Floor Statements

Will the majority leader yield for a question?

Yes.

So I am clear as to what the process is now that has been structured, you have used the term it has to be a ``relevant'' amendment. But, essentially, under the present process, is it not true that for any amendment to move forward in this body it would have to move forward on the basis of unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment?

Mr. President, if the majority leader would yield for a further question, essentially, we have set up a process which is extremely constricted. And, in fact, in comparison

with the Rules Committee, it is even more constricted than the House process because any Member--and there are 100 Members in this body--who does not like the fact somebody is going to offer an amendment which might affect their interests--and, believe me, there isn't an amendment that will be offered that would not have opposition on the other side-- is going to be knocked down by an objection from that individual Member.

So you have essentially shut the floor of the Senate down because the only amendments that can be brought up would be amendments that would have unanimous consent, which means 100 people have to agree to them. Basically, they are amendments of no impact or significance, relevant or irrelevant.

Mr. President, if the majority leader would yield further, of course, the end of that sentence should have been: Yes, but I control the ability to allow those amendments to come forward.

And, in fact, it has been made fairly clear that control will be exercised by the leadership in a way that limits amendments that are brought forward to those which are agreed to by the majority leader until we get to the point where the majority leader is going to file a motion for cloture, which, on a farm bill, of course, would most likely be successful because we all know everybody around here is ``in the field,'' so to say. I would not say ``in the tent,'' but they are in the field for the farmer.

So as a practical matter, this is an extraordinarily closed process. Just to use one example, the majority leader said--he threw out, and maybe it was just a throw-away line--estate taxes shouldn't be brought onto this bill because they are not relevant, under the majority leader's terms. If I want to offer an amendment which says we should reform the death tax--which I might like to offer in light of the fact there is a tax title there--I happen to think that has a huge impact on the farming community because, for the most part, it is family farms and small businesses that are most impacted by the death tax. But we have already been told that would not be a relevant amendment.

Mr. President I don't want to beat a dead subsidy, so I will constrain myself to this last question.

The point is pretty obvious. Sure, any Senator on any bill can object to setting aside an amendment. That is not the way the institution has ever worked, in my experience. The way the institution works is the amendment process is a free-flowing, Wild West exercise around here, especially on bills such as this, which are huge authorizing bills with a lot of mandatory funding in them. Amendments are simply taken up in seriatim as they are offered.

What will happen now, and the majority leader has been specific about this and very open about this, he is going to limit the ability to bring forward amendments, and the unanimous consent is not going to be granted unless he deems those amendments are relevant to the underlying bill, which means in his context of what is relevant. Well, a lot of us will have different views on what that means, as I pointed out on the death tax alone as an issue.

So this is a process of shutting down the amendment process on the farm bill. The last time we debated the farm bill, we had 245 amendments and 19 rollcall votes, and we were on it for 4 weeks. I think on the first day or the second day of the farm bill debate around here, for those of us who may not be enamored with the bill, even though we know a lot of effort was put into it--because it spends a lot of money, creates a lot of new subsidies and programs, and uses a lot of budgetary gimmicks--we would like to have a much more open process, and I am disappointed we are not going to.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate the majority leader's explanation of his position. But I think in his own explanation he raises the issues on which we are concerned. He has now taken off the table the estate tax. I cannot think of anything that is more relevant to the farmers, to the family farm, than the ability to pass that farm on to your children without having it wiped out by punitive and other inappropriate taxes, the death tax.

He has now taken off the table global warming issues. Well, I have to say from my little knowledge of that issue--I studied it a bit, I have spent a lot of time on it in a couple of narrow areas such as acid rain. Farming is a critical issue in the issue of global warming. What is done on a farm has a huge impact both positively and negatively on global warming.

Then he took off the table the issue of labor, labor questions. Well, in my experience, labor questions have a huge impact on farm policy, especially the immigration labor issues, how you get people who are immigrants to help you pick apples in New Hampshire, and the potatoes in Idaho. That is a labor issue.

So his concept of relevance is an extremely narrow one. But his concept of relevance is going to be the concept that disciplines this floor relevant to amendments being made.

The Senate was never conceived as being the House. This is supposed to be the place where we get into debates, where we exchange ideas, where people throw out a thought on a bill such as this that is fairly significant, and it gets debated, a position. But that is not going to happen on this bill because the majority leader has decided to execute a process which is even more constricted than what would be the House procedure under this similar bill.

It is certainly inconsistent with the traditions of the Senate, on the issue of the farm bills specifically, but on our traditions generally. He used my statistics to support his position. I do not see how he can do that, quite honestly. Farm bills have always involved significant debate on the floor. Why? Because they are huge policy issues which affect a lot of people in this country--everybody who eats, to begin with, and

that is about everyone--and obviously the farm community, which is the producers of food and do an extraordinary job for our Nation. They have always taken a long time on the floor to debate--weeks, usually. And they have always been open for amendments, which is totally reasonable because of the complexity of the bill. They have often brought in issues such as the death tax, immigration, labor, and how you get migrant labor, global warming, and in the case of New England, for example, they brought in the question of these subsidies, which we find a little difficult to tolerate, which are now being expanded to asparagus. There is a crop that needs a subsidy or the walking-around money that has been put in this bill for the purpose of disasters or the fact that there is probably $20 billion of gimmicks put in this bill that are budgetary games or the fact that they have moved mandatory spending over to tax expenditures.

What an outrage on the budget process. They opened a $3 billion add- on in mandatory spending so they could go out and spend that on various interest groups by creating a tax credit. The list goes on and on and on and on.

Why should we not on this bill get into a debate over the issue of tax policy? Because tax policy underlines the way this bill is paid for. The Senator from Arizona has an extraordinarily good proposal on the death tax. Why should that not be on the table here?

The whole issue of AMT should be on the table, in my humble opinion, because there are a number of farmers, by the way, who pay the AMT tax, a number of them. There are going to be a lot more when we bump up to 20 million people paying that tax next year. These are all relevant to this bill, in my humble opinion, of what relevant is.

By the way, in the Senate, relevance is everything when it comes to the open amendment process. We are not functioning under postcloture rules here. Relevant is irrelevant when it comes to a bill on the floor of the Senate. Anything can be amended in any way, and it is an open bill. That is the concept of the Senate.

If somebody wants to put on this bill policies relative to Nicaraguan housekeepers, they can put that amendment on traditionally. That has no relevance at all to the average American looking at it, but it is the Senate's prerogative.

So we are undermining the fundamental prerogative of the Senate and every Member of the Senate, I think in a very damaging way. I am disappointed in the decision by the majority.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, is the pending business the Graham amendment?

I send an amendment to the Graham amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, I rise in support of the Graham amendment. It is an amendment which I have been involved in helping to develop. It is an amendment that was offered on the Homeland Security bill, and essentially it is the same concept. The purpose of this amendment is something on which I think there is general agreement in the Senate, which is that we supply adequate resources to make sure that our border is secure.

Now, this is an effort we have been pursuing for quite a while. I had the good fortune to be chairman of the Subcommittee on Homeland Security of the Appropriations Committee, and during that time we dramatically increased our commitment to border security, especially in the area of the number of agents, in the area of the number of detention beds, in the area of fencing, in the area of electronic and virtual fencing, and in the area of making technology available and support facilities available to border security agents, and the ICE agents. It is a ramping-up process, however, and there is still a ways to go, although we have made very significant strides. Unfortunately, in our opinion, on this side of the aisle--and this amendment was agreed to by the other side of the aisle for all intents and purposes when it was offered on Homeland Security--there is a need for additional funding to make sure that we put in place the resources which will basically assure the American people that the southern border can and will be secured.

Now, what does that require? Well, this amendment doesn't put specific numbers relative to the number of agents or detention beds or fencing, but what it does put in place is an additional $3 billion in emergency funding, which will essentially go toward three major areas, the first of which is agents. We know that we need about 20,000 agents on the border. We know we are headed toward that number, but we know it is going to take a significant increase in funding for us to get to that.

Now, we wish we could sort of wave a magic wand of dollars and produce these agents overnight, but we can't. These people are highly skilled. They require special qualities as individuals. They have to be obviously law enforcement individuals, but they also have to speak Spanish. They have to have the character and the personality to be able to work in a very intense environment and deal with very threatening situations, while at the same time dealing with people who are coming across the border and trying to make a better way of life for themselves and shouldn't be treated in a criminal way but should be treated as decent human beings trying to seek a better way of life in the United States, who try to come in inappropriately but having to go back. Handling that type of situation requires a little bit more care and sensitivity than dealing with somebody who is coming across to sell drugs.

So the individuals we need to attract into the border security effort are high-quality, high-caliber individuals. You can't gather them up overnight. It takes awhile to get the applicants and then put them through the schooling process, and it does take money to do that. This amendment will allow us, to the extent that we can find these types of individuals to populate this workforce, to do exactly that so we will have a full complement of agents on the southern border.

In addition, it will add detention beds which are critical. There is a belief that we need around 33,000 detention beds, I think is the number. We are headed toward building out a significant number of detention beds, and this amendment--or the dollars in this amendment-- will give the Department the resources it needs to accomplish the additional detention beds.

Why are detention beds important? Because we have gone from a policy which was essentially catch-and-release of 2 years ago, or 3 years ago, to a policy where we actually catch and hold people. We no longer say come back in a few months after we catch you crossing the border illegally; we would say come back in a few months and appear before the court, and what happened was people never came back. We would send them off and they would never return, not surprisingly. Now we hold these folks, and we make sure they have their day in court, that they receive the proper protections of our law enforcement system, but that if they are found to have entered this country illegally, they get sent back. But it takes money, and that is why this amendment is important.

Thirdly, we are building a fence in those areas, a physical fence in those areas where we need fencing. Fencing isn't appropriate for the entire border, but in our more urban areas along the border, it is appropriate, and it is expensive. So this money in this bill will allow us to complete the fencing commitments which we think are necessary. Equally important, it will put in place the operations of what amounts to what we call a virtual fence, but it is a real fence. There will be towers essentially. We have a tremendous electronic surveillance capability, oversight capability through unmanned aerial vehicles. All of this has been put into the works, and we are in the process of building out this system of surveillance in nonphysical fenced areas but areas which will have basically an electronic fence and a visual capability. But that, again, costs a lot of money. So this amendment fully funds the movement in that direction. That is what we need to do. We need to spend this money.

Now, it is a lot of money, $3 billion, there is no question about it. But I see it very much as part of the war on terror, as a necessary element to protecting our culture and our society. A country which can't control its borders, which doesn't know who is coming across its borders, is a country which is at considerable risk. It is at considerable risk for a lot of reasons, but obviously the primary reason is the threat of terrorism. We have an obligation to our citizenry to make sure as people come across the southern border, we know who they are and we know that they are coming across legally.

I think the American people have grown--and rightly so, I am afraid-- a little cynical about our efforts on the southern border. They see us say: Well, we are going to secure the southern border, but then they don't see us putting the resources on the border to accomplish that. These dollars will complete the debate on the issue of resources. The dollars will be there. Whether the management capability is there, whether the build-out capability is there, that is still an issue--I admit to that--but at least the dollars will be in the pipeline to accomplish this goal.

So as a practical matter, I think this is a very important step forward. I congratulate the Senator from South Carolina, who has been a leader on this effort for awhile. He was obviously a leader on immigration reform, and he has backed up his words on immigration reform, in that the first step in effective immigration reform is effective border security.

That is true. That is essential. He has backed that up with this amendment which puts the dollars in place to accomplish this. That is a corollary to this whole debate, which is that we do need to significantly overhaul our immigration laws, make them more appropriate to the times and to the situations. But you cannot get the public

confidence to do immigration reform unless the American people believe at the outset that our border--especially the southern border--is secure from people being able to cross willy-nilly into this country illegally.

These dollars will put in place the resources necessary to accomplish that, to make sure our southern border is secure on the issue of crossings. It may take a couple years for them to bear fruit because there is not an instant response with the hiring of agents. But the fact is that the resources will be in the pipeline to accomplish that, and the American people can have confidence that it is going to occur.

I congratulate the Senator from South Carolina for his amendment. I am happy to join him as a cosponsor of the amendment. I hope it will be adopted unanimously or with a large majority.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to Scott Gudes, who leaves his post at the helm of my Budget Committee staff this week. After 29 years of loyal service to the Federal Government, Scott has chosen to become vice president for government relations for the National Marine Manufacturers Association--a job well suited for a man who loves the sea as much as he does.

When I became chair of the Senate Budget Committee in 2005, I asked Scott if he would serve as my staff director. In under a year, under Scott's stewardship, we passed both a budget for the first time in 2 years, specifically the fiscal year 2006 budget resolution, and a reconciliation bill, the Deficit Reduction Act, DRA--marking the first time in 10 years Congress had passed a reconciliation bill to reduce spending.

The DRA was a notable achievement in that it saved $39 billion, a feat which is practically unheard of around here, as the last time it was done was in 1997. These accomplishments could not have been done without Scott, who worked tirelessly to shepherd each authorizing committee through the often confusing reconciliation process. His unique combination of intellect, humor, and humbleness was a key component in navigating the complex waters of the compromise that was necessary to pass the first substantive deficit reduction legislation in 10 years.

Scott followed up his initial year of success by spearheading efforts to develop a more comprehensive approach to restraining spending. His efforts contributed to the introduction of the Stop Over-Spending Act, a budget process reform bill that helped focus the national debate on solutions to our long-term fiscal challenges. Just this year, Scott helped structure the Conrad/Gregg Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Act of 2007, legislation that will encourage bipartisan action to put our fiscal house back in order. At heart, Scott is a true nonpartisan who recognizes that the best policy is made when both sides of the aisle work together, and his first instinct is to seek out common ground rather than partisan differences.

However, much like Thomas Jefferson chose to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence rather than various elected offices he held, including President, I expect that Scott would rather be remembered for spearheading efforts to write, edit, and publish the ``Budget Committee History'' rather than his impressive legislative credentials. Scott took it upon himself to initiate a historic accounting of the Senate Budget Committee. This labor of love reflects countless interviews and hours chronicling the birth, history, and importance the committee has held in shaping the Federal budget and fiscal policy. His devotion to this project is an example of Scott's love of history and respect for the institution of the Senate.

The handful of aforementioned achievements merely reflects Scott's latest accomplishments in an achievement-filled career. It would be nearly impossible to chronicle the numerous programs and projects he created, funded, and oversaw--programs that improved and enriched both individual lives and the environment.

In addition to his tour of duty at the Senate Budget Committee, Scott has held key positions on both sides of the Capitol, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and a point I like to forget, Scott has even worked on both sides of the aisle. Included in this impressive list are stints as the clerk of the Commerce, Justice, and State Appropriations Subcommittee, professional staff on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and Acting NOAA Administrator, where he championed science, service, and environmental stewardship programs and greatly improved agency morale. In NOAA circles, Scott is a virtual god--king of satellites, staunch advocate of the NOAA Corps and its ships and planes, and an addict of the NOAA label, which I understand is plastered on literally everything under and around his home, car, and office.

But the true bearing of Scott's 29 years of Federal service is not the remarkable list of the jobs he has held, although the list is long and distinguished, but the manner in which Scott

has approached these positions and the people he has touched along the way. Those who know Scott best describe him as a loyal, encouraging, and creative boss, who supports and celebrates those who work with him. Everything Scott does is done in an ``all hands on deck'' manner that gives everyone an opportunity to pitch in and support the common goal.

One cannot talk about Scott without recognizing his acumen for all things trivia--Scott is a virtual trivia savant. He knows the answer to nearly every trivia question, regardless of topic, and can somehow relate every event back to an old movie or seventies rock song. He will search to the end of the Internet to find a historic or comic analogy to make a point about fiscal responsibility, or often the lack of it. He is equally conversant on the latest entertainment news and military strategies of ancient times. The influence of his crosscutting interest and knowledge has occasionally found its way to the Senate floor, where both the Geico Caveman and a Rube Goldberg cartoon have been used to drive home a point.

As a lifelong boater, fisherman, and lover of all things relating to the ocean, Scott reminds me of the remarks that President Kennedy made at the 1962 America's Cup sailing race. He said, ``All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea-- whether it is to sail or to watch it--we are going back from whence we came.''

Kathy joins me in wishing Scott well as he joins the National Marine Manufacturers Association, to ``go back from whence he came'' and advocate on behalf of issues he is most passionate about. As he sets off for new adventures with his wife Ann, and, of course, Buddy the Budget beagle dog by his side, Scott leaves in his wake a nation that is better off for his service, and colleagues that will miss him dearly.

Madam President, I wish to speak in morning business.

Madam President, we are today going to vote on what is euphemistically known as the SCHIP bill. It is clearly incorrectly identified because under that reading one would think it was for children, but it is actually a bill that also covers adults. I think there is a general consensus and no disagreement about the fact that children who are at or near poverty--even considerably above poverty-- families who have that type of fiscal constraint should be covered. There is agreement on that.

The issue is whether we should take a program which covers children in poverty, or near poverty, up to 200 percent of the poverty level-- which, if we define poverty, it is twice as much as what poverty is-- whether we should cover children who are in families who have incomes well above 200 percent of the poverty level and adults who have no children at all, and whether we should do that extra coverage through a nationalized system.

That is what is at issue. The issue is not whether children who come from families who are not that well off--not necessarily poor families but are not well off--those children are covered under the President's proposal, under proposals which I would support, children from families with incomes up to 200 percent of poverty.

The issue is whether we should have States, for example, such as New Jersey, where families who make $71,000 a year--$71,000 a year--should be able to be covered under a federally, totally subsidized, taxpayer- paid-for health care plan, and whether families that are not even families--because they are two adults with no kids--should also be able to be covered under that federally subsidized health care plan, where the taxpayers pick up all the costs, and whether those plans should be structured in a way that they are single-payer, Government-directed, nationalized health care plans.

What is the practical implication of taking a program, which is supposed to be directed at children who come from low-income families, and expanding it radically in the way that the bill we are going to get does?

Well, the first practical implication is it spends a heck of a lot of money: $71 billion over 10 years in additional spending--$71 billion-- to cover children in families with up to $71,000 in income. In fact, they go up to 400 percent of the poverty level, with families who make up to $80,000 a year, and they cover adults who do not have children. Yet they claim it is a children-in-need health care program.

So you are going to increase the Federal Government and the size of the Federal Government and the spending of the Federal Government-- which, remember, comes from taxpayers--by $71 billion under this proposal.

The President has proposed increasing spending in this area over the baseline--which is about $25 billion--by an additional $5 billion over 5 years. Some of us have proposed we even go a little higher so we make sure every child in that category of 200 percent of poverty can be covered.

But to expand this program to a $71 billion increase is a huge explosion in the Federal program, in the size of the program, and in the cost to the taxpayers. Remember this: Another effect

of this policy of covering families who make up to $80,000 a year with this federally taxpayer-paid health care insurance is that families that presently have their children insured by the private sector are going to move their insurance from the private sector, which is paying for the cost--the business they work for--over to the public sector.

In fact, it is estimated, under the proposal before us, 4.4 million children will be covered who are not covered today by this new SCHIP program which covers families up to $80,000 and spends an extra $71 billion. However, what people do not tell you--at least folks from the other side do not tell you--is 2.4 million of those children who are going to be picked up by this plan are already covered--they are already covered--by private insurers.

So we are basically shifting the burden from the private insurance over to the public side, which means the taxpayers--average working Americans--are going to have to pay more to cover kids who are already covered by the private sector through their taxes.

Does that make sense? Of course it does not make sense. Why would you do something like that? Why would you set up a program like that? Why would you expand a program to families that make $80,000; to adults who do not have children; to children who already are insured and draw them out of the private insurance into the public insurance? Why would you do something like that?

Well, the answer is pretty obvious. This is part of the effort of the other side of the aisle to move us toward a single-payer, nationalized system of health care. There is no hiding that fact. That has been stated as the purpose, even by the chairman of the Finance Committee. So the goal is not necessarily to bring more kids under insurance who need to be insured because they come from families of less means. That is going to be done under either program. The goal is to radically expand the size of a public insurance program to families that are really doing quite well, families making up to $80,000 that may not have children or the children may already be insured by the private sector because you want to move more people onto the public insurance system because you want to have a nationalized system.

Now, I do not happen to support a nationalized system of health care. But I think if we are going to have a nationalized system of health care, we should not do it through the back door. We should not do it through this bait-and-switch approach that this bill represents. We should do it in a very open, honest statement, much as what Senator Clinton proposed back in the early 1990s: We are going to nationalize the health care system of this country. There is going to be one payer. It is going to be the Federal Government. And all your health care will be provided for by the Federal Government, with the cost being picked up by the American taxpayer.

I oppose that type of an approach for a variety of reasons: first and most honestly because in every other nation that has tried that, it has led to dramatic rationing of care. Depending on your age, you simply are not able to get certain types of care, treatment. You go to Canada, and you wait for months, sometimes years for certain types of procedures or you go to England and you wait for months, years, and you cannot even get certain types of procedures. So you get rationing.

Secondly, you undermine research. You do not get people investing in creating new products and new ways to make people healthy because the cost is not reimbursed.

Thirdly, if you take the private sector out of providing health care, you immediately create huge inefficiencies because you reduce competition, you reduce the forces for cost control that private insurance brings into play.

So I do not support a single-payer plan. But I especially find it inappropriate that the way the other side of the aisle is trying to get to a single-payer program is through this surreptitious back door of taking one chunk of the population--kids who are already insured by the private sector--and moving them over to the public sector in the name of protecting children who are from lower or moderate-income families.

All the proposals that are pending around here--the proposal by the President, the proposal I would support--protect children in families at 200 percent of poverty or less.

One of the ironies, of course, is that as they expand to higher income families, in States such as New Jersey, for example, where people making up to $71,000 are covered under the single-payer plan, they actually leave out low-income kids. For example, in New Jersey, there are about 19,000 kids who are in families that are under 200 percent of poverty and are not covered under the New Jersey plan.

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense, if we were honestly trying to address low-income kids, to put in place a plan which actually covered kids who were in family situations where the income was less than 200 percent of poverty and make sure everybody was covered? That was the proposal from our side of the aisle, by the way, but it was rejected in this rush toward trying to get a big bite on the apple of nationalization, single-payer proposals.

So that is the policy problem with this bill. But there are a lot of other problems. Call them technical, if you want, but they are pretty big technical problems. For example, there is the problem that there is a scam going on, a scam in this bill as to how it is paid for.

You can see this chart I have in the Chamber. This reflects the increased costs of the bill as it goes forward. But in order to make their own budget rules, which they claim so aggressively to be following, such as pay-go, they have to take the program, in the year 2013, from a $16 billion annual spending level down to essentially zero. In other words, they are zeroing out this program in the year 2013. They are not spending any money on it at all so they can hit their budget numbers. That is called a scam. That is called a scam. It is a budget scam. And it is being played against a background of claiming they are going to do all these wonderful things with all of this extra money, such as nationalize the system for people making $80,000 or less, but they are simply not going to claim how they are going to pay for it. This big, white area in here, they have no idea how they are going to pay for that. None. None. I will tell you how they are going to pay for it: by raising taxes on the rest of working Americans. That is how they are going to pay for it. Working Americans are going to pay for it so they can nationalize the system.

Then, on top of that, they have set up a verification system which uses Social Security numbers which the Social Security Administration says will lead to illegal immigrants being the people who get the benefit of this program, primarily--or not primarily but in part-- because the Social Security Administration is incapable of accurately monitoring whether these numbers are correct. So you are going to have a lot of illegal immigrants getting coverage, claiming they are legal, because the system has been set up to accomplish that. Maybe this was the back-door approach toward some level of amnesty or something, but if it was going to be done, it should have been done more openly than the system that is being used in this bill. This is a fundamental flaw of this bill. It is a bill which, in its present form, is not paid for and has a huge cap.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Madam President, it has a huge gap in the way it is paid for. Secondly, it sets up a system of verification which the Social Security system says it can't accomplish, and, therefore, presumes that a large number of people who are in this country illegally will end up in this program.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the response of the Social Security Administration on this point and a letter to Jim McCrery, who is a Congressman and the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee.

Madam President, to summarize, everybody around here is supportive of a plan which would fully fund what is necessary to take care of children whose families make 200 percent of poverty or less. But what we on our side don't want to see is an expansion of this program as a method of taking people out of private insurance and putting them on the public system, creating a single-payer plan and, as a result, moving down the road toward the nationalization of the entire health care industry. It would be at a cost of $71 billion to the American taxpayer, a cost which isn't accounted for in this bill and which is not paid for. The program has a fundamental flaw in it as to how they verify who is participating so we don't even know if we are going to have citizens participating in this program versus illegals. It is a bill which is flawed. It should be opposed, and it should be vetoed.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask to proceed in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, as I understand it, morning business on our side has been extended to 10:35.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I rise as an alumni of Columbia College to ask a question which I suspect is on the mind of a lot of the alumni of Columbia College and probably a lot of average Americans wandering around the country, which is, why did they create a forum for the President of Iran in a way that basically almost made him look like a sympathetic figure because of the actions of the President of the college? Open dialog on our campuses is important. We all recognize that. In fact, it is the essence of a good education. Columbia has a strong history, ironically, of having an extraordinary curriculum called a core curriculum which requires you to study all sorts of subjects whether you want to study them or not so that you gain knowledge in a variety of different areas and are exposed to a variety of different areas.

I have always believed that core curriculum was one of the great strengths of the college and was certainly one of the things I most enjoyed while I was there. So open discussion and having people on the campus who have an opinion which is antithetical to the values of our society is, I suppose, reasonable. But you have to put it in the context of what other discussion is allowed on our allegedly elite university campuses or even some campuses which are maybe Ivy League; that is, if you have a view which is conservative and you happen to want to express that opinion, you are quite often limited as to your ability to speak on those campuses. I, for example, suspect it would be very hard to get a date for Donald Rumsfeld to speak at Columbia. I suspect it would be probably even more difficult to get a date for the President of the United States to speak at Columbia. I am absolutely sure the Vice President of the United States would never be invited to speak at Columbia.

So one has to ask the question, Why did they decide to give a forum to an individual who is running a government of a country, the purpose of which is to develop a nuclear weapon, which nuclear weapon and weapons will be used to threaten world stability and clearly threaten their neighbors in the Middle East? Ahmadi-Nejad has said he intends to eliminate Israel. In his speech yesterday, he affirmed his view that the Holocaust was a theoretical event, maybe never happened--an absurd statement. Yesterday, he went so far as to even describe his whole society as having nobody of a homosexual persuasion. He is leading a terrorist nation, or a terrorist government--the nation itself isn't terrorist, I suspect--but a terrorist government which is in the process of arming people in Iraq who are killing American soldiers. Yet Columbia invites him and gives him a forum in which to spread his values, to the extent you can call them values, or his views. It seems ironic and inconsistent and highly inappropriate in the context of what Columbia would not allow in the area of open discussion, which would be to have, for example, the Vice President of the United States speak, I suspect.

Then, to compound this error--the President of Iran is going to have his forum today at the U.N. Columbia did not have to give him an additional forum--but to compound that error, the president of the university was so egregious in the way he handled the situation, in my opinion, that he actually almost made the President of Iran look somewhat sympathetic, which is almost impossible to do. The attitude of arrogance and officiousness and the posturing of positions and questions by the president of Columbia in a way that basically gave Ahmadi-Nejad the opportunity to basically respond as if he were being coherent--because the questions and the attacks were so aggressive in a way that was arrogant and inappropriate, even in dealing with

somebody like Ahmadi-Nejad--was a startling failure of leadership at the university by the president of the university.

As an alumni, I was embarrassed, to put it quite simply. I was embarrassed by the fact that they would choose to give this individual such a forum, this individual who will probably, for my children, my children's children, and maybe even our generation, be the most significant threat to world peace that we have as soon as he develops his nuclear weapon, which he is on course to do, and then to compound that by setting up the forum in a way where the president of the university basically went way beyond what would be considered to be a coherent and thoughtful and balanced approach to addressing this individual. It would have been much more effective had the president of the university simply allowed the President of Iran to make his statement and, by his own statement, indict himself because that is exactly what he would have done, and he did. But, unfortunately, rather than the President of Iran becoming the issue, which he should be, the president of the university made himself part of the story and the issue.

It was not a good day for Columbia or for alumni of Columbia, in my humble opinion, and it speaks volumes about the level to which the universities in our country, especially those which proclaim themselves elite, have sunk in the area of setting up open and free dialog because, as I said, as has been seen in various universities across this country, conservative thought would not have been given the type of forum this militaristic individual, whose purpose it is to essentially destabilize the world through the use of nuclear weapons, was given. Others would not be given such a forum.

So it is with regret that I rise today to ask why--again, why--why did Columbia pursue this course and why did the president of the university pursue the course he pursued in responding to the attendance of the President of Iran on his campus?

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to correct a press release issued by my office on August 2, 2007. In this release, we correctly quoted Senator Baucus during the SCHIP debate when he stated, ``We're the only country in the industrialized world that does not have universal coverage. I think the Children's Health Insurance Program is another step to move toward universal coverage.''

Due to a misplaced quotation mark in the release, the following statement I made on the floor was included in the same quotation attributed to Senator Baucus: ``Everyone realizes that the goal of this legislation moves us a giant step further down the road to nationalizing healthcare, which would result in a drop in quality and in rationing.'' Although this is an accurate quote, it should have been attributed to me and not Senator Baucus, and I apologize for any confusion that our press release may have created.

Madam President, I rise today to speak about the passage of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments of 2007. This bill includes the reauthorizations of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, PDUFA, and the Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act, MDUFMA, both of which provide an essential source of funding to the FDA to ensure faster review times and enhanced patient access to safe and effective drugs and devices.

The bill also reauthorizes two programs that have had a great impact on the safety of medicines for children. I support the reauthorization of the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act, BPCA, and the Pediatric Research Equity Act, PREA, in particular the provision that maintains the current 6 months of data exclusivity provided under current law to create a meaningful incentive for drug manufacturers to

perform pediatric safety studies. It is because of the great success of these two programs that I am pleased that the bill requires both programs to be reauthorized together in 2012. This joint sunset date allows for further reauthorizations to continue balancing the incentives and authorities that drive pediatric study.

Most of all, I am pleased that the drug safety portion of the bill contains provisions from my Safer DATA Act. This language requires the FDA to establish and maintain an active surveillance infrastructure to collect and analyze drug safety data from disparate sources, such as: adverse events reports, Medicare Part D and VA health system data, and private health insurance claims data. The private sector and many academic institutions have had these capabilities for years. With this legislation, the FDA will finally have access to the best information possible.

The legislation also directs the FDA to establish drug safety collaborations with private and academic entities to perform advanced research and further analysis of drug safety data once the surveillance system detects a serious risk.

And finally, to enhance risk communication, the language establishes a one-stop shop web portal to give patients and providers better access to drug safety information, including aggregate information from the surveillance system.

I congratulate Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi for their support of the inclusion of this provision and for their efforts to get this bill finalized before the September 21 deadline.

We have consistently heard from HHS Secretary Leavitt and Commissioner Von Eschenbach over the past few months that if we failed to complete the reauthorizations of PDUFA and MDUFMA by September 21, they would be required to issue reduction-in-force--RIF--notices to FDA drug and device reviewers--the key staffers who are on the front lines of ensuring the safety and efficacy of FDA approved products. In 1997, when Congress failed to reauthorize PDUFA on time, the 1 month delay caused departures to the extent that it took 18 months for FDA to return to full staffing levels. Not only would the issuance of RIF notices this year have affected nearly 2,000 FDA employees and their families, but it would have essentially obliterated the ability of the agency to fulfill its public health mission.

So it may be surprising to some, that the key obstacle to finishing this bill over the last few weeks was the House Democratic leadership's insistence on a provision that they included on behalf of their most precious constituents--not the FDA employees, not the scientists, not even the patients, but the trial lawyers.

Yes, included deep in section 901 of this bill is a one-sentence rule of construction that makes the obvious statement that, notwithstanding the new authority granted to the FDA under this bill to require labeling changes; it is the responsibility of the drug company to comply with other regulatory requirements regarding the drug's label. This so called ``gift to the trial lawyers'' merely restates current law, and is not such a gift at all. Regardless of whether or not the drug company or the agency initiates a labeling change, it is the FDA that continues to have the express authority to approve, reject or modify the labeling of a drug.

Not only is this rule of construction meaningless, but it pales in comparison to the expansive authority given to the FDA throughout the rest of the bill's 422 pages. What this bill does at the majority's insistence is expand the reach of the FDA's regulatory authority over prescription drugs, devices, food, and even tanning beds.

In addition to the bill's many other provisions, section 901 gives the HHS Secretary explicit authority to request certain safety labeling changes. If the Secretary becomes aware of new safety information that the he or she believes should be included in the labeling for a drug, the Secretary may notify the drug company and begin a process to modify the label.

Under existing preemption principles, FDA approval of labeling under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act preempts conflicting or contrary State law. The determination of whether or not labeling revisions are necessary is, in the end, squarely and solely the FDA's. Given the comprehensiveness of FDA regulation of drug safety, effectiveness and labeling under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, additional requirements for the disclosure of risk communication do not necessarily result in positive outcomes for patients, but create differing standards that heighten confusion.

If we had intended through this legislation to give State courts and State juries the authority to second guess the scientific expertise of the FDA, we would have done so. In fact, based on the totality of the bill's 422 pages we have done the opposite. The intent of this legislation is explicitly clear. One FDA. One gold standard. One expert Federal agency charged by Congress with ensuring that drugs are safe and effective and that product labeling is truthful and not misleading.

Let me begin by thanking the chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Conrad, for moving forward with this important effort to try to reach a conclusion and progress on the most significant issue this Nation faces beyond our fight with Islamic terrorism. In the post-Katrina world, if the country knew that a category 5 hurricane was headed at us, we knew where it was going to hit, we knew the size of the hurricane, and we knew the damage it would do, the Government would be absolutely irresponsible not to respond to that.

What we have coming at us is a category 5 fiscal hurricane. We know when it is going to hit, and that is when the baby boom generation retires and begins to retire next year and reaches its peak in its retirement size by about the year 2025. We know the impact of the problem, the size of the problem, that there is $62 trillion of unfunded liability which will be generated by the retirement of the baby boom generation to pay for the benefits under Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

To try to put that in context, that is more than the entire net worth of all of America--all our homes, cars, stocks, all our assets. That is how big this liability is. We know the effect of this category 5 fiscal hurricane because we know it is going to basically wipe out the ability of our children and our children's children to have as high a quality of life as we have had because the cost of paying for this fiscal tsunami will be so high.

We need to get on to the issue of trying to address this looming threat. As the Comptroller General said today, we have a category 5 hurricane headed at us and people are still playing on the beach as if the wave is not going to arrive. Well, the wave is going to arrive. So what the chairman of the Budget Committee has put forward today--and I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in this effort--is a proposal to move forward with substantive and definitive legislation which will result in action. That is what we need--action. It is similar to the old Fram oil filter ad: You can pay me now or you can pay me later. If we act now, the cost is going to be less than if we act later.

So this proposal, which has been put together after a lot of thought and effort on behalf of myself and Senator Conrad, is basically built around three concepts. First, that there must be absolute bipartisanship. So as Senator Conrad has outlined, the task force, when it meets, must have a three-fourths vote in favor of whatever proposal they bring forward. Secondly, everything has to be on the table. Nothing can be off. After all the discussion, in order for this to work, all these parts interplay with each other, you have to be willing to address not only reform and how you deliver better benefits at a lower cost under Medicare and Medicaid and better benefits at a reasonable cost under Social Security, but you also have to address the tax side of the ledger. So everything needs to be on the table. Third, that for this to work, there has to be an action-forcing mechanism. We have seen report after report, commission after commission. A lot of them have done excellent work. But on these issues, which are such hot buttons, what happens is, a commission will make a report, and all the interest groups will attack it from this side and that side and the next side. So this proposal is structured so there is an action-forcing event; specifically, fast-track approval which, again, has to be by a supermajority of the final report of the task force.

This truly is an opportunity to move forward to address this issue. Our failure to do so would be truly ironic because the problem which we confront as a nation, which I say is probably the single biggest issue after the war on Islamic terrorism, fighting the war against Islamic terrorism, is that this fiscal category 5 hurricane is headed toward us, which is essentially going to wipe out our children's opportunity to have a quality of lifestyle equal to ours, is totally the responsibility of the present generation who is governing, the baby boom generation. We are the generation of governance today. So before we pass our problem on to the next generation, we have a responsibility to address it and to try to improve the effort.

I know, as I look around this Chamber and at this administration, there are people of goodwill who, given the right structure, which this task force is, would be willing to come together, make the difficult decisions, and have the expertise to know how to make those decisions to move maybe not a complete resolution of these issues but a significant resolution of the issues down the road so the next generation does not have to bear the whole burden of resolving the problems. It is time to act.

I congratulate the chairman of the Budget Committee for being the force behind getting this effort going. It is a very positive initiative. I think it will be received very well on our side of the aisle. I believe strongly that the administration will receive it well. Therefore, I believe we have a great opportunity to move forward in a way which will make sure our children and their children have as good a country and as strong a country from the standpoint of fiscal policy as we have.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I think the Senator made an excellent point that we are now in a Presidential election. This Commission is a gift to those candidates because they can come forward and point to this Commission as taking on some of the most complicated issues they are going to face. Because this timebomb--which is an appropriate description, using the Senator's words--is going to start to explode, and the explosion will be rather large during the term of the next Presidency.

So this is an opportunity to give those candidates for President a forum and a procedure where these issues, which are so critical to the success of the next Presidency, can actually be moved down the road toward resolution. Is that not true?

I once again congratulate the chairman of the Budget Committee for his exceptional leadership in this area. This is the first step in a bipartisan effort which, hopefully, will lead to a bipartisan solution that America will see as fair and which will pass on to our children a stronger and more vital Nation.

Thank you.

Let me begin by thanking the chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Conrad, for moving forward with this important effort to try to reach a conclusion and progress on the most significant issue this Nation faces beyond our fight with Islamic terrorism. In the post-Katrina world, if the country knew that a category 5 hurricane was headed at us, we knew where it was going to hit, we knew the size of the hurricane, and we knew the damage it would do, the Government would be absolutely irresponsible not to respond to that.

What we have coming at us is a category 5 fiscal hurricane. We know when it is going to hit, and that is when the baby boom generation retires and begins to retire next year and reaches its peak in its retirement size by about the year 2025. We know the impact of the problem, the size of the problem, that there is $62 trillion of unfunded liability which will be generated by the retirement of the baby boom generation to pay for the benefits under Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

To try to put that in context, that is more than the entire net worth of all of America--all our homes, cars, stocks, all our assets. That is how big this liability is. We know the effect of this category 5 fiscal hurricane because we know it is going to basically wipe out the ability of our children and our children's children to have as high a quality of life as we have had because the cost of paying for this fiscal tsunami will be so high.

We need to get on to the issue of trying to address this looming threat. As the Comptroller General said today, we have a category 5 hurricane headed at us and people are still playing on the beach as if the wave is not going to arrive. Well, the wave is going to arrive. So what the chairman of the Budget Committee has put forward today--and I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in this effort--is a proposal to move forward with substantive and definitive legislation which will result in action. That is what we need--action. It is similar to the old Fram oil filter ad: You can pay me now or you can pay me later. If we act now, the cost is going to be less than if we act later.

So this proposal, which has been put together after a lot of thought and effort on behalf of myself and Senator Conrad, is basically built around three concepts. First, that there must be absolute bipartisanship. So as Senator Conrad has outlined, the task force, when it meets, must have a three-fourths vote in favor of whatever proposal they bring forward. Secondly, everything has to be on the table. Nothing can be off. After all the discussion, in order for this to work, all these parts interplay with each other, you have to be willing to address not only reform and how you deliver better benefits at a lower cost under Medicare and Medicaid and better benefits at a reasonable cost under Social Security, but you also have to address the tax side of the ledger. So everything needs to be on the table. Third, that for this to work, there has to be an action-forcing mechanism. We have seen report after report, commission after commission. A lot of them have done excellent work. But on these issues, which are such hot buttons, what happens is, a commission will make a report, and all the interest groups will attack it from this side and that side and the next side. So this proposal is structured so there is an action-forcing event; specifically, fast-track approval which, again, has to be by a supermajority of the final report of the task force.

This truly is an opportunity to move forward to address this issue. Our failure to do so would be truly ironic because the problem which we confront as a nation, which I say is probably the single biggest issue after the war on Islamic terrorism, fighting the war against Islamic terrorism, is that this fiscal category 5 hurricane is headed toward us, which is essentially going to wipe out our children's opportunity to have a quality of lifestyle equal to ours, is totally the responsibility of the present generation who is governing, the baby boom generation. We are the generation of governance today. So before we pass our problem on to the next generation, we have a responsibility to address it and to try to improve the effort.

I know, as I look around this Chamber and at this administration, there are people of goodwill who, given the right structure, which this task force is, would be willing to come together, make the difficult decisions, and have the expertise to know how to make those decisions to move maybe not a complete resolution of these issues but a significant resolution of the issues down the road so the next generation does not have to bear the whole burden of resolving the problems. It is time to act.

I congratulate the chairman of the Budget Committee for being the force behind getting this effort going. It is a very positive initiative. I think it will be received very well on our side of the aisle. I believe strongly that the administration will receive it well. Therefore, I believe we have a great opportunity to move forward in a way which will make sure our children and their children have as good a country and as strong a country from the standpoint of fiscal policy as we have.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I think the Senator made an excellent point that we are now in a Presidential election. This Commission is a gift to those candidates because they can come forward and point to this Commission as taking on some of the most complicated issues they are going to face. Because this timebomb--which is an appropriate description, using the Senator's words--is going to start to explode, and the explosion will be rather large during the term of the next Presidency.

So this is an opportunity to give those candidates for President a forum and a procedure where these issues, which are so critical to the success of the next Presidency, can actually be moved down the road toward resolution. Is that not true?

I once again congratulate the chairman of the Budget Committee for his exceptional leadership in this area. This is the first step in a bipartisan effort which, hopefully, will lead to a bipartisan solution that America will see as fair and which will pass on to our children a stronger and more vital Nation.

Thank you.

I would say to my friend from New Hampshire that my staff informs me that they, too, were not consulted on MEPI-added criteria.

I appreciate your bringing these matters to my attention. My staff will request a briefing from the State Department on the scholarship program, and if needed, we will seek additional clarification during conference on this matter with the House.

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

Mr. President, I rise to address this issue now because, as I understand, there is a bit of a lull here. I congratulate the managers for wanting to get the bill completed.

I want to continue this discussion that has been going forward today on the treatment of General Petraeus by the group MoveOn.org relative to the advertisement they ran, which has been shown on the floor a number of times, which referred to him as ``General Betray Us.'' I think it was a despicable act. I think it crosses the line, where someone who has dedicated his life to defending this Nation would be subjected to this type of a personal assassination, personality assassination, character assassination. It is totally inappropriate.

The troops serving us in Iraq are doing so because they believe unalterably in the cause of America. They believe what this Nation stands for is good and right. They are putting their lives on the line to make sure we can maintain the freedoms that are so critical to us. You can disagree with the policies on Iraq--and I have a lot of reservations about them, especially my severe concerns about what is happening with the Government of Iraq in both the area of creating a coalition government and stability, and specifically in the area of corruption.

But what you cannot argue with and what should not occur is to say to our troops who are out there every day facing danger and, obviously, a lethal threat, that we do not support them. Yet when you impugn in such a gratuitous and vicious way the integrity of their commander in the field, you clearly impugn the troops in the field also. It is wrong, and it should not be tolerated.

General Petraeus has a record which is extraordinary. He has dedicated almost four decades, I believe, to the military service of this country. He has received the Bronze Star, along with innumerable other decorations. He commanded the 101st Airborne. He has been to Iraq on three tours and spent the last 4 years overseas away from his family. He has put in place an initiative in Iraq which he generally believes, as his testimony has shown both yesterday and today before the House and the Senate, is making progress in a number of critical areas relative to the war on the ground, relative to fighting the Islamic terrorists who wish to do us harm.

Yet before he even got to the Senate or to the House to testify and make his case as to why he felt his policy, the policy he is pursuing as the general in command, is the correct policy and should be sustained, before that could even occur, his character was attacked in the most vicious way by people who oppose the war.

Opposing the war is a legitimate position. There are very strong arguments in that area. I do not happen to agree with many of them, but I respect those arguments when they are made substantively and appropriately. But when an organization, such as MoveOn.org, which is a national organization of dramatic influence, steps out and runs a full- page ad at the cost of $160,000 in the New York Times which has as its title, ``Is he General Petraeus or General Betray Us,'' that is an inexcusable, vicious and petty act and not becoming of our society and a democracy generally.

The other side of the aisle--and I have the greatest respect for Members on the other side of the aisle relative to their commitment on this issue--the other side of the aisle said: It is not us doing this. Let's remember that MoveOn.org identifies with and openly claims to be a major player in the caucus of the Democratic Party. In fact, this weekend in the New York Times, the lead spokesman for MoveOn.org said-- and I paraphrase here--but he said: I meet regularly with the Democratic leaders of the Senate, and I talk almost daily to the Democratic staff of the Democratic leaders of the Senate.

Earlier in the year, MoveOn.org--and I believe it was the same individual, and I again paraphrase--said of the Democratic Party: We bought it, it is ours, we are going to dominate it. I see in New Hampshire that MoveOn.org is being one of the most aggressive arms of the Democratic Party in our State. They are the ones carrying the message relative to the war, relative to the Democratic leadership in our State, that is for sure.

So I think this attempt now to step away--the attempt isn't even occurring. But this statement by MoveOn.org, which is so over the top and so outrageous and so inexcusable in its treatment of an American soldier and the troops he commands, should be repudiated openly. It should be repudiated by this Senate because it is wrong. It is common decency that we should repudiate it.

Yet we see on this floor that procedural mechanisms are being used to protect MoveOn.org. That is what is happening here. Rule XVI, a procedural mechanism in this Senate, has been used to keep a very reasonably innocuous sense of the Senate from being brought forward to a vote. It doesn't take very long to vote on something such as this. We could set up a vote in 10 minutes.

What does this sense of the Senate, which is so inappropriate that it has to be knocked down by a procedural action, say? It says:

(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate--

(1) to reaffirm its support for all the men and women of

the United States Armed Forces, including General David H.

Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force--Iraq;

(2) to strongly condemn any effort to attack the honor and

integrity of General Petraeus and all of the members of the

United States Armed Forces; and

(3) to specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal

attacks on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group

MoveOn.org.

I think it is No. 3 that must bother my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, which is causing us not to be able to go to a vote on this amendment, that we would repudiate, probably from a financial standpoint, one of the biggest contributors to the efforts to fight the war and that organization, which openly claims to essentially be an arm of the Democratic Party, would be repudiated on the Senate floor. But they deserve to be repudiated.

Honestly, if an organization which identified itself with the Republican Party--I cannot think of any that we have that has the type of money that MoveOn.org has because we don't have any George Soroses funding us or any organization such as that, but if we did have such an organization and they did something such as this, I would immediately want to repudiate it because somebody of the character and commitment of General Petraeus does not deserve this attack. He came back to testify because he was asked to come back to testify by committees which are majority committees, committees where the majority is controlled by the Democratic leadership of the Congress. Yet before he gets here to testify before those committees, there is a clear attempt to discredit him personally because they do not like the message. So instead of attacking the message, they decided to kill the messenger or attempt to at least undermine the messenger. That is the goal of this ad, nothing more than a petty attempt to basically undermine the message General Petraeus has to deliver: We are going to attack him who is the messenger, which is gratuitous, inappropriate, inaccurate, unfair, and vicious, quite simply vicious, calling him ``General Betray Us.''

So if the majority party does not subscribe to this message, then they should allow us to offer this resolution right now while he is in town, while he is testifying before the Senate today and before the House yesterday. They should not ask us to wait until next week to correct this egregious act and to go on record to repudiate this egregious act. They should not use a parliamentary procedure to defend MoveOn.org. No, we should have a vote right now on this resolution, this sense of the Senate.

So at this point, I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, that rule XVI not apply to this sense of the Senate and that a procedural attack on this sense of the Senate not be in order.

Mr. President, I further ask unanimous consent that we immediately move to a vote on this resolution stating we support General Petraeus as general in the field, we support his men and women who are fighting for us, and that we reject the despicable ad of MoveOn.org.

Mr. President, I regret the decision by the majority party to not allow us to proceed in this manner, to help us give this good man his fair hearing.

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

Mr. President, the bill before us today from a policy standpoint does some things which are extremely positive. It adjusts, I think appropriately, the cost of the amount of subsidy that is going into the system relative to higher education loans and takes savings from that subsidy, which was going to lenders, and moves it over to assist people who need assistance, especially under the Pell Grant Program.

So it is, from a policy standpoint, moving in the right direction in many ways. In addition, as the Senator from Wyoming has pointed out, there needs to be tied to this a Higher Education Reauthorization Act, which unfortunately is not in this bill and needs to be in this bill in order to complete the package. That is critical to this whole undertaking in making sure we significantly improve our ability to support people who are going to college, making sure the loans which these people get are properly disclosed and that the money does not end up, as we increase the Pell grants, being taken away by increasing tuitions which are tied to our Pell grant increases.

So there are good things about this bill. There is also a big part of this bill that is missing, which is the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, and certainly the Senator from Wyoming made an eloquent statement on that.

What I wished to talk about, however, was the fact that this bill comes to the floor in an inappropriate way, using the wrong vehicle, and as a result deems serious harm to the budget process we have in the Congress. This bill comes under what is known as reconciliation. Reconciliation is a very unique vehicle which we have in the Senate, the purpose of which is to avoid filibusters and allow legislation to move, which is going to be used on the spending side of the ledger, at least, to reduce entitlement spending.

It was created out of the 1974 Budget Act. It has been used over the years for the purposes of reconciliation, of reducing entitlement spending. In fact, in 1990, it reduced entitlement spending--it was used to reduce about $480 billion in entitlement spending over a 10- year period; in 1993, about $433 billion; in 1995, about $337 billion; in 1997, about $118 billion; and then in 2006, about $36 billion. Why do we use this mechanism? Well, every year we have two different types of spending in the Federal Government. We have discretionary spending, which means it occurs on an annual basis and is appropriated, it goes through the Appropriations Committee. That represents about a third of the Federal Government spending. Then we have entitlement spending, which is spending that occurs where the Federal Government, as a result of laws, has an obligation to pay money to somebody.

Agriculture programs are, for example, entitlement programs, where if you plant a certain amount of fields or do not plant a certain amount of fields, you have a right to obtain payment from the Federal Government under the law. Medicare is an entitlement program. We have a lot of education programs which are arguably entitlement programs and a lot that are discretionary programs.

But the problem is, when you have an entitlement program, you cannot adjust it annually through the appropriations process. The only way you can adjust it is by changing the law which affects that program and creates savings or more spending. So the Budget Act recognized this and also recognizes it is extremely hard to do that in the context of the Senate because the Senate has the filibuster, where you can basically tie anything up without 60 votes. It also requires 60 votes to pass just about anything.

So this very unique and very powerful instrument was given to the budgeting process called reconciliation, where there is a limited amount of time to debate a bill, in this case 10 hours as a result of a conference report, no filibuster can apply, and it only takes 51 votes to pass the bill.

But this whole concept of giving this very strong power to the Budget Committee and to the committees of jurisdiction was to allow us to reduce the rate of growth of entitlement spending in order to make the budget more manageable.

What has happened, however, has been to reverse that, to actually do the exact opposite using reconciliation, with the representation that we are going to save, I believe it is $750 million, which is minuscule--remember that over the years we have been saving billions of dollars through reconciliation--with the representation that we are going to save $750 million. We have a chart which reflects this. These are savings which we have received under reconciliation when we have used it in the past: $428 billion; $433 billion; up until 2006, we did $39 billion.

This year, this reconciliation bill, saves less than $1 billion net. So it is not a savings vehicle at all. In fact, what it does is it uses that $93 billion savings to mask an almost $21 billion spending event.

It takes the reconciliation--as long as you get a net savings, you are allowed to use reconciliation--and uses it to dramatically increase spending. In fact, the amount of new spending in this reconciliation bill exceeds the amount of savings by 2,900 percent. In other words, the spending in this bill is 29 times larger than the savings in this bill, which totally undermines and makes a joke out of the budget process and reconciliation, and it is totally inappropriate to have done this, to use reconciliation in this manner.

It could be effectively argued the proposals that have been brought forward under this bill would easily pass this Congress with 60 votes, with or without reconciliation. But by using reconciliation, they allowed themselves to eliminate all amendments, for all intents and purposes of any significance, and they have this 51-vote rule, and as a result of spending 2,900 times more than they save, they essentially make a mockery of the budget process.

Not only do they make a mockery of the budget process on the issue of reconciliation, they make a mockery of the budget process by the manner in which they score the bill itself. This bill is set up so the Pell grants will increase, which is what the goal of the bill is, to $5,400 per person, but the spending on the Pell grants will also increase rather dramatically over the next few years because we are taking a subsidy which is now going to lenders and putting it into Pell spending.

But in the year 2013, under this bill, we are going to go back to zero, essentially zero dollars being spent on Pell grants. That is what this bill calls for in 2013, zero dollars essentially will be spent on Pell grants.

What a farce. I mean, really. In order for them to take advantage of reconciliation and the protection of reconciliation, they had to put in place a program which goes from almost $5 billion in the year 2012, down to zero in 2013. Talk about truth in budgeting or integrity in budgeting. How can anybody vote for this who believes we should have an honest budget and claim that they are being honest?

There is $9 billion of Pell grant, which one could realistically argue over the next 10 years is going to have to be spent, which isn't accounted for. It is sort of, well, it will appear from the sky, I guess. One would think that would be enough; that basically the proposal makes a mockery of the reconciliation process in the budget, makes a mockery of the baseline by going back to zero spending in 2013. But then we get to pay-go; pay-go, the sacred cow of fiscal discipline from the other side of the aisle that we hear so much about. We are going to stand by pay-go in order to discipline Federal Government spending. We heard that incessantly in the last Congress from the other side of the aisle. We heard it incessantly from people running for office from the other side of the aisle. But it has become Swiss cheese as bill after bill after bill has been brought to the floor which has waived pay-go when it came to spending. What a surprise. The Democratic majority waives pay-go when they want to spend money.

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 3 minutes.

Then they claim they are using pay-go to discipline the Federal Government. It has happened time and time again. The most recent egregious event prior to this one was SCHIP, where they added $41 billion of new spending waiving pay-go. This $6 billion down here that was a pay-go violation has now grown to be about

$20 billion under this bill. So the little hole in the Swiss cheese should be a great big hole.

Anyone who comes to this floor and claims they are using pay-go to discipline the Federal budget at any time for the rest of this Congress will have to have a sanity test given to them because they certainly can't defend that on the basis of any facts.

The problem with this bill isn't the policy. In fact, quite honestly, I would have probably used a more aggressive policy. I would have been willing to auction all these accounts to get to the real number as to what the subsidy is. We might have saved a lot more money and put more money into Pell. The problem is, this bill, in the manner in which it is brought to the floor, basically puts a stake through the heart of the budget process. It takes reconciliation, which is the most significant tool of the budget process, and makes a joke out of it by using it to increase spending 2,900 times more than it creates savings. It takes the baseline and makes a joke out of it by reducing Pell grants in 2013 to zero spending, when we know we are going to be spending $5.5 billion on Pell grants in 2013. It takes pay-go, which is alleged to be a disciplining mechanism, waives it, and then spends $21 billion that would have been subject to it.

My point is obviously one of frustration, as former chairman of the Budget Committee. I would like to see us have a budget that means something. We didn't pass a budget. The Democratic Party passed a budget; I congratulated them for that. I didn't agree with it, but at least they passed it. But if they are going to pass it, they ought to have a purpose for it, and they ought to live by it. The purpose should not be to expand spending, to make a joke of the baseline, and to basically put holes in the pay-go mechanism which they claim is the essence of their fiscal discipline.

From a public policy standpoint, the bill may have good policy in it, but from the standpoint of managing the fiscal house of this country, it is doing fundamental harm to the budget process.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I appreciate the Senator from Wyoming yielding to me. I know the Senator from Illinois would have yielded for a question, but his statement carried him away. Please note, I have no water on my desk--not by choice but I suspect that they don't trust me with it. I was glad to learn that it is the water that has caused the dysfunctionality of the Senate. I had been beginning to think maybe it was the Democratic leadership, since the change of hands. But getting this clarified is very important.

I do want to make this simple point: Pell grants were expanded through SMART grants when we did the last reconciliation, when I was chairman of the Budget Committee. We put $8 billion in the SMART grants, which helped kids, especially freshman and sophomores. We eliminated the origination fees, and we also increased the auto zero to $20,000, and we increased the asset protection allocation. So we did make these decisions. But at the same time we reduced the funds to lenders and put a significant amount of it into deficit reduction, $40 billion into deficit reduction.

The Senator from Illinois takes the position that when we cut taxes, we were having the same impact on the budget as when they increased spending. That is the difference between the parties. It is fundamental. We believe when we leave people's dollars in their pockets and they get to spend it themselves--because it is their money to begin with--that is not necessarily aggravating the Federal budget situation. They believe when you take the money out of people's pockets and expand the size of the Government--in this case, 2,900 times more than you save in the area of spending reduction--that is good, because there is a philosophical difference here.

The philosophical difference, quite simply, is the Democratic Party believes it knows better how to spend people's money than the people know how to spend their money. We believe the people know how to better spend their money better than the Federal Government does. That is the difference.

Well, Mr. President, first I would like to complete my thought on this point because I think it is critical. The budget reconciliation process was not set up to be a stalking-horse for dramatic expansion in the size of Federal Government entitlement programs. That was not the purpose of the reconciliation structure. It was set up for the purposes of being able to control the rate of growth of entitlement programs.

Now, we can debate whether the budget process was set up for the purposes of allowing us to return more tax dollars to taxpayers with reasonable tax rates, but certainly on the issue of spending, there is no question but that reconciliation was not intended to expand entitlement spending.

independent students

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, let me join and participate in expressing my appreciation to Senator Leahy and his staff for bringing forward a bill that is a reasonable bill. It is within the budget requested by the President. In fact, it is a little bit underneath it. It has a very strong commitment to the right priorities, and Senator Leahy deserves great credit. He has been instrumental on the issue of how we proceed in foreign policy for many years. Prior to my assuming this ranking position, Senator McConnell and he worked together hand in hand to address these issues, which cover the globe, are complicated but have a huge impact on an awful lot of lives.

I appreciate his exceptional work in this area, and I appreciate the fact he has brought forward a piece of legislation which I am happy to support with enthusiasm. There are some issues, obviously, on policy which hopefully will be straightened out and which have been alluded to. They are primarily the issues of Mexico City and the Kemp-Kasten language. But the bill itself is basically a very strong bill, and it is within the budget as requested by the President. Therefore, hopefully, we can get the Mexico City language straightened out and move on to passing the bill.

His staff--Tim Rieser and the Democratic staff--have been extraordinarily fair to our staff--Paul Grove and our people on this side--and we appreciate their courtesy. When we raised issues, they tried to address them and resolve them.

I wish to point out a few highlights in this bill. The chairman has mentioned a number of them. I think it is important to recognize we are a compassionate Nation, committed to trying to help people who we see in need. This bill reflects that innate quality of the American people. It is one of our great characteristics as Americans that we as a nation and as a people try to reach out to those who have not been dealt quite as good a hand as we have been dealt and try to help them across the globe.

We use a lot of American taxpayers' dollars to do that. People work hard for those dollars. When we spend them in other countries, people want to be sure, of course, they are spent well, and they want to be sure they are getting results. They expect them to be spent to benefit regions of the world that have not been quite as lucky as we have been.

That is why the commitment in this bill to AIDS, which is huge--$5 billion--is important. It is something that has been bipartisan. The President has clearly taken the lead on this issue. This committee has strongly supported those initiatives.

We also have made a very significant effort in the area of humanitarian aid dealing with migration and refugee assistance and with international disaster assistance. That is what these dollars are used for. When you go out and you meet folks, as all of us do--that is one of the fun parts of doing this job, representing our constituents and hearing from them--sometimes--actually, not that often in New Hampshire and I suspect not that often in Vermont, but sometimes you hear people say: What are we sending all this money overseas for? Those are dollars we worked hard for and could spend here in America.

Well, we spend them overseas, first, because we are a nation which is blessed--and we understand others are not--and when we see things we can try to help with, such as the AIDS epidemic in Africa. We also send these dollars overseas because, quite honestly, it benefits us. It is that simple: It benefits us. It benefits us on two levels.

First, it benefits us on a national security level. Most or many of these dollars which we spend under this bill essentially go to countries which undertake actions which assist us in our national security and pick up burdens which we might otherwise have to pick up, not only with dollars but also with American troops being at risk. So it is a good investment from that standpoint.

Also, we basically are a trading nation. Our great success as an economy is the fact we are engaged, we are the international economy. Participating in that economy is critical to creating jobs and economic benefit here. Thus, we use these dollars, to a significant degree, to stabilize regions and give them economic viability. Quite simply, we can then participate in that economic viability by selling them goods-- products or services--which we manufacture or make in the United States.

Again, it benefits us. So these dollars which we spend--and they are significant; $34 billion is a lot of money--are dollars which we spend well, I believe, on behalf of the American people in most instances.

In this bill, for example, we significantly assist the military efforts of the nations of Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other allies around the globe. We have increased the funding, for example, rather significantly to the country of Jordan. Let's take that as an example.

Here is a country right in the middle of the Middle East, which is a linchpin in the Middle East which represents stability, represents a forward-thinking Government, that cares for its people and wants its people to succeed but does not have the resources of many of those nations in the Middle East that have the good fortune to have oil or gas. Yet they take on responsibility that we would have to otherwise take on. They take on massive numbers of refugees from Iraq, which has strained significantly their infrastructure and their educational system and the culture.

We have some obligation, I believe, to support a country which is willing to take these types of steps to assist its neighbors but also has duress to some degree because of our efforts in that region. So that is why I think increasing the funding for Jordan is very appropriate. I certainly hope we will be able to maintain that as we move through the entire process.

There are no earmarks in this bill. We obviously have had quite a battle in this Congress over how many earmarks people should have, what types of earmarks people should have. This bill is pretty much earmark free. In fact, unless you consider funds going to a foreign government requested by the President as an earmark, there are virtually no earmarks in this bill, for which, again, I congratulate the chairman for that sort of leadership. As he said, he is complying with S. 1, which passed this body back in July. It has not been signed yet, but we presume it will be, or at least the language relative to how earmarks in appropriations bills are handled will certainly go into force. So I congratulate the chairman for pulling this bill together in that form.

I wish to speak briefly, though, about one area which I am concerned about and which I find to be a bit of an affront--more than a bit--a real affront, and that is dollars which we are allocating to certain activities in this international arena which are being wasted, they are being fraudulently handled, they are being used for patronage or there is simple corruption, which is stealing. We have three examples of that which are rather severe. We are missing $8 billion, minimum--remember, the number, I suspect, is significantly higher--in Iraq in reconstruction. A lot of the reconstruction money which we are supposed to be spending in Iraq doesn't appear to be getting out into the field, the rubber doesn't seem to be hitting the road. The money seems to be somewhere; we are not sure where. We hear representations that it may be buying buildings in Switzerland rather than building buildings in Iraq, but we know, because the money is not moving out, that the dollars are not there and not doing what they are supposed to be doing.

This concerns many of us on both sides of the aisle. The GAO has been giving us report after report. The special Inspector General has been giving us report after report highlighting this concern, which is that there is and appears to be significant corruption, and that corruption is misallocating funds--American tax dollars--in Iraq.

In addition, another example of concern is the World Bank. The World Bank has just taken on a new leader, Secretary Zoellick, Ambassador Zoellick, who is one of the strongest individuals I have met in my experience in public life. I think he is one of the best public servants I have come across. He is totally committed to doing things the right way and has no problem making a decision and shaking a place up, that is for sure. I think he is going to be good for the World Bank. But he comes into a situation which has very big issues relative to the dollars that are being spent there. Reports are coming out that literally hundreds of millions--if not billions--of dollars are being siphoned off from these grants, that there is inadequate oversight, that there is a lack of transparency, that there is shoddy accounting, and that there is just plain theft going on of some of these dollars. We have examples of corruption which appear to be fairly significant in Kenya, in Guyana, in India, in Bolivia, and in various other regions. The biggest concern, independent of the loss of dollars and the dollars not being used to benefit these nations which need the assistance, is the fact that there seems to be a real resistance within the structured bureaucracy of the World Bank to telling anybody what is going on, and there appears to be more of a commitment to hiding the facts than to disclosing the facts when it comes to corruption, mismanagement, poor accounting, and that is not right.

These are American tax dollars. We are going to put $1.1 billion into the World Bank with this bill, and the American taxpayer, at least the people from New Hampshire and, I am sure, the people from Vermont, don't expect those dollars to be spent to line the pockets of some corrupt official in one of these nations. They expect them to be spent to assist the people in those nations who haven't been as fortunate as we have. The World Bank has to get its act cleaned up, and that begins with transparency.

So in this bill we have put in significant language--I believe it is significant--which will essentially fence 20 percent of the appropriations until we hear from the World Bank that they have made public the available financial disclosure forms, that the bank has established a plan and a schedule for conducting regular independent audits, that the bank is adequately staffing and sufficiently funding the Department of Institutional Integrity, and that the bank has made publicly available the bulk of the panel report which we wish to see. We may add another thing to that. We want to make it unalterably clear that we are tired of the obfuscation that is coming out of the World Bank and that the World Bank makes public the Department of Institutional Integrity November 23 report relative to the India issue, which has received a fair amount of attention recently.

So we are fencing these funds. They are not going to get this money until we get some accounting rules that work over there. I think with Secretary Zoellick now in charge, he will be equally aggressive in making sure that this sort of action occurs.

In addition, of course, there is the United Nations. I have always supported funding the United Nations. I strongly support the United Nations as an institution, as a concept, and as a key player in world events in order to try to give the world a place where it can come together and resolve disputes, especially.

But once again, we have a track record of mismanagement and shoddy accounting, and sometimes no accounting, and patronage and misuse of tax dollars that are rather staggering. Article after article has been reported in this area. It is--the U.S. taxpayer picks up about a quarter of the cost of the United Nations--a disproportionate amount quite honestly, in my opinion--but we do it because we believe in that institution. But it is very hard to tell an American taxpayer that the dollars they are sending to the United Nations, if it goes into certain accounts is going to disappear, or it is going to be used to give a job to somebody's cousin

who is coming in from some country where they couldn't get him a job.

So again, I say this is an issue we are going to focus on in order to try to get some fair and honest accounting, transparency, and a system that uses at least American tax dollars efficiently to benefit the world rather than uses them to benefit individuals who happen to be in high places or have found themselves in positions to take advantage of the situation.

So those are issues I think are critical. The corruption issue is very high, at least on my agenda, as to how we handle these dollars. But that doesn't undercut the basic need here, which is to have a strong and vibrant commitment to foreign aid assistance and to international assistance which addresses priorities that we have as a nation in dealing with other countries and also addresses the needs of other people around this globe where we see we can make a difference, such as in the AIDS area.

Again I congratulate the chairman who has done a good job on this bill, his staff has done a good job on this bill, our staff has done a good job on this bill, and I hope we can pass it promptly.

There are a number of amendments from our side. I have been made aware of a number of amendments, and we are ready to start the amendment process, and whenever people want to start offering amendments--I see the Senator from Florida is here and I know he has two very good amendments that I will certainly be supportive of, I suspect, and I will be happy to proceed if he wants to offer them, and I will be happy to hear them. I presume there will be no votes until about 2:30.

Madam President, I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

Madam President, I would like to reserve that request and I ask unanimous consent that the committee amendment be agreed to, that the bill as thus amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and that no points of order be waived by virtue of this agreement.

I note the absence of a quorum.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

I understand all of the Senator's amendments are paid for, is that correct?

Madam President, first, I thank the Senator from Florida for his cooperation with the committee

and for bringing these amendments forward so promptly so we can address these important issues he raised.

The Senator from Florida obviously is the leading expert in this Congress on the issue of Cuba for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that he was a refugee from Cuba. His success story is an American success story since his arrival in the United States. I am sure the Cuban people take great pride in seeing him in the Senate as a person who came to this country with nothing. We admire him for that fact. He has maintained, obviously, close ties to the issue of Cuba and how we can best address it. His suggestions here are that we bring the funding levels for supporting initiatives relative to democracy in Cuba up by $10 million and supporting Radio Marti so it is fully funded by adding $5 million. Those are reasonable suggestions that I support. I hope we can move them forward.

The Senator is also the leading expert in Congress on the issue of South America and how we deal with that. South America--the issues of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia--is a very important issue to us as a nation. This region of the world is very close to us. What happens there has a direct and immediate impact on us both in terms of people leaving those countries and illegally coming to the United States and in terms of drugs being exported to the United States.

In the case of Venezuela, they have a government that has a clear antipathy toward the United States and is trying to undermine American interests throughout the world, but especially in South America.

As the Senator pointed out, the government has had incredible successes in Colombia, which was a basket case when it was controlled by the mob--the FARC, as it is known--for a number of years. It was the center of and remains, regrettably, a high-profile producer of cocaine, which ends up in the United States. Now they have a government that is freely elected and which is making significant strides toward establishing a functioning nondrug-based culture and economy in that country. We need to support this government. We need to support President Uribe as he moves forward.

I honestly haven't understood what seems to be an antipathy from the intelligentsia in the United States, especially the Northeast intelligentsia, toward President Uribe and his government. It has a lot of overtones, in my opinion, to what happened in Haiti, where the intelligentsia of the Northeast decided that Mr. Aristide was the perfect person for that nation, and it turned out he was a horrific event for that nation, as he backtracked and continues to backtrack. Why there should be antagonism toward a government that has been freely elected with overwhelming majorities, and which is moving aggressively toward trying to control the criminals who export cocaine to this country, is hard to fathom. But that exists and I think it is unfortunate.

But I do think we, as a government, should recognize that the Government of Colombia, and specifically President Uribe's government, has made some very significant strides toward trying to get control over the cocaine production and the FARC elements. They have done it at not only a risk to their Government but at tremendous personal risk. These folks are targeted for assassination by these criminal groups. They have shown tremendous courage in moving forward and moving their nation forward. We should be supporting that courage. We hear from our own people--not from the Colombians but those who are fighting drugs in this country, including General Walters, who believes firmly that he needs the additional money being proposed here by the Senator from Florida in order to adequately fund the effort with primarily hardware--helicopters specifically--in Colombia in order to continue the successes we have begun to see under Plan Colombia.

I support the Senator's initiative, and I hope we can support these amendments as we move forward. We are not going to have any votes until probably later in the afternoon, but it is good to start with these amendments. I congratulate the Senator from Florida for bringing them forward.

I see no objection.

Madam 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.

Madam President, will the Senator from Kansas yield for a question?

I see the Senator from California is in the Chamber. I was wondering if we could enter a game plan. I understand the Senator from Kansas has two amendments, one dealing with the Mexico City language and one dealing with Kemp-Kasten.

The Senator from California has an amendment that deals with the language in this bill also in that general area. I was wondering if we can work out an agreement where the Senator from Kansas can have the time he has already taken, plus an additional 30 minutes on his two amendments, and the Senator from California can have 30 minutes on her amendment, and then maybe we can vote on all these amendments.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Kansas have 30 minutes and be allowed to offer his two amendments without second-degree amendments, and the Senator from California then follow with 30 minutes and be allowed to offer her amendment without second-degree amendments, and those three amendments be voted on at the conclusion of that time.

And in an order to be determined.

Madam President, I ask that the Senator from Kansas yield for an additional unanimous consent.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that no second- degree amendments be in order to the amendments proposed.