Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004, a bill that will increase the ability of our civilian agencies to effectively respond to complex emergencies and stabilize countries in the wake of war or crisis.

I commend and express my gratitude to Chairman Lugar for his leadership on this issue. Since December of last year, the chairman and I have been engaged in discussions with experts from

in and outside government on whether the United States is adequately organized and equipped, and its personnel trained, to deal with post- conflict reconstruction. Our premise was this: in the last decade, the United States has taken on post-conflict stabilization missions in countries such as Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. In the decade to come, whether we like it or not, nation building will remain vital to our national security.

We have learned a lot from our efforts. And we have made a lot of mistakes in the process. One lesson that I think is clear is that we have not done a very good job of turning our experience into tools for the future. So the chairman and I put together a group of outside advisers who had held senior positions in the last two administrations; we also invited officials from this administration to give their ideas. The bill we are introducing today is the product of those consultations. I wish to thank all of the participants of the group for their invaluable input to this bipartisan initiative.

Addressing the needs present in post-conflict reconstruction--and in particular, in countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It matters to the people living in those nations, and it matters to the American people. A bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found, to no one's surprise, that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as pose grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.''

We should not have to reinvent the wheel every time we are faced with a stabilization crisis--it's inefficient and ineffective. Rather than address crises on an ad hoc basis--cobbling together plans, procedures, and personnel--as we have been doing, we need to be forward-thinking, comprehensive, and strategic.

The thrust of this legislation is to do precisely that. The bill authorizes the creation of an office within the State Department that will be the focal point for creating plans and procedures to respond to crises, and it establishes a corps of active duty and reserve personnel who will be able to deploy rapidly when and where critical needs arise.

Mr. President, this bill is not a cure-all. But I believe it is a good start to addressing a critical need: that of strengthening our civilian capacity to handle complex emergencies overseas. Again, I thank Chairman Lugar and the members of our policy advisory group for their work on this issue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004, a bill that will increase the ability of our civilian agencies to effectively respond to complex emergencies and stabilize countries in the wake of war or crisis.

I commend and express my gratitude to Chairman Lugar for his leadership on this issue. Since December of last year, the chairman and I have been engaged in discussions with experts from

in and outside government on whether the United States is adequately organized and equipped, and its personnel trained, to deal with post- conflict reconstruction. Our premise was this: in the last decade, the United States has taken on post-conflict stabilization missions in countries such as Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. In the decade to come, whether we like it or not, nation building will remain vital to our national security.

We have learned a lot from our efforts. And we have made a lot of mistakes in the process. One lesson that I think is clear is that we have not done a very good job of turning our experience into tools for the future. So the chairman and I put together a group of outside advisers who had held senior positions in the last two administrations; we also invited officials from this administration to give their ideas. The bill we are introducing today is the product of those consultations. I wish to thank all of the participants of the group for their invaluable input to this bipartisan initiative.

Addressing the needs present in post-conflict reconstruction--and in particular, in countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It matters to the people living in those nations, and it matters to the American people. A bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found, to no one's surprise, that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as pose grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.''

We should not have to reinvent the wheel every time we are faced with a stabilization crisis--it's inefficient and ineffective. Rather than address crises on an ad hoc basis--cobbling together plans, procedures, and personnel--as we have been doing, we need to be forward-thinking, comprehensive, and strategic.

The thrust of this legislation is to do precisely that. The bill authorizes the creation of an office within the State Department that will be the focal point for creating plans and procedures to respond to crises, and it establishes a corps of active duty and reserve personnel who will be able to deploy rapidly when and where critical needs arise.

Mr. President, this bill is not a cure-all. But I believe it is a good start to addressing a critical need: that of strengthening our civilian capacity to handle complex emergencies overseas. Again, I thank Chairman Lugar and the members of our policy advisory group for their work on this issue.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in my 33 years as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, I have had the opportunity to give hundreds of speeches on the Senate floor, but today is a first. It gives me tremendous pride today to officially congratulate my alma mater, the University of Delaware, on winning its first-ever NCAA Division I-AA National Football Championship.

Players, fans, and students will celebrate this milestone in the University of Delaware's history at a rally on Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at the Bob Carpenter Center. And we have much more than the national championship to celebrate. The Fightin' Blue Hens played one of the most outstanding seasons in college football history, with a record of 15 and 1 and setting a school record for victories in a season.

After clinching their seventh Atlantic 10 Football Conference championship, the 2003 squad sailed through the Division I-AA playoff, outscoring opponents by a combined score of 149 to 23. In fact, they won the championship game by shutting down Colgate 42 to 0. You can be sure I attended every playoff game, along with tens of thousands of other devoted Blue Hen fans.

As I said earlier, this marks the University of Delaware's first Division I-AA title crown, but we earned six other football titles as a Division II school. The last Division II title in 1979 was significant because our current coach, K.C. Keeler, played on that 1979 championship team as a linebacker.

In just his second year at the helm of UD football, K.C. Keeler took his team to the national championship; but, K.C. is the first to give his predecessor, legendary Hall of Fame coach Tubby Raymond, all the credit for recruiting and building this team. Tubby, this championship is yours, too.

To be sure, UD football has come a long way since the 1960s when I was at the University. But at a time when we all need some good news, the 2003 University of Delaware football team has given our State plenty to cheer about. My warmest congratulations to the coaches, players, parents, school officials, cheerleaders, marching band members, students, and, of course, the diehard fans, as we celebrate being national football champions.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor a true business leader and long-time friend in my State of Delaware, Jim Wolfe. Many of us in public office talk about creating good-paying jobs and fighting for the middle class, Jim Wolfe has lived those goals throughout his professional career.

For the past 11 years, Jim Wolfe has led the Chrysler, now the DiamlerChrysler Automobile Assembly Plant in Newark, DE. Tomorrow, he is hanging up his hat as plant manager to take the helm as president and CEO of the 2,800-member Delaware State Chamber of Commerce.

As plant manager of Delaware's DiamlerChrysler plant, which is home to the popular, award-winning Dodge Durango, Jim orchestrated a dozen overhauls of the facility to retool it for new car models. More significantly, he oversaw the re-training of thousands of workers to upgrade their skills.

The DiamlerChrysler plant in Delaware is one of only a few U.S. auto facilities remaining on the East Coast. It is an economic engine in Delaware, employing more than 2,300 people and contributing $363 million annually to our State's economy. The financial domino effect goes even further: one auto worker creates another 1.6 jobs in other industries, such as transportation, retail services, and labor.

Jim Wolfe is no stranger to the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. For the past year he has served as Chairman of the Chamber's independent Board of Directors. He is a long-time member of the Chamber's Board of Directors and Executive Committee, as well as serving as Chairman of the Delaware Manufacturing Association.

On a personal note, Jim has been a great and trusted friend and advisor to me for many years. I have visited with him and his workers at the Newark DiamlerChrysler Plant more times than I can count, and he always gave it to me straight. When the facility was in jeopardy of closing in the early 1990s, he counseled me on how to help save this manufacturing gem for our State, which we accomplished.

Jim is a 40-year employee of Chrysler. We stole him from his native Michigan, but he and his wife Laura are now part of the Delaware family.

Jim's stature in the business community has been earned and is well- deserved. He will bring a hands-on knowledge of the business world to his new position directing the Chamber's many affiliates, including the Manufacturing Association, the Delaware Retail Council, The Public Policy Institute, and the Small Business Alliance.

DiamlerChrysler's loss is truly the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce's gain. But we all win because we'll continue to benefit from Jim's affable personality, skilled business acumen and foresight as a community leader in Delaware.

Mr. President, Tom Carper and I have a resolution at the desk, and I ask for its immediate consideration.

I thank the Chair. I thank the clerk for reading the resolution in its entirety.

Mr. President, my friend, our colleague, Bill Roth, died while the Senate was out of session. Otherwise, I am certain there would have been a profuse outpouring of sentiment on the floor, as when any person of consequence dies.

Bill Roth was a man of the Senate and a man of consequence. He was also, even though we were on opposite sides of the aisle, one of my closest friends in the Senate. We had the honor, as my friend and colleague, Senator Carper, and I do, of riding Amtrak together. In Bill's case and my case, we rode the train together almost every day for 28 years. Literally, for the first 24 years probably every day the Senate was in session.

You can't have that kind of proximity with a man or a woman without getting to know them pretty darn well. I got to know Bill very well. I got to know his family. I got to know his hopes, his dreams, his fears, and his concerns, as he did mine, my family, my hopes, dreams, and concerns.

An unusual thing developed: a bond of trust. I can and will say for the record that there is no person in public life I came to trust more than Bill Roth. I trusted him with my concerns. I trusted him with family issues. I trusted him with personal issues. And I trusted his judgment on political issues, even when he and I disagreed.

We would ask each other questions: What do you think would happen if I do the following? What do you think the consequence would be? Even though we were in opposing parties, neither hesitated to give our friend the best advice we could.

I once said that running against Bill Roth was like running against a wheat thrasher: big, gobbles up everything in his way, and he was very silent. Before it was all over, everything was harvested.

Bill Roth, I think, was the most underestimated man with whom I have served going into my sixth term as a Senator.

I might note for the record that Bill Roth's family is incredibly talented. His wife, Jane Roth, is one step away from the Supreme Court as a Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge. None of us

who know her ever hesitated to support her. We pushed her. She is highly regarded and, as my friend from Pennsylvania, Senator Specter, knows--and no one knows the Third Circuit better than he does; literally no one knows it better than he does--is one of the most respected jurists on that venerable circuit.

His son, Bud, is a lawyer who is an extremely talented young man, and his daughter, Katie, is a doctor. I might note that Bill finally had a namesake. Just shortly before he died, he got to see his daughter's son who they named William. Bill actually died here in Washington visiting Katie.

This is a man who lived a full life, raised a great family, and will be missed not just by his family, but by our entire State and all those who knew Bill.

I can say without equivocation that I would have been honored, quite frankly, to have any one of his senior staff members work on my staff. One of the ways I think you measure the mark of a national leader is to look at the people with whom he or she surrounds himself or herself. Look at the people who they pick to represent them. Look at the people who they choose to be their alter ego.

Without exception, Bill Roth chose administrative assistants and senior staff members out of the same mold as himself: always totally honorable, balanced, straightforward, not at all ideological.

I have close friendships, personal friendships, with Bill's former staff directors, people who still live in Delaware and, I might add--I don't want to ruin their reputations--support me politically, support me in my races. It is hard, as I said, in a State as small as ours--I see my friend from Utah, which has grown to be a very large State relative to us, but when I first arrived here, when his dad was here, with whom I served, I think we were a little bit bigger than Utah at the time.

In small States, everyone knows everyone. Everyone has a sense of who everyone else is. It is hard in a State as small as ours, when you are in close proximity to people you respect, not to let it show, and that is exactly what happened in Delaware.

We went through 28 years of serving together, and I cannot think of one single solitary time--not one single occasion--where Bill Roth had or I ever had even a negative inference asserted about the other guy. We have a tradition in Delaware of not being very negative and partisan. I can tell you with the single exception of one highly contested political race, you never heard Tom Carper, you never heard our sole Congressman and former Governor, Mike Castle, you never heard in my State any of us criticizing the other. It has been a wonderful State to represent.

Bill Roth set the pattern. He surrounded himself with people of character such as himself, and that is something that should be strived for.

Bill, as I said, was known on the Senate floor, known in the country like few of us will be for the Fulbright scholarships, for the Roth IRAs. Everybody knows that Bill Roth was a man who promoted savings. He was a man who was tight with the taxpayers' money, which is a great asset. We used to kid. Every once in a while we would go to a function here in Washington and we would take a cab together. I remember once Bill leaning in to talk to the cab driver.

I said: What are you doing?

He said: I gave him a dime tip and told him to vote Democrat.

He also had a sense of humor, which most people on the floor never got a chance to see.

I don't know anybody who worked with Bill Roth who ever suggested that you could not work with Bill Roth; that he would not weigh in.

One of the things I want to mention about Senator Roth, though--and I am trying to move through this in the interests of time because I know we have the State of the Union and I know matters are going to be brought up today--is that one of the hallmarks of his career is he had a real sense of proportion, a sense of proportion that is missing today in much of public life. He fully understood that the Federal Government was both dangerous and necessary, that it is of value and sometimes part of the problem. He never had any trouble distinguishing between when it should be proactive and when it should not be active at all. He was not driven by ideology that blinded him to the needs of the people of my State, the Nation, or blinded him to civil liberties and civil rights.

He used to always surprise many of my Democratic colleagues because Bill was always so conservative on tax policy. I hope I don't get my friend from Utah in trouble, but one of the things about him is he is a man of independence. I think it surprised some of my colleagues when he voted against the constitutional amendment on the flag.

They said: Wait a minute, this guy is a conservative. It is because he is a conservative, I might add, that he did vote against it. But it would always surprise my colleagues on the Democratic caucus. They would say: Wait a minute, Bill Roth is a strong proponent of Title IX. That is the title that says you have to spread a proportionate amount of money on women in sports and colleges and universities. Bill Roth was very strong on women's rights.

To the chagrin of his colleagues and some of mine, he is in large part a reason there is no drilling in ANWR. Bill Roth is a Republican leader of the effort to see there was no drilling in ANWR. We have the Tongass Forest in Alaska, which is multiple times the size of my State, because of Bill Roth. Bill Roth had an environmental record that could easily have been associated with a liberal Democrat. Bill Roth's views on women's rights, civil rights, was moderate to liberal.

It always used to surprise people on this side of the aisle when they would say, whoa, was that Bill Roth who just voted on this, that, or the other thing?

Bill Roth was a complex man, a man who could not be pigeonholed or characterized by a single label. But he was ultimately a practical guy, a man who knew what he thought, what he believed, and very quietly and unhesitatingly never, never ceased or backed off from what he thought was a right thing to do.

On a personal note, like all of you in these cynical times--I would like you all to know that Bill Roth was anything but cynical. Bill Roth was not only an honorable man, Bill Roth was a noble man. The word ``nobility'' comes to mind, to me. When I learned of his death--and I was caught off guard as I was asked by the press about it--the first thing that came to mind was: He's a noble man. He's a noble man.

Let me explain what I mean by that. It is the way he dealt with people. It is the way he acted. Name someone for me in contemporary politics who was a winner of the Bronze Star and never once mentioned it. You cannot find a single piece of campaign literature that I am aware of. I never heard him speak of it. I never heard his campaign use it. Who, today, would not be out there talking about having been the recipient of a Bronze Star--to prove their patriotism, to prove their bravery? Bill Roth never, never mentioned it.

This is a politician who was not afraid to use gimmicks. This is a guy who rode an elephant to make a point, out here in front of the Capitol. This is a guy who talked about the $3,000 toilet seats and would hoist up toilet seats. He was a bit of a showman in that regard. But when it came to talking about himself, Bill Roth never did. He had this sense of nobility about him.

The other thing I loved about Bill Roth, in an environment where--I guess it has always been this case in politics--where money is king, campaigns cost so much money--Bill Roth was the chairman of the Finance Committee. Bill Roth could have raised more money than the Lord Almighty. But he always used to drive his chiefs of staff crazy when he wouldn't do what other people legally would do. He wouldn't call in the heads of the corporation and the business community and others who had great interest in what went on before the Finance Committee. He wouldn't do it. Bill Roth had trouble raising money. He was uncomfortable. I loved him for it. I loved the fact that he was uncomfortable doing it.

The other thing that used to drive me crazy sometimes, to show you how he was, I remember we had a little fight on the floor here about a thing most people don't know much about but in Delaware it is a big ticket item financially for the State--escheatment. Escheatment means when somebody dies and leaves no heir and owns a security, under the rules that exist now,

that money reverts to the State of incorporation.

So let's say you owned 1,000 shares of stock of General Motors and you passed away, you had no heirs, the estate was left--the State gets the estate. But which State gets it? Historically it has been the State where you are incorporated. So if General Motors is incorporated in Delaware, even though its business is in Michigan, the money goes to Delaware. That is a big amount in their budget.

There was a suit filed in the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court said, no, it is OK to do it that way, but it is up to the Congress to change it if they wanted to.

Mr. President, 78 Senators said let's change that, and 370-some Congressmen said let's change that. I didn't think it was a good idea to change it. I have a simple rule. I say it straightforward. I think I never take personally the competition for highway funds or bridges or programs. We all compete, each of our States, for that. I take it very personally when my colleague or a colleague in the Senate decides to take an action that would benefit his State only marginally, but would do great damage to my State. I take that very personally.

Changing law on escheatment would have been marginally beneficial to 47 other States but a gigantic detriment to my State. So I went to Daniel Patrick Moynihan; New York was affected by this. I went to my friend, my friend who is no longer here, Al D'Amato--affectionately referred to as pothole Al. And I went to my friend Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts, and we said we are going to do what we can to see this doesn't change.

I will tell you the end of the story. We ended up winning. Even though over three-quarters of the Senate cosponsored the change and more than that in the House, we ended up winning in the end of the day. That was because our colleagues realized we took it personally, it didn't affect their States very positively, and they in fact saw the better part of valor here and were willing to help us.

I remember standing in the well of the Senate saying to Bill: Bill, you are chairman of the Finance Committee. Let your colleagues know this is important to you.

He said: I don't know. You tell them. You tell them.

He was even uncomfortable saying that. He was one of the most powerful men in the Senate and he wouldn't say: Hey, look, Bennett, this is important to me. Please help me. He wouldn't even do that.

Although he had all this power, the thing that was so beautiful about him, he was uncomfortable with power. I think it is always healthy when people are uncomfortable with wielding power. But he never hesitated to wield it when he thought it was absolutely clear cut.

So this was a guy who was a noble man. I just watched him. I watched him operate for over 28 years.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for 3 more minutes.

Mr. President, there is a quotation engraved on the wall at Union Station. It goes like this:

Be noble, and the nobleness that lies in other men sleeping

but never dead will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

Bill Roth also brought out the humility in those who worked with him and those who were around him.

There is much more to say about him. I have said too much.

I apologize. I did not realize that time was controlled. My colleague from Delaware, a cosponsor of this resolution, Senator Carper, would like to speak. I ask whether my colleagues would object if Senator Carper is able to proceed.

Mr. President, Americans believe in fair play: the right for everyone to have his say, the opportunity to get a job and make your own way in the world, a fair wage for a day's work.

This is not just idealism--we figure we are all better off if the system we live in is open and fair.

That belief in fair play is the foundation of this Senate and indeed of our constitutional system itself.

My father worked hard and he taught me that fairness is our most fundamental value. He taught me that we always have to stand up against the abuse of power at every level. Whenever someone uses their advantage, be it wealth, education, size, strength, whatever it may be, against someone else, it is wrong, and it goes against everything we stand for, everything we are as a nation and a people.

Not just the process is flawed. The product of that process, the Omnibus appropriations bill before us today, is flawed, too. It is unfair.

That back-room, unrepresentative process has produced legislation that deserves to be defeated, not just because of the way it was cobbled together, but because of what will happen if it becomes law.

Here is one result of that process: millions of men and women who will lose their right to time and a half overtime pay, a cornerstone of our workers' rights for over half a century.

Both the House and the Senate, with bipartisan majorities, voted last year to block new Labor Department rules that weaken overtime protections. But this bill cancels out that decision, allowing those rules to go forward.

The latest news from the jobs front--that hundreds of thousands of Americans have given up looking for work after we have gone through 3 years of job losses--sent a shock through financial markets. It should worry us all.

Now is not the time to be cutting the pay of those Americans who have jobs. But that is just what weakening overtime pay will do.

While recent economic news has been positive, there is little hope for sustained, healthy economic growth without solid, good-paying jobs. Consumer confidence and consumer spending--the keys to our economy-- ultimately depend on Americans' confidence that they have a secure job, a job that pays a fair wage for a fair day's work.

For over half a century, American workers have known what that meant--a 40-hour workweek, and time and a half if you worked overtime. You could count on that extra pay in exchange for the extra burden of working more than 40 hours a week.

Many workers often have no choice about working overtime--it is up to their boss. But if they have to work those extra hours, their employer is required to pay them time and a half. This has been a cornerstone of the social contract between labor and management, between workers and employers.

But despite the key role of the 40-hour workweek, despite the wide- spread reliance on time and a half pay for work past those 40 hours, this administration has proposed radical changes in the regulations governing overtime pay.

When I spoke here as a cosponsor of Senator Harkin's amendment here on the floor of the Senate back in September, we heard from some supporters of the rule changes that they would not decrease the number of workers eligible for overtime pay.

But if there was any doubt about the real motivation behind these regulations, just look at the regulations themselves. They provide explicit instructions to employers on methods they could use to avoid increasing the pay of employees who, we are told, will become eligible for overtime pay.

So all of those workers we were told would benefit, who would ``automatically'' qualify for time-and-a-half overtime pay, if their pay is under $425 a week, could easily see not one dime of new pay.

Employers are coached on ways to avoid any new costs and still comply with the regulations. So don't tell me this is going to add to workers wages--that claim is refuted in the regulations themselves.

And for other workers, with pay over that threshold, the regulations clearly threaten to take away overtime protections. They want to make it easier for employers to reclassify as many as eight million hourly workers who now get overtime pay, to make them ineligible for overtime pay.

Right now, if you are not ``white collar''--working in management, essentially--your boss has to pay you time and a half for all the work you do over 40 hours a week. The idea is that more highly educated workers, who participate in management, who have significant authority over the workplace, are more properly classified as salaried, not hourly workers. They get a fixed amount of pay, no matter how many hours they may put in a week.

Hourly workers, on the other hand, who do not manage the conditions under which they work, who have less to say about how the workweek is organized, must be compensated if they work more than the basic 40 hours. That has been the definition of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay for more than half a century, and its basic fairness still makes sense today.

But the administration's new regulations would make it easier--would actually create an incentive--for employers to classify workers who have little advanced education and little or no authority, to classify those workers as white collar workers.

Overnight, under these new regulations, millions of workers could lose the right to overtime pay. These rules are designed not only to make it easier to reclassify workers, but to make it pay for employers who do so. They will save money, since they will no longer be required to pay workers the time and a half rate that they are now guaranteed.

No change in the number of hours they could be required to do, no change in their education, no change in their responsibilities--just a change in the regulations in Washington, and they are out overtime pay.

That is one of the many reasons this legislation should be defeated, but it is not the only one.

Right now we have a law on the books that makes sure everyone who buys a gun is checked to see if they have a criminal record--or if they are on our terrorist watch list.

Those records are kept for 90 days--long enough to find out if a gun was sold to a criminal or terrorist, someone who initially may have appeared to have no criminal record or other ``red flag'' that would signal he is a bad guy.

Ninety-seven percent of the times that the reporting system discovered that a bad guy--a terrorist, a wife-beater, whatever--had mistakenly been sold--a weapon, it took more than 24 hours to figure it out. Destroying those records in 24 hours will destroy our chances of catching bad guys.

The change in this legislation will mean that 97 percent of the criminals or others who are mistakenly sold a weapon will go undetected by a system that was supposed to make us safer. Does the public know about this? I don't think so. That is because of the closed-door, backroom deal making that cobbled this massive bill together. This provision has never previously been considered by the House or the Senate.

Bad process, bad product.

And that is true for what the leadership did with the issue of media ownership.

Last year, the FCC decided to abandon its long-standing limitation that said no company or person could own television stations reaching more than

35 percent of the Nation's viewing audience. The FCC raised that limit to 45 percent, threatening harmful consolidation among media outlets that could undermine competition and diversity among broadcast voices.

The FCC's actions were met with consternation from all sides of the political spectrum, and both the House and Senate voted with bipartisan majorities to forestall this change. But the will of the Congress was cast aside.

The leadership of the Congress--mind you, not the Members of the House and Senate--under pressure from an administration eager to take care of large corporate interests, removed the 1-year restriction on the FCC's changes and replaced it with a new permanent 39 percent cap.

The list of bad provisions goes on. When we wrote the farm bill in the last Congress, with the support of both parties, we included a requirement that when we shop at the grocery store, we know what country our produce and meats come from.

That rule--requiring labeling that indicates the country of origin-- was to go into effect this year. But this legislation delays that rule for 2 years.

It rewrites the farm bill to delay that rule--something neither the House nor the Senate voted to do.

Since that change was put into this bill, we have now found out that mad cow disease made its way into our country from Canada. Not a major cause for alarm, but certainly a lot of folks would now want to know where their beef comes from. But it will be 2 years before they get that information, if this bill passes.

There is one other thing that has to be mentioned here today. We have come through the last 3 years, including several months of strong economic growth, but we are still not creating new jobs.

For the first time since the Great Depression, we have gone 3 straight years without creating a single new job. Not one. The unemployment rate has come down recently, but that is because the job picture is so bleak that over 300,000 people just stopped looking.

Long-term unemployment is a much bigger problem these days, especially in our hard-hit manufacturing sector.

The kinds of changes we have gone through in recent years means that many of those jobs just won't be coming back. Those that will come back will return slowly. That leaves hundreds of thousands of Americans running out of their long-term unemployment benefits.

But we went out of session last fall and let the extended unemployment compensation program just expire, at the worst possible time. And we come back today with this appropriations bill, leaving that program expired and those Americans without benefits.

There are now 2.4 million fewer jobs overall than there were when the last recession began. Every month, about 100,000 more workers exhaust their existing benefits. The most recent report of people dropping out of the job hunt altogether is all the proof we need that long-term unemployment is a key feature of this economy right now.

This is not the time to let the program expire, but this bill, which covers so many programs and so many policies in so many parts of our Government, fails to address this problem.

That is unacceptable.

For the bad policies that are in it, and for the good policies that have been dropped from it or simply ignored, I urge my colleagues to join me in voting against cloture on this bill.

This conference report continues the administration's attempt to undo the equation we put in place when I wrote the 1994 Crime Bill: more police equals less crime. The conference report cuts COPS by 24 percent, and cuts the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program almost in half. These are proven programs that help local police departments beef up their staffs and modernize their equipment, and the cuts couldn't be coming at a worse time.

There is only $756 million for COPS in the conference report, a drastic cut from the fiscal year 2003 level of $978 million. COPS' core program--the initiative that helps local police departments hire new community police officers--is funded at just $120 million, a 30-percent cut from last year and a far cry from the late nineties when the hiring program regularly received over a billion dollars per year.

These cuts are shortsighted, ill-conceived, and I fear they will significantly hurt local law enforcement's ability to fight crime. In a time of color-coded alerts, a rising murder rate, and an FBI increasingly focused on counterterrorism and away from violent crime, we are inexplicably asking the men and women of law enforcement to do much more with much less.

When asked to justify this approach, the administration responds that Federal resources for ``first responders'' are way up. Respectfully, that simply is not an adequate answer, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of local law enforcement. Defending the homeland against a terrorist attack and preventing a woman from being raped are simply two different problems that require different solutions and different sets of contributions from the Federal Government.

I think Massachusetts Public Safety Secretary Edward Flynn is on the right track when he says, ``terrorism is the monster that ate criminal justice''.

We need to dedicate sufficient resources to fight international terrorism and local crime at the same time, but this conference report falls far short in this regard.

I recently received a letter from the International Association of Chiefs of Police where they express ``grave concern'' over the funding levels for COPS and the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant contained in this conference report. In their letter, the IACP states their ``belief that at this crucial time in our history, we cannot afford to reduce the effectiveness of our nation's state and local law enforcement agencies by cutting vital federal assistance programs.''

The Nation's police chiefs are not alone in their concern. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors:

too many families are still being ravaged by illegal drugs,

too many citizens and law enforcement officers are put in

danger due to drug and gun related crimes, and property and

violent crimes are still a major issue in too many

communities.

They also strongly oppose the cuts in this conference report.

The National Association of Police Organizations wrote me to say that this conference report ``does not sufficiently address the needs of America's police officers in their dual fight against terrorist threats and domestic crime.'' I cannot support the cuts this conference report proposes, and I encourage my colleagues to listen to their mayors and police officers before casting their vote.

Mr. McCain. Mr. President, because of time constraints, my comments will be brief. I will, however, make extensive remarks about the omnibus bill at a later time.

We are nearly 4 full months into fiscal year 2004 and we are still without 7 of the 13 annual appropriations bills. For the second time in less than a year, we are considering a massive omnibus appropriations bill, with this one totaling a whopping $820 billion. Sadly, this conference report is loaded with over $11 billion in special interest pork-barrel projects and legislative riders that have no business in this or any other spending bill.

This omnibus appropriations bill has received considerable and justifiable criticism in the press and it should serve as an alarming wake up call. We are facing a $500 billion deficit. That's half of a trillion dollars--the largest ever. And what do we do when faced with such a problem? We spend even more. An article in Sunday's Washington Post pointed out what really drives the agenda here on Capitol Hill. The article states:

Today, the country still faces serious problems--oil

dependence, child poverty, new gaps in health care coverage,

deteriorating rural communities and failing public schools.

One doesn't have to be an advocate of big government to

believe Congress has a role in crafting pragmatic solutions

to these problems. Yet as Congress returns this week, none of

these issues is on the agenda. What is on the agenda? Why,

things Congress has always excelled in: dispensing pork

barrel projects and using taxpayer's money to reward

supportive lobbies.

Additionally, an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal states:

The bottom line is truly shocking. Passage of the omnibus

would raise total discretionary spending to more than $900

billion in 2004. The editorial goes on to note that this

increase should not be blamed on the war. It states that, At

18.6 percent, the increase in non-defense discretionary

spending under the 107th Congress, 2002-2003, is far and away

the

biggest in decades. In 2003, total Federal spending topped an

inflation-adjusted $20,000 per household for the first time

since World War II. Let me point out just a few of the things

that are included in this bill: $450,000 for the Johnny

Appleseed Heritage Center in Ohio; $200,000 to the Rock and

Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, OH for the Rockin'

the Schools education program; $175,000 to paint a mural on a

flood wall in a city in Missouri; $325,000 for construction

of a swimming pool in Salinas, CA.

In addition to literally thousands of earmarks, this conference report contains major policy changes. Some of these provisions include legislative language authorizing the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fisheries rationalization plan, which would divide 90 percent of that crab market among just a small group of processors. Fishermen could only sell to those processors and only those processors would sell to consumers. This proposal has not been considered by the authorizing committees of jurisdiction, nor requested by the Administration.

Another legislative item included in this bill include media ownership provisions to undo a June 2 FCC regulation. Further, language is included mandating that the background check approval records issued after the purchase of a firearm be destroyed within 24 hours instead of the current policy of 90 days. This omnibus legislation also contains an environmental rider meant to benefit Briggs and Stratton, a major manufacturer of small engines. There is also language that redirects $40 million for construction of a cargo terminal at the Port of Philadelphia that is designed to support high speed cargo vessels for a private venture. Today, not only do the vessels not exit, but their design is based on unproven technology.

We have to change the way we do business around here. Through our wasteful spending practices, we have succeeded in tying a millstone of debt around the necks of future generations of Americans. Today, we have on opportunity to make serious and substantial change in the way we treat the American taxpayer. Let's rise to the challenge. Let's not squander this opportunity. I urge my colleagues to vote against cloture on this horrendous piece of legislation.

construction of a port of philadelphia marine cargo terminal

Mr. President, I voted against this bill today because I would never do anything that risks the future of Medicare, and I fear this bill takes the first steps toward the breakup of the traditional Medicare Program. In addition, this administration's misplaced priorities put enormous tax cuts first and left us little room to provide the comprehensive and fair drug benefit that seniors deserve. We should have done this right and provided a better drug benefit without jeopardizing the Medicare Program that has given seniors health security for 38 years.

My vote today was one of the more difficult decisions I have faced in my Senate career. For starters, let me note that not all of this bill is bad. Some people will get help with their drug costs. We in Delaware are fortunate to already benefit from unique programs that have long helped low-income seniors with their prescription drug costs, and this bill should build upon that foundation. It also offers some coverage to many middle class seniors and disabled citizens. All in all, these aspects of this bill are not enormously different from those in the Senate-passed bill that I voted for earlier this year.

This bill also includes sorely needed payment adjustments for hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers, which will ensure that Medicare patients get quality care and continued access to important medical services.

On the downside, however, this legislation still has a large gap in coverage--forced by budget constraints--in which the Government provides no subsidy for prescription drugs. I know that many people will find this gap confusing, disappointing, and burdensome. I am also very concerned that this bill does not sufficiently protect millions of retirees who currently receive good health care benefits from their former employers.

If we had done this the right way, we would have held back on some of the excessive tax cuts pushed through over the last three years and allocated more of our resources to meeting our obligation to provide a complete prescription drug benefit. Instead, the administration's misplaced priorities tied our hands.

If this legislation were just limited to the prescription drug benefit and the provider payment modifications, it would probably have my vote as being about as good as could be done under the current budget circumstances. But I have very serious concerns about other provisions tacked onto this bill that will take the Medicare Program and the health care benefits for 40 million Americans into uncharted and hazardous waters. This bill takes the first step toward monumental changes in the very foundation of how Medicare operates, beginning a push toward the breakup of the entire program.

The strength of the Medicare system has been its broad coverage, its simplicity, and the open choices patients enjoy. This bill sets in motion a new system that could tear down each of these advantages.

On balance I cannot support this legislation. To me, the negative features have such damaging potential that they overwhelm the benefits. Had the negotiations on this bill been done in the open, with the full participation of both parties, I think we could have crafted a better bill. I cannot vote for a bill that sets us on the path toward undermining the traditional Medicare Program that has worked so well for decades.

Mr. President, it is with tremendous pride that I rise today to commemorate that after 213 years, Delaware's original copy of Bill of Rights ratified in 1790, is returning home.

This is a story steeped in history, mixed with some modern-day political negotiations--worth celebrating.

While Delaware holds the distinction as the first State to ratify the Constitution, on December 7, 1787, it was the sixth State to ratify the Bill of Rights--on January 28, 1790. The two signors of this historic document were Jehu Davis and George Mitchell. And they were quite efficient. Instead of drafting a separate letter, as most States did, to notify Congress of Delaware's ratification of the Bill of Rights, they simply penned their signatures on the Bill of Rights document and returned it whole cloth to Congress. Thus, Delaware had no copy of what Davis and Mitchell signed.

The National Archives, to its immense credit, conserved Delaware's original copy of the Bill of Rights in pristine condition for more than two centuries. However, two years ago Delaware's Public Archives, State House Majority Leader Wayne Smith, and the Delaware General Assembly asked the congressional delegation to help negotiate the return of our Bill of Rights document. We all agreed that this historic document should be displayed for all to see in Delaware, not stored in the basement of the National Archives in Washington, DC.

The National Archives is, justifiably, quite protective of its documents. Suffice to say that it took ten months of negotiations, meetings, letters and conference calls to come to terms on an agreement that returns this document to Delaware, while retaining the National Archives legal and preservation rights to it.

Starting this December 7, on my State's 216th birthday, its original Bill of Rights will be on display for all to see. It will be on view at our new, state-of-the-art Public Archives Building in Dover, DE. And that is exactly where this document belongs--on public display where school students and adults alike can appreciate its historic significance.

We should all be proud of this accomplishment because it's part of our history. The Bill of Rights is a symbol of who we are and the values we hold dear. It ties us to our past and reminds us of those principles that will guide us into the future.

Mr. President, one of the greatest challenges we face today is how to address the needs of failed states--or countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--and how to rebuild post- conflict countries. It is a critical issue, and one that we cannot afford to get wrong--for the sake of the people living in those nations, and for the sake of our own security.

Last January, a bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found to no one's surprise that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as posing grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.''

The most obvious case in point is the reconstruction of Iraq. I've spent many hours on this floor making clear that we have to get it right in Iraq. And in addition to Iraq, unfortunately, we can talk about many other states that are either unstable, or are tenuously recovering from past conflicts including Liberia, Afghanistan, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. We need comprehensive strategies to address the many needs in rebuilding all of these struggling countries.

A significant component of reconstruction, in my view, is to tap into the store of human as well as financial resources here in the United States. We should allow, and indeed encourage, immigrants from post- conflict countries to use their skills, talents,and knowledge to be part of the efforts to rebuild. In fact, the diaspora presents one of the best collective resources that exists: these people know the communities. They know the culture. They know the language--more than any contractors, more than any humanitarian workers from the outside, no matter how well-trained, no matter how much expertise they may have.

So today, Mr. President, I am introducing legislation creating a visa ``Return of Talent'' program.

The idea is simple: a Return of Talent program would allow legal immigrants in the United States to return home to help with reconstruction. ``Legal Permanent Residents'' will be able to return temporarily to their countries after a conflict to help rebuild, without their time out of the United States affecting their ability to meet their requirements for U.S. citizenship.

Under current law, a Legal Permanent Resident who want to apply for U.S. citizenship is required to be physically present in the United States for at least half of the five years immediately preceding the date of filing the naturalization application.

This residency requirement could be particularly difficult to meet for those who may have family and friends at home who are in desperate need of help. We should not stand in their way of going home, holding over them their hope for citizenship here in the United States. We should be helping them bring their talent and expertise home, helping them help their country of origin at a time of greatest need.

Recent press articles have highlighted stories of such indivduals-- engineers, bankers, teachers and translators--who are willing to contribute to reconstruction efforts. They simply cannot do so without jeopardizing their immigration status.

This legislation would encourage those skilled and committed individuals to return to their countries of origin to revive the business, industry, agriculture, education and other sectors that have been weakened or destroyed after years of conflict.

The Return of Talent program would include any individual who demonstrates an ability and willingness to make a material contribution to the post-conflict reconstruction in their countries of origin.

The program would apply to immigrants from countries where U.S. armed forces are, or have engaged in the past ten years, in armed conflict or peacekeeping, or to immigrants who are from countries where the United Nations Security Council has authorized peacekeeping operations in the past ten years.

Estimates of individuals who could participate in this program are relatively low. For example, the United States admitted 1,764 Afghani and 5,196 Iraqi immigrants in 2002, and similar levels since 1992, who are not Legal Permanent Residents eligible to pursue U.S. citizenship. Yet, while the program would have a small impact on the U.S. naturalization process, the contributions of even a few hundred individuals could have a tremendous positive effect on post-conflict reconstruction work.

In simple terms, a Return of Talent program makes sense. Everybody wins: The United States is able to support rebuilding efforts; immigrants are able to use their skills and resources to help rebuild their communities without jeopardizing their immigration status; and post-conflict countries, and the people in them, receive much-needed assistance.

We have not done enough in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries that are--or are on the verge of becoming--failed states. As the ``Winning the Peace'' report also states, ``Despite over a decade of recent experience in trying to address the challenges of . . . rebuilding countries following conflict, U.S. capacity of addressing these challenges remains woefully inadequate.''

A Return of Talent program is an important piece of our overall strategy to stabilize and rebuild countries torn by conflict. I urge my colleagues to support his legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, one of the greatest challenges we face today is how to address the needs of failed states--or countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--and how to rebuild post- conflict countries. It is a critical issue, and one that we cannot afford to get wrong--for the sake of the people living in those nations, and for the sake of our own security.

Last January, a bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found to no one's surprise that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as posing grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.''

The most obvious case in point is the reconstruction of Iraq. I've spent many hours on this floor making clear that we have to get it right in Iraq. And in addition to Iraq, unfortunately, we can talk about many other states that are either unstable, or are tenuously recovering from past conflicts including Liberia, Afghanistan, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. We need comprehensive strategies to address the many needs in rebuilding all of these struggling countries.

A significant component of reconstruction, in my view, is to tap into the store of human as well as financial resources here in the United States. We should allow, and indeed encourage, immigrants from post- conflict countries to use their skills, talents,and knowledge to be part of the efforts to rebuild. In fact, the diaspora presents one of the best collective resources that exists: these people know the communities. They know the culture. They know the language--more than any contractors, more than any humanitarian workers from the outside, no matter how well-trained, no matter how much expertise they may have.

So today, Mr. President, I am introducing legislation creating a visa ``Return of Talent'' program.

The idea is simple: a Return of Talent program would allow legal immigrants in the United States to return home to help with reconstruction. ``Legal Permanent Residents'' will be able to return temporarily to their countries after a conflict to help rebuild, without their time out of the United States affecting their ability to meet their requirements for U.S. citizenship.

Under current law, a Legal Permanent Resident who want to apply for U.S. citizenship is required to be physically present in the United States for at least half of the five years immediately preceding the date of filing the naturalization application.

This residency requirement could be particularly difficult to meet for those who may have family and friends at home who are in desperate need of help. We should not stand in their way of going home, holding over them their hope for citizenship here in the United States. We should be helping them bring their talent and expertise home, helping them help their country of origin at a time of greatest need.

Recent press articles have highlighted stories of such indivduals-- engineers, bankers, teachers and translators--who are willing to contribute to reconstruction efforts. They simply cannot do so without jeopardizing their immigration status.

This legislation would encourage those skilled and committed individuals to return to their countries of origin to revive the business, industry, agriculture, education and other sectors that have been weakened or destroyed after years of conflict.

The Return of Talent program would include any individual who demonstrates an ability and willingness to make a material contribution to the post-conflict reconstruction in their countries of origin.

The program would apply to immigrants from countries where U.S. armed forces are, or have engaged in the past ten years, in armed conflict or peacekeeping, or to immigrants who are from countries where the United Nations Security Council has authorized peacekeeping operations in the past ten years.

Estimates of individuals who could participate in this program are relatively low. For example, the United States admitted 1,764 Afghani and 5,196 Iraqi immigrants in 2002, and similar levels since 1992, who are not Legal Permanent Residents eligible to pursue U.S. citizenship. Yet, while the program would have a small impact on the U.S. naturalization process, the contributions of even a few hundred individuals could have a tremendous positive effect on post-conflict reconstruction work.

In simple terms, a Return of Talent program makes sense. Everybody wins: The United States is able to support rebuilding efforts; immigrants are able to use their skills and resources to help rebuild their communities without jeopardizing their immigration status; and post-conflict countries, and the people in them, receive much-needed assistance.

We have not done enough in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries that are--or are on the verge of becoming--failed states. As the ``Winning the Peace'' report also states, ``Despite over a decade of recent experience in trying to address the challenges of . . . rebuilding countries following conflict, U.S. capacity of addressing these challenges remains woefully inadequate.''

A Return of Talent program is an important piece of our overall strategy to stabilize and rebuild countries torn by conflict. I urge my colleagues to support his legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, for our national security, for our economic future, for the health of our environment, our country needs an effective, comprehensive national energy policy. We must free ourselves from dependence on foreign sources of energy. We must leave behind costly, inefficient energy practices and invest in cutting-edge technologies that will keep our economy the most productive in the world. And we must protect and heal the natural environment that we will leave to our children and grandchildren.

The legislation before us fails to meet those needs. When I, and 83 other Senators, voted for the Energy Policy Act on July 31, it was very a different piece of legislation. Unfortunately, the bill has been drastically changed since then. Without sufficient discussion and input from our side of the aisle, unacceptable parts were added to this legislation and crucial parts were taken away. We have been left with a bloated symbol of lost opportunity. I cannot support it.

This is not a trivial matter. This bill would set our energy policy for the next 10 years; we must get it right. Consider how things have changed since we last enacted an energy policy in 1992 and what new challenges we will face in the next 10 years.

Cracks in our energy policy, both in infrastructure and regulation, have become evident in the last few years. They have been most clearly shown during the Enron scandal and the August blackout in the Northeast and Midwest. These were clear signals of serious problems in the current system. Sixty million people were affected by the blackout, and it cost New York City alone $1 billion. This should have been a call to action, but it was not. This bill fails to address the weaknesses in our electrical grid that were exposed over the summer.

The Federal Energy Regulation Commission is prohibited in this bill, until 2007, from reforming the national power grid through mandating Regional Transmission Organizations, which would be necessary to ensure that further blackouts don't occur. This legislation also requires those who want to construct a Regional Transmission Organization to foot the full bill themselves, basically guaranteeing that it won't happen. I have received complaints from the Public Service Commission in Delaware on this very provision.

As our colleagues from the West Coast have reminded us so forcefully, Enron-style energy market manipulation was a major force in undermining the energy system in that part of the country. But this bill does not close the loopholes, with cute names like ``Fatboy'' and ``Get Shorty,'' that allowed Enron to inflate their profits, and that directly caused some of the disruptive and costly power shortages.

The bill also rescinds the Public Utility Holding Company Act without providing an adequate replacement. PUHCA has for decades protected energy customers from energy corporations, like Enron, who might undertake predatory actions or make risky acquisitions or mergers. The repeal of this legislation leaves consumers holding the bag if a power company loses money on a non-energy investment. They could just put it on their customers' electric bills.

Not only does this bill not address the problems of the past, it doesn't plan at all for the future. Our reliance on oil and gas today is inescapable, but the need to move toward something better is undeniable. We will invest billions of taxpayer dollars in this bill for a resource that can't possibly sustain us. Our dependence on oil ties us to internal politics of unstable countries around the world. It condemns us to unsustainable levels of pollution. It should not be a very radical idea to suggest that we need to shift the type of energy that we use in this country. We consume almost 25 percent of the world's daily production of oil, though we hold only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. This is a deficit that we will pay for with lack of control over our own economy and security. We are bound to the price fixing of Middle East suppliers and unrest in South America and the states of the former Soviet Union, and we will continue to be unless we invest in alternate sources of energy and curb the rate at which we consume.

Unfortunately, this bill takes no major steps toward these goals. In fact, the conference refused to include renewable portfolio standards, supported by 52 Senators, which would have required utilities to generate 10 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020.

To deal with our dependence on fossil fuels, we must address both supply and demand. But this bill fails to provide us with a sensible energy conservation program. It doesn't address the need to improve fuel efficiency in our cars and trucks. In that regard, we can now count China among the countries with more foresight than this legislation provides on the issue of automobile efficiency. And this bill simply dropped a measure, accepted 99 to 1 by the Senate, that would have instructed the President to reduce our daily oil consumption by a little more than 5 percent by 2013.

Instead of a forward-looking policy on energy, this bill has been turned into a vehicle to undermine our Nation's environmental laws to the benefit of fossil fuel producers. The bill spends $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars for the purchase of conventional coal-burning technologies, which reduces future demand for ``clean-coal.'' At the same time, subsidies to promote the cleanest coal technologies have been cut by 20 percent.

It rolls back provisions of the Clean Air Act, by allowing communities to bypass compliance deadlines on ozone attainment standards if they can prove that some of the pollution drifts into their area from upwind locations. Unfortunately, almost all communities with poor air quality can meet this test. The result is a significant weakening of the Clean Air Act and a slap in the face to cities, like Wilmington, DE, who have met clean air standards despite dealing with upwind pollution.

This is not only an environmental problem. Currently, 130 million Americans are living in areas that don't comply with the air quality standards, and non-compliance has been linked to an increased occurrence of respiratory problems. A group of health organizations including Physicians for Social Responsibility and the American Lung Association have estimated that this rollback would cause more than 385,000 asthma attacks and nearly 5,000 hospital admissions per year.

The Clean Water Act has likewise been weakened. Oil and gas drilling sites are exempted in this bill from run-off compliance, and hydraulic fracturing, an oil and gas recovery technique, has been completely removed from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

These are two major changes, but there are other assaults on the environment. For instance, royalties charged to oil and gas recovery units on public land were reduced; offshore oil drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf was authorized; and, a Senate-approved provision, authorizing research on global climate change, was eliminated. This bill prefers ignorance to understanding when it comes to the most important environmental issues that our planet faces today.

And, in perhaps the most transparent concession to special interests, this bill not only waives liability, retroactively to September 5, for those who have produced the toxic substance, MTBE, that is polluting our ground water supply, but it grants its manufacturers $2 billion in transition funds and doesn't ban the additive until 2014, a provision which can be easily waived by the President or any Governor. This leaves those affected communities with a $29 billion clean up tab.

But, that is not the only tab that this bill leaves with the American people. It leaves us to pay $25 billion,

mostly in pork, almost half in backward-looking tax breaks to fossil fuel producers. That is simply too much to be spent on a bad idea. This is not a roadmap, a vision on the horizon, to guide us for the next decade.

This bill fails to give us the comprehensive energy policy our Nation needs in this new century. It does nothing to free us from our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels. It does not set a clear course toward cleaner, more efficient technologies. And it fails to protect our environment. In too many ways it has sacrificed the long-term interests that we all share for shortsighted special interests. We can, we must do better.

Madam President, I feel like I am part of New Jersey. The Senator from New Jersey is--I don't want to hurt his reputation--my closest ally in the Senate. We share a common border. Although I always kid him, as big as New Jersey is, the Delaware River is owned by the State of Delaware up to the high river mark in New Jersey. It is one of our claims to fame. We literally lap upon New Jersey's shore. But I thank him. I will be very brief.

Madam President, I rise today to congratulate French President Jacques Chirac for having taken resolute steps to stop attacks on Jewish sites in France and, more broadly, to address some of the causes of anti-Semitism among Muslim youths in that country.

As you know, Madam President, France has a large Muslim minority population. In the past, I have been strongly critical of President Chirac, the French, and other Europeans for not having been sufficiently attentive to the cancer of anti-Semitism that still exists in Europe, and in the United States to some extent.

Some have ignored the insidious way criticism of some Israeli policies has been conflated into pure anti-Semitism. Others have shied away from meeting the problem head on because of fears of provoking more violence in Europe. Still others have refrained from speaking out for fear of alienating domestic electoral constituencies.

Whatever their motives, until recently, precious few European leaders have demonstrated very much leadership with regard to combatting anti- Semitism, which is on the rise.

Last Saturday, a Jewish school near Paris was destroyed by an arson attack. Two days later, President Chirac convened a meeting attended by Prime Minister Raffarin and other top officials to react to this latest outrage. The result of the meeting, as reported in the New York Times, was a package of measures including beefed-up policing and prosecution of anti-Semitic violence, and also an earmark of nearly $8 billion worth of investment in urban renewal to clean up neighborhoods that breed Islamic fundamentalism.

President Chirac was quoted as saying: ``Anti-Semitism is contrary to all the values of France,'' and that Jewish Frenchmen and Frenchwomen are at home in France just as are all other groups.

Last month, the Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on anti-Semitism in Europe, which revealed the shocking extent of the problem. Recent public opinion polls in Europe have confirmed our hearing's testimony.

One of the most important weapons in the fight against anti-Semitism is political leadership. Or as Justice Holmes said: The best disinfectant is the light of day. The best disinfectant is light, and shedding light on the anti-Semitism in Europe, and criticizing it, can only be done effectively by Europe's political leadership.

France's measures are, to be sure, only a beginning of a long struggle to eradicate this disease from the European body politic. I have been critical in the past when European leaders have not responded. Now President Chirac should be complimented for having had the courage to forcefully show the way. He deserves credit, and I hope it is the beginning of a process.

(The remarks of Mr. Biden pertaining to the submission of S. Con. Res. 82 and S. Con. Res. 83 are printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')

Madam President, I thank my friend from New Jersey. We use that phrase very loosely around

here, but he is my friend, and I thank him for his courtesy.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator.

(The remarks of Mr. Lautenberg pertaining to the introduction of S. 1882 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. President, I rise today in recognition of the centenary celebration of Ralph Bunche's birth

Ralph Bunche was an extraordinary man whose success was a definitive accomplishment in the history of America.

His grandmother was born into slavery.

His father was a barber in a shop for whites only.

His mother was a musician.

When his mother and father died his grandmother took him to California where her influence and the perspective she gave him on life and liberty shaped his future and, to some extent, the history of the Nation.

He was a brilliant man, a musician, debater, athlete, a summa cum laude student and valedictorian. A loving husband to Ruth and father of Joan, Jane and Ralph Jr.

He went to Harvard, taught at Howard University and earned his doctorate comparing French rule in Togoland and Dahomey.

And when the civil rights movement came he spoke out loudly and his message was clear: ``Segregation and democracy are incompatible,'' he said. ``Racial prejudice is an unreasoned phenomenon without scientific basis in biology or anthropology.''

But Ralph Bunche did not want to be remembered for his race. He wanted to be remembered for his accomplishments and his competence, for his dedication to service and his commitment to the recognition of the fundamental rights of men and women to live in harmony and peace.

He came from a generation of Americans who believed that it was wrong to recognize a man for the color of his skin, that we should, instead, recognize men and women for the power of their ideas and the contribution they make to the community.

Ralph Bunche did not want to be remembered as the first African American who was the first to graduate from University of California at Los Angeles as valedictorian or the first to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. in government and international relations, or the first to become Chief U.N. Mediator.

Least of all, the first to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He wished to be remembered simply as an American who answered his country's call of duty.

That is not a shortcoming . . . It is not a slight to any man or woman of color in our society . . . it is, however, a statement of hope, the hope I grew up with, that we can one day be a society that judges us not for our differences but for our accomplishments and the fact that we, as human beings, made a difference.

Ralph Bunche was one of those human beings who made a difference and left an extraordinary legacy.

By tailoring the language in the 11th and 12th Chapters of the U.N. Charter, Bunche made it possible for the United Nations to recognize the peaceful self-determination of those being exploited by colonialism, and through sheer force of will he recovered from an assassination attempt which killed 4 of his colleagues to negotiate an armistice agreement ending the first Arab-Israeli war.

With an eye for the future he presided over the conference which finalized the statues for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And in response to an international crisis he established the foundations for the first international peacekeeping operation in Egypt.

This legacy is manifest in his dedication to the United Nations, and to the cause of peace for which we will always remember him.

His words were perhaps prophetic when he said: ``If today we speak of peace, we also speak of the United Nations, for in this era peace and the United Nations, have become inseparable. If the United Nations cannot ensure peace there will be none.

``If war should come it will be only because the United Nations has failed.

``But the United Nations need not fail.

``Surely every man of reason must work and pray to the end that it will not fail.''

Those are not popular words today but they are truthful words, a heartfelt notion from a man whose life and work centered on a way to bring people--all people--together to solve problems.

In concluding his Nobel Lecture, he said: ``There will be no security in our world, no release from agonizing tension, no genuine progress, no enduring peace, until, in Shelley's fine words, reasons voice, loud as the voice of nature, shall have waked the nations.' ''

Today we honor this visionary man of peace as an accomplished scholar, a distinguished diplomat, a tireless campaigner for the civil rights of all people in every nation, and as one of the 20th centuries foremost figures and a role model for every young man and woman, black or white, Christian, Muslim, or Jew.

I ask all my colleagues to join with me in recognizing the life and work of Ralph Bunche by passing this resolution.

Mr. President, today I rise to support a United Nations Democracy Caucus to address questions that underlie a countless number of our foreign policy decisions, particularly in today's climate:

How can the United States be more effective in advancing our foreign policy priorities?

How can we be more active in collaborating with our allies on issues of common concern?

How can we be more productive in promoting the values upon which this nation was founded and getting our message across to those around the world who look to us for leadership?

Three years ago, in Warsaw, Poland, the United States took a step to address these questions when it became one of eight convening countries of the ``Community of Democracies,'' a network of representatives of over 100 nations that meets every 2 years to promote the advancement of global democracy and human rights.

Two years later, in Seoul, Korea, many of these countries reaffirmed their commitment to collaborating with one another and agreed to work together in existing international and regional organizations.

Hence, the idea of establishing a ``democracy caucus'' within the United Nations began to take form.

The idea is simply this: democratic nations share common values, and should work together at the United Nations to promote those values.

A simple notion that, in my view, makes extraordinary sense.

What has happened in the last several years is that support for the establishment of a democracy caucus in the United Nations has begun to take root among foreign policy experts in the United States.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has endorsed the idea, as has Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

In addition, it has been endorsed by a broad-based coalition of organizations and advocacy groups like Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, the American Jewish Committee, the American Bar Association and the Council for Community of Democracies.

In recent months, even senior Bush administration officials have expressed interest in the establishment of a democracy caucus-- recognizing that the United States would be more effective if we were to work together and organize with other like-minded countries.

Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, Kim Holmes, recently deemed a U.N. democracy caucus as ``an idea whose time has arrived''.

Working together with like-minded nations is a logical and practical way to conduct foreign policy. We build coalitions in the Senate. We build coalitions in Congress. And it makes sense to build coalitions in the United Nations, not only for the sake of forging common positions on issues of mutual concern, but also to provide a counterbalance to other coalitions that are well organized in the United Nations, but do not necessarily share our goals.

The 115-member nonaligned movement (NAM) is an example. Last year, an Independent Task Force co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and Freedom House argued that ``the United States is frequently outmaneuvered and outmatched at the UN'' because the cooperative work of the NAM ``binds the organization's many democratic nations to the objectives and blocking tactics of its remaining tyrannies.''

A democracy caucus would give us a new and potentially effective tool within the United Nations to counter coalitions that act in a manner inimical to our interests.

So today I am submitting a resolution promoting the establishment of a democracy caucus within the United Nations.

The resolution is straightforward: it expresses the support of this Congress for a U.N. democracy caucus and outlines the vision that I, and others, have of what such a caucus would do, and how it would go about doing it.

The general idea is that a democracy caucus would convene at the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and other U.N. bodies on a regular basis.

Members of the democracy caucus would work together to forge common positions to bolster democracy and democratic principles, advance human rights, and fight terrorism.

Furthermore, this bill also talks about who will join a democracy caucus.

We need to establish a criteria for which countries would be considered democracies, and which would not. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch.

The Community of Democracies forum has established such criteria by drawing on major principles of international law and international standards set forth in the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Drawing up this criteria was a collaborative process during the First Ministerial of the community of Democracies, and the guidelines have been effective in laying the foundation and advancing the goals of the forum.

Therefore, this legislation models the U.N. democracy caucus' eligibility criteria on that already established by and for the Community of Democracies.

I envision that the U.N. democracy caucus would advocate that states that are deemed to be gross violators of human rights, sponsors of terrorist activities, or subjects of United Nations sanctions, not be elected to leadership positions in the United Nations General Assembly or other United Nations bodies.

This issue has received, and deservedly so, much attention this year--particularly after Libya was elected to serve as chair of the Commission of Human Rights.

In my view, the credibility of U.N. institutions is undermined when the members of its bodies--and particularly those in leadership positions--fall into this camp of bad actors.

According to the Freedom House 2003 survey, of the world's 192 governments, 63 percent of them have an electoral democracy form of government.

Furthermore, in the 2002 meeting of the Community of Democracies in Seoul, 118 nations were invited to participate, based upon their commitment to shred democratic values.

These numbers tell us that a democracy caucus within the U.N. would have a strong base from which to begin its work; it could be robust from its inauguration.

At the First Ministerial Conference of the Community of Democracies in Warsaw, Poland, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said, ``When the United Nations can truly call itself a community of democracies, the charter's noble ideals of protecting human rights and promoting `social progress in larger freedoms' will have been brought much closer.''

In that spirit, I submit a resolution in support of the establishment of a U.N. democracy caucus.