Floor Statements

Mr. President, knowing we are scheduled to go out at 12:50, I ask unanimous consent to stay in session for no longer than 10 minutes more, so we will break at 1 p.m., for Senator Collins and I to respond to Senator McCain--hopefully, sooner than that.

I thank the Chair, particularly since the Chair will be occupied by the distinguished Senator from Montana between now and then.

I wish to respond very briefly to the statement of my friend from Arizona, with a couple big points. The first is that Senator McCain has declared the Postal Service of the United States dead much too prematurely. He compares it to the Pony Express. Of course, electronic mail and other changes have occurred but, today, every day, the Postal Service delivers 563 million pieces of mail--every day. There are businesses and individuals all over our country who depend on the mail. The estimate is there are approximately 8 million jobs in our country, most of them, of course--almost all of them--in the private sector, that depend in one way or another on the functioning of the U.S. Postal Service.

It is not fair and it is not realistic to speak as if the Postal Service is dead and gone and it is time to essentially bury it with the McCain substitute. I cannot resist saying that Senator Collins and I come not to bury the U.S. Postal Service; we come to change it but to keep it alive and well forever because it is that important to our country.

Secondly, Senator McCain speaks as if the substitute legislation, S. 1789, that we are proposing--bipartisan legislation--does nothing; that it is a status quo piece of legislation; it is not even a bandaid on the problem. We all know, because we have talked about it incessantly since we went on this bill, that the Postal Service is in financial difficulty. Incidentally, I wish to say there is not a dime of taxpayer money in the Postal Service. Ever since the Postal Service reforms occurred, it has been totally supported by ratepayers, basically by people who buy the services of the Postal Service, with two small exceptions which are small--one to pay for overseas ballots for members of the military so they can vote and another special program to facilitate the use of the mail by blind Americans. But it has a problem: $13 billion lost over the last 2 years.

This proposal of ours--Senator Collins and I, Senator Carper and Senator Scott Brown--is not a status quo proposal. It makes significant changes. There are going to be about 100,000 fewer people working for the Postal Service as a result of this bill being passed. There will be mail processing facilities that close. There will be post offices that will be closed and/or consolidated. There will be new sources of revenue for the Postal Service. The bottom line: The U.S. Postal Service itself estimates that our legislation, if enacted as it is now, as it is phased in over the next 3 to 4 years, by 2016, will save the Postal Service $19 billion a year. This isn't a bandaid. This is a real reform, a real transformation of the Postal Service to keep it alive-- $19 billion.

Let me put it another way. This is a bipartisan proposal. We have worked on it very hard to keep it bipartisan. We think it can pass the Senate and it can ultimately be enacted. If Senator McCain's substitute were to pass the Senate, nobody thinks it is going to get enacted into law. It would not. Certainly, the President of the United States would not sign it, and that will mean nothing will be done. What will be the effect of that? The effect will be that the post office will go further and further into debt and deficit. Also, the Postmaster General will be faced with a choice of either enormous debts and deficits or taking steps that will make the situation worse--which our bill, through a reasonable process, is trying to avoid--which is a kind of shock therapy whose effect will be, as the McCain substitute would be, to actually drop the revenues of the post office and accelerate its downward spiral.

I think the two numbers to think about--the ones that come from the Postal Service itself--are these: By 2016, if we do nothing, the Postal Service will run somewhere between a $20 billion and $21 billion annual deficit. If we pass this bill and it is enacted into law, that deficit will be down to around $1 billion--a little more--and heading toward balance in the years that follow.

So I urge my colleagues to vote against the McCain substitute and the BRAC amendment. The BRAC-like Commission amendment I think is not necessary. It is not necessary for us in Congress to give up and give in. We have a good resolution to the problem. Incidentally, if we get this enacted, I think we will send a message to the American people that we can face a tough problem that exists in a public service, deal with it in a reasonable way, and ask people to sacrifice but keep a venerable and critically important American institution alive and well.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor for my distinguished ranking member.

Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of the act and budget resolutions for purposes of the pending amendment for reasons that we described in the debate we had here on the floor yesterday. The U.S. Postal Service says this bill will, in fact, save $19 billion a year.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I ask unanimous consent that the vote on this motion to

waive be placed at the end of the list of amendments that are in order to vote on now.

If I may, if we are going to vote now--and Senator Collins and I spoke to this at great length yesterday. The CBO score my friend from Alabama cites is a real misreading of the effect of this legislation. It is a kind of form of accounting over the reality of budgeting. The bottom line is that the U.S. Postal Service itself says that if this bill--the substitute to S. 1789--is adopted--and it would be phased in over 3 years--the Postal Service will save $19 billion annually. To me, that is what this is all about--no deficit, a saving.

I ask my colleagues to support the motion to waive the point of the order.

I would yield to my ranking member.

Mr. President, very briefly, I join my colleague in saying that if this point of order by our friend from Alabama is sustained and this bipartisan bill therefore is not able to be brought up, the effect will be that the Postal Service will continue to run ever-greater losses to a point where they, in fact, will have to turn to the Treasury, which they are not doing now, to bail them out. This is a responsible answer to a problem and a bipartisan one.

I urge my colleagues to vote to support the motion to waive the Senator's point of order.

Mr. President, very briefly, I thank Senator Brown from Massachusetts for his statement and his work on the bill.

This point of order puts the whole bill in jeopardy. Right at the beginning of the debate and the vote, it forces Members to decide whether they want to deal with this crisis of the Postal Service. I think it tests Congress again--in this case the Senate. Are we going to face a real problem in one of the iconic areas of American public service, the Postal Service, which cannot continue to do business as it is now--and this bill will force it to change in ways that are significant but will still keep it alive--or are we going to turn away from the problem, which would be the effect of sustaining this point of order. It would also cut off the debate.

We have 39 amendments pending. This bill may change as the debate goes on. The final vote on passage of the bill will require 60 votes. So don't cut it off now.

Let's have this debate and prove to the American people that we can take on a problem and, on a bipartisan basis, fix it. I urge my colleagues to vote for the motion to waive the point of order.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

I thank my colleagues.

We had kind of an existential vote at the beginning which we didn't expect. It is always good to survive terminal action, and now we can proceed. We have 39 amendments pending. I hope we can proceed expeditiously. I hope some of our colleagues will agree to voice votes. On several of these, Senators Collins, Carper, Scott Brown, and I agreed on and we are prepared to accept them. So I hope our colleagues will allow us to do that by consent. But now we can proceed with the first amendment.

Amendment No. 2056, as Modified

Mr. President, I support Senator Tester's amendment.

It simply creates safeguards to ensure that the Postal Service, when it closes a post office, does so as the result of a process that is transparent and takes into account the unique needs of communities, particularly small towns and rural areas.

This does not stop the decisionmaking process at the Postal Service to change the Postal Service. It makes it transparent and fair.

If I may, at this time I ask unanimous consent that if a voice vote is requested and acceptable for any of the amendments relative to the postal reform bill, including this one, that the 60-vote affirmative vote requirement be waived for that amendment.

Mr. President, I want to note for the benefit of our colleagues that on the list of 39 amendments, the first amendment was Senator McCain's amendment No. 2001. He did not call it up, which is an expression of his intention not to go forward with it. I thank him for that, and I hope it sets a precedent that other of the sponsors of amendments will feel moved to follow.

Mr. President, I urge adoption of the amendment and ask for a voice vote.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I also support the amendment, and I thank Senator Coburn for introducing it. This is disclosure and limitation of spending on conferences. Unfortunately, the excessive and outrageous spending by GSA on the conference in Las Vegas brought the whole area of Federal spending on conferences into the public Klieg lights, and I reached a conclusion that we are spending too much.

This amendment would require the posting online of all agency conference spending. It limits the amount that can be spent on conferences and limits the number of conferences agency employees can attend and it imposes a 20-percent across-the-board cut on agency budgets for this purpose. I hope the amendment passes. I hope the bill passes as amended.

There are a couple parts of that that we have begun to work with Senator Coburn and his staff on which I think will make this a better amendment. But bottom line, this responds to a need, and I support it.

Mr. President, I rise to oppose the amendment. This amendment would create a commission similar to the base closure commission to oversee Postal Service decisions regarding which post offices, processing plants, and district offices are to close or consolidate.

In this bill we have constructed what I think is a clear and fair system for making exactly those decisions. The language in the bill is not status quo language. If this bill is enacted, there are post offices that will close or be consolidated as well as mail processing facilities that will close. That simply has to happen, but it will happen according to a system of due process that gives most heed to the fiscal crisis of the Postal Service.

In other words, I think we have a congressional answer to this problem. We don't have to yield it to another BRAC commission.

I urge opposition to the amendment.

Mr. President, I rise to support the amendment. I thank Senator Wyden and those who worked with him on this amendment for, frankly, calling our attention to this important matter and working to ensure that our efforts to salvage the U.S. Postal Service-- to change it, to keep it alive--do not come at the expense of our critical efforts to ensure access to the voting booth by mail as well as no-excuse absentee programs that rely heavily on dependable mail service. I support the amendment.

If there is no further debate, I urge that we adopt the amendment by voice vote.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the next amendment on the list, the so-called McCaskill-Merkley amendment, be dropped a few places down because we are working on some compromise language that we hope will lead to a voice vote of acceptance.

That would mean Senator Coburn's next amendment, which is amendment No. 2061, is now the pending business.

Madam President, a while back we skipped over the McCaskill-Merkley amendment. We were working on a modification. The modification is ready now. I ask unanimous consent that we proceed to the McCaskill-Merkley amendment No. 2031.

Madam President, I appreciate the work that has been done on this amendment. I know there is a lot of interest on both sides of the aisle because of the concern about rural post offices. This establishes, again, some standards. It effectively asks the Postal Service before it considers closing a rural post office for 1 year after enactment of this legislation

that it explore every other opportunity to continue to provide service other than closing the post office.

The one clear authority given in the modified amendment is to close a rural post office when there is no significant community opposition, which is to say, when the Postal Service has convinced the people of the community that they have a good alternative to the current post office. So I think we have reasoned together.

I hope this enables our colleagues who may have been thinking of more absolute prohibitions to closing post offices to step back from that. This is a rational, fair approach. I support the modification and the amendment.

I urge that the amendment be adopted by voice vote.

I move to reconsider the vote and ask unanimous consent that the motion be laid upon the table.

The motion to lay upon the table was agreed to.

Madam President, I rise to oppose the amendment of my friend from New Mexico. I know there are a lot of people who don't want to lose 6-day delivery. But the greater imperative is not to lose the Postal Service as we know it.

The Postmaster asked for the immediate authority to go from 6 days of delivery to 5. In this bill we have given the Postmaster authority in many different areas to save money. We said, as a result, that we will not give him the authority to go from 6 days of delivery to 5 for 2 years, hoping that within the 2 years he can save enough money not to have to make this change. Frankly, I am skeptical that he can. We wanted to give him 6 days of delivery--that last opportunity.

To pull this procedure out of the bill, with a lot of due process before the move can be made from 6 to 5 days, removes the credibility from the bill and will jeopardize its ultimate adoption.

With a lot of respect and affection for my friend from New Mexico, I urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment.

Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Madam President, I thank my friend from Illinois. He has explained the amendment totally. It is a good amendment. I support its passage, and urge we adopt it by voice vote.

Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote, and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 2034

Mr. President, I wish to join my friend from Maine in respectfully opposing Senator Akaka's amendment.

This workers' compensation program has gotten out of control. Senator Collins has worked hard on this with others. Her reform proposal for the Postal Service struck the Obama administration as so sensible that they asked our committee to extend it to all the Federal Government employees.

I urge opposition, respectfully, to the Akaka amendment.

Mr. President, I rise to oppose this amendment. It deals with some issues that the committee and the bipartisan bill have dealt with in a fair and balanced way. It kind of breaks through that proposal we have made. It would permit the Postal Service to move to 5- day delivery service immediately. It would increase rates without a cap. It also removes some protections that are in the bill at this time.

I think this amendment, if adopted, would lead to the kind of curtailments in postal operations that would actually not help the Postal Service but diminish revenues and put it more dramatically into deficits.

With respect to my friend, the Senator from Tennessee, who sponsored it, I oppose this amendment.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the last vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 2049

Mr. President, the next amendment on the list is Senator Mikulski's amendment. Senator Mikulski has decided not to introduce her amendment. I thank her for that, and we will go next to Senator Akaka's amendment numbered 2049.

I rise to support the amendment offered by my friend from Hawaii. The Postal Service is going to need the support of all its employees and managers to turn around its current decline.

Postmasters and postal supervisors are a real and important human asset for the Postal Service and we should do what we can to foster productive and constructive collaboration between the Postal Service and the senior employees. The Akaka amendment just clarifies and strengthens existing requirements for consultation, not collective bargaining, for the scheduling of changes and terminations of pay and benefit programs. I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. President, I believe the next amendment in order is amendment No. 2025 by the Senator from Kentucky.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

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

Mr. President, it has been announced by the clerk that the Senate is now considering the motion to proceed to S. 1925, the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act.

At 2 p.m. this afternoon, the Republican leader or his designee will move to proceed to S.J. Res. 36, a resolution of disapproval regarding the NLRB election rule. The time until 4 p.m. will be equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees.

At 5 p.m., the Senate will proceed to executive session to consider the nomination of Brian Wimes to be a U.S. district judge in Missouri. There will be a rollcall vote on confirmation of the Wimes nomination at 5:30 p.m.

Postal Reform

Mr. President, as you and our colleagues know, after a lot of work and good-faith negotiations, we reached a bipartisan agreement last week to complete action on the bipartisan postal reform bill tomorrow, with an agreement that includes almost 40 amendments--39, I believe, is the number--to be voted on tomorrow.

Although, we--and particularly our staffs--have been working with sponsors of the amendments, we expect that probably more than half of them will be negotiated to agreements, modified, and/or accepted. But there still will be a significant number of rollcall votes,

which will begin tomorrow afternoon after the respective party caucuses.

There was a good amount of debate on the postal bill last week. Tomorrow, once we go from S.J. Res. 36, the resolution on the NLRB election rule, to the postal bill in the afternoon to begin voting on the amendments, there will not be much time for debate.

As announced last week, last Thursday after this agreement was achieved, Senator Collins will be here from now until 2 p.m. when we go to the NLRB rule. We will be here from 4 to 5, the next open block before we go to the judicial nomination, and we are prepared to stay this evening after the judicial nomination for as long as proponents or discussants of the various amendments want to come to the floor to engage in debate and discussion on them. I hope our colleagues will do that.

As Senator Reid said, this is an important piece of legislation. Nobody denies that the U.S. Postal Service is an iconic American institution which millions of people depend on not just for the mail but for their jobs, both directly working for the Postal Service and indirectly--but not too indirectly because they work for related businesses that depend on the mail.

We simply can't turn aside, do nothing, and let the Postal Service continue a fiscal spiral downward. The Postal Service, as we said over and over last week, lost $13 billion in the last 2 years. It is going to go over its debt limit later this year. The Postmaster has been very clear that if we don't give him some authority to find a new business model, to economize, he will have to take very aggressive action, potentially closing--on one list he put out there were 3,700 post offices and approximately 250 mail processing facilities, which would be extremely disruptive both to the post office and to the personal life and commercial life of our country.

This bill Senator Collins and I, along with Senators Carper and Scott Brown, offered to our colleagues offers a sensible but tough way forward to preserve the U.S. Postal Service, but also to acknowledge that it has to change to stay alive forever, certainly through the 21st century. Because of the impact of e-mail, it has dropped the volume of mail in the last 5 years by more than 20 percent. When that kind of revenue is lost, we have to find ways to economize and a different kind of business model, including different ways to raise revenue, all of which is authorized in this bill.

I know some people think our bill doesn't do enough. They are ready to basically close down a lot of the Postal Service as we know it. Some people think our bill does too much. We naturally think we have struck a sweet spot or a point of common ground. In fact, the Postal Service told us they believe if our bill is enacted, it would save--after fully implemented over the next 2, 3 years--between $15 billion and $20 billion a year, to be conservative--probably closer to $15 billion. That is a significant amount of money. It creates a series of incentives to alter the business model of the post office, including authorizing the post office to get into some businesses it has not been in before as a way to take advantage of its unique assets and raise more money.

So this is a moment of truth for the Senate. In some sense, it is a somewhat smaller version of the larger moment of truth we are going to have to face sometime about our Federal budget overall, but here is a great American institution that is in real fiscal trouble.

We have the ability with this legislation to get it back on a path of balance, stability, and even growth. Some post offices will be changed under this bill. Mail processing facilities--some of them will be closed. The Postmaster says he wants to have that happen.

We have authorized a significant amount of money to be spent to incentivize 100,000 postal employees to retire. They are eligible for retirement with an incentive. We think they will, and that itself would save the Postal Service approximately $8 billion a year.

This is not one of those bills that people enjoy voting on, but it is our responsibility. It is necessary we face the crisis the Postal Service is in and help it stay alive and flourish throughout this century.

That is what is on the line in the bill. The amendments cover a range of topics. This was a very broad bipartisan agreement on the amendments. There are some that make the bill tougher, some make it softer. They all deserve a good debate, and that is what Senator Collins and I are here to do now.

Measure Placed on the Calendar--S. 2327

Mr. President, I understand that S. 2327 is at the desk and due for a second reading.

Mr. President, I object to any further proceedings with respect to the bill.

I yield for my distinguished ranking member, Senator Collins.

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

Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer for liberating me from the chair so I may now speak in my capacity as a Senator from the State of Connecticut. First, I would like to thank my friend from Maine, Senator Collins, for what I thought was a very convincing, insightful description and really a critique of the CBO estimate of the financial impact of this bill.

This is tough to follow. The two of us, Senator Collins and I, and others on the committee have been deeply saturated in this for probably too long. But the fact is, when the CBO estimate of the bill came out saying it was going to cost more than we were saving, I was shocked. As I read over it, part of it is because they are not simply considering the Postal Service budget, which we are out to save; that is, to cut a lot of money from it so it can be saved, and as Senator Collins said, the Postal Service is off-budget. It does not spend taxpayers' money except for those two little matters of paying for ballots for military personnel and others overseas, and I think the other is for blind people in this country, but the rest of it is all paid by the ratepayers. So as you go over, one by one, as Senator Collins did, the elements of the ``costs''--and I put quotations around them--they are just not real. This is form over substance. This is a kind of ``Alice in Wonderland'' accounting that does not relate to the reality of the Postal Service's budget or the Federal budget.

The so-called FERS repayment that is coming from the Federal Government, everyone agrees--including Senator Sessions, who stated his intention of making a budget point of order on our Postal Service bill--the Postal Service did overpay this amount of money, just as if a taxpayer overpaid taxes. Well, if I overpay my taxes, that is my money I am asking back from the government. In this case, the Postal Service has overpaid to the Federal retiree pension fund, and it is asking for its money back.

There is something else to be said here about the reality of accounting in the real world. When the approximately $11 billion--or maybe more--is paid back to the Postal Service, that only happens once, when that total is paid back. But what we have demanded in the bill be done with a part of that money, which is to get involved in this incentive for early retirement or retirement when members of the Postal Service are eligible, mandating that 18 percent--about 100,000 postal employees--retire, that saves $8.1 billion on a recurring basis every year. So you have the one-time--it may come in two or three payments but only one-time--$11 billion repayment to the Postal Service for the overpayment it made, and then every year it saves $8.1 billion, forever. That is a pretty good deal both for the taxpayers and the Postal Service.

Secondly--and Senator Collins went on very effectively about this-- the prefunding of health benefits. The fact is in the Postal Reform Act of 2006--you might call it an excess of caution--the Postal Service was required to make payments into the retiree health benefits fund that are greater than most any other business or government in the country. We have just spread this out to a 4-year payment schedule according to the normal discount rate other Federal programs pay for their retirees' benefits.

Senator Collins talked at length about the impact of the way in which the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, refuses to score--as we say, count--dollar-for-dollar the amount of money saved by early retirements, which does not make any sense because that is what will be saved.

Now, I want to enter into the Record at this point--and speak to it-- the estimate of the U.S. Postal Service about what our substitute amendment to S. 1789 will save, and it is quite dramatic. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.

All along, our goal has been to get to a point, over 3 or 4 years, where we would save as close to $20 billion a year as we could. That is the number Postmaster General Donahoe gave to our committee as to what he needed, the Postal Service needed to get back in balance.

On the current course, in fiscal year 2016 the U.S. Postal Service--I am reading now from the statement I have entered into the Record that the Postal Service has given us--will have a deficit of $21.3 billion. In 2016, under the passage of S. 1789 with our substitute amendment, the loss is reduced to $1.8 billion. That is from $21.3 billion to $1.8 billion. Well, of course, we want to get it to total balance, but we are clearly going to hit balance after that on the course we are on. That means, according to the Postal Service, passage of S. 1789 with our substitute amendment will save the Postal Service over $19 billion a year by 2016. That is exactly what the Postal Service needs to stay alive.

We do it without compelling layoffs. We do it with incentives for retirement. We do it without mandating--as some of the amendments would that we will vote on tomorrow--the mass closure of mail-processing facilities or our post offices around the country, which, as Senator Collins said, would be a kind of shock therapy. It would so jolt the system that people would turn away from the post offices in increasing numbers. In fact, it would accelerate the loss of revenue. We do it without an immediate move from 6 days of delivery to 5 days because that is a tough one for a lot of people. We have given the Postal Service 2 years to essentially prove it can get back in balance without that move from 6 days to 5 days of delivery.

We have added new sources of revenue. We have created a process here, which is not scored by the Postal Service, that we think can add more money because it will develop a new business model, a new way to use the assets the Postal Service has to make more money.

The fact is--I want to emphasize this again--this saving of $19 billion, which will result by 2016 if this substitute to S. 1789 is passed, does not take any taxpayer funds. In fact, it properly returns certain overpayments to the Postal Service.

The CBO score for S. 1789 is simply misleading--profoundly misleading--because of the kinds of accounting rules that do not relate to the reality of the budget for the Postal Service.

I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish. It took a lot of work. As Senator Collins has said, if this point of order Senator Sessions intends to make at some point in the debate--hopefully after the amendments are voted on--is sustained, it will end this bill. Instead of, therefore, having passed a bill which, if it goes all the way to enactment, would save $19 billion for the Postal Service every year by 2016, the Postal Service's deficit and debt spiral would continue downward. I would predict there would be massive cutbacks in services and a loss of employment by people in the Postal Service but particularly among the 8 million people who are in jobs that depend on the Postal Service in the private sector for their livelihoods. So with all respect, I will vigorously oppose the point of order my friend from Alabama, Senator Sessions, will make.

Mr. President, I note the presence on the floor of the distinguished Senator from Virginia. Does he wish to speak?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my friend from Virginia most importantly for focusing our attention--I know Senator Collins and Senator Akaka have also been involved in this--on this unacceptable situation, where Federal employees are retiring. Because of a lot of failures here, the failure to implement an effective--it is 2012-- electronic system for this purpose, this paper processing, meaning that people have to wait these very long times after they retire, while they are waiting, they are getting a significantly reduced benefit which causes real hardship.

The Senator from Virginia is absolutely right. We mandate in this bill, the underlying bill, that the Postal Service accept the goal of 18 percent in reduction of workforce. The total number of career employees in the U.S. Postal Service is about 545,000, and 18 percent comes out to around 100,000, which is our goal for reduction. This has to happen if the Postal Service is going to get back in balance. Because as Senator Collins said earlier today, 80 percent of the operating budget of the Postal Service is personnel costs. Obviously, it is a labor-intensive operation. So we are going to have another 100,000 people. In fact, it keeps going. By 2017, we will have--from now, this year, we will have a total of 138,000 postal employees eligible to retire. The Postal Service is going to have to work to incentivize them to retire so the service overall can stay in balance.

I wish to thank Senator Warner because we have worked very well together on a modification to his amendment, which I think most significantly will require the Office of Personnel Management to submit a report to Congress related to the completion of retirement claims for postal annuitants, to keep the pressure on them to end this inhumane-- in many cases, unacceptable--situation.

I know when the proper time comes, we intend to support this modified amendment. It strengthens the bill. It does the right thing. I thank the Senator from Virginia for expressing his intention to support the overall bill.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico.) The Senator from Maine.

Mr. President, thanks to the Senator from Virginia. He makes a very important point: Of the $19 billion in savings that the Postal Service itself believes will result annually as of 2016, $8.1 billion will come from the reduction in salaries paid because of retirements that are incentivized under this bill.

It is common sense that if a worker is thinking about retiring and hears there is such a backlog that they are only going to get half of what they deserve for their pension until the paperwork has cleared, they are probably not going to rush to retire, and, therefore, we are going to save less money.

We are approaching the hour of 2. According to the unanimous consent that governs our activities today in the Senate, we are going to go to another matter, the NLRB rule. I wish to thank particularly Senator Sessions and Senator Warner who came to the floor to discuss their amendments. Senator Collins and I will return at 4. We will be here until 5, when we go to the discussion of a judicial nomination. Then, we will be here after the vote tonight as late as anybody is here to discuss and debate amendments before we go to the vote tomorrow.

I thank the Chair. I thank my friend from Maine.

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

Mr. President, I just want to say briefly, thanks to my friend from Tennessee not just for his kind words, which mean a lot to me, but for coming to the floor to discuss his amendment.

There are different points of view about this issue. I think, as I said very simplistically at the beginning of the debate, some think our bipartisan committee bill does too little. Some think it does too much. I think we have hit the right common-ground spot. And I repeat what I said earlier in the day: There is some due process in this. We don't allow for what might be called shock therapy for the Postal Service because we don't think it will work, and we think it would have the net effect of diminishing the revenues of the Postal Service by cutting business.

But here is the report we received today from the U.S. Postal Service itself, just to indicate to my friend from Tennessee and others who may be following the debate.

This substitute bill of ours, S. 1789, is not just fluff. The Postal Service itself estimates that over the coming 3 years; that is, by 2016 fiscal year, our bill, if enacted, will enable the Postal Service to save $19 billion annually. They were hoping for $20 billion, but $19 billion is pretty close. I think we have done it without the dislocation to the millions of people in our society who depend on the mail and depend on mailing industries for their jobs, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who work for the Postal Service, 18 percent of whom we hope will receive incentives that will be adequate for them to think about retirement.

But this is a bill that creates a transition that will keep the Postal Service alive--and we think even healthier--without the kind of sudden jolts the amendment offered by my friend from Tennessee would impose.

So I would respectfully oppose the Corker amendment, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for just three moments to speak on this amendment.

Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Akaka for coming to the floor and speaking on behalf of his amendment. He is one of the most hard-working, constructive members of our committee, the committee from which the underlying bill has come. He is one of the finest people I have ever met. I have the greatest admiration and affection for him.

So unlike Senator Collins, it is with some reluctance that I must say I oppose this amendment. I will speak very briefly since Senator Collins has spoken well on it.

I think the current system goes beyond taking care of those who need workers' compensation, and it has come to a point where it is unfair not just to those who are paying for the system but to others who are working in the Postal Service today.

I thank Senator Collins. She has worked very hard and very thoughtfully. The proposal she made turned out to be so balanced and constructive that folks in the Obama administration who had been working on a similar proposal for all Federal employees asked that we extend the workers' compensation reforms in the Postal Service bill to all Federal employees. Dare I call this a Collins-Obama proposal? I don't know. I just raised that prospect.

In any case, I support the underlying bill in this regard and very respectfully

and affectionately oppose the Akaka amendment.

I yield the floor, and I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Reid, and, of course, thank Senator Collins. We have again worked very closely together. I thank the staff on both sides who worked very hard, and I thank all of our colleagues.

I know it took a lot of effort, because people have strong opinions about the crisis in the Postal Service of the United States, but we have ended with a process here that will allow a discussion and votes on a wide range of amendments on both sides. I would say based on the knowledge we have of this list that not all of these amendments listed will actually require rollcall votes.

We will be working over the weekend trying to see if we can find common ground, accept some of these amendments or modify them. But bottom line, this consent agreement, though we are not there yet, gives me great hope that the Senate is going to prove that we are capable of taking on a crisis situation which the post office is in, losing $13 billion plus over the last 2 years. If we do not do anything, it is only going to get worse and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and a lot of people who depend on the mail are not going to get it in the same way.

This is a bill that will provide an orderly reform that will keep the post office not only alive but change it so it can survive throughout the 21st century.

Senator Collins and I will be here at noon on Monday to debate any of the amendments people want to come to debate. I believe I am speaking for both of us in saying--I know I am--that after the votes Monday afternoon unrelated to this matter, we are prepared to remain here into the evening to continue debating amendments before the actual votes occur on Tuesday afternoon.

Again, I thank everyone involved, particularly Senator Collins.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I thank the Acting President pro tempore.

Madam President, I thank my friend from Oregon for his excellent statement, really. Senator Collins and I want to work with the Senator and the other cosponsors of the amendment.

I want to say a couple things. The first is, the particular examples Senator Merkley gave of the importance of post offices in small towns and in rural America make a larger point to those who have said--those within the Senate and those outside--that in the age of the Internet, the Post Office is a relic we cannot afford, and we have to cut, cut, cut, cut.

Well, there is no question that because the Postal Service is running big deficits--up to about $13 billion over the last 2 years--there has to be economizing and we have to look at a different business model. But to draw an easy conclusion that in the age of the Internet the post office and the Postal Service do not have a role to play and are not playing a role anymore is wrong. I think the Senator's examples, in very personal ways, show that.

I said yesterday about three times--and I am going to say it again today--notwithstanding the drop in mail volume because of the Internet today, every day the U.S. Postal Service delivers 563 million pieces of mail, and a lot of the things the Postal Service is delivering are critically important to people. An awful lot of the prescription drugs people are getting today, in an increasing number, are coming through the mail. It is an example the Senator cited. The same is true for small businesses with a particular urgency or dependency in small-town and rural America.

So the Senator makes a good point. That does not mean everything that exists has to exist forever. It means we cannot reach an easy conclusion that because the Internet exists we do not need the post office or the Postal Service anymore. The fact is, a lot of people depend on the Postal Service every day, and we want to respect that reality, which is important to the quality of life people live and to the health of our economy overall.

I look forward to working with the Senator on his amendment. The existing bill tried to recognize this problem and contains within it, S. 1789, a number of steps that are aimed at ensuring the post offices in rural areas and towns are protected and appropriate weight and consideration is given to the importance of such post offices in their communities.

This was done in large part in our committee thanks to a bipartisan amendment offered by Senators Tester and Moran. That was strengthened, we think, in the substitute amendment we are now considering. It includes retail service standards, standards for possible post office closings, and what the standards would be on appeal to the PRC. But I do not believe this is a perfect document and I accept, therefore, the Senator's amendment as a thoughtful attempt to do even better on what we are trying to do. I say to Senator Merkley, I look forward to working with you to see if we can reach common ground on this issue.

I will say something else, to put this in a different sort of hard numbers context. The Postmaster General set as a goal at the outset to try to cut about $20 billion from the annual operating expenses of the Postal Service. That is a tough number. That is over the next 3 or 4 years. We think this bill--and the Postal Service seems to agree--does not quite do that, but it gets pretty close to it. It certainly is somewhere in the $15 billion to $20 billion range.

Some of the elements in the bill that save a lot are the money we provide for incentivizing postal workers to retire early. That is an $8 billion annual savings. There are significant savings in terms of the mail processing facilities--in the billions.

The reality is, interestingly enough, as I think my friend from Oregon knows, the amount of money saved if the Postmaster General actually closed the 3,700 post offices that he put on the list of possible closings is relatively small. It is not nothing, but we are talking about $150 million to $200 million if we closed all of them.

So as compared to the billions in the other items we are doing, and in relating that number to what the Senator described in the examples he has given and what we heard in our committee, I think this is an area in which I personally believe we have to tread cautiously.

I thank Senator Merkley for his thoughtful statement. I look forward to working with him. I know Senator Collins does too, and the other sponsors of the amendment, to see if we can reach an agreement so we can find a way to accept the Senator's amendment.

I thank the Senator.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, if I may just briefly, thanks to Senator Mikulski for her kind words but also for her directness about her concern about the processing facility she talked about and overall and to thank her for her willingness to work with us to see if we can work out something acceptable.

As Senator Collins said, we have made some changes in this substitute that will still require overnight delivery--less broadly than before because we are trying to deal with how to responsibly react to the precipitous drop in mail volume because of the Internet, yet not reduce the quality of service so much that people leave the mail system even more.

I used an analogy yesterday which is probably not exact, but way back when

I was in the State senate in Connecticut, we had a crisis in the financing of our public bus system. One of the things that was done that seemed quite logical at the time was to raise the price of the bus fare. What does the Senator think happened in response to that?

Fewer people were riding the buses and the fiscal problem got worse. There is a reality here. The mail volume has dropped so much that we have to close some of the mail processing facilities or--and Senator Collins and I feel very strongly about this--we have to thin out the number of personnel working at the facilities.

We put this in as a condition which we thought originally was what the Postmaster was going to be interested in. Do not just precipitously close a lot of mail processing facilities. First--and we require this now--they have to consider a plan to reduce the capacity of a particular facility and presumably the number of people working there before they absolutely close it.

Anyway, bottom line, thanks to Senator Mikulski. We look forward to working with her to reach a mutually agreeable result.

Madam President, I note the presence of my friend from Tennessee on the floor. Before he speaks, I would like to spend a moment responding to Senator Collins, and then I will quickly yield to him.

I thank Senator Collins. She made a quite complicated subject very understandable. It is a misunderstanding--really a misstatement--to say the money the Postal Service will be refunded is taxpayer money. It is not. It is the return of money collected, as the Senator said, by the post office from ratepayers and from their own employees which was mistakenly put into this retirement fund. This is no more a bailout with taxpayer money than in the case--which happens--where an individual or a business overpays taxes to the Federal Government. When that miscalculation or error is discovered, they can ask for a refund. That is exactly what has happened here with the Postal Service.

It is critically important to this bill and to the future of the Postal Service because we are requiring in the bill and authorizing that the money refunded not be used for more spending but be used to, one, pay down the debt and, two, make investments by incentivizing the retirement of employees, which will have an enormously important effect on the annual Postal Service budget.

The Postmaster believes that with the money he receives back--really not a majority of it--he can incentivize the retirement of approximately 100,000 current employees of the Postal Service, which is the goal we set for them in this bill. That will result in a savings of over $8 billion a year for the Postal Service. So this is not only a refund of the Postal Service's own money--not taxpayer money--but it is going to be used to save $8 billion a year, which is the largest savings component of the proposal we have made.

Again, I thank my friend from Maine.

I yield to my friend from Tennessee.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Durbin for a moving statement and for his persistence in introducing the DREAM Act, which it has been my honor to cosponsor with him, among many others, and to support its passage. It is about basic fairness.

I think it also describes the reality, and the Senator reminded me of my own situation. We lived in my grandmother's house most of my childhood--

my mom, dad, sisters, and I--and she was always one of the most patriotic Americans I ever met because she had something to compare America to. She was an immigrant from Central Europe. Particularly important to her was freedom of religion, and the respect she got from her neighbors for her religious observance, and, of course, the dream that her children and grandchildren would do better in this country, which was realized.

But I was moved by the Senator's report of his conversation with the cab driver. Maybe all of us need to do that. But when I get the immigrant cab drivers and they are a little older, I always ask: What are your kids doing? And it is quite amazing because they have the kind of excitement and sense of gratitude about the opportunity that America provides that sometimes people who have been here for a while, unfortunately, may lose. Their kids are all working hard, achieving, and contributing to this country.

We are at a time in our history where a lot of people are down about their future and down about America, which was never the case when the Senator and I were growing up--and I started growing up a little before the Senator from Illinois.

But when we think about these stories, it makes one feel good about how unique this country is. I know, because illegal immigration--people may take what I am about to say the wrong way. But I always say one of the great market measurements of the greatness of America today is that there is not another country in the world that more people are trying to get into--legally, I am talking about--and fewer people are trying to get out of than the United States of America. I think the DREAM Act recognizes that reality and is totally consistent with the values of our country.

I thank the Senator for his persistence. One day, I hope not too far from now, we are going to get that adopted into law.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Vermont for his statement but more broadly for his real steadfastness and the hard work he has done to improve the bill. It has been a pleasure to work with him.

Before Senator Collins came to the floor, and not counting the occupant of the chair, I was reveling in the fact that the only Senators on the floor were Independents.

Anyway, I thank Senator Sanders. We have tried to deal with this problem. In the postal reform of 2006, Senator Sanders is quite right, for various reasons which we need not go into the Postal Service was required to make payments into the retiree health benefit fund that were beyond what most any business or other governmental entity is doing, more than was necessary to sustain the payments and in a much shorter period of time, as the Senator from Vermont said.

I would say, to state it as bluntly as I can, maybe too bluntly, the people advocating this were, frankly, concerned that the Postal Service might get to a point where it defaulted, it was no longer able to operate, and then the fear was that the government, the U.S. Treasury, the taxpayers would at some point in the future be forced to pick up the cost of the retiree health benefits. So this uniquely demanding responsibility for payment now was put on the Postal Service.

I think everybody agrees, particularly in light of all the real problems the Postal Service has now, that is not sensible or fair. I do want to point out that in the underlying bill, S. 1789, we have attempted to ease the Postal Service's prefunding requirements for retiree health benefits by immediately beginning a stretched-out 40- year amortization schedule for these payments and we require the Office of Personnel Management, when determining how much the Postal Service has to put into the retiree health benefit fund every year, to use the same discount rate that is used to calculate the Federal Government's pension obligations to the Federal Employees Retirement System and the Civil Service Retirement System. The Postal Service thinks this accounting change will reduce their unfunded liability for the retiree health benefits plan by literally billions of dollars.

The other change made here is that right now the health benefits of retired employees come out of the operating expenses of the Postal Service. That was going to be the case until a day later in this decade. But there is enough money in the fund that it can pick up money that the Postal Service has put in, that it can pick up the cost of health benefits for postal retirees now. So we require that. I want to state for the record we are trying to deal with that reality in the bill as it is and of course I state my intention to continue to work with Senator Sanders to make this bill as good as we can, both in accomplishing the purposes we all have, which is to keep the Postal Service alive and well because so many people depend on it, and to do so in a much more fiscally responsible way, in every way in which that term might be understood, including the fairness of payments under the retiree health benefits plan, than has been the case before.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, before I proceed to the Senator from Missouri, I want to thank my friend from Florida for his principled and passionate statement. He speaks from his own experience--his family's own experience in leaving a dictatorship in Cuba and coming to the freedom of this country, but he speaks more broadly from the depths of American history and American experience. We are a very different nation. We are different from our beginning because we defined ourselves not by our geographical borders but by our values and the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence about those human rights, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the endowment of our Creator. Those rights, obviously, were not just the endowment God gave the people of the United States but all human beings anywhere on this planet. It is what makes us a great nation. I think the extent to which we hold to that principle that was the motivation for our founding is one by which we can measure ourselves day by day.

I really appreciate that the Senator from Florida has committed himself both to the upholding and the application of the principle of human rights, the sanctity of human rights, and America's role in protecting them, and to persistently continue to come to the floor to speak of particular cases where that principle is being violated. I happened to be on the floor for the postal reform bill, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank him for his very compelling statement.

I yield the floor to my friend from Missouri.

Mr. President, I thank Senator McCaskill for her statement. What is interesting, this is one of those cases where maybe we appreciate something more than we would every day when we think it may disappear. It is true of institutions as well as people. There is no question that post offices, both in rural areas and small towns--and I will say for Connecticut, in neighborhoods and cities--that the post office has played an important community-building role. But beyond that, in a tough time economically, a lot of people depend on those post offices for their mail, for their prescription drugs, and for the business interactions they need. But here is the other side of it, which my friend from Missouri knows very well.

We have 32,000 post offices in America. If we consider them to be retail outlets, which they are, that is more retail outlets than Walmart, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined. But we are talking about necessities. So we are very concerned that post offices not be closed in a precipitous manner if some have to be closed.

So as my friend from Missouri knows, we put language in this bill that doesn't stop the process of review but forces the Postal Service to consider other options, such as consolidating post offices within a reasonable distance, reducing the number of operating hours, for instance, and permitting a contractor or a rural carrier to provide retail services in the communities served by the post office.

We also allow an appeal to the Postal Regulatory Commission, and I know there are other amendments that will come in to strengthen that part of the bill.

We have to find a balance between the financial pressures on the post office--which, if unresponded to, will take it down--and the continuing dependence that millions of American people, including in small towns and rural areas, have on the post office.

Just a final word. Some of our colleagues have come to the floor and spoken about the post office as if it was in its entirety a relic which has no purpose anymore because of the Internet. Obviously, the Internet is affecting the volume of first-class mail. But the fact is today--I repeat, every day 563 million pieces of mail are delivered by the Postal Service, as you said, consistent with the promise of universal service anywhere you are, anywhere your business is.

Incidentally, that capacity to deliver to the last mile is one of the great, unique, irreplaceable assets of the Postal Service, so irreplaceable that big private sector companies such as FedEx and UPS depend on it. People depend on the Postal Service increasingly for packages too. I maybe have a limited horizon, but I still can't conceive of an Internet that can transport a package from one place to another, and a lot of those packages are needed by the recipients, including, particularly, prescription drugs.

So I thank my friend from Missouri. I say that Senator Collins and I would like to work with her. I think we can find a way without doing damage to the purpose of the bill to accommodate the concerns about the preservation of rural post offices, and I look forward to doing so.

I might add this for the information of Members who haven't said this yet today: Yesterday, both cloakrooms hotlined--in the vocabulary of the Senate--a request to every Senator to indicate whether they have an intention to file amendments. At this point, we have a list of over 50 amendments that have been filed. Senator Collins and I, Senator Carper, and Senator Brown are working to try to reduce that to a number that can be the basis, I hope, of a bipartisan agreement to go ahead and debate those amendments and vote on them.

We have a cloture vote that probably will occur tomorrow, unless vitiated, which will critically determine whether we have the 60 votes that say we can go forward. If we get those 60 votes, I think we can come to an agreement on a number of amendments, have a good, open debate, both sides, and then pass this bill.

If we don't pass this bill or if we don't achieve the 60 votes tomorrow, it is not as if nothing is going to happen to the post office. The fact is the deficit will continue to build, and let me be more specific.

A while back the Postmaster General issued a notice, which he was required to do, saying that as of May 15, less than a month from now, he would have a list of mail processing facilities--not post offices but mail processing facilities--which are candidates for closure. I believe he will close some on or about May 15 unless there is movement on this bill.

So I hope we can reason together; that we can agree on a good, balanced, representative, bipartisan group of amendments and, most of all, that we will not block the bill from being taken up for the lack of 60 votes to grant cloture and stop any attempt at a filibuster.

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

Mr. President, I rise to thank my friend for his moving and eloquent statement, as a Senator from Connecticut, a proud fan and admirer of UConn women's basketball, with the great coach Geno Auriemma. No one appreciates someone such as Coach Summitt more than those who have competed against her, including Coach Auriemma and the great players in the University of Connecticut women's basketball history.

She sets the standard and she has set the standard. I join my colleague in his praise of her, and with some confidence, wishing her well in the future.

It is fortuitous and I cannot believe it is accidental.

If Geno Auriemma were here, he would have at least echoed what I had to say and added some great stories and words of tribute because I know the respect that Coach Auriemma has for Coach Summitt.

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

Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Connecticut for his words. I stand with him in this cause. You can say this is parochial, but it is obvious that we are all--both of us and most everybody in Connecticut are very proud of our UConn basketball programs, both the men's and the women's. But there by the grace of the NCAA go every one of our colleagues and their teams.

Everybody understands and agrees that there has to be academic standards. As Senator Blumenthal said so well, these standards are being unfairly applied to the University of Connecticut men's basketball program in this case because they have been punished essentially already and they have corrected the shortcomings. They have had what might be described as a perfect record in terms of players achieving academic--the threshold standard.

To keep them out of the NCAA tournament next year is unfair. Frankly, in a direct sense, it hurts the University of Connecticut in terms of the revenues it needs to continue to produce not only good basketball but great academic offerings. It also deprives basketball fans around the country of a competition with all the best teams in it. And it has, for our program at the University of Connecticut, consequences beyond next year. In my opinion, this is cruel and unusual punishment.

I am very glad to be joining with Senator Blumenthal. He has taken the lead on it, but I stand arm in arm with him and the other members of the Connecticut congressional delegation. We are going to push forward until we get this unjust decision overturned.

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

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

Mr. President, I rise to urge all of our colleagues to support the pending cloture motion filed by the leaders so we can begin a debate that will help decide whether the U.S. Postal Service--this iconic American institution created more than two centuries ago, embedded in the Constitution, created in the age of inkwells and quill pens--will survive in the age of e-mail and the Internet.

To me, this cloture vote should be an easy one because if we vote against cloture, we are essentially saying two things: One is we don't want to do anything. If we don't do anything, the Postal Service is going to run out of money and hit its borrowing limit later this year, forcing us to miss payments and unnecessarily begin to shut back or close down operations, which is the last thing the country needs at this point.

Frankly, the other thing we will do if we think we should do nothing is to leave the Postmaster General, the Postal Service, with an unlimited right to take steps that I believe a majority of Members of this body don't want to be taken precipitously without considering the alternative. That alternative is closing thousands of post offices around the country, including small towns in rural areas, and dramatically and quickly cutting back on the number of mail processing facilities, and therefore the standards by which mail is delivered and the speed with which it is delivered in this country. So I hope our colleagues consider this an easy vote, which is simply not to turn away from the crisis the Postal Service is in.

Senator Collins and I are joined by Senator Carper and Senator Scott Brown. We have a substitute that is a bipartisan proposal that I think will help save the post office but also force it to begin to make tough cost-efficient steps to keep itself in fiscal balance.

Let me give a sense of the scope of this matter. The Postal Service today, if it were a private corporation, would be the 35th largest company in the United States based on revenue, putting it just ahead of Apple. It would be the country's second largest employer just behind Walmart. The 32,000 post offices in America represent more domestic retail outlets than Walmart, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined.

These are big numbers, and the post office has a storied history. But today it is a troubled business and, frankly, on the verge of insolvency if we don't act--in part because of the recent economic recession but mostly because of the transformational impact of the Internet. The Postal Service has had a 21-percent drop in mail volume in the past 5 years, and, of course, a corresponding cut in revenue. As more businesses and communication move online, mail volume is inevitably going to continue to decrease.

In fiscal year 2011 the Postal Service took in $65.7 billion but had expenses of $70.6 billion. This $5 billion loss would have actually been twice that if Congress had not delayed the due date for a statutorily required payment to the retiree health plan due at the end of the fiscal year. That followed record losses of $8.5 billion in 2010. This simply cannot continue. As I said earlier, if nothing is done, the Postal Service will not have enough money to pay its bill.

Please vote for cloture. We have a good, solid substitute that is a major reform with some due process that will make the post office leaner and more efficient. It will dramatically reduce the number of employees and the number of facilities the post office maintains, but it will do so in a way that I think is evolutionary and not Draconian either to the Postal Service or the impact it would have on the millions of people who depend on the post office and will continue to every day.

There are a lot of different ideas about how to fix the post office. Some people don't want us to make any changes, and that is the road to bankruptcy. Some people want us to make Draconian changes right away, and I don't think that is appropriate. So I ask for a vote for cloture.

I yield the floor.

I would do the same.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I thank our colleagues for a very strong vote which says to me that Members of the Senate, across party lines, understand that the Postal Service is a historic and also important part of America's future. It needs to change. It is in the midst of a real and dangerous fiscal crisis. We may differ about how to react to that crisis, but this strong cloture vote says to me that three-quarters of the Members of the Senate at least are ready and eager to debate and to pass something that will save the Postal Service from bankruptcy and the implications that would have for our economy overall. The billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars of our economy that depend on the mail would be compromised, and our economy and jobs would be further hurt.

I hope that as the day goes on--obviously, with the strong vote for cloture, we now proceed to a 30-hour period of debate on the matter, but I certainly hope that as the day goes on and the members of both caucuses and the leaders talk we can find a mutually agreeable path not to spend the 30 hours on the debate on this motion to proceed but that we go right to the bill.

At that point, Senator Collins and I, along with Senator Carper and Senator Scott Brown, will file a bipartisan substitute amendment which we have worked on which we hope will be the pending matter and then have an opportunity for people who have a different point of view about how to deal with this fiscal crisis of the post office--not to avoid dealing with it--people will have an opportunity to present amendments, and the body will work its will, which is the most important thing.

There are too many great national problems the Congress is not dealing with because of partisanship, because of ideological rigidity, because of an unwillingness to do what has to be done in our system of government, which is to compromise--not to compromise your principles but to understand that in a representative body such as the Senate, representing a country as big and as diverse as ours, you rarely can expect to get 100 percent of what you want. The aim should be to make progress, to get at least 50 percent of what you want and to let the other side get some of what they want as well.

So I would like to deliver now an opening statement and then hope that the ranking member, Senator Collins, will do the same on the bill, the substitute, which is S. 1789.

I am convinced that the substitute will help make the Postal Service leaner, nimbler, and more cost efficient, while still maintaining the service we Americans need to live our daily lives and to keep our economy going. But I want to be clear: This bill alone is not going to save the U.S. Postal Service. The changes occurring around it and within it are too deep. It will represent a very significant step forward. It will save the Postal Service, as we will indicate as this debate goes on, save billions and billions of dollars annually, and put the Postal Service back on the road to fiscal balance.

I view this bill as a bipartisan compromise, as the middle way between two different approaches to the fiscal crisis at the Postal Service, one that to a certain extent wants to wish it away, to say that really nothing has to change and we just have to find more ways--a different business model--we

have to find more ways for the Postal Service to make money, and we can just keep on doing business as we are doing. The end result of that is that either the Postal Service will collapse of its own weight or the Federal Government--the taxpayers--will be expected to bail it out, and I don't think that is what the American people want us to do. So one way is to do nothing.

The other way is to impose what I would call kind of an immediate overreaction--close thousands of post offices that people depend on across the country, close hundreds of mail processing facilities, which will mean that people will not be able to get their mail and businesses will not be able to realize the expectation of timely delivery of the mail. And it will have a negative impact on this economy of ours which is still struggling to come out of a recession.

We are offering a middle way here that will provide real and substantial savings from the current operating picture of the post office, which is in severe debt and lost more than $13 billion over the last 2 years, but will do it with due process, will do it in a way that requires the post office to look at every alternative before closing post offices that are so important to people in most every area of our country.

This bill, in other words, is an important beginning, and it will allow the Postal Service more time to continue working with its customers, its employees, Congress, and others to develop a balanced approach to what we need it to do in an age when almost every piece of communications that can be digitized is being digitized and sent over the Internet.

But if I may, I would like to step back and offer just a little bit of history because we are dealing with a current problem, but there is a rich history when you talk about the U.S. Postal Service.

It is kind of an accidental irony, a coincidental irony of the Senate bill numbers that this bill turns out to be S. 1789 because 1789 was the year the first Congress under the Constitution was seated. Among the duties of that founding body was the charge under article I, section 8, and I quote, ``to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.'' In fact, in the list of congressional powers detailed under section 8, creating the postal system comes before the creation of an army, a navy, or Federal courts. That is how important the Founders felt this public function would be to our new government, particularly in a democracy, how important communication was, and, in a country that had ambitious economic and commercial dreams right from the beginning, that the ability to communicate through a post office would be critically important to commerce and job creation.

In the Revolutionary era, it was the post office, under the direction of our first Postmaster General, Benjamin Franklin, that sped communications among the members of the Continental Congress and the American Revolutionary military as well as delivered letters and newspapers from across our fledgling Republic that helped keep the citizens of our new country abreast of events in faraway cities and towns.

If you read some of the histories of the Revolutionary War, some of the great biographies done of the founding generation of Americans, that extraordinary and gifted group, you see the role the post office and postal communications played in their ability to keep in touch with each other. And some of the most important communications occurred, for instance, between the government and the military.

Ever since that early period of American history, the post office has had a tradition of aiding progress and innovation. Maps from the early days of our Republic show that many of the roads we still depend on today--if I may be parochial, I will cite I 95 in Connecticut and a lot of other places along that path--still follow and in some cases are built on top of old post roads.

The job of maintaining Samuel Morse's first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was entrusted to the post office. And it was a former Postmaster General who helped Morse expand his transformational network of telegraphs and communications to other cities in our country. But that network grew slowly, so to keep our Nation connected with its frontiers way out in places such as Montana, I might say to the occupant of the chair, the post office helped sponsor the Pony Express. That was a great early example of what we talk about a lot but do not do as much as we should--public-private partnerships. The Pony Express filled a necessary gap in communications until the telegraph finally spanned our Nation coast to coast.

The post office's subsidies for airmail in the early days of aviation helped jump-start the fledgling airlines and air freight industries, which, of course, we all depend on so much today.

I will not repeat what I said in my statement about the scope of the Postal Service today when I spoke earlier in support of the vote for cloture, but I will just repeat and say that if the post office were a private corporation, it would be the 35th largest company in the United States just ahead of Apple; that is, by revenue. It would be the country's second largest employer just behind Walmart. Its 32,000 post offices across America represent more domestic retail outlets than Walmart, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined.

But perhaps because of some of that, certainly notwithstanding it, the post office is today a troubled business. I want to speak honestly and directly. It is on the verge of insolvency if we do not act. Part of the problem more recently, obviously, is the impact of the economic recession we are in, but the big problem is one that is not going to get better; that is, business loss to the Internet has led to a 21- percent drop in mail volume in the past 5 years and a slump in revenue as a result. You have to be unrealistic to say anything other than that this trend is going to continue and that mail volume will continue-- first-class mail volume will continue to decrease. As I mentioned, there has been $13 billion in deficit in the last 2 years--running a deficit in the last 2 years at the post office. It would have been $5 billion more if Congress had not come along and delayed the due date for a statutorily required retiree health care prefunding payment that was due at the end of the last fiscal year.

This simply cannot continue. This is one of those bills that come along not because you are excited about doing it but because you have to do it. If we do not act, I repeat, two things are going to happen: Either the Postal Service will become insolvent and have to cut back its operations or the Postmaster will use authorities he has under the current law to close a lot of post offices and mail-processing facilities and cut back service. And I know Members across party lines do not want that to happen precipitously.

Let me now describe some of the major parts of the substitute bipartisan bill that has come out of our committee.

The bill includes the two measures that will relieve some of the immediate financial pressure on the Postal Service. The first is based on an Office of Personnel Management determination that the Postal Service has overpaid its contributions to the Federal retirement system by roughly $11 billion. Call it a misunderstanding, call it a clerical error--it is fortuitous for the Postal Service and the trouble it is in. Our bill directs OPM to refund this money to the Postal Service and then directs the Postal Service to use this money to provide retirement incentives to employees and to pay off some of its debt.

Let me explain what I mean about those incentives. S. 1789, the substitute, would direct the Postal Service to use part of these refunds in the Federal Employee Retirement System to reduce its labor costs, which make up about 80 percent of its budget. There is no way the Postal Service is going to get back in balance without continuing to do what it has been doing, by tens of thousands, reducing the number of employees it has. But the aim here is to do that as a result of a voluntary buyout program.

The fact is that approximately half of the Postal Service's current workforce is eligible for either full or early retirement, and if 100,000 workers took advantage of the program--which is below the full amount eligible--the Postal Service would save $8 billion a year. That is the single most significant saving item in the package that we bring before you today. We set a goal here, which is that the Postal

Service should aim to reduce its workforce with this incentivized retirement program by approximately 100,000 workers or 18 percent of its current workforce.

Our bill also reduces the amount the Postal Service must pay into its retiree health benefits account over the next 40 years. The current formula of scheduled payment was part of postal reform passed some years ago. We conclude that the payments required are larger than necessary to sustain the viability of the retiree health benefits plan, so we mandate an updated amortization schedule to fund postal retirees' health care in the future. It is not just an arbitrary number. We think that means the Postal Service is likely to see a significant cut in its annual $5 billion bill to prefund retiree health care, which, of course, would take further stress off the Postal Service's annual operating budget. We expect, as the debate goes on, to have as close as possible an exact projection of how much that change would save for the Postal Service itself.

Now let me talk about some of the proposals that the Postal Service and Postmaster have made that have been most controversial.

First, Saturday deliveries and canceling most Saturday deliveries. The Postal Service has said it can save $3.1 billion a year by cancelling Saturday deliveries to individual homes and businesses. It is not something you want to do, but if you are looking to get this institution back into balance and keep it alive, it is one of the things we are probably going to have to do. The Postal Rate Commission agrees that ending most Saturday deliveries will save a lot of money, but says their savings estimate is $1.7 billion a year versus the $3.1 billion figure from the Postal Service.

Either way, we are talking about a substantial reduction in costs, and one we may have to face. Our bill recognizes that ultimately it may well be necessary to switch to 5-day delivery. I say it is going to be necessary to switch to 5-day delivery. But we require the Postal Service to follow a certain path over the next few years before that significant step--6 to 5 days--is carried out.

They first have to determine, according to the bill, if the other cost-saving measures in the bill have made canceling Saturday service unnecessary. We can hope that would happen, but I am skeptical that it will.

If a 5-day schedule is deemed necessary, the Postal Service must then submit a plan to Congress, the GAO, and the Postal Rate Commission on how it plans to cushion the negative effect on the businesses and communities it serves.

GAO and the PRC will then submit their own studies to Congress on this matter. If the PRC and the Comptroller General conclude that the change is necessary to allow the Postal Service to achieve long-term financial solvency, then 2 years from adoption the Postal Service will implement a 5-day delivery schedule.

What about the closing of post offices, which has created a lot of concern all across America in response particularly to the Postmaster announcing a list of 3,700 post offices that are possible candidates for closure? One of the things we found in response to this is exactly what I have found over the years in Connecticut. The local post office is not just a place where mail and packages pass through; it becomes a local institution of community significance. It is hard to convince people they should be closed. People are attached to their local post office, not just in small towns and rural areas--especially there--but in a lot of other places, including cities and neighborhoods in a State such as my own State of Connecticut.

The reality is we cannot afford to continue to have as many post offices as we do, operating in the way they do. So our bill would improve the present law covering post office closures. It doesn't prohibit them, but it requires more public participation and due process, and it requires the Postal Service to issue comprehensive retail service standards to ensure that communities throughout the country have access to retail postal services if their current post office needs to be closed--in other words, to look for ways to consolidate retail postal services. Perhaps they can put the retail postal service in a State or local government office building or perhaps put it in a retail establishment or a Wal-Mart or whatever to make sure that the services are maintained in a more cost-effective way, even if the local post office is not.

The bill also requires that the Postal Service take steps before closing a post office that it does not now have to take, including offering a community these other options I have talked about, such as keeping the post office open with more limited hours or permitting private contractors or rural carriers to provide the services the local post office is now providing.

Another one of the controversial proposals the Postmaster made is to close 232 of its current 461 mail processing facilities--not the post offices, but the places the mail goes to be processed so it can get from where it is sent to where it needs to be delivered. The truth is there is excess capacity in this system now, and the Postal Service has to eliminate some of that excess capacity.

However, the bipartisan substitute proposal basically requires that care be taken so this is done in a way that does not compromise the service standards necessary to maintain the current customer base. In other words, we have to reduce expenditures, but if we do it precipitously, as some of our colleagues will propose amendments to do, the net effect is that less people will use the post office, because they will not get the needed service and, as a result, revenues will drop, and probably even greater.

The substitute amendment, therefore, permits the Postal Service to eliminate excess capacity in the mail processing system but again requires the Postal Service to maintain a modified overnight delivery standard--a bit reduced from what it is now, but still there, particularly for the local delivery areas.

The maximum standard delivery time--and most people probably don't know this--the Postal Service accepts a maximum delivery time of 3 days to deliver a letter mailed anywhere in the continental U.S.; it has to be delivered anywhere else in the continental U.S. within 3 days. That will remain unchanged. The Postal Service would be required to maintain a sufficient number of processing facilities to meet these delivery standards but could otherwise close unneeded facilities.

So far, I have talked about the cost side of the ledger. S. 1789, the substitute, also gives the Postal Service tools to bring in fresh revenues by offering new products and services, specifically authorizing contracting with State and local governments to issue State licenses, authorizing for the first time the Postal Service to do what some of the private shippers do--shipping beer, wine, and distilled spirits, and provide notary services or provide specialized Internet services.

Our bill would also create an advisory commission of prominent citizens and charge them, within a set period of time, to reconsider the Postal Service's current business model and provide it with a strategic blueprint for the future that will enable it to both continue to exist and provide the services people want, but to do so in a way that balances its budget.

Finally, it creates a chief innovation officer at the Postal Service whose job is to continue to find ways to innovate and build on not only the constitutional responsibility to maintain the Postal Service and post offices but to do so in a way that is innovative and builds on the irreplaceable assets the Postal Service has, particularly the capacity to deliver to the last mile anywhere in this country.

These reforms are necessary. They will make the post office smaller and more cost efficient. As a result of this bill, there will be fewer employees at the post office and fewer facilities. You have no choice but to bring that about.

But this bill will keep the Postal Service alive. I think it will keep it well and it will put it on a path to surviving forever but in a different way, because the environment in which it is operating, because of the Internet, simply has changed. Despite its shrinking stream of posts and parcels, here is the reality we are dealing with and what would be affected if the Postal Service is to begin cutting back its operation.

The Postal Service still delivers 563 million pieces of mail every day. Only the Postal Service, for the price of a

stamp, will go literally that last mile to ensure delivery to every business and residence in America, using burros in the Grand Canyon and snowshoes in Alaska, doing whatever is necessary to make that happen.

What Federal agency, if I can go to another service the Postal Service gives, could process--think of the unthinkable--6.7 million passport applications a year if the Postal Service weren't there.

These are some examples and suggestions of the fact of what is possible but also proving that the Postal Service is not just a relic of the 18th century; it is a pivotal part of the 21st century.

The computer age poses unique challenges to the Postal Service, and the day may come when we will send and receive mail, get most of our magazines and books, and pay our bills on electronic devices that are reliable and secure. But honestly the day will never come when we can send physical things across the Internet between homes and businesses-- such as medicine, clothing, household and business supplies, and even spare parts for those computers we use so much.

The Postal Service is unique, and its network of support facilities and dedicated employees stands ready to deliver to every home, store, business, and factory in America. That is why we have to act to make sure it continues to be able to do that.

Let me go back to the first Postmaster General, Benjamin Franklin, who always had a lot of good things to say that even seem relevant centuries after. Franklin said, ``By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.'' This bill offers preparations to succeed, to make sure the Postal Service never fails.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know the Senator from Maryland, Mr. Cardin, is on his way to the floor to make a statement. Pending that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

In Massachusetts?

Madam President, first I thank my friend, the Senator from Massachusetts, for his kind words about me. It has been a pleasure to work with him. He has been a great and devoted member on our committee. He introduced, along with Senator Gillibrand, the two bills that became the anti-insider trading bill and worked as a ranking member on the subcommittee that Senator Carper chairs that has been working, focused on saving the United States Postal Service.

I appreciate his kind words and the stated intention, to name a post office for me. I hope he names one that is not then closed shortly thereafter. I also thank him for doing his part personally for the Post Office by continuing to write letters and sign them.

If we all personally--I am using e-mail as much as anyone else. I am going to wander a bit here in preparing for this my last year in the Senate and how you wind things down. They actually keep our e-mails on disks. They can be stored in libraries, as you would normal memos. We do reserve the right to edit somewhat. We are privileged in that way. But so much of the communication that goes on between people on e-mail is effectively lost in the ether of cyberspace.

When you think about the richness of history, how much of history comes from letters that were written or typed over time, I think-- though the trend here is clear, more and more will be done on the Internet, on e-mail--I think people are going to still want to write and receive letters. That is just one of the reasons why the Post Office should stay what it is--not what it is now but remain a viable institution which is not only important for the slightly sentimental reasons I have mentioned but because millions of jobs in our society and our country depend on the Postal Service. Although e-mail and the Internet are changing the reality of communications in our world, there are some things, in addition to mail, that will always best be done through the services of the U.S. Postal Service and not through the Internet. Some of that is the catalogs and magazines we get through the mail, but some of it is the packages, medicine, products that people buy over the Internet, that have to be delivered. Most of that is actually delivered, the last mile, by the United States Postal Service.

I thank my friend from Massachusetts for responding to Senator McCain's statement. It described where we are simplistically on this. I know there are some people who believe the bipartisan bill that came out of our committee--Senator Collins, Senator Carper, Senator Brown, and I--does too much. It is too tough on the Post Office. So they are concerned about it.

Senator McCain is on the other side. He doesn't think--and I am sure there are others--that we have gone far enough quickly enough. I think we found the right spot. I think this is a balanced, middle-way proposal. But make no mistake about it, the substitute bill that has been filed is not a status quo bill. It authorizes and facilitates exactly the kind of significant change in the U.S. Postal Service that the reality of its declining business demands we propose. So in most of the cases, with the exception of the 6- to 5-day delivery, which I will come back to, to change the 6- to 5-day delivery requires legislative authorization. I hope somebody puts an amendment in that would authorize the Post Office to go immediately from 6- to 5-day delivery because I wish to see what the sentiment is in the Senate. My guess is--

for the reasons that the Senator from Massachusetts stated very eloquently--people are not ready for that precipitous change from 6 to 5 days; that if we do some of the things Senator McCain is proposing, it would make such rapid and dramatic changes in the Postal Service that it will have the contrary effect to what people intend and it will diminish its services so rapidly that it will accelerate its downfall by decreasing its revenues.

This perhaps is not the right parallel, but I remember years ago when I was in the State Senate in Connecticut we had a real problem with the publicly supported bus transportation running a deficit, and one of the inevitable proposals was to raise the cost of the bus fare. Well, of course, one of the logical and sensible reactions to that--which happened--is that fewer people rode the bus because it cost more and it got into more trouble, and that is exactly the kind of downward cycle that the sensible change we are facilitating in this bill will make possible. Post offices and mail processing facilities will be closed under this bill. A lot of employees will leave the Post Office. This will all be done according to standards and in a methodical way that I think ultimately will not only save a lot of money for the Post Office--and I expect we will have an official estimate in the next day or two on that savings derived from our bill from the U.S. Post Office--but it will do so in a way that doesn't break people away from the Postal Service and put it into a more rapid spiral downward.

As a matter of process, I want to say in response to my friend from Arizona, Senator McCain--first, I want to say that I appreciate what he said about the amendment from the Senator from Kentucky, it is not relevant to this bill. I am sure there will be another occasion that his proposal to terminate financial assistance to Egypt will be relevant and should be brought up, but it should not be brought up on this bill because it is not relevant and it is exactly those kinds of irrelevant amendments that often get the Senate into a gridlock situation which means we won't get our job done, and makes the public even more dissatisfied with us. So I thank Senator McCain for speaking to that.

Senator McCain has introduced an amendment, which I oppose, but it is relevant and it ought to be debated. I know the majority leader is very open to working out a process by which amendments from both caucuses will be introduced and introduced in a timely way. There are several colleagues on the Democratic side who have amendments they want to offer as well. So I hope Senator Collins, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and I can work together to begin to reach a bipartisan agreement where we can take up amendments that are relevant--Senator McCain's is one of them--and we can debate them and get something done here. Too often the public is so frustrated and angry with us because we leave problems unsolved because we get stuck in partisan, ideological, or procedural gridlock. This is a real problem.

The Post Office lost more than $13 billion in the last 2 years. It would have been $5 billion more if we had not waived a payment responsibility the Post Office had to the retirees' health benefit plan. It cannot go on this way. And if we don't act, it is not as if nothing will happen; something will happen. The Post Office will continue to spiral downward and the Postmaster will inevitably have to impose dramatic cuts in services and personnel. So I think it is our responsibility to create a set of rules and procedures here that acknowledges the need for change in the Postal Service, create a process--well, actually authorizes the Post Office to do some things it has not been able to do until now to raise more money--and create a process for changing the business model of the U.S. Postal Service so it can survive in a very different age, the age of e-mail, and also flourish because so many people in our country depend on it for doing so.

Madam President, 563 million pieces of mail get delivered by the U.S. Postal Service every day, so this is not some kind of irrelevant and antiquated relic somewhere. This is a beating, functioning, critically important element of our life, our commerce, and our culture, and a lot of people depend on it, so we have a responsibility to change it and to keep it alive.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to thank my dear friend and colleague from Maine, not my ranking member but really sort of cochair partner of our committee, for her excellent statement. I share her frustration about the procedural moment we are at in the Senate. I hope and I believe this is temporary. I believe Senator Reid's intention is to do exactly what Senator Collins has said she would like to see happen, which is that we negotiate an agreement, hopefully--it would have to be adopted by consent, but it would have to be amendment by amendment, where we would go back and forth and consider amendments from each side of the aisle.

I know Senator Reid has filled the tree. It is not as if there are not amendments that the Senate Democratic caucus wants to offer to the bill. There are. There are several of them. I know there are several on the Republican side. We worked very hard on this bill, as Senator Collins has said. The meetings did seem endless. I would say sometimes they seemed excessively endless. But, nonetheless, we reached across the aisle and compromised.

This is not a perfect piece of work. It is an important subject, so it deserves to be considered, debated, and amendments need to be offered. I am confident in saying that is exactly the direction in which the majority leader wants to go, and the sooner the better.

Having said that, and seeing no one else on the Senate floor, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from Delaware, for his excellent statement on the bill and where we are in regard to the U.S. Postal Service. I thank him for what he has done over the last several years to try to save the U.S. Postal Service in a changing environment and to lead the change.

No one in the Senate--I believe no one in the Congress--has worked harder over the last decade to reform the U.S. Postal Service than Senator Tom Carper. There is a way in which he has engaged in the kinds of problems that others try to get far away from. He sees an institution like the U.S. Postal Service and how important it is, he is challenged by it, and he goes at it with all of his considerable capabilities and persistence until he gets it right. I cannot thank him enough for doing that.

This is not the kind of issue on which one gains a lot of political advantage. Again, it is a test of our government, a test of our capacity to maintain public services that people depend upon in a changing world. We all know--and he has been a leader--that e-mail is affecting the volume of mail. The post office has to change to stay not only viable but strong. I think we are going to do it in this Congress, and nobody will deserve more credit for that than Senator Tom Carper. I am glad I had the chance to spontaneously offer that much deserved gratitude and praise to Senator Carper.

I say to my colleagues and staff who may be watching or listening--to pick up a theme of Senator Carper and try to bring it home--there are some amendments on both sides that ought to be aired out. I believe Senator Reid wants to do that and wants to create a process where relevant amendments from both sides--not without limit but a good number of them--get to be debated on the Senate floor.

It is my understanding that both caucuses now are hotlining a request to Senate offices that if Senators have an amendment they want to introduce on this postal reform bill, to let their respective cloakrooms know so that we can see what the universe is and then we can see if we can work on an agreement where we alternate submitting amendments and begin to get into the substance of the bill and move it to a point where we can actually adopt something.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic River Act. I first would like to thank my colleague, Senator Blumenthal, for joining me as a cosponsor of this legislation, and also wish to thank Congressman Chris Murphy, who recently introduced an identical bill in the House.

My work to preserve and protect the Farmington River dates back many years, and holds a special place in my heart. In 1993 and 1994, in my first term in office, I worked with Congresswoman Nancy Johnson to introduce and pass legislation that added 14 miles of the Upper Farmington River, or the west branch of the river, to the National Wild and Scenic River System, becoming Connecticut's first addition to the system. In 2006, I again had the privilege of working with Rep. Johnson and Sen. Chris Dodd to introduce and pass the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic River Study Act, which authorized a study of the Lower Farmington, or the east branch of the river. Now complete, the study found that the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook possess outstanding natural, cultural, and recreational values. I am honored to return to the Senate floor today to introduce this legislation, which would add the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System in order to preserve the extraordinary ecological and recreational values it brings to our state.

Passing through ten towns in northwestern Connecticut, the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook is home to extensive wetlands, unique geology, and stunning vistas. The pristine and unique qualities of this river system and the surrounding landscape provide visitors and residents alike, a special location for hiking, paddling, and fishing. This unspoiled natural retreat has a rich history that is only rivaled by its vibrant biodiversity. Archeologists have revealed that sites surrounding the river date back over 11,000 years. The timeline that has been discovered chronicles important Native American development as well as the birth and growth of our nation. From

the prehistoric campsites, to the Underground Railroad network, and burgeoning manufacturing that sent goods to markets across the world, the river and its banks are an essential component of our nation's history.

But the importance of the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook goes beyond its contribution to our nation's history. Among the country's most biologically diverse ecosystem, the river is home to 30 species of finfish, 105 bird species, and the only river in New England that is home to all 12 of the freshwater mussel species native to the region, one of which is a federally listed endangered species. Since prehistory the rich biodiversity has also benefited agriculture along the banks of this river system. Driven by the unique qualities of the soil, Native Americans, colonists and Connecticut residents have harvested tobacco that is known the world over.

Today, outdoor recreationists visit the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook in increasing numbers. As Americans return to nature, it is essential that policies are in place which enhances stewardship and conservation in Connecticut and across the nation. Unchecked development threatens to erode biodiversity, destroy unprotected historic sites, and consume priceless natural resources. In order to combat such destruction we must have the foresight to ensure that treasures such as the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook remain unspoiled for today's recreational users as well as tomorrow's.

I thank Congressman Murphy, all the members of the Study Committee, and especially the Farmington River Watershed Association and its Executive Director, Eileen Fielding, for working with me to advance the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook's status within the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System. I reaffirm my strong support today for the river's protection, and I look forward to working cooperatively with my colleagues in making it happen.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic River Act. I first would like to thank my colleague, Senator Blumenthal, for joining me as a cosponsor of this legislation, and also wish to thank Congressman Chris Murphy, who recently introduced an identical bill in the House.

My work to preserve and protect the Farmington River dates back many years, and holds a special place in my heart. In 1993 and 1994, in my first term in office, I worked with Congresswoman Nancy Johnson to introduce and pass legislation that added 14 miles of the Upper Farmington River, or the west branch of the river, to the National Wild and Scenic River System, becoming Connecticut's first addition to the system. In 2006, I again had the privilege of working with Rep. Johnson and Sen. Chris Dodd to introduce and pass the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic River Study Act, which authorized a study of the Lower Farmington, or the east branch of the river. Now complete, the study found that the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook possess outstanding natural, cultural, and recreational values. I am honored to return to the Senate floor today to introduce this legislation, which would add the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System in order to preserve the extraordinary ecological and recreational values it brings to our state.

Passing through ten towns in northwestern Connecticut, the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook is home to extensive wetlands, unique geology, and stunning vistas. The pristine and unique qualities of this river system and the surrounding landscape provide visitors and residents alike, a special location for hiking, paddling, and fishing. This unspoiled natural retreat has a rich history that is only rivaled by its vibrant biodiversity. Archeologists have revealed that sites surrounding the river date back over 11,000 years. The timeline that has been discovered chronicles important Native American development as well as the birth and growth of our nation. From

the prehistoric campsites, to the Underground Railroad network, and burgeoning manufacturing that sent goods to markets across the world, the river and its banks are an essential component of our nation's history.

But the importance of the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook goes beyond its contribution to our nation's history. Among the country's most biologically diverse ecosystem, the river is home to 30 species of finfish, 105 bird species, and the only river in New England that is home to all 12 of the freshwater mussel species native to the region, one of which is a federally listed endangered species. Since prehistory the rich biodiversity has also benefited agriculture along the banks of this river system. Driven by the unique qualities of the soil, Native Americans, colonists and Connecticut residents have harvested tobacco that is known the world over.

Today, outdoor recreationists visit the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook in increasing numbers. As Americans return to nature, it is essential that policies are in place which enhances stewardship and conservation in Connecticut and across the nation. Unchecked development threatens to erode biodiversity, destroy unprotected historic sites, and consume priceless natural resources. In order to combat such destruction we must have the foresight to ensure that treasures such as the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook remain unspoiled for today's recreational users as well as tomorrow's.

I thank Congressman Murphy, all the members of the Study Committee, and especially the Farmington River Watershed Association and its Executive Director, Eileen Fielding, for working with me to advance the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook's status within the National Wild & Scenic Rivers System. I reaffirm my strong support today for the river's protection, and I look forward to working cooperatively with my colleagues in making it happen.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012, at 10 a.m., to conduct a committee hearing entitled ``Export-Import Bank Reauthorization: Saving American Jobs and Supporting American Exporters.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012, at 10:30 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled, ``The Comprehensive Contingency Contracting Reform Act of 2012 (S. 2139).''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety of the Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012 at 10 in Dirksen 406 to conduct a hearing entitled, ``Review of Mercury Pollution's Impacts to Public Health and the Environment.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Competitiveness, Innovation, and Export Promotion of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to hold a meeting during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012, at 10 a.m. in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.

The Committee will hold a hearing entitled, ``Promoting American Competitiveness: Filling Jobs Today and Training Workers for Tomorrow.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on April 17, 2012, at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, on April 17, 2012, at 10 a.m., in room SD 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Ending Racial Profiling in America.''

Mr. President, I know there are many who dismiss the President's proposal of the so-called Buffett rule as an election year tactic which has no chance of being enacted. But, for me, it must be taken as a serious proposal because it touches important economic principles at a very difficult economic time for our country. Although I was unable to be present for this afternoon's vote, I would have voted against the motion to proceed to the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012, S. 2230, and I want to explain why.

I am not opposed to the Buffett rule because I am opposed to raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans. I am opposed to the Buffett rule because it would double to 30 percent the capital gains tax on one group of investors and therefore reduce exactly the kind of capital investments we need to get our economy growing again and create jobs. To protect America from being drowned in public debt we will eventually have to raise revenues, hopefully through broad tax reform, and, of course, we will also have to cut expenditures, particularly the rate of increased spending on so-called entitlement programs. But that is different from the question of how to tax gains on capital investments. I have long believed in the value of having a lower tax on capital gains than on regular income because capital investments are

one of the engines that has driven this great economy of ours, made us the land of opportunity, and created the American middle class. Someone once said that if you take the ``capital'' out of capitalism, all you have left is an ``ism.'' There is a lot of truth in that play on words.

My support for a lower capital gains rate was probably born when one of the great political inspirations of my life, President John F. Kennedy, advocated lower capital gains taxes as part of his ``a rising tide raises all boats'' fiscal policy. During my first term in the Senate in 1989, I supported President George H.W. Bush's proposal to lower the capital gains tax. I was one of a small group of Democrats to do so. During the 1990s, I worked alongside the late, great Jack Kemp in support of lower capital gains rates, especially for gains made on capital investments in low-income urban and rural areas which we called enterprise zones. Throughout the years, I cosponsored broad proposals to lower the capital gains tax with Senator Hatch and other Members of the Senate from both political parties. To me, economic history proves that lower capital gains taxes grow our economy and higher capital gains taxes don't increase revenues. This particular tax increase is especially ill-timed, since it is clear that literally billions of dollars are now being held back from new investments in America by individuals and businesses because they are uncertain about the future of our economy and the future of government policies that will affect their businesses and their investments. The best thing we could do to regenerate economic growth is to adopt broad-based tax and entitlement reform that would bring our government books into balance and give American businesses and investors a sense of certainty about the economic environment in which they will be living for years to come. The Buffett rule, on the other hand, targets a particular kind of economic activity--capital investments--which are what America's economy and people urgently need now. And that is why I would have voted against the Buffett rule.