but not quite as much. But Senator Pryor's amendment is absolutely the wrong thing. It is a budget-busting amendment. It allows the Congress or the appropriating committees to spend $62 billion more than the present budget allows. It busts the budget. Second, it instructs the deficit commission to propose tax increases and entitlement cuts to fund increases in discretionary spending. That is not what the commission is supposed to be about. It is to try to get our entitlements back on sound footing, not to create money to spend on a new program.

I urge colleagues to vote no. It is not the right thing to do.

I make a budget point of order that the pending amendment contains matters within the jurisdiction of the Committee on the Budget. Therefore, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 306 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

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

Mr. President, I offered, along with Senator Clair McCaskill, my Democratic colleague, an amendment that will help contain our tendency in this body--a bipartisan tendency, unfortunately--to bust the budget, to spend more than we state we are going to spend. It is a temptation that is all too real. We are faced with competing choices to spend and spend, and some of our Members just find it hard to say no.

We have to be careful about that because each time we do that, the baseline of the budget or the emergency spending goes up, and we have gotten into a habit of it that is surging us on an unsustainable path. Mr. Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, the Obama administration's leaders, independent economists, and Republicans across-the-board are saying we are on a spending path that is unsustainable, that we cannot keep on. But I have to tell you, a lot of this is bad because we budgeted it; but a lot of it is bad because we break the budget and spend more than the budget says.

We have a historical incident in which this Congress passed statutory caps on spending to support the budget. In effect, Congress passed laws that said this is our budget for the next several years. We have actual spending dollar limits in our budget. Let's pass a law that says if we go above that, it takes a supermajority.

Our bill says it would take a two-thirds vote to exceed the spending the budget allows. Some say: A two-thirds vote? That is a high vote. But it is based on the budget and the passage of a budget, and the budget is passed by a 50-vote majority. So the budget essentially will be the Democratic colleagues' budget. What they pass is what they expect the levels of spending should be and where we should cap it and where we should not go any further.

This legislation would enhance our ability and state with clarity, as a bipartisan act of this Senate and Congress, that this is where we are going to stay and that we are serious about it

this time and we are going to do something about spending that is out of control.

The simple truth is, we cannot continue to spend as we are. The simple truth is, we are spending into debt, deficit, more than we ever have in our history. Let me just show this chart. I think it is a pretty indicative chart that should cause the average person to lose their appetite--maybe even have their hair stand up. I used this chart a week or so ago. I was meeting later with a Foreign Minister from a European country.

He said: I happened to be watching C-SPAN. I saw you yesterday on the floor with this chart. He said: Do you use charts on the floor often?

I said: Yes, sir, we do, Mr. Minister.

He said: I thought it made a lot of sense. You ought to go all over the country and show that.

This is the Congressional Budget Office numbers based on the budget that is out there. It shows what our debt held by the public is. The debt held by the public is the debt where we sell Treasury bills and people give us their money. They loan us their money, and we promise to pay them back--over 10 years or 2 years or 30 years--at a certain rate of interest. Some people say: You should not count the internal debt; that is not exactly accurate. The only thing that really counts is the public debt.

The internal debt, the gross debt is much larger than this, but let's just use these numbers. In 2008 the total public debt of the United States was $5.8 trillion. Since the founding of our Republic--in 1789, I guess, since the Constitution was written. In 2013, according to CBO staff, it will double to $11.8 trillion. That is just 3 years from now--double. Then, in 2019, it is projected to go to $17.3 trillion, more than triple. This is not a little-bitty matter. That is why people are saying we cannot continue this way. That is why Moody's, the debt rating agency, is continuing to discuss whether to downgrade the American debt.

There are entities out there that insure debt. Some people are so nervous about debt they want to insure the Federal Government debt and they pay an actual insurance premium to make sure if the government doesn't pay them what they owe, the insurance companies will pay them what they owe. I am not sure that is a smart deal. Maybe it is in a smaller country. At any rate, people pay this.

The amount of insurance that has been paid on the American debt has tripled. It is not a lot, but it says something about what independent people are valuing.

The debt of Greece amounts to 12.9 percent. The 1-year deficit for Greece amounts to 12.9 percent of their total economy--GDP. We are at 9.9 percent, our debt. This year--the year ending September 30, last year--that deficit was $1.4 trillion, three times the largest debt in the history of the American Republic--three times.

Is this year going to be better? No. This year they are projecting when September 30 arrives, our deficit for that one fiscal year will be $1.6 trillion. According to some of the estimates, the debt would drop down to about $600 billion over the next 10 years, through 2019. But now we are seeing numbers that indicate that was too rosy a scenario and we probably will not drop below $700 billion, and then it starts up in 2018, 2019, 2017--almost $1 trillion a year annual deficits.

These numbers are low by any estimate. Already this year's deficit was supposed to be a little over $1 trillion, but it is going to be $1.5 trillion; maybe $1.6 trillion. That is a lot of money. We just passed another bill that added another $104 billion to the debt for a jobs bill.

What we are saying is, we are on a pathway that is unsustainable. We cannot continue to run trillion-dollar deficits. We are going to average almost $1 trillion a year deficit for the next 10 years-- probably it will average maybe more than that. That is why I think all of us are concerned about it.

Senator McCaskill and I, as a first step, offered legislation that said we are going to stick with our budget. If we will just stick with our budget things will be better than they would be if we do not stick with our budget. It is not a cure-all. It does not deal with entitlements and all the things with which we are confronted, but at least our discretionary spending will stick with our budget.

The first vote was 56 voted for it. We made some changes to accommodate concerns of some of our colleagues, and 59 voted for it--18 Democrats joined in voting for that amendment. So we need one more vote to make it law, and I am pleased to work with Senator McCaskill because we are serious about this good step.

When it was done, similar legislation was passed in the early 1990s and continued throughout the 1990s. That was a factor, no doubt, in going from substantial deficits in the early part of the 1990s and in the 1980s to surpluses in the latter part of the 1990s. That was a big part of it because we stuck to our budget numbers and we made progress.

Again, what number are you saying--is it a freeze on spending? Not really. The President talked about a freeze on spending. I will support that aggressively, but we are talking about a 1-percent or 2-percent increase, according to the budget. So it will give us a hard limit on how much increase in spending we will have. It will not require a cut in spending.

How does this play out in terms of our economy? Well, what is a $1 trillion? We used to talk about millions, and then billions, now we are talking about trillions. Is that really a lot of money? Yes, it is. One trillion dollars is one thousand billion.

In Alabama State, we are almost 1/50 of the American population, and Alabama's general fund budget is about $2 billion. Alabama, counting education, is less than 10. One trillion dollars is an amount of money difficult for us to comprehend. We have never, ever dealt with numbers as dramatic as these numbers.

What is wrong with borrowing? Why don't we just borrow? We have to pay interest on it. This is public debt. We do not have any internal surpluses anymore, or very little, from Social Security and Medicare. We have to go out and borrow this money on the marketplace and we pay interest on it. We pay interest every year on what we borrow. Congress passed, over my objection, an $800 billion stimulus package. Every dollar of that was borrowed because we were already in debt, and when we spend $800 billion more we have to borrow it and we pay somebody interest on it. It comes out of our money that we collect in taxes. We have to pay interest first just like you do on your mortgage. The first thing, you pay your house note, otherwise they are coming to foreclose and out in the street you will go.

How much interest do we pay? That is a question I think drives home how serious our unsustainable course is. A simple truth is that the interest on the national debt is growing in an incredible rate and will soon surpass defense budgets and everything else in our budgetary items. Look at these numbers.

In 2009, last year, we paid $187 billion in interest. What about the highway program? The Federal highway program that we talk so much about and argue and debate about exactly how much that should be is $40 billion a year, just $40 billion. We paid last year $187 billion in interest. This is a lot of money. But as I told you, since we have an unsustainable annual deficit every year, huge deficits on top of the debt we have already accumulated, our interest payment on the public debt will go up. Look at these numbers.

In 2020--from 2009 to 2020 the number hits $840 billion in 1 year we will have to pay in interest because we borrowed so much money. That is why we hear people say time and again this is immoral. We are borrowing from our future, from our children and grandchildren, so we can spend today and live well today without worrying about the impact it is going to have in the future. Do not think this will not impact the economy adversely also. This money is all a product of borrowing from the economy, so the government is now crowding out private borrowing by sucking up the money itself.

If you are a private person and you needed to borrow money and you say: I promise to pay you back, and the guy said: I think you will pay me back, but the U.S. Government will pay me 5 percent on a T-bill. Why should I loan you money at 5 percent? If I loan to you, you are less secure. I want 7 or 8 percent from you, big boy. That is how things happen. It drives up our wealth

and capital for the expansion of businesses and home buyers and that sort of thing.

So look at that chart. It is a stunning chart, and it is a chart that has the numbers on President Obama's budget that he submitted to Congress, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

Well, that is why we have to do something. There are a lot of things we need to do. But I am hopeful that in our debate and discussion in recent days that we have had this vote up, this will be the third time we vote on it. I am hopeful my colleagues will see this as at least one firm step we will take that will help us contain our tendency to not stay with our budget.

If we were to stay with spending increases that did not exceed 1 or 2 percent that is in the budget of the next 4 years now, according to the budget passed last year, we would see a positive impact on spending.

Unfortunately, in the last year, we had bills such as Agriculture increased to 10 percent; we had bills such as Interior get about 15 or 20 percent; we had bills such as EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, a 30-percent increase; State Department, a 30-percent increase.

A 30-percent increase in a budget, the budget is going to double in about 3 or 4 years. At 7 percent, money will double in 10 years. So I just would say, this is a dangerous thing. This will help us contain that spending. That is why Senator McConnell and I are so interested in seeing if we can be successful with this legislation.

I understand Senator Pryor has an alternative; they call it a side by side. ``Vote for mine, do not vote for theirs'' kind of amendment. I am not exactly sure what it says. Hopefully, I can support his too. I understand his may be just a 1-year binding cap. It provides no point of order to waive the cap. It increases spending in a number of accounts. So we will look at that. I would like to be able to support his too.

But what I would say to my colleagues is, the advantages of the amendment Senator McCaskill and I are offering are, it is a proven procedure, it requires a two-thirds vote to break the budget, it allows us to tell ourselves, tell our constituents, and the world financial markets that we get it, we are willing to begin to contain this spending and that we can do better and we will do better in the future and there will be other steps we will want to take.

But I do believe this amendment will be one of the first things we can do, in a bipartisan way, to help control the growth of spending and put us back on track. In the 1990s, it led to actual surplus. So I urge my colleagues to support the Sessions-McCaskill amendment. I believe it is the right thing for our country. It is a significant step that will work. It is not going to solve all our problems, but it will be a big help.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I have an amendment, No. 3453, at the desk, and ask that it be called up.

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

Mr. President, briefly, I will call my colleagues' attention to this serious bipartisan effort with Senator McCaskill of Missouri to contain our penchant in this body to violate or manipulate the budget and spend more money than we intend to spend. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies, and Members of both parties have been guilty of that.

I originally offered a very similar amendment that adopted the budget amounts passed by this Congress, our Democratic leadership, and would have made those amounts that we said would be our top spending amounts--the budget maximum. It would have set a statutory cap at those levels and say if we were going to violate those limit, it would take a two-thirds vote to do so.

A number of senators were concerned about it, but it received broad bipartisan support. When we voted, 56 people voted for it--4 short of the 60 necessary to be adopted. But I thought it was a positive step, and I know Senator McCaskill felt it was, too.

I believe we can dispute how much we ought to spend, but one of the biggest dangers and problems the Senate confronts--and often fails to meet--is breaking our own budget. This amendment would have made it harder to break the budget, and 56 Senators voted for it.

Then we listened to our colleagues because people were saying: This year, Jeff, I believe we have to do some things that we may not have to do in the future--and that we do not want to do in the future--but this year our economy is in such a state that we can't be so limited.

So Senator McCaskill and I proposed another amendment that we voted on, which would have exempted this year and made it a shorter bill. We would remain under the normal budget rules for this year and would therefore not be creating the power to block additional stimulus legislation a number of Senators were concerned about. Frankly, I felt that was a compromise we could make. I would have preferred to have had it apply to this year, but I understand that concern and we made that change. So 59 Senators voted for it--1 short of the necessary vote to make it a part of the legislation.

So now, we listened again to some of the concerns we have heard from our colleagues. Senator McCaskill and I believe this bill, with the additional changes we made, will be the kind of legislation that could garner perhaps very broad bipartisan support and could actually make it into law. It would significantly help us honor the budget process. It would send a positive message to the world markets and our financial world because some rightly think we have lost our spending bearings and we are spending crazily here. We could send them a message that we have a budget out there that you may or may not like, but at least we are not going to bust it wide open and we will be more faithful to those limits. It would suggest less of a danger of massive deficits than we have had over the last 2 years.

What were the changes we made? Well, we exempted emergencies. In other words, some people felt we may need to pass emergency legislation and that a two-thirds vote--67 votes--is too much, and they would prefer to be able to pass emergencies by 60 votes. So we have acquiesced and put that in there. If a Senator is proposing extraordinary spending, they would have to openly state that it was an emergency, advocate for that, and the current law would still be in effect then. It would only take 60 votes to declare an emergency.

We made another change, one that I kind of hate to do but I am not unwilling to do. We would exempt year 2014, so it would only be a 3- year statutory cap on spending. Some people said: Well, we don't know what will happen in 2014. We may be in better financial condition. We won't have to contain our spending to the budget levels we passed last year, and we could do it in that fashion. I think that is all right. I really accept that if it helps us get the votes necessary.

So now we have 3-year legislation that does not change the law with regard to what is an emergency. We could violate the budget if it is an emergency, and we would have the votes to do it, but I still think it would be a good deal harder to take basic spending levels and break the budget on those. Technically, you could declare it an emergency. Most anything with 60 votes could be an emergency, but I think most Senators have some conviction that we shouldn't abuse the emergency spending level.

We will leave the emergency spending definition with the same number of votes, but the basic spending of our country needs to be within the budget caps. Remember, this is the level of spending a Democratic majority voted to pass last year. I voted against it. I thought it had too much spending in it, particularly last year. This year's spending was also too much, but the outyears had pretty tight budgets with 1 or 2 percent spending increases. The Congress and the Senate voted for it, and I think if we live with that, we might surprise ourselves to see that it would create a positive impact on the size of our deficit.

I am confident we are moving in the right direction. Again, it is a statement to ourselves if we pass this legislation. It is also a statement to the world markets that we are going to be less likely to violate our budgets in the future and more likely to contain our spending increases to levels that are acceptable.

I would note one more thing. President Obama, in his State of the Union, announced a freeze over the next 3 years, and he believes that in our discretionary spending accounts--which is what this essentially covers--we should actually have a freeze. I intend to support him on that. But this bill does not call for a freeze. It allows for a modest increase of 1 to 2 percent consistent with last year's budget.

I will just say that we should and hopefully we will pass a budget this year that has a freeze in the discretionary accounts. But if we don't or if people attempt to break it and go above it, at least we would have a stronger high ground from which to defend budget-busting legislation.

This is a bill that deserves bipartisan consideration, and I think it has gotten bipartisan consideration. I know 18 Democrats and every Republican voted for it last time. We have listened to the concerns of some of our Members, and we amended the legislation to be more amenable to those concerns. I hope we can pass it.

Let me say one thing that is an obvious matter of law. If 60 of my colleagues feel as though this is too restrictive, then they can pass a piece of legislation with 60 votes that wipes this out entirely from the books. It is mostly a self-imposed discipline. But it would be harder to pass legislation to wipe out the two-thirds vote level just because somebody has hard feelings that they didn't get enough spending in this or that bill as part of the normal governmental process. So I think it would be an effective tool. But as a matter of power in the Senate, make no mistake, this is not a two-thirds rule that would keep the Senate from doing anything. The Senate can pass legislation promptly to eliminate this statute any time we want to.

I believe it will work. It worked before. In the early 1990s, such legislation was passed, and it was extended periodically, up through 2002. From sizable deficits in the early 1990s, the spending was contained to much lower levels than we have adopted in recent years and it resulted in a budget surplus at the end of the 1990s. I am absolutely convinced a significant tool in the effective effort to contain spending and put our budget back in balance was the statutory limit on spending, consistent with what we voted for in a budget. That is what we are doing today. This is not new legislation, really, but we are fundamentally reestablishing the kind of legislation we previously had.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Dorgan for his comments and the frustrations we all share. He comes at it from one party's perspective, and I have my party's perspective. We can argue these issues for a lot of time.

I have gotten to the point--and I think Senator McCaskill and a lot of Members of the body have as well--that we need to do something that might actually work. I say to Senator Dorgan, the reason I believe we should go forward on this amendment is because the first time we had an amendment with 56 votes and bipartisan support. Then the last time it was 59. We made some more changes to primarily assuage concerns of my Democratic colleagues that Senator McCaskill still believes could put us in a position to pass this legislation. It will make some difference.

I was at a townhall meeting. The questioner criticized me for something. I said: I wrote a letter about that to the Cabinet person and complained. He sat there and looked at me.

He said: You wrote a letter. Thank you a lot.

I didn't have much to say.

At some point we have to do something. I have made speeches. Senator Dorgan, one of the most eloquent--Members of this body, has made speeches. But we are not doing anything. Deficits are surging beyond limits. We have a possibility of passage here and that is why I think we should go forward. We have the possibility of reaching this agreement that for 3 years will place in statutory form the budget my Democratic colleagues passed, which is higher than what President Obama is saying we should spend. We could at least have that as a firewall. It would be difficult to go above those amounts, but it would not eliminate or make it even any harder to pass an emergency bill because we amended our amendment to change that part we previously had in there that would have made it harder to declare something an emergency.

One thing I would like to share with my colleagues--I see Senator Dorgan is gone--about the allegations, which are not all wrong, that President Bush and Mr. Greenspan were insignificantly concerned about deficit spending after we had a series of surpluses.

But first, let me go back. One of the great political efforts in this Congress--and it has had some success and partisan success--is to give President Clinton credit for the balanced budget. Not a dime can be spent by any President that is not appropriated by the U.S. Congress.

Republicans took over the Congress in 1994 and shut down the government in a dispute with the President over how much money he ought to be spending. It caused a big controversy. But they fought and fought against spending. People were sleeping in their offices. But the budget got balanced for several years.

After 9/11, we slipped into a recession. We were in a war. As a matter of fact I heard Mr. Greenspan, in effect, say he believed the country could take on more debt. Senator Rockefeller probably remembers essentially that. He serves on many of these committees.

He said: I think we can take on more debt.

What Mr. Greenspan and, I think, Mr. Bush did not realize was that once you start taking on more debt, it gets harder and harder to stop. We started a trend of taking on more debt as if it did not matter. Some people even said deficits don't matter. Some Republicans said deficits don't matter; we can handle it.

We got into a bad habit. Both parties got into that habit, and it is roaring away today with spending levels the likes of which we have never seen.

We passed a budget that I think has reality in it. I think if we hold to that budget, we might surprise ourselves how much progress we can make. These kinds of statutory caps were part of the success in the nineties.

I ask forgiveness of my colleagues for trying to pursue a vote on this amendment. I say to my colleagues, if we get the 60 votes I think it will be an indication that it would not in any way burden the FAA bill. In fact, it might be attractive to some Members of this Senate to vote for the bill if this cap was in it--Members who might not otherwise vote for it. I don't think it would damage the prospects of the bill's passage. This amendment is building up with increased votes each time. We are near to success. I think it would be a great bipartisan statement of commitment to financial responsibility, and I think it is important to go forward.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we earlier had a cloture vote on, what I guess is called the jobs bill. It has some things in it that I think might be helpful to this economy. Continuing certain tax cuts is important. But I have to say, it is very much a disappointment that the legislation spends $100 billion more than we have. In other words, it will add $100 billion to the debt of the United States.

It was a few weeks ago that this Senate voted for a pay-go idea that asserted we were not going to spend money we didn't have and we were going to pay for what we spent. In other words, if we increase spending, we are either going to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to keep us on the right track. But we have not done that. This is actually a $140 billion bill.

This bill has $40 billion in costs assumed by the CBO for continuing the tax credits that have been in place, some of them, for 10 years. Those are to be continued, and they score that as costing $40-some-odd billion. But that is paid for. Our Democratic colleagues are prepared to pay for allowing the American people to keep money that is theirs; money that the government hasn't assessed against them and extracted from them over a 10-year period. That is paid for through other increases in taxes and other activities which, so far, offset that. But the $104 billion of new spending is not paid for.

Regardless, the bill is a bill that adds $104 billion to the debt. I don't see how that is a responsible action for our Congress. Because last year, in February, Congress passed an $800 billion stimulus package--the largest spending bill in the history of America, and every penny of it was added to the debt of the United States. It was the kind of bill the likes of which Congress has never, ever seen before. We did that. And that was not long after the $700 billion financial bailout package--the TARP bill. The one thing about the TARP bill is that we always understood we were to get some of it back. And we would have gotten a lot more of it if they had spent it to buy toxic assets, instead of giving billions of dollars to one insurance company; giving a huge amount of money to General Motors, which is unlikely ever to be paid back by that company. Now the government basically owns an automobile company and an insurance company. And that is not anything like what we were told when that TARP bill came before the Senate. I believed at the time, it was so unprincipled and such a dangerous piece of legislation that I opposed it vigorously. But Congress said we had to pass it and it passed. Then we came back in January after the new President was in office. We had to stimulate the economy, and many of us warned that the legislation was not stimulative in nature and it was not going to create the kind of jobs we needed to create. It just was not.

I remember quoting from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize economics winner. He warned the bill was not stimulative enough. But we had to pass it. It was supposed to be for crumbling bridges and infrastructure.

Yet less than 4 percent of the money went to crumbling bridges and infrastructure. Most of it went to social programs, bail out a State, Medicaid--not job-creating things. Mr. Becker told us in his op-ed shortly before the vote, giving his best judgment about what would happen, he said that it was not going to be a job-creating bill; that you should look for well above $1 growth out of an investment of $1 in stimulus funds. Their impression was, he and his team, it was going to be well below $1.

Now we come back this year, we want another stimulus, another jobs bill because the first one did not work. But now we are in a position where we are surging the debt of this country to a degree it has never been done before. This, in many ways, exceeds World War II, when we were in a life-and-death struggle.

These are just the basic numbers. In 2008, the total American public debt was $5.8 trillion. In 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our own experts, based on the 10-year budget the President has submitted that would double to $12.3 trillion. Congress actually ended up passing a 5-year budget very similar to his first 5 years, but this shows the track the President has proposed the country move on. I am not making this up. Then, in 2019, it would go up to $17.5 trillion. CBO is stating that next year's deficit will exceed this year's deficit. The deficit of the year ending September 30 of last year was $1.4 trillion. They are estimating our next year will be about $1.5 trillion.

So, blithely, our leadership walks in today and says we have to extend unemployment insurance, we have to do a number of other things, and we have not figured out a way to raise the money for it or reduce spending on programs that do not work so we will just borrow it too. That is not calculated in these numbers. That was not legislation that was on the agenda or on the books before the Congressional Budget Office made this scoring.

There are other things we know are going to be part of this. I will talk about a few of them. One of the things that is in the legislation before us is what we have come to refer to as the doctor fix. I feel strongly about that. We had passed the Balanced Budget Act in the late 1990s, and it contained the growth of Medicare spending on payments of physicians. As the years went by, we realized pretty quickly that the cuts were too large or at least Congress did not have the will to let them go into effect, so we wiped it out. We did not let the cuts come in.

We have been doing it now for over a decade, Republicans and Democrats--each one had a majority. Instead of facing up to the shortfall in the physicians' reimbursement, we have allowed this problem to grow. What it amounts to is, if Congress does not act, the doctors who are taking care of our parents and grandparents on Medicare will have their payments cut 21 percent. A lot of physicians are losing money on Medicare today. If this were to happen, there would be a massive quitting of taking care of Medicare patients. They would not do it anymore. It is not right. You cannot justify, from any logical approach to medicine, that we should cut physicians by that kind of amount. I think fundamentally we need to restore it and put it on a path that is sustainable and a growth rate instead of a 21-percent cut. We need to wrestle with how to do it.

If you fix the doctor fix, and you allow a modest growth instead of a 21-percent cut over the next 10 years, it will cost the U.S. Treasury $250 billion. That is a lot of money, even by Federal Government standards. Our annual highway bill has been about $40 billion. The annual budget of my State of Alabama is less than $10 billion--$7 or $8 billion for the whole State, including education. That $250 billion is a lot of money. But millions of American seniors are treated every day by physicians and they paid into the Medicare Program for 40 years. They have been told that when they get to be seniors at retirement age, they will get basically free physician services. It is a commitment we made. Maybe it was improvident at the time. Maybe we could have been smarter about the way it was done, but that is what we told them, and I believe we have to honor that in principle today.

This bill attempts to deal with it by extending it, as we have done each time, 1 year. That is what I call a budget gimmick. It is a misrepresentation of the true state of our finances because what will occur is, we will put the money in for this year. It is going to cost $7.3 billion to fix this year's doctors' payments. But you know what the CBO scores when they estimate what our debt will be? They assumed the law will go back into effect next year, and there will be a 21- or maybe then 22-percent or 23-percent cut in physician payments. They will assume that is going to be true for 9 years, leaving about $240 billion extra money that we in Congress can spend--except it is going to be paid. We cannot cut the physicians by that much money. We know we are going to fix it, 1 year at a time. It appears we do not have the courage or the will to fix it permanently like we should, so we will just fix it and we will use that and then they can make the deficit look better than that.

This budget, this number CBO has scored, does not assume the doctors' payments are going to be increased 21 percent. They assume doctors' fees are going to be cut because that is what the law is, unless we act to change it. They make an estimate based on what the law is today, so we can fix the doctors' payments for 1 year, but for the next 9 years they assume we have a lot more money than we have because we are going to fix it every year. This kind of gimmickry is what put us in this fix.

Let me say this: An attempt was made earlier this year to do a doctor fix outside the health care reform bill. That was a very duplicitous act, in my opinion. I have to be frank with my colleagues. Why? What was wrong about that? The President has always said that in health care reform, in fixing our health care problem, what we need to do was deal with physician payments, the SGR. But when they sat in that secret room around here, moving the money around to try to figure out how to present a bill and plop it out on the floor and ask us all to vote for it, they had a problem. They had promised the bill would be deficit neutral. But if they fix the doctor fix, it was going to cost $250 billion. They could not make the numbers work.

Do you know what the Democratic leadership tried to do? They brought it up separately. We are going to pass a bill in the Congress that would have funded the fix of the doctors. Every penny of it goes straight to the debt. But because they took it out of health care reform and sat it over here, they were going to say the health care reform did not cost any money. I can dispute that and it is not accurate, but that is what they did.

But do you know what happened? Thirteen Democrats said no. To their great credit, under, I am sure, pressure, they decided: I am not going to vote for another big debt increase on a bill that is not paid for. We ought to make this paid for. They were listening to their constituents back home and they are concerned about it. I know colleagues on both sides of the aisle are definitely concerned about this deficit. But I just wish to say if it had passed and it would have been another hiding of the debt by doing it in that fashion.

Since that failed, we now have it in this bill for 1 year. It is going to be unpaid for and it will go straight to the debt. I think people who voted against the last doctor fix because it was not paid for and added to the debt should vote against this legislation because it continues to take us in that direction.

Finally, I will say the entire debt process we are on is dangerous to our economy in the long run. This much money being poured into the economy and being unwisely spent--as Mr. Becker warned us a year ago-- has to have some positive impact. For heaven's sake, you borrow $800 billion from the future and you pump it into this economy today and now we are talking about another $100 billion we borrow from the future and pump into the economy today--those kinds of actions have to have some positive impact, at least in the short run. But nothing comes from nothing. There is no free lunch. We know somebody will pay. Can anybody dispute that--that anything we take in today and distribute among ourselves and enjoy today somebody paid for?

Who is going to pay for this? Let me tell you. Last year, the interest on the debt of the United States was $187 billion. That is a lot of money. The Federal highway bill is $40 billion. Interest on the debt was $187 billion. Alabama, an average size State of 4 million people, has a general fund budget of less than $10 billion. $187 billion. But because we are tripling the debt in 10 years, in 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in that year alone people still alive and well in the United States and making some money and trying to feed their families will pay $800 billion on the debt in interest--in that year alone, $800 billion.

This is a burden that our economy will be carrying for years. By the way, there is no plan to pay it down. In fact, in 2019, it is projected the deficit will be almost $1 trillion that year. The debt, the deficit, and the shortfall in income over expenditures in 2019 will still be growing. The debt will still be surging.

Greece is in such a terrible fix today; their deficit amounts to about 12.7 percent of the entire gross domestic product of the nation of Greece. They are considered to be very unstable. The economy is thoroughly in danger. They are going through some significant reforms to try to work their way out of it. Our deficit-to-GDP ratio this year is 9.7 percent.

This is one of the highest ratios in the world, and it is a danger that we face. So to get down to the nub of the matter, I am not going to vote for this bill. I am sure some of my colleagues will say: That is because you do not like the unemployed, and you do not want to help them. I do want to help them.

I am sure it is going to be because some of my colleagues will say: You do not want to pay the doctors. You do not like doctors so you are mean and cold-hearted. And: Do not worry about the debt, Sessions.

But at some point we have to bring our house under control. Just like a family budget, we cannot continue to spend dramatically more than we take in.

We passed a resolution. This Senate passed a bill that is supposed to limit expenditures through a pay-go mechanism. It was predicted then that people were not serious when they were passing it. This would be the second time we voted in a matter of weeks to break through pay-go, and this is $100 billion.

I would suggest there are a number of things that can be done. One of them is, we can go back and look at the unspent stimulus money. There is about $170 billion not only unspent but unobligated at this point. That money can be utilized to take care of some of these needs we have, and there is no doubt we could do that. We could find other mechanisms to deal with this, and one of the things we are going to have to face up to is that there are a lot of programs in this government that are not returning value for the taxpayers. We are extracting money from taxpayers. We are sending it out to programs that are not producing any legitimate return, and they should be eliminated. When is the last time we have ever eliminated any expenditure in this country where we can see that it has not been effective?

Well, a lot of our reports show that a lot of our government programs are ineffective. There are a lot of things we can do to enhance our productivity as a national government to eliminate this surge in debt and get us off the path we are on that I think leads to financial problems in the future.

A witness before the Budget Committee testified that studies show that this kind of debt with the high interest payments, will pull down our economic growth.

Most people think economic growth is going to get us out of this fix. But if we are burdened with high interest rates, if the U.S. Government is going out in the marketplace and competing with private business to get people to loan you money, it tends to drive up interest rates. It tends to reduce the amount of money available in the marketplace for private business. They predict it would at least reduce the growth by 1 percentage point in the future. When you are talking about 2 percent annual growth, and you drop to 1 percent growth, or 3 percent and you drop to 2 percent growth, this is serious.

So it is no doubt this kind of debt will crowd out spending when we have $800 billion in the tenth year just to pay interest. It will be the biggest expenditure the government has on any account. That is a problem.

So I would say it is time to take this bill back. Let's look at it. Let's see if we cannot contain some of the spending that is in it, and let's see if we cannot pay for the rest of it and produce a bill that we can be proud of that will help people in need without socking it to the debt of America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I was pleased to see an article in the Boston Globe today saying:

. . . White House advisers are close to recommending that

President Barack Obama opt for military tribunals for the

self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and

four of his alleged henchmen, senior officials said.

The review of where and how to hold a Sept. 11 trial is not

over, so no recommendation is yet before the president and

Obama has not made a determination on his own, officials

said. The review is not likely to be finished this week.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity.

I will just say, I think that is right. I appreciate the President reevaluating the position taken by his Attorney General. I think it was based on a number of errors in analysis of the nature of the conflict we are in and the status of law, frankly, in America today. I have written about that in the Politico publication.

I will make a point or two about the five errors, mistakes, sometimes even falsehoods, it seems to me, that have been put forth to justify trying military combatants--unlawful combatants, really--in civilian courts and why this is not a good idea and some of the thought processes we should go through.

On February 3, Attorney General Holder wrote this:

Since the September 11 attacks, the practice of the U.S.

Government followed by prior and current administrations

without a single exception has been to arrest and detain

under Federal criminal law all terror suspects who are

apprehended inside the United States.

That was his letter. The Attorney General is incorrect in that. It is made clear by his own citation in that very same letter of the Jose Padilla and the Ali Al-Marri cases. In those two cases, President George W. Bush ordered each terror suspect transferred into military custody after they were captured on U.S. soil. It does not mean they cannot later be tried in civilian court, if that is appropriate and you have a good reason for doing that. It is not often I could see what that would be the case, but it could be. You are not prohibited from doing it. The law has apparently established that. They were taken into military custody. That means the Speedy Trial Act is not triggered. It means the government does not have to pay an attorney for them. And it means they can be interrogated, but interrogated consistent with the techniques Congress has approved in legislation that dealt with the controversy over what kind of interrogation is appropriate. We have legislated on that issue.

Secondly, administration officials have often noted that Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, was charged in the civilian criminal system, but they fail to mention that the military commission was not even in place when he was arrested in December of 2001, not long after 9/11. The Military Commission Order No. 1 that created the military commissions was not signed into law until the next year in March. Congress, which dealt with these issues, did not authorize, legislatively, the commission system and its structure until 2006. So that is not a very good argument, is it?

Mr. Holder, in his letter to me and other Senators, stunningly cites the Second Circuit decision in the Padilla case to assert that the President lacks the authority to detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant on U.S. soil. He cites the Second Circuit and says the Padilla case is authority for the proposition that the President lacks the authority to detain a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant on U.S. soil if he is captured. The Attorney General, however, fails to note that the Supreme Court reversed that decision, stating in the 2004 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case that there is no bar to this Nation holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant. A citizen, no less than an alien, can be ``part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners'' and ``engaged in armed conflict against the United States,'' and ``such a citizen, if released, would pose the same threat of returning to the front during the ongoing conflict.'' Of course, that is accurate. Just because you are a citizen does not mean you cannot attack the United States, join with forces hostile to it and attack the United States.

How they missed that citation is pretty stunning. If a lawyer in the Department of Justice in the Solicitor General's Office arguing before a court of appeals somewhere in America failed to note that the opinion he was citing was overruled, they would be subject to disciplinary action. The lawyer is an officer of the court; they have to know what they are citing to the court. They should not ask them to believe something that is not accurate. Yet that came out of the Attorney General's Office. We can do that, is my point.

On the question of granting terror suspects Miranda rights--that is, the right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer, that kind of thing-- the Attorney General and his team have cited the Padilla case to suggest the government could not have held Mr. Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber this past Christmas, in military custody without affording him the same access to counsel he was due as a criminal defendant. That is just not true. You do not have to capture a person on the battlefield. And this is the legal situation we are talking about when they captured Abdulmutallab. In World War II, if you captured a Japanese or German soldier, you did not appoint them lawyers. You did not try them often. You held them until the war was over, and they did not get trials during that time.

To support this totally unjustified position, they note in one of their letters that the judge in the case, Judge Michael Mukasey, who later became Attorney General of the United States--and a fabulous legal mind--who at that time was a Federal judge in New York, granted Mr. Padilla a lawyer. So they say he is entitled to a lawyer. But that was long after his arrest and it arose from a much lighter contest about his detention and whether he should be given a hearing in Federal court. The judge agreed to give him a habeas corpus hearing and appointed a lawyer for him. But that is not to say that Abdulmutallab, who was captured on Christmas Day and interrogated for 50 minutes, was entitled to be given a lawyer or be given Miranda rights. It is not accurate. It is not correct.

In Mr. Holder's letter of February 3, he wrote this:

The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to

convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism related

charges.

We have heard that argument made time and again by Members of the Senate. Last May, Senator Kyl wrote to Mr. Holder seeking basic information to support these claims. Senator Kyl noted that ``a comparison of terrorists in Federal prisons to terrorists detained in Guantanamo is instructive only if the severity of their actions, their background, and allegiance is equivalent.'' No answer was received. In November, I asked Attorney General Holder at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if he would provide that information. He responded unequivocally:

I will supply you with those 300 names and what they were

convicted of. I will be glad to do that.

Months later, he has still not provided the list. I think the reason is clear, frankly: the facts do not support that allegation, that statement.

Many of the individuals labeled as terrorists by the Obama administration whom they are counting in this number--I think they have now dropped it down to 195 or 200--were prosecuted for far lesser crimes than Mr. Abdulmutallab, who had a bomb on his person to blow up a plane, who had come directly from al-Qaida in Yemen, attacking this country as a direct representative of al-Qaida in Yemen, carrying an al-Qaida bomb. Mr. Andrew McCarthy, a former Federal prosecutor in terrorism cases in New York, recently shed light on a 2008 article published by Human Rights First which said that 195 defendants have been convicted so far in 199 terrorism-related cases. But Mr. McCarthy digs into it and notes that the report defines ``terrorism'' so broadly that its finding included prosecutions for false statements, financial fraud, and immigration fraud.

Some say: You are politicizing this matter, Jeff. Don't be so critical.

That is what Mr. Gibbs at the White House says, that criticizing and raising

objections to falsehoods and inaccuracies, and legal statements that are not in error is somehow politicizing it. We have young men and women in combat today. Their lives are at risk. I think the leaders of our country in a time of war should not be spinning this Congress, but giving us the unvarnished truth.

I wanted to say that, and to say I am glad there is now apparently an evaluation going on as to how best to handle this situation. I was also pleased that Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Lieberman introduced their legislation--I believe yesterday they introduced it or the day before--that would call for trials of unprivileged enemy belligerents. That is the more recent term. It used to be ``unlawful combatants.'' Now it is ``unprivileged enemy belligerents'' in military custody. It says they are not to be given Miranda rights. They can be detained in military custody for initial interrogation and to determine their status. It uses Congress's spending power to deny funding to article III civilian trials for these unprivileged enemy belligerents and mandates, in effect, trials by military commission.

I would just note, Congress passed legislation and funding to deal with the Supreme Court's concerns about the legitimacy or the propriety of the procedures used in military commissions. They raised questions about that; found several things they believed were inadequate, and Congress dealt with it. We had a debate for a number of weeks and we passed legislation. The military, at the same time, was reading the opinion and changing their procedures to be in compliance with the Supreme Court and the laws of our country.

We put money in establishing our courtroom in Guantanamo to try these cases, and we are basically ready to go, after a lot of years, I will admit, of uncertainty. Now the President, unwisely--probably based on an improvident campaign promise that he would end this--is attempting to end it. But I hope now he will reevaluate at least some of that and we can get this system back in the right order because an unlawful enemy combatant can be tried for crimes. A lawful soldier can't be tried.

If you capture an enemy--a Japanese soldier or a German soldier who is fighting for his country and he is out there in his uniform and fighting according to the laws of war--they are not prosecuted. But if you sneak into the United States surreptitiously, carrying a bomb in order to sabotage and kill innocent men, women, and children, contrary to the rules of war, then you can be tried. You can be detained as long as the war continues as an unlawful combatant. If you violated the laws of war, you can be tried for it.

For example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the alleged mastermind of 9/11, can be tried for murder in military commissions because he was not a common criminal. He was a part of al-Qaida, executing a military attack on the United States, contrary to the rules of war.

So I would hope we can move forward with this in a good way; that the President will take the lead because these kinds of decisions are easier made in the executive branch than by the legislative branch having to cut off funds or pass legislation mandating this or that. The Constitution certainly allows these cases to be tried, and the Supreme Court has so approved it.

In fact, Attorney General Holder, in the Judiciary Committee, as a result of questions I asked him, has agreed these cases can be tried in military commissions and that there is no constitutional prohibition of it. In fact, he said it was a policy decision that caused him to have the cases tried in civilian courts and not in military courts. I believe that is a policy error and it needs to be corrected.

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

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I value the Senator's views on these issues so much. I recall when the Senator chaired the Joint Economic Committee, the Select Committee of the House and Senate. He was our chairman. Since then he has been known as one of the authoritative voices on our economy, as well as Senate business.

I guess I would first say that I am very intrigued by your legislation. It sounds as though it is something that is exactly what we need. I don't, I guess, want to be in a political tit for tat, but I remember and recall the Senator from Utah opposing the stimulus package that was on the floor and voting against that and raising concerns about it. I think the general concern most often raised was one that Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker raised: It wasn't one that creates jobs.

I guess I would ask, based on the Senator's experience in the Senate, the amount of money that went into that bill--the purpose was supposed to be to create jobs--give us your honest evaluation of how well it has performed.

I thank the Senator from Utah for those thoughts. What a tragedy that is. I don't think people realize how much $800 billion is.

So the Senator's legislation would be far less expensive and would immediately help small businesses create jobs without a government bureaucracy telling them what to do. Is that fair to say?

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I value the Senator's views on these issues so much. I recall when the Senator chaired the Joint Economic Committee, the Select Committee of the House and Senate. He was our chairman. Since then he has been known as one of the authoritative voices on our economy, as well as Senate business.

I guess I would first say that I am very intrigued by your legislation. It sounds as though it is something that is exactly what we need. I don't, I guess, want to be in a political tit for tat, but I remember and recall the Senator from Utah opposing the stimulus package that was on the floor and voting against that and raising concerns about it. I think the general concern most often raised was one that Nobel Prize Laureate Gary Becker raised: It wasn't one that creates jobs.

I guess I would ask, based on the Senator's experience in the Senate, the amount of money that went into that bill--the purpose was supposed to be to create jobs--give us your honest evaluation of how well it has performed.

I thank the Senator from Utah for those thoughts. What a tragedy that is. I don't think people realize how much $800 billion is.

So the Senator's legislation would be far less expensive and would immediately help small businesses create jobs without a government bureaucracy telling them what to do. Is that fair to say?

I thank the Senator.

Madam President, I appreciate the remarks of the junior

Senator from Massachusetts. He has come off the campaign trail, where he talked to thousands and thousands of people all over his State and heard from, I would guess, millions from around the country. We should listen to some of the things he is telling us because it strikes me that we, too often in this body, are a bit insulated, and we fail to see that people are asking us to make some changes in what we do when we think we have to continue to operate the way we have been operating.

But that is not what I am hearing at my townhall meetings. I don't know that anybody in this body, if they are listening in their townhall meetings, are hearing business as usual is what the people want us to do. What I am hearing is a great concern and expression of regret, and in some cases frustration and anger, over the amount of money we are spending and how recklessly we are doing it. I guess that is what I am here to talk about.

The bill Senator Claire McCaskill and I are offering is a bipartisan bill. It had quite a bit of Democratic support last time. We came within just a few votes of reaching 60 votes and passing it, and I am hopeful today, with the alterations we have made, it will appeal to some of my Democratic colleagues and they will be able to support it now. I believe it will take quite a positive step in how we fund our government and how much debt we run up.

In the 1990s, an idea was placed into law that said the budgets we pass should have statutory language and should be made a part of statutory law. So we did that in the 1990s. We began to see, shortly after the passage of that, a containment of the surge and growth in spending. The growth was far more modest and, as a result, by the end of the 1990s we had a surplus.

President Clinton claimed great credit for that. I think sometimes he fails to recall the Congress acted, and ultimately it is Congress that has the power of the purse. No money can be spent that we don't authorize and appropriate. Nothing can be spent by the President or any other Cabinet person that Congress hasn't authorized and appropriated to be spent. Those are the facts.

This legislation would put what we call caps or limits on discretionary spending. That does not include entitlement spending, so not counting Social Security and Medicare and those kind of things. It is the discretionary accounts we have in the Senate. This amendment would put some limits on them--the limits we chose for the fiscal year 2011 through fiscal year 2014. This is the 2010 budget resolution we are now under, which was passed by our Democratic majority and supported by the President of the United States. It is his projections and our projections--the Congress's projections--for spending growth in the next 4 years. The budget resolution we passed allows for a 2- percent increase per year in both defense and nondefense spending. The caps in the amendment are exactly those we voted for in last year's budget.

Currently, we are not standing firm with the budgets we pass. We know that is a problem for us and we need to discipline ourselves. We have learned that from 1991 through 2002, the statutory caps on spending helped us contain spending. We did not surge discretionary spending as much as had been the case earlier. When it ended in 2002, the spending started back up again. Not only did it start up, it has now reached a level of growth the likes of which the country has never seen before. Last year, our total deficit for the year was $1,400 billion. This year it is going to be $1,400 billion or $1,500 billion when we end. We have never had anything like this before. How much we are spending and how little we are paying for what we spend is a stunning development.

This legislation would not impact the bills that have already passed. Some say: Well, you might try to contain the stimulus bill we passed. No, that has already passed and wouldn't be covered. None of the other bills that have passed would be covered. Indeed, as part of our discussion with our colleagues in the Senate about their concerns with the legislation the last time we voted on it--a few weeks ago--we exempted this year, and we are spending pretty substantially this year--well above our budget. So we had people say: Well, Jeff, I am concerned about this year. I want to spend more this year. But next year we have to get this house in order. Well, we are well into this year already, so my decision would be: OK, that is a request I will accept, and Senator McCaskill agreed. So now we are asking that this limit be placed beginning next fiscal year, instead of this fiscal year.

It is very similar to the plan proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union Message and his fiscal year 2011 budget. In fact, President Obama actually went further in saying he wanted to see a freeze on a lot of these accounts. Our bill would allow a 1-percent to 2-percent increase in spending in these accounts. He is saying a freeze would be better. So, Jeff, are you saying you want to spend more than the President? No. I think we should try, and I would be supportive of trying to maintain the freeze the President suggested. But I would say, based on our history and what we have seen from statutory caps, if we pass caps with this 1- to 2-percent increase, then we might be able to at least stay within that because last year our increases were 8 percent or more in spending. We all know we have to do better, and our budget says we will do better. So this amendment would give some strength to that.

The legislation specifies spending for defense and nondefense programs consistent with the budget resolution. It contains a $10 billion-per-year emergency fund, which fits in with the budget resolution. We have set aside $10 billion this year, and we should do at least that amount each year to ensure we have resources available if a genuine emergency arises and we need to respond to an emergency. So we would set that aside. This amendment requires a two-thirds vote of 67 Senators to waive the annual caps or the emergency $10 billion fund. That is stronger than we have had before. We have had a 60-vote cap. But we know we are spending at a very reckless rate. Contrary to what people say, we have had bipartisan support for all kinds of emergency spending, and there is usually 90 or 100 votes for hurricanes, earthquakes or similar things. At any rate, we think the 67 votes would say to this Senate that we are serious and there should be a legitimate reason that can be defended to waive the budget to spend more money. Also, it would say why don't we find money elsewhere within our budget, through efficiencies and other ideas, to contain that growth in spending and pay for some of it first before we send it to the credit card and add it to the debt?

This amendment does not apply the caps to spending for any military action. I know Senator Inouye and others have raised the question will it deny soldiers in the field support. The caps would not apply to any military action in which the Congress has provided a declaration of war or authorization to utilize military force. That is, I think, the appropriate way to handle it. This amendment would be exempting those kinds of situations.

This is similar to what the President has called for and what Congress did throughout the 1990s with bipartisan support. This amendment has been evaluated by some of the best budget minds in America, independent groups that are respected. These experts understand the nature and problems of our Congress and how we tend to break our budgets instead of staying within them. They are terribly concerned about our spending; they are issuing reports, and many of them have endorsed us.

One of the best known groups is the Concord Coalition. They endorse the amendment. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that includes former OMB, Office of Management and Budget, officials and Congressional Budget Office officials. They work together for responsible Federal budgets, and they support it. Citizens Against Government Waste; the National Taxpayers Union; the Heritage Foundation; Alice Rivlin, who was the first head of the Congressional Budget Office and was the head of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton and is now a Brookings Institute senior fellow--she supports it. As does Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the CBO under President Bush, who has spoken out on these issues.

This amendment is supported by a majority of the members of the Senate

Budget Committee the last time it was considered, and it gives the Budget Committee more ability to make sure their budget is not abridged and broken.

What about some questions and answers? Will this bill prevent the Federal Government from responding to legitimate purchases? The answer is no, it will not. We have $10 billion set aside anyway; it is set aside right upfront. The amount is included in our budget resolution from last year and that money can be utilized for any emergency.

Second, the emergency appropriations, for example after the 9/11 attack; the 2004 tsunami; Hurricane Katrina--all passed with overwhelming support in the Senate, 93-votes-plus each and every time. So this is far above the 67 votes. Not a single emergency natural disaster bill since the emergency designation was created in 1990--and there have been quite a few--has gotten less than 67 votes. To say it will deny us the right to respond to a legitimate emergency is incorrect.

Question: Would the Sessions-McCaskill bill prevent Congress from funding the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan? As I said, this threshold of 67 votes would not apply in cases ``of the defense budget authority if Congress declared war or authorizes the use of force.''

In addition, all emergency war supplementals for the global war on terrorism have received far more than 67 votes anyway.

Question: Would the Sessions-McCaskill bill prevent Congress from caring for veterans? That has been raised a good bit. The fiscal year 2010 budget resolution incorporates significant increases in funding for veterans, an 11-percent increase in fiscal year 2010, which built on large increases in fiscal years 2008 and 2009. In addition, a significant amount of veterans spending is mandatory. Entitlements and mandatory spending would not even be covered by this, just as Social Security and Medicare is not covered by it. Veterans programs have always enjoyed wide support in the Senate and I don't think there is any doubt that legitimate concerns for veterans would be properly addressed. It should be paid for whenever possible but, if we cannot do that, if we have a crisis for our veterans, I have no doubt there will be 67 votes to take care of the veterans' needs. In fact, the emergency supplemental for veterans' health care that came up in 2005 received 99 votes. Veterans funding, I think most of our Members believe, ought to displace less priority items.

There is a myth out there that the sponsors are saying this will balance the budget by focusing on nondefense discretionary spending and this is a small part of the budget. It is not the biggest part of the budget. And it is not going to balance the budget in itself. But the facts are this. First, the amendment caps growth in both defense and nondefense discretionary spending. Second, the sponsors have never claimed the amendment would balance the budget. We have to do a lot more than this. The President himself estimates that his 3-year freeze he proposed--spending not related to defense or veterans or foreign affairs--would result in a $250 billion savings over 10 years and that is real money.

This legislation has the potential to save hundreds of billions of dollars. If the choice is between 8 and 10-percent increases, as we have had in the last couple of years, and the 2-percent or so increase that would be allowed under this budget, it would save a lot more than $250 billion over a period of time.

I want to say how much I appreciate the support and leadership by Senator McCaskill on this matter. When we voted before, all Republicans but 1 and 17 Democrats voted for the legislation. I expect there is at least one more vote with our new Senator from Massachusetts. We have changed it to apply to next year and not this year. That should attract more support. I am hopeful that we could pass this. I think it would send a message to our colleagues and to those who appropriate the money here, that we are serious about staying within the budget limits. We are saying to the President, not only do we support you but we are going to create a mechanism where it is going to be harder to spend more than you proposed. We will send a message to the financial markets, which are wondering what we are doing here.

If you read the financial pages, people make statements on Wall Street that indicate they have no confidence we are going to reverse the trend we are on. In fact, the trend is so stunning it puts us on the road to tripling the national debt in 10 years--from 2008 with $5.8 billion in public debt held by people all over the world, including governments such as China, to 2013 with $11 trillion, to 2019 with $17 trillion--doubling in 5 years, tripling in 10 years.

I think we can do better. There is a lot of blame to go around and all of us deserve some of it. But we are in a position where I think we can make a difference today. This legislation, I believe, is a good step and would send a message throughout the world, to the financial markets, that Congress is beginning to take firm steps that would contain the growth of spending.

I am pleased to see my colleague from Missouri here. She has been a champion on this and integrity in spending in all areas. She challenges waste, fraud, and abuse. She understands more than most in our body that the money we have extracted from the American taxpayer should be spent very carefully in order to guarantee we get a quality benefit from it.

I yield the floor.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet.) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Amendment No. 3337

Mr. President, we have been talking about having a bipartisan effort to rein in spending and some of the things that we can do in that regard. So I am pleased to share a few thoughts today on the legislation that my Democratic colleague, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and I have offered that would ensure that we show some fiscal discipline in our spending habits.

It is not a dramatic change in what we should be doing and what I think we can do, but I think it is an action that would send a message to the financial markets in the world that we are beginning to get the message from our constituents that this recklessness and this kind of spending cannot continue.

Our legislation received bipartisan support last time. Fifty-six Senators voted for it, which is a pretty good number. But you do need to get 60 votes to pass the legislation. I think this time, with our new colleague from Massachusetts, we might be at 57 or 58, and at this point, I think others may be evaluating whether this is the kind of action they would like to support.

Let me take a minute or two to explain what our legislation attempts to do, how it can work, how it has worked in the past, and why this step is important. It would set a much firmer cap on spending. It would make it more difficult to enact spending levels that violate the budget. I wish to explain why it is something Members of both parties can support.

What we are talking about is moving beyond the budget caps that are only good for 1 year and take those budget caps, extend them for 4 years and make them statutory. It is not something that can't be changed. If there is an emergency, we can vote to change them. In fact, Congress can, with 60 votes, eliminate the whole statute and write a new statute, if we believe it is too severe. So Congress clearly would have the ability to act, if it chooses, to get around these limits on spending.

Back in the early 1990s, legislation was passed that put a statutory cap on spending. I have a chart I will show. It is kind of upside down in a way. This shows the deficits in the early 1990s. This is when we passed the legislation, the statutory cap on spending. The deficits went down until we hit surplus for 4 years in the late 1990s, early 2000.

Then this statutory cap expired. That is when deficits started going up, and they are continuing to rise. Last year's deficit was three times this amount from the year before--three times that amount--one thousand four hundred billion in debt last year, and it is expected to be one thousand five hundred billion in deficit this year, for 1 year. This is an unsustainable path.

This is a proven technique to gain control of spending. Why it was allowed to expire and not extended in 2002, I do not know. I know a number of people argued that it should be kept, and it was not.

Secondly, what is the cap? What would it be? The limit we would place on spending would be the amount President Obama asked for in his budget. It is 1 to 2 percent in the spending accounts. If you went above that, you would have to have a serious bipartisan vote of two- thirds to break that cap the President has set as the proper goal. Parenthetically, since the President submitted that budget, he has indicated he wishes to see a freeze on spending, on nondefense discretionary accounts, a flat freeze. I would be supportive of that. I would support the President in that. First, if we can get a hard limit on the 1 to 2-percent increase, we believe we will have done something worthwhile.

How would this work? If somebody came in and proposed spending levels that exceeded the specific budgetary limits as set by President Obama's budget, it could only be surpassed by waiving the statutory cap. That takes a two-thirds vote. This would have some teeth to it. We have gone back and checked. For the last 30 years and every time there has been an emergency, such an as an earthquake, an ice storm or a hurricane, the Congress has waived the budget and enacted emergency legislation with 90 votes, 100 votes, high 70 votes every single time. It is unlikely that we would see a genuine emergency not being promptly funded with emergency spending, if the Nation has to do that. I don't think that is a problem.

What we are saying is, when we have legislation come up that is not paid for, that is not accounted for, a person would be able to make a budget point of order and say: You should not have expended moneys at more than a 1-percent or 2-percent increase in this budget account, and I make a budget point of order. It would take a two-thirds vote of the Senate to waive it. It gives some real teeth to the President's budget, the same kind of teeth President Clinton had during his time in office, his or the congressional budget that was actually passed by the Senate and the House. That budget was enforceable. When it was enforceable, we achieved a surplus.

Let's be frank. It will be more difficult today to achieve a budget surplus than in the 1990s. We have a lot of different factors at work here. One of them is that the deficit is so much larger, and we have some real problems getting there. But we have to begin.

You say: Well, you have a budget. Why is this a problem? Why can't you use your budget point of order and stop spending and contain it through a rate close to inflation and lower rates than we have seen in the past?

It didn't work last year. This chart is the 2010 base increases in the year we are in today, the fiscal year 2010. It shows you how spending has increased. The chart I have does not include the breathtakingly huge $800 billion stimulus bill. Each one of these accounts got money out of that bill. I haven't even included those amounts. But look what we did the year we are in. The budget had levels below this, but eventually this is what we passed: Foreign operations, foreign aid, State Department got a 32.8-percent increase. Interior Department got a 16.6-percent increase. CJS, Commerce-Justice-State, is a 12.3-percent increase. THUD, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, received a 23-percent increase. Agriculture received a 14.5-percent increase. Defense, the lowest one, received a 4.1-percent increase. All of these are well above the inflation rate.

What I am saying is, this is unsustainable. Every witness we have had at the Budget Committee hearing, Democrats and Republicans, Brookings and Heritage Foundation, all of them are saying: This is an unsustainable course. It has the potential to threaten our economy and our political future. One of the witnesses recently said: When you run up debts, such as we are doing today, and you get to the very top of the amount of debt this Nation can carry--and we are heading to that

direction--bad things can happen quickly, unanticipated. You have a serious collapse in Greece. The New York Times today reports real instability with regard to the Brits and their debt. If you think Greece has an impact on our economy because of their reckless spending, the British economy is far larger and would have an even greater impact. We are not far behind. In fact, in some ways we are ahead of the Brits in the amount of money we are spending and the amount of debt we are accumulating. We are threatening our economy, if we don't watch it, in a way that we can't anticipate.

There were some private prognosticators who predicted the dramatic events of 2007 and 2008, when we had the Wall Street collapse and the financial collapse. Some people saw the balloon that was rising and predicted bad things would happen. But none of our leaders did. Mr. Bernanke is supposed to be so great and they brag about him. If he is so smart, where was he when all that happened? Our people are suffering today because of bad decisions.

I have a simple view. That is, nothing comes from nothing, and nothing ever could. Everything you take today, somebody has paid for and bought. If you don't have the money today and you grasp something of value, somebody is paying for it. In our case, we are borrowing the money.

We can do better. We did better in the 1990s. We are not going to be able to slash spending in record amounts, but in some of our accounts, we absolutely could eliminate spending. Some of the government programs have been independently evaluated as being not worth the money we are spending on them. They should be ended. We should not be spending money on a program that doesn't produce a return worthy of the investment we are putting into it. Even if we call it a jobs bill, if we are going to help people have jobs, if it doesn't produce jobs, how can we spend money on it? We need to be more vigorous in analyzing it.

Please look at this amendment. A few more votes and we could have a bipartisan statement that we are going to stick by the budget we passed, the budget President Obama submitted. If the President comes in and helps us and we battle for it, maybe we can spend less than even this legislation would control. We could even reduce spending in certain accounts. I hope that is possible.

This isn't the final word, but it would send a message to the world, to Wall Street, and to our constituents that we hear their concerns. We are going to take firm steps. We are not going to be waltzing in here every week or two with some other bill that is not paid for and treating it as an emergency and increasing our debt.

I see Senator Bunning. A lot of people didn't understand what it was he objected to with regard to the bill containing unemployment insurance. The legislation that came up essentially declared that this was an emergency, that we are going to spend another $10 billion on top of the budget amounts, and the budget would not apply to it. Every bit of that would have to be financed by borrowing on the world market. Senator Bunning said: I am willing to support an unemployment insurance extension, but I wish to start paying for it for a change and end this cycle of increasing debt and the ease by which we go about it.

We are in a big battle right now. Let me say a bipartisan word about my legislation. Because there is so much intensity this year about our spending, Senator McCaskill and I have altered the legislation from the one we voted on a few weeks ago that got 56 votes, 17 Democrats voting for it. We have altered it so it begins next year. So we will have this fight this year and each bill will have its own battle. We will have our own votes over it, but it only applies to next year. I think that is a good-faith way to reach-out to our colleagues and say: Let's at least do that. Let's at least take the caps that we put in place as part of our budget, as part of President Obama's budget, and let's put them into effect. We will start it next year.

If we go above that and somebody has an idea of going above it, it won't be so easy. It will take a two-thirds vote to do so. So if you don't believe we ought to make it tougher to bust the budget, don't vote for it. But if you believe, as I think most constituents believe, we are showing too little fiscal discipline, then you should vote for it. It would give us a proven ability to contain spending and get us beginning on the right track.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, after all we have done to work with the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he still complains. I am amazed.

This nominee seems to be a solid nominee. The President has due deference on nominees, and I think she should be confirmed and I will support her. But President Bush's nominees, for example, to the circuit courts, waited an average of 350 days from nomination to confirmation. And that was just the average. President Obama's circuit nominees have been confirmed, on average, 100 days faster.

Indeed, some of President Bush's nominees to the circuit courts even received a hearing, despite being highly qualified and highly rated nominees.

The majority of President Bush's first nominees waited years for confirmation--the first group he put up.

But besides that, as I told the chairman, I hope to end the tit-for- tats on this issue. He is having a good record of moving nominees who are good, and the ones who are opposed on this side will be vigorously opposed. But this nominee is qualified, and I support the nominee and urge my colleagues to do so.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, there is always an easy way to get something done in this body, and that is to spend money and not pay for it. And I am sure that gets a lot of Democratic votes and they could just pass this bill right through the body. I am sure our House Members, the majority in the House, will just pass this legislation and we will just add $10 billion more to the debt. That is what we are talking about.

Is this necessary? Senator Bunning has made a number of suggestions about how this bill could be paid for. But it is not a question of delaying it, in my view; it is just simply a question of not wanting to use any of our existing moneys to pay for the extension of unemployment insurance. If we don't do that, if we don't pay for it, as we in the Senate are wont to say, then where does the money come from? We borrow it.

There is an interesting article in the Washington Times today, a front-page article talking about how much of our debt China owns. They say they own a good bit more of it than we have understood, that a lot of their money goes through other institutions, and then they buy U.S. Treasury bills, and really the amount owned by China is larger than we expect. Well, so be it. I don't know what that number is. But it is not healthy for the United States of America to incur the amount of debt we are now incurring. It is not healthy.

Just a few weeks ago, this very Senate, our Democratic majority, with great pride, passed the pay-go legislation saying that if we have additional expenditures, we will pay for it unless, of course, we deem it an emergency and we get a supermajority and then we don't have to pay for it.

Well, here we are just a few weeks later. We want to spend some more money to help out on unemployment insurance. I think that is a worthy goal, and I think it is something we need to do. But where do you get the money? I would suggest several places. Senator Bunning has a place that I think my Democratic colleagues have supported--a tax credit account. I would say that has possibilities. I know he has also supported out of the unspent stimulus money--that could be a source of it.

But all of these things apparently are just being rejected. Why are they being rejected? I assume it is because my colleagues want to spend that money on something else, an additional new spending program that is not clear to us at this time; otherwise, why would there be an objection to it?

So I think the thing that has come to my mind is we can't keep going on like this. We really can't.

We just had a hearing in the Budget Committee. The witnesses--most of them were Democratically called witnesses, but every single one of them said we are on an unsustainable financial course. We are spending more money than we are taking in at an unprecedented amount each year and we cannot sustain it. At some point, we have to decide if we are going to stop. At some point, we are going to have to decide, just like our families, our cities, our counties, our States; they are having to decide they don't have the money, and they either can't borrow more or they don't want to borrow more. And they actually, amazingly, may even reduce spending for a while. Do you think those counties and cities and States are no longer going to exist? Will they fall off the face of the planet? Senator Bunning has been around a long time. He knows that is not so. Every day, businesses are having to cut back. Families are cutting back. We can't cut back at all, but we continue to expend greater and greater amounts.

The basic budget for this year has discretionary spending, nonmandatory spending, which goes up about 10 percent. On top of that is the $800 billion stimulus package. All that is debt. The $800 billion, we had none of it in our accounts or our banks. We had to borrow it. Every penny of that we pay interest on. This will be $10 billion more.

Well, it is just $10 billion. After $800 billion, that is not very much, is it? Oh, yes, it is. Ten billion dollars is more than Alabama's State budget, and we are an average-sized State, about 4 or 5 million people. That is bigger than our State budget.

So one little whip--and Senator Durbin, who is so eloquent, said: Well, we just need to pass it right now. We do not need to be talking about paying for it. If you say we want to pay for it, that might take an extra day to get the paperwork worked out with the House of Representatives. Somehow it is Senator Bunning's fault that he has actually been asked to give his consent that this body would increase our debt by $10 billion and let this bill pass.

Senator Bunning says: I am not going to do it. You asked my consent. I am a Member of the Senate. I have a right to give that consent. If I have a right to give it, I have a right to withhold it, and I am going to withhold it unless you pay for this bill. So I do not think that is anything that should subject him to criticism.

Oh, yes, it slowed down the plan. The plan was all greased. We were going to zip this right through, pop another $10 billion to the Nation's debt, and claim we have solved all our problems, at least for the moment.

But that is not a healthy approach. I think it is a healthy approach for someone with the gumption to stand and question what we are doing, to say: You have asked for my consent for something, I do not believe in it, and I am not going to give it. I think it is time for us to get on a more sound financial footing.

I just wish to say to Senator Bunning, I respect the Senator's view on that. A lot of people do. I think it is interesting our colleagues like to quote letters from people in Kentucky, talking about that they are suffering as a result of unemployment and that is so painful.

But I am sure you got letters, as I have got letters. In my townhall meetings, people are coming up to me and saying: Are you people losing your minds? How much money do you think you can continue to spend? Time and time again, I hear that. Go through the airports: Keep fighting. Hold the line. Do not give in.

They are not talking about adding another $10 billion to the debt because we will not even slow down long enough to figure out how to pay for it. That is not what my constituents are telling me. I am sure they are not telling Senator Bunning that. So I think this is a big deal.

So when are we going to end this process? When does it stop? I say the time to begin to stop is now. I am going to be supportive of Senator Bunning in his plan. I feel this matter is getting out of hand.

As I explained the other night, I serve on the Budget Committee. The budget numbers are not in dispute. The budget proposed by President Obama, a 10-year budget, analyzed over 10 years by the Congressional Budget Office, would conclude this: Last year we paid, in 1 year, interest on our debt of $170 billion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, because we are tripling the national debt at the rate we are going, in 10 years the amount of interest we will pay on the debt is $799 billion.

I think the American people understand this is unacceptable. They do not need an accountant or an economist or a bureaucrat to tell them this is an unsustainable path. They know it is. They have known it is for some time. Some people say: Well, this is just a populist revival. They do not understand. We understand better. You have to borrow, borrow, borrow to make our economy go back.

Well, what an individual from Alabama told me today out in the hall was the same thing a constituent told me a few weeks ago back in Evergreen. It is, you cannot borrow your way out of debt. You cannot borrow your way out of debt. This is a fundamental principle of life. We seem to have lost sight of it.

So we are on a path that is unsustainable. We see what has happened in Greece. It is destabilizing the entire European Union or it threatens it. We have seen other countries get in the same kind of trouble. Our country is not very far behind.

Moody's is already talking about downgrading our debt rating, the amount of money you have to pay to get insurance against credit, against default against the U.S. government has tripled in the last few years. These are people who do this stuff for a profit. People are worried. So I would say to my friends and colleagues, it is not that complicated. We simply have to stop spending so much money. We have to stop spending so much money. We cannot do everything we would like to do. We do not have the money. Most people understand that in their lives, and most of our local governments understand that. But we in the Senate think we know better.

I would just say, with regard to the small business taxes and some of the things that probably would be somewhat helpful in creating economic growth, I am so disappointed we did not include more of that in the bill we passed when this stimulus bill passed. I remember coming to the floor quoting--right before the final vote--a major op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by a Nobel Prize laureate, Gary Becker, who said: This bill you are considering in the Senate does not have sufficient stimulative impact. He thought it would be much less than $1 per $1 in, and you should get well above $1 in a good stimulus package. He warned it was not going to be a job creator.

Senator McCain had a better bill, at half the cost, $400 billion, targeted for jobs, targeted for economic growth, not a welfare bill, a stimulative bill, voted down by the Democratic majority.

Senator Thune offered an amendment similar to the one Paul Ryan and others in the House of Representatives had put together, about half the cost of the bill we passed that would score, according to Christina Romer, President Obama's Chief Economic Adviser--her model of how you score these things would have created twice as many jobs for half as much money as this monstrosity we passed--others passed. My wife reminds me, do not say ``we'' when you voted against it.

So this is what we are now in. We have thrown out 400 or so billion, $400 billion not yet spent. It is not getting the impact we wanted. That is so tragic. For everybody who is unemployed today, they need to wonder why this Congress insisted on passing legislation we were warned would not be effective in creating jobs, which is the key to our economic growth and prosperity.

So I would say: I know good people can disagree. Some people think that when we are in a recession, we should keep spending, no matter how long, no matter how much, and somehow this will make us come out of it. But when you are creating an $800 billion-a-year interest payment, you realize it does not work that way.

If that was the way it worked, why did we not spend $1.6 trillion in the stimulus package instead of $800 billion? Why did we not spend $1,600 billion in stimulus rather than 800? Because obviously that is a philosophy that has its limits.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor. I am proud to support the Senator from Kentucky.

Madam President, today I pay tribute to COL Robert L. Howard. Colonel Howard grew up in Opelika, AL, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1956 at age 17. He retired as a full Colonel in 1992 after 36 years service. After retiring, Howard worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. During Vietnam, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Green Berets, and spent most of his five tours in the secret Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, also known as Special Operations Group, which ran classified cross-border operations into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.

These men carried out some of the most daring and dangerous missions ever conducted by the U.S. military. The understrength 60-man recon company at Kontum in which he served was the Vietnam war's most highly decorated unit of its size with five Medals of Honor. It was for his actions while serving on a mission to rescue a fellow soldier in Cambodia that he was submitted for the third time for the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary heroism. Colonel Howard was a sergeant first class in the Army's Special Forces on Dec. 30, 1968, when he rallied a badly shot-up platoon against an estimated 250 enemy troops. Despite being unable to walk because of injuries, he coordinated a counterattack while aiding the wounded and was the last man to board a helicopter, according to military records.

He served five tours in Vietnam and is the only soldier in our Nation's history to be nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor three times for three separate actions within a 13-month period. He received a direct appointment from master sergeant to first lieutenant in 1969 and was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Richard M. Nixon at the White House in 1971. His other awards for valor include two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Defense Superior Service Medal, four awards of the Legion of Merit, four Bronze Star Medals and eight Purple Hearts. He was wounded 14 times while serving in Vietnam.

Colonel Howard, 70, died at a hospice in Waco, where he had been for about 3 weeks, suffering from pancreatic cancer. He was buried in Arlington on February 22, 2010. Colonel Howard is survived by his son, Army SGT Robert

Howard, Jr., and daughters Melissa Gentsch, Rosslyn Howard, and Denicia Howard; and four grandchildren. I was also pleased to meet his brother Steve Howard, 6 years younger, who also volunteered at age 17. In an annual event, Steve was able to serve with his brother on one of his tours in Vietnam. It was wonderfully clear to one how much affection and respect Steve had for his big brother.

So, Madam President, it is my honor to pay tribute to this great Alabamian and, most of all, this great American. He, like so many today, went into harm's way, a courageous patriot, to effect the decided military positions of the United States. It is on the actions of such men that our liberty and prosperity depend. I am humbled to have the opportunity to express my appreciation for Colonel Howard's heroic and superb service to this country.