Floor Statements

Madam President, I come today to honor one of the great educational leaders of our time: Dr. Katherine Mitchell of Alabama. Dr. Mitchell is nationally acclaimed for her work in developing the Alabama Reading Initiative, ARI. This scientifically based program has not only been of tremendous benefit to students and teachers in Alabama but also in many other States that have modeled their State reading initiatives after ours. I firmly believe that Dr. Mitchell's work will prove to be seen as resulting in the most dramatic improvements in student learning in the last 50 years. Recently, the National Association of Educational Progress, NAEP, test scores were released, showing Alabama to be No. 1 in reading improvement for the fourth grade. Between 2005 and 2007, Alabama's fourth graders made a significant gain of eight points in fourth grade reading. That is the highest gain in the Nation. I must also point out that a number of the States that are right behind Alabama in reading gains are States such as Massachusetts and Florida that have both modeled State reading initiatives after the Alabama Reading Initiative.

I have spoken with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings many times about Dr. Mitchell's work and the great things happening in Alabama, and she is ecstatic about the innovative ways Dr. Mitchell and her fabulous team have changed education in Alabama and across the country. I am always impressed with Dr. Mitchell's enthusiasm for her work, and her strong desire to motivate and inspire educators wherever she goes. She is a rare and admirable person, and I applaud the many ways she has touched the lives of children and families around the world throughout her life.

It is important to say, and not inappropriate, that Dr. Mitchell is a woman of sincere and strong religious faith and that she has felt that her service is a calling by God. Such a conviction, it is plain to see, has given power to her insight for improving education. An active member of Frazer Memorial United Methodist Church, pastored by the wonderful John Ed Mathison, she is involved in so many good activities, while receiving inspiration that drives her work. I am sorry to say that Dr. Mitchell is retiring from her position at the Alabama State Department of Education, and I know that this will be a great loss for the State. However, I know Dr. Mitchell too well to ever think that she will be less busy in retirement--she has far too much energy and too much to offer. I look forward to hearing about Dr. Mitchell's ongoing contributions to our Nation with her expertise in education, and I am so thankful that Alabama's students, and America's students, will benefit for years to come from her investment in a program that teaches children how to read.

Thank you, Dr. Mitchell, for your service. Your shoes cannot be filled, I am sure of it, but I am also sure that the team you have so carefully trained will continue to carry on your vision with the same commitment and passion that you have so admirably displayed.

Mr. President, I would like to share some thoughts on the FISA legislation. It is critically important, and we need to pass the Intelligence Committee bill.

I will first say, in response to my able colleague from Illinois, that General Hayden's comments in which he indicated three people had been subjected to waterboard torture are something we ought to think about. First, I am glad, as he said and has been repeated, waterboarding was only used three times early on after 9/11 against some of the most dangerous people we have ever dealt with.

As a result of the debate and discussion about that, we had an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which Senator Kennedy offered to the Military Commissions Act in 2006, to prohibit waterboarding. It failed 46 to 53. We have a statute that does prohibit torture--Congress passed it overwhelmingly and it was supported by Senators Kennedy, Leahy, Biden, and others--that defined torture as infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. I am glad we are no longer utilizing waterboarding. I hope we never have to do it again.

I just want to say to my colleagues, be careful how you portray the United States around the world.

Mr. Goldsmith, who has been quoted here and previously testified before our committee, has written a book. He said this war on terror has been the most lawyered war in the history of the Republic. Lawyers have been involved in everything. Great care has been given to ensure the law was followed. To compare waterboarding of 3 individuals to what was done to American prisoners by the Japanese in World War II is just unthinkable. To date, not a single prisoner whom we have captured in the War on Terror has died, to my knowledge, in American custody--maybe or one or two from some disease, but certainly not from abuse.

I just finished reading the book ``Hells Guest'' by Mr. Glenn Frazier from Alabama, a Bataan Death March survivor. About 90 percent of those prisoners died. They starved to death. They were beaten on a regular basis and abused in the most horrible way.

To even compare what was done to American soldiers wearing a uniform lawfully being a combatant to what has been done to a few people without any physical or permanent injuries is not fair. It is part of a rhetoric designed for political consumption at home that has embarrassed our country around the world and led decent people around the world to believe our military is out of control and we are systematically abusing and torturing prisoners when it is not so. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to go on again and again about it.

We continue to be confused. Our country faces very real dangers. Terrorists are determined to damage this country. It is not just talk. We know it is true. They have done it before. They have attacked us around the world. They attacked us repeatedly before 9/11, and they desire to destroy our country.

Our administration made a decision after 9/11 that we could not treat these kinds of military attacks, designed to destroy our country by organized foreign forces, as normal law enforcement. I was a former Federal prosecutor. In a criminal prosecution, you try to catch people after they have committed the crime. But these acts are so horrible that the nature of them is such that they are acts of warfare and not crimes, and they need to be treated in that fashion. We remain somewhat confused about it. So the old policy meant you would investigate after the crime was committed. It was basically a stated or implicit policy of the Clinton administration. We cannot return to that kind of strategy.

One of the most important legal powers and authorities we have to defend America is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It has played a key role in preventing subsequent attacks on U.S. soil for the last 6 years. We are dealing with very real, very imminent threats, and we must continue to assist the fabulous military and intelligence personnel who are working this very moment long hours to protect our Nation.

I have visited our National Security Agency and met with the people who gather the intelligence under this act. They love America. These are not people who are trying to harm our country and deny us our liberties. They are sterling individuals who carefully follow the rules we give them. They follow the rules. They say they cannot continue effectively to do their job unless we pass this legislation. They cannot continue to do what they need to do.

The terrorists waging war against our country do not fight according to the rules of warfare, international law, moral standards, or basic humanity. They have even, in recent days, apparently used mentally ill women as suicide bombers, setting off bombs that have resulted in the deaths of other people, as well as the poor people who had the bombs strapped to them.

So, historically, we have provided the protections of the Geneva Conventions only to those whose conduct falls within the rules of war, those who fight under a flag of a nation, who wear uniforms against other organized military units. However, under a twisted rationale, predicated on the belief by some that we are not fighting a real war, we have given more rights to these individuals, who flatly reject any rule of war, than we have provided to legitimate prisoners of war who have followed the rules of war. We have done that in a number of different instances--it is sort of amazing to me--including providing them with habeas corpus relief to go to Federal court. These are not traditional prisoners of war, but prisoners who are unlawful enemy combatants. So we have endangered, sometimes I really believe, not only our troops, who put themselves in harm's way--and are in harm's way right now--to carry out the policies we gave them, but innocent Americans here at home.

We have to keep this threat in the forefront of our minds. These are individuals dead set on the destruction of our country at any cost. There is nothing they will not do.

Let me state that the FISA law should be made permanent. It should not merely be extended with another sunset provision. It is a fallacious argument to claim we cannot revisit a law unless there is some sunset when it ends. As Members of this Congress, it is incumbent upon us to continually review legislation we pass to ensure that the laws are accomplishing the goals set forth and that no unintended consequences occur. There is no sound reason to pass critical legislation such as the Protect America Act and slap an expiration date on it.

Fighting the war on terror is a long-term enterprise that requires long-term institutional changes. As the Vice President said in a recent speech:

The challenge to the country has not expired over the last

six months. It won't expire any time soon, and we should not

write laws that pretend otherwise.

The Intelligence Committee bill is a collaborative, bipartisan compromise that was crafted in consultation with members of the Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence community after months of negotiation and review of highly sensitive information, most of which was classified, secret, about the current surveillance procedures and how they were being used by the Government to obtain critical national security information. We cannot overstress that the committee most intimately involved with this process and the electronic measures being utilized voted their bill out by an overwhelmingly bipartisan 13-to-2 vote.

Remember, it has been over 6 years 4 months since the terrible attacks of September 11, and we may be most thankful that not one attack has been carried out on our soil since that day. As we move further from that dreadful day, I fear our memories have begun to fade. Otherwise, there is no sound justification for doing anything other than reauthorizing the Protect America Act, which would allow the intelligence community to simply continue, uninterrupted, their work which has been protecting this Nation and can continue to protect it in the future.

After the intelligence Committee passed a bill, the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, got involved and produced a partisan bill. We already voted to table the partisan Judiciary substitute, and we debating the bipartisan Intelligence Committee bill. Let me point out, however, something that happened in the Judiciary Committee. The bill produced by

the committee was given very little process during one committee meeting where 10 Democratic amendments were accepted along a strict party-line vote, and the bill itself, ultimately, was voted out with only Democratic support. No Republican voted for it. It was a purely partisan bill.

Strikingly, the one vote that garnered bipartisan consideration was against an amendment that was offered by Senator Feingold to strip the retroactive liability protections found in section 2 of the Intelligence bill.

We had a discussion and vote on whether the liability protections to keep the companies that helped us and responded to Government requests--whether they should be sued for doing so--should be stripped from the bill. We voted in the Judiciary Committee, 12 to 7, to follow the recommendation of the Intelligence Committee bill that they passed 13 to 2, and keep the limited liability protections. So it was a 12-to- 7 vote to defeat the Feingold amendment that would have removed those liability protections.

Directly after that vote, however--it was curious how it all happened--but directly after that vote, Chairman Leahy moved to report only Title I of the Judiciary substitute bill out of Committee. When that passed, that effectively stripped the liability protection provisions the committee had just voted to keep.

The point is that the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee, when voting directly on removing retroactive liability, voted 12 to 7 to keep it. But by the time we passed out the Judiciary Committee's version of the bill, we had taken it out. I'm not sure people fully understand how that occurred, but it certainly was an odd thing that it passed out of committee without liability protection, when we specifically voted to keep that language in the overall bill.

Now, the main area of disagreement is over this important question that will be coming up, I understand, in the amendment offered by Senator Dodd, amendment No. 3907--and a Specter-Whitehouse amendment that will allow substitution--which will, in effect, allow litigation to continue against telecom companies that responded to the requests of the Attorney General of the United States, certified by the President. So our disagreement is whether we should provide these good corporate citizens who cooperated with a formal written request by the Attorney General of the United States, certified by the duly-elected President of the United States, to provide information for a surveillance program implemented shortly after the attacks on September 11--and at that point in time, we did not know how many terrorist cells there were in the country and what plans they may have had.

Now, the nature of the program is highly classified, but after an uproar of complaints, the procedures were studied carefully by Congress, and we reacted by giving approval to the program in passing the Protect America Act overwhelmingly last August. I did not want to be too lighthearted about it, but I remember all the brouhaha that this program was somehow wrong and had to be eliminated, and people made all these unsubstantiated allegations. But after we went in great depth, we found, as Mr. Goldsmith said, that the lawyers have been on top of this since day one. It was a carefully constructed program. A court opinion issues last spring caused us to not be able to continue the way it was being done, and the Intelligence community asked us for legislation so it could continue. The Congress passed the Protect America Act this summer, but it was a short-term bill that lasted only 6 months.

All I would want to say is, nobody apologized to President Bush or the Attorney General of the United States or the people at the National Security Agency for all the bad things they said about them. After having studied what they did, we concluded it is constitutional and legal and proper and necessary, and we actually passed a law to authorize it to continue.

But still, there have been over 30 lawsuits now filed against telecom providers for their alleged participation in the terrorist surveillance program--30 lawsuits. Analysis of these lawsuits leads only to the conclusion that the plaintiffs are substituting speculation and a fevered brow for fact and are ignoring the dangerous consequences these lawsuits can have on our national security.

I do not know who is actually filing these lawsuits. I will just say this, parenthetically: Last October, before the last election, Lancet magazine produced a report--a medical magazine in England--that said 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqis were killed by the American military in Iraq. And ABC, CBS, and our Democratic colleagues all raised cane that, unbelievably, we would kill this many people. After the election was over--and by the way, the guy who wrote the report said he wanted to be sure it came out before the election--we learned some things about it.

In a fabulous article in the National Journal, an unbiased magazine, they detailed the fraudulence of that article, and pointed out that even an antiwar group said, at most, it was 50,000, not 500,000 or 700,000. And where did they find out the money for the Lancet article came from? George Soros, and the MoveOn.Org crowd. The ``blame America first'' crowd. Well, I don't know who is actually funding these lawsuits. We ought to ask some questions about it. Certainly there is no indication that anybody's liberties have been impacted adversely.

If these suits are allowed to continue, we face a number of problems. The sources and methods relied on by our intelligence community to conduct surveillance are highly classified, and if these lawsuits are allowed to proceed, even allowing for the Government to be substituted for the telecom companies, we run the risk of exposing the things our enemies really want: classified national security information. Make no mistake, if forced to defend themselves against lawsuits brought about because they cooperated with a government request certified to be legal, companies will certainly hesitate or refuse outright to cooperate in the future. Even where substitution by the Government is an option, we would be putting national security decisions in the hands of corporate counsels in the future whose duties--and their first responsibilities--extend to the stockholders of their company, and not the national security.

If we ask a company to help us, do we want all the lawyers in that company to say: Wait a minute. The last time we worked with you government we got sued, and we are going to review all of this because some court may hold this--or George Soros may fund some lawsuit and tie us up in court. We don't think we want to help. I think they would naturally take that tack in the future to resist cooperation.

During floor debate in December, the distinguished chairman of the Intelligence Committee, our Democratic colleague Senator Rockefeller, said this. This is what he said about the matter:

Our collective judgment--

and he is talking about the Intel Committee members--

Our collective judgment on the Intelligence Committee is

that the burden of the debate about the President's authority

should not fall on the telecommunications companies--

In other words, the debate about whether the President had authority to do this shouldn't fall on the telecommunications counsels--

because they responded to the representations by Government

officials at the highest levels that the program had been

authorized by the President and determined to be lawful and

received requests, compulsions to carry it out. Companies

participated at great risk of exposure and financial ruin for

one reason, and one reason only: in order to help identify

terrorists and prevent follow-on terrorist attacks. They

should not be penalized for their willingness to heed the

call during a time of national emergency.

Senator Rockefeller said that.

The ranking member of the Judiciary Committee who favors substitution has stated this, flat out:

The telephone companies have acted as good citizens.

Certainly they have. In many instances, the Government must seek assistance from the private sector and private individuals to help protect our national security and even local security in our communities. In order for this practice to continue, we must allow them to rely on assurances that the assistance they provide is not only legal but essential to protect our national security without fear that they will have their names dragged through

the mud by protracted litigation initiated by the ``blame America first'' crowd which subscribes to wild theories about Government conspiracies to deny people their liberty. They are forgetting the safety of America, and they are ignoring sound legal precedent.

Some in this body sincerely believe that liability protection is not needed if these companies did nothing wrong, they say. Well, this is faulty reasoning since either allowing the lawsuits to proceed or substituting the Government will still force them to be a party to lawsuits that run the risk of exposing national security information or doing irreversible financial and reputational damage to companies innocent of any wrongdoing. We are putting these companies in harm's way when they, bound by a sense of patriotism and civic responsibility, participate in a government program that was certified to be legal by the Attorney General of the United States and the President of the United States.

If the Government is substituted--in accordance with one of the theories that has been offered--in the place of a particular company, it will most certainly assert the state secrets privilege, leaving, in effect, the company virtually impotent when it comes to mounting a defense and showing what their legitimate actions were. Due to the nature of this state secrets privilege, a company will be forbidden from making their case and will be left without the ability to even confirm or deny their participation in the program. We should applaud the actions of these citizens, not stab them in the back by suing them for their actions.

To refresh everyone's memory, the Intelligence Committee, after months of negotiation in highly classified settings, rejected an amendment to strip liability protection from the bill for these companies by a vote of 12 to 3. It then passed the bill out in toto by a bipartisan vote of 13 to 2, protecting these companies from lawsuits.

The Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, had one markup after less than 2 weeks of reviewing the Intelligence Committee's legislation, and rejected an amendment specifically that would have denied liability protection by a vote of 12 to 7. So we voted not to allow them to be sued either. Furthermore, the Judiciary Committee rejected an amendment to allow the Government to be substituted for the plaintiffs by a vote of 13 to 5. We rejected substitution too, although the liability protections were ultimately removed from the bill the Judiciary Committee passed.

Even if the Government is substituted, plaintiffs in litigation will seek discovery, they will file depositions and ask for interrogatories and motions to produce. They will seek trade secrets and highly classified technologies. Companies would still face many litigation burdens. They would be--we would be subjecting them to harm, not only from consumer backlash, but their international business partners will be pressured around the world.

Under the limited liability protections incorporated in the Intel bill, plaintiffs seeking to question the Government will have their day in court as it only protects good corporate citizens from civil suit. So the liability protections in this bill do not preclude lawsuits against the Federal Government from going forward. In fact, there are at least seven lawsuits currently pending against the Government that will proceed against the Government or Government officials. This was accepted by the Intelligence Committee. Some wanted to say you couldn't sue the Government for these activities also, but the Intel Committee reached an agreement, an overwhelmingly bipartisan agreement, that would allow those lawsuits to proceed.

The companies that helped the Government did so to help protect us from further attack, and valuable information has been gathered with their help. I have been out to the National Security Agency. I have talked with the people. I know they scrupulously follow the rules we give them, and I know they have gained great, valuable information through this program, and I know they lost very valuable information when the program had to be stopped. This information has saved undoubtedly countless American lives by enabling our intelligence community to thwart attacks.

Some have said this amounts to amnesty, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Amnesty is an act of forgiveness for criminal offenses, such as granting citizenship to people who broke the law to come into our country illegally. The companies were operating under a certification of legality in a time of national danger doing what they could as Americans to follow the law and prevent future attacks. At no point during their participation were their actions illegal. For Heaven's sake. To grant liability protection is to adhere to that great Anglo-American legal tradition for hundreds of years that when called upon by a law officer, with apparent legal authority, wearing a uniform, out on the street, a citizen is not to be held legally liable if, in responding to the officer, the officer was wrong. That is all we are talking about. That is a fundamental, historical, legal principle. The only question--the legal question has always been simply this: whether the citizen was responding to a legitimate request by a government law officer, a police officer to chase a bad guy. Was the citizen acting reasonably in believing this was a legitimate law enforcement request and he was helping by being a good citizen. That is the test. If he participated knowingly with somebody acting illegally, then that citizen could be liable. Certainly certification by the Attorney General and the President of the United States in written documents suffices as a legitimate request.

The bottom line is, we do not need to pass legislation that panders to the extreme interest groups in America who find fault in everything our people do, our law enforcement and intelligence officers, and that fosters a fundamental mistrust of those officials who are working daily to serve all of us. The burden should not fall on the shoulders of good corporate citizens who are acting patriotically to help save lives and protect our country.

I urge my colleagues to vote to support the Intel Committee bill, a carefully crafted, carefully studied, bipartisan bill. I also urge my colleagues to support the liability protections in the Intelligence Committee legislation and a vote against any amendments that attempt to strip these provisions or in any way alter the carefully structured, limited provisions of the bill.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank my colleague, Senator Bond, the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He has been working for a full year virtually on trying to accomplish what we need to accomplish now.

I may not be able to follow the debate, but it seems to me that now we are beginning to hear that somehow despite your determined efforts and those of Senator McConnell and our side of the aisle the Republicans are being accused of holding up this legislation.

Can you give us your perspective on that? I am sure it is different from what I have heard on the floor earlier on.

Indeed, didn't he say it couldn't have come at a worse time to have us be denied this kind of intelligence capability?

To follow up on that, you are familiar with the NSA and have seen it. Would you dispute his decision based on what you know? Didn't you also conclude, as I did, that he was exactly right; this was absolutely critical to our national defense and security?

When we heard what he said, we got busy. You were one of the leaders. We worked through and passed the legislation in August, just this past August, that basically affirmed this program and kept it going. But can you tell us now why we didn't make it permanent at the time?

How did we get here and why do we need another 15-day extension? Why can't we get this thing done?

It seems to me that our Democratic leadership has had legislation from the Director of National Intelligence since April. We have refined it, particularly your committee, the Intelligence Committee, has moved it forward on the floor. And we have just wasted a lot of time when we need to be making this permanent.

I thank Senator Bond and Senator Rockefeller and the Intelligence Committee. I serve as a member of the Judiciary Committee. I strongly opposed the bill that came out of our committee. I believed your bill, the Intelligence Committee bill, which passed 13 to 2 in a bipartisan fashion out of the Intelligence Committee, was superior to the one that passed Judiciary on a narrow party-line vote. I also grasped during that debate that one of the real differences was the Intelligence Committee members knew what was at stake. That had been your responsibility, to ensure that our intelligence community was

able to function effectively. You knew how the system worked and we didn't. We allowed theoretical ideas and maybe partisan politics to interfere with a simple project which was to identify what we needed to do to fix the broken intelligence system and to do so consistent with the Constitution and liberty.

You all worked on that and reached an agreement on it. We continued to have nitpicking, complaints, ideas. Everybody has a different idea how they would like to see it done. I guess that is lawyers. Maybe that is the Judiciary Committee lawyers as opposed to Intelligence Committee members.

The way I would boil this issue down for the American people is this: We are not asking in this legislation that anything be done to diminish the great liberties we as Americans have come to cherish. Actually, all it is doing is facilitating historic concepts of intelligence surveillance that we have always done. Fundamentally, there is no dispute that American intelligence officers abroad can intercept such communications as they are able to intercept without any Federal court warrant or anything else of that nature because the Federal court does not have jurisdiction, one reason, in Europe or the Middle East or Pakistan or any other country. They just don't have jurisdiction there. So we have always known that our intelligence agencies are capable, authorized, and legally able to do this.

In the United States, however, if somebody taps your phone--and we have had so much confusion about this--if a Government agency were to tap someone's phone, they are entitled to listen not only to the calls that are placed away from that phone to someone else, they are also entitled to listen to phone calls that come into that phone number. That is part of the legal authorization to surveil inside the United States.

So the first thing you have to do is have legal authorization to surveil. Once you do, on that phone, then you can listen to the calls that come in. What we do as a matter of practicality is we mitigate if a phone call comes in on a matter unrelated to the criminal activity that is being surveilled in the United States. That is the way it is.

So what I want to say is, don't think this is somehow a retrenchment of historic American protections. What we are saying is, if you have a legal authorization to intercept a telephone system in Afghanistan--and we do, our people have a right to intercept a phone conversation--it seems to me you also have a right, just as you do if you have a warrant involving a U.S. citizen, to listen to the phone calls they place into the United States. And if it is not relevant to any kind of terrorist activity, then you would mitigate against it. But if you follow what I am saying, once you have the authority, as we do, to intercept a cell phone number somewhere, something like that, if you have this activity and you intercept that and you can surveil that number, then you are able to surveil who they call.

If they are calling into the United States to set up a terrorist organization to carry out a plot, then that is the kind of call you want to intercept, for heaven's sake. I just don't think we have a big issue. I am proud of the committee. They have added protections, eliminated ideas that could lead to some abuse somewhere, but you have written a bill that is worthwhile.

Let me say about the people at the National Security Agency and our FBI and our other agencies that are out doing this kind of work, they follow the laws we give them. Don't think, like you see on television, on ``24'' and some of these things that people just go around and violate the law on a regular basis. I was a Federal prosecutor for 15 years. People don't put their careers on the line, throw away their careers, violating the law.

So we have to have a law that allows them to lawfully do their work and not deny them the right or a legitimate power to protect America because we are putting ourselves at risk, and we should not do it. So I am frustrated, forgive me, that we are so timid about allowing the full historical surveillance capabilities our Nation is used to having at this time when we have unique threats from terrorists who have proven they have the ability to inflict thousands of deaths on Americans.

Our good people are working their hearts out. Let's don't make it more difficult for them. Let's affirm what they are doing. We will continue to monitor it so it is never abused.

I thank the chairman and the Intelligence Committee for their bipartisan work to serve our country by producing a bill we all can be proud of.

I yield the floor.

I object.

Mr. President, I appreciate so many of these remarks. I would like to say a few things about Trent.

I think Trent's strength, first, is his roots. He knows where he came from. He knows how he was raised. He is loyal to his constituents and his people. He loves the people of Mississippi, and they love him. If he chose to move to Alabama and run for the Senate, he would be a winner there. He is well known in our State. He used to have a television program with the three Congressmen from that region, the ``Gulf Coast Report.'' It went for 35 years. It ended last year. He started that with former Congressman Jack Edward of Mobile and it had such a tremendous following. In fact, it was front-page news in Alabama when Trent Lott announced his retirement.

Secondly, Trent was at the forefront of what clearly has been a historical movement of mainstream Republican thought in the South. It has been a trend that has been steady and strong and has shaped the Nation. It ended up helping provide a Republican majority in the House and the Senate to accomplish things that would not have been accomplished otherwise.

I am not that much younger than Trent, but I remember when he made that fateful decision to run for Congress as a Republican in Mississippi. Those of us who were following politics at that time knew his decision was an important one. We young Republicans, throughout the South in particular, all watched with tremendous interest to see whether he would be successful. He and Thad both were successful that year. It was a movement of significant historical importance because many have followed his path.

Trent has had an incredibly wise way of dealing with people. I remember sitting right over here, having not been here long, and a very important bill was on the floor. A very critical amendment was being decided, an amendment, if it had gone the wrong way, could have derailed the entire legislation. I had reasons to vote against it, but I had not made up my mind. There were a lot of reasons I could have voted against it. Some good friends were on the other side. He sidled up to me, and all he said was: Look at old Phil. This is his first big bill on the floor. It would be a shame to see him lose that bill.

(Laughter.)

He did not say any more. Those simple words touched my concerns, and I thought about them for a day and a half before I decided to vote with Phil and Trent. He had a gift to sense your concerns, to know where members were.

I will mention two other things I think were of historical importance.

We could not agree on how to handle the impeachment. Trent was the leader of the Senate. The Senate was supposed to try the House charge of impeachment. The Chief Justice who sat back here off the floor was asked: What procedures shall we use, Mr. Chief Justice? He leaned back in his chair and said: Well, it is the Senate's job to figure out how to conduct the impeachment trial. That is what the Constitution says. It is your problem, not mine. And still we could not agree.

Trent thought and worried and did everything he could possibly do to reach an agreement on procedure. That agreement could not be reached, so he took an unprecedented step of calling the Senate together in the Old Senate Chamber. Do you remember that? That is when we had, what Trent called, the great epiphany when Ted Kennedy and Phil Gramm spoke up and an agreement was reached. We did not embarrass the Senate. We did our duty. We followed through successfully. We met the constitutional responsibility we had. He was creative in trying to impress on us the importance of reaching that decision.

I can think of another one from the Republican side. In our movement in 2001 to reduce taxes the vote was close, with every single vote critical. Senator Domenici was the Budget chairman at that time, and I believe the critical vote was over the budget reconciliation. Trent called a meeting of the Republicans in the Senate Chaplain's office.

(Laughter.)

The room has a high arched ceiling--so I guess we had a prayer meeting up there. You could look down the Mall and see the Washington Monument. Such a location had never been used before or since. There were a couple of votes Trent had to have. He knew; he could count votes. Maybe there was just one vote he had to have. So that meeting was orchestrated carefully, and it worked. Our tax cuts passed, with every vote crucial and ultimately on the floor the vote was a 50-50 tie, with the Vice President breaking the tie. For 10 years, however, we will have had tremendous tax relief for Americans. It has surged our economy.

Without a truly skilled leader in both those instances, this Senate could have gone the other way and the history of our country quite differently.

I have enjoyed my friendship with Trent Lott and Tricia. I think he is a fabulous leader who has done remarkable things for our country. It has been an honor to serve with him.

If you come to Alabama, you can have my Senate seat, Trent.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for 2 minutes.

Mr. President, we know what the situation is, and we are a great nation. We are not at liberty to flip-flop around every time there is some change afoot in some polling data. We voted this summer 80 to 14 to give General Petraeus a chance. We funded the surge and we funded his new strategy. At the time we did that, things were not going well in Iraq. We had a tough year, there is no doubt about it. In the last few months and in the last few weeks, we have seen dramatic changes under the surge and under the classic counterinsurgency strategy this brilliant general is conducting. So I say let's allow him to conduct this war. Let's allow General Petraeus, a proven leader, to do so. Let's reject the tactical decisions of ``General'' Feingold and ``General'' Kennedy. We have a professional there who is achieving things beyond what I would have thought possible a few months ago, actually. I hoped and believed we were going to see progress, but the extent of it is remarkable.

The last thing we need to do is to take action to pull the rug out from under the fabulous men and women who are serving us at great risk this very moment, whose highest and deepest wish is to be successful, to execute the policy we gave them by a three-fourths-plus vote several years ago.

I thank the Chair and reserve the remainder of the time.

Mr. President, today I commend a distinguished resident of the State of Alabama, Dr. Douglas C. Patterson on the occasion of his retirement from Troy University. Upon receiving his bachelor's degree from Alabama College in 1967, Patterson was commissioned a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a platoon commander for a Combat Engineer Platoon and as an intelligence officer for the First Engineer Battalion of the First Marine Division in the Republic of Vietnam.

Upon returning from Vietnam, Patterson received his masters from the University of Montevallo and his doctorate from the University of Alabama. Dr. Patterson's experience includes serving as a high school counselor, director of Counseling and Career Services at Jefferson State Junior College, vice president for instruction at the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind and currently, he serves as the senior vice chancellor for administration for Troy University.

Dr. Patterson has served Troy University with great honor and distinction as a senior administrator since 1989 and has provided exemplary service to the university and to the citizens of the State of Alabama. During his tenure as senior vice chancellor for administration, Dr. Patterson directed

the institution's finance and budgeting, information technology, institutional effectiveness, television and radio, strategic planning, athletics, and day-to-day operations. Under his leadership, the University has enjoyed an unprecedented era of growth, doubling worldwide student enrollment to almost 30,000 students. Dr. Patterson has been instrumental in Troy University's glowing record of stewardship and financial stability, garnering praise and awards from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and earning TROY recognition as a ``Best Value'' university from such publications as MONEY Magazine and The Princeton Review. Dr. Patterson played a key role in the university's decision to move Troy University athletics to the highest level of NCAA competition, bringing national recognition to the university and fostering pride among its students, alumni, and friends. Dr. Patterson was recently honored by Troy University as the Honorary Alumnus of the Year for 2007.

I commend Dr. Douglas C. Patterson, on the occasion of his retirement from Troy University, for his leadership in Alabama higher education and for his outstanding service to Alabama and our country.

Mr. President, Senator Feingold may have been next, and I see he has returned. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, is the Senator's request for 3 additional minutes on each side?

Mr. President, I believe the last unanimous consent agreement was that there would be 5 minutes for Senators Kyl, Chambliss, and myself. We have added 3 minutes to that. I ask unanimous consent that we each have 6 minutes.

Mr. President, I appreciate my colleague, Senator Feingold, and his passionate argument, but I am going to tell my colleagues that this Congress and this Government of the United States are capable of overreacting. We are capable of getting excited about an issue and taking theoretical positions that end up, as a practical matter, leaving our country at greater risk. This is not just an item of discussion; it is very real.

I would point out to my colleagues that we have made two dramatic errors some years ago in a situation just like this, on emotion driven by our civil libertarian friends, such that a wall was put up between the FBI and the CIA which barred the sharing of information between those two critical agencies.

We also mandated that the Central Intelligence Agency officers could not obtain information from people deemed to be dangerous. Bad people. How do you get information in the world and protect America and our legitimate national interests without sources? Those became laws.

And what happened after we were attacked on 9/11? Both those rules that we imposed on our military intelligence agencies were deemed to be bogus, wrong, and mistaken, colossally so. Many Members of this body were warned when they were made the law of the United States, they were warned then that if we did these things it was not wise. But, oh no, the others loved the Constitution more, they loved liberty more, so these unwise laws were passed. And what happened afterwards, after 9/ 11? Well, we properly removed both of those silly rules. We have taken them off the books, in a bipartisan, unanimous way. They were never required by the Constitution. They were never sensible from the beginning. But we passed them on emotion not reason. Some ideas being promoted now are not sensible either and can leave our country in dangerous straits. So this is an important matter. These things are life and death issues.

Last year, a Federal court ruled, based on changes in technology, that those laws we passed effectively limited the collection of critical communications of foreign intelligence. It was not the intention of Congress when we passed it, I am sure, that the law would, in effect, end up gutting perhaps the most important surveillance program we have against international terrorists, but that was the effect of it.

Admiral McConnell was flabbergasted. He came to us and pleaded with us to give him relief. So what happened? Well, he said this to us. Listen to these words. Basically this is what he said: The United States was unable to conduct critical surveillance of . . . foreign terrorists planning to conduct attacks inside our country.

That is basically--that is what he said to us. That is a dramatic thing.

So what happened? Congress went through an intense study, and we passed the Protect America Act this past summer. Some people said: This is a rush, though we spent weeks on it. Congress spent a lot of time working on it. But we said: OK, it will come back up for reauthorization in February. As of this date, there has been no example of abuse of that act.

Senator Feingold says these intelligence procedures were illegal wiretapping. I think that is really not a fair thing to say. A court ruled that these procedures we had been using for some time, must, according to statutes we passed, go through a certain number of procedural hoops that, as a practical matter, would have eliminated the possibility of us continuing these surveillance techniques. That is what they ruled. I don't think we ever intended this to be the effect, but the court probably ruled fairly on the law. I am not sure. We are stuck with the ruling regardless.

I don't think it is fair to say the program was illegal. But certainly the procedures were not unconstitutional because this summer, when we passed the Protect America Act, we effectively concluded the program was good and constitutional. We affirmed the program.

I want to say, if we have any humor left on this subject, perhaps we ought to write President Bush a letter and tell him: Thank you. We are sorry we accused you of violating our Constitution and basic civil liberties. After the Congress spent weeks studying this, we passed a law that basically allowed the program to continue as it was.

I urge that we do the right thing on this legislation and move forward to the Intelligence bill, not the Judiciary bill.

Mr. President, I would first just express my appreciation for the thoughtfulness and eloquence of the Senator from Maryland. I think she has analyzed the matter very well and has called us to a compromise agreement that we should rally around and pass--an agreement that will protect our country and also protect our liberty; and that is, the agreement that came out of the Intelligence Committee 13 to 2. It is the kind of agreement that reflects weeks, even months, of study, both of law and of technology.

Our Intelligence Committee, more than our Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, was deeply involved in exactly what is being done in foreign intelligence and how it was being done. They studied it carefully. There are a lot of members of the Intelligence Committee who would not hesitate to object if they thought what was being done was in error or certainly if it violated our Constitution. As a result, we have moved forward with their bill.

Unfortunately, the Senate Judiciary Committee that had referral on the matter has now come forward with additional ideas and proposals that are not wise, in my view. We did not spend nearly as much time on the matter. We are not nearly as involved and knowledgeable of the details of what has gone on as the Intel Committee is. I believe we should not move forward on the Judiciary Committee bill. I opposed it in committee and remain in opposition to it.

With regard to this matter of immunity for our telecom companies that cooperated with the President, the Senator from Maryland has explained how we got to this point. Mr. President, 9/11 occurred. We had a 9/11 Commission that said we did not have good intelligence, we did not share the intelligence we had correctly, we were not analyzing properly the intelligence we had, and we ought to do much better with regard to intelligence.

That was a uniform view, and the President authorized these programs, some of which basically had been authorized for years and had never been considered to be improper in any way. Government officials met with the telecom providers and asked for their assistance because the Government does not handle these communications systems. It is private companies that do. These companies were given a legal statement from the Attorney General that said the President had declared their cooperation to be important to national security, that it was legal, and asked them to help.

Now, we discussed the basic principle in the Judiciary Committee at some length, and I would like to go back to it. The basic principle that has been embedded in our law for hundreds of years, from our British heritage, is that a citizen--when called upon by a law officer, the gendarme, the Federal

official, or the State law officer who has apparent legal authority, to help in a situation involving a danger in the community--that citizen should respond. OK. How have we dealt with that?

We are so committed to that fundamental principle that we have embedded in our common law the concept that if the Government official was in error and should not have asked the citizen to do something--an example would be where somebody is running from a building, and apparently, a burglary has occurred. Several uniformed police officers are chasing the apparent burglar. They ask a citizen to help. The citizen assaults, tackles, and holds the person he has been told to try to capture. He helps the police officers capture that person, and it turns out he is not the burglar, but an innocent person.

It is absolutely clear as a matter of Anglo-American law--this is not some new deal; this is our heritage--that the citizen is not responsible and cannot be held legally liable because the only question is: Was he or she responding to what appeared to be a legitimate request by the Government to assist them?

So that is the deal. That is what our telecom companies did. More than that, they did not just respond to some police officer in uniform, they did not just respond to a military officer or a National Guardsman or a Coast Guardsman to help, they responded to the Attorney General of the United States of America requesting in a formal letter saying that he was authorized by the President of the United States to ask for their assistance to preserve and protect the safety of American citizens. They were given assurance that what they were being asked to do by the Attorney General was lawful.

How could we possibly suggest that these companies now are going to be rightfully sued for money damages? It is unthinkable we would allow that to happen. It would contradict our fundamental principles as a country.

They say: Well, how do we know? We need to have a lawsuit. Well, we have all kinds of telecom communications statutes that we have imposed over the years. Apparently, a court, in reviewing these matters, interpreted one of these statutes in a way that rendered the procedures then utilized under the request of the White House incorrect. The court did not say that the program could not be done, but that it had to be done using different techniques and different procedures. But the practical effect of that decision, it turns out, was to make it impossible for those techniques to be continued to be used. You just could not do it. As a practical matter, you could not continue to conduct the surveillance the Intelligence community said was required.

So the net result was we passed the Protect America Act this summer so the surveillance could continue because we, after great study, concluded it was needed and basically a lawful procedure. We passed the Protect America Act that allowed it to continue.

So I want to go back to say, the fact there was an alteration in the way this process was ongoing does not mean American companies that agreed to be supportive of the Attorney General and the President of the United States in a time of national emergency ought to have been sued. The person responsible if there was an error was the Government, not the companies--the Government. And many of these matters are very complex.

If we now are going to place the burden on the CEO or the legal counsel of every company in America to conduct their own independent research as to whether a request to participate in helping to defend America is constitutional, and they now are required to go beyond a certified letter from the Attorney General of the United States and have their lawyers express their own opinion, we are at a point where we are not going to get help in the future. It is just that simple.

So I think we ought to be careful about it. In fact, in the letter Senator Hatch has referred to, which is a Statement of Administration Policy--what they call a SAP--issued today by the Executive Office of the President, the President's advisors indicate they would recommend to the President that this important, critical legislation be vetoed if certain objectionable matters are in it.

One of the matters they are concerned about is this question of liability. I would like to read from page 4 from that SAP that deals with this issue. It sets out the question clearly. It says:

In contrast to the Senate Intelligence Committee bill, the

Senate Judiciary Committee substitute would not protect

electronic communication service providers who are alleged to

have assisted the Government with communications intelligence

activities in the aftermath of September 11th from

potentially debilitating lawsuits. Providing liability

protection to these companies is a just result. In its

Conference Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee

``concluded that the providers . . . had a good faith basis

for responding to the requests for assistance they

received.''

That was a bipartisan vote, 13 to 2. Senator Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman, and Senator Bond, the ranking Republican, and all members voted on that language.

I am still quoting now from this SAP:

The Committee further recognized that ``the Intelligence

Community cannot obtain the intelligence it needs without

assistance from these companies.''

In other words, we cannot get this intelligence without the cooperation of these companies, for heaven's sake. This is not a matter of dispute. This is an absolutely undeniable fact. It goes on to say:

Companies in the future may be less willing to assist the

Government if they face the threat of private lawsuits each

time they are alleged to have provided assistance. The Senate

Intelligence Committee concluded that: ``The possible

reduction in intelligence that might result from this delay

is simply unacceptable for the safety of our Nation.''

It is unacceptable. This SAP goes on to say:

Allowing continued litigation also risks the disclosure of

highly classified information regarding intelligence sources

and methods. In addition to providing an advantage to our

adversaries by revealing sources and methods during the

course of litigation, the potential disclosure of classified

information puts both the facilities and personnel of

electronic communication service providers and our country's

continued ability to protect our homeland at risk. It is

imperative that Congress provide liability protection to

those who cooperated with this country in its hour of need.

It goes on to say this:

The ramifications of the Judiciary Committee's decision to

afford no relief to private parties that cooperated in good

faith with the U.S. Government in the immediate aftermath of

the attacks of September 11 could extend well beyond the

particular issues and activities that have been of primary

interest and concern to the Committee. The Intelligence

Community, as well as law enforcement and homeland security

agencies, continue to rely on the voluntary cooperation and

assistance of private parties. A decision by the Senate to

abandon those who may have provided assistance after

September 11 will invariably be noted by those who may

someday be called upon again to help the Nation.

I think that is indisputable. So I do not know how we got to a place where we are supporting an effort by some to allow these companies, these good corporate citizens, to be sued. I know it is being driven by a lot of leftist, the ``blame America first'' folks who seek to undo every single thing that is done to protect America from attack by foreign adversaries. They go through it. They attempt to find anything that can be complained about, and we end up having a big debate on these issues. But these matters have serious consequences.

So I would say to my colleagues, we did not deny moveon.org any right to be heard. They have been heard--moveon.org, that's the organization that declared our fabulous General Petraeus to be a betrayer. But we have listened to all of their complaints. We have listened to the ACLU. The Intelligence Committee has spent months looking at it. The Department of Justice has been involved in it. The Senate Judiciary Committee has been involved in it. I would submit we have found that these surveillance procedures are not an extreme thing, that this is all consistent with the law of America and that it is legitimate in the way it was done. We ratified these procedures just this summer in the Protect America Act. I said a little earlier this morning that I know it is too much to expect that we would apologize to our security officers and the President for saying--as some have done--that they violated our Constitution to do these procedures because, after all this debate and

effort, we have now passed laws, including the Protect America Act, that allows them to continue. If they are so horrible, why did we overwhelmingly vote to allow them to continue? I would say there was nothing fundamentally wrong with what was being done to begin with. This was necessary and legitimate.

One more thought I wish to share on the basic question of surveillance abroad is this: American citizens abroad are protected by a rather strong Presidential order--Executive Order 12333--that protects them from surveillance without probable cause having been shown. It is a pretty strong order. Why have we never had the Supreme Court, which has ruled on surveillance in the United States, declare its power on the issue of surveillance abroad? Think about this: Can the Supreme Court--can a Federal judge in America approve a surveillance, electronic surveillance in a foreign country of an American citizen? The answer is, no, because they don't have jurisdiction. Federal judges don't have jurisdiction in France or Russia or Afghanistan. If you don't have jurisdiction to authorize a surveillance, you don't have jurisdiction to issue warrants or to assert jurisdiction at all, and that is the way it has always been interpreted. But because people were concerned about American citizens abroad, President Reagan issued an Executive order that controls those situations and that is being followed today.

So I wish to say we need to be careful about our thought processes as we go forward. There has never, ever been any doubt that an American intelligence operative can surveil foreign persons abroad whom they believe may pose a threat to the United States or may possess information valuable to the United States. That has never been in doubt.

So as we go through with this, I hope we will listen to the work of the Intelligence Committee. I think, for the most part, it is a pretty good bill. Their bill is something I can support. It has some things in it I don't believe are necessary that put restrictions on our efforts to make sure our officials don't overreach. We can create safeguards in a bipartisan way, and I hope we will. But in truth, we need to pass legislation soon because the current bill, the Protect America Act, expires in February.

I went out a few weeks ago to the National Security Agency and got a full briefing, as a number of Senators have, on what is being done there. I was so proud of our personnel. These are fabulous Americans. The suggestions that have been made by some that they are sitting out there trying to listen in on somebody's private conversation about Christmas from Paris or Afghanistan is beyond reality. They are out there trying to protect America. They are looking to see if they have any information that they can legally pick up that would indicate an attack may be imminent or that people are plotting to attack the United States.

So I thank the Chair. I hope we will move forward with this legislation based on the Intel bill and that we will reject efforts to deny liability protection to Americans who serve our country. Also, I hope we will reject the Wyden language in the Intel bill because I think it goes far too far in constricting the ability of our intelligence personnel to do their job, and it is not legally or constitutionally required.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, we should be frank as to where we are today. The situation is not good. Yes, we do have too much partisanship in this body, and we need to move beyond it. But I wish to ask a couple of questions. I think we might as well talk about it directly and honestly: Has this Congress performed well this year? I say we have not. We passed only one appropriations bill, and it is almost Christmas. They all should have been passed before the end of the fiscal year, September 30. Only one has been passed. No wonder the polling data shows Congress has the lowest respect of the public in our history. I know that in this last election, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle campaigned strenuously: Elect us and we will do better. Elect us and we will balance the budget and we will be fiscally responsible; the Republicans aren't fiscally responsible. We will do things in a better way, and we will run the Senate in a better way. For the majority, I have to say it is incontrovertible that that has not occurred. In fact, we are about to vote--perhaps, because who knows what may happen in the last hours--but the momentum is in place and the goal is to bring forward an omnibus bill that has all but one appropriations bill in it, no telling what other legislation in it. It is going to be hundreds, perhaps 1,000-plus pages. It is going to be dropped here. It is going to make this Agriculture bill look like a dime novel. They are going to say: Vote for it. It is going to be over budget and it is going to try to put constraints on our military commanders in Iraq, telling them how to deploy our troops. It is not going to be accepted by the President. It is not going to be accepted by the American people.

So we are in a big deal. We are heading to a real collision course, and my colleagues on the other side are trying to blame people on this side for it. I don't think that is legitimate; I really don't.

Senator Cornyn has shown at great length how little has been done this last month. We have only had 10 votes. Is that right, Senator Cornyn? In the last 31 days, 10 votes. Why is that? Is this hard to do? It is not hard to have votes. You can have 10 votes a day. We have had days where we have had 40 votes or more a day. We are not having votes because the majority party, led by the majority leader, Senator Reid, doesn't want to vote. Senator Reid is a good friend and a person I like and respect, but he has a group of people there and they don't want to vote, because votes define you. You can talk all kinds of platitudes, but when a vote comes up, are you going to vote for money for our soldiers or not? Are you going to vote to tell General Petraeus how to deploy his troops or not? Are you going to vote to fund Defense? Are you going to vote to crack down on illegal immigration or not? So they don't want to vote. That puts them on record.

They are trying to move all of this pork, all this funding, all of those appropriations bills in one colossal package, and they want to have the absolute minimum number of votes to avoid being on record on important issues--issues that Americans care about; issues that are important to America.

But I will tell my colleagues the big deal. The big deal in this--and we might as well be honest about it--what are we going to do about our troops who are right there on the eve of Christmas serving us in harm's way?

Let me read an e-mail given to me by a father-in-law of a soldier in Iraq. It was sent in October. You know, we have had a tremendous reduction in violence in the last several months. Things have gone better than I would have thought possible in June. I believe General Petraeus's strategy is working in a way that I didn't think would be so positive. There is a long way to go, though, and this e-mail indicates that it is still tough.

He talks about his staff sergeant, a man of the highest character, who was killed by a sniper:

The loss affected us all significantly. He was a ranger and

a jump master that constantly led his men from the front.

The men performed heroically and magnificently. After he

was hit, myself and our medic were attending to him within

seconds. We were receiving fire from multiple locations

and the boys were hitting them back hard. We did get the

sniper and he is no longer a threat to

any of our forces. Still, more are out there,

unfortunately. Four days later we had another one of our

leaders hit by an IED.

He goes on to say this:

I have been reading in the newspapers and trying to figure

out why some political powers are openly encouraging the

enemy to embolden themselves and display the disdain to

attack us daily. If all these presidential candidates would

admit to the public what they already know, this would be

easier. They voted for us to be here. They authorized the

President to use force.

And so forth.

I want to say our men and women are there. They are serving us. We have seen tremendous progress, and we don't need to tell General Petraeus, who is doing a fabulous job, how to deploy his troops. The President cannot and will not accept that. We need to fund them. General Petraeus promised that in March he would be back before this Congress and hopefully, he implied, to announce further reductions in our troops. Let's do this. Let's don't have this gimmick in which all the appropriations bills are put into one, the supplemental for our troops is put into it, and try to put the President in a position where he is forced to veto legislation that ought not to be. We ought to take care of our soldiers first, get that done, and we can fight over these other matters at some time.

I know other people are here who wish to speak. I will offer this unanimous consent request for S. 2400.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be discharged from further consideration of S. 2400, the Wounded Warrior Bonus Equity Act, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read the third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I probably misspoke a little bit. This is not the wounded warrior legislation you are talking about; it is the Wounded Warrior Bonus Equity Act that has been filed. It is S. 2400. It deals with a situation in which persons who have been promised bonuses to enlist and reenlist and then have been discharged due to injuries sustained in the line of duty, the Dole-Shalala Commission raised the question of whether those promises were being honored because these bonuses are dispensed over a number of years. They have been injured, some have been in combat, and they have not received their full bonus. This would move that bill forward. It is different than the bill which the Senator referred to. It has bipartisan support. Senator Casey, the Presiding Officer, Senators Clinton, Dorgan, Lautenberg, Martinez, Murkowski, Sanders, Wyden, Webb, Lieberman, Ensign, Collins, and McCain are in support of it. For some reason, there is a hold on it. I renew my unanimous consent request.

Mr. President, I will yield the floor in 1 second, but first I need to say we are not in a good position today. This Congress has not performed well. We have passed only one appropriations bill. We have had only 10 votes in the last 31 days. That is not a good performance. I have been prepared to move forward on this legislation and I hope others will. I am disappointed that we have continual objections to that end.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I want to thank Senator Lincoln for her articulate and effective explanation of the difficulties in the Dorgan-Grassley amendment. I absolutely am confident that it will undermine the traditional agricultural safety net for farmers in the Southeast.

There are a lot of reasons for that. I cannot say for sure what it is like in other areas of the country. Apparently, the amendment would not have the same effect in every area, at least in the same percentage of farmers. But since the 2002 bill, input costs to produce agricultural products have increased, particularly in the Southeast and particularly for cotton, one of our most significant cash crops.

The cost of nitrogen, potassium, phosphate, and diesel fuel have risen dramatically. I do not mean a little bit; some of them have doubled during this time. However, support payments have remained level.

As a result, the safety net already has, in effect, been cut in half. The committee-passed bill essentially continues the 2002 structure of having a safety net that is half of what it was a few years ago.

Producer groups in the Southeast understand the Federal budget reality is not something they want to deny. And the lack of availability of new funding impacts our ability to provide increases in the safety net as we would normally expect to occur. But they are united in their concern and opposition to any effort to further reduce the safety net. The Grassley-Dorgan amendment would not impact producers in the Midwest, it appears. Crops such as corn and wheat are not expensive commodities to produce. As a result, payments do not have to be as high to support farmers in those areas when prices fall.

Crops grown in the Southeast, such as cotton and peanuts, are high- value commodities that cost a great deal to produce. For example, cotton currently costs approximately $450 to $500 to plant and harvest per acre. That is a lot of money. In Alabama, the average Statewide yield is approximately 700 pounds per acre from year to year. However, with current market conditions, producers are barely able to break even with the safety net currently in place. Any further attempt to limit payments will practically destroy agricultural production of high-value commodities in the Southeast.

I suggest our colleagues take note of what the farm bill did. Before, when you actually compute the support payment levels, they were $360,000. Now, with the changes in amendments and loophole closings that have occurred, it has dropped to $100,000. Multiple payments are no longer effective, and a decreased limit has the potential to be very harmful.

Let me share this thought with my colleagues. My family on my mother's and father's sides are farmers. They have been in rural Alabama for 150 years. I know something about farming, but there is more to farming than just the farmer. My father, who had a country store when I was in junior high school, purchased a farm equipment dealership. There are a lot of other people who support agriculture than just the farmers. To be effective, make a living, and farm in agriculture in Alabama and throughout the Nation, you have to be engaged in a large-scale operation with expensive equipment. You have to invest a tremendous amount of money in bringing in a crop. If crop prices fall, you can be devastated. As Senator Lincoln said, who is going to fill the gap? It is not going to be somebody here. It is going to be somebody else around the world who is receiving far more subsidies than our people.

There is the farm equipment dealer. There is the fertilizer dealer. There are the seed people. There are the people who labor at harvesting and the people who process the cotton, the soybeans, the peanuts and convert them to marketable products. That whole infrastructure, the bankers who loan the money, the businessman in town, the hardware store that supplies their needs, is dependent on the farmer. In Alabama, as in most areas of the country, farmers are larger. They have far more at risk. If they go under, not only do they go under, but entire industries go under. We have cut this to effectively reduce the abuses in the system. I thank the committee for doing so, and I oppose the Dorgan-Grassley amendment.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I will attempt to complete my remarks in less than the 10 minutes I have.

Modification to Amendment No. 3596

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to amend my amendment. We got a score today that indicated it would cost $1 million over 10 years. This would be an offset for that. So I send this modification to the amendment to the desk and ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to amend the amendment.

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

Mr. President, I renew my unanimous consent request that I be allowed to modify my amendment to allow for an offset for the $1 million cost over 10 years.

Mr. President, I will try to be succinct.

Crop insurance is a critical part of farm policy in America. It is not working perfectly. A number of farmers do not like it and do not take it out. Many do take it out and are not happy with the way it works.

We spend a lot of money on it. The Federal Government contributes 58 percent of the premiums for crop insurance, totaling $3.2 billion a year.

One of the goals of crop insurance was to eliminate ad hoc individual disaster relief bills when farm disasters occur. Yet, since 2002, we have averaged $1.3 billion in additional disaster relief to agriculture. So it has not met that goal.

In 1999, the Alabama Farmers Federation, now affiliated with the National Farm Bureau, had a study of crop insurance. Farmers recommended--these were farmers--they recommended we adopt a system in which farmers, if they chose, could take the subsidy from the Federal Government, plus their own premium, and pay that into a farm disaster savings account and draw on that account if a disaster occurred--but only if they voluntarily chose to do so.

I have studied that. I believe it is a good policy. I talked to Secretary Johanns when he was Secretary of Agriculture a few months ago. He tells me he thought it would be particularly good if we moved forward in this way as a pilot program.

So I have offered this amendment which would call on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create farm savings accounts for insurance purposes, which would allow the Federal contribution to Federal crop insurance to go into that account, along with the farmer's contribution, but only for 1 percent of the farmers in America. That would limit it to a number of 20,000. Then we would try it out and see how it works. I think it could work very well for quite a number of farmers; I don't know how many. It certainly will not eliminate the need for crop insurance. Most farmers, I am sure, would want to have crop insurance.

Under my amendment, farmers would have to have catastrophic insurance. Their crop insurance numbers would be a smaller amount to take care of the more routine financial losses that farmers incur. I think it is a good program. It has been thought out pretty carefully. We have worked with the Department of Agriculture, the Alabama Farm Bureau, the Farmers Federation. They support it strongly. The National Farm Bureau has not taken a position. So I think it is the kind of legislation we ought to consider, and I urge my colleagues to do so.

In a few years, we will see how it is working. If it is not working, so be it. If it is working, we might want to make it permanent. So I ask my colleagues to support this amendment.

I yield the floor, reserving the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman for his willingness to consider this. I do believe I have given a good bit of thought to it, and I have shared it with the committee for the last several or couple weeks. But at any rate, I urge my colleagues to support it, recognizing that it is a pilot program involving only 1 percent of the farmers in America, and from that pilot program, we may learn that we have a good program indeed. So I urge support for it.

I yield the floor, and I yield the remainder of my time.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I call up amendment No. 3596.

Mr. President, I believe I will have an hour debate on this, 30 minutes on each side. I ask I be recognized for 10 minutes tonight and be notified when that 10 minutes has run.

Mr. President, first I would like to share in the gist of the remarks of Senator Wyden, that OPEC is a cartel. They meet to decide how much production they will allow. The reason they do that is to control the price of oil in the world marketplace. By controlling the amount they produce, they control the price. It is a cartel price, it is not a free market price. They call themselves a cartel. In effect, they meet to decide how much they are going to tax the American consumer. That is because the value of the oil on the global marketplace is disconnected to the cost of its production throughout the world.

I think we should do what we can with ethanol and other alternative fuels to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, both for our economy, as well as for our national security.

I thank Senator Harkin for his leadership as chairman of the Agriculture Committee. He has been courteous to me and other Senators in any number of ways. I thank Senator Chambliss for his leadership and his expertise, particularly concerning matters in our region of the country.

My amendment has to do with crop insurance. I truly believe it is an amendment that will be a good-government amendment that will allow us to test an idea that came from farmers themselves and could, indeed, create a situation in which crop insurance works better in America than it currently does.

Crop insurance alone has not worked as well as we expected. Many farmers don't sign up, one farmer told me today. That alone should tell you something. He said farmers are pretty clever. They know a good deal when they see it. If they are not signing up, usually there is a reason.

But crop insurance is a critical component of farming in America today. We need more farmers signed up. We need more farmers insured. How we get there is the question. The farm insurance program that the Government funds and helps support has not ended the periodic disaster payment bills that Congress has considered. Since the year 2000, $1.3 billion per year has been appropriated by this Congress as disaster relief, indicating that the crop insurance is not yet covering the losses that farmers are sustaining. In addition, we are supporting crop insurance premiums to the tune of $3.25 billion a year. That is a lot of money.

What can we do? I suggest we should listen to the farmers. In 1999, the Alabama Farmers Federation held a conference and formed a committee to see what could be done to improve crop insurance. That committee was led by Ricky Wiggins, a cotton and peanut farmer in south Alabama, and concluded that farm savings accounts could do that. That is what they recommended. My amendment would create and allow the Department of Agriculture, in fact, to create farm savings accounts for farmers. The Federal Government subsidy that has been going to insurance premiums would go into this account, and the farmers' part of the premium would go into this account. It

would be their controlled insurance fund.

I talked to Secretary Johanns about this when he was our Secretary, and he liked the idea. He thought it was premature to try to mandate this around the country. We discussed a pilot program and he thought that was a good idea and that is what I am proposing in this amendment.

The concept would be for the Department of Agriculture to create and implement regulations for a pilot program. It would be limited to just 1 percent of farmers throughout the country. That is only approximately 20,000 farmers nationwide. It would create a whole farm risk-management account for all the farming activities, not just on a commodity-by- commodity basis. The combination of two and three failures of a small nature can put a farm in critical condition, and often they are not able to collect on their crop insurance because no one particular crop has been badly damaged. Farm savings accounts would overcome this by providing more flexibility.

The Federal Government would contribute, the farmer would contribute, and when a disaster occurs, a farmer would be allowed to withdraw the money from his emergency fund. If his income fell below 80 percent of his 3-year farm income average, unless there was change in his activities, he would be able to draw money out of that account. But the farmer also must have catastrophic insurance through an insurance company because it is still possible that there would be a catastrophe and he would have a total loss and would need the kind of coverage this farm savings account does not provide. The pilot program would be totally voluntary. No farmer would be required to participate.

I believe the results of this pilot program could be substantial. It would certainly save overhead. It would create a situation where the farmer could decide how to utilize his resources. Today, if a farmer believes his crop is a total loss, he calls in an adjuster. The adjuster has to look at the crop and has to certify that this crop is likely to be a failure at the time it is harvested and would not be worth carrying forward. This will allow farmers in many circumstances to plow under that crop and replant another crop. Until he gets the certification that his insurance is going to pay, he is delayed from doing the replanting. This can be crucial because as the weeks go by the season gets shorter and the farmer has less and less ability to replant.

Those are things I hear about a lot. They come to me and complain. I called insurance companies on behalf of farmers. It is a difficult situation for both sides. The insurance companies have legitimate reasons to be cautious and responsible with their money. Farmers have a legitimate reason to seek prompt payment so they can move forward.

Farm savings accounts could reduce the amount of disaster relief that our Nation is paying out each year. I believe it is an amendment that my colleagues should sincerely consider.

In conclusion, let me say this about it. We will talk about it more tomorrow. This is a farmers plan. They came forward with it. The Alabama Farmers Federation is an affiliate with the American Farm Bureau. They strongly support it. The Farm Bureau itself has not taken a position on it. They are not opposing this legislation.

It would apply only to 1 percent of farmers. It would be voluntary. No farmer would have to sign up for it. The decisionmaking for how to utilize the money when a disaster occurs would be given to the farmer and not an insurance adjuster. And we can see how it works. Maybe it will not work, and maybe we will realize this is not the way to go. But, then again, it might work. In fact, I think it will work. In fact, I think our farmers were very smart when they asked for this.

I believe quite a number of farmers may find this is far more effective for them than the present system we are utilizing. One can conjure up objections that might occur. Certainly, for some farmers this would not be something they would want to opt for, but I believe the Department of Agriculture can work through this and create some guidelines and regulations that would work.

So I say, let's try. Let's give this idea a chance. Let's see if we can create a better way of handling insurance for a number of farmers. After a few we will have learned something. I urge my colleagues to consider this legislation as we go forward with this farm bill. We will probably have a vote on it tomorrow. I truly urge them, let's try this. If you have any objections, I would be pleased to try to address them, and we will speak in more detail about the amendment tomorrow.

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

Mr. President, I add that I appreciate Senator Bingaman for his fair and good leadership. Particularly, I thank Senator Domenici, who understood the problems some of us have had in our region with the high cost of electricity that would occur if this bill were to pass as it came back from the House.

I do think the legislation has a lot of good things in it. Hopefully, we can work forward in a way that we can pass it because we have a need to be more energy independent, and we need to create more energy in a cleaner way. I thank Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici. I am optimistic we will reach that agreement.

Mr. President, I am pleased today to offer a bipartisan bill to fix a serious loophole in the law that has prevented some of our wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan from receiving their full enlistment bonuses when they are discharged as the result of wounds they receive in combat. The Wounded Warrior Bonus Equity Act reflects the hard work of several Members of Congress, who put partisanship aside to address this serious matter. The men and women of our magnificent armed forces serve with incredible courage and bravery. In return, the U.S. makes a commitment to them, and the Government must fulfill its end of the bargain.

Mr. President, I am pleased today to offer a bipartisan bill to fix a serious loophole in the law that has prevented some of our wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan from receiving their full enlistment bonuses when they are discharged as the result of wounds they receive in combat. The Wounded Warrior Bonus Equity Act reflects the hard work of several Members of Congress, who put partisanship aside to address this serious matter. The men and women of our magnificent armed forces serve with incredible courage and bravery. In return, the U.S. makes a commitment to them, and the Government must fulfill its end of the bargain.