Floor Statements

Madam President, I rise to support the long-delayed nomination of Judge Marisa Demeo for a seat on the DC Superior Court and urge my colleagues to approve her as quickly as possible so she can take her place on this court that is both busy and shorthanded.

Judge Demeo is well qualified for this position and brings a range of legal experience to her new job that would make her an asset to the court. She has been a judge, a prosecutor, a plaintiff's attorney advocating for civil rights and a law professor.

Specifically, for the past 2 years, Judge Demeo has served as a magistrate judge in the Criminal Division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

Prior to that, from 2004 to 2007 she served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; from 1997 to 2004 she served as the Regional Counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, from 1993 to 1996 she was an honors program trial attorney with the Justice Department Civil Rights division, and she was an adjunct professor of law at Howard University in 2003, 2005 and 2008.

Judge Demeo is a graduate of Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in political science and earned her law degree at New York University. And besides her legal work, she is also in demand as a speaker on legal issues and is the author of many articles on civil rights law.

Judge Demeo also has a compelling personal story that reminds us that the American dream is alive and well. Her father--the son of Italian immigrants--and her mother--a Puerto Rican immigrant--taught her that if you work hard, anything is possible and Judge Demeo has channeled her talent and drive into a successful career in public service.

These facts taken together led the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to endorse Judge Demeo's nomination by voice vote in May.

Let me say that again, the committee reported Judge Demeo's nomination to the full Senate in May--11 months ago--and it has been stalled ever since.

There is also speculation that some object to her because of legal advocacy work she has done on behalf of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, also known as MALDEF.

But there is no reason that this sort of work should be held against any nominee. Under our system of justice, when an individual or group believes something is not just, they are allowed to have their day in court and have an attorney zealously argue their cause.

In her confirmation hearing, Judge Demeo was specifically asked if her advocacy work would affect her decisionmaking as a judge. Let me give you Judge Demeo's response in her own words:

When you think about the parties that appear in the

courtroom, oftentimes it's plaintiffs versus defendants and

one party against another, and I've . . . worked in both

positions in my career. Being in the judge position has

allowed me to take a step back already, in the magistrate

position, and listen to the parties and be open to both

sides.

To that end, at her confirmation hearing, representatives of the Justice Department and the Public Defenders' office came to lend their support to her nomination.

And we should remember, that nominations for the DC courts are made through a process different than other judicial nominees.

Under the District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act, the Judicial Nominations Committee recommends three individuals for each position to the President, and the President then selects one of those individuals and sends the nomination to the Senate for confirmation.

The Judicial Nominations Committee is a diverse, Federal-district entity, comprised of two individuals appointed by the Mayor of the District of Columbia--one being a nonlawyer--two appointed by the Board of Governors of the District of Columbia Bar, one nonlawyer appointed by the city council of the District of Columbia, one individual appointed by the President of the United States, and one judicial member appointed by the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

This is a process aimed at getting the best qualified nominees, without regard to party or politics.

Finally, Chief Judge of the Superior Court, Lee F. Satterfield, wrote to both the majority and minority leaders in October pleading for the swift approval of Judge Demeo because the court is already five members short.

In his letter, Judge Satterfield wrote:

The Superior Court is a busy, urban court with a caseload

of over 100,000 cases a year. Each day we make important

decisions about neglected and abused children, juveniles

alleged to have committed crimes, and accused charged with

everything from minor misdemeanors to first degree murder and

sexual abuse. Vulnerable families in the District rely on

Superior Court judges to make timely and fair decisions

regarding domestic violence, housing, child custody and

support, and numerous issues that affect them every day. Our

goal is to serve the community well by handling the important

decisions we are entrusted with fairly, justly and

efficiently.

And last month, Judge Satterfield sent another letter to the majority and minority leader with this dire warning, ``We are beginning to experience delays in meeting performance measures and standards for how quickly cases should go to trial.''

But, a shorthanded court cannot achieve these goals, which means justice is delayed for many. It's long past time that we approve this highly qualified nominee and I urge my colleagues to vote yes on this nomination and allow her to get to work administering justice for the citizens of our Nation's Capital.

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

Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to the extraordinary life and service of Bill Stanley, a statesman, a scholar, and a true American patriot who passed away on April 19, 2010. Bill was a valued public intellectual, historian, and leader in the Norwich, CT, community. Beloved for his brilliant mind and generous spirit, Bill Stanley will be missed deeply.

I knew Bill for many years, and I am grateful for all of the wisdom he offered me personally. Bill was a loyal and valued friend who was always generous with his time and advice. Mostly though, I treasure the example that Bill Stanley set in his career of devoted service to this country. Bill served America with courage and distinction in the U.S. Marine Corps, in Connecticut's State Senate for two successful terms, and through the many important causes that he championed in the city of Norwich and throughout our State.

Bill Stanley's desire to serve his community was boundless, as was his generosity. Bill's legacy of enormous contributions and achievements has touched thousands of people across our state. Among his many initiatives were the St. Jude Common, a center that has cared for thousands of seniors across Connecticut, and the Forgotten Founders Committee, an extraordinary project that will honor many of early America's most important--and often overlooked--historical figures.

Bill Stanley loved history, taught history, and made history. With his unique insight, energy, and passion, Bill Stanley illuminated our hearts and minds with his weekly columns for the Norwich Bulletin. Bill never hesitated to ask tough questions or take a contrarian stance on an issue. For this, he was respected and trusted by countless readers; many of whom he knew personally and others who admired him from afar.

Bill Stanley wrote about many of the most important figures and moments in Norwich's history and uniquely brought to life the stories that form the fabric of the city of Norwich, a city he understood and cherished like few others. Bill lifted his readers up to experience a new, exciting, and wider view of the past. In doing so, he has offered us a deeper understanding of the present and helped us chart the future course for our State, our country, and our world.

Our State and this Nation are blessed to have people like Bill Stanley who truly enrich our communities. We--his readers, his students, and his friends--were particularly blessed with the opportunity to have learned from him. Bill's brilliant mind, magnanimous spirit, and unforgettable stories will never fade from our memory.

I extend my condolences to Bill's wife Peg and his children Bill Jr., Carol, and Mary.

Madam President, I rise today to honor the Center for Excellence in Education, CEE, for launching the first National Lab Skills Symposium. As an honorary member of the board of trustees for the center, I have witnessed firsthand the important work CEE had undertaken, and I could not be more impressed and excited about its newest endeavor.

Improving science education is an essential investment toward the future of our Nation and world. Since it was founded in 1983 by Joann DiGennaro and the late ADM H.G. Rickover, CEE has been an influential leader in championing efforts to provide science, technology, engineering, and mathematics initiatives for this Nation's top achieving students.

With over 25 years of experience as a leader in STEM academic programs for high school students, CEE understands exactly what it takes to prepare future innovators for the 21st century; and it is prepared to take further steps to ensure that students develop the skills they need. Consequently, after data from both of CEE's world- renowned scientific enrichment programs, the Research Science Institute and the USA Biology Olympiad, demonstrated that even our Nation's best and brightest students are receiving inadequate training in laboratory skills and practices, CEE initiated the National Lab Skills Symposium to address the poor quality of instruction and learning in our Nation's science and technology labs.

CEE held its first such symposium from April 8-9, in Washington, DC, to discuss best practices in laboratory education and to determine the ways in which high school teachers throughout the country can use these best practices for the teaching of laboratory skills to students for success in STEM careers.

Before holding the symposium, CEE examined laboratory education programs across the United States, seeking those programs that follow the most cost-effective, sustainable, and replicable models for teaching students practical lab skills. CEE found six programs it deemed exemplary, which were recognized at the symposium. These programs also served as a framework that attendees, which included influential members of academia at the high school and university levels, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agency representatives, and corporate leaders, could evaluate and reference when developing a set of best practices for laboratory education. CEE plans to implement the symposium's best practice recommendations in several States within 2 years and hopes to eventually adopt them nationwide.

I applaud the efforts of CEE to address the crisis in lab skills, and I am confident that this new initiative will help us to ensure that the United States fields a talented and diverse workforce in science and technology for years to come. I commend CEE's president, Joann DiGennaro, for the leadership and vision she has demonstrated in putting together the National Lab Skills Symposium. I have no doubt that Admiral Rickover is saluting this latest effort.

I ask that all of my colleagues join me in recognizing the Center for Excellence in Education for all it has done to assure the Nation's economic growth and national security.

Madam President, I gather I have at least 7 minutes assigned to me.

I ask that the Chair inform me if I am not finished when there is 1 minute remaining on my time.

Madam President, a good friend once wisely said to me that it is only a very short road that has no turns. The road that health care reform has traveled to get to the Senate has been very long and has had many turns. Its path to us might well be described as tortuous, with all that word has come to mean. As I said when I explained in December why I was voting for the Senate health care reform bill, any piece of legislation this big, this complicated, and this transformational is unlikely to be perfectly pleasing to anyone. That is true for me. In the end, each of us has to ask ourselves, do the positives in this legislation outweigh the negatives? Does what pleases us in it outweigh what worries us? Let me begin with the measure before us now.

The reconciliation act that is before us preserves most but not all of the health care reform the Senate adopted and I voted for in December. I concluded then and repeat now that together these measures achieve real change in the three big areas in which our health care system needs to be changed: reforming health care delivery to put a brake on the skyrocketing costs of care for individuals, families, businesses, and our government; better regulating health insurance companies to protect consumers, including those with preexisting conditions; and helping millions of middle-income Americans who cannot afford health insurance now to buy it.

For me it is particularly noteworthy that the Senate bill, plus the reconciliation act, achieves all that progress without a government takeover of health care or health insurance. That would have been a very costly deficit-exploding mistake and would have fundamentally and adversely altered the traditional American balance of power between the public and private sectors that has worked so well over our history to create economic growth and opportunity and to build the American middle class. That is why I opposed the so-called public option so strenuously and why I am so grateful it is not in the reconciliation act the House has sent us. Those are the big and good things I appreciate in this health care reform package.

What worries me about it? First, the size of this proposal concerns me, particularly at this time of national fiscal indebtedness and economic stress. I wish we had chosen to achieve health care reform step by step, beginning with delivery reforms that would lower health costs and then moving on to expand middle-class access to affordable health insurance and then more aggressively regulating health insurance companies. But there was never enough bipartisan support for such step- by-step reform. I know because I tried to find it. So now, along with each of my colleagues, I must vote on the proposal before us, not on one I wish we had before us.

My biggest concerns about this proposal are its prospective fiscal consequences. I worry that the savings this bill achieves in Medicare and the revenue it raises from new Medicare taxes to help pay for health care reform will soon be urgently needed to save Medicare itself from running out of money it needs to pay the bills for seniors' health care. Most of all, I worry that the bottom line consequences of this health care reform will be to increase our already ominous national debt.

I am, of course, greatly encouraged by the conclusion of the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that this health care reform legislation will not only not increase the debt but actually decrease it by more than a trillion dollars over the next two decades, and that its savings in Medicare will not only pay for part of health care reform but actually extend the solvency of the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund.

According to the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the solvency of the trust fund will be extended by 10 years as a result of the Senate health care reform bill that is now law.

However, for those good and significant things to happen, future Congresses will have to be very disciplined and keep the promises that are made in this legislation to reform health care delivery to cut costs. Most of those reforms will over time be opposed by providers and beneficiaries. The record of Congress in resisting such pressure to stick with the costly status quo is not encouraging.

So in the end, I have weighed the pluses and minuses, and I have decided to vote for this health care reform package, choosing its real change over the broken status quo, raising my hopes above my fears, and adding, if I may, a personal prayer that future Congresses and Presidents do not weaken the reforms in this bill that will stop the constant increases in health care and health insurance costs and help reduce our national debt.

That will happen best if we can achieve the bipartisanship in overseeing the implementation of this historic health care reform legislation that we, unfortunately, were not able to achieve in its passage.

I thank the Chair.

I thank the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee for his extraordinary effort that produced this admirable result.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator.

Madam President, it was a pleasure to yield that time to my friend from Pennsylvania, which he used very well.

I rise to continue a discussion of amendment No. 3456, which has been offered by Senators Collins, Byrd, Feinstein, Voinovich, Ensign, and myself, which would reauthorize the Opportunity Scholarship Program for students, needy and deserving students here in the District of Columbia, sometimes referred to as the DC voucher program.

This amendment would, as I say, reauthorize this program which otherwise would either atrophy over time--there are still 1,300 students in it, but now, for the last 2 years, it has not been reauthorized. President Obama in his budget says this probably will be the last year that Federal funding would be in it. The nonprofit corporation that has administered this program has said--under the circumstances the Congress by our inaction and in some sense interruption have created--they cannot continue to administer the program. No one else has come forward to do that.

This amendment says, effectively, it would be a tragedy, a human tragedy, 1,300 human tragedies--that 1,300 economically disadvantaged students in the District of Columbia who have been given a lifeline out of failing public schools to try to better educate themselves so they can live a life of self-sufficiency and satisfaction--that all that hope would be ended, all that opportunity would be ended.

This amendment would turn all that around and say the Senate believes this program is at least worth continuing as an experiment. But more than that, it has worked, by independent evaluation. Why terminate it? There is no good reason to terminate it. Would the Chancellor of the District of Columbia School System, Michelle Rhee, obviously an advocate for the public schools here--as I am, as the other Senators, Collins, Byrd, Feinstein, Voinovich, and Ensign are--would the Chancellor of a public school system here support this program if it were not a good program? Of course not. Would she support it if she thought it was a threat to the public schools? Of course not. That is her first and major commitment. She supports a 5-year extension of this program that this amendment would authorize because, as she said poignantly to our Government Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over matters related to the District of Columbia--she said until she can say to a parent of a child at a school that has been designated under Federal law as a failing school, a school that has failed to give those children an equal educational opportunity--until, Chancellor Rhee has told us, she can say to the parent, ``that public school that your child is in here in the District of Columbia, our Nation's Capital, is prepared to give your child an equal and good educational opportunity,'' then she cannot say terminate the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program which gives low-income, economically disadvantaged children a lifeline, a passport, a scholarship they can use at a private or faith-based school of their choice.

This program was started after difficult and intricate negotiations in

2004. It was started with a basic premise that is deeply and wonderfully American, which is: Hey, this is the country whose Declaration of Independence said that the government was being created in the first place, in 1776, to secure the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that everybody has an endowment from our Creator--not by the government; the government is there to secure those rights--the endowment came from God, from our Creator. One of the fundamental ways in which we have attempted over our history to secure those rights is through the public school system, through our school system.

Generations and generations of Americans, new Americans, immigrant Americans, have come here and the school system has given them an opportunity for education and they have gone on to not only make a success of themselves but contribute enormously to our country.

The sad fact is that a lot of our public schools today are failing particularly our economically disadvantaged students. There is a terrible gap based on income and race and ethnicity, an achievement gap, in our public school system. No Child Left Behind and various Federal programs are trying hard to close that, but it has not been closed yet.

That is why a lot of us got together in 2004, the administration and both parties, and tried to negotiate and ultimately did negotiate a compromise which was based not on supporting any particular educational institution but founded on that goal that was in the Declaration of Independence, that is characteristically and fundamentally American, the individual and, in this case, the individual child. How many individual children, in this case in the Nation's Capital, can we give a better education so they can develop their God-given talent to the highest level possible, which they cannot do if they are not getting a good education?

So in this compromise that was enacted in 2004, we basically created new income streams. Some people say: Oh, the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program looks like it is working. It is a good idea to help kids get a scholarship to a private or faith-based school, but I am against it because it takes money from public schools. Wrong. That was the whole premise.

In fact, to even it out, when we adopted this program we gave an equal amount of additional money to the DC Public Schools as went into the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, then a new stream of money into charter schools in the District of Columbia. That was the agreement that was made. It was a good agreement. Those of us who support the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program are not at all unhappy to give an equal amount of extra money to the public schools and to the charter school movement in the District.

I guess the program is controversial because some people do not want to experiment with something other than the public school system on how to educate the individual. OK, I respect that. I understand that.

Teachers unions are at the forefront of the opposition. They are against this bill. I understand that. But I disagree, respectfully. This is not an assault on teachers or the public schools. As Chancellor Rhee has said: This is a temporary lifeline for students who are in schools designated under Federal law as inadequate to educate them, to give them an opportunity to step up and go to a private or a faith- based school where they can do better.

I do not know why anyone would want to terminate this program. It is a small program. As I will make clear in a few moments, it has been positively evaluated. Particularly, I repeat, why would we want to intervene when the leader of the DC Public Schools says this Opportunity Scholarship Program should be continued because it is good for kids in the District of Columbia. She cannot really say to parents: I can give a good, first-class education to all of your children.

Parents like this program a lot. Kids like it. We heard moving testimony from children in the system. Polling in the District of Columbia shows very strong support for it, particularly and not surprisingly in economically disadvantaged areas.

Look, let's talk from the facts. Most of us, I will say ``us,'' including me, have the money to send our kids to either private or faith-based schools because we think they can get a better education there or the kind of education we want them to get, particularly if it is in a faith-based school.

These are parents who do not have that choice because they do not have the money. Imagine the frustration that we would feel if our children were trapped in a public school where we knew they were not getting a good education that would compromise the rest of their life and yet we did not have the money to get them a better education.

That is all this program deems, the Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is a scholarship to give economically disadvantaged kids an opportunity to rise to the limits of their ability. A vote against this amendment, I really believe, is a vote to take away opportunity for 1,300 economically disadvantaged students who are now in the program and hundreds of others who would join if and when this program is extended.

There have been hundreds of students involved. At its peak there were 1,930 students enrolled for the 2007-2008 school year. Because no new students could enroll, because the program was not reauthorized to that extent by Congress, enrollment declined to 1,721 for the 2008-2009 school year. It is now at 1,319.

Here is a terrible thing that happened: Last year, 216 students were offered a scholarship for the year that followed, the school year that followed. Then that offer, because of opposition to this program and a decision not to allow new students into it, was revoked by the Secretary of Education of the United States.

Since its inception, the Opportunity Scholarship Program has served over 3,000 students, and more than 8,400 have applied to participate. Over 85 percent of the students in this program would be attending a school in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring as designated under Federal law. This is a remarkable program that really does deserve to be continued.

I note the presence of my colleague and friend and cosponsor, Senator Ensign. If the Senator would like to speak at this time, I will be glad to yield the floor, and then I will take it back after he has concluded.

Madam President, I thank Senator Ensign for his cosponsorship, for his convincing and informed argument for this amendment. I couldn't agree more. There is such an irony here. Secretary Duncan of Education is a reformer. The President supports school reforms. Michelle Rhee is trying very hard and valiantly and effectively to reform the DC Public Schools. Why would Secretary Duncan and members of the administration and some in this body and our colleagues in the other body oppose this program, an opportunity scholarship program which Chancellor Rhee supports because it is consistent with her attempt and the attempt of Secretary Duncan to reform our public schools? The only answer I can think of is that certain interest groups, including particularly teachers unions, oppose this measure.

For me, that is not an acceptable reason to terminate the hopes of 1,300 children in a program in the Nation's Capital.

I note, with pleasure, the presence of our colleague from Maine, Senator Collins.

I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague, Senator Collins, for coming to the floor, for being a cosponsor of this amendment. And for the passionate and reasoned way in which she spoke.

Two things come to mind in listening to her remarks. One is, we are very often dealing with big national or international matters on the floor of the Senate--health care reform, jobs act, whatever. They all involve people,

of course. But here is one which is local, and we can actually quantify the people. We have 1,319 children who are in private or faith-based schools because of this DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, getting, by their own telling and that of their parents, so much better an education, feeling better about themselves, being on the road of opportunity.

If we don't authorize this, although the administration has said it is committed to at least following these students through high school, there is not enough money there to do that. The President, in the budget, said this is probably the last year he will fund it. There is not enough money to carry these students through high school.

The second point is, with all the uncertainty in the program, the current administrator of it, a nonprofit corporation, has said they don't want to do this anymore. So far, no one else has been found to do it.

So this definitely closes the door to opportunity for hundreds of other students in the District and their parents to give them a better education, while Chancellor Rhee, over the next 5 years, is trying to make every school in the District of Columbia a good school.

But, secondly, it really focuses us on the possibility that these 1,319 children will be forced to go back to the public schools in their neighborhoods, and 86 percent of those schools, as Senator Collins has said, are designated under Federal law as inadequate. None of us would let our kids go there, and we would pay their way out. But these parents who benefit from this program cannot.

So Senator Collins has really spoken of this as a tragedy, a human tragedy--she is right--that you could look into the face of each of these 1,319 kids and say: Sorry, you can't go on in this school you all are so happy to be going to at this point.

The second point is this, and I say this respectfully: It has been very rare, when I have been involved in a debate in the Senate on a matter, that I have not felt there were some respectable, good arguments on the other side. I did not agree with them. On balance, they did not convince me my position was wrong. But I must say that on this one I cannot think of a single good reason to be opposed to this amendment: 5 more years of an experimental program, $20 million to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program out of, by my recollection, $13 billion of Federal taxpayer money that goes to title I schools, and over $25 billion that goes from the Federal Government to public schools around America in the No Child Left Behind Program--a total of $25 billion or $26 billion.

This is $20 million for these DC Opportunity Scholarships, alongside $20 million more to the DC Public Schools that they will not otherwise get, and $20 million more for the charter schools. In fact, if this program is allowed to die and those 1,319 students are forced back into the public schools in their neighborhoods, that adds, by the estimate of one independent authority I have seen, at least $14 million more to the expense of the DC Public School System to take them back.

So I welcome people who oppose this amendment to come to the floor to debate it, but honestly, listening to Senator Collins, I cannot think of a good reason to be against this amendment. I thank the Senator very much for coming over, for her cosponsorship, and for all the work we have been able to do together.

Again, I say, why did this come before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee? Because historically--the Presiding Officer, I am now proud to say, is a new member of the committee--the Governmental Affairs Committee has been given jurisdiction over matters regarding the District of Columbia. It is in that capacity that we have done oversight of this program.

I note the presence of another cosponsor--and I will give her a moment to get ready--Senator Feinstein of California, whom I will yield to whenever she wants to speak.

One of the arguments against this--actually, since no one is on the floor opposing this, I am going to use a memo sent out this afternoon by staff to Senators opposing the amendment from the Democratic leadership office, I believe. I will just pick out a few of these.

The first problem cited: This program was passed in 2003 as a 5-year pilot program. It has now been extended twice through appropriations bills to minimize the disruption to students already in the program, and a plan for winding it down is in place. But that is the point.

So they say: Reauthorization is not needed to keep students in the schools they are in. That, according to the DC authorities on this, is not true. There is not enough money in it to keep them in there. The President said, in his budget this year, this would probably be the last time he would recommend appropriating to this program. The promise was to keep these students in the Opportunity Scholarship Program right through graduation from high school. There is not enough money there.

But more to the point, there is every reason to do it, based on the independent evaluation of the program, based on Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the DC Public Schools, who is supporting the 5-year reauthorization because she feels it is necessary.

Incidentally, this reauthorization is also supported by Mayor Fenty. He supports the tripartite appropriation: public schools, charter schools, and the Opportunity Scholarship Program. And it is supported in a letter from a majority of the members of the city council of the District.

I want to quote--I will come back to it again--Michelle Rhee. This is why it is not adequate to say this ought to be just appropriated every year and keep these students in the program dangling every year, making it harder to find an independent administrator of the program, why reauthorization is needed. But listen to this. This is Michelle Rhee in testimony before the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee on September 16 of last year. She says:

[O]n a regular basis, I have parents from Wards 7 and 8

(which are our highest poverty wards, which are also the home

of our lowest performing schools) come to me and they've done

everything a parent should do and they say, ``I've looked at

all the data, I know my neighborhood school and the schools

surrounding are not performing at the level that I want them

to. So I participated in the out-of-boundary process; I went

through the lottery and I didn't get a slot at one of the

schools I wanted.'' So they look at me and say, ``Now what?

What are you going to do?''

Michelle Rhee answered in her testimony:

And I cannot look at those parents in the eye right now at

this point and offer every single one of them a spot in a

school that I think is a high-performing school.

Here is a gutsy comment from this chancellor who is really devoted to the improvement of the public schools. Chancellor Rhee says:

And until I think we are able to do that, which I think is

on that five-year horizon, then I believe that we do need to

have choice for our families and I think they do have to have

the ability to participate: either to move into a charter

school or to use the opportunity scholarships.

End of quote from the chancellor of the DC Public School System. I have the greatest respect for her. It took a lot of guts to say that. But she said ``5-year horizon,'' and that is what this reauthorization does. It gives these kids--these parents who know their children are not getting a good education in the public school they are in--who have not been able to go to one of the out-of-boundary, out-of-their- neighborhood schools because the schools are packed, have not made it into a charter school because I gather there are thousands waiting who cannot get into the existing charter schools--let's give them an opportunity to get one of these opportunity scholarships and have a chance for a better education and a better life.

Mr. President, I am going to stop now. I am very grateful for the cosponsorship by the distinguished Senator from California, a former mayor, of course, who is intimately knowledgeable on public education, who is committed to public education and yet really concerned about every child. That is what this program is about.

I will yield the floor at this moment.

Mr. President, briefly, I thank my colleague and dear friend from California for a wonderful statement. First, I say officially as an Independent that the Senator from California has begun demonstrating her independence of mind, spirit, and heart.

Secondly, I cannot tell the Senator how important it was that she did what she did with those three students because this is personal. This matters to individual students. It is hard to imagine the talents these three have shown and have developed would have been developed in the same way, unfortunately, at the school they were consigned to by their neighborhood.

Years ago, I learned an expression from some wise person--a hundred years ago--that if you save one life, it is as if you saved the whole world because every individual has all the potential of the world within them. That probably was talking more about physically saving a life. The truth is, in a way, that is real. By giving these kids an equal educational opportunity, we are giving them the ability to save their own lives.

I cannot thank the Senator from California enough for a wonderful statement. I appreciate it very much.

I note the presence of my friend and colleague from Ohio, Senator Voinovich, who has been a long-time advocate, going back to his days in Ohio, for better educational opportunity for every child.

I yield the floor and look forward to his statement at this time.

Mr. President, I rise to thank Senator Voinovich for his statement. He brings several thoughts to my mind. The first is: Senator Voinovich, I am going to miss you when you retire at the end of this year. You are a straight shooter, you are a straight talker, and you speak from your heart. You have had a lot of practical experience-- as mayor, as Governor, and as a Member of the Senate--and you bring it all to bear in what you said.

Secondly, I look forward to buying that book you are about to write. I hope it is about your career broadly, but I would be real interested in that Ohio opportunity scholarships or voucher program.

Well, let's call it the Lieberman-Voinovich amendment.

Senator Voinovich has spoken from his own experience in the Ohio case. As he said, sometimes people say opportunity scholarships or vouchers are constitutionally suspect or unconstitutional. Not true. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Ohio voucher program was a neutral private choice program that did not violate the establishment clause.

But I will tell you what rings in my ear is the questions that have been raised by my colleagues in support of this amendment. Senator Voinovich said: Why would you vote against this amendment? Why would you vote against this program? As the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, said: What is there to be afraid of in this program? It doesn't take money away from the public schools. The head of the DC Public School System is for the program because she thinks it will benefit the children who need it, whom she knows she can't give a quality eduction to over the 5 years of the authorization program.

This program has been tested by an independent evaluator, Dr. Patrick Wolf, principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Education study, and he concluded that:

The DC voucher program has proven to be the most effective

education innovation policy program evaluated by the Federal

Government's official education research arm so far.

Of the 11 innovation programs investigated, studies showed only 3 have reported any statistically significant achievement gains, and the gains reported in the Opportunity Scholarship Program in the District of Columbia are the highest thus far.

I know Senator Rockefeller wants to return to the FAA authorization bill, so I will begin to wind this up. I thank all my colleagues who came over to speak on behalf of the amendment. I regret that nobody has come to speak against it. I was looking forward to a good debate. So I have to go back to this staff memo sent out to Senators against the amendment. We have actually dealt with all the arguments made:

Public dollars should be spent on public schools that accept all students subject to uniform public standards. This program accepts the students who apply, and when there are too many, they subject them to a lottery. It is a wide-open program.

They cite the Department of Education study. They do not do it fairly. They speak wrongly: DC parents already have choices about where to send their children with the public charter school network. Yet we know those programs are oversubscribed.

The fact is, all the arguments made in this memo against the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program and keeping it alive in the hopes that the lives of a limited number of students in the DC school system-- 1,300; maybe with this reauthorization they will be able to add a couple hundred more in each year for the next 5 years; maybe it will be 1,000 more children--will be better and for whom the doors of opportunity will be opened in a way they are not opened now. Why would anybody oppose this? I can't think of a good reason.

The group that has been most vigorously opposed has been the teachers unions. I understand why, but their interests do not outweigh the interests of these children, economically disadvantaged, with dreams and hopes they can't realize in the schools they are in but who have those hopes elevated and realized--as those three beautiful pictures of students who have been in this program that Senator Feinstein showed us.

Look, along with Chancellor Rhee, I hope for and, in fact, envision a day when the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is not needed and it will not be needed because the DC Public School System will be providing a good education to every student who lives in the District of Columbia. But that, as Chancellor Rhee has said, is not the reality these children and their families live in today. Many schools in our Nation's Capital, as the chancellor has said, are not providing an adequate education to the students.

I repeat: I will bet there is not a Member of this Senate, if their children were consigned by neighborhood allocation systems, who would not spend the money to get their children out of those schools because their children's lives and hopes and dreams would be compromised, through no fault of their own, simply because the schools were not adequate to educate them. So this is all about helping some

of those students by supporting this amendment to reauthorize the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program 5 more years.

I hope and pray what Chancellor Rhee said is right; that in 5 years she can look every parent of every student in the DC Public School System in the eye and say: Your child is at a school where he or she can get a good education so we don't need the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program anymore. But for now, Chancellor Rhee says we need it, Mayor Fenty says we need it, former Mayor Williams--who helped to create the program--is strongly for it, and a July 2009 poll conducted in the District of Columbia says, 75 percent of District residents want and need the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.

I don't see a reason why a majority of Members of this Senate, hopefully an overwhelming bipartisan majority, would speak against this; would frustrate the hopes of all these families, all these students, and all these leaders of education in the District of Columbia. So I am going to yield the floor with the hope that we can have a vote on this soon, and I urge my colleagues to think about the 1,319 children whose lives will be compromised, whose dreams will be stifled if this program is not reauthorized.

I thank Senator Rockefeller for his patience while we continued on this amendment, and with that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is a bipartisan amendment introduced by Senators Collins, Burr, Voinovich, Feinstein, Ensign, and myself. It would benefit schoolchildren in the District of Columbia, reauthorizing a program we created 7 years ago now that has worked: $20 million to the DC public schools, $20 million to charter schools, and $20 million to the Opportunity Scholarship Program.

The last part is the controversial part. But it should not be. As Senator Feinstein said in her remarks on this amendment, what is there in this amendment to be afraid of? It has helped 1,300 economically disadvantages children to have an opportunity to get out of a public school that the Chancellor of the DC Public Schools says is not working for them.

This measure is supported by Mayor Fenty, Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a majority of the members of the DC Public Schools, and it has been judged by an independent evaluator to be the most effective program of its kind in America.

I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Arizona for the question and for the opportunity to engage in this dialog on the important and troubling course of relations at this moment between the United States and Israel.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this colloquy be conducted as in morning business.

I thank the Chair.

I say to my friend from Arizona what not only he knows, but what he has helped to bring about throughout his career, are two things: that the American relationship with Israel is one of the strongest, most important, most steadfast bilateral alliances we have in the world because it is not based on temporal matters--that is, matters that come and go and politics or diplomacy--it is based on shared values, shared strategic interests in the world, and, unfortunately, now on the fact that we in the United States and the Israelis are also targets of the Islamist extremists, the terrorists who threaten the security of so much of the world. So we have a strong bilateral relationship.

The second thing to say, in answering my friend's question, is that the Israelis depend, to a very large degree, on America's friendship as they approach the world. The Senator is absolutely right, without a confidence--not that everything Israel does America will support, but that underlying we are heading in the same direction, we are allies, we are friends, it is as if we are part of the same family. Without that confidence in the U.S.-Israel relationship, the Israelis will not have the confidence to take the risks necessary for peace. So the uproar over the last several days is very troubling in that regard.

Vice President Biden, as my friend knows, went to Israel to reset the relationship. Unfortunately, at that time, from all the Israeli Government says--I have no reason to doubt them--a bureaucratic decision was made within one department of the government, the Ministry of the Interior, to issue a permit--I gather one of seven permits necessary within the next few years for this building project to take place. It has become not just a bureaucratic mistake but a major, for the moment, source of division between our ally, Israel, and ourselves, and it does not help anyone to continue this.

I just want to say briefly to my friend because he said something most people do not know--and this is my understanding of the situation--the permits for this housing are in an area of Jerusalem that is today mostly Jewish. The Israeli Government has taken the position, however, since 1967 that anybody ought to be able to buy property and build and live in any section of Jerusalem they choose to regardless of their religion or nationality or anything else. That is a very American concept.

Secondly, this particular part of Jerusalem is, in most anybody's vision of a possible peace settlement, going to be part of Israel. A lot of Israelis believe all of Jerusalem should remain the eternal unified capital of Israel. But going to the negotiations that occurred between President Clinton, Prime Minister Barak, Chairman Arafat in 2000, which were about as detailed as any recent negotiations, this

particular neighborhood of Jerusalem, in the document that was almost accepted by Arafat, was part of Israel.

So it is not a violation of that. It is not a violation of the moratorium on new settlements that Prime Minister Netanyahu adopted, and it ought not to be--I tell you, that first wave of reaction, when Vice President Biden was there, I understood. He was upset. It was embarrassing. Maybe some of the words--``condemn'' was a little strong for a bureaucratic mistake. But why this continues now, including on the Sunday talk shows, with Mr. Axelrod saying it was an affront and an insult by Israel to the United States, serves nobody's good. It does not serve our interests; it does not serve Israel's interests. It helps those like the people in Tehran who want to cause difficulty throughout the region.

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Arizona. I agree totally with what he said. I think it is very important the Senator from Arizona has gone to the speech that Vice President Biden made. I believe it was on Wednesday of last week in Tel Aviv at Tel Aviv University.

What is interesting is, that speech came after the first date he was there. When this bureaucratic announcement of housing permits being issued in Jerusalem was made, Vice President Biden put out a statement condemning that action. I understand why he was upset by it, that it had been happening when he came. Prime Minister Netanyahu outright apologized in public for it. He said he is appointing a review committee to look at how it happened so they could set up a mechanism within the Israeli Government so a decision such as that would not be made, if I understood what their intention is, without the Prime Minister's office being notified. Then Vice President Biden made quite an important speech at Tel Aviv University.

The Senator from Arizona is absolutely right. The Vice President said the relationship between the United States and Israel is unbreakable, and there is no space between us. When there is space between us, it only helps our shared enemies, not the two of us, the two great democracies.

Vice President Biden also made clear that while we are committed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it is very important for both-- and Prime Minister Netanyahu has too. He has taken his Likud Party to a place it has never been before. In a speech he gave at Bar-Ilan University, he said for the first time, very clearly, as the Likud Prime Minister, that he supports the two-state solution: two countries, two peoples side by side. Then he issued that moratorium on settlement expansion in a whole series of areas which Secretary Clinton, in an earlier visit, described as unprecedented.

Then we go to the Vice President's speech. There, he focuses on Iran and the threat of a nuclear Iran, the threat of an Iran that suppresses the rights of its people, and he says not only is Iran explicitly a threat to Israel--as Ahmadinejad has said, threatening Israel's existence--Vice President Biden made very clear our concern about an Iranian nuclear weapon is not because of what Ahmadinejad said about Israel, although, obviously, that concerns us; it is because a nuclear, autocratic, tyrannical, totalitarian Iran threatens the short-, medium- , and long-term security of the United States of America.

After that speech, I thought this whole business about the permits for housing was over. Yet then the State Department spokesman comes out on Friday with very strong language about the phone conversation with the Secretary of State whom, of course, the Senator from Arizona and I not only respect but like very much. She is our friend, our colleague. She has a long record of support for the United States-Israel relationship. But Friday afternoon's press statement seemed to be dredging up again something that seemed to have been calmed and ought to be calmed.

The Senator from Arizona is absolutely right. I take it that is the point the Senator is making: There is too much that ties us together with Israel, too much on the line for both countries, to continue to make a mistake, for which the Prime Minister of Israel has apologized, into a division between two great allies.

Mr. President, I agree totally with my friend. Let's cut the family fighting, the family feud. It is unnecessary, and it is destructive of our shared national interests, the

United States and Israel, and it takes our eye off the two balls we have to focus on. One is the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the other is the threat of a nuclear Iran, which is not only a threat to us and Israel, it is a threat to Palestinian leadership because Iran is the No. 1 supporter of Hamas, which is the foremost antagonist to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

The Senator from Arizona is absolutely right. Peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians requires very difficult, delicate negotiations. But we are at a moment--and my friend and I were together in Israel and the Palestinian areas in January of this year and we met with the leadership. It is an interesting moment, because in both countries the economy is doing pretty well. The Palestinians have seen a real surge in economic growth. Security is better on both sides. We have leadership on both sides: Netanyahu in Israel and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen, and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. We have three leaders there committed to the two-state solution, renouncing terrorism, a peaceful process. If, for some reason, people in the American Government continue this dispute, frankly, it makes it hard for not just the Israelis but the Palestinians to get into the peace process because we can't be more demanding than they are, if you will. I think Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad want to move the peace process forward, I am convinced, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said.

So it is time to lower voices and get over the family feud between the United States and Israel. It doesn't serve anybody's interests but our enemies: George Mitchell--I will say it here--is a saint. Whoever the saint of patience is, George works under that saint's aegis. Through his patience and persistence, the proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership are about to begin, and they have the prospect of making some real progress.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment 3456.

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

Mr. President, I introduced this amendment with a bipartisan group of cosponsors, Senators Collins of Maine, Byrd of West Virginia, Feinstein of California, Voinovich of Ohio, and Ensign of Nevada.

Its purpose is to reauthorize--in fact, to save--the Opportunity Scholarship Program or OSP for students here in the District of Columbia.

We are introducing our amendment to this legislation, and I use the word ``save'' because without prompt action by Congress, there is a reasonable probability that the OS Program, the scholarship program, will not just be limited to the number of students who are in it now-- and, in fact, there have not been any new students admitted in the last 2 years--but it will be doomed.

As I explained here on the floor of the Senate yesterday, the current administrator has advised Secretary Duncan that it will no longer--the administrator being a corporation, an entity--that it will no longer administer the program without a reauthorization.

No other entity has yet expressed a willingness to take over, given the constraints imposed by Congress. So despite President Obama's intent, stated in his budget message to continue this program, admittedly only for those 1,300-plus students currently participating in it, it appears that even that will become impossible.

I think that would be a tragic result. This program has given a lifeline for students in failing schools in the District of Columbia, a scholarship to go to private or faith-based schools where, by all accounts, they are receiving a much better education and being given the talents with which they can make something much greater of their lives.

We first offered our amendment to the American Workers, State, and Business Relief Act, which was passed earlier today. I was proud to support that measure. It is good for the economy, good for people hurting in our economy, good for businesses hurting in the economy. Unfortunately, we were not able to get a vote on this amendment on that bill. As promised, we are here today again in another attempt to get a vote in the Senate on this issue. It is time sensitive. It is urgent. The life of this program hangs in the balance and, in a very real way, the future of these 1,300-plus children in the District who are benefiting from the program.

The truth is, the FAA reauthorization bill has been referred to as a jobs initiative. I believe it is. What is more important to getting a good job than getting a good education? That is what this bill is all about.

Achievement gaps in our schools, including our schools in the District of Columbia, have a profound impact on the quality of our workforce and on the future of our economy and, in a classically, characteristically American sense, focusing on the individual children who, by twists of fate, have ended up in schools that are not adequately preparing them. I will have more to say about this, but these are schools I am not just personally judging to be failing schools but, under characteristics, standards created by the Federal Government under the No Child Left Behind Act, are designated as failing schools. The OSP provides these low-income students in the District with a chance at a better education.

Dollar for dollar, this program accomplishes this goal at a very low cost. Personally, how did I get involved in this? Of course like all of us, I have an interest in education. I have an interest in overcoming the achievement gaps in American schools that are so profoundly related to income and to race. More particularly, I have followed the status of this program in the District of Columbia for several years in my capacity as a ranking member and now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee because of the committee's traditional jurisdiction in its governmental affairs aspect over and regarding the District of Columbia, our Nation's Capital.

Last year our committee held a hearing on the Opportunity Scholarship Program and heard testimony from students in the program and their parents. It was evident from their testimony that this program has served as a lifeline to many students who otherwise would have been assigned to schools in which they would not have received a good education, as designated by No Child Left Behind.

One parent whose annual income is only $12,200 testified that she had sought an opportunity scholarship, a voucher for her 8-year-old son after her 17-year-old nephew was shot and killed at the Ballou High School. Her son since has thrived in the Opportunity Scholarship Program, loves his school and his teachers, is part of the reading and debate club, and now wants to be a doctor. His hopes have been fortified and elevated, and his achievement has been remarkably improved. This mother believes that none of this would have happened had her son been forced to stay in the school he was in in the DC Public School System.

Another young man, Ronald Holassie, started in the Opportunity Scholarship Program in sixth grade. He is now a high school student. He told the committee the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program ``has changed my life.''

Then he said:

No one should take away my future and dreams of becoming a

successful young man. No one should take that away from me

and the other 1,700 children in this program.

Now, because of the failure of Congress to support the program over the last couple of years or fill the spots opened by graduation, it is down to 1,300 children. Ronald Holassie became the deputy youth mayor for legislative affairs of the District of Columbia and is now applying to college. What he said was right. This program provides a quality education to economically disadvantaged students at half the per-pupil cost of educating students in the Public Schools.

Our committee also heard from Tiffany Dunston. She told us:

Receiving a scholarship was a blessing for my family and

put me on the path to success. I grew up in a neighborhood

with a lot of poverty and crime. And there were such low

expectations for kids in my neighborhood schools. I would

watch kids hanging out in the streets and not going to

school. . . . My motivation to get the best education

possible was my cousin James who was shot and killed at 17. I

am always thinking of what he could have done. . . . With the

help of a scholarship my dream [has been] realized.

Those are very moving testimonies, personal anecdotes, affirmations of the worth of the program. But has there been an independent professional evaluation of the program? Yes, there has.

Required by Congress, the person chosen to carry out that program is a man named Patrick Wolf, Dr. Patrick Wolf, the principal investigator of the valuation conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. This is a report required by Congress, carried out by an institute under the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Patrick Wolf testified that the Opportunity Scholarship Program has had a statistically significant, positive effect on the test scores of students in reading in this program.

I know some of the critics of the program, some of the opponents have downplayed these results. However, the fact is, as I have learned, most education innovation programs actually fail to show any significant gains, certainly in the first few years.

Dr. Wolf has said when compared to all other similarly studied education innovations throughout our country--not talking about the the District of Columbia--``the reading impact of the DC voucher program is the largest achievement impact yet reported.''

He went on, the principal independent investigator, to say:

The DC voucher program has proven to be the most effective

education policy evaluated by the federal government's

official research arm so far.

So why stop it? Why terminate it? Certainly not based on this independent evaluation, certainly not based on the testimony our committee and others have heard from the parents and students involved. The reasons I leave to others, but I fear it is because of the opposition of teachers groups and others who don't want this kind of competition.

In sum, Dr. Wolf's study used the gold standard of research methodology and found that the Opportunity Scholarship Program is getting very impressive results. Those who oppose OSP argue in part that vouchers take away funds from the public schools in the District. This is simply false. When it was adopted in Congress, to overcome the argument that it would take money away from the public schools, this program did exactly the opposite. We reached an agreement to get the votes to pass the program that whatever amount of money was given for the OPS, the so-called voucher program in the District of Columbia, exactly that amount of money would be added, not subtracted, to the public school budget of the District of Columbia. They otherwise would not have received that money for the public schools.

Incidentally, a similar amount was appropriated for charter schools in Washington. Why? Because there is no one answer at this moment to the challenge to give every child endowed by our Creator, as the Declaration of Independence says, with an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which, in our time, is very much equated with the right to an equal education. The fact is, previous Congresses have been prepared to support all three of these ways because they were focused not on a single method of educating our children but on benefiting each and every one of our children.

I know some say these scholarships are not the solution to the problems that beset the DC Public Schools. I agree. They are not the sole solution. But they can and should be part of the solution, certainly, while the reform efforts of the chancellor, Michelle Rhee, are going forward and until they reach a turning point, a tipping point where the schools really have been broadly improved.

I strongly support Chancellor Rhee's efforts to reform and improve the public schools in the District. I strongly support efforts across the Nation to improve our public schools. That is always where we will educate most of our children. That is always where we should put the greatest emphasis.

Chancellor Rhee, with the backing of Mayor Fenty, has moved aggressively to turn around failing schools in the District. She is getting results. She certainly has my full backing when it comes to the reforms she is working to implement. But Chancellor Rhee has said something so honest, so compassionate, so fair, so focused on the well- being of the children in Washington, DC, that, to me, it should end any argument against the amendment we are proposing.

She has said herself, Chancellor Rhee, that the reform effort in the DC Public Schools is making progress but it is not going to happen overnight. As one of the students I just quoted said before our committee, the DC Public Schools did not get to the troubles they are in overnight, and they are not going to get out of the troubles they are in overnight.

But Chancellor Rhee said this is a multiyear process. In the meantime, many District schools are failing our most economically challenged children. For this reason, Chancellor Rhee, Michelle Rhee, the head of the public schools in the District, has said the OSP should continue. I ask my colleagues, why wouldn't we want to use every means at our disposal to provide the best education possible to all children here in Washington, DC?

Chancellor Rhee has been very explicit about this. She said that it may take 5 years to turn around many of the schools that are failing-- officially failing--to give a decent education to the students in the District of Columbia. She said, in a very personal and moving way, until she could say to parents of children who are in schools now designated as failing that they were no longer failing and the parents could be confident that their children would receive a good education in those schools, she would support the Opportunity Scholarship Program 5 years. Based on that assessment, our amendment reauthorizes the OSP for 5 years.

Our amendment also continues to ask for a rigorous evaluation of the merits of the program. At the end of the 5 years, we will have better information on both the effectiveness of this scholarship voucher model and the reform effort in the DC Public Schools. I want to suggest to my colleagues, at the end of this 5-year period, we can determine whether we want to continue to provide Federal support for these opportunity scholarship, school choice programs based on conditions at that time.

Our reauthorization proposal includes a number of improvements and enhancements to the program, including many sought by my friend and colleague, Senator Durbin, the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that has in previous years funded the Opportunity Scholarship Program. Specifically, we require that all schools in the program have certificates of occupancy, that core subject matter teachers have appropriate credentials and schools meet the accrediting standards of the DC Public Schools; that regular site inspections be conducted; and that participating students take the same test as students in District of Columbia Public Schools.

There are currently 1,319 students benefiting from opportunity scholarships in the District of Columbia. I repeat that no students have been allowed in for the last 2 years because of congressional inaction. At its peak, 1,930 students were enrolled in the 2007 to 2008 school year. Because no new students can enroll, enrollment declined to 1,721 last year and then 1,319 this year. Last year, 216 students who were offered a scholarship had the offer revoked by the Secretary of Education of the United States because of failure to support the program.

I want to repeat, over 85 percent of students in this program would otherwise be attending a school in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring--in other words, a failing school designated under the No Child Left Behind Act.

In closing, I would say this: 1,319 is the number of students benefiting from the Opportunity Scholarship Program. If we do not reauthorize it, at this point there is no one to run the program and it probably will simply die. Those are 1,319 reasons to save this program and offer hope and opportunity to these young boys and girls in this city

who want as much as any child in this country to live a life of success and self-sufficiency and deserve that right as much as any other child in the country.

So I ask my colleagues to consider what we would want for our own children. All of us have the resources to essentially exercise school choice, and that is precisely what many of us do because we want the best for our children. But there are many parents around America--in this case, particularly, who live in our Nation's Capital, the place where we work--who have much more limited resources and also want the best for their children. They want to make a choice, which the Opportunity Scholarship Program allows them to make. So I appeal to my colleagues to take up this amendment. Let's have a vote on it, and let's act favorably on it to preserve this lifeline for a gifted and hopeful group of children in our Nation's Capital.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Stephen Obenhaus, who is a fellow involved in matters of education from our office be granted floor privileges for the duration of the consideration of this bill.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that I be permitted to call up amendment No. 3381 and that at the end of my statement, the amendment then be withdrawn.

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

Mr. President, this amendment that I rise to offer has been cosponsored by a bipartisan group, I am pleased to say: Senators Collins of Maine, Byrd of West Virginia, Feinstein of California, Voinovich of Ohio, and Ensign of Nevada.

The purpose of this amendment is to reauthorize--literally, to save-- the Opportunity Scholarship Program or OSP. Some know it as the DC school voucher program. We are offering our amendment to this legislation because without prompt action by Congress, the OSP, I am afraid, will end. The current administrator has advised Secretary Duncan that it will no longer

administer the program absent a reauthorization, and no other entity has expressed the willingness to take over, given the constraints imposed by Congress under the prevailing set of circumstances. Despite the President's stated intent in his budget to continue the program, if only for those students currently participating, even that will become impossible.

This amendment, as I will explain in a moment, will reauthorize this program for 5 years at essentially its current levels. As I will explain in a moment, it is working, and it is immensely popular with families of children and failing schools in the District of Columbia. It is supported by the chancellor of the school system, Michelle Rhee, and by Mayor Fenty. It is warmly endorsed by the families of the students who have benefited from this program as it literally changed their lives. Yet it has run into opposition in Congress, I fear from people who are committed to defending a status quo that is not working.

Chancellor Michelle Rhee is working so hard to reform the school system of our Nation's Capital, the public school system. Why would she be supporting this Opportunity Scholarship Program that will allow some children--low-income children--in the District of Columbia to get this scholarship and go to a private or faith-based school? She said, in terms that were very compelling, as she testified before committees of Congress, the following: That if a parent of a student in a school that literally had been determined to be failing turned to her and said, can my child get a good education in the school the public school system sends her to, she can't now say yes to parents of students who are in these designated failing schools.

And she said, I think with great strength and conviction and honesty--and she is the head of the public school system here--that until she can tell these parents that their children will get a good education in the public schools of the District of Columbia, she cannot in good conscience oppose this plan that will basically enable these children a lifeline while she is fixing the DC public schools--a lifeline to a better education, a better career, a better life.

Her own estimate is that it will take her 5 years more to get the DC public schools to where she wants them and every parent of a child here in the District wants them to be. That is the length of the reauthorization of this program that our amendment would provide.

I understand there will be a point of order raised against our amendment, as well as objections to proceeding to a vote on our amendment, and that, therefore, I will be obliged to withdraw my amendment. It was not possible on this bill to receive the consent necessary to bring up this amendment for a vote, although I am pleased to understand that no objections would likely be raised on the minority side to at least bringing up a vote for an amendment.

I do want to serve notice that I will continue to push for a vote on this matter, because I think it is so critically important. I know there are several bills coming before the Senate, including the reauthorization of the FAA, which will come soon and that will be subject to amendment and, therefore, I will be afforded an opportunity--myself and my cosponsors--to amend those bills and to offer this opportunity scholarship amendment to those bills.

I don't know at this moment that we have the 60 votes to pass this amendment, but what I am committed to doing is making sure we have debate on the amendment and a vote on the amendment so the Senate can be heard and, in that sense, is challenged to take a position on this amendment and this program which, I repeat, has been a lifeline for kids trying to get a decent education and build a better life.

In my view, this amendment did belong on the American Workers, State, and Business Relief Act--the underlying bill before the Senate-- because, obviously, the opportunity to seek and receive a better education enables our children to be better, more productive workers, to help our businesses and, of course, to grow our national economy. Achievement gaps in our schools have a profound effect on the quality of our workforce and on the future of our economy. Most importantly, the quality of our schools has a profound effect on the quality of the lives of the children who go to better schools and get a better education.

Like so many millions and millions of others in our country today, including, I am sure, a lot of other Members of the Senate, my life was transformed by the public schools of my hometown of Stamford, CT, which gave me an education that enabled me to be the first person in my family to go to college, and then I was able to go to law school after that.

There are within the District of Columbia so many gifted and talented students who are in schools that are developing their gifts or growing their talents by giving them a good education. The OSP takes a limited number of those--and they are low income--and gives them a chance for a better education and a better life.

I regret that I am not going to be able to debate this issue and to get a vote on this amendment on this bill, but we are going to wait for the next opportunity to do so. I do want to make, however, some brief remarks on the substance here.

I have followed the status of the OSP for several years in my capacity as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It is one of those strange twists of Senate committee jurisdiction that the governmental affairs part of the jurisdiction of our committee--the traditional historic jurisdiction before homeland security was added--included, according to the wisdom of a previous generation of Senators, jurisdiction over the District of Columbia. So I can tell you we need only listen to the students in the program and their parents--as our committee has had the privilege to hear--to know this program has served as a life changer--not just a game changer but a life changer--for many of these children in this program.

We also have a federally mandated study that documents the success of this program. Despite a lot of misleading statements by those who oppose the program, the science behind this study--an independent study required by a previous act of Congress authorizing this proposal-- proves that the program is working. It is one thing to hear the students and their parents talk about how their lives have been changed with the opportunity to go to a school that has made them feel they can be a success and educated them better, but Dr. Patrick Wolf, the lead investigator for the study that was authorized by a previous act of Congress, concluded:

The DC voucher program has proven to be the most effective

education policy evaluated by the Federal Government's

official educational research arm so far.

That is an awful lot to be able to say.

So the path this bill has followed, the opposition to it, has been so frustrating. People say this is money that is coming out of the public school budget. The whole design of this original program was to add money in equal parts to the DC public schools--money it would not otherwise have received. It was a kind of compensatory balance: the same amount to the charter schools, which are doing very well here in Washington, and then the same amount to the opportunity scholarship program. So money not from the public schools, but an education opportunity for poor kids in Washington now going to schools designated as unable to educate them, and instead giving them the opportunity to go to better private or faith-based schools.

I thank the Chair and my colleagues for allowing me the time to bring up my amendment. As I say, I look forward to engaging in the very near future in a larger discussion of these issues, and at greater length, by submitting this as an amendment to the next bill that comes to the Senate floor.

Amendment No. 3381, withdrawn

Pursuant, nonetheless, to the agreement I had with the leadership and my colleagues in the Senate, understanding there was not consent to proceed, I will now withdraw my amendment.

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

Mr. President, I rise to speak about the Help Find the Missing Act, otherwise known as Billy's Law, which I am introducing today along with my colleagues, Senators Schumer, Gillibrand and Merkley.

I was introduced to the issues Billy's Law addresses by two of my constituents, Jan and Bill Smolinski, who have lived through a parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of their son.

On the afternoon of August 24, 2004, then-31-year-old Billy Smolinski disappeared without a trace. He left behind a dog he loved and his brandnew house; a truck with his keys and wallet still inside; and parents who have spent every day since searching for him and praying for his return. One moment he was there, asking his neighbors to look after his dog for a few days, and the next he was gone without explanation.

Jan and Bill Smolinski have spent countless hours working with law enforcement to try to find Billy. Through that experience, they discovered that we do a poor job managing data about missing adults. The bill we are introducing today will help correct those shortcomings so that families in similar situations can focus only on their missing loved ones and not have to worry that their agony will be prolonged simply because we fail to keep track of--and share--critical identifying data.

Billy's Law does three things: It facilitates the sharing of data about missing people between agencies; it requires law enforcement to compile and track missing persons data that is not currently being collected consistently; and it provides funding to improve, monitor, and maintain that data.

It is my hope that no parent will ever have to experience what Jan and Bill Smolinski are going through, and, as a parent, my heart truly goes out to them. Passing Billy's Law will help give families of missing adults confidence that we are doing everything we can to carefully track the information necessary to locate their loved ones.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about the Help Find the Missing Act, otherwise known as Billy's Law, which I am introducing today along with my colleagues, Senators Schumer, Gillibrand and Merkley.

I was introduced to the issues Billy's Law addresses by two of my constituents, Jan and Bill Smolinski, who have lived through a parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of their son.

On the afternoon of August 24, 2004, then-31-year-old Billy Smolinski disappeared without a trace. He left behind a dog he loved and his brandnew house; a truck with his keys and wallet still inside; and parents who have spent every day since searching for him and praying for his return. One moment he was there, asking his neighbors to look after his dog for a few days, and the next he was gone without explanation.

Jan and Bill Smolinski have spent countless hours working with law enforcement to try to find Billy. Through that experience, they discovered that we do a poor job managing data about missing adults. The bill we are introducing today will help correct those shortcomings so that families in similar situations can focus only on their missing loved ones and not have to worry that their agony will be prolonged simply because we fail to keep track of--and share--critical identifying data.

Billy's Law does three things: It facilitates the sharing of data about missing people between agencies; it requires law enforcement to compile and track missing persons data that is not currently being collected consistently; and it provides funding to improve, monitor, and maintain that data.

It is my hope that no parent will ever have to experience what Jan and Bill Smolinski are going through, and, as a parent, my heart truly goes out to them. Passing Billy's Law will help give families of missing adults confidence that we are doing everything we can to carefully track the information necessary to locate their loved ones.

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Arizona, Mr. McCain, first for his leadership on this issue, which is consistent with a lifetime of support for America's freedom agenda, for the principles that are enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and that have always been at the center of our foreign policy when it has been at its best.

This is a day of history. It is a day of history on the streets of Tehran and other cities in Iran on this 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution.

I heard a report today. It encapsulates what has happened to that revolution. Today, apparently, the granddaughter of Ayatollah Khamenei was arrested as a street protester. When they realized who she was, they immediately let her go.

Mr. President, I say to my friend, I did. That is the wife of the former Prime Minister, I believe, Mr. Mousavi. His wife was beaten on the streets of Tehran today.

This is a day of history in Tehran, and I hope we can make it a day of history in the U.S. Congress because if this legislation which Senator McCain and I and a bipartisan group of other Senators introduce is adopted, it will be the first time we impose economic sanctions on Iranian leaders for the human rights abuses of their own people.

We have come full circle. We have obviously been concerned about Iran's sponsorship of terrorism. It is still the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism in the world, according to the State Department. Second, its nuclear weapons program menaces its neighbors in the world. But as so often happens with countries that threaten their neighbors in the world, that have no regard for human life, ultimately we come back to their core. And the core of the Iranian regime is rotten. It is rotten because it treats its own people not just with disrespect but with brutality. As my friend from Arizona has said, look at the television. Look at YouTube. Read the Internet, the text messages about what is happening on the streets of Iran as we speak today: remarkable demonstrations of courage by the people coming out to protest, to simply ask for their freedom, and unbelievable brutality against them for doing nothing more than asking for their universal human rights.

Yes, indeed. I thank the Senator from Arizona. President Obama adopted the policy of reaching out to the Iranian regime. Personally, I thought he did the right thing. What he got in return for his outstretched hand was a clenched fist.

I think the only thing constructive that has come out of this attempt to engage the Iranians, to begin a new chapter, to give them a peaceful way to avoid conflict with the rest of the world, the only constructive result of it is that we see that the problem in the relations between the United States and Iran is not the United States, it is the oppressive, extremist regime in Tehran.

I think it is clear that President Obama has not only been disappointed but grows impatient and, I will say from what I perceive, angered by what has happened. That explains the increasing move, including just in the last day or two, of the imposition of new sanctions on companies related to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and individuals. This regime will not stop its nuclear weapons program, in my opinion, will not stop its support of terrorist killers, will not stop suppressing the human rights of its people unless it feels pain, unless it feels that perhaps its regime is in jeopardy. We can only do that now with tough sanctions, such as those that are proposed in the legislation we introduce today.

The Senator from Arizona is very clear that these sanctions directed against the thugs in the Iranian Government who brutally suppress the rights of their own people will be very popular with the people of Iran. In my opinion, the economic sanctions that would be imposed in the legislation that passed the Senate unanimously about 10 days ago--those sanctions are tough, but if we have any hope of achieving an end to the Iranian nuclear weapons program through diplomacy, it has to be coupled with tough economic sanctions or else we will be left with no alternative but military action.

There is a difference between the regime in Iran and the people of Iran. The people of Iran want a change in the regime, it is clear. There is nothing inherently at odds between the American people and the people of Iran. As a matter of fact, we have all sorts of histories and values and goals in common. The problem is the extremist, brutal, aggressive regime in Tehran, and the sooner it goes, the better.

I hope the people of Iran hear this legislation we are introducing today, under the leadership of Senator McCain, as an expression of unanimity across party lines and ideological lines

on behalf of the people of America that we stand with the people of Iran against the Government of Iran as it attempts to suppress the people.

Mr. President, I was with Senator McCain. It was such a baldfaced lie because we see Mr. Motaki get up and say Iran is the most democratic regime in the entire Middle East region and beyond and says, with regard to our complaints and the Europeans' complaints about the suppression of the rights of the Iranian people, the execution of political demonstrators, the jailing of thousands of peaceful political protesters, that is the law and if they violated the criminal law, they would be punished for it. When somebody is so detached from the truth as we know it from what we see with our own eyes, it is hard to trust them otherwise.

I wish to add a word. If we adopt this proposal, as I believe we can and will when the general Iranian sanctions bill comes back from conference, we will have taken a significant first step in the direction of penalties on the Iranian regime for human rights abuses of its own people.

I want to use this, and I ask my friend if he agrees that the impact of this legislation would be magnified many times over if our allied governments around the world, particularly in Europe, which has a tradition of support for human rights, also joined us in adopting laws that impose targeted sanctions against human rights abusers in Iran? It does not require previous U.N. Security Council action. There is nothing stopping our Congress or the EU from imposing targeted human rights sanctions as quickly as possible. I ask my friend if that would not make the power of what we hope to do in Congress many times more effective against the tyrants in Tehran.

Mr. President, over the past several months, the Iranian government has carried out an unprecedented campaign of repression and violence against the Iranian people. Its targets have spanned everyone from religious clerics to women's rights advocates, as well as bloggers, students, photographers, children's advocates, human rights activists, journalists, and members of the political opposition. In fact, according to Reporters Without Borders, Iran now has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world.

The targets of the Iranian regime's crackdown have suffered numerous and varied human rights abuses. Some have been dragged out of their homes and away from their families in the middle of the night, disappearing without charge and without process of law. Others have been beaten and tortured while in government custody, and in some cases, sexually abused. Still others have been prosecuted in mass trials by revolutionary courts and punished with draconian prison sentences, for no reason other than their political beliefs. And some have been executed. Human Rights Watch has rightly condemned Iran's crackdown ``a human rights disaster.''

These abuses are ongoing. Just in the last few hours, despite the efforts of the Iranian government to control the flow of information from their country, videos have gone up on YouTube showing peaceful protesters on the streets of Iranian cities being violently broken up, and individual Iranian citizens brutally beaten, by members of the Iranian security forces.

These human rights abuses are a clear violation of multiple international agreements signed by the Iranian government, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

To be clear, this isn't about the outside world dictating our values to Iran. This is about the failure of Iran's own leaders to live up to the international human rights obligations that they themselves voluntarily committed to, both through the international agreements they have signed and through their own constitution. All we are asking of Iran's leaders is that they respect their own laws. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that Iran's government does not respect its obligations--whether with regard to human rights record or its nuclear activities.

The legislation that we are introducing today has a clear purpose; namely, to shine a bright light onto the human rights abuses being committed in Iran as we speak, and make clear to the people who are perpetrating them that there is going to be a cost to be paid for doing so.

I am very encouraged that this legislation has already won the support of a broad bipartisan coalition of cosponsors--many of whom unfortunately could not be here today because of the weather. They include Senators Durbin, Kyl, Bayh, Collins, Casey, Brownback, Gillibrand, Graham, and Kaufman.

I would especially like to thank my colleague Senator McCain for his leadership on this issue. As he mentioned, Senator McCain sought to attach an earlier version of this legislation as an amendment to the comprehensive Iran sanctions bill that was then on the floor of the Senate and that the Senate unanimously passed. Although we were unable to attach Senator McCain's amendment to the broader sanctions bill at that time for procedural reasons, I remain very hopeful that the human rights legislation we are introducing today will become part of the comprehensive Iran sanctions bill when the House and Senate meet in conference.

And I hope that President Obama will aggressively apply these sanctions once they are signed into law.

More broadly, I hope that the Obama administration will make human rights a centerpiece of our Iran policy in the days and weeks ahead. I understand that, on Monday, there will be what is called a ``Universal Periodic Review'' of Iran's human rights record at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, and that the administration hopes to use this event to shine a spotlight on the human rights abuses that are being committed there. I welcome that initiative, and appeal to other countries to support it as well.

Finally, I would like to appeal to our international partners, in particular in the European Union, to join us in imposing these kinds of targeted sanctions against human rights abusers in Iran. We all know what the Iranian regime has been doing to its people, and I hope that Europeans in particular--given the importance they attach to human rights--will not turn a blind eye to these abuses. We don't need to wait for a U.N. Security Council resolution to do this. There is nothing stopping the EU from imposing target human rights sanctions right now.

Mr. President, this is a piece of legislation that has significance if it is adopted, in effect, we hope, but this is also our way--the 10 of us who have sponsored this legislation, and I would guess every Member of the Senate when it comes to a vote will vote for it--to say to two groups of people, first, the government in Iran, that we see what you are doing, we know what you are doing, it is intolerable, it is unacceptable, and you will be punished for it; and secondly, to say to the people of Iran--who have the courage to be in the streets protesting and asking for

the rights their government is supposed to give them according to international treaties that Iran itself has signed--we are with you.

The struggle for freedom and justice against tyranny is often a long one, it is always a hard one, but history tells us that, in the end, freedom and justice prevail. That means the people of Iran will prevail over the totalitarian government that now brutally rules them.

I thank the Chair, I thank my friend from Arizona for his leadership, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I rise to urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to vote for cloture on the nomination of Martha Johnson to be Administrator of the General Services Administration. The point of cloture is to allow this critical agency to finally have a permanent leader. It would be the first time in nearly 2 years and could potentially save America's taxpayers billions of dollars in the bargain.

Let me give a few examples of what is at stake, which is to say what the General Services Administration can do for us. Last year, Federal agencies bought $53 billion worth of goods and services, and they did so through contracts negotiated by the General Services Administration, the GSA. Having GSA negotiate these procurements lets the individual agencies focus on their core missions, doing what we or previous Congresses created them to do. It also allows the Federal Government to leverage our buying power because if the buying is occurring from one central agency, we can get, in conventional terms, volume discounts, leading to lower costs and, therefore, savings to the taxpayers.

We need strong leadership at GSA to ensure these savings are a reality. For example, in 2007, GSA awarded the NETWORX contracts to provide telephone network and information technology services to all Federal agencies. That is a program estimated to be valued at, at least, $68 billion in the course of its 10-year lifetime. These contracts will allow agencies to take full advantage of the new technologies their colleagues in the private sector use every day to increase efficiency and lower costs. But without a permanent Administrator at GSA, agencies have been slow to move to the NETWORX services, costing taxpayers more than $150 million to date and an additional $18 million every month.

Given GSA's wide responsibilities in providing information technology and telecommunications services, I am concerned that we lack a confirmed Administrator at a time when we are also trying, of course, to strengthen our cyber-defenses. Government Web sites, such as private Web sites, are constantly under attack. GSA needs to play and can play a very important role in ensuring that our Federal IT systems are resistant to those cyber-attacks. Furthermore, because of the government's buying power, GSA's purchases will have a natural positive spillover effect in the private sector.

In other words, GSA, by its own requirements associated with purchases, can drive technologies that then become more available to the general public, and I am thinking here specifically of technologies that can defend

against cyber-attack on private companies as well as on public Web sites.

Here is another example about another function of the GSA. GSA is effectively the government's landlord, with 8,600 buildings and assets under its control that are valued at more than $500 billion. It is one of the largest, if not the largest, property management organizations in the world.

Another of GSA's roles is to help other agencies dispose of buildings and property they no longer need. Across the government, these numbers are both stunning and unsettling. There are different agencies that own thousands of buildings worth about $18 billion that are not being used.

Every day I hear Members come to the floor saying we need to work hard to trim the fat from the Federal budget so we can cut the deficit. I agree. Yet the GSA--the very agency established to help make government operations more cost efficient--has been languishing without a leader for over half a year and I think in that sense is losing some opportunities to save some money.

What is frustrating is that a hold has been placed on this nominee for reasons that have nothing to do with her qualifications or her personal history. That is why I am glad Senator Reid filed a cloture motion and we have forced this nomination to the floor. It is important, in a totally nonpartisan way, that we get a full-time Administrator in here at GSA.

Martha Johnson's nomination received the unanimous support of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in June of last year--more than half a year ago. So that says she had total bipartisan support in our committee based on her experience and qualifications, and I am confident she has wide bipartisan support in the full Senate as well. I hope and trust we will see that when the vote occurs on cloture and final confirmation at around 3 o'clock.

I hope this nomination is a call to action and common sense--and not only bipartisan cooperation but the cooperation of every Member here who has the right to hold up nominations but ought to think about the public interest and the national interest when they do this--that we cannot continue the practice of holding nominees ``hostage,'' as President Obama said yesterday, for reasons that are parochial and unrelated to the nominee's ability to do the job they have been nominated for. I think these kinds of actions damage the Senate as an institution and further reduce the public's respect for how we do our business.

I wish to remind my colleagues at this point how well qualified this nominee is. To begin with, Ms. Johnson is a former Chief of Staff of the GSA. So she already knows the agency inside and out and will be ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work on day one--no on-the-job training needed. This is crucial both to the efficiency and morale of an agency that has not had a permanent Administrator since April of 2008--almost 2 years. April 2008 was the time when the former Director was asked to resign by the previous administration. GSA has since been run by five acting Administrators who could not act with the same authority as a Presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed person in that top job.

But both before and after her government service, Martha Johnson's career shows a quite extraordinary mix of work in the public, private, and academic sectors that we should want in government service. Ms. Johnson holds a BA in economics and history from Oberlin College and an MBA from Yale Business School. She also taught some classes during this time.

After graduating from Yale, Ms. Johnson began her career in the private sector as a manager at Cummins Engines Company. She then had a series of other management positions in the private sector and was asked by President Clinton to become Associate Deputy Secretary of Commerce, and then Chief of Staff of GSA from 1996 to 2001.

Since leaving government service in 2001, Ms. Johnson has served as a vice president for the Council for Excellence in Government--a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of government at all levels--and, most recently, she served as a vice president for Computer Sciences Corporation.

This is an extraordinarily experienced and qualified nominee, and that is why I think she deserves--and I think will receive--broad bipartisan support when this matter comes to a vote at around 3 o'clock.

It is past time for GSA to finally have a permanent Administrator, and we happen to have a nominee here who is remarkably well suited for the job. I urge my colleagues in the Senate to vote ``yes'' on cloture, and then we can have a final vote and get this able person on the job working for the American people and I think help us not only manage the Federal Government's activities better but to save billions--literally billions--of dollars for the American taxpayers.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

I would yield, if I might, to my friend and colleague from Louisiana whatever time she needs to speak at this time.

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

Mr. President, I cannot help but note that the occupant of the chair presides not only over the Senate but other organizations to which I am privileged to belong.

I ask to proceed as in morning business.

Mr. President, later this afternoon, the Senate will vote on a cloture motion on the nomination of Patricia Smith to be Solicitor of the Department of Labor. Last Friday, I believe, Senator Reid also filed a cloture motion on another nomination, and it is that nomination I would like to talk about because it comes out of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which I am privileged to chair. That is the nomination of Martha Johnson to be Administrator of the General Services Administration.

It has become unfortunate practice, I believe, that Members have been holding up Executive nominations, in some cases, and I am confident it is the case with regard to Martha Johnson, for reasons unrelated to her qualifications. She is extremely well qualified and very much needed at the General Services Administration, as I will note in a moment.

As I understand the process we will follow this week--presuming, as I hope will be the case, that cloture is granted later this afternoon, when we vote on the nominee for Solicitor of the Department of Labor, whenever the vote on that nomination occurs--hopefully, sooner than later this week--immediately thereafter, we will go to a vote on cloture on this nomination of Martha Johnson. In anticipation of that, I wished to speak to my colleagues about what is coming.

She is an extraordinary nominee, in my opinion, for a job that is critically important to the efficient operation of the Federal Government, about which a lot of us have been speaking with intensity in recent times. She is a former Chief of Staff at the General Services Administration, so she comes with some background that will give her the opportunity to hit the ground running, and that is important in an agency that has not had a permanent leader since April of 2008. Here we are in February of 2010. GSA has not had a permanent leader since April 2008, when the former Director was asked to resign by the previous administration. Since then, the agency has had five Acting Administrators. It is obviously time for stable leadership.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously endorsed her nomination last June, more than a half year ago. Since that time, GSA has undergone several changes in top management, including the departure of the Chief of Staff and the retirement of the Deputy Administrator. So it has been very frustrating for the members of our committee to see such a qualified nominee being held up in the Senate for more than a half year because of a hold that had nothing to do with the nominee's qualifications.

I wish to speak for a moment to my colleagues about the full scope of GSA's responsibilities. It is a critically important agency of our Government that mostly works out of the spotlight. GSA is often called the Federal Government's landlord because it provides workspace and office services for almost every Federal office and agency across our country, from court houses to ports of entry. With 8,600 buildings and $500 billion in assets under its control, GSA must be either the largest property management organization in the world or certainly one of the top and largest property management organizations in the world. But GSA actually is far more than just the Federal Government's landlord. It has 12,000 employees spread across the country in 11 districts. They help guide Federal spending on everything from basic office equipment to the Federal fleet of

more than 200,000 vehicles owned and leased by the U.S. Government. GSA's purchasing divisions have broad effect on the rest of the economy since, as an early acquirer of new technologies, including green technologies, the agency has helped and will continue to help spur production that brings down costs and makes these technologies available and affordable to the broader consumer market. GSA is that important, that it can help build a market for an innovative transformational technology.

In fact, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the Stimulus Act, which we adopted last year, gave GSA specific responsibility to help green the Federal Government by providing $5 billion to make Federal buildings more energy efficient and $300 million to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles for the Federal fleet.

GSA also has wide responsibilities for providing information technology and telecommunications services for Federal agencies. With its leadership, GSA can ensure that the Federal Government is using cutting-edge technology to lower costs, better engage with citizens and detect and defend against cyber threats. In other words, GSA spends so much money every year acquiring information technology systems that if it requires the providers to put together systems that are resistant and defensive to the kinds of cyber attacks that, unfortunately, public and private information networks are under today, it can drive that technology development, which then will be more broadly available to the private sector as it acquires information technology equipment.

A lot of big and important responsibilities are there, meaning the agency is in need of strong leadership. If confirmed, Ms. Johnson will face many challenges, and I wish to take a moment to lay out for my colleagues a few which have come to the attention of our committee, which has oversight of GSA. In the area of procurement, contracts negotiated by GSA must leverage the vast buying power of the Federal Government so agencies get more value for the taxpayers' dollar. Last year, Federal agencies bought approximately $53 billion of goods and services right off GSA schedules and other GSA contracts, which offer everything from office supplies to human resource services, to security equipment, to energy management services and through other contracts negotiated by GSA. Having GSA negotiate these procurement agreements lets these customer agencies stay focused on their core missions. In other words, the agencies do not have to get into all the back-and- forth details on negotiating these contracts. The experts at GSA do it for them. The agencies can focus on what they are supposed to be doing.

Some agencies, if I may speak directly, have lost confidence of the ability of GSA to provide the best products at the best prices and have begun to negotiate their own contracts or interagency contracts. This duplicates services offered by GSA. It is effectively a waste of Federal money and effectively also defeats the purpose of GSA, which was created by President Harry S. Truman, in 1949, with the specific intent of streamlining the Federal Government's purchasing process so every agency of the Federal Government did not have its own separate purchasing division that may have done well or not so well but certainly not as efficiently as one for the whole Federal Government.

The second problem, similar to this one, exists in GSA's property management activities, with agencies sometimes questioning whether GSA has now met their needs in the most cost-effective manner.

Another problem a new administrator must address is the amount of excess or underutilized property owned by the Federal Government. The Office of Management and Budget has reported--these are stunning numbers--that the Federal Government owns 21,000 buildings, worth about $18 billion, that are underused or no longer needed, but they are sitting there. In effect, the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, has put the management of Federal property on their high-risk list for this reason. Not all those properties are under GSA's control, but one of its jobs is to help other agencies dispose of excess property. That is another reason why we need a full-time administrator there.

Think about it, $18 billion. The freeze the President has announced-- which I support--doesn't come to much more than that, when you think about the potential for selling some of this property and bringing more revenue to the government.

Let me come back to Martha Johnson. This is a job with big challenges, as I have described, in part. She brings a tremendous wealth of experience in the private, nonprofit, and government sectors. She has a B.A. in economics and history from Oberlin College and a masters in business from Yale Business School. After graduating from Yale, Ms. Johnson began her career in the private sector at Cummins Engines Company. She had a series of other management positions in the private sector and then was called on by the Clinton administration to be the Associate Deputy Secretary of Commerce and then, as I mentioned earlier, Chief of Staff of GSA from 1996 to 2001--very relevant and indispensable experience.

After leaving government, Ms. Johnson was a vice president for the Council for Excellence in Government, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of government at all levels, and most recently she has served as vice president at Computer Sciences Corporation. She is extremely well qualified, has broad qualifications, including extensive experience at GSA.

All these varied experiences make Martha Johnson a perfect fit for the responsibilities and challenges she will face as GSA Administrator. The fact is, she, Martha Johnson, has had broad bipartisan support. I urge my colleagues to vote yes on cloture. I even preserve the hope that there may be a decision to vitiate the cloture vote, that we go right to a final vote, and we confirm this excellent nominee so she can go to work for the American people.

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