Floor Statements

Mr. President, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the presentation of the Diane Reese Award to Marilyn J. Smith for her work as the president and cofounder of the Abused Deaf Women's Advocacy Services in Seattle, WA. The presentation took place in the Library of Congress during a major conference on domestic violence.

This award is much more than recognition of an individual who has gone above and beyond to help those who have and still are suffering from the terrible domestic violence abuses happening daily. This award recognizes a way of life that has inspired and helped countless people that are in need. I would like to commend Marilyn J. Smith for her outstanding work continuing Ms. Reese's compassionate legacy.

As some of you know, I got my start serving the public when I came to southern West Virginia as a VISTA volunteer. Although Ms. Reese's social justice work started long before her life moving journey to the coalfields of West Virginia, it was that journey that connected both of our lives together.

I was able to witness firsthand Diane's ability to gracefully build the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Working with Sue Julian, who still is a team coordinator at the Coalition, they provided the leadership to create a strong program that has grown into a network of shelters, outreach centers, and support groups throughout West Virginia. Diane inspired many thanks to her steady, quiet but fully committed life. Sue and the rest of the coalition continue that work.

Visiting the various shelters Diane helped set up in the early 1990s was a very moving opportunity that I feel very fortunate to have experienced. Working closely with Ms. Reese and the coalition, we fought together for the passage of the first Federal Violence Against Women Act and its subsequent reauthorizations. I have continued to work with the coalition and have tried to help with vital Federal grants. Diane, Sue, and the coalition have played a pivotal role in advising me about the Violence Against Women Act over the years.

In West Virginia, Diane Reese touched the lives of so many with her unique ability to heal and serve those in need. Throughout her years of serving the public, Diane became an adjunct faculty at Southern WV Community College and was an active member in the Mountaineer Food Bank, the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund Board, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, just to name a few. As you can see, Diane certainly went above and beyond the norm with her generosity and charity.

Just last year the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence that Diane helped to create provided support to over 15,000 people, including children. As you can tell, the numbers of those touched by her life are enormous. Her community organizing efforts, spirit for social justice, and expert skills as an educator made her a good counselor and dear friend.

I and all the people who knew and worked with her were saddened to lose her, and we mourn her still. But Diane has an extraordinary legacy that lives on in the work of the coalition in West Virginia and the national award that continues to inspire and acknowledge the next generation of advocates. Diane Reese pursued every obstacle she faced with knowledge, kindness, respect, expertise, and conquered each one of them with grace and optimism. Those of us lucky enough to know her personally will also remember her, and the award in her memory continues to inspire all of us. And, I know that with the great challenges that still face the victims and survivors of domestic violence, Diane would be urging us to continue the work she began and reminding us that the goal of securing peace at home for everyone is a goal upon which we must never give up.

Mr. President, I rise before you today to introduce the Keeping Families Safe Act of 2008 which seeks to keep families together when a parent is in a residential substance abuse treatment facility. Numerous studies have shown the benefits of keeping families united as a parent undergoes substance abuse treatment. In fact, one study found that 60 percent of mothers who participated in the Pregnant and Postpartum Women and Their Infants program were completely clean and sober six months after their discharge. This same study found that 88 percent of these children were still with their mothers six months after the mother was discharged. However, only 5 percent of all substances abuse treatment facilities are able to accommodate children.

Congress has shown support for comprehensive family based substance abuse treatment facilities in the past. In 2006, Congress passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which included a $40 million grant program, to promote two key goals, substance abuse services for families in the child welfare system, and regular caseworker visits.

The Keeping Families Safe Act is one way to invest in children and families. This legislation would allow children, who are in foster care, to be with their parent while he or she is receiving treatment at residential comprehensive family-based substance abuse treatment centers. These facilities provide comprehensive services to both parent and child. If this family based approach is not available, these children would often be forced to claim Federal funding in the foster care system. By using these funds instead to go to the residential facility with their parent, the chances for success are much greater.

Family based substance abuse treatment centers have proven to be an effective means of treating substance abuse and reuniting families. Many of the parents in treatment are there in hopes of overcoming their addiction and reuniting with their children. This bill is designed to give them that chance. I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation to help keep families together and provide another funding source for these important facilities.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be placed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise before you today to introduce the Keeping Families Safe Act of 2008 which seeks to keep families together when a parent is in a residential substance abuse treatment facility. Numerous studies have shown the benefits of keeping families united as a parent undergoes substance abuse treatment. In fact, one study found that 60 percent of mothers who participated in the Pregnant and Postpartum Women and Their Infants program were completely clean and sober six months after their discharge. This same study found that 88 percent of these children were still with their mothers six months after the mother was discharged. However, only 5 percent of all substances abuse treatment facilities are able to accommodate children.

Congress has shown support for comprehensive family based substance abuse treatment facilities in the past. In 2006, Congress passed the Deficit Reduction Act, which included a $40 million grant program, to promote two key goals, substance abuse services for families in the child welfare system, and regular caseworker visits.

The Keeping Families Safe Act is one way to invest in children and families. This legislation would allow children, who are in foster care, to be with their parent while he or she is receiving treatment at residential comprehensive family-based substance abuse treatment centers. These facilities provide comprehensive services to both parent and child. If this family based approach is not available, these children would often be forced to claim Federal funding in the foster care system. By using these funds instead to go to the residential facility with their parent, the chances for success are much greater.

Family based substance abuse treatment centers have proven to be an effective means of treating substance abuse and reuniting families. Many of the parents in treatment are there in hopes of overcoming their addiction and reuniting with their children. This bill is designed to give them that chance. I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation to help keep families together and provide another funding source for these important facilities.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be placed in the Record.

Mr. President, I wish to add my voice of love, respect, and a very deep feeling of comradeship with the good Senator from Wyoming who has died--Senator Thomas. My family has been associated with Wyoming for many years. In a sense, their Senators have been Senators whom we have related to. Senator Thomas, Senator Enzi, now a new Senator, these are people we feel very strongly about. I have particularly strong feelings about both--about Senator Enzi because of his willingness to come to a coal mine in West Virginia and actually write a bill that rewrote 30 years of our mine inspection laws, and Senator Thomas simply because as member of the Finance Committee he was always an even, steady voice--level-headed. You could trust him. He was totally a man of his word, and I will miss him greatly.

Mr. President, I am pleased to report to the Senate that the Senate Intelligence Committee has completed its review of prewar intelligence related to Iraq. Today the committee filed with the Senate and released to the public the two final reports of what has been called phase 2 of the review. One of these reports examines the public statements of senior policymakers prior to the war and compares those statements to the intelligence that was available to those senior policymakers at the time they made those statements. The second report looks at the intelligence activities of individuals working for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense Policy.

The first of these reports, report on public statements, has obviously been the most controversial aspect of the committee's work on prewar intelligence. That was inevitable. Much has been said and much has been written since the beginning of the war about how we got into it. In the end, the committee did conclude that the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact, when in reality it was unsubstantiated and often contradicted what they were saying, or even was nonexistent.

The committee's July 2004 report found that the prewar assessments on

intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction were clearly flawed. There was a 511-page report and it decimated the whole concept of weapons of mass destruction being there. It turned out most of them were left over from the Iran-Iraq war. Nuclear scientists were kept around, but they had nothing to do. People began to draw conclusions. They understood, at some of the highest levels, that this intelligence was there, but they ignored it. The report we are releasing today indicates that many of the public statements of the Bush administration were, in fact, accurate and substantiated by underlying intelligence, even though that intelligence itself was flawed. So we tried to be fair. No one, however, should interpret these findings as vindication of how the administration was using intelligence to sell to the American people and to the Congress the war in Iraq.

This report documents significant instances in which the administration went beyond what the intelligence community knew--well beyond what the intelligence committee knew or believed, most notably on the false assertion that Iraq and al-Qaida had an operational relationship, a partnership, and the manipulative attempt to suggest, inaccurately, that Iraq had any complicity in the attacks of September 11--shockingly wrong statements which were made and made and made.

Many of them obviously were made prior to the State of the Union Address in an attempt to prepare American public opinion. But, on the other hand, many of them continued well afterwards and even until recently. The committee also found that when administration officials were making statements related to weapons of mass destruction, they often spoke in declarative and unequivocal terms that went well beyond the confidence levels reflected in the intelligence community's intelligence assessments and products.

They omitted caveats. In other words, if the Department of Energy and INR in the Department of State, their intelligence wing, disagreed-- those were omitted. Anything that didn't agree was omitted, it was ignored. Dissenting views by intelligence agencies were ignored and did not acknowledge significant gaps in what we knew. In other words, they had a message they were driving and they stopped at nothing to do that.

In short, administration officials failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security. When the Nation is weighing the decision to go to war, they deserve the complete and unvarnished truth, and they did not get it in the buildup to the war in Iraq.

Additionally, the committee found instances where public statements selectively used intelligence information which supported a particular policy viewpoint; that is, public statements made by high officials, the highest officials, and at the same time they completely ignored contradictory information that weakened the position which they declared to be the truth. While on its face the statement might have been accurate, it nevertheless presented a slanted picture to those who were unaware of the hidden intelligence. Intelligence is complex. It is an art, not just a science. You have to establish all aspects of what goes into an intelligence product before you can make any kind of a declaration or decision.

In fact, the committee's report cites several areas in which the administration's public statements were not supported by the intelligence, and I very specifically wish to state them now. No. 1, statements and implications by the President and the Secretary of State, suggesting Iraq and al-Qaida had a partnership or Iraq had provided al-Qaida with weapons training were not substantiated by the intelligence. No. 2, statements by the President and the Vice President, indicating Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information. No. 3, statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political security, the economics, et cetera, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products. The results have been there for us to see. No. 4, statements by the President and Vice President, prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities, did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing. No. 5, the Secretary of Defense statement that the Iraqi Government operated underground WMD--weapons of mass destruction--facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground, so deeply buried--that was not substantiated by available intelligence information. No. 6, the intelligence community did not confirm that Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001, as the Vice President has repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly claimed--and may do so again today. That is terribly important. There was all kinds of information which so totally contradicts that it should be embarrassing, but it was not, and they went ahead and used it. No connection between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence.

In addition, the administration's misuse of intelligence prior to the war was aided by selective declassification of intelligence reporting. The executive branch exercises the prerogative to classify information in order to protect national security. Unlike Congress, it can declassify information unilaterally, and it can do so with great ease. The administration manipulated and exploited this declassification authority in the lead-up to the war, and disclosed intelligence at a time and in a manner of its choosing, knowing others attempting to disclose additional details that might provide balance or improved accuracy would be prevented from so doing under the threat of criminal prosecution. So they could declassify what they wanted. Nobody else could do anything.

This unlevel playing field allowed senior officials to disclose and discuss sensitive intelligence reports when they supported the administration's policy objectives and keep out of the discourse information that did not support those objectives.

In preparing a report on public statements, the committee concentrated on those statements that were central to the debate over the decision to go to war in 2002-2003. We identified five major policy speeches made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of State Colin Powell during this period as the most significant expressions of how the Bush administration communicated intelligence judgments to the American people, to the Congress, and to the international community. Additional statements made by senior administration officials during this same timeframe, containing assertions not included in the major policy speeches, were examined as well and they are part of our report.

To the point: The statements we examined were made by the individuals involved in the decision to go to war and in convincing the American public to support that decision. The committee will be criticized for not examining statements made by Members of Congress. A bipartisan majority of the committee--bipartisan--agreed these statements do not carry the same weight of authority as statements made by the President and others in the executive branch. It was the President and his senior advisers who were pushing the policy of invasion, not the Congress. In addition, Members of Congress did not have--do not have--the same ready access to intelligence as the senior executive branch policymakers. We do not see raw intelligence data. We do not get PDEs. We do not receive the daily briefing and were not briefed every morning by the Nation's senior intelligence officers.

It is important to note we did not receive the October NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, critical to the vote, until 3 days before the Senate was expected to vote. Was that initiated by the administration? No. It was initiated, requested and finally agreed to and then rushed up very quickly because Senator Bob Graham was chairman of the Intelligence Committee at that time, and he asked for it.

As I said, the truth of how intelligence was used or misused is not black and white. Supporters from both sides will point to specific findings in this report to bolster their arguments. I consider that to be evidence that the

committee's findings are fair and objective. Our job was to compare statements to intelligence and render a narrow judgment as to whether the statement was substantiated. In those instances where a statement is not substantiated by the intelligence, the committee renders no judgment as to why. All we were interested in was the facts.

The second report we are releasing today deals with operations of the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. It is a very important report. A February 2007 report from the Department of Defense inspector general addresses many of the issues the committee had originally intended to examine relating to this office. That report concluded that the Policy Office of the Pentagon had inappropriately disseminated an alternative intelligence analysis, drawing a link between Iraq and al- Qaida terrorists--again what the administration wanted--who carried out the attacks on September 11. This hypothesis has been thoroughly examined by the intelligence community and no link was found. That, however, did not stop this office from concocting its own intelligence analysis and presenting it to senior policymakers. The committee first uncovered this attempt by DOD policy officials to shape and politicize intelligence in order to bolster the administration's policy in our July 2004 report and the inspector general's review. Both of these were confirmed.

The committee's own investigation of the policy office's activities had been abruptly terminated by the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee in July of 2004 because the inspector general's report thoroughly covered the issues of alternative analysis when the committee investigation was restarted in 2007, it focused on clandestine meetings between DOD policy officials and Iranians in Rome and Paris in 2001 and 2003.

These meetings were facilitated by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and intelligence fabricator implicated in the 1986 Iran Contra scandal. During these meetings, intelligence was collected, but it was not shared with the intelligence community. It went right around the intelligence community, including the CIA. They knew nothing about it. George Tenet indicated there was no possible way he knew anything about this.

The committee's findings paint a disturbing picture of Pentagon policy officials who were distrustful of the intelligence community and undertook the collection of sensitive intelligence without coordinating their activities. It was a rogue operation. It went to high levels in the administration; it went right to the National Security Council, totally bypassing all other intelligence agencies. It is infuriating and not the way intelligence should be handled at all.

The actions of DOD officials to blindly disregard the red flags over the role played by Mr. Ghorbanifar in these meetings and to wall off the intelligence community from its activities and the information it obtained were improper and demonstrated a fundamental disdain for the intelligence community's role in vetting sensitive sources.

The committee's 2004 report presented evidence that the DOD policy office attempted to shape the CIA's terrorism analysis in late 2002, and when it failed, prepared an alternative intelligence analysis attacking the CIA for not embracing a link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So the CIA and the intelligence community were trying to do what they could, and these people were just end-running them because that is what the White House wanted to see. And then, you know, it was a disgrace, an embarrassment to the Nation. The Department of Defense inspector general found himself that these actions were highly inappropriate.

Our most recent report shows that these rogue actions of this office were not isolated. The committee's body of work on Iraq-related intelligence--a series of six reports issued over a 4-year period-- demonstrate why congressional oversight is essential in evaluating America's intelligence collection and analytical activities.

During the course of its investigation, the committee found that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was based on stale, fragmentary, and speculative intelligence reports and replete with unsupported judgments. Troubling incidents were reported in which internal dissent and warnings about the veracity of intelligence on Iraq were ignored in the rush to get to war.

The committee's investigation also revealed how administration officials applied pressure on intelligence analysts prior to the war for them to support links between Iraq and the terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11, none of which existed.

Our investigation detailed how the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi attempted to influence the U.S. policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States at the higher levels that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists and how this false information was embraced despite warnings and fabrication.

The committee's investigation also documented for the public how the administration ignored the prewar judgments of the intelligence community that the invasion would destabilize security in Iraq and provide al-Qaida with an opportunity to exploit the situation and increase attacks against U.S. forces during and after the war. After 5 years and the loss of over 4,000 American lives, these ignored judgments were tragically prescient.

Overall, the findings and conclusions of the committee's Iraq investigation were an important catalyst in bringing about subsequent legislative and administrative reforms of the intelligence community so that these mistakes will never be repeated again, hopefully.

In conclusion, it has been a long, hard road for the committee to get to this point. There have been and continue to be a lot of finger- pointing and accusations of partisanship. It is important to remember that this undertaking was a unanimous decision--phase 1 and phase 2-- was a unanimous decision of the committee in February of 2004. That it took such a long time to do is another subject. It is also important to remember that the committee adopted these two reports, both reports, by a vote of 10 to 5--in other words, bipartisan.

In undertaking these additional lines of inquiry, the committee acted to tell a complete story of how intelligence was not only collected and analyzed prior to the Iraq invasions but how it was publicly used in authoritative statements made by the highest officials in the Bush administration in furtherance of its policy to overthrow Saddam Hussein and more.

I believe these reports will help answer some of the many lingering questions surrounding the Nation's misguided decision to launch the war in Iraq.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to take a few moments to discuss an amendment I have filed to the underlying Boxer substitute amendment to the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill.

I feel very strongly that, in any responsible attempt to address the very real threat of global climate change, one of the very first orders of business must be to ensure that our economy comes out of the process as strong or stronger after the enactment of carbon constraints as beforehand. Our economy, as I have said many times since coming to the U.S. Senate, is inextricably tied to coal. Some may not appreciate it still, or may let it slip to the back of their minds until another tragedy in the coalfields, but the fact is, coal provides about half of all of our electricity. Some months a little more, and some months a little less. But in almost every scientific or economic analysis I have seen, our dependence on coal to keep our economy functioning is going to continue to increase--and this is true even under the aggressive approach of the climate change bill before us.

That projected growth in the use of coal probably is a function of long-term economic growth and the relative difficulty and high cost of building generation alternatives. Coal can provide us with many decades--some experts say many centuries--of cheap, reliable, domestic energy. But as this country moves to address climate change, as I fervently believe we must, the future for coal--and I reiterate, the health of the American economy--depends on the ability of our electric utilities to use coal in a cleaner way than ever before, which includes capturing and permanently storing carbon emissions.

This is why I am proposing an amendment that will dramatically increase in the size and the scope of the carbon capture and storage, CCS, programs already underway in the Department of Energy. It is my goal with this provision--which will authorize $650 million for CCS research, development, and deployment through the end of fiscal year 2014--that a program already underway, but plagued by much-lower funding that is really required, can move beyond the baby steps currently being taken, and move us closer to a day when coal can deliver on the promise those of us in West Virginia and other coal states have always understood it to have.

But my CCS amendment neither begins nor ends with merely increasing funding of current R&D programs. In fact, while I have no doubts about the quality of the work being done by fossil fuel researchers at West Virginia's National Energy Technology Laboratory and their scientific collaborators at West Virginia University, Marshall University, and other fine schools around the country, I am not convinced the bureaucratic nature of DOE is the right or only environment in which to make the best use of the science to bring about the cost-effective, commercial-scale CCS, technologies we know we need. I believe that the men and women working in our National Labs can produce great results, but my grave concern is that government tends to move slowly and simply cannot afford to wait the several decades that are anticipated by the current technology roadmap. That is why I am proposing an additional-- and I believe, transformational--means at arriving at commercial-scale CCS much more rapidly.

The cornerstone of this amendment is the creation of a nearly $20 billion quasigovernmental corporation, which I am calling the Future Fuels Corporation. The Future Fuels Corporation is intended to push the environmentally responsible use of coal for electricity and the production of carbon products--transportation fuels and industrial inputs--in a process called ``polygeneration,'' while also moving us further and faster toward a time when commercially viable CCS technologies make using coal, our most abundant domestic fuel source, no more environmentally worrying than deriving electricity from the wind or the sun.

What separates the Future Fuels Corporation from other CCS research and demonstration projects, those underway or new programs being proposed as part or in reaction to the underlying bill, is that when the corporation comes into being it will be funded by the Federal Government, but run by an independent board of directors, each of whom is an energy expert in his or her own right. These experts will be nominated by the President, confirmed by the Senate, but responsible to the taxpayers for realizing the goals of the Future Fuels Corporation without the heavy hand and bureaucratic meddling that can be the unfortunate byproduct of the program administration of any government agency. The Future Fuels Corporation will have to deliver results. The scientists and researchers brought onboard the Future Fuels Corporation will carry out their activities with a ``do it right, but do it fast'' business mindset, and not the measured academic pace of traditional R&D programs that could keep important CCS developments from being realized as fast as we need to have them up and running.

I am firm in my belief that the United States must do something significant to slow and ultimately reverse the carbon-induced climate change that an unimpeachable scientific consensus shows us is already happening. We must not hesitate to engage internationally, and when we do, the effort cannot be allowed to let off the hook developing nations that are fast becoming significant sources of atmospheric carbon. Our action must be scientifically justified, but must always acknowledge the economic implications

for workers in carbon-intensive industries, and for the poor and middle class families who will find it even harder to pay their bills when carbon constraints raise energy prices. Similarly, we cannot exacerbate the competitive advantage enjoyed by manufacturers in foreign countries. We must aggressively enforce our own trade laws, and address the fact that many of our trade competitors do not regulate carbon.

I have serious reservations about the underlying bill. The President quickly issued a veto threat. For myself, I will continue to support procedural votes to keep this debate moving forward, but let me be clear--I cannot support the bill in its current form. My amendment will improve the bill, but I believe the need for major, urgent, front- loaded CCS research, development, and deployment transcends the bill before us. I intend to bring it back on other legislation moving in the future, and we should not hesitate to act on CCS as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome of this debate.

Mr. President, we all know that college can be a wonderful, eventful, and sometimes overwhelming time in the life of a young person. With new doors opening and a plethora of choices ahead, the years that young people devote to their college education shape the person they grow to be. We should all hope that when our loved ones set out on this journey that they encounter role models and mentors like Dr. Jerry Beasley. He has steered Concord University since 1985, in which time he has had an immeasurable impact on the institution and its students. In the time I have been allotted, I cannot do justice to the great service Dr. Beasley has dedicated to Concord University, but through the examples I can provide I hope to at least honor these selected accomplishments.

From the beginning of his career at Concord, Dr. Beasley has embodied the university's mission of learning and service. Traditionally, university presidents hold elegant ceremonies and inauguration parties in order to celebrate themselves and their achievements before beginning work. Dr. Beasley is not one of these presidents. He preferred to donate the funds usually allocated for such ceremonies to the support of student scholarships, setting a precedent of selflessness he continued throughout his tenure. He taught his students that giving and service were the foundation of citizenship, and renewing Concord's commitment to social responsibility.

As many of you know, access to technology is an issue of particular importance to me. I have committed myself to the enhancement of technology resources for students in West Virginia, a commitment which Dr. Beasley and I share. During his tenure as president and thanks, in part, to his oversight, the $13.9 million Rahall Technology Center is now complete and open for student use. Its 24-hour facilities provide students with access to technology ranging from high-speed internet to computer science courses.

Our society today is becoming increasingly dependent on technology. As we become integrated into a global marketplace, the values of knowledge and service have become even more important. The expansion of our resources and influence demands that we all develop a greater understanding of the world we live in and the people we share it with. Under Dr. Beasley's leadership, Concord University has met these challenges headon. The student body has grown significantly reaching an all-time peak enrollment of 3,055 students in the fall of 2001. The student body has also become incredibly diverse, with representatives from 27 States, 22 countries, and the District of Columbia. The diversity of faces and backgrounds at Concord is also complemented by a diverse range of study abroad opportunities, with scholarships available for study in Europe, South America, and around the world.

Dr. Beasley not only enhanced the diversity of the Concord student body, but also broadened the resources available on campus. Since the early 1930s, a goal of an interfaith chapel has been kept alive on the Concord campus, but, for many years, the project was left unfinished. Dr. Beasley has shepherded the project, which is now nearing completion. The building will mark not only the campus's concern for multicultural understanding, but also of Dr. Beasley's ambition to this end.

Concord University students can now enjoy a wealth of opportunities without fearing the exorbitant financial burdens of education. Financial aid and scholarships are now more available than ever with more than 90 percent of Concord's students receiving some form of educational assistance. Dr. Beasley was instrumental in the effort to bring programs such as the Bonner Scholars program to campus.

What I admire the most about Dr. Beasley, though, is his personal commitment to public service, and the inspirational example he has set for his children, his students, and all of us. He has dedicated his career to improving education, and for that we owe him our sincerest thanks. Dr. Beasley, I am very grateful for your contributions to Concord University, and I wish you well in a peaceful retirement.

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

Mr. President, it is an interesting situation in which we find ourselves today.

I guess I have to say last week was the most frustrating week I have spent in the Senate in my 24 years here. We are discussing an aviation bill which has highway provisions. We are discussing, for example, in the Presiding Officer's State, the need for essential

air service, shown by its loss of Frontier Airlines, and my State there is a similar situation and other States are in similar situations.

We are also talking about the fact that airlines are not being run in a safe enough manner. We are talking about the fact that we are just behind Mongolia in terms of our air traffic control system, in terms of its relevance to the modern age. It is a very scary situation.

Last week, we did not hold a single vote. We were on the aviation bill all week, but we did not have a single vote on aviation. I find that interesting, and I find it profoundly depressing, and, to a certain extent, it defines what the American people find so inadequate about Congress or, in this case, the Senate.

We have ideas, people work very hard, they work long hours, staff works particularly long hours, we negotiate, Members negotiate, we come to what we think is an agreement, and then days go by and nothing happens.

I repeat, I have never been through a situation where we have been on a bill which is this important and where 1 billion passengers are going to be using this air traffic system in 2015 and they are going to be using it on basically a ``Polaroid camera'' technology system. We have not had crashes. We did have one in Kentucky, but it is a little bit similar to post-9/11: Unless you have crashes that attract lots of cameras, people begin to lose interest. If there is anything not to lose interest in, it is not only the war on terror, but it is also aviation safety.

I repeat, we had all last week devoted to the aviation bill. We had one vote over the course of 5 days. That vote was a procedural vote-- not the kind of thing that raises you out of your seat with excitement. Other than that, we did not vote on one aviation issue for the entire week.

When Senator Lott and I began this process a long time ago, we operated in a completely bipartisan manner. Senator Hutchison and myself were doing the same thing. We wanted to work together. We had worked together before on the aviation subcommittee. We had operated in a bipartisan manner. Senator Reid wanted to bring the FAA reauthorization bill to the floor. It was timely. It was important. I worked very hard, from my point of view, to compromise.

I have a very large problem with the fact that high-end corporate jets and personal jets that may have one or two people on them, plus stacks of sandwiches and goodies, take the same amount of time for the air traffic controllers to navigate through the skies as some airplane that have 300 people aboard. A plane which is headed somewhere in America with people who have all kinds of work they have to do. Some are on vacation, because we are at that time of year, but most people are traveling because they have to travel--they have to go to a meeting, they have to be somewhere, they have to visit somebody sick in their family.

What is interesting is the general aviation community is paying for about 3 percent of the entire cost of the air traffic control system--3 percent, which means the commercial airlines are paying 97 percent. Yet the general aviation community dominates the skies at any given moment. There are an average of 36,000 planes in the skies during the day, and two-thirds of them are likely to be general aviation.

Of course, as soon as I said that, every Senator got 1,500 telephone calls from high-end jet users. I was on the Commerce Committee. We had to work this out with the Finance Committee. I worked with the Finance Committee, and we came up with a system that didn't put that kind of burden on the general aviation system.

My provision, which they said was really quite a horrendous thing to consider, was when a 737 or GV or GVIII takes off, they have to pay a $25 fee. If they flew to Bonn, which has this system already, obviously--all of Europe does--if they returned, they would have to pay another $25 fee. That would be a total of $50.

They began to talk about the end of general aviation as we know it. I stood back, aghast, at the sense of perspective in all of this. What they very well know is in general aviation we excluded 90 percent of all general aviation aircraft from this provision--crop dusters in Montana up to King Airs, everything was excluded; everything. Single- engine planes that doctors and lawyers fly to calm their nerves and get their heads in order--all those are excluded. Only the high-end jets-- rich people, big corporations, big planes getting the full attention of the air traffic control system would have had to pay the fee in my provision.

I negotiated this provision with Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee. He had a different perspective on this issue. Because he has superb staff and he himself is very good, I understood I was not going to get anywhere with my approach--which is a very small, little item in all of this. So I backed off from my approach and I eliminated this horrendous, Draconian, Attila the Hun-type $25 fee that it would actually take should the Presiding Officer own a G-8, that he wouldn't have to pay that. He simply would not have to pay that. He could just go right off and fly to Bonn and not pay that $25. So I backed off on that.

Then everything began to come together, and I was really encouraged that the full Senate could reach an agreement once the Commerce and Finance Committee bills were reconciled, and this appeared to be happening. But, on the other hand, there were other issues, so I got together with Senator Hutchison, and our staffs got together.

Actually, it was Leader Reid who came up with a very smart idea. The idea, Senator Hutchison told me, was of interest to her. She said that sounds pretty good. It was the following: All aviation taxes, keep them but raise nothing on commercial airlines. Why? Because you have to hold them harmless because they are broke--some are in chapter 11, some in chapter 7--whatever it is they are in a mess. Keep the highway funding provisions. There are those who believe it is pretty important. It creates a lot of jobs. But strike the tax increases to pay for the highway funding, to use general funds--revenues to pay for highway spending. Keep the bonds for New York. Keep railroad bonds. Strike tax increases to pay for bonds.

We take sort of the extraneous financial parts of the aviation bill, which do not deal directly with aviation--and therefore you could say: What are we doing this for? You know you want money in the highway trust fund. I do. We do in West Virginia. The Presiding Officer's people do in Montana. We agreed to say, as we did with the alternative minimum tax--the Republicans voting along with that--that we would do these things, but we would not pay for them. That warmed my heart because it struck me that we were approaching a deal.

Then we agreed--that is, between Senator Hutchison and myself--to strike the pension provision, which affected American Airlines and a couple of others, on the basis that it was already settled law. It had been settled last year. It was the law of the land, and you don't just remove it.

Then there was kind of a return offer. It started out with no New York bonds. The New York bonds are in the President's budget. They are part of the commitment the U.S. Government and the President of the United States made to the State of New York after the 9/11 attacks. So that seemed to be something that could be done. But a lot of people, evidently, don't like New York--it would appear to be that way--so they said we have to get rid of those New York things. They also wanted to change the railroad bonds from tax credit bonds to tax-exempt bonds. That is cheaper. Maybe we can live with that. Working with Finance, we could likely work out a deal on railroad bonds, though railroads are not aviation, but they are a serious matter. That would probably be worked out. However, New York bonds we were told are simply off the table. That will affect rather deeply one New York Senator I can think of, who has a way of expressing himself quite strongly on this issue. But other than that, it seemed to me that everything could get pretty well worked out.

The problem was I had not heard from Senator Hutchison, and none of my staff had. We didn't really know, therefore, what she was thinking. She had said: That seems like a pretty good idea. Then we get back this other proposal, which complicates things.

Now I understand that Senator Hutchison, the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, are in conversation. I

pray--I earnestly pray that they are in conversation right now about what to do about this because I really don't want to spend the next week not voting, and I really don't want to come to a cloture vote this afternoon which cannot possibly pass because, in more or less uniform fashion, the other party votes against it.

That is my sense of where we are at the moment. A number of people have come down and spoken about the bill. They have spoken usefully. But the important thing was that we chose not to act. We simply chose not to act. I reiterated that our aviation system is on the brink of collapse. Our air traffic system cannot handle the burdens of today, much less tomorrow.

I repeat my oft-used example of landing at Washington National Airport the other day and it was just wall-to-wall people, from one end of the airport to the other. I really couldn't figure that out what it would look like in about 5 more years and when we were soon going to have 300 or 400 million more people using this airport. What would it look like? How could it expand? What do air traffic control people do? In the meantime, the commercial airline industry is losing billions of dollars, and the increasing cost of fuel could force additional bankruptcies, and that means even more widespread job losses. If we do not pass this bill, essential air service disappears. Airport improvement development programs, which all rural States depend on with every fiber in their body, will disappear. And our constituents whom, the last I heard, we represent, we would be saying to them: You go ahead and wait for 9 hours or 2 days, a lot of cancellations, and that is really OK because we can't agree as between the two sides.

I am boggled by the concept of us ignoring a problem so huge for so long--just in the past week, much less in the last 10 to 15 years. Compromise is the essence of the Senate. I had hoped and I truly believed that we could make the necessary compromises to move this bill. I still hope that. I am always optimistic.

I compromised, as I said, on what are to me a number of really basic core issues in order to move this important legislation forward. Senator Baucus and I had a number of serious policy differences over how to fund the modernization of our air traffic control system, but because of the urgency of the legislation and our good working relationship, we reached agreement. Why? Because we had to. I only wish our colleagues shared this sense of urgency.

People sometimes have their particular parts of a bill which they raise to sort of a sainted status.

They are called amendments. And if you are a floor manager of a bill, you are trying to pass a bill. On the other hand, if you are an individual Member of the Senate and you have a particular issue that you care about and you put it up as an amendment, and it becomes your bill. Actually, it is an amendment, but if that amendment passes and it is not agreeable to others, then the whole bill fails. That is not the way democracy is meant to work.

Now, I have very high regard for Senator Hutchison, and I really do believe we can work out all of the aviation-related amendments to this bill in a bipartisan fashion. I will not give up on that. I never give up on anything.

We cannot work out the disagreements over nonaviation issues but, then again, maybe we can. As I have indicated, I will come back to this bill at a moment's notice. It should not take a crisis or a major accident, a bankruptcy that strands tens of thousands of passengers, or a long hot summer for this bill to be considered.

I will say also that Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens want to continue this as soon as we can. So I do urge my colleagues to take the long view. At the appropriate time I will urge them to vote for cloture. In the mean time, I stand here as manager of the bill without much going on. And I have gotten accustomed to that, but I have not gotten to like it any more.

There are no amusing aspects to it nor, most importantly, for the airlines and the people who travel on them. So since I am here alone, and not challenged by any others, I will continue to make some other remarks, and I will talk about aviation safety because I haven't sufficiently had an opportunity to discuss this. It is a speech that I would either give this afternoon or this morning. So why not give it this morning when I am sure I can give it all.

Aviation safety provisions are obviously at the core of our legislation to reauthorize the FAA and are fundamental to the public's faith in our aviation system. The FAA is responsible for overseeing the largest and most complex aviation system in the entire world.

I am proud to say our country is a global leader in aviation safety. But as I have cautioned before over the last months, that reputation has come under serious doubt and there are always numbers to be looked at underneath--you know, a number of accidents, and the FAA's lax oversight of Southwest Airlines has cast a serious pall over the agency's ability to execute its core mission.

Around that is the safety of the Nation's aviation system. Unfortunately, the agency's casual oversight of Southwest does not appear to be an isolated incident, despite the agency's claims to the contrary. Just the other day the front pages of our Nation's newspapers described another potential FAA coverup, this time on runway safety violations. And nobody has thought about that very much. That simply is airplanes taxiing on runways either to get to the terminal, or to get away from the terminal, and to get into the air. So air traffic controllers do not just look up in the sky, they have to look down on the runways. I know the FAA states it is working to address each new problem that becomes public. But with each new story, we have more questions than answers about the agency's commitment to the ability to address pressing safety issues.

At an aviation subcommittee hearing several weeks ago on this issue, I called for the Secretary of Transportation and the White House to engage on this issue. And I would actually make a point here. I am not aware of any White House involvement on any of these issues about aviation at any point.

I have not talked to anybody from the White House nor has any staff. They are just watching it happen. There is a pattern to this, but the pattern in this case is a cruel one because it is sort of deliberately condemning. I think it is fairly well understood that much of what happens on the Senate floor emanates from directions from the White House.

So I call for the Secretary of Transportation and the White House to engage on the issue. The administration issued a number of statements and committed to undertaking serious review of the FAA's safety oversight.

I am still not convinced it appreciates the severity of the challenges facing the FAA. I get the distinct impression the changes the FAA implemented are in response to our actions in the Congress. I still need reassurances that the senior leadership at the FAA, the DOT, and the White House itself recognize the extent of the FAA's problems and are committed to rectifying them. I do not think that is unreasonable. This is a massive national problem which people take for granted, but they cannot anymore because the system is collapsing.

I know many in the FAA and the industry cite the fact that there has not been a fatal airline accident in almost 2 years, and that statistically this is the safest time in the history of aviation to fly. That is the kind of statement, as soon as I hear it, I automatically start having darker thoughts because it is much too simplistic and optimistic a statement to make under any situation.

They happen to be correct, statistically. I still want to believe and be certain that the United States has the safest and best air transportation system in the world. Although the United States has not experienced a tragic accident since August 2006, the fatal crash of a commuter carrier in Lexington, KY, our aviation nevertheless has experienced a disturbing number of significant safety lapses. Any safety lapse is either inches or feet or seconds away from becoming a tragedy.

Although the FAA's oversight of airline maintenance has dominated the newspapers and the question of whether their maintenance should be done offshore, without particularly rigorous oversight, the number of serious runway incursions remains unacceptably

high and, as the General Accountability Office has stated, they are trending in a troubling direction.

I love that phrase, ``trending in a troubling direction,'' which, out of a Government agency, means that you are approaching catastrophe.

As I have said, having the safest system in the world does not mean it is safe enough. I am deeply concerned that the risk of a catastrophic accident is increasing rather than decreasing. We have all read the stories of near misses at our Nation's airports. Let's be honest. Had it not been for the quick thinking and actions of a few controllers and pilots, our Nation would have had at least one if not several major accidents claiming the lives of hundreds of people.

I do not mean to be overly dramatic or to scare the public, but I am growing increasingly concerned that our aviation system is operating on borrowed time. A National Transportation Safety Board member testified before our aviation subcommittee of the Commerce Committee earlier this month, and he stated he believed the next major aviation accident would not likely be in the sky, or some plane crashing into a mountain, it would take place on a runway. That would be the next major accident.

Many, including myself, have criticized the agency for being too close to the industry it regulates. Now, that is an easy statement on my part to make, and not fair in its entirety because we have some very good inspectors. We have some very good people in the industry that are trying, and then there are probably weaknesses on both sides. There certainly are weaknesses on both sides.

In 1996, to stave off efforts to privatize the FAA Congress accepted at that time a provision from both Democratic and Republican administrations so they could operate the FAA more like a business. We gave the agency special authority so it could run more like a private entity. The theory was that by running it like a business, it would cost less to operate. We must recognize that the FAA is not a business; it is a Government agency paid for by the people who it may or may not be protecting.

The FAA does not provide commercial services, it provides public goods, and they are called air traffic control, aircraft certification, and safety oversight.

We, that is the taxpayers of the United States, pay taxes for these services. This is not a private enterprise matter. We need to start thinking about this agency very differently. That is not meant to diminish the people who work for the FAA or run the agency. This is simply a challenge for policymakers.

I believe it is a challenge that this bill begins to address. The Aviation Investment Modernization Act provides the FAA with additional needed resources to do a lot of things. First and foremost, we authorize 200 more safety inspectors. I do not know if that is enough; it probably is not, but the FAA has always been overlooked. It is like the Veterans' Administration which was overlooked until somebody wrote a story in the Washington Post that took this Congress and just shook it from head to toe.

We will never be the same again with respect to veterans, at least I pray that we will not. I do not believe we will. So the Appropriations Committee has already substantially increased FAA funding for inspectors for this fiscal year. And this bill will give the ability to do more in subsequent years because it is a multiyear bill.

I want to take a few minutes and outline the safety provisions in the bill that I believe will strengthen the FAA's oversight of airlines. It makes sure the FAA's voluntary disclosure reporting process requires that inspectors verify that the airlines actually took the corrective actions they stated they would. That is like a teacher correcting a math test. It is one thing to take a math test; it is another thing to have it looked at and graded. You find out whether you passed.

It is very sensitive. It would evaluate if the air carrier had offered a comprehensive solution before accepting the disclosure and confirms that the corrective action is completed and adequately addresses the problem disclosed. That is sensible. That is in the bill. That is in the bill on which we did not have a single vote all last week, except for one procedural one.

It implements a process or second-level supervisory review of self- disclosures before they are accepted and closed. Acceptance would not rest solely with one inspector. This is an important statement. So you do not get coziness; inspectors change.

It revises the FAA's postemployment guidance to require a cooling off period of 2 years before an FAA inspector is hired at an air carrier he or she had previously inspected. While we do that increasingly, I cannot think of a more important place to do it than in the FAA safety inspections. It implements a process to track field office inspectors and alert the local, regional, and headquarters offices to overdue inspections. One of the problems is people get way behind on inspections, the airlines do. The FAA does a lot of paperwork. All of the problems with an underfunded agency, which we in the Congress and administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have tended to put in a secondary category.

The process must incorporate something called ATOS, the Air Transportation Oversight System, reviews to determine full compliance with air worthiness directives at a carrier over a 5-year period that incorporates physical inspection of the sample of their aircrafts.

It establishes an independent review through the Government Accountability Office to review and investigate air safety issues identified by its employees. This develops a new review team under the supervision of the Department of Transportation inspector general; that is, the DOT IG who conducts periodic reviews of FAA oversight of air carriers.

It requires a comprehensive review of the FAA Academy and facility training efforts to clarify responsibility and oversight of the program at the national level and establishes standards to identify the acceptable number of developmental controllers at each facility. That is not a Shakespearean paragraph, but I hope the Presiding Officer and the ranking member of the Finance Committee understand what I am saying.

As a recent New York Times article said:

One of the most critical challenges in aviation safety is

improving safety conditions on our nation's runways.

I am back at them. Over the past year, we have seen a marked increase in the number of serious misses on our Nation's increasingly crowded runways. Again, this legislation includes provisions to reduce the number of runway incursions. It does so in the following manner:

First, the bill requires that the FAA develop a plan for reduction of runway incursions through a review of all commercial airports and establishes a process for tracking and investigating both runway incursions and operational errors that includes random auditing of the oversight process. That is not Shakespearean either, but it is precisely accurate, and it is what needs to be done. It directs the FAA to create a plan for the deployment of an alert system designed to reduce near misses.

This alert system must notify both air traffic controllers and flight crews about potential runway incursions. The establishment of this system is one of the NTSB's highest aviation safety priorities.

In addition, the bill requires a number of other safety provisions, including a provision to reduce the flammability of airplane fuel tanks. This was identified as the direct cause of the TWA 800 crash which occurred over a decade ago. I know the issue is a priority for Senator Schumer.

Improving the safety of our Nation's aviation system is one of the most paramount objectives of this bill. I believe we have made substantial progress with respect to this objective. I look forward to further debate on the safety provisions, as Senators come to the floor. I welcome any input that might improve these sections of the bill, but even more importantly, that might actually get us to a point where we can vote on a bill.

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

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I would ask the Senator to modify his request and include an amendment which includes all of the provisions of my pending amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 10 a.m., in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 at 10 a.m. in room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to hold a hearing entitled, ``Perchlorate and TCE in Water.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 10 a.m., in room 215 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Seizing the New Opportunity for Health Reform''.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a hearing on Holocaust era insurance restitution.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

select committee on intelligence

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on May 6, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a hearing on the nomination of Michael E. Leiter to be Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Policing Lenders and Protecting Homeowners: Is Misconduct in Bankruptcy Fueling the Foreclosure Crisis?'' on Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 2 p.m., in room SD- 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

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

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

Mr. President, I remember those days in West Virginia when all the major airlines operating large jet aircraft served all of West Virginia's airports--jets, actual jets coming into West Virginia. Airline deregulation was a terrible mistake. It changed the very nature of air travel in this country for all. For millions of Americans in large urban areas, it ushered in an era of affordable air traffic. A trip to New York and Los Angeles went down. In fact, at a number of points, it became much cheaper to go

to Los Angeles from New York than to go from West Virginia to Washington. But for West Virginia communities, it meant a loss of service and convenience and often higher prices. It seemed to me that the big jets disappeared from West Virginia within days of deregulation. I remember those nice American, United, and Eastern jets sitting out there on the tarmac, people piling on. Deregulation--boom, they were gone.

For 30 years, small and rural communities have had to cope with very limited and unreliable service. The Presiding Officer knows exactly what I am talking about. Over the last several years, these problems have been exacerbated by the weakened financial condition of the U.S. airlines, which is what this whole effort to get a bill going is about.

After September 11, dozens of communities saw a dramatic decrease in the level of air service. It was measurable, noticeable, and depressing. Many lost service altogether. As the industry recovered from the dramatic downturn in the air traffic that tragic day sparked, small communities did not see the benefits of that resurgence because once they dropped something, it was easier to keep it dropped rather than to help.

Small community air service is facing an unprecedented crisis. If we fail to act to address this problem, dozens of small communities across our Nation will face a future without air service. Consider that for a moment--small communities, viable industries, institutions, people who count. Americans are born equal, but then some don't have air service. That is what we have now. Without access to reliable air service, we throw into question their economic future.

I do not come to the Senate to represent the diminution of possibilities for West Virginia's economic future. I have spoken about the weakened financial condition of our major airlines. But we must also recognize that small regional carriers that provide the air service to rural States such as West Virginia and Montana and parts of Ohio, I am quite certain, also provide the vast majority of air service to midsize communities across the country, and they are teetering on the brink of collapse because of high fuel prices.

As Senator Baucus knows all too well, small airlines across the West have folded, leaving at least 17 communities with no air service at all. Seventeen communities would sort of make up the entire State of West Virginia. That is a terrible blow. So few regional airlines are willing to initiate service to small, isolated communities that, when one withdraws service, it is very hard to find replacement air service. In most cases, it is impossible. Hundreds of small and rural communities across our country are facing drastically reduced air service because of this financial turmoil in the industry. Even in the best of times, these communities face a difficult time maintaining and developing new air service options. Today, their challenge is preventing the complete loss of air service. That is effort No. 1: Hold on to whatever you might have. No matter if it is one flight a day, hold on to it. Fight for it.

I strongly believe the Federal Government must continue to assist our most vulnerable communities stay connected to the Nation's aviation network, a network paid for by all Americans.

The reduction or elimination of air service has been devastating in terms of its effect on the economic well-being of many of our communities across the country. Having adequate air service is not only a matter of convenience, it is a matter of economic survival. Without access to reliable air service, businesses will not locate their operations in these areas of the country, no matter how attractive the quality of life or the quality of the workforce. We have, for example, extremely low housing prices, low property taxes, and an extraordinarily highly productive workforce, with an average in manufacturing of 1 percent annual turnover. That is almost unheard of. Airports are economic engines that attract critical new development opportunities and the people who can make those things happen or continue to grow.

West Virginia is a very good place to do business. Toyota and a number of other large industries, chemical and otherwise, have found that out. I can proudly state that countless large U.S. and international companies have facilities in my State. I can even point out that 20 Japanese companies have industries in the State of West Virginia, three in Wayne County, which the Presiding Officer is familiar with. From West Virginia, a business traveler can get to seven airline hubs and from these seven cities can get to any point on the globe. One-stop service to Tokyo, London, Dubai is critical if my State is going to compete in the global economy. West Virginia has been able to attract firms from around the world because corporate executives know they can visit their operations with ease. That is why we have air service. Rural and smalltown America must continue to be adequately linked to the Nation's air transportation network if its people and businesses are to compete with larger urban areas and around the world.

When Congress deregulated the airline industry, we promised small and rural communities we would make sure they would remain connected to the aviation system. We have failed in our commitment to those promises. The Essential Air Service Program, which Congress established when we deregulated the airline industry, is not a huge program, but it provides money to attract airlines into smaller communities and is incredibly valuable.

But, on the other hand, the essential air service has never met the true needs and expectations of rural air service or the necessary requirements of rural air service.

In West Virginia, the essential air service has often been plagued by high fares and limited, sporadic service. For 10 years, I have worked to strengthen small community air service. I do that because I represent a rural State with hard-working people who have an enormous desire to succeed and to work and are deprived of what many other Americans take for granted. That is not fair in Internet connection; you cannot have a rural and urban divide. It is just as true in airline service; you cannot have urban doing well, rurals being left out because we are all Americans, all created by God to be equal.

So I have worked to strengthen small community air service. In the Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century, which Congress enacted into law in the distant past of the year 2000, we began to address the need to improve air service in small and rural communities.

I, along with many of my colleagues, supported the creation of something called the Small Community Air Service Development Pilot Program, a competitive grant program to provide communities with the resources they needed to attract new air service to their town. We try everything we can. We try absolutely everything we can. Over 100 communities now have used these grants to secure and retain new air service options. That is good.

I wish to highlight two success stories which happened in my State. Charleston received money under the program I have described and has used it successfully--Charleston is our capital--they have used it very successfully to attract a new service connection for our chemical industry to Houston. Why is that important? Well, our chemical companies do a lot of the training of their people in Houston and then they come back and they work in our chemical companies. Air service to Houston gave West Virginians an important gateway, in addition, therefore, to the markets of Latin America.

Over the past 2 years, Tri-State Airport in Huntington has been reborn because of the money it received under this Small Community Air Service Development Grant Program. Prior to attracting a low-cost charter operator, the airport had seen a steep decline in the number of passengers using the airport. With fewer passengers, airlines cut back flights. Fewer flights meant fewer passengers. It was a death spiral.

Once the community was able to secure a grant, matched with almost as many local dollars, airport officials were able to attract a new carrier that served the critical markets local residents wanted. For the first time in 20 years, large jets roared off the runways in West Virginia, in Huntington. The airport will have 100,000 passengers pass through its gates for the first time in decades.

Now, that is not very impressive if you are from New York or Los Angeles,

but in West Virginia it shakes the world, and it gives people new hope. I was there when all this happened, and you could see a new sense of vigor and determination in the population. Air service attracts community ambition.

Improving air service must be a collective effort. Communities are most successful in creating new air service options when everyone-- including the Federal and the State governments, airports, airlines, businesses, and citizens--works together to attract, promote, and use the service.

One of the things we learned the hard way in West Virginia was you cannot treat an airport similar to something which is out there which people will automatically go to. We used to have a lot of our people from Charleston driving all the way to Cincinnati and actually not understanding that the cost of traveling to Cincinnati and the fuel and the overnight and all the rest of it actually did not give them that much of a financial break, but they looked at the cost of the airline and off they went. So 16 percent of Charleston's traffic disappeared.

I am now proud to say West Virginia communities have been able to use this important program to rethink their air service needs, to think about marketing airports. You market airports like you market anything else. People have to be aware of it. You have to attract people to it. It is not something which is there. It is something which has to sell itself. LaGuardia does not have to do that. Newark does not have to do that. In West Virginia, we have to do that, and we are doing that.

The FAA bill that is before us extends the authorization for these important programs for 4 more years.

Four West Virginia commercial airports rely solely upon the Essential Air Service program for any service at all. We are extending that and enlarging the amount. No community wants to be dependent on essential air service. It is not a badge of honor. But it is a fact of survival. But for many, it is their only option to maintain air service.

But as I mentioned earlier, the program has not met the needs of many communities. In 2003, as part of the last FAA reauthorization bill, I created a number of new voluntary pilot programs for essential air service communities. I modeled these initiatives after the Small Community Air Service Pilot Program by focusing on incentives rather than punitive approaches.

Under this new plan, a community could receive funds to develop its own marketing plans rather than rely on the airline for one. It could use funds to increase service levels, opt to use different types of aircraft or investigate the use of alternative transportation service. In other words, it said: What is our problem? What are we going to do about it? We cannot wait on other people. We have to make these decisions ourselves. We are doing that in West Virginia.

This year, we have added a number of provisions to strengthen the Essential Air Service program. We have increased the authorization level for the program by $58 million to $175 million a year. We have included provisions to help carriers that provide the essential air service so they can meet the cost of high fuel. It is essential. We have increased the flexibility of the program even further so communities can work with the Department of Transportation and air carriers to find air service that works for them.

Small and rural communities are the very first to bear the brunt of bad economic times. It has always been so. It shall always be so. The Presiding Officer knows exactly what I am talking about. We are always, in West Virginia, at the end of the food chain on everything. We understand that. We do not like it, but that is our current destiny, and so that is why we have to fight harder and try to be more imaginative.

The general economic downturn and the dire straits of the aviation industry have placed exceptional burdens on air service to our most isolated communities. The Federal Government must provide additional resources for small communities to help themselves attract air service. If you have to do the work yourself, you do it. You just do it. The Federal Government must make sure our most vulnerable towns and cities are linked to the rest of the Nation. It is an easy statement to make, but it is a huge statement. We have an obligation in this country to make sure all of our communities and our people are linked to the broad air service opportunities, hubs and spokes. It has to happen.

My legislation builds on existing programs and strengthens them. We must continue to provide our constituents the tools and resources necessary to attract air service, and we are doing that.

So, in closing, I should say a subsidy alone does not solve the problems of small community air service. If our constituents do not use that service, or the airlines take it away--airlines cannot operate unprofitable flights or flights that are marginally profitable, for which they could do better elsewhere. They make a little bit of money or they do not make a little bit of money, and they are gone because their situation is so dire.

I do not know what the future of the U.S. airline industry will look like in 6 months, but our Nation needs a strong airline industry. Our communities need to be connected to the aviation system.

That is why we are going through this most extraordinary exercise of no amendments to be voted on, a good deal of time to sit and talk, a great deal of frustration. But we are trying to pass something called the Federal aviation bill that will provide service to our people. If there is anything in the national interest, it is that. I will not go so far as to say it is more important than the interstate highway system, in terms of economic development and also reaching out to the world, which all our States need now to do on a two-way basis.

So we fight. We continue to fight.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I say to my good friend, the Senator from Georgia, things have changed a bit this morning and decisions are being made on that side of the aisle that will determine whether we can move forward. I am hopeful about that process.

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

Madam President, I say also to my very dear friend from Georgia with whom I have a long and wonderful background because of his strong reaction to our plight in West Virginia with the coal miners--he doesn't have coal in his State but he came into our State and adopted it as his own and we adopted him.

I also wish to tell him that what he is suggesting is something I very much support.

Amendment No. 4642 to Amendment No. 4637

Madam President, I believe there is an amendment at the desk.

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

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

Mr. President, I would like to take a few moments today to discuss what is a catastrophe all across our Nation--and it certainly is in West Virginia--because of the price of gasoline and other transportation fuels.

My State is not wealthy. I think it is either the third or fourth poorest State in our country, and I do not say that with shame, I say that with pride because it was, in a sense, one of the reasons I was a VISTA volunteer. I went there as a VISTA volunteer because I saw a place where I could at least try to help. The people are the best ever. When people have to struggle to make it, day-in and day-out, they are pretty solid people.

As I am sure it is the case for all of my colleagues, for the past few weeks and months I have been hearing from my constituents constantly about rising gasoline prices and the resulting rise in the prices for goods and services throughout our economy.

West Virginians are hurting. West Virginians will always find a way to persevere--always--but right now many are struggling to juggle expenses, making enormous sacrifices to feed and clothe their families, while trying to pay the cost of going to work. We have plants in West Virginia which people drive hours and hours every day to get to. Work is not easily found, so where it is, people have to drive. We are 96 percent mountains, 4 percent flat. We have a lot of roads. People pretty much have canceled the occasional splurge for a movie. We have a baseball team in West Virginia. That has pretty much been pushed off. In other words, if it is a nonemergency purchase, they bypass it. It takes away from their happiness, their stability as a family, but they have no choice. Belts have been tightened just about as far as belts can be tightened.

Yet, this week, we hear that oil company profits are again nearing or exceeding record highs and that these companies have no plan and these companies have no desire to increase domestic refining capacity--one of the very few things we know would actually help bring down prices.

The Energy Information Administration and private sector energy experts tell us to expect gasoline and diesel fuel prices to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. I do not know what that means. I do not think West Virginians care very much what that means. It just means a long time. And a week, a month, is a long time. This is well beyond the usual cyclical annual price fluctuation. And the so-called summer driving season is not even here yet. But other than a brief dip in January, the price West Virginians have been paying at the pump has been climbing steadily since before Christmas--not as noticeable at first, now catastrophic.

The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in West Virginia has risen from just over $2.70 a gallon in August 2007 to a price on the last day of April 2008 of $3.71. I do not have new wage data for workers in my State. I wish I did. But I am willing to stand on the floor of the Senate and assert that nobody's salary has risen to match that 37-percent increase.

The idea of $4-a-gallon gasoline--which 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago would have sounded crazy--really now is a matter not so much of ``if,'' but ``when.'' The timeframe I just mentioned is relevant, of course, because we are a country that has been at war in Iraq for more than 5 years--spending money, letting people do corruption at all levels. I am always suspicious of oil companies. When our brave American forces set out to impose regime change on that country based upon the false--or at least unforgivably imprecise; I prefer the word ``false''-- intelligence, West Virginians were paying, on average, $1.63 for regular gasoline. That was not that long ago. It had been as low as $1.26 in the months leading up to the invasion.

It should come as no surprise to anyone within the sound of my voice, but in that time oil industry profits have risen steadily: almost $60 billion in profits in 2003, just over $80 billion in profits in 2004, approximately $110 billion in profits in 2005, just under $120 billion in 2006, and just over $120 billion so far in 2007. ExxonMobil, Shell, and ChevronTexaco have each had increasingly larger profits each of the last 5 years. BP and ConocoPhillips have done nearly as well. In all, the five largest integrated multinational oil companies have reaped almost $560 billion in profits since President Bush and Vice President Cheney came into town. I don't particularly want to do it that way, because I blame the companies more than I blame them, but there is lots of blame to go around.

Anyone who looks at the numbers can make this about politics, of course. It is easy to do. But this is, in essence, for me, a former Vista volunteer in my 44th year in West Virginia, all about people. It is simply all about people and families who have been struggling anyway. The average salary for the average working family of four in West Virginia is $31,000. That is not a lot of money, before you get to all of this, and then it is even less.

Today, if you are lucky enough to live or work near Sam's Club in Vienna, WV, which is on the Ohio River, and you can afford to become a member there, you can get a gallon of gasoline for $3.49. It is hard for anyone I know in West Virginia to think of that as cheap, but it is the lowest price reported in the entire State. Frankly, based on the data I have seen, it is so much lower than the rest of the State that you almost have to consider it an anomaly.

If you are running low in Spencer, WV, a rural community, however, you need to be prepared to pay $3.82 at the Exxon station on Main Street. It is $3.79 in South Charleston. Residents of Huntington are paying $3.75. In Berkeley Springs, not far from Washington, it is $3.69. No West Virginia county--none--is reporting an average price per gallon of regular gasoline that is below $3.61. Only three of my States' 55 counties are reporting average gasoline prices lower than $3.67.

Individual price quotes at individual stations are ominous enough, but the real stark numbers, the real telling calculation, is how much more West Virginians are paying for gasoline than they were in years past, and that is not even getting into the meteoric rises in food prices and the other costs essential to daily living. Even those in West Virginia who travel by air, which is the subject of the bill we are meant to be on, those prices have gone up.

Since 2001, West Virginia households are paying almost $2,500 per year more for gasoline. If it is a household with children, that makes it $3,000. I take my colleagues back to the average salary for the average family of four, working family of four in West Virginia: $31,000. When you add on health care, food, rent, and all the rest, everything else, it is an enormous matter. If it is a household with teenagers, it is just below $3,600 more. Families, businesses, and farmers in West Virginia will spend $153 million more on gasoline in April 2008 than they spent in January 2001.

If prices remain at current levels, $1.83 billion more will be spent on gasoline in West Virginia this year than

was spent in 2001. West Virginia consumers, farmers, and businesses are on a track to pay $2.96 billion for gasoline this year.

So West Virginians are asking two questions: How did we get here; but to them, much more importantly, what can be done to fix this.

Nobody in Government, academia, or the private industry can give us a single definitive equation for what makes the price of oil go up and down. We don't know why, but we can't. Generally, increased demand from China, India, and much of the developing world has set the stage obviously for prices that we have to take into consideration.

Much of our oil comes from an unregulated and unresponsive cartel called OPEC. We also know that since the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world price for petroleum has been affected by a global struggle against stateless thugs.

The instability brought about by the invasion in Iraq has done nothing but raise the pump price. I don't know a single benefit to our Nation that has been accomplished there. But smaller factors have also had huge consequences. Instability in Nigeria and the outrageous behavior in Venezuela have contributed in similarly negative ways. The recent strike by refinery and pipeline workers in Scotland, unbeknownst to many of our citizens, will not help. Likewise for the very serious refinery explosion in Utah this week.

Economists cannot pinpoint how much speculation in the commodities market is adding to the price of oil, but a congressional study in 2005 suggested it was in the $20 to $25 per barrel range. A more recent study announced by Public Citizen said it is now closer to $30 a barrel. It doesn't matter. Every cent of that is being seen at the gas pumps in West Virginia and around the country, and it hurts, and trying to give a worldwide economic explanation for it doesn't solve anybody's problems or anybody's pain.

We know, too, that the price is manipulated up and down the supply chain. Nobody will ever convince me that there is not a large amount of corruption and manipulation, deliberate, cozy and easy, that goes on around boardrooms in oil companies. From the huge oil companies that find the oil, through more markets and middlemen than we can keep up with, every player has the ability to force the price up for their own bottom line. There is manipulation beyond the reach of my people in West Virginia or the Presiding Officer's people in the State of Colorado. We are at their mercy. We pay the price, we are at the mercy--at the mercy of oil. Federal investigators cannot usually pinpoint collusion, but those acting independently to manipulate prices cost the people of West Virginia all the same. There are a lot of things Federal regulators never manage to find.

In the long term, the things we need to do sound basic--and this is the final part of my remarks and the important part, other than the overriding theme of anger--such as increasing supply and reducing consumption, but achieving these goals has proved to be very difficult.

I have long supported efforts to improve automobile fuel efficiency, and so have most other people--not all. We made a small and long overdue change last year, and I believe we will do more. I think CAFE standards are going to go up and up, as they should; cars will get smaller and smaller, as they should. That will not be good for my legs, but it will be good for my people. But even when Detroit catches up with the rest of the world's automakers on fuel efficiency--I repeat, catches up--we do need to add to our supply now.

That is why in 2006, I supported Senator Domenici's legislation to increase oil and gas exploration in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When these new fields are fully on line, they will add 1.26 billion barrels of oil to our domestic supply. Now, I say that, but I also have to say in all honesty that I voted against virtually every other attempt to do drilling offshore and in ANWR, for example. ANWR to me has always been a shibboleth. People say: Well, we can get lots of supply there, just as many people or more say it is technically feasible or maybe it is economically feasible, but it is not both. In the meantime, the tundra continues to melt.

That is why I have also consistently supported holding off on additional deposits in our Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is more than 97 percent full as it is, and there is no economic rationale for filling it to the brim with $120 per barrel of oil. That product should be making its way into the market some place.

I joined my colleagues earlier this year to ask the President to suspend deliveries into the petroleum reserve until the price of oil drops below $75 a barrel. Since the President persists in refusing to stop taking oil off the market, I will support legislation to force him to do it.

I also support, as I have in the past on several occasions, the imposition of a windfall profits tax on integrated multinational oil companies. People say this won't have any effect. I would like to try that out to show that they are wrong and to send a message. The oil companies are making so much money maybe they won't even notice it. But I doubt that, because there are now 300 million Americans who are very angry about what very few of them are doing. As I have said, these companies are making huge, perhaps unconscionable--not perhaps--totally unconscionable profits off the hard-working people in my State and off the wages of struggling Americans everywhere. If they refuse to reinvest in additional refining capacity, which has been their habit, the least we can do is use some of those profits to shore up the highway trust fund for the road infrastructure and transportation projects that we need for the 21st century, and perhaps even for something called aviation. Those projects would create jobs.

I will also reintroduce legislation this week that I first introduced in 2001. It is called the Low Income Gasoline Assistance Program, or LIGAP. This will provide some relief to Americans hardest hit by any rise in prices; to wit, the working poor, which describes a lot of my State. For many West Virginia seniors who have no means of getting to work, the grocery store, or to a doctor's appointment other than their cars or trucks, if they have them, LIGAP assistance for gasoline purchases will enable them to weather this crisis with a little more peace of mind. I say ``if they have them'' because many people in communities I have worked in throughout West Virginia don't have automobiles, so when they have to go somewhere, usually a pretty long distance, they have to hitch a ride. Even though our people are innately good and generous, because they depend on others as others depend on them, they will usually charge a fee for that ride. In any event, whether they can even take that ride will depend on whether they can afford the gasoline price to get there.

So LIGAP eligibility would be linked to and modeled after LIHEAP, the very successful and efficient home heating and cooling assistance program. Funds would be distributed to States as additions to allocations under the existing community development block grant program.

It makes sense. For everyone who qualifies, LIGAP would give stipends of between $100 and $165 a month. Hopefully, this may mean not having to scrimp on their children's food or cut back on prescription drugs and other family needs.

Families are the basis of our country. People are the basis of everything we do. It is just that there are some sectors of our economy that choose to avoid that because they don't have to depend upon those people because those people have no choice but to buy their products.

It is time for Congress and the administration to come together and stop bickering--it would be a majestic accomplishment--and stop fighting over turf, as we are doing on the aviation bill. While we engage in parliamentary tactics that most Americans don't give a hoot about--in fact, they hate us for doing it--West Virginians and citizens in every State are suffering, while oil companies are laughing all the way to their many banks. This must stop. I ask my colleagues to work with me to make this stop.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on May 1, 2008, at 2 p.m. to conduct a Committee hearing entitled ``The More You Know, the Better Buyer You Become: Financial Literacy for Today's Homebuyers.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to hold a hearing during the session of the Senate on Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 2:30 p.m., in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate in order to conduct a hearing on Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate in order to conduct a hearing on Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 2:15 p.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a nomination hearing.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet, during the session of the Senate, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Keeping America's Children Safe: Preventing Childhood Injury'' on Thursday, May 1, 2008. The hearing will commence at 10 a.m. in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Indian Affairs be authorized to meet on Thursday, May 1, at 9:30 a.m. in room 562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing entitled Indian Energy Development--Regaining Self- Determination Over Reservation Resources.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, to conduct a hearing on Judicial nominations on Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 2:15 p.m., in room SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on May 1, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a closed hearing.

Mr. President, a procedural matter. I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2954, introduced earlier today by Senator Harkin.

Mr. President, I ask if there is objection to proceeding?

This would follow both you and Senator Nelson.

I am informed we have to get this bill to the House right away.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with, no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I honor, as always, the words and wisdom of the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Durbin's amendment.

The debate is not about an arcane, technical pension funding rule. The issue before us is about whether thousands and thousands of airline employees are allowed to keep hard-earned defined benefit pensions or if we are going to regulate them or throw them out to the underfunded PBGC, which has so much debt that you cannot count the zeros. This issue is about whether we are going to send additional major carriers, who have so far avoided bankruptcy in these brutal financial circumstances, into a downward spiral. My premise is to hold the main carriers harmless. They are up against it, at the cliff. We should hold them harmless.

Adding this pension provision to the FAA bill would defeat the whole purpose of this compromise brokered by the Finance and the Commerce Committees, which was done with the underlying principle that we should hold the commercial airlines harmless during these turbulent economic times, which are expected to last. That is sacred. That is why it would be unwise to load up an additional liability on airlines trying to do the right thing for their employees.

It would be especially wrong to cause that result in a misguided effort to put the preservation of regular order before common sense--in other words, going around a committee. It happens. Airline employees will pay the unnecessary price for this change from current law. It cannot happen.

During these tough times of rising fuel prices and mounting financial losses, this is not the time to impose tougher, unrealistic pension funding requirements upon the airline industry. To do so would risk more bankruptcies and force carriers to dump their pensions into the woebegone PBGC. That would put in danger the economic security of workers who would prefer to stay employed and not have their pensions frozen.

In 2005, when the Senate was considering the Pension Protection Act on the Senate floor, we passed an amendment by voice vote that I cosponsored with Senator Isakson and Senator Lott. The amendment would have given all airline carriers substantial pension relief. The amendment did not pick winners or losers within the airline industry. It is not our business. Rather, it focused on keeping their defined benefit pension plans solvent.

Unfortunately, as Senator Hutchison pointed out, the final product that came out of conference in 2006 limited the pension relief the Senate sought to give all airlines. Led by--and I will say he is gone and I am not sad--the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Bill Thomas, the conference report chose winners and losers. It gave some carriers more pension relief than others, creating a competitive advantage for some carriers.

A number of Senators were not happy with the airline provisions bill, including Senators Durbin, Reid, Obama, Harkin, Menendez, Lautenberg, Bill Nelson, and a lot of the rest of us. They entered a colloquy on the floor arguing that this disparity needed to be dealt with.

That is why in last year's Iraq war supplemental appropriations legislation Dick Durbin did the only thing that he had available to him to do, and with the strong support of Senator Hutchison, he sought to right this wrong and inserted a provision that brought the airlines up to par and gave them the necessary pension relief that they deserved. I understand this was perhaps not the best process. We are not a body known for our meticulous protocol. We are trying to get something in that is lifesaving for the Nation.

As a senior member of the Finance Committee myself, which has jurisdiction of pension legislation, I agree with Senator Baucus that it would have been more ideal to go through the regular order and have the Finance Committee review and vet the provision. The problem is that it wasn't going to happen.

However, airlines need and deserve pension relief. We cannot adopt the pension provision of the Finance Committee tax title and impose higher pension burdens upon five domestic airlines, which has been discussed by various people, during these tougher economic times.

Remember, hold legacy commercial airlines harmless. So we would be turning our backs on American, Continental, US Airways, Hawaiian, and Alaska Air. To do so would risk more bankruptcies and more job losses. I pointed out earlier that one out of every six jobs in the airline industry has been lost in the last 6 years.

In 2005, while we were debating the Isakson-Rockefeller-Lott amendment that brought all airlines equitable pension relief, I stated on the Senate floor that my goal was to protect the employees and retirees who worked so hard to earn retirement benefits, and that remains my goal today.

To deny disadvantaged airlines the relief they rightfully deserve in the Pension Protection Act and which the Senate voted to give them would be unfair.

I have the utmost respect for Senators Baucus and Grassley. They are a superb team. They did their very best and did a very good job on the whole on the Pension Protection Act. But the Finance Committee in the Senate should not have received the dicta of the now thoroughly retired former Ways and Means Committee chairman. The former House majority succeeded with their desperate efforts to achieve questionable policy goals by holding long-awaited pension reform legislation hostage. But that was then and

this is now, and we should not give the former House majority the satisfaction of achieving their desired objective over a jurisdictional squabble, and that is all it is. It counts. I understand that. It counts. People lie on the floor to protect it, but in this case, we are dealing with something much larger.

We can do better, and that must begin by us stepping back and invoking the ``do no harm'' principle. America cannot afford another major bankruptcy to cripple our aviation system.

With all of my respect to the Finance Committee leadership, we just cannot do one more thing to jeopardize the health of our domestic aviation industry, particularly the commercial sector. The rest of it is doing very well. For that reason, I will support Senator Durbin's amendment, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I wish to inform the Presiding Officer of a quandary. We have in front of us a bill which would come close to rescuing the aviation industry of the United States of America. It is a bill that the aviation industry supports. It is a bill that the general aviation community supports. But it is not supported by a couple of Senators, with their reasons, and we find ourselves, therefore, in a position not to be able to move forward in the short term. It is one of those situations when the more you wait, or the greater the disagreement, the more people dig in.

I wish to offer my feelings which are that in a big bill such as this, which I think would be the biggest policy bill this Congress has passed this year if we were to do it, there are always areas of disagreement. The trick is to work out those areas of disagreement. That is what the floor of the Senate is for. That is what negotiations are for.

But I do want people to understand that in the interests of protecting certain prerogatives, protocols, our aviation industry as a whole is being ignored and thereby threatened. If we were to put up some purportedly helpful amendments, we have no idea at this point how they might turn out. So there are really a couple of people who control this entire situation. As long as they remain negative, there is very little we can do that we can count on turning into success.

The aviation industry, just in my State, as I have explained a number of times, is a $3.4 billion industry that employs 51,000 people. That is something almost nobody does in a State as small as West Virginia. But we have to work this through. Everybody can't come out an exact winner. If I were to line up one side versus another side, I think having an aviation industry, giving them the confidence to go forward, the passing of this bill would be like an increase in their bond rating, certainly psychologically, and it would give them the confidence that we are trying to do the right thing by them.

In doing that, we have held all of the commercial aviation airlines harmless so they will not have to pay any more fuel tax than they do today, which is about $10.7 billion, and adding a small portion of fuel tax on to the general aviation industry so they would be paying about a billion dollars.

We found a mechanism, being clever but correct, to actually raise $400 million a year for the life of this bill. Of course, there would have to be other bills to get us on our way to building a $20 billion to $30 billion to $40 billion air traffic control system which is sufficient for the needs of the aviation industry. I know the Presiding Officer has an amendment which I would support, and there are others who have--they just don't want to--I don't know how to put it, but they just don't want to lose their position in all of this.

So the question is, What do we do? I am just here to report that we are hard at work. Everybody is working feverishly in back rooms--that is in a good sense--the Democratic and Republican cloakrooms. Senator Hutchison and I are in precise agreement on all of this, and it is a bipartisan bill. It has enormous consequences to the economy of America, to the passengers who are held hostage by delays and maintenance problems. Sixty-eight rural States have had airports entirely removed from service which were previously served. It is very painful if you are from a rural State. It sort of defines the meaning of being cut off from the rest of the world. That is not important to some people, but it is very important to those of us who come from a rural State, and to be quite frank, every one of us comes from a rural State in some part.

So what I am saying is, the stakes are extraordinarily high. It is, in my judgment, and on a bipartisan basis, an amazingly one-sided case. You protect your legacies; that is, your commercial airlines, you get the support of the general aviation community which has an enormous number of airplanes with millions more to come, and you get the financing to start on an air traffic control system which is behind that of, as I have said today several times, Mongolia. Landing aircraft by ground radio and x-rays is not really the way to run a safe system. We have had so many close collisions that have been averted only at the last moment by air traffic control folks and very quick-witted pilots. Hundreds and hundreds of deaths could have easily resulted.

So I think it is a choice of the people doing the negotiating or the people who want to block the people who are doing the negotiating to think in very clear terms about what is important. Is it pride? Is it the future of the aviation industry? We haven't passed any bills in Congress on our side, and this would be a major accomplishment. But that is not important. The importance is it would save an aviation industry, and they believe that because the bill carries on for a number of years. They would begin to get their safe landing system.

So people must be wondering what is going on, and I just wanted to report that people are at work, hopefully in good faith, trying to get a parliamentary situation or an amendment situation or whatever that works our way through this crisis.

In the meantime, we are on hold. I wanted to make that report to the Senate.

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

Madam President, I withdraw my amendment No. 4585.

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

Madam President, I would observe that from the very beginning of this most interesting day, my very good friend, Senator Hutchison, who is the ranking member on the Aviation Committee, has said there is a way to pass this bill in 5 minutes and that is: One, we do the amendment with respect to what my substitute amendment does; and, secondly, that the extraneous amendments, financial amendments which the Republicans do not like, they can put up that amendment. Now, they have said nobody on their side will vote for our amendment on the theory that it didn't come before they had a chance to take out the extraneous amendments. So I would say to my distinguished friend, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, offer your amendment right now, right now. Offer it. You may find a more welcome audience than you think.

Mr. President, I don't know if I am closing or not. I want to offer this observation. I have been here virtually all day. I have had plenty of rest--very little talking and very little learning. What strikes me, as this day closes, is that the people who are objecting in various ways to taking a vote--there will be no votes from our side on this or that or whatever--are missing the whole point of the bill. I support the Durbin position on pensions because it is part of the written law. It is not very difficult.

Everybody wants their own little piece to win. I have heard almost no conversation today--and virtually none yesterday--about the perilous condition of our aviation industry, particularly the commercial aviation industry. There isn't any sense of urgency about the large matter. Maybe people have it in their hearts, but they don't choose to bring it out here because on the floor they want to win points or they have ideological considerations that we cannot raise taxes or whatever. But while we are sitting here doing nothing--and I am sure impressing the American people mightily with our vigor--we have an aviation industry that is on the verge of collapse.

I pointed out a number of times that one out of every six employees has been laid off by commercial airlines. The fastest growing part of the aviation industry is the general aviation industry. I have very strong feelings about that, but for the sake of the chairman of the Finance Committee, I backed off of my solution for a fee of $25 per flight for a high-end private or corporate jet. I never really figured out how the $25 was going to bring them to the feet of catastrophe. Most of the jets that are made at the high end are sold elsewhere, overseas.

So I am very frustrated, as chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee, that we are not really talking about how to fix aviation. We are talking about how to keep our turf, how you are going to get no votes on this until I get my votes on that. None of it is about the big picture. It is about little things inside the bill which people choose to put their feet down on and then not move.

That is very depressing to me because I am very keenly aware that aviation is not a subject that has a great deal of appeal broadly. Most of our meetings on the Commerce Committee are attended by relatively few. There are relatively few on the floor of the Senate who really understand the condition of the aviation industry or the details pertaining to its condition, the history of that condition, and what the future holds.

I hope that, as we go through this night of cooling down, we will become reflective about what the bill is about, which is trying to give the commercial aviation industry, as well as the general aviation industry, a chance to survive in one case and flourish in the other case.

I made enormous compromises with the chairman of the Finance Committee--monumental, from my point of view. But so what. That is not even the point. The point is commercial airlines. So many of them are closing down. So many of them are in chapter 11 bankruptcy, in and out of chapter 11. Some are headed toward chapter 7. It is a national catastrophe--not to speak of our air traffic control system where we are at this point behind Mongolia.

So these things are important, and evidently others don't think so because they want to win their points to keep their positions and let the aviation industry take care of itself. I have not heard anybody on the floor today discussing with any passion, any coherency, or logic the condition of our aviation industry. That is very disappointing to me.

So I put up that caution and say that I hope we will be a wiser group tomorrow and that we will reach an accommodation because if we don't, we will

not only not be the world class of aviation, we will be very far from it. It is not just the commercial airlines, it is the air traffic control system. And, yes, you do have to kind of raise taxes for that. You have to build a digital GPS satellite system at the same time as you maintain an analog system. It will take 10 or 12 years to build this modern air traffic control system which every other country in Europe has--Japan and probably China have it.

It is discouraging to me for people not to be keeping their eye on the central force of this bill, which is to preserve what we need to do in commerce, to stay in touch with each other, to visit a dying mother, and do all kinds of things that are in the American way of life. Our debate today has not reflected the American way of life. It has reflected kind of a much more parochial view than I am comfortable with. But I am managing the bill, so I have to deal with that.

So I just close by saying that I hope tomorrow will be a brighter day.

I yield the floor.