Floor Statements

Mr. President, over the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the lack of progress the Democrat majority in the Senate has made on judicial confirmations in the last couple of years, but I want to thank the majority leader for his promise last night to confirm three judges by Memorial Day. This is certainly welcome news. I hope at least one of those is the nominee for the Fourth Circuit.

As we all know, our courts are in crisis. Currently, there are over 40 vacancies on the U.S. Circuit Court, and of those half are judicial emergencies. The consequences of the majority's failure to act on these nominations result in extended judicial vacancies, increased casework, and a delay in verdicts. This obstruction is harmful for the American judicial system and the American people.

One of the most important jobs we have here in the Senate is to offer advice and consent to the President's judicial nominees. While I believe all of these nominees deserve an up-or-down vote on the Senate Floor, I rise today specifically to speak on the current judicial vacancies on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and the qualified nominees waiting for a vote.

The Fourth Circuit of Appeals, which covers South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, is one-third vacant. Even though the Fourth Circuit is facing so many pronounced vacancies, and there is a critical need for judges, the Democratic leadership has made no effort to move any of the pending nominees.

In spite of the number of vacancies, the Fourth Circuit, run by Chief Judge Karen Williams, continues to do a remarkable job. Many of the cases brought before the Fourth Circuit are extremely complex, and the judges must spend a longer amount of time on each of these cases before issuing their opinion. Our judges will not sacrifice quality, but it may take a lot longer for the court to issue its decision. We are lucky that the Fourth Circuit has the leadership it has. They are dedicated and hardworking, clearly, but we cannot continue with this high level of vacancy.

I have heard firsthand about the impact these vacancies have on the Fourth Circuit. Appellate courts must have enough judges to fill the panel, and if a seat is vacant, they must fill it somehow. This means judges from other circuits or judges from the district courts must take time away from their families, their caseload, their administrative tasks to fill the spot on the panel.

Two of the Fourth Circuit nominees, Mr. Steve Matthews of South Carolina and Mr. Robert Conrad of North Carolina, have the support of their home State Senators and are ready for a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite these facts, both nominees have been waiting for over 200 days for a hearing.

Let me quote an editorial from the Washington Post in December of 2007 in which they addressed the dire straits of the Fourth Circuit.

The Senate should act in good faith to fill vacancies--not

as a favor to the President but out of respect for the

residents, businesses, defendants, and victims of crime in

the region the Fourth Circuit covers. Two nominees--Mr.

Conrad and Steve A. Matthews--should receive confirmation

hearings as soon as possible.

On that note, I wish to spend a couple of minutes telling you about Mr. Steve Matthews from South Carolina. President Bush nominated Steve Matthews in September of 2007, but the Senate Judiciary Committee has failed to hold a hearing on his nomination.

Matthews received his undergraduate degree from the University of South Carolina and his law degree from Yale Law School. He is currently the managing director of Haynesworth, Sinkler, and Boyd in Columbia,

I thank the Senator. I have spoken on judges. I will defer to Senator Hatch and make my comments later.

Mr. President, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. President, I thank the chairwoman and ranking member for setting an example for this body in how a bill should be presented to the Senate--with full disclosure, all documentation. It allows us to have an open and honest debate about any differences. There is no question about what is contained therein and what is not. In this case, we disagree on parts of this, but I don't want to begin without first saying I believe the chairwoman and ranking member have set an example for the rest of the committees.

My motion to recommit simply addresses what I believe are serious problems in developing a technical corrections bill that actually changes the legislation from one earmark to another or pluses up earmarks, takes money from an earmark that might be not needed anymore, the project is not wanted, that money is moved somewhere else. While it certainly is correct that the total cost of the bill is about the same, we do need to remember that by next year, we are projecting over a $3 billion shortfall in the trust fund. So instead of adding to earmarks and creating new ones, it makes sense to try to save some of that money so we can fund important infrastructure projects around the country.

The motion to recommit sends this bill back to committee with an amendment that says it should be presented back to the Senate where all of the new earmarks are excluded and any additions to funding for existing earmarks is returned to the current level. What that leaves us with is a technical corrections bill, which is what this bill should be.

The administration has noted with strong concerns that the majority of the technical corrections bill is devoted to earmarks. It modifies hundreds of earmarks from the legislation that passed in 2005. It effectively creates new earmarks, including a stand-alone section that would provide mandatory funding for a magnetically levitating rail system. The presence of excessive earmarks in the 2005 bill created significant inefficiency in the allocation of resources to fund transportation infrastructure.

I have heard regularly from the Department of Transportation of the difficulty in implementing a national transportation system with thousands and thousands of earmarks for special projects that don't necessarily match State priorities.

I encourage my colleagues to take a look at the motion to recommit. It does not kill the bill. It simply refocuses on a technical correction perspective rather than adding to earmarks or creating new ones.

I thank the chairwoman for the opportunity to offer this and thank both her and the ranking member for setting an example of how a bill should be brought to the floor.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Virginia.

(The remarks of Mr. Warner are printed in today's Record under ``Morning Business.'')

Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

I appreciate the chairman giving me the time to speak on the bill. I am offering a motion to recommit, which will be up for a vote in just a few minutes, and it is a motion to recommit the technical corrections bill back to the EPW Committee.

The purpose of this is clear: Colleagues, we have to stop increasing spending at every point, never cutting anything and never looking for savings. On this Transportation bill, there have been a number of projects, hundreds of millions of dollars worth, that were not needed or wanted. And we need to be reminded that the highway trust fund by next year is going to be over $3 billion in the red. With this Transportation bill, we had an opportunity to save. Yet, instead of doing that, I am afraid this technical corrections bill goes well beyond technical corrections and takes the money that would have been saved from unwanted or unneeded projects and uses it to add new earmarks to the Transportation bill that aren't in the original legislation and adds spending to existing earmarks.

My motion would recommit the technical corrections bill to the committee and instruct them to take out any new earmarks and any increases in spending for existing earmarks. What that will do is just leave the base bill, which would be, at that point, technical corrections. That is what this bill is intended to be. So I encourage all my colleagues to show some fiscal restraint and to restore this bill to a technical corrections bill.

I thank the Chair, and I yield back the remainder of my time.

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

Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes to speak on the transportation technical corrections bill, which we will be discussing this week. Later on I will offer a motion to recommit, with some considerations I would like to address now.

A lot of us were part of moving this through Congress. It is an important transportation bill, when roads and bridges are in desperate need of funding for repairs and widening.

There were over 6000 politically directed earmarks in the original highway bill. Now, the corrections bill involves 500 of those earmarks. I thought we should talk about the bill and what this means, as far as transportation in the United States.

First, I want to thank Senators Boxer and Inhofe for all of the work they have done on transparency on this legislation. While I strongly believe we should put an end to the practice of earmarking, if the Senate is going to earmark, it must do it in a transparent manner. I believe the chairwoman and ranking member have set an example for all committees in providing information in a way that people can look at it and debate it. It is all right for us to disagree on whether we like earmarks. In this case, we can do it with full disclosure of what is actually in the bill.

The American people deserve to know how their elected representatives are spending their money, and the way this bill handles earmark disclosure helps us do just that. The Senators from California and Oklahoma have disclosed the sponsor, the recipient, and the purpose of the earmarks in this bill, in addition to letters disclosing that the sponsors have no financial interests in the particular earmark. I was also pleased to see that disclosures were made in a timely manner so we could review them before we began consideration of the legislation. They have gone beyond the requirements of the Senate rules, and I applaud them for their commitment to transparency. I hope the other committees are equally committed to transparency.

My colleagues have suggested on the floor that this bill is needed so States can move forward with planning and construction of authorized projects from the last highway reauthorization bill. As with all large bills, there were typos and other errors in this bill, and the technical corrections bill we are discussing this week was designed to correct those technical errors and problems. I think that is something, obviously, we need oftentimes to do with most of our legislation. But instead of correcting the errors from the last reauthorization bill, the committee decided to rewrite public law and add contract authority as well as add to spending levels for certain projects, essentially adding new earmarks to the bill.

The President's statement of administrative policy regarding this technical corrections bill contains strong language critical of this legislation, and let me quote some from that SAP.

The administration notes with strong concern that the

majority of the bill is devoted to earmarks. The bill

modifies hundreds of earmarks from a bill that passed in

2005, effectively creating new earmarks, including a stand-

alone section that would provide mandatory funding for

magnetically levitating rail. The effort through H.R. 1195 to

modify these earmarks from an authorization that passed only

three years ago is a further reflection of those

inefficiencies. Therefore, the Administration urges that

these provisions be removed from the bill.

That is effectively what my motion will address when we offer it later in the week.

Again quoting from the administration's position on this bill:

The administration urges Congress to restrict the bill to

true technical changes. For example, in addition to those

noted above, both the Senate-proposed substitute and the

underlying bill contain substantive changes to statutory

provisions regarding waiver procedures for Buy America

requirements that should be removed from the bill because

they are not technical corrections. In addition, section 104

of the substitute would repeal section 111(d) of title 23 of

the U.S. Code, which allows idling reduction facilities at

public rest areas in Interstate rights-of-way. This provision

is a policy change, not a technical amendment. Repealing this

section of the U.S. Code would eliminate a beneficial

initiative first proposed by this administration.

We have heard for the past months, and will continue to hear today, that Members of Congress know what is best in their districts--know better than some unelected Federal bureaucrat. If a Member of Congress knows what is best for their district, then why are we debating a 138- page so-called technical corrections package? I suppose some of these are drafting errors, and I do not deny there should always be room for some error in the legislative process. But page after page of corrections does not speak well for our whole earmarking process.

The 1982 highway bill had only 10 earmarks. That number rose to 538 in 1991, and 1,800 in 1998. The SAFETEA-LU highway authorization bill we are talking about today contained an inexcusable 6,000 earmarks, at a cost of well over $20 billion and now nearly 500 changes in the technical corrections package. A 2007 report by the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General, requested by Senator Tom Coburn, found that DOT earmarks have increased in number by 1,150 percent from 1996 to 2005--an incredible increase--and, as we can see, a number that has been very difficult for us to manage effectively here in the Congress.

This administration has projected that the highway trust fund will have a negative balance of $3.2 billion by 2009 if we continue on the path of outspending the receipts in this account.

So piling on the additional authorization levels to projects in this technical corrections bill will only further deplete the highway account and cause the highway trust fund to be bankrupt sooner than projected.

I know the case has been made that this technical corrections bill does not increase the overall amount, but as we went back through this and found numerous earmarks that were no longer needed or even wanted, instead of moving that money to savings, we moved it to earmarks, and new earmarks, and to add to additional earmarks at a time when we need to be trying to save money to overcome the projected deficit. Congress needs to take a timeout and examine the country's infrastructure priorities instead of relying solely on Members of Congress transportation earmarks.

Of most concern is that many of the earmarks requested and funded in highway authorization bills are neither the most effective nor efficient use of funds. Many of them, such as an earmark for renovating the Apollo Theater, have nothing to do with transportation. Senators and House Members have picked particular projects for funding that they know will result in their gaining political support. They will get more votes in their reelection campaigns for bringing home the bacon, but funding will be redirected from highway projects where it is most needed.

This is why I have proposed this motion to recommit, that will send this bill back to the committee and require that the bill be reported back to the Senate with an amendment that eliminates any provision in the bill that increases spending for earmarks that are contained in the SAFETEA bill. Increasing spending for existing earmarks is simply not a technical correction, and such provisions do not belong in this legislation, that is intended to only correct the technical aspects of the bill.

Here are a few examples of provisions in this bill that are not technical corrections but are actually inserting new earmarks into law or significantly increasing funding for existing earmarks.

Page 18 amends an earmark in current law that provides $800,000 for an intersection project in Pennsylvania by striking the $800,000 designation and increasing the earmark to $2.4 million. That is not a technical correction.

On page 19, we amend an earmark in current law that provides Federal funds for widening two blocks of Poplar Street from Park Avenue to 13th Street in Williamson County, IL, by striking that description and inserting the following new earmark, which is to construct a connector road from Rushing Drive north to Grand Avenue in Williamson County. It is not a technical correction. It is a new project and it is the elimination of another one.

Page 22 amends an earmark in current law that provides $800,000 to widen State Road 80 in Henderson County, FL, by striking the $800,000 figure and inserting $1.6 million. We double the earmark amount.

Page 29 amends an earmark in current law that provides $2.7 million for upgrades to an interchange in Pennsylvania by striking the $2.7 million amount and increasing the earmark to $3.2 million.

Page 35 amend a New York earmark in current law that provides $4 million for Miller Highway improvements by striking the existing earmark and inserting the following new earmark: pedestrian paths, stairs, seating, landscaping, lighting, and other transportation enhancement activities along Riverside Boulevard and at Riverside Park South. This is not a technical correction, and it is one of the reasons we are not rebuilding and improving and maintaining bridges in America, because we are focused on things that are not basic infrastructure.

Pages 63 and 64 amend a New York earmark in current law that provides $500,000 for design and construction of an access road to Plattsburgh International Airport by striking this description and inserting the following new earmark: preparation, demolition, disposal, and site restoration of Alert Facility on Access Road, Plattsburgh International Airport.

So we found we didn't need the money in one area, but we found a new area, instead of saving it, as we apparently need to do to keep the Highway Trust Fund on the path of solvency.

The most glaring example of a nontechnical correction made by this bill is the MAGLEV section, which provides $90 million over 2 years in mandatory spending for a MAGLEV rail project from Nevada to California. Under current law, this project was simply between two cities in Nevada, but this technical corrections bill paves the way for extending this project all the way to California and leaves the Federal Government on the hook for paying the price tag.

How will this project expand Federal spending? Well, first, it jams all the funding into the last 2 years, which increases the baseline from $30 million in 2009 to $45 million. The way we fund things here is based on year-to-year baselines. It turns the funding from an authorization to direct spending. In the original bill, it allows the funding of a project. Now it requires the funding of a project. It extends the Federal project from Primm, NV, to Anaheim, CA, and it involves the Federal Government in a dubious construction project that will create an unwanted transportation mode, the cost of which will likely expand considerably.

Along this same route, a private company has raised billions of dollars to build a high-speed rail corridor from Nevada to California without any taxpayer money. Our role in Government should be to make the private sector work, not to replace it and to compete with it with taxpayer dollars.

In addition to increasing Federal funding, this provision inserts the Government into a business that appears to need no propping up from taxpayers. Press reports indicate that the MAGLEV route is nearly identical, as I mentioned before, to a completely privately financed rail project, which is estimated to cost between $3 billion and $5 billion. This legislation would use taxpayer dollars to fund a government project that is in direct competition with an existing privately funded effort.

The Government does not need to be replacing private sector involvement. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times had this to say about

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and bring up the DeMint amendment No. 4474.

Mr. President, if I may, I will mention a few things about the amendment. I am, obviously, disappointed that a germane amendment cannot even be brought up in this debate. A part of this housing package is a $4 billion title III section that we are referring to as community development block grants. Many people here support those.

I wish to make clear to my colleagues this is not a normal block grant. What it is--in the name of helping homeowners who have lost their homes, this $4 billion goes to selected areas of the country where there has been the highest concentration of foreclosures. What it actually does is use taxpayer dollars to buy homes from banks. The banks have taken these homes from former homeowners. This money doesn't help the people who have lost their homes. It takes taxpayer money from all over the country and bales out the banks that now hold this. What we are going to end up with is this money that goes through States down to local communities, through the block grant process, to local communities themselves or through an intermediary who is actually buying private property now owned by the banks, and we are spending money to fix those homes up and then to sell them, the local communities--we are helping to make them property owners.

The bill, as written, does not prevent them from keeping the property as rental property. This will not only spend $4 billion, it will not necessarily do it in an equitable way around the country. It doesn't help homeowners who have lost their homes. In fact, it may hurt the homeowners who don't get the benefit of Government money to fix up their homes. They don't get bailed out if they cannot make their payments. What we are faced with is the Government fixing up a home. We are giving someone a tax credit to buy that home but not the one for sale next to it.

We know this process of how block grants work, and these have been deemed one of the least-effective programs by the General Accounting Office and other Government agencies that looked at this. We are going to funnel money from here to the States, to the local communities, to the banks, and the transactional costs to move these homes and to fix them up is going to probably be more than any value from it. We put responsible homeowners at a disadvantage in this package.

I encourage my colleagues to look at this whole bill. First of all, look at the process. If we cannot have a germane amendment postcloture--which was promised when this bill was brought

up--and we cannot strike a large provision such as this, which is clearly not in the interest of those who are hurting; it is obviously bailing out banks who have made bad loans, what this will ultimately do is encourage banks to foreclose on homes they might not have because they know they are going to get the Government to buy that home if they take it from the homeowner.

The perverse incentives built into this plan need to be thought through. There is no way this will work to help those who have been hurt. It is throwing the money into the wrong places and making homeowners out of local communities in an inequitable way in this country.

It is unfortunate we are not allowed to up bring this amendment and vote on it in a fair and open process. Nevertheless, I appreciate the opportunity to speak, and I appreciate the chairman's indulgence today.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4328 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, every Senator here today knows we need to address the problem with Social Security. Within the next 8 or 10 years, the current surplus we have for Social Security will run out and we will be in the red as far as cashflow goes. We will begin to transfer money from the general fund to pay for Social Security.

Over the last two decades, we have taken over $2 trillion of Social Security surplus and spent it on other things. In the next 5 years alone, counting interest, we will take another trillion of this surplus and spend it elsewhere. This amendment simply says we should spend this Social Security surplus that is in front of us only on Social Security.

The last time this bill was on the floor, it got 45 votes. Several of you who voted against it said you thought it set up private accounts, so you voted against it. There is nothing in this amendment about setting up private accounts or how we save it. It simply says that we spend Social Security on Social Security and save it for the future.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Nelson of Florida.) The Senator from Montana.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4232 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I would ask Senator Allard to take a minute. I have called the amendment up. If the Senator will explain what it is.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4340 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, with high gas prices becoming an increasingly difficult burden for all American families, it is very important that we consider all the legislation we pass here to make sure it doesn't further increase the prices of gasoline.

This is a very simple amendment that creates a 60-vote point of order against any legislation that would cause the price of gasoline to increase, as determined by the CBO in consultation with the Energy Information Agency.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Parliamentary inquiry: Mr. President, if this point of order is waived and the amendment is adopted, would it cause the budget resolution to lose its privilege at this time?

Mr. President, in that case, I move to waive the Budget Act and ask for the yeas and nays.

My colleagues, it is time for some straight talk on earmarks. And it is time for some real change that all Americans can believe in. All three of our colleagues running for President are cosponsors of this moratorium on earmarks.

All three of our colleagues running for President are cosponsors of this amendment. I thank John McCain particularly for years of warning us of what earmarks and our earmark system were doing to undermine confidence in this Congress. I thank Senator McCaskill for her courage in standing up, and my Democratic cosponsors, Senators Obama, Clinton, and Bayh, and all of my Republican cosponsors who know what we all know: that this earmark system is out of control.

It has undermined the faith and the confidence of the American people. It is time for a timeout. My amendment creates a 1-year moratorium on all earmarks by establishing--

My amendment creates a 1-year moratorium on all earmarks by establishing a 67-vote point of order against bills with earmarks. We have heard all the excuses; we will hear some more tonight.

I encourage all of my colleagues to vote against the status quo and vote for this moratorium to give us time and a sense of urgency to reform the system.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I call up amendment No. 4347 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

May I ask the Chair a question?

It is not the intent to bring down the budget or compromise a privilege in any way. If the Senator is worried about privilege, I ask unanimous consent if the motion to waive is successful, that the amendment be withdrawn and deemed passed in a separate Senate resolution.

If that is the case, I now move to waive the Budget Act and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman. This is amendment No. 4339. What it does is what I believe all of us in the Chamber would like to do and that is to make it easier for people without health insurance to buy health insurance. It does not accomplish all our goals or solve all the problems, but what it does is allow people who do not have health insurance through their employer to buy health insurance and deduct it the same way an employer would.

It is a very simple amendment. That is the only item in it, to allow individuals to deduct the cost of a health insurance premium from their taxes.

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

Correct.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, since there has already been more than a minute in opposition, that I have 2 minutes to speak on this amendment.

Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, if I may have the attention of the Chamber, I bring this Semper Fi amendment to the floor as a promise to a number of marines and their families. I admit this is somewhat unusual, but this amendment is not about free speech.

In Berkeley, CA, there were some folks protesting the Marine Recruitment Office. They have their right to protest, to speak out. My case is against the city of Berkeley, which incited hate against our marines and encouraged them to disrupt recruitment, which is their Federal responsibility.

This is a terrible precedent for a local government to take a position against our constitutional role to defend our Nation, which requires recruitment.

The things that were said by the city council about our marines were disgraceful. What we are proposing is to make a point. The earmarks that are talked about that went to Berkeley, over $2 million worth of earmarks, should not have gone there anyway, and they do involve special gourmet-type meals for the schools and money to the University of California at Berkeley, where they already have a $3.3 million endowment.

We can argue about the earmarks all night, but I am trying to make a point on behalf of marines and everyone in uniform that it is not the role of city or State governments to try to disgrace and intimidate, embarrass--whatever--our marines who are doing what we ask them to do.

So my amendment takes away those $2 million worth of earmarks as a symbol to every local government that may want to take on our Federal role and try to make an issue with our marines.

Semper Fi means ``Always Faithful.'' It is the motto of our marines. They are always faithful to us, and I promised many of their families, when I was in Iraq and back here, that I would stand up for them. I encourage all my colleagues to vote for this amendment to make a point.

Would it be OK to add an additional 30 seconds, just to clarify the misinformation?

Mr. President, was the chairman accepting the deductibility amendment?

So you would like to bring it up and vote.

Mr. President, we have had some partisan and controversial amendments tonight. I hope this won't be one. This amendment simply allows individuals who buy health insurance on their own to deduct it from their taxes.

All of us talk about the uninsured. This is a chance to give a number of the uninsured the opportunity to buy health insurance on the same basis that we do in Congress, and that is to make it deductible. Some will say this is a cost. We are already paying for this, and probably much more, as people seek health care in the emergency room and other places when they are not insured.

I encourage all of my colleagues to vote for the amendment to allow Americans to deduct 100 percent of the cost of the health insurance premium.

About 20 minutes or so.

Exactly.

Thank you, Mr. President. I wish to make sure my time is counted against the resolution and not the amendment that was just brought up.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I rise this morning to speak on an amendment I will offer to the 2009 budget resolution on behalf of myself and a bipartisan group of reformers in the Senate.

This amendment creates a 1-year moratorium on all earmarks. It does so by establishing a 67-vote point of order against bills, joint resolutions, conference reports, and messages between Houses that contain congressional earmarks for the fiscal year 2009.

This is very important to the budget debate. As we look at this budget, with planned spending over the next 10 years, we have clearly-- both parties--helped to wreck the budget at the Federal level, while every month we expect families across this country to balance their budget.

I would like to start with a little background. Before I came to Congress, one of my jobs was training quality development people in organizations. We worked on quality improvement--quality process improvement--for a number of years. One of the great consultants in that field, Tom Peters, wrote a book ``In Search of Excellence.''

One of the examples he gave in the book, related to improving quality, was a person who got on an airplane and pulled down their tray and saw a coffee stain there. People could say a coffee stain on a tray in an airplane is not a big deal. But many times we get our cues about quality, or about whom we can trust and why, from things that are different than the real substance.

But his point was, if you see a coffee stain, you not only are concerned about how the cleaning service does in that airplane, you wonder: If they are not able to clean up a coffee stain, are they maintaining the engines? Is this a safe plane to fly in?

For us in Congress, our coffee stain is earmarks. Earmarks tell Americans we cannot be trusted to spend their money in a way that is efficient and for the good of our country. Americans know if we continue to throw their tax dollars at bridges to nowhere or hippie museums--or a number of things I will talk about today--that if we cannot be trusted to do those things, certainly how can we be trusted to do the big things in this country.

We have lost our moral authority. We have undermined the trust of the American people. A lot of that goes right back to our coffee stain, which is earmarks.

In 2006, many in this body, particularly my friends on the other side, promised to clean up earmarks in Washington. But after 1 year, things have gone back to business as usual. The number of earmarks had fallen to 2,600 in 2007 because we were able to stop this huge omnibus spending bill that was going through. But now earmarks are back up to all-time highs. This year, there are 11,612 earmarks, costing $17.2 billion, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. It is the highest level of earmarks in history.

It came through in this Omnibus appropriations bill, which we were given less than 48 hours to review. No one read it. It was full of earmarks, full of wasteful earmarks and wasteful Government spending.

We still expect the American family to balance their budget while we continue to wreck the budget at the Federal level.

Last year, we worked together to pass earmark reforms, but, unfortunately, many of these reforms have been gutted or ignored. As many of my colleagues know, the earmark rule we passed 98 to 0 was watered down behind closed doors and then passed despite our objections. Those in this body who oppose change insisted on continuing business as usual.

I would like to review a little bit the history of the debate so everyone knows how we got to this place. For Americans who may be looking in and still wondering what earmarks are--and I, frankly, confess when I came to Congress I did not know what an earmark was--it is when every Member of Congress and the Senate feel like it is their responsibility to take a piece of taxpayer money and designate it to a particular favorite project or cause or organization back in their congressional district or State. Instead of doing what is good for the country, we do what is good for our next election,

and we use taxpayer dollars to enhance our image back home.

Mr. President, 2007 started off with a pretty hopeful note. I actually offered Speaker Pelosi's earmark transparency measure as an amendment to the Senate ethics bill. But, unfortunately, the leadership on the other side tried to kill the Pelosi transparency language which would have required disclosure of all earmarks instead of 5 percent, as we had on the Senate side. But the effort to kill my amendment failed, and we won the day.

Republicans voted with me and a few brave Democrats--Claire McCaskill and some others--joined us in saying: Enough is enough; America needs to know what we are spending. We were able to pass that transparency bill. But the original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule that was part of Senate bill No. 1 last year, and agreed to unanimously, said authorization earmarks could not be added or airdropped into conference reports with the House. But that provision has been gutted and ignored.

The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule gave Senators the right to force a vote on individual earmarks that were added into conference reports in the dark of night. But that provision was secretly gutted.

The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said bills containing earmarks could not be brought to the floor until we had at least 48 hours to read the bill online in an easily searchable format. That was not easily searchable with this bill you are looking at on the table. But that provision, too, has been gutted and ignored.

In fact, in less than 24 hours we brought this bill to the Senate floor--the largest appropriations bill in our history--that contained over 11,000 earmarks, and it passed in less than 48 hours. No one read that bill.

We are wrecking the Federal budget, and we still expect Americans to balance their family budget.

The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said neither the Senator nor his or her family could financially benefit from an earmark, but that provision has been changed to the point where it is almost meaningless.

The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said the Parliamentarian, who is nonpartisan and whose job is to make impartial rulings, would be responsible for determining if bills brought to the floor complied with earmark transparency rules. That was a good rule, but that has been gutted. The provision has been changed so that now the majority leader and the chairman of Appropriations verify if it has met the rules.

The list goes on and on.

The Senate also passed legislation last year to ban the practice of what we call phone-marking or letter-marking, which occurs when Senators secretly request earmarks by pressuring agencies with phone calls or letters without complying with the earmark disclosure rules. That provision has been gutted.

Last year, the majority promised to cut the number of earmarks in half. But they did not. Instead, we passed the second highest level of earmarks in history. You can see from this chart, Republicans did a lousy job containing the number of earmarks, but we were able--by stopping an Omnibus appropriations bill before we left the majority--to reduce the number to 2,600. But last year it went back up to the second highest level in history--a lot of broken promises.

I also wish to review some things about the earmark system and why it is broken. In the last 20 years, porkbarrel earmarks have exploded. In 1987, Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill that had only 121 earmarks. Here is what he said:

I haven't seen this much lard since I handed out blue

ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.

Mr. President, 121 earmarks. We are dealing with tens of thousands of earmarks now every year. By 2005, earmarks had skyrocketed to about 14,000 wasteful earmarks into our spending bills. In fact, since 2000, Congress has spent more than $188 billion of Americans' taxpayer dollars on over 77,000 porkbarrel projects.

Americans are outraged about a system that hands out their tax dollars based on political influence and congressional seniority instead of on the merit of the projects. Here are a few examples of the results of the earmark favor factory over the last several years. Keep in mind as I read these earmarks, this is hard-working American tax dollars coming to us. We are expecting the family to use their money responsibly to balance their checkbook. Here is what we are doing with their tax dollars:

The International Fund for Ireland, funding the World Toilet Summit, $13.5 million; Richard Steele Boxing Club, $100,000--this is at a time we are creating debt and waste every year--animal waste research and management, $4.75 million; a study to determine if poultry litter can generate electricity, $225,000; the Tiger Woods Foundation--he is hurting for money--$100,000; golf charity, $3 million taken out of the Department of Defense budget for a golf charity; Museum of Glass, $550,000; a fake prison museum, $100,000; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame--a clear national priority--$200,000; The Historic Coal Library, $800,000; wine research, $11 million; Baseball Hall of Fame, $750,000; the National Wild Turkey Federation, $500,000; grasshopper research, $775,000; bike paths, $6.8 million; Montana Sheep Institute, $400,000; National Peanut Festival, $200,000; ornamental fish research, $600,000; Grammy Institute, $800,000; the American Film Institute, $90,000; DNA study of bears, $1 million; study to analyze bear fur, $300,000; wood research, $9.5 million; Cowgirl Hall of Fame, $90,000; Indoor Rain Forest, $50 million; water-free men's urinals, $2 million; Charlie Rangel Monument, $2 million; Teapot Museum, $500,000; an 85-foot speedboat the Navy didn't want and refused to use, $4.5 million; Woodstock Hippie Museum, $1 million; Coconut Road highway project that was unwanted by the city it was sent to, $10 million; shirts for the U.S. Marine Corps that were found to melt in battle and caused severe disfiguring burns, $2 million; National Drug Intelligence Center that duplicates work already done by 19 other Federal agencies and which the OMB asked to be shut down--we still gave them $400 million; and, of course, the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, $320 million.

Folks, there are people who come to this floor during this debate and cite earmarks that they say are good, and certainly we can find some. But for every one earmark that could be justified, we could find hundreds that sound just like the ones I read today. At a time when our country is in severe deficit, when we are at war and the American family is straining every month in their budget, we are throwing their money away--coffee stain after coffee stain, demonstrating to the American people that we don't have the commitment to do what is best for this country.

This is just scratching the surface. Did I read a couple of dozen? There are almost 12,000 right here that Americans will never know how their money is spent.

Besides the waste, earmarks have also led to corruption. Let me say that I have spent enough time working with my colleagues to know that most are not corrupt. They love their country, and they want to make it a better place. But the system of earmarking has taken our energy and diverted it away from solving national problems and wasted it on the task of steering tax dollars back home. This perversion of purpose has undoubtedly led to real corruption scandals that have caused the American people to lose trust in Congress.

In 2006, former Congressman Duke Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison for trading earmarks for over $2.4 million in personal bribes. As reported by ABC News at the time, Cunningham actually kept a bribe menu where he listed what payments he demanded in return for earmarks from Government. This card here shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required $50,000 in bribes. The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went over $20 million.

Also in 2006, former lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to nearly 6 years in prison for corruption and fraud. Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding numerous Indian tribes for which he helped secure earmarks. It was Jack Abramoff who called the congressional appropriations process the

``earmark favor factory'' for his ability to secure millions in taxpayer funds for his clients.

There are thousands of lobbyists who are sent here by towns and universities, small colleges, organizations that are up here trying to get a piece of these Federal handouts that we call earmarks. It is corrupting the whole process.

Why is it so easy for this earmarking system to lead to corruption? It is because there is so little oversight. Rather than being funded based on merit, they are chosen based on political influence and congressional seniority. Is a sewer or a highway project in West Virginia more worthy than one in Wyoming simply because the State's Senator holds a high-ranking appropriations seat? I don't think so.

Americans are frustrated with Congress. Congressional approval is at alltime historic lows. Voters threw out the Republicans in 2006 hoping for a change, but not much has changed. Wasteful Washington spending hasn't stopped. We continue to wreck the Federal budget as Americans are struggling to balance theirs. The congressional favor factory hasn't been closed; it is just under new management.

When Members of Congress are sworn into office, we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. This Constitution prescribes a limited role for the Federal Government, whose purpose is to ``form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty.''

This purpose statement should give Congress a clear focus on national priorities and the good of the Nation as a whole. Unfortunately, many in Congress have forgotten that oath and lost sight of our congressional purpose. I did not raise my hand and swear allegiance to the State of South Carolina and promise to get them as much Federal money as I could. Those who say it is a constitutional responsibility to earmark are not using quotes from this document, the Constitution. In fact, everything in here suggests a national priority. It suggests a uniform way in collecting taxes. It says: No preference should be given to a State when money is appropriated, and it says this, which is key: that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriation made by law.

Over 95 percent of the earmarks we produce here in this Congress are not law, they are not constitutional, and there is no excuse for them at all. We can't hide behind this Constitution. It does not give us the authority, explicitly or implicitly, to take on a local and State role, decide where water and sewer plants go, where bike paths go, which local museum should be funded. That is not our job, but that is a reason we are not dealing with a broken Tax Code, a broken Social Security system, a broken Medicare system, how we deal with keeping jobs in this country, because we are spending most of our time trying to figure out what needs to be done back in our local communities.

The primary culprit of most of the problems we are dealing with here is the addictive power of congressional earmarks that we are trying to stop today. My objection to earmarks is not to specific Members. The requirement that earmarks now have names on them makes them more personal, but it is really the earmarking system that is the problem.

When Members of Congress invest their time in securing Federal funds for sewer plants and bike paths, as I have mentioned, they are doing more than assuming a Federal role for a local responsibility; they are locking themselves into voting for whatever bill contains their projects. That is how leadership here in Congress gets us to vote for bills that are billions over budget and contain lots of bad policy-- they cram in their projects that make it very difficult for us to vote against. For this reason, Congress has repeatedly, regardless of which party is in charge, demonstrated an inability to curb out-of-control spending. Members who may otherwise vote against a massive, wasteful spending bill end up voting aye because it contains a project for a special interest back home.

In January, the first baby boomer received her first Social Security check. In just 3 years, she will qualify for Medicare. With 77 million Americans in line right now behind her, now is the time for Congress to address the long-term fiscal crisis that lies ahead. Social Security and Medicare are trillions of dollars underfunded. Yet we are focused on using earmarks to deal with local issues such as determining the location of local parks and community centers, and we are failing to address these serious national problems. We are wrecking the Federal budget while Americans are struggling to meet their family budget.

I didn't come to Washington to fight against earmarks. I didn't even know what they were when I got here. I came here to work on tax reform and fixing Social Security and Medicare. But the culture of earmarks is distracting the attention of Congress from much needed national reforms. So I have made eliminating earmarks an urgent and immediate goal.

One of the things I found out in trying to improve the quality culture in organizations is you have to understand the root causes of problems and not spend your time treating symptoms. The root cause of many of the problems, particularly the wasteful spending in this Congress, is earmarks.

Already in this new Congress, which promised to be more transparent and to cut earmarks in half, we have seen many shameless requests for pork projects, including taxpayer-funded monuments to individual Members of Congress. Worse, Members of Congress insist on hiding these wasteful pork projects behind some of our Nation's most important priorities. We have held hostage health care for poor children, veterans benefits, and funding for our troops in order to sneak through porkbarrel projects.

We have basically made human shields of our most vulnerable Americans, giving Members of Congress two bad choices: Either we vote for bloated bills that are billions over budget and full of wasteful earmarks or we vote against national priorities and needy constituents. This is no way to run the most important Government in the world.

So we ended another year with a lot more debt and a lot more broken promises. We have not helped Americans buy health insurance; in fact, we have made it harder. We haven't cut spending; we have raised it. Our antiquated Tax Code continues to chase jobs overseas, and we have not addressed the huge entitlement crisis. Meanwhile, we increased the number of special interests and wasteful earmarks from last year, and both parties are bragging that we did better than expected. Instead of keeping promises, we have let the earmarking system pervert our purpose as Members of Congress.

The purpose of the amendment that I have with the budget is to take a timeout. When you have a problem, when you have an addiction, you have to agree you have a problem and you have to get into rehab. Congress needs to get into rehab. We need to stop earmarking this year, take a timeout, and figure out how to reform the system. Those who continue to give excuses, who say: No, we don't need a timeout, we will fix it, I have been listening to for 8 years. They keep saying there is a problem we need to fix, but they never do. It is time to take this issue seriously, to get earmarks off the table so that we can look at it objectively.

I would encourage all of my colleagues to join me, the Republican nominee for President, John McCain; the two Democratic possibilities for President, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; and Claire McCaskill and vote for this amendment and show America we can be trusted.

I thank you, Mr. President, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Alabama for their leadership on this immigration issue. Thanks for a few moments to speak on a bill that I will be offering related to the immigration debate that is called the Complete Fence Act.

Last year, I think we took on a noble task of trying to solve the immigration problem with one grand bill, but what we have learned in the Senate is that it is very difficult to focus on one issue and get a bill through without a lot of add-ons for special interests. We are certainly seeing it with the consumer product safety bill that we are debating now.

The House passed a bill that was bipartisan and unanimous and was supported by consumer groups as well as industry groups. It was a bill that was ready for us to take and pass and send to the President. But we in the Senate needed to add in a number of special interest provisions that have nothing to do with consumer product safety. We even discovered last night, as the bill was put into a managers' amendment, they had added some new things that apply to one State and things that have nothing to do--no germaneness--with consumer product safety that we have to deal with.

Certainly, that is what we ran into on the immigration issue. So much was added to the bill, it was like trying to swallow an apple when that apple needs to be eaten with a number of different bites.

That is what we are trying to do with this series of immigration bills which recognize that in order to have a real solution to the immigration problem in the country, we need to build a platform for reform one plank at a time. Even those who were pushing the comprehensive bill now realize we need to begin with border control and enforcement, the type of enforcement internally that the Senator from North

Carolina was talking about: a worker verification program so employers know who is legal and who is not. If we build this system that way, in a way the American people can trust, we can get to the point where America will trust us to develop new immigration policies, how to deal with those who are already here, and how to accept immigrants in the future who are needed for our economy.

But the very first step, as all of us have recognized, is to have border control. This body has passed several times legislation that would build a 700-mile fence along the border that would support our Border Patrol in stopping illegal immigrants. It is not just an issue of illegal immigrants themselves; it also involves drug trafficking, it involves human trafficking, and it also involves security from terrorists who might be smuggling weapons into this country. It is essential that we control our borders.

In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act which required 700 miles of fencing, and this is metal fencing--this is not virtual fencing; this is metal pedestrian fencing along the southwest border-- and a deadline for 370 miles of this to be completed by the end of this year. At this point, only 167 miles of real metal fencing has been completed, but we have been assured by the Department of Homeland Security that they will meet their goal of 370 miles of fencing before the end of this year.

The bill I am introducing would set a deadline for 2010 for all 700 miles of pedestrian metal fencing to be completed. This is essential to move ahead with the immigration reform process so the American people will know we are serious about protecting the border and having a workable immigration system.

So I urge all of my colleagues to urge the Department of Homeland Security and comfort the American people with the fact that we are serious about completing this fence and to support the Complete Fence Act of 2008.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have an agreement with the chairman and the next speaker to bring up an amendment and then yield the floor. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and send an amendment to the desk.

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

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I want to speak for a few moments on my amendment No. 4124, which focuses on section 31 of the underlying bill, the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act. This section deals with garage door openers.

It is important, obviously, as the bill that addresses safety, to look at issues such as garage doors. I remind my colleagues that the whole reason for the Consumer Product Safety Commission is to evaluate the safety of various products. When we as a Senate or as a Congress as a whole take it upon ourselves to determine what is safe and what is not, we basically violate the principle of what we are trying to do-- particularly when we get into even more detail, where we attempt to prescribe the particular technology that has to be used on certain projects before it is deemed safe. That totally goes around the idea of an expert panel on this commission, with the testing lab that we are going to fund, using their expertise and resources to determine the safety of a product.

This particular section, I am afraid, takes one particular technology that is only used in one product in one State and says that has to be the technology used on all garage door openers. This is something that, as a Senate, we all need to stop at this point. The precedent that it establishes for us to prescribe a particular technology violates everything we are trying to do here.

Let me talk specifically about it for a few minutes. Section 31 mandates that all garage doors in the United States include a device that doesn't require contact with an item or person, using photosensors, while prohibiting the sale of other technologies, namely the touch technology, in the United States.

Most new garage doors in this country--automatic garage doors--use a technology where if it touches something on the way down, it stops. It generally uses the pressure of about 15 pounds.

Specifically, the section states:

Notwithstanding section 203(b) of the Consumer Product

Safety Improvement Act of 1990 . . . or any amendment by the

American National Standards Institute and Underwriters

Laboratories, Inc. of its Standards for Safety-UL 325, all

automatic garage door openers that directly drive the door in

the closing direction that are manufactured more than 6

months after the date of enactment of this Act shall include

an external secondary entrapment protection device that does

not require contact with a person or object for the garage

door to reverse.

Keep in mind that it has been deemed safe to use the technology that is being eliminated by this bill. The language explicitly says ignore the experts at the Underwriters Laboratories. This effectively requires all garage doors to include a photosensor at the bottom of the door that reverses the door direction.

Why is this a problem? This provision puts Congress in the position of picking and choosing winners and losers in a highly technical area of safety regulation. No Senator has the expertise to determine what is a safe garage door technology. Most of the Members of this body are lawyers or businessmen, physicians and veterinarians, and we should not substitute the judgment of Senators who, by and large, have no technical background for the expertise of the engineers at the Underwriters Laboratories. By legislatively mandating that only one technology is safe, we are doing just that--requiring garage door manufacturers who sell garage doors to include these devices, increasing the cost to consumers, and it discourages innovation in the future. If we say this is the technology that has to be used, then the chances of new technology which improves safety and convenience in the future are diminished. Legislatively mandating that only one type of technology is safe enough for us in the United States will also help certain companies at the expense of others and discourage innovation in one of the areas where innovation is most important and should be encouraged, which is consumer product safety.

This will mandate away free market competition. It will boost the sales of companies that sell this required technology while hurting the sales of those that do not.

The Door and Access Systems Manufacturers Association, which is an association representing garage door manufacturers, recently voted on whether they would support this provision. They voted 14 to 1 to oppose the provision. I will let you guess who the one vote was that voted against it. It was Chamberlain, the company that makes the technology that is required in this legislation.

The inclusion of this provision in the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act represents why the American people do not trust Congress. It represents Washington politics as its very worst. After the experts approved a competing technology for sale in the United States, this one company, Chamberlain, retained a high-powered lobbying shop in Washington and paid them in excess of $140,000 to secure inclusion in this provision. Because of the connections to the lobbying firm, it was able to secure proposed Federal legislation that would protect its company from competition.

Is the technology that the bill mandates the only safe technology? Not at all. According to the experts at Underwriters Laboratories, the technology the bill mandates is safe, but it is not the only safe technology. The Underwriters Laboratories, through its standard product certification process, has certified another technology as safe, which does not use a photosensor but uses approximately 15 pounds of resistance to trigger a reverse on the door.

For example, according to the Architect of the Capitol, the doors of the Senate subway that we all ride on, which carries thousands or maybe millions of people per year from the Dirksen to the Hart Senate office buildings, uses touch technology. If it touches an

object that provides more than 30 pounds of resistance, the doors will pop back open. The Senate daycare also uses the same technology on its doors, which reopen if they touch an object with 8 to 15 pounds of resistance. Thus, the technology that the Underwriters Laboratories found safe, which this bill deems unsafe, requires less resistance than the Senate subway doors and approximately the same resistance as the Senate daycare doors to reverse the course.

The fact is that touch resistance technology is being used all over our country today very successfully and safely. This bill prohibits its use in the future. The reason it prohibits it is one of the reasons people don't trust us here--because it is clearly not there to make America and American products safer, but to do a specific favor for a constituent with a lobbying firm that puts pressure here on Congress.

Why do my colleagues need to support striking section 31? As I have said several times, I think it represents the worst of the legislative process here, and we all know better. Congress should not use its power to override the opinions of congressionally designated experts, unless we have proof they are wrong. We should not promote legislation that would pick winners and losers in the marketplace. We should not pass legislation that would discourage innovation, especially when it comes to ensuring we have the safest technology possible to protect our children.

By striking section 31 of the Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, this amendment would give the experts at Underwriters Laboratories the final say in determining what technologies are safe for sale in the United States. The amendment would not give a competitive advantage to any company, and it does not strike any safety provisions. It simply restores the law to where it is today. It would only require that the experts decide what technologies are safe in the United States, which is the purpose of the whole bill. We give more funding to the Commission. We give them a more sophisticated testing lab to use. We are empowering the best experts in the country. It is not our job to come in and try to give one company an advantage because it happens to be in the State we represent.

Mr. President, I hope all of my colleagues will support the amendment to strike section 31 from the underlying bill.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield?

Madam President, I appreciate the Senator's comments. I do wish to make it clear that while Congress has set many safety standards, it is very unusual for us to select and prescribe the technology that will be used to achieve those standards. For instance, a bicycle helmet has to take a certain amount of impact, but we do not prescribe what that helmet is to be made of. We do the same with automobiles and impact. We need to tell the safety labs, the manufacturers, what standards they have to achieve, but when we start picking the technology, we get way out of bounds.

I have the UL standards in front of me. I just need to clarify what my colleague from Arkansas said because the standard does require a primary reversing system as well as a secondary reversing system. So currently, most garage doors are going to have a system in the motor, and if it senses resistance, it will reverse, and there needs to be a secondary system. The way that is done today is either by some photo type of mechanism where if something crosses the path between the door and the bottom, it stops and reverses. That is one way. The other way is pressure sensitivity along the bottom of the door itself. But what the underlying bill does--the UL standard is it has to be an equivalent secondary safety measure; it has to be the photo type of system or the touch system. But this bill says it has to be the photo system. Frankly, from what we understand from talking with some consumers, there is not necessarily a lot of satisfaction with just the photo system because a door that goes down can be opened by a leaf blowing underneath it. But the touch system has been deemed just as safe by the Underwriters Lab, but it does not have the same inconvenience.

What we are asking is that we stick to the standards that are here, that we have a primary and a secondary reversing system but we allow the industry to pick whether it is a photo type of reversing system or a touch system, and let the UL system we have set up, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, determine which is safe and which is not. This bill says that only one way is safe for the secondary reversing system. Actually, the industry has already proven that there are other safe ways to do it which we need to continue to allow.

Again, I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to debate. I appreciate the intent of this amendment, which is to make garage doors safer, but I think we can leave the technology to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Madam President, I would like to clarify some of the facts my colleague is talking about because there is nothing in my amendment to strike or prohibit the use of this phototechnology. If that is deemed the safest by the manufacturer, then certainly it can be used. But the secondary reversing device that uses touch technology has had no injuries. It has been deemed safe as well. In the future there are likely to be even better and safer and maybe even more economical ways to make garage doors safe.

The reason we need to strike this provision is because it limits consumer safety to one idea--one idea that exists today. It prescribes for the UL laboratories that it has to be done this particular way instead of us saying, as a Congress, it has to be safe. If we want to prescribe those standards, that is fine, but I am afraid we are distorting the information. We need to allow the opportunity for innovation in safety in all areas.

There is nothing that says this phototechnology is any safer than the touch technology we have talked about, which is another option being used by garage door companies today. So the argument to keep this in is totally parochial. It is not about safety for children, which has been spoken about today.

We believe the current standards that have a primary and secondary reversing system are important and that we need to encourage manufacturers to innovate on the safest ways to make that happen and that the labs we have put in charge of determining safety can look at these different ways to make garage doors safe and tell us which ones are the safest and tell consumers which ones are the safest. It makes absolutely no sense, and it is a terrible precedent for us as a Senate to come in and say: This is the technology that always has to be used in order to be safe, and we have no standard associated with it. We say, this is the technology.

Our job is to set the safety standards and say products should be safe, not to act on behalf of companies that happen to be in our States and say you use their technology or you don't use any at all. That is not what my amendment says. My amendment says: Find the very best technology, make it as safe as possible, but don't prescribe how that has to be done.

Madam President, I yield back.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up two amendments I have at the desk. They are amendments Nos. 4095 and 4096.

If I can respond to the chairman, two amendments--one is the House bill, which is 4095, and the other relates to the whistleblower provision, which is 4096.

No. They are at the desk. I wanted to call them up and speak about them later.

Yes.

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

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Amendment No. 4094

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

Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes to speak on two amendments I called up this morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak. These amendments certainly relate to the consumer product safety bill my colleague from Arkansas has done such a great job ushering through committee and onto the floor. It is clearly a very important issue for us as a nation.

Last year, we were reminded a number of times of the problems when the safety of our products is not ensured. We saw some products coming in from other countries that gave us cause for concern, as well as from within our own country. In the food and drug area, we have certainly seen problems there. So we need as a Congress to make sure we do everything we can to ensure the products that are sold in this country, particularly for our children, are safe.

This was an issue the House of Representatives took very seriously. They have worked for a number of weeks, if not months, on a consumer product safety bill. Speaker Pelosi was very involved with the bill, as well as Chairman Dingell and Ranking Member Barton. They produced a bill that had been vetted by a number of people. It had support from consumer product groups, as well as from a number of manufacturers, which is key, that we cannot ignore in the Senate. We need to make the products safe, but we also need to make sure we do not put such a burden on American businesses that they cannot create the jobs and grow the opportunities in the future. That is a delicate balancing act which I believe the House achieved.

In a remarkable vote, the House voted unanimously to support the consumer product safety bill they had on the floor. That bill does a number of things we talk about here.

Let me first read a quote from Chairman Dingell, who is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. It was his committee that worked so hard on this bill. He said, in a New York Times editorial:

Let's hope that the Senate acts expeditiously and with the

same bipartisan commitment as the House.

It is a quote I very much appreciate. We were here in the Senate disturbed, a few weeks ago, when we worked real hard to pass a bipartisan Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that we hoped the House would act on in the same bipartisan fashion. Unfortunately, the House decided they needed to include some provisions, some special interest provisions that allow plaintiffs' lawyers to sue the telecommunications companies that are helping us intercept messages from suspected terrorists.

I am afraid we are doing the same thing now on the Senate side that our House colleagues did. We have a very important issue in front of us, which is consumer product safety. The House has sent us a bipartisan bill with clear support from all our constituencies. Yet we have decided on the Senate side to add some special interest provisions, specifically for plaintiffs' attorneys and union bosses.

The House bill does a lot of the things I believe in and I think most of my Senate colleagues believe need to be done.

First of all, it requires there be third-party testing of children's products for lead and other hazards to ensure that unsafe toys never make it to the shelves.

It also requires, as my colleague from Arkansas was mentioning earlier today, that manufacturers place distinguishing marks on products and packaging of children's products to aid in the recall of those products. It can be years later that a product is found to be defective and recalled, and we need to have a way to identify those defective products and recall them and to notify consumers of safety problems.

The bill the House passed unanimously also replaces the Consumer Product Safety Commission's aging testing lab with a modern, state-of- the-

art lab that will allow them to find which toys are safe and which ones are not.

It improves the public notice about recalls so we have a better system of letting the public know when we find a safety problem.

It preserves a strong relationship between industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ensure that industry continues to share information we can use to determine the safety of products.

It also restores the full panel of five Commissioners to the Commission.

This bill is a bill we should pass in the Senate. We know if we go through the process this week of adding amendments and changing the bill, even if we ultimately pass a bill, we are looking at weeks if not months in conference with the House to come out with a final bill.

We have an opportunity. If we pass this amendment, which is a substitute to the underlying bill, passing the House bill, we can send a new bill, a consumer product safety bill, to the President that can be implemented right away.

Again, this is a bill that passed 407 to nothing in the House, with the Democratic leadership taking the initiative on this bill and Republicans agreeing. What we are doing here in the Senate is adding a number of provisions that are not for consumer product safety but designed to create loopholes for special interests.

One is the whistleblower protection provision, which I have a separate amendment to strike. There are ways we can fix this provision. We have a Federal standard we apply to our own agencies that does not create an open-ended litigation process but focuses more on protecting those who make us aware of a problem that an employee tells us about. We need to do that in industry.

I am certainly willing to work with the majority on this issue. I believe Senator Cornyn has an amendment that applies that Federal standard, which would improve this legislation, provide whistleblower protection, but at the same time not create a playground for plaintiffs' attorneys as well as create an opening, as this bill does, for disgruntled employees to wreak havoc inside an organization.

The way the bill is set up, any employee--who may be aware he is getting ready to lose his job for incompetence or something else--can complain about a safety issue, which may or may not be real, and that employee is basically guaranteed a job for life because this bill does not allow a company to fire someone who complained about a safety problem. Even if there was not a safety problem, all the employee has to do is say they had a reasonable belief there was a safety problem.

Folks, it is hard enough to do business in this country today. It seems everything we do in this Congress makes it more expensive and more difficult for our companies to compete in a global economy. Countries throughout Europe lowered their corporate tax rate to 25 percent. China has lowered its corporate tax rate. We continue to keep ours at a level that makes it very difficult for our companies to compete. We need to realize, as we seek consumer product safety, particularly safety for children, we do not need to put unnecessary burdens on our companies and make it more difficult for them to operate in this country.

The whistleblower provision in this bill does not improve consumer product safety, but it does create a potential for increased problems with folks who are manufacturing in this country. We need to realize foreign-based companies are not faced with this same provision. It is only those that are American owned, operating here, that have to follow this whistleblower law the Senate is attempting to add in the consumer product safety legislation. So what we have are American companies at a disadvantage to companies in other parts of the world that do not have to comply. My amendment would strike this provision. Perhaps we can reach a compromise and protect the whistleblower without damaging our competitiveness as a nation.

Mr. President, these are two amendments, and I have a number of others that get at some of the problems in the bill. But, again, I commend the chairman for his work and the commitment by this body to improve consumer safety in this country. I hope we can work together in a bipartisan fashion to create a bill that is focused on safety and not so much on doing favors for our different constituencies.

With that, Mr. President, I yield back and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I would like to speak for a few minutes on my amendment that I believe we will be voting on at 5:30 today. This amendment brings up the House-passed consumer product safety bill. This was a bill that had extraordinary bipartisan support. It was led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Dingell and Ranking Member Barton. They worked together for a number of weeks to create a bill that did a lot of the things we had hoped to do in the Senate, and Chairman Dingell has encouraged us to take up the House bill and pass it today.

I see Senator Stevens has come to the floor, and I know he wants to speak on this bill. I would be glad to yield my time or part of my time and then follow Senator Stevens, if he would like me to. I think we have the balance of the time until 5:30 together, and I understand the Senator from Alaska needs 5 minutes. I yield 5 minutes to Senator Stevens.

Mr. President, I agree with a number of points the Senator from Alaska just said, particularly the importance of working in a bipartisan fashion on a bill as important as consumer product safety. That is exactly what I am proposing with this amendment because this is something that not only had bipartisan support in the House, it had unanimous support in the House.

The Senator from Alaska also mentioned the importance of moving quickly. He suggested that my amendment might actually slow this bill down. In fact, the opposite is true. If we were to adopt this amendment, the consumer product safety bill could go to the President tonight. This is a bill that has been thoroughly vetted and includes a lot of good provisions about which I would like to speak. But even my colleagues who would like to vote for the final Senate bill--I don't know whether my amendment will be adopted or not tonight--can still vote for the Senate bill even if they vote for the House bill.

Voting for this amendment is voting for a good, clean, bipartisan consumer product safety bill that we might not have at the end of this process. As all of us know, the longer this debate goes on, the more nongermane amendments will be added to the bill, and the possibility of this bill being passed and going to conference and actually coming out with a bill we can all support--we don't know what the odds of that are. But we do know if we pass the House version of the bill tonight, we will have a new consumer product safety bill that does a number of the things all of us want. I will mention a few of those.

One of the items we talked about is not just to count on companies to test their own product safety but to have a third-party testing, particularly of children's products, for lead and other hazards. The House bill sets that up.

We also require manufacturers to put distinguishing marks on their products so that in the event of a recall, we would know how to identify the products that are out in the marketplace that need to come back. Consumers would know which ones are safe and which ones are not.

It also replaces the aging testing labs the Commission uses now and installs a state-of-the-art testing system that will help us determine more quickly which products are safe and those that are not.

We create a new system of advising the public when we have found a safety problem through using the Internet, radio, and television, and we preserve the strong relationship between industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, so we get the information from them on a constant basis if there are any safety problems or even improvements in safety in different product categories. And we restore the full panel of Commissioners to the Commission, which is not in place right now.

The House bill had support from a total range of Members. From the most conservative Republican to the most liberal Democrat, they agreed to come together without further delay and pass a bill that we need.

The groups from the outside that look at these issues, particularly the manufacturer groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, that represent millions of jobs across this country--and that is really what we

are talking about here. The Senate bill would actually put an additional burden on American-based manufacturers that our foreign competitors do not have. If there is one thing we do not need to do as a Congress, it is to make it even more difficult to do business in this country, to put our workers at a further disadvantage to workers from overseas by adding an unnecessary burden to this consumer product safety bill, provisions that do not necessarily improve safety but do make it increasingly difficult to be competitive as an American manufacturer. We need not do that.

The Senate bill has some problems, and we have a number of amendments we can add. Right now, my amendment has the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, chamber groups; business journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, are supportive of this amendment, and they are not supportive of the Senate version, frankly.

So we have a better alternative tonight. I encourage my colleagues to set aside partisanship, to set aside maybe particular special interests we may want to do some favors for in the Senate bill. The House set that aside, and they did the right thing. That is really what I am encouraging my colleagues to do tonight: Do the right thing.

This is not a bill I created. This is a bill which is supported by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Dingell, as well as the Republicans on the House side. We probably will not have another opportunity this year as a Senate to vote for a bill that has unanimous support in the House. Yet we have it on the floor tonight. I encourage my colleagues: Do the right thing. Let's practice what we preach for once and be bipartisan and support an amendment that will get a consumer product safety bill to the President right away so we can start the implementation process.

Mr. President, I appreciate the time. I know my colleague, the chairman, wishes to speak before the vote. I yield the remainder of my time. He can have the rest of that time. I yield back my time.

I want to thank you and all my Democratic colleagues for allowing me some time on the floor to discuss the progress in the war. This allows us as Republicans to contrast our position versus the position of retreating and announcing that we are giving up on Iraq.

We have heard a lot of talk here today, and apparently there is too high a pricetag for freedom. Certainly you can make an argument that it is expensive to be in Iraq, just as other wars have been expensive and deadly to our country.

World War II, the importance of that war can never be underestimated, and the price on it could not be estimated. The fact that we need to fight wars to show our strength as a nation has been proven time and time again. I am worried that the Senate is not united in the need to show strength against the war on terror.

Last year at this time, my Democratic colleagues had said that the war in Iraq was lost, and implicitly the war against terror, since the front line today on the battle against terror is in Iraq. It was announced here on the Senate floor that the war was lost, that we were in a hopeless civil war in Iraq. Since then we have had about 40 votes, or different variations of votes to cut funding, to withdraw, to retreat, sending a terrible signal to our troops and our enemies that we lack the resolve that is necessary to win this war. Whether we call it running and retreating or giving up or saying America cannot win, all of those words and ideas emanated from the Senate floor from the majority side in the past year.

Many even voted against the funds to surge the troops that has proven to be such a success over the last several months. Some of the funding as late as the end of last year was held hostage to gross earmarks that were unnecessary in a time of war. How can we talk about the war on terror being so expensive when we held those funds hostage to other things that were certainly not a high priority?

I am afraid my Democratic colleagues, at least many of them--I know this is not true for all of them, but too many clearly do not understand the threat of terrorism in our world today and what that means to our country and our freedom. Too many have forgotten the importance of a strong military and how that results in peace around the world when nations respect the power of the United States of America. But who can respect America any longer, after stating our resolve to stand Iraq up as a free and stable democracy, if in the middle of that challenge we decide to retreat and withdraw?

The very fact that we have talked about it so many times has sent a signal of weakness that has empowered our enemies and likely put more of our forces at risk. I hope this is the last time we do it this year.

Everyone has a right to dislike the war, to say it is too expensive. But our responsibility here in the Senate is much different than the average citizen. When we send a signal that we are not supporting the key mission of our military, we do much to demoralize our troops, and to strengthen the resolve of our enemies.

Again, I hope this is the last time we will do it. My Democratic colleagues cannot have it both ways. They continue to try to say they support the troops, but everything they actually do undermines them, pulls the rug right out from under what they are trying to do. It's a lot of empty rhetoric. But in the last week we have seen from the Democrats on the House side, a key essential part of our intelligence system is being threatened because we will not give the administration the tools to use our technology to intercept messages from terrorists who might be planning to attack us or our interests around the world.

I returned from Iraq a couple of weeks ago. This is my third trip. I saw a marked difference from anything I had ever seen before. The statistics have been talked about here on the floor of the Senate: The monthly attacks have decreased 60 percent since June of last year; civilian deaths are down over 75 percent in the last year; al-Qaida in Iraq remains a threat but their power and ability to do damage has been greatly diminished.

I wish to talk a little bit about the trip. I joined Senator Ensign and Senator Tom Coburn on this trip. Once we landed in Baghdad, we took a helicopter to a small community about 30 miles south of Baghdad. This was a community that was controlled and terrorized by al-Qaida up until about 3 months ago. You would not even go down Main Street in an armored vehicle, we were told by our troops there.

Yet we landed at an American outpost there, American soldiers were living in that community a couple of blocks from the Iraqi Army outpost where they were living in the community, and we walked out of our outpost on the main street and talked to the citizens who had opened their markets, talked to the Iraqi soldiers, and talked to the citizens who were helping to patrol the area. In this picture here I am talking with one of the local sheiks, Sheik Ali, who told us that al-Qaida only a few months before had dragged his father in front of him and shot him and killed him.

Next to him is an Iraqi soldier whom we helped to train. They are as sharp as any soldier you would expect to see. This community is well protected. Colonel Ferrell, who is in charge of the outpost, who took us down the main street, was giving us briefings and we were talking to the sheik as well as the Iraqi soldiers. They were proud to tell us what was happening there.

The sheiks and the local tribes are the key to working with the American surge and have freed much of Iraq in the last 6 months. These local leaders have turned against al-Qaida, because al-Qaida has done such damage and such brutality to their families and their communities that they are now talking with us and helping us to defeat al-Qaida in that area there.

I have another photo here. I know it is difficult to see. But we were walking down a street that was empty except for bodies a few months ago. These little markets have opened. As we walked down the street, in this case it was mostly American soldiers walking with us, except for this group--these young men in the green jackets which they called in this community the ``Sons of Iraq.'' Our military pays them to help patrol every day. When I asked the colonel, when all of these citizens came running out to us, why were they not worried about them blowing themselves up and killing all of the soldiers and us who were walking down the street, the colonel responded: Because we know everyone who is here.

A lot of these folks from the markets came out and hugged our soldiers. I tell you, I couldn't have felt better to see our soldiers so appreciated in that area, to see these young men with walkie- talkies. Their job is to patrol, to make sure if any stranger comes to the community, that they notify the Iraqi Army and the American Army so that these people can be checked out.

We saw a number of trucks with mattresses and furniture piled high, of people moving back to this little community--who had moved out months and years before because al-Qaida had run them out. We walked down several blocks. Probably 80 to 100 markets have reopened, and the people were glad to see us. They were cheerful. They feel as if they have their community back.

We have not won this war yet, but we can see everywhere we go that Iraqis are standing up and taking back their country for themselves. And our troops, along with the Iraqi troops whom we helped to train, and the Sons of Iraq are guarding and protecting their community.

I want to talk about one Marine here. This is Major Alston Middleton, who actually went to Porter-Gaud High School in Charleston. He is a Marine working in the base where we are training Iraqi soldiers. Every 3 weeks we are producing 2,500 new Iraqi soldiers who go straight from that camp to the battlefield. They are being trained with the same equipment and arms they will be using when they get there.

He is proud of what he is doing. Everywhere we went, our troops wanted to prove to us that what we were doing was necessary, it was right, it was working, and we could win it. It was important to them that we know it.

When I asked them what do they need that they do not have, the answer I got--more than any other answer--was: Do not forget us. Some of the rhetoric on this floor has sent the signal to our troops that we are forgetting them and do not appreciate what they are doing.

This Marine, away from his family, like all of the other Marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen we see there, many of them away from their children and spouses for over a year, we know what sacrifices they are making. But I am afraid these Marines are not respected in some parts of this country. I am afraid the Democrats on the Berkeley City Council in California--and some here may say that is an isolated situation, but it is not, because they are taking their signals from what they hear right here on the Senate floor. They called our Marine recruiters unwelcome intruders. They called them thugs. They called them Bush's murderers. When you see the video and what they called our Marines, while our Marines are sweating and bleeding and dying for us and our freedoms.

What the Berkeley city council did was not freedom of speech. The protesters had their freedom of speech for months, but that wasn't good enough for them. They wanted the power of government behind them to support their point of view at the expense of the Marines and all Americans who appreciate our Marines and love what they do. We need to recognize that some of the things that have been said right here are sending a signal to people like the Berkeley city council to show disrespect for people like Major Alston Middleton, who is willing to put his life on the line for us.

I have introduced a bill we call the Semper Fi Act, named after the Marine motto, which means ``always faithful.'' It is just to rattle the cages a little bit

of the city council in Berkeley, to tell them: OK, if you want to take exception to our Federal mission there in Berkeley, certainly you don't deserve these secret earmarks we have sent to Berkeley in the last several months. But the Marines are always faithful and always have been. They are faithful to our country, to each other. We need to be faithful to them and all those who are fighting for us.

This discussion on the floor is again trying to have it both ways, that we support our troops, but then we don't. We don't support them when we don't support the very mission we have asked them to give their lives for. We can't have it both ways. We can't keep having this discussion which questions, before the whole world, the very mission we have asked of our soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen and all the civilian support staff we have in Iraq and Afghanistan and throughout the world who are fighting the war on terror. We are going to win the war on terror because of the resolve we have to be free and peaceful as a nation.

I hope we will get the message here that our troops have in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world, that sometimes you have to fight for the freedom we have here in this country. Now is the time we have to fight. The fact that we have shown resolve in the last year has resulted in clear successes in Iraq that are undeniable. We know we can win this battle, but this battle will not be the last one. The terrorists are going to be here for a generation or more. If they are not in Iraq, they are going to be in Afghanistan or they will be in Africa. They are going to be somewhere, if they are not here, doing their terrorist deeds against the peaceful people of the world. We have to show resolve. Our enemies must know that we will never stop until we root them out and do away with them.

I also want to make one last comment because the folks from South Carolina are in so many ways very involved with the effort in Iraq. In fact, over the last several years the airmen at Charleston Air Force Base flying C-17s carry more of the cargo, supplies, and arms into Iraq than any other base in our country. This picture is one of the crews that flew us out of Afghanistan back to Kuwait on our way home. But we actually had three teams out of Charleston that moved us from Kuwait to Baghdad, out of Baghdad and to Afghanistan and back. They are proud of what they do. They wanted us to know, and me to tell you, that they believe this mission is important and that we can win it. Every day they save lives and deliver freedom.

All they need is our support, not our empty rhetoric, our real support and our belief in them and what they are doing. I came back with that belief and that resolve, that what we are doing is right. If we continue what we are doing, we will win, and we will continue to set the terrorists back on their heels and keep our country safe.

I thank the men and women at Charleston Air Force Base who are making all Americans proud as they serve all over the world on their missions.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the words of the chairman on the need to improve Indian health care. It is clear from the Government Accounting Office study that there is no doubt Indian health is suffering and there are many reforms that are desperately needed. I wish to talk about several amendments we proposed that we think will help the bill. One is related to what Senator Dorgan was just talking about and the fact that there is just not enough money currently to provide the health care that is needed for many Indians across the country today.

Unlike a lot of other Federal support for health care, Indian health care provides 100 percent coverage to all members of tribes across the country, regardless of income level. The problem that creates at a time when we are offering new programs and reforms is we are not offering enough money to actually support all the programs that are in this new bill.

My amendment No. 4073, which we call the Indian gaming amendment, would allocate the scarce resources to the poorer tribes by excluding some of the richer tribes that benefit from class III or casino-style gambling.

Many of us have looked at the statistics. Revenues from Indian casino gambling have surpassed $12 billion, and many members of these tribes will receive income from these casinos from $30,000 to over $300,000. There are clear discrepancies in the income in the tribes across the country, and in designing Indian health care reform, it is important that we recognize that fact.

In 2001, there were 290 Indian casinos across 28 States that brought in more than $12.5 billion with more than $5 billion in profit. To put this in context, the average family in South Carolina makes around $50,000 a year. These families, sometimes on their own, sometimes through their employers, have to pay and help pay for their health care and many times deductibles and copays. The average income in the tribes that have casino gambling is generally much higher than that amount. Yet we are providing free health care for these tribes.

This amendment would exclude from the new programs in the underlying bill those tribes with casino gambling, class III gambling, which would take the money that is provided in the bill and allocate it to the poorer tribes, which uses just basic common sense. If we have a limited amount of money to go around, let's target those tribes with the greatest poverty and the greatest need and allow those tribes with the highest incomes to participate in purchasing their own health care. That is amendment No. 4073. We will vote on that amendment today.

Let me address another amendment that will be voted on today; that is, amendment No. 4070 which recognizes that some of the programs in the bill that are designed for injury prevention or safety have actually been used in the past by Government agencies to promote antifirearm programs, gun buyback programs, or programs that generally stigmatize the ownership of guns for collecting, hunting, or self- defense.

This amendment provides that none of the funds in the bill may be used to fund antifirearm programs, gun buyback programs, or programs aimed at discouraging or stigmatizing the private ownership of firearms for collecting, hunting, or self-defense. That is basically the language in the bill.

We know from programs we have looked at before--we have legislation, for instance, that we passed that would prohibit the Centers for Disease Control from doing exactly the same thing; that is, using money that is supposed to be used for safety programs or other injury prevention and actually use it to promote a political agenda which is an anti-second-amendment agenda. This is another amendment we will vote on today.

So two amendments we will be voting on today after the cloture motion vote is the Indian gaming amendment that would exclude those tribes that have the revenue from casinos, as well as the other amendment which would prohibit funds from being used to stigmatize the ownership of guns.

Mr. President, I wish to address another amendment which is pending to this bill, which is what we call the health savings account choice. This amendment would simply make another choice available to Indians in the purchase of their health care. Right now, they have most of the options that we have at the Federal level in our Federal employees plan, but they do not yet have a health savings account option which we have added to our Federal programs. This simply would allow Indians the same choice that we have. They could purchase a PPO or other plans-- managed care, HMO, or with this amendment, they could also have a health savings account with a high-deductible plan.

I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment. I am actually working with the chairman on the possibility that this amendment could be accepted and avoid a vote on the amendment tomorrow; otherwise, we will be voting on it tomorrow before final passage.

I wish to make a few comments on a second-degree amendment that I added to one of these amendments the week before we left last week which we call the Semper Fi amendment. This is an amendment that is not germane and will fall after cloture but still deserves some comment. The Semper Fi amendment is named in honor of the marine motto, which means ``always faithful,'' and it is a bill which I introduced after the Berkeley, CA, city council voted to refer to our marines as unwelcome intruders and had proposed that they leave town--that their recruiting office actually leave town. When I heard of this, it immediately angered me and we developed this bill which would simply take away about $2 million of wasteful Federal earmarks, which were not voted on in the Senate or the House, but were added as what we call report language. We are not trying to take away all their Federal funding but simply to say, if they are not going to respect our marines or their mission, which part of it is recruiting, then certainly they should not be the beneficiary of taxpayer-funded earmarks, and certainly those that aren't necessary.

When I first introduced this bill, it was more to make a point and maybe rattle the cages of the city council, because I know all the people in Berkeley don't feel this way. If anyone looked at the video-- and it was one of the most watched videos on YouTube--you could see person after person stepping up and maligning our marines and the job they are doing, not only in Iraq but throughout history, and referring to them as murderers and thugs, unthinkable things being said about the same marines who provided them their freedom of speech.

Some have said by my introducing this bill I am against freedom of speech, and that is not it at all. In fact, the anti-American group Code Pink had been demonstrating for months in front of the marine recruitment office there in Berkeley, and I have no problem with that. They have every right. But they wanted more than freedom of speech, they wanted the power of the local government behind them, to give them an advantage over those who supported the marines, supported their mission, and supported our country. So the city council voted to give Code Pink a free parking place in front of the marine recruitment office, and also voted to give them a permit to use a bullhorn, a megaphone, to shout down any who would want to come into that recruitment office. That is not free speech. That is a government- sponsored political agenda that took the side of a few liberal demonstrators against traditional Americans and the marines who have fought for our freedom of speech.

My amendment got a fair amount of attention and a lot of supporters here in the Senate, which I appreciate. The same bill was also introduced in the House by a number of Republicans. I have been surprised at the response we have gotten--literally thousands of phone calls and e-mails and letters. What this has exposed to me is it is not only a single event, but it has exposed a raw wound not only of our marines but everyone serving in uniform, and their families.

I have heard it when I have been in Iraq, more than once, when I ask our soldiers, marines, and airmen what they need, and the response has often been: Don't forget us. The letters and e-mails I have gotten have indicated the same thing, that finally some are standing up for those who are fighting for our freedoms.

I was surprised by the response. I have gotten letters at home from mothers who have sent me pictures of their marines, thanking those of us who have stood up for their marines. I have agonized over the fact that they need someone to stand up for them.

But when I go back and see what was said in this Chamber and the House Chamber, and what governments such as the city of Berkeley have done, it should come as no surprise to us that there are doubts in the minds of those who put on the uniform that we support them, that we believe in what they do, and that we support their constitutional mission to recruit and to talk about what we offer in our services. People--Americans--are concerned about this.

We have tried to get the Semper Fi act on the floor for an up-or-down vote, and we have not been able to do so. We tried to pass it by unanimous consent, which got 100 percent Republican support but was blocked on the Democratic side. I added it to an amendment to this bill, to try to get a vote, but it will fall after we vote for cloture.

I promise the marines and all those in uniform that I am going to continue to persist until we get a vote on this, because it is not just about this amendment, it is not just about those who support it, it is about letting those who put on the uniform and who are willing to fight for our freedoms know we stand behind them. When any government, at any level, takes a position against them, it is our responsibility here in the Congress to stand up for those marines and those fighting men and women and not to allow them to be taken advantage of and intimidated and bullied by some local government such as we saw in Berkeley.

I have been happy to see some local governments across the country actually pass resolutions in support of the marine recruiters, and I appreciate any across this country who stand and make a statement on behalf of those who are fighting for our freedom. Again, I emphasize that anyone who wants to speak out in protest against marine recruiters, against the Iraq war, or anything, it is their free right. But when government, whether it is a local government or a State government, takes a position against our Federal constitutional amendment to defend this country, which requires the recruitment of marines, soldiers, airmen, and Coast Guard, that is part of our job. It is not freedom of speech when a local government takes a position against what we are charged to do here at the Federal level.

I encourage all those parents, all those in uniform, that the majority of those here in the Senate, in the House, and across this country respect and appreciate what you are doing every day. I got back from Iraq last week, with 2 days on the ground, and I know I speak for all my colleagues when I say I was never prouder of my country and what I do here than when I stood with those in uniform who are sacrificing, in many instances, more than a year away from their family, and some on second and third tours. They are fighting for us and we need to stand up for them. I am going to continue to persist until my colleagues give me a chance to stand with our marines and to support the Semper Fi bill.

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

Mr. President, the underlying Indian health care bill allows Federal funds to be used for certain health promotion activities which include injury prevention, personal safety, and violence prevention. My amendment would simply say that none of these funds in the bill may be used to fund any firearm programs, gun buyback programs, or programs aimed at discouraging or stigmatizing the private ownership of firearms for collecting, hunting, or self-defense purposes, which are important to the Indian community. So that is my amendment.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I filed a number of technical improvements to this bill, which I wish to work on with the chairman to see if we can resolve these without a vote. These are very small wording amendments, in some cases, that I would like the chairman and his staff to look at before I call them up, because I think it is very unlikely we will need votes on these particular amendments.

Amendment No. 4067 to Amendment No. 3894

Mr. President, I call for the regular order with respect to the Bingaman amendment No. 3894 and I send a second-degree amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment and the Bingaman amendment.

Mr. President, we will talk about it and get the vote later on. I want to say a few words about this amendment.

My amendment is identical to the Semper Fi Act, which I introduced along with Senators Allard, Bond, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Cornyn, Inhofe, Martinez, McConnell, Vitter, and probably a number of other Members. Since the bill that is pending now will probably be the last vote before the recess, I think it is important that we vote on this Semper Fi amendment. Last week, when I introduced the bill, the majority leader did not recess so that we could not get this on the calendar. This is an important bill, which I will explain in a minute. We also tried to move it by unanimous consent through the hotline process, and all of the Republicans approved the bill, but apparently someone on the majority side is holding it. That is why it is important that this amendment be part of the bill we are considering today.

The Semper Fi Act would rescind all earmarks, or specially designated spending projects, contained in the fiscal year 2008 Consolidated Omnibus Appropriations Act for the city of Berkeley and entities located therein, and redirects those funds to the U.S. Marine Corps.

For those who have not been paying attention, the Berkeley City Council recently voted to ask the U.S. Marine Corps to vacate their recruiting office in town, and that if they chose to stay they did so as ``uninvited and unwelcome intruders.''

During debate of the resolution, one council member called the Marines ``the President's own gangsters'' and ``trained killers.'' Another said the Marines had given the country ``horrible karma'' and said they had a history of ``death and destruction.'' In a document drafted to support the resolution against the Marines, the council stated: ``Military recruiters are sales people known to lie to and seduce minors and young adults into contracting themselves into military service with false promises regarding jobs, job training, education and other benefits.''

After voting to insult the men and women who fight and bleed for their freedom, the city council cast another ridiculous vote in favor of giving the radical protest group Code Pink a parking space directly in front of the Marine Corps recruiting station. They also voted to give Code Pink a sound permit for protests in front of the Marine Corps building. The city council stated in the resolution that they ``encourage all people to avoid cooperation with the Marine Corps recruiting station'' and to ``applaud'' Code Pink for working to ``impede, passively or actively'' the work of the Marines Corps in Berkeley.

Frankly, I just returned from a visit to Iraq, saw our marines on the ground and what they were doing. It is inconceivable to me that any governing body in this country would say such things to our marines.

Code Pink is a fringe organization that distinguishes itself by attacking American policy, while defending dictator Hugo Chavez. The group is so disrespectful that they have no problems demonstrating in front of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center with signs reading ``Maimed for a lie.''

The council's resolution sparked an escalation of anti-Marine protests. Code Pink organizer Zanne Joy points to the city council as justification for the escalation. She said that ``anything legal is justified if it succeeds in persuading the Marine Corps to move its recruiting station out of Berkeley.'' According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Code Pink protesters have been heard shouting at young men who are trying to enter the recruiting station, ``You guys are just cannon fodder!'' and ``They want to train you to kill babies!''

It is sad to see a city like Berkeley moving so far left. The city in which the legendary World War II Pacific Theater Commander, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, established the Naval ROTC in the fall of 1926 is now sadly a shell of its former self, thanks to its elected leadership.

This is disappointing, but in a republican form of government, it must be up to local voters to change their leadership.

However, this particular case became the business of all Americans when they insulted our troops and their constitutional mission to defend our country; while coming to the Federal Government asking for special taxpayer-funded handouts. Over $2 million was secretly tucked away for Berkeley earmarks in the 2008 Omnibus appropriations bill, projects that were never voted on or debated.

I do not believe a city that has turned its back on our country's finest deserves $2 million worth of pork barrel projects. So my amendment revokes these earmarks.

Included in the $2 million worth of pork are some particularly wasteful projects.

One earmark provides gourmet organic lunches to schools in the Berkeley School District. While our Marines are making due with MREs of Sloppy Joe and chili with beans, Berkeley students will get Federal tax dollars to design meals that promote ``environmental harmony.'' Chez Panisse's menu features ``Comte cheese souffle with mache salad'', ``Meyer lemon eclairs with huckleberry coulis''; and ``Chicory salad with creamy anchovy vinaigrette and olive toast''. That is unacceptable.

Are we to understand that the city that has been home to many of the country's most rich and famous cannot afford to pay for its own designer school lunches?

Another $975,000 earmark is for the Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at U.C. Berkeley, which may include cataloging the papers of the late Congressman Robert Matsui. Is it really necessary to tax the paychecks of Marines so we can earmark nearly $1 million for a school that is already sitting on a $3.5 billion endowment?

Let me be clear, my amendment does not cut off all Federal funds to the city of Berkeley, though I am sure most Americans would feel that is justified. It merely rescinds wasteful earmarks. Berkeley is free to compete with other towns and cities across America for merit-based Federal grants.

Actions have consequences. When the Berkeley City Council decided to insult the Marines in a time of war, it was a $2 million decision. Especially in a time of war, we cannot just allow cities to play insulting games at our troops' expense while continuing to shower them with congressional favors.

On Tuesday, the city council met to revisit its ridiculous actions. Hundreds of military supporters and antiwar protesters gathered at Berkeley City Hall. Berkeley police reported four arrests before the meeting began, all misdemeanors. Police said there were minor scuffles between the antiwar and promilitary camps. An American flag was set aflame outside the city council chambers, damaging a pair of bicycles. When the council meeting finally started, more than 100 speakers took turns at the podium.

In a sense, what happened in Berkeley was a quintessential American experience, a spirited exchange and protest followed by debate and democratic action. And while I find some of the views and behavior of many of the protestors repugnant, the exchange itself is a solemn reminder of those who have sacrificed so much to preserve our freedom, especially our freedom of speech.

Let me be clear. I do not question the sincerity of anyone on either side of the issue. I think there is genuine concern among many in this country about the war. But while we can respect the legitimate worries about the war and can respect the sincerity of even the most radical protestors, we must recognize that words have meaning and actions have consequences. Some of the hateful words that have come out of Berkeley, CA, have had real consequences on our troops, their families, and our recruiting.

One of those who spoke at the city council meeting was Debbie Lee of Arizona, whose son Marc was the first Navy SEAL to die in the Iraq war. She demanded an apology from the council, and she said: My son gave up his life for you. Lee told the council, as she clutched his framed picture, ``I'm appalled at what you did,'' referring to the council's vote on Marine recruiters.

Debbie Parrish, another military mom whose son Victor is currently serving in Iraq, said to the Berkeley City Council:

It is despicable what you said about our military. It is

very, very sad. Shame on you.

After all the testimony from the military supporters and families, the Berkeley City Council could only muster the votes to not send a letter insulting the U.S. Marines by calling

them ``uninvited and unwelcomed intruders.'' Let's be clear. They did not apologize for the letter. They just didn't mail it. Of course, the sending of a letter at this point is inconsequential given that the text of the letter has been running on national television for a week. The city council also modified one of its past resolutions to ``recognize the recruiters' right to locate in our city and the right of others to protest or support their presence.''

But the resolution also stated that the city council opposes ``the recruitment of our young people into this war.''

The resolution proposing a formal apology to the Marines failed. The city council also voted to let four additional items passed at last week's meeting stand. One resolution encouraged all people to avoid cooperation with the Marine Corps recruiting station. A second one requested that the city attorney investigate if the Marines are in violation of Berkeley's policy against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In addition, two resolutions giving the radical antiwar group Code Pink a weekly parking space and a weekly sound permit to protest the Marine recruiting station were upheld by the council's decision.

It was my hope that the city would apologize and revoke its previous resolutions and move on. The council chose not to do that. We have no choice but to acknowledge the reality of what they have done and to defend our military recruiters who are doing the job we asked them to do. If we don't take action, we will be sending a message to other towns or cities that they can use their power to try to influence U.S. foreign policy, thwarting our recruitment efforts.

This issue is not about free speech. It is about a city that has shown total disdain for our Armed Forces and used its official government powers to harass our military as they try to keep our country safe. And this amendment is not about forcing the city to change its mind. It is about whether we are going to shower the city with favors, with special goodies that do not meet national needs. I think the American people have spoken loudly and clearly that they do not believe that should be the case.

There is a video with clips of the city council meeting on YouTube. It has been viewed by over 200,000 people. It is the 70th most viewed video this week and the 11th most viewed video in news and politics, with 767 people posting comments overwhelmingly in support of the legislation. People are paying attention.

I am amazed at the response received regarding my public outrage over the city of Berkeley's behavior. My office has received thousands of calls and letters from military supporters all over the country. On Wednesday afternoon, I received a call from Sgt James Strowe of the U.S. Marine Corps. Sergeant Strowe is currently fighting to protect our freedom in Kuwait. Sergeant Strowe understands what the Marine recruiters in Berkeley are going through quite well because he served as a recruiter himself for 7 years. And he just told me his folks serving with him wanted to thank those of us who were standing up for them while they were fighting for our country.

After talking with the sergeant, I decided it would be a good idea to call the marines at the Berkeley recruiting station to ask how they were holding up amidst all the controversy. I talked to GSgt Rick O'Frente, who seemed to be taking the events in stride. He even said a number of citizens from Berkeley had come into the recruitment office, brought them food, and some had apologized for the actions of the council.

I guess I have said enough about all of what we are hearing. I have pages and pages of comments from people who are asking us to stand up for our marines while they are fighting for us, and we will be asking again for votes as part of the deliberations on this package.

Mr. President, now that I think the chairman has had a chance to understand in more detail what this bill is about, I will once again ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment and the Bingaman amendment.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call for the regular order with respect to amendment No. 4070, and I call up amendment No. 4080 as a second- degree amendment.

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

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Senator Specter has correctly stated the conversation which we had after the floor debate and we agreed it would be useful to have this discussion to clear up the record. As I told Senator Specter privately and now state publicly, I was in no way suggesting that his support for these programs resulted from campaign contributions or political support. My reference to the ``culture of corruption'' was not intended to suggest that there was any corruption involved in this matter. In my statement, I was specific in not suggesting inappropriate motivations when I said ``motivations are generally good.'' I was also careful to focus on the ``appearance'' and not the reality by noting it ``has alarmed the American people.'' As many know, my objection to earmarks has to do with the system itself, not the people who participate in it. While Senator Specter and I naturally have differences on issues of public policy, which is to be expected in an institution like the Senate, I have worked with him during my tenure in the Senate of more than 3 years and do not question his integrity.