Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that remaining time for the majority be reserved.

I would like to be recognized as in morning business. I guess we are in morning business?

First, I wish to commend the Senator from Colorado and try to ratify what I heard him say. I came in after the first part of his speech, but I know his focus was on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and No Child Left Behind. He is exactly right. There are reforms that do need to take place. We have gone 3 years without a reauthorization, and reauthorization, hopefully, can happen this year. When it does, we can improve the plight of our children, and we can reform the way we do some of the things we do in SEA to open new opportunities for our kids. But accepting the status quo, he is right, is not good enough. We need to make those reforms, and we need to make them now. I look forward to working with the Senator from Colorado in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee when that issue comes up, to reform ESEA, get it reauthorized, to reempower our teachers, our students, our parents, and raise the level of education for all Americans.

I congratulate him for his great contribution to the State of Colorado and, further, to the Senate.

I wish to steal a line he just gave us 1 minute ago. When I walked in, he was saying there are some things Congress cannot do. He is right. Education does take place at the local level. There are some things we can fix in Washington, but it is primarily done at the local level.

But there is one thing Congress can fix; that is, our spending, our debt, and our deficit. For just 1 second, I wish to speak not in the tone of a politician, not as somebody who is a part of the institution, trying to talk about what he thinks, I wish to talk about what I think the people of Georgia think. The people of Georgia do not understand why we cannot do in Washington what they have had to do during the last 3 years. During the economic travails of the last 3 years, every American family has had to sit around their kitchen table, reprioritizing how they spend their money to deal with lower returns on their investments, the consequences of unemployment or underemployment. They have had to adapt to difficult economic times. Yet when they turn on the television and they look at C-SPAN, they do not see us adapting to the economic times we find ourselves in as a country. I was in the real estate business for 33 years and I do not understand a lot of things, but I understand leverage.

Leverage is a marvelous thing in capitalism. If you have proper leverage in real estate or proper leverage in business, it can make a lot of things happen. Leverage is good, but too much leverage is a death sentence and we are at a precipice in this country. We are at a precipice where we are about to fall off. If we all fall off, there is no recovery because continued deficit spending and continued increasing debts results in two things: inflating the dollar in future years to pay that debt off with cheaper dollars, which devalues every asset of every American family, and increasing the interest rates to unsustainable and unpayable amounts.

I lived through that one in the post-Carter years in 1980, 1981, and 1983 when we dealt with the Misery Index in America--double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and double-digit interest rates. In my home State of Georgia today we have double-digit unemployment, 10.4 percent. Interest rates are low, but it is arbitrary, and they are getting ready to go up. The yield spread curve between 2-year Federal debt and 10-year U.S. debt is triple, which indicates the markets that are buying our debt are already looking out in the future and saying interest rates are going higher, three times what they are now, maybe more.

If you look at inflation, inflation is arbitrarily low right now. But with what is happening to food and prices, contributed by gasoline and petroleum, what we see happening in the world marketplaces, it is an inevitable factor, unless we get our arms around our debt and our deficit.

We owe about $14 trillion in debt. The deficit this year is over $1.5 trillion. Those are unsustainable numbers. We do not have to pay the debt off today. We do not have to reduce the deficit to zero. But we have to get ourselves on a glidepath to reducing our deficit and, in turn, reducing our debt over time. It means we have to sit down at our kitchen tables, the floor of the Senate and the floor of the House, prioritize what we are doing, and get to the business the American people expect us to get to.

We are playing some political games right now with short-term CRs, when the big votes, the big debates, and the big decisions loom ahead-- first, the debt ceiling, later the fiscal year 2012 appropriations.

There are three things I hope we will do: No. 1 is recognize our system is broken and is not working. I did a little research. Most of my years in Congress, more dollars have been appropriated through omnibus appropriations than through legitimate debate and budget units on the Senate floor. We did not do any last year. The reason we are doing a CR this year on last year is because it was an omnibus appropriation.

We are not spending our money like the American people have to spend theirs. We are not prioritizing. We are not looking at cost-benefit analysis. We have to change our system. I am pleased to have joined with former Governor Shaheen of New Hampshire, a Democratic colleague, to introduce the Biennial Budget and Appropriations Act for the Congress, an act which mimics what 20 of our States, 40 percent of the country, already does: appropriate on a 2-year cycle rather than on a 1-year cycle; appropriate in odd-numbered years so that in even- numbered years, which also happen to be election years, we do not do appropriating, we do oversight. We spend a year not making political promises of what bacon we are going to bring home, but we spend a year looking for savings and redundancy and duplication and waste in Federal spending.

If we do not spend a minute looking back, we can never spend a minute looking forward. Right now we do not spend any time looking back and seeing where money is being spent and where it might be saved. We do not reprioritize what was introduced and established years ago. The Biennial Budget and Appropriations Act requires the President of the United States to submit a biennial budget, requires Congress to act on the independent budget units in a 2-year fashion, in the odd-numbered years, and requires the oversight in even-numbered years of every function of the Federal Government.

We do not do oversight anymore, and we are paying a terrible price for it. That is the first thing we need to do. Second, we need to understand that we need to appropriate our money the way the American people appropriate their money. They measure the benefit compared to the cost, and if the benefit to their family is not equal to or greater than the cost, they do not spend the money. But in the Congress, we do not measure cost-benefit analysis. We measure how much more we can spend in continuation than what we appropriated in a previous year. That is a broken system, and it is a broken cycle.

I commend Senator Corker on his introduction of the CAP Act, which is the second part of what we need to do; that is, put ourselves on some type of fiscal constraint through a balanced budget amendment and through a spending cap.

A little known secret is 2 years ago the Nation of Israel confronted problems such as the ones we have today--burgeoning debt, a bigger deficit, and spending problems. Prime Minister Netanyahu and their Finance Minister sat down at their kitchen table in Tel Aviv and established a biennial budget process, 2-year appropriations rather than 1, of even-numbered year election oversight and odd-numbered appropriating.

Then they did a second thing. They put a cap on their debt, and they put a cap on spending. Do you know what happened in 2 years' time? Israel's GDP has grown by 7.9 percent. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have told the EU and some of the struggling countries in the EU such as Portugal and Spain that they should adopt a biennial spending process and the oversight process of a biennial budget and an appropriations act.

Well, I would say this: If 20 of our States are doing it, and they are 20 of our most fiscally sound States, beginning with New Hampshire and Nebraska and Oregon and States like that, and if Israel has done it and demonstrated, in difficult world economic times, they can grow their GDP by 7.9 percent and reduce their debt and cap their spending, and if the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are telling the European Union, which is in most difficult straits today, that it is part of the answer as to how they spend their money and getting an arm around their spending, then I think we should take a look at it, and it should be on the floor of the Senate being debated.

We have a window of opportunity. We have the chance to reform our spending process, to set ourselves on a glidepath to reducing our debt and reducing our deficit over time and sending a signal to the world market that the strong America they have known and invested in is going to be even stronger in the future.

But if we continue to dilly-dally around, trying to make political headway out of economic events, and push ourselves out in time on debt and deficit, we are going to have higher inflation, higher interest rates. We are going to devalue the assets of the American people and, worst of all, we are going to lose our place in the world.

I do not want to be a part of that. The President does not want to be a part of that. I do not think any Member of the Senate wants to be a part of that. So my encouragement to the leadership, Democratic and Republican alike, is, let's let the best ideas flow. Let's let them come to the floor of the Senate. Let's debate them. Let's invite the President to come and sit down with us and do the same thing.

Instead of taking entitlements off the table, they ought to be part of the discussion. Instead of saying there are some things we are not going to do and some things we will, we ought to be open and say we will look at everything, and then we will prioritize based on cost versus benefits. If we do that, we will do what the people of Georgia expect me to do, and I think what the people of the United States expect all of us to do.

We have a great country made great by a great people who made difficult decisions in difficult times. This is the difficult decision facing our time. I want to be one of the people who is a part of the solution, not a footnote in history at the beginning of the decline of the United States of America.

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

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

Mr. President, I rise for a brief moment to pay tribute to a great career in aviation and aviation manufacturing in the State of Georgia and the United States. Tomorrow, Lee Rhyant, of Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA, will retire at the age of 60, after giving the last 11 years of his life to that plant and overseeing the remarkable C-130J Super Hercules, the best selling transport aircraft in the history of aviation; of overseeing the completion of the first 187 F-22 Raptors, the stealth aircraft of the 21st century, the backbone of our Air Force; and then the development of the FA-35 Joint Strike Fighter, all being built in part or in whole in Marietta, GA.

Lee Rhyant has guided that process through difficult times and he stood up for the Air Force and he stood up for America and he stood up for those airlines, knowing they were the right thing for the American people to have to ensure our defense and our strength nationally.

I am sure, Mr. President, you have been to Iraq. I have been to Iraq, Afghanistan. We have flown in the C-130s. I flew out of Baghdad 2 years ago on one C-130 that was built in 1969 in the Marietta, GA, plant. It is still flying today, a great airplane built by great men and women.

Lee Rhyant has been the leader of that great company at Lockheed Martin in Marietta for the last 11 years. He came there from Rolls Royce and has been a great leader in aviation throughout his 35 years in business--so great that 2 years ago, in 2009, he was selected the National Management Associate of the Year by the National Management Association, a tremendous credit that only 35 people have received in the past.

Lee is my friend; he is my neighbor; he is a great American. He has led a great company and a great community in Georgia. I rise tonight to pay tribute to his dedication, to his commitment, and, most of all, his compassion for the American people and for the defense of our country.

I wish him the best in his retirement, knowing that he has given to his country everything he could have given and earned every day of retirement he is about to receive.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from Louisiana, and I look forward to being in New Orleans this weekend, I might add. It is a great State and a great city.

Madam President, there is a pending amendment by Senator Hutchison dealing with medical waivers, which prompts me to come to the floor for a minute and talk about that issue as it affects Georgia today, and in particular to talk about it in the context of what our Governor and legislature are having to deal with right now in terms of the mandates of the health care bill signed on March 23 of last year by President Obama.

In fact, on the signing of that bill, there were a couple of statements made, reflecting back on that long debate, and I want to repeat them right now. One was made by Speaker Pelosi, saying about a month before the House passed the health care bill, that you had to pass it to find out what is in it. That was a funny statement at the time, but it became prophetic as we are beginning to discover over and over the unintended consequences of the legislation on our States and on medicine.

Secondly, Vice President Biden declared the magnitude of the impact of the health care bill. That magnitude is turning out to be higher cost, less benefit, and more regulation on our States.

In particular, I want to bring two points up to talk about why this whole issue of medical waivers is so important. Our insurance commissioner, Ralph Hudgens, has submitted to CMS for a waiver on the medical cost-benefit rule in terms of benefits paid on policies, taking it up to 85 percent. That mandate in the health care bill is going to force not better coverage but less coverage by our insurance companies in Georgia because they will leave when they cannot meet it.

It is the intention to regulate the amount of benefits paid. But the application means companies that can't meet it by the time set in the bill will leave the State. So instead, you will have less of what was promised rather than more. You will have less available choice and more people forced to a single-payer system in the government operated through an exchange.

This prompts me to talk about the second issue going on in Georgia. Our newly elected Governor, Governor Nathan Deal, is trying to deal with a mandate on setting up the State exchange that will be available to operate by 2014, in a period of time where the public wants no part of the national health care bill and wants to wait on a Supreme Court ruling on June Vinson's opinion from Florida.

I come to the floor to say these medical waivers are important. States are having to ask for them because of the impact of the overall health care bill that was signed on March 23 of last year. If some relief doesn't come, we are going to have some cataclysmic events. One will be the impact on employees and small businesses, which is what this bill is all about.

I ran a small business. I had independent contractors for whom under ERISA you could not provide health insurance. I tried my best to get this Congress and this President to consider an associated benefit program approval so we could have people, such as those in my profession, assemble together and form large risk pools so they could compete for insurance, the same as major companies and States do. That was rejected instead for an exchange and for a simple system that says small businesses must provide health insurance to their employees, but if they do not provide it, they will pay a modest fine that is much less than the cost of the insurance. That one statement and rule alone forces people in

small business to leave health care coverage from an insurance carrier, getting it through their employer, and instead they are forced to go to a government exchange where choice is limited and mandates are many.

I want to commend the distinguished chairman and ranking member of the Small Business Committee for the effort they are making on this bill, but also commend Senator Hutchison on the importance of considering the volume of these waivers being filed; why are they being filed, and are they an early warning for what will happen to us when this bill goes into effect if we don't take the ObamaCare legislation and commit drastic surgery or, better yet, start over and build a system that works, where we have the private delivery of health care and a minimum of government interference.

I thank very much the chairman for giving me the time to speak.

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

Madam President, I rise to acknowledge the second anniversary of a tragic event that happened on March 11, 2009, in the nation of Benin in Africa. On that tragic day, a young lady by the name of Kate Puzey was tragically murdered in her sleep in her house at night.

Kate Puzey was a Peace Corps volunteer from Georgia, who went to Benin with all the dreams, hopes and aspirations of the program John F. Kennedy created over a half century ago. She had served there for months. She was teaching young African children. She was sharing wisdom. She was sharing knowledge. She was sharing her love of mankind. She was representing the United States in the way the Peace Corps intended it.

Unfortunately, her life was lost. I did not know Kate Puzey before her death. I only know her after her death. But I know her through her parents, through her schoolmates, and through her fellow Peace Corps volunteers in Africa who told me the story of Kate Puzey, and also, tragically, stories of other Peace Corps volunteers who have lost their lives or have sacrificed in the service of our country.

Tomorrow night, at 6:30, on the steps of the Capitol, there will be a candlelight vigil, acknowledging the second year anniversary of the death of Kate Puzey. Kate's mother will be here, as well as Peace Corps volunteers, as well as people from the Peace Corps organization. It will be a solemn moment, but it will also be a very sacred moment.

As the ranking member of the Africa Subcommittee, I have traveled to Africa on a number of occasions, and I have been in a number of African countries. On each visit, I arrange either a breakfast or a lunch, where I host the Peace Corps volunteers from the United States in that country.

Without exception, and in every case, these are the finest of Americans.

Just 2 years ago, when I was in Tanzania, I met a couple--73 and 72 years old--who in their retirement decided they wanted to give back and help their country and serve their mankind. They volunteered to go to Tanzania and build a library where there was not even a library, a book or a school, and they built it.

In Kenya, I visited with young people who went to Kenya to help carry the message of democracy, to help share, in the terrible slum of Kibera, the promise and hope of education, of good nutrition, of knowledge, of hard work, and of democracy.

We as a country are blessed to have men and women who serve us in many capacities--those who may serve in the House or the Senate, those who serve in the branches of the military overseas in harm's way--but equal to their service is the service of our Peace Corps volunteers. Kate Puzey is an example of what those Peace Corps volunteers do--at its height.

When I attended her funeral, I sat and listened, for over 2 hours, to her fellow volunteers, her former classmates tell about the Kate Puzey they knew: the academic genius, the committed volunteer, the person who loved life and loved people and wanted to share that love wherever she could.

The volunteers in Benin told of her countless sacrifices to help young people and children in their troubled land, in their difficult country, to understand better their life's future and to not look to poverty as a lifetime of shackles but to look to opportunity as a lifetime of hope.

Tomorrow night, when the vigil takes place on the steps of the Capitol, I will not be here, unfortunately, but I will be saying a special prayer for the life of Kate Puzey, for her family, and for what she and all volunteers who have sacrificed in the Peace Corps have done for the United States of America, and, better than that, for mankind.

We have many great people to be thankful for in this world, but tomorrow, at 6:30 p.m., on the steps of the Capitol, there will be a pause to recognize the life, the legacy, and the sacrifice of Kate Puzey and I will be there in spirit and I will be with her in prayer.

I yield back and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, on June 27, 2010, President Obama made the following statement:

I hope some of those folks who are hollering about deficits

and debt will step up, because I'm calling their bluff.

I am stepping up. At the same time, I also want to call the President's bluff. I think we are at a serious point in time in our history, and we need to be realistic about what confronts us ahead of time.

The biggest bluff this year in the Congress was the 2012 budget presented by the President which did not take any of the recommendations from his own deficit commission--by the way, I was one of the Republicans who supported that--and instead locked in a 25.4- percent increase in spending over the last 2 years and made it permanent by calling it a freeze. It raises taxes in the outyears and dedicates a higher regulatory environment in the United States of America. None of that does anything to reduce the debt or the deficit. In fact, the President's budget actually makes it worse.

But it is fair to ask people to step up. The American people are asking us to step up. They want us to do what they have been doing in the last 3 years: sit around their kitchen table, reorganize their priorities, spend within their means, and reduce their debt and the deficit. The very least they should ask of their country is their country to do the same thing they have had to do. In large measure, we have been the contributor to the protracted nature of the current recession.

Now, everybody knows there are two ways to reduce the deficit in the short run and the debt in the long run. One way is to cut spending. But that is not the only way. Another way is to raise revenue and increase income. And that is not just by raising a tax, that is by improving business opportunity and the expansion of opportunity in America. There is a third way: by changing the processes by which we regulate and make decisions, by looking at reforms that in the outyears make a difference for all of us.

On the spending side, the spending cuts are going to be difficult. They are going to be modest compared to what our deficit really is. But they are going to send a signal to the world that we are finally going to get serious about our spending level, and the majority of the rest of the world already has--whether it is Great Britain or many of the other countries in the European Union.

So spending cuts are important. But spending cuts in and of themselves will not solve the entire problem. In fact, H.R. 1, in the House, which made reductions of $61 billion, was a modest start at a long-term process. But it sent us in the right direction, and it called the bluff the President was talking about by making real, significant proposals.

Secondly, in terms of raising revenue, we raise revenue by expanding opportunity, not by raising the rate of tax, but, as his deficit commission said, by lowering the rate of tax, doing away with deductions that are specialized and targeted in nature and giving business the encouragement to expand.

A funny thing happened to me on January 3 of this year in Atlanta, GA, right after the first of January. I went to the OK Cafe in downtown Buckhead, GA, for a breakfast. That is the gathering place for most Atlanta businesspeople on the north side of town. I was going to have a business meeting, and Steve Hennessy walked in, one of the largest automobile dealers in the United States. He happened to come up to me. He rushed toward me. He had his arms open. I thought I was going to get a good luck hug, a ``go to Washington and do a good job'' type speech. Instead, he put his finger right on my nose and said: Johnny, I just had to hire two compliance officers to comply with Dodd-Frank, and I lost a salesman. I am spending more money complying and less money producing.

That is one of the things this administration has done in tremendous quantity to put us in a very difficult situation. Every agency is promulgating rules and regulations at a rapid rate--regulations that to comply with cost new employees, more expense in operating a business, and less capital investment in what that business does.

It is very important that the President understand what happens; that is, regulation has consequences. Right now the regulatory volume of the United States being proposed by this administration is unsustainable. It is costly, and it increases the debt and the deficit of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it is a reach far beyond where government should go.

I am the first person to support occupational safety, the first person to support financial security, the first person to support transparency. I will always fight to see that our government is transparent and our rules are fair and our occupational safety is good. But to overreach, to go beyond our reach, is just wrong.

I will give you a couple of examples. Georgia is a large agricultural State. Yesterday I was with some cotton farmers who were bemoaning the fact of the most recent proposal to regulate agricultural dust. The EPA actually wants to regulate the dust created by a plow or a tractor or a truck on a dirt road on a farm, to say that the farmer must make sure that dust stays within the confines of his hedge row or his fence line--meaning we are going to try to control nature? Well, how is he going to do it? By hiring water trucks to follow behind his tractor to tamp down the dust? That is a reach too far.

To categorize milk as oil and to say farmers who run dairies have to have storage tanks for milk that are equivalent to storage tanks for petroleum, that is just crazy. It is a reach too far, and it makes the ability to do business tougher, the ability to make a profit more impossible, the amount of revenue produced less because it is less profitable, and it protracts our debt and our deficit problem.

So when the President talks about calling bluffs, I am willing to do it. I am willing to sit down and talk about the hard issues. In fact, I am willing to tell the story about how in certain measure myself and everybody else born after 1943 in America is an example of some of the things we need to do.

In 1983, I was 39 years old. Social Security sent out their annual report on the stability of the Social Security fund and said it was going broke; that if we did not do something we were going to run out of Social Security benefits in the early 2000s.

Well, that worried everybody. But Tip O'Neill, a great Speaker and a

Democrat, and Ronald Reagan got together at the White House, and they said: We have a problem.

Ronald Reagan said: Well, I don't want to raise the payroll tax.

Tip O'Neill said: I don't want to lower the amount of the benefit.

They looked at the actuary and said: What do we do? And he said: Recast the eligibility. Push it into the outyears, and that will get the system calibrated and back to actuarial soundness.

So they sat down with the actuaries at the table and said: I tell you what we are going to do. We are going to preserve everybody's Social Security eligibility today. But for those people born after 1943 and before 1947, we are pushing them out from age 65 to age 66. I was born in 1944. With a stroke of a pen, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill changed my eligibility by 1 year. But they changed mine and millions of other Americans at the lead of the baby boomers, recalibrated the system, and put Social Security in actuarial soundness until 2050. Then they added 2-month increments for eligibility beyond, where eventually the law now takes Social Security eligibility to 67.

The President's commission recommended doing a similar thing over the next 50 to 75 years to push eligibility out so that benefits are not cut. Eligibility is changed but taxes do not go up. Eligibility is only changed, and when you become eligible to collect.

We already know that when Social Security was formed originally, most people did not live to the eligibility age of 65, and today most everybody does. Our lifespans are a longer time, and that is what has gotten the system actuarially unsound.

So I do not think it is right to say that nobody has answered the call on debt and deficit reduction. I do not think it is right to say that our bluff--we have not been bluffing anybody, neither did the President's debt and deficit commission. They called our hand by giving us consequential recommendations that work and in the long term make the future of America bright.

This problem is not a partisan problem; it is a bipartisan problem. The parties have contributed each to the other to cause the problem. We need to sit down together and begin solving it but not making it a political issue for the 2012 election with no solutions. Instead of bluffs, we ought to make constructive proposals. Instead of speeches on the floor that run time, we ought to be offering amendments on the floor that make a difference in terms of the debt and the deficit of the United States of America.

This is the greatest country on the face of this Earth, and it is because people trust it. But if we continue to look the other way as our debt and our deficit increases, that trust will dissipate and our interest rates will go up, the cost of goods and services will be inflated, and America will be in trouble.

I close by telling a brief story about a speech I made in Albany, GA, last year in November, when I was talking about the debt and the deficit, talking about some of the solutions we have talked about. I kept talking about a trillion this and trillion that, and saying one day soon we are going to owe $14 trillion.

A farmer at the back of the room at the rotary club raised his hand and said: Senator, I only went to Dougherty County High School. I don't know how much $1 trillion is. How much is it?

Well, I stumbled and I stammered, and finally, I said: Well, it is a lot. I could not think of how to quantify it.

I got home that night, and my wife said: What is wrong? I said: Well, I got stumped today.

She said: What was the question?

I said: The question was, how much is a trillion?

She said: What did you say?

I said: Well, it is a lot.

She said: Well, that was stupid.

I said: Well, give me a suggestion.

And she is always right.

She said: Well, why don't you just figure out how many years have to go by for 1 trillion seconds to pass. Then people will understand how much $1 trillion is.

So I did the math. I multiplied 60 seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours times 365 days. I got on the calculator, and the calculator only went to 12 digits. So I had to go to the computer to get something that would go to 13 digits, which is a trillion. I divided that product into 1 trillion.

Do you know how many years have to pass for 1 trillion seconds to go by? Madam President, 31,709. And we owe $14 trillion. At a dollar a second, for over 400,000 years, we could solve our problem. That is a huge problem. But we have the benefit of the time value of money and the hope and opportunity of the greatest country on the face of this Earth.

So I call the President's bluff. Let's sit down together and talk about the tough things. Let's talk about the shared sacrifice. Let's talk about the benefit that comes from responsibility, frugality, and a commitment to the principles of our Founding Fathers and always remember the principle that less debt is better, and we should never be a country controlled by those we owe. Instead, we ought to be a country loved by those we protect.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized as in morning business.

Mr. President, I come at the end of a long day for all of us to talk about a subject that is off the subject from the bill on the floor but is one of tremendous importance to the United States and the recovery of our economy.

I want to also point out for the record--and hopefully also for the right people--that we are at a critical point in terms of housing in America, with Dodd-Frank having been passed and newly promulgated rules. It is essential that we don't make the mistakes that led us to the last collapse that caused the tragedy in the housing market in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

In the Dodd-Frank bill, there was an amendment called the qualified residential mortgage, which was offered by Senators Landrieu, Hagan, and myself to ensure that the risk retention provisions of Dodd-Frank would not apply to a well-underwritten, well-qualified loan. Risk retention, as the Chair remembers, is the 5-percent retention requirement of any lender who made a residential mortgage that was not qualified, but they were not specific in their definition of what a qualified mortgage would be. So we took the point to take the historical underwriting standards that have proven to work so well in this country and write them into the Dodd-Frank bill, which were that a mortgage that may be exempted from a risk retention would have to have 20 percent down, and if there was more than 80 percent loan to value, that amount above 80 percent would have to be covered by private mortgage insurance. We required third-party verification of bank deposits, third-party verification of employment, third-party verification of an individual's ability to make the payments and service the debt, credit records, and all the underwriting standards. As the Chair remembers, what got us into so much trouble from 2000 to 2007 is that we made subprime loans, used stated income, didn't do debt checks or anything else we should have done. We made bad mortgages.

My point is this. There is a committee that has been formed--made up of very distinguished Americans--that is promulgating the rules to carry out the intent of Dodd-Frank. That committee includes Sean Donovan from HUD; Ben Bernanke; Edward DeMarco, Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency; John Walsh, Acting Comptroller of the Currency; Mary Shapiro, head of the SEC; and Sheila Bair, head of FDIC. That is a very august group. They are in the process of promulgating rules to carry out the intent of Dodd-Frank. The rumors coming out of those negotiations--and I say rumors because I cannot verify it because I am not there. But I know the articles I have read in the papers in the last couple of days send a troubling signal to me.

Just for a few minutes, I wish to make the points that I think are so critical.

No. 1, it is my understanding they are considering memorializing 80 percent as the maximum amount of loan to value for a loan that would fall as a qualified residential mortgage and do not address private mortgage insurance for coverage above 80 percent.

Without getting technical, what that would mean is the only qualified residential mortgage that could be made and not require risk retention would have to have a minimum of a 20-percent downpayment. In the olden days of standard lending in the eighties, seventies, and sixties, when you borrowed more than 80 percent but not over 95 percent, you had private mortgage insurance to insure the top 30 percent of the loan made so the investors had the insurance of knowing, if there was a default, the top portion of that loan, which was the most in terms of loan to value, would be insured and would be paid.

If it is, in fact, correct that this committee is going to recommend a qualified residential mortgage require a 20-percent downpayment and not make provisions for PMI, we will be making a serious mistake because two things will happen. One, very few people will be able to get a home loan in the entry-level market or even in the move-up market because a 20-percent downpayment is significant. Second, by not utilizing PMI, we will be turning our back on 50 years of history in America, where PMI has been used to satisfactorily insure risk and insure qualified lending.

We must remember what happened in terms of the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. What happened was Congress directed they buy a certain percentage of their portfolio in what were called affordable loans, which became subprime securities, which became 13 percent of their portfolio, which brought them down when subprime securities collapsed. If we all of a sudden, through fiat, decide to pass regulations to define a qualified residential mortgage that is so prohibitive we run everybody to FHA, which is exempt, then we will be putting a burden on FHA that is unsustainable and create a situation of another collapse or another inability of the United States to meet housing needs through the private sector and through well underwritten loans.

My reason for coming to the floor tonight is, hopefully, to send a message, before the decisions are made, to be thoughtful in determining what the parameters will be on a qualified residential mortgage. Yes, I do think an 80-percent or less loan should be qualified and avoid risk retention. But a well-paid, well-verified, well-credit-evaluated individual who borrows more than 80 percent but less than 75 should be able to do so and be excluded from the risk retention as long as they have private mortgage insurance covering that top 30 percent of the debt created by that loan.

If you do that, you protect the equity provisions, you protect the investor,

you make the qualified loan, you do not put the country at risk, but most important of all, you do not force everybody to FHA. That is what we are about to do because FHA is, by definition under Dodd-Frank, exempt from risk retention. All other loans are not, except those that will fall under the QRM, qualified residential mortgage. It would be a disaster for the recovery of American housing to force Americans to only one source of money to finance their home and put so much stress on the Federal Housing Administration that it collapses under the burden.

We need to be pragmatic when we look at issues facing housing. We need to be practical in taking Dodd-Frank and making it work for the American people. We need to recognize the value of private mortgage insurance, the value of good, solid underwriting and not put a risk retention in that is so high that we take most American mortgage lenders out of the business, isolated only for a few who dictate and write the parameters they want to write for housing. We are at a critical time in our recovery. Housing has hit the bottom, and it has bounced along the bottom, but it is showing some signs of coming back. Now would be the worst time to send a signal that mortgage money is going to be harder to get, the banks are going to have to hold 5 percent risk retention on even the best of loans and, worst of all, it would give the American people only one alternative for lending; that is, the Federal Housing Administration which, in and of itself, is already under a burden and stressed.

I appreciate the time tonight to bring this message to the floor that as we write the rules to promulgate the intent of the Dodd-Frank bill in terms of residential housing and finance, we be sure we do so in such a way that we meet the demands of a vibrant marketplace rather than restricting it, putting a burden on FHA, and protracting what has already been a long and difficult housing recession.

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

Mr. President, I rise to second the statements made by Senator Chambliss on these two nominees to the northern district of Georgia court, Amy Totenberg and Steve Jones. Amy Totenberg is an attorney, in practice for many years, a judge, an arbitrator, a mediator, and an educator. She brings a wealth of experience to the bench in many areas, not the least of which is personnel law. In fact, during her term of service to the Atlanta Board of Education in the mid-1990s, I was chairman of the State Board of Education and dealt with the major litigation pieces that went through the system of education in Georgia. I know of her competence, her ability, and the trust her colleagues have in her, and I think she will be an excellent appointee to the northern district of Georgia bench.

Steve Jones is the real deal. He is a terrific individual, one of those people who is so active in trying to make the community better. One example is Clark County in Athens where Steve has been a superior court judge for many years, which is one of the leading and founding drug courts in America, an intervention court that intervenes in those first drug cases when young people are caught for the first time, works with them as an advocate and as a mentor to see to it they never return to drugs and therefore never return to crime. That is just one example of his intensity in trying to make his community better.

He is respected by lawyers throughout the circuit, he is respected by his fellow judges, and he is deeply respected by me as an individual who brings great credit to the State and great credit to the bench.

I urge all our colleagues tonight on the vote for Steve Jones and Amy Totenberg to unanimously support both of those nominees to the northern district of Georgia bench.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my DOD fellow, Julius Spain, Francie Powers, and Michael McLaughlin, be allowed to have floor privileges during the reading of Washington's Farewell Address.

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

Mr. President, in just a moment, I will ask the body for unanimous consent to adopt S. Res. 60. Before I do, I wish to talk about the significance of this agreement we have come to on this important resolution.

Fifty years ago last September, President Eisenhower signed into law legislation that established real estate investment trusts, or REITs, as an investment opportunity for all investors. Prior to 1960, access to the highly desirable investment returns of commercial real estate assets was limited to institutions and wealthy individuals that had the financial wealth to make direct real estate investments. By creating REITs, Congress recognized that small investors should be afforded the same opportunity to invest in portfolios of large-scale commercial properties and achieve the same investment benefits--diversification, liquidity, performance, transparency--as those able to make direct investments in real estate.

Some of my colleagues may not be familiar with each REIT property in their States, but they should be aware that these properties are making a significant contribution to the economic vitality of their State and our Nation. REITs are companies dedicated to the ownership and development of income producing real estate, such as apartments, regional malls, shopping centers, office buildings, self storage facilities and industrial warehouses. They operate under an intricate set of tax rules that require them to, among other things, meet specific tests regarding the composition of their gross income and assets, in order to stay in business. For example, Federal tax law requires that 95 percent of a REIT's annual gross income must be from specified sources such as dividends, interests and rents, and 75 percent of the gross income must be from real estate related sources. Similarly, at the end of each calendar quarter, 75 percent of a REIT's assets must consist of specified ``real estate'' assets. Consequently, REITs must derive a majority of their gross income from commercial real estate. And, the REIT rules require that at least 90 percent of a REIT's total income must be returned to the company's shareholders in the form of dividends.

While REITs have played a major role in the U.S. economy since 1960, their mark in the investing world has primarily been achieved since passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, a time period many refer to as the ``Modern REIT Era.'' This law removed most of the tax-sheltering capability of real estate and emphasized income producing transactions, allowing REITs to operate and manage real estate as well as own it. I am pleased that over the years, Congress has adopted legislation to perfect the REIT method of investing in real estate. Among many proposals, these include the REIT Simplification Act of 1997, the REIT Modernization Act of 1999, the REIT Improvement Act of 2004, and the REIT Investment Diversification and Empowerment Act passed in 2008.

REIT executives are hard-working business men and women who are singularly focused on bringing increased value to their shareholders. According to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, NAREIT, which is also celebrating its golden anniversary, these executives have proven to be successful in this objective, especially in the past two years in the wake of the financial downturn. Indeed, the vision of Congress has come to fruition: the equity market capitalization of REITs at the end of 2010 was $389 billion, up from only $1.5 billion at the end of 1971, and listed REITs distributed $13.5 billion to shareholders in 2009.

I am pleased to be joined by my colleague, Senator Mikulski, who is a cosponsor of this legislation, and I am pleased that my home state of Georgia is headquarters to several REIT companies that are engaged in the daily business of creating wealth and employment for many investors across the country and my constituents. These companies include Cousins Properties Incorporated, Gables Residential Trust, Piedmont Office Realty Trust, Incorporated, Post Properties, Incorporated, and Wells Real Estate Investment Trust. In total, there are more than 1400 REIT properties located in Georgia, with an estimated historical cost in the billions of dollars.

Commercial real estate represents more than 6 percent of this country's gross domestic product and is a key generator of jobs and other economic activities. Today, because of the foresight that Congress had 5 decades ago, anyone can purchase shares of real estate operating companies, and do so in a manner that meets their investments needs by focusing on a particular sector in the commercial real estate world and a specific region of the country. That is the beauty of the REIT method of investing, whose influence has now spread abroad to more than 2 dozen countries that have adopted a similar model encouraging real estate investment.

I again congratulate the REIT industry on this momentous occasion of their 50 years of leadership in the real estate investing market. REITs have fulfilled Congress' vision by making investments in large scale, capital intensive commercial real estate available to all investors. I thank my colleagues for supporting this resolution, and I look forward to continuing to work with them on issues of importance to REIT investors.

With that, I ask unanimous consent the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 60, which was submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

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

Madam President, I rise to speak for a few minutes about a gentleman whose 70th birthday will be celebrated next Monday night in Atlanta, GA. He is a gentleman who has deep ties to the Senate. His name is T. Rogers Wade.

He came to the Senate in 1973 as an administrative assistant and later chief of staff to Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge. During those years, Senator Talmadge was chairman of the powerful Agriculture Committee which, in my State of Georgia, is instrumental. Rogers Wade is one of those unique people whom all of us, such as the Presiding Officer and myself, are lucky enough to have in our offices, somebody who supports us, keeps us moving in the right direction, helps us back home with our people--in other words, kind of drives our ship of State. My chief of staff does. Rogers Wade did it for Herman Talmadge.

He took those talents and brought them back to Georgia after 1980 to do a number of memorable and tremendous things. For example, when he first came back he founded a firm called Edington Wade & Associates, a public affairs firm that represented many Fortune 500 companies throughout the State of Georgia and their locations.

Following that, he did many other things in Georgia. He founded Leadership Georgia, a program today celebrating over 40 years in our State, generating new leaders for our State. It is a great program. He came to the Fanning Institute of Leadership at the University of Georgia and serves on its board. He serves on the board of the Richard Russell Foundation. Most importantly, he is a can-do guy who became president of something known as the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an organization that is nonpartisan and dedicates itself to opine on legislation going through the Georgia Legislature or initiatives coming before the people on the ballot to give them an unvarnished, nonpolitical, straight-talk expression of what that law or what that issue would be. It has become one of the most respected foundations in our State and, in fact, around

the country. He served as president of that foundation from 1997 to 2009 and today is a trustee of the foundation.

One of the interesting things T. Rogers Wade did--a lot of people talk about what they want to do to reform education and help kids in need. T. Rogers Wade did it. He founded something called Tech High in Atlanta, GA, a school in an old dilapidated building that he raised the money to rehabilitate. He brought in excellent faculty in STEM math and science and opened it as a charter school approved by the State of Georgia for the most in need, free-and-reduced-lunch kids in the metropolitan city of Atlanta public school system. He began attracting those kids to that charter school. So successful has Tech High been that Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, chose it to be one of his first visits after he became Secretary of Education under President Obama. It still is a guiding light today of what can be done, with a focus on excellence and helping kids in need to brighten their future.

Just recently, with the election of Nathan Deal as the new Governor of Georgia, he picked one person out of our State to guide him in his transition team. It was T. Rogers Wade.

T. Rogers Wade has touched the lives of American servicemen by being on the board of the USO, Georgia businesses by being on the board of the chamber of commerce, and citizens around our State by being the president of the Public Policy Foundation.

Next Monday night, I am going to have dinner with a great Georgian and great American. And I rise at this moment on the floor of the Senate to pay tribute to T. Rogers Wade on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

I yield back the remainder of my time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.