Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am here to join the Senator from Indiana, and I think I can presumptively speak for everybody in this body. We want to help the people in New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern States that were hurt by Sandy. We have had some pretty tough disasters in Tennessee as well. We had a 1,000-year flood 2 years ago--not a 100-year flood but a 1,000-year flood. We knew the Federal Government wasn't going to make us whole. We had billions of dollars of damage, 52 counties hurt, but we knew the Federal Government could help and it did help and it helped swiftly and that is what we want to do in this case.

With all the talk about the money we are about to appropriate, I think it is important to remind those who live in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut what is already being done with money we have already appropriated. For example, there are 4,402 FEMA personnel working in those States. There are 514,343 citizens of those States who have already filed individual assistance applications. This is when your home is gone and you need money for rent or you need money to rebuild. Those applications are in.

Already $1.13 billion has been paid. There are 24 disaster recovery centers in New York, 24 in New Jersey and 1 in Connecticut. $150 million in disaster loans have already been approved by the Small Business Administration, and more than 360,000 applications have been sent out.

The important fact to know is that help for victims of Hurricane Sandy doesn't depend on what we are about to do tonight. We already have money in the bank. We already have FEMA people on the ground. There is already help available. In my experience in our Tennessee disasters, that help comes in a matter of days, in most cases.

So what are we about to do? As Senator Coats said--and I wish to congratulate him for making a very sensible approach toward this--what we are about to say is this is $24 billion more for the accounts that are already helping people in the areas hurt by Sandy.

For example, there is over $5 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund. That is just to make sure there is enough money to fund those half million requests that are already in. There is $9.7 billion for flood insurance. If you have flood insurance, the Federal Government will be able to pay your claim. There is $3.4 billion to repair roads and bridges. There is $2 billion for community development block grants. We found in Tennessee that is especially flexible money, which is very helpful. That is $2 billion between now and March. There is also $500 million for the Small Business Administration.

So what is not included in the proposal we are offering. It doesn't include items that are not related to Hurricane Sandy. This is supposed to be about Hurricane Sandy. It doesn't make changes to the Stafford Act. What that means is we don't go in, in this emergency appropriations bill for the next 3 months, and make wholesale changes in the law, make things permanent that are temporary, and streamline regulations. They all may be good things to do, but we have a process for making legislative changes.

We don't include $13 billion for unspecified future projects. They may be good projects, but if they are, we have a process to consider those projects. The distinguished Senator from California and I are the ranking members of one of the subcommittees that does some of that. We expect to do that next year. So we are filling the accounts that are already being used to help many people.

Finally, if I may say something about process--which I think would be more interesting to the Senators than to the people of New York and New Jersey--but it is important to know this bill came to the floor in record time. No one objected to its coming to the floor.

It was virtually unanimous, before we even started voting on amendments, that we agreed to invoke cloture and to have a final vote of 51 votes so the bill in some form will pass. In return for that, those of us on the minority side, so far as I know, got the amendments we wanted.

I simply want to say to my colleagues that it is still far from a perfect process in our effort to continue to improve the way the Senate works. The bill should have gone to committee to begin with. It did not. It could have been amended there. When it came to the floor on Monday, and we said come right on, no one objected to that, we should have started voting. We could have voted for 3 days on this bill: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, instead of running around trying to see who had amendments. Let us just put them up and vote on them. Then we should have had the cloture vote which, as I said, was done with, I think, only one dissenting objection.

So the process has been better but not as good as it should be for the Senate. But Senator Coats' substitute is the right proposal. It is 24 billion more dollars now for the accounts that are already being used to help victims of Sandy.

The last thing I would say is this. When there is an emergency, Congress has always acted. We don't always do everything in the first week or second or third week because we already have money in the bank for those needs. But in Katrina, for example, there were nine different supplemental appropriations bills over time. The next wave of appropriations requests can come to us, and we will go to work on them in a few weeks. We can get to work in the committee right away, for example, and Senator Feinstein and I could work on it a few weeks after that. Then the majority leader will bring the bills to the floor--which he did not last year--and we can vote on them and have the second round of funding.

So I thank the Senator from Indiana, Mr. Coats, for his hard work on this. We want the people of New York and New Jersey to know we want to help them, we are helping them, and will continue to be interested in the things that need to be done. It will not make them whole, but it will help them get on their feet, just as we have in Tennessee and just as we have in other States across the country after large disasters.

Mr. President, Senator Inouye told me a story which I wish to repeat for our colleagues.

In 1973, George Gallup, the pollster, asked to come see him. This was at the height of the Watergate hearings. Back then, these investigations into President Nixon's Watergate break-in were consuming the country. Then there were only three major television networks, plus the Public Broadcasting System, and the Watergate hearings were televised from the Senate every single day, for several hours a day, on all four of those networks. So, almost everyone in the country watched the Watergate hearings for weeks. They got to know Sam Ervin, the chairman. They got to know Howard Baker, the ranking Republican. But George Gallup came to see Senator Inouye. And Senator Inouye said, I am glad to see you, but why do you come to see me?

He said, Senator, who would you say is the most recognized person in the United States today? Senator Inouye said, Well, I am sure President Nixon is. And Gallup said, That is right. But the second most recognized person is Senator Dan Inouye.

Inouye said, Well, how could that be? George Gallup said, Well, Senator, I suspect so many Americans have never seen a United States Senator of Japanese ancestry with one arm and a distinguished voice and presence, and you have made an indelible impression on the American people.

That was 1973. That was a long time ago. Since then, Dan Inouye made an indelible impression on a great many people around the world, and especially on the 100 of us who serve here. He commanded our respect in a remarkable way, in part because of his service in the war.

He and Bob Dole, our former colleague, were wounded at about the same time in Europe and were in the same hospital recovering from tremendously serious wounds. Of course, Senator Inouye was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for that.

Senator Pryor was telling the story that when Senator Inouye was finally elected to Congress, he wrote Senator Dole a note and said, I am here, where are you? Because both of them, when they were recovering from their war wounds, had determined that one day they wanted to serve in the United States Congress. Inouye got here first.

A few years ago, Senator Inouye and Senator Ted Stevens invited a number of us to go with them to China. It was quite an experience. Senator Stevens--of course, another World War II veteran--had flown the first cargo plane into what was then Peking, in 1944. Of course, Senator Inouye was well regarded in China for his service. So the group of Senators--there must have been a dozen of us of both parties--got more time with Mr. Hu and Mr. Wu, the No. 1 and 2 leaders of China, than the President of the United States nearly did. We were accorded every courtesy possible because of the presence of Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens. They were like brothers. They called one another brothers. They acted that way in private. They served that way in the Senate, as chairman and vice chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Over a number of decades, they singlehandedly shaped our American defense posture, and they did it with skill and patriotism and knowledge of our structure that very few could have.

Several Senators mentioned how bipartisan Dan Inouye was. He was of the old school--not a bad school for today, in my point of view. He treated each Senator with courtesy, even the newer Senators. He treated each Senator with a sense of equality, even those who were in the minority and not on his side of the aisle. He was always fair, he was always courteous, and he always tried to do the right thing. He was a textbook U.S. Senator.

He announced for reelection after his last election. I don't know his exact age at the time--maybe 85, 86. He will not be able to run for that reelection now that he is gone, but he will be well remembered.

Not long ago, he spoke at our Wednesday morning Prayer Breakfast that we have here. Usually we have 20 or 30 Senators. On the day he spoke, we had maybe 60 or 70. We had Senators sitting on the windowsills, standing around the back, just to hear what he had to say. I won't repeat what he had to say because we don't talk about what goes on there in public except to say he talked about his war experiences--and in a quiet way. He stood there for 10 or 15 minutes and explained those experiences to us, most of whom had never had that sort of experience. It gave us a new sense of him, and it increased our respect for him, if that could have been possible.

I join with my colleagues to say Senator Dan Inouye was a patriot. He set the standard, really, for a U.S. Senator. He set the standard for a man or woman in our military fighting to defend his or her country. And he set the standard as an individual who showed courtesy to everyone he met. We will miss him. We honor him. And we give his family our expressions of grief, but, more important, our great respect for our colleague who today is gone.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I have two items I would like to briefly mention. The Nation is consumed by the fiscal cliff. From all I can tell, the Presidential limousine is moving very rapidly toward the fiscal cliff with the President's foot on the accelerator. I am still hopeful we will get a budget agreement that will help us get the economy moving again, but at a time like this, of course, what we all need to be doing is thinking about saving every possible penny to fix the debt.

This government in Washington, DC, is borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we spend. That is why I come to the floor to point out a proposal that has been made to fleece the taxpayers out of an additional $50 billion over the next 6 years. This is a proposal that is as brazen as a mid-day bank robbery on Main Street. It is a proposal by the wind developers of America to say to the taxpayers: Please give us $50 billion or so more dollars over the next 6 years to phase out the Federal taxpayer subsidy for wind power.

Why is this a brazen fleecing of the taxpayers? First, this taxpayer subsidy began in 1992, 20 years ago, as a temporary subsidy for a new form of energy. Of course, windmills are not really new. We have had them for hundreds of years. But the idea was to give them a little boost so they could get bigger and perhaps help us supply electricity.

It was intended in 1992 that this would only be a temporary tax credit. But as President Reagan used to say: There is nothing that comes as close to eternal life as a government program. So this temporary taxpayer credit has been renewed time after time after time. It is 20 years old. Now, after billions of dollars and 20 years, wind power is, according to President Obama's Energy Secretary, a mature technology.

The Congress has decided that Federal taxpayer subsidies for wind power should end at the end of this year. Everyone knows that. This is no surprise. It has been out there for a while, so businesses can plan on this. In other words, it is time for wind power, the Congress has said, to take its place in our free market system and compete with natural gas, compete with nuclear power, compete with hydropower, compete with solar power---compete with other forms of power producing electricity. After all, we produce and use about 20 to 25 percent of all the electricity in the world, and we want to make sure we have plenty of it and that it is a reliable supply at a low price.

Yet along came the wind developers who have benefited from this giveaway for 20 years--I say giveaway because, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the United States Treasury, from 2009 through 2013 it has cost the taxpayers $16 billion to subsidize windmills in America. Put that in a little perspective. The federal government spends only $6 billion a year on all energy research. We could be spending it there. We could be reducing the debt. Instead, we are continuing to subsidize this mature technology.

But the brazenness of those who have been receiving this giveaway money--it is hard to imagine how it could be exceeded by a so-called phase-out proposal. They announced: Phase us out over the next 6 years, through 2018. In 2013 the credit would be 100 percent. We would have the credit for next year at the same level it is this year. That's estimated to cost about $12 billion. That is twice the amount of money we spend each year on energy research in America. Then, in 2014, they want 90 percent of the previous full tax credit, and then 80 and 70 and 60 and nothing after 2018.

I have not had a chance for the Congressional Budget Office to evaluate how much this phase-out would cost, but it is tens of billions of dollars. One estimate is $50 billion new taxpayer dollars at a time when we are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar to keep doing something that is already phasing out on its own terms. We cannot afford that. We simply can't afford that. We cannot afford 1 year more of the wind tax credit--that is $12 billion--on top of the $16 billion for grants and the production tax credit from 2009 through 2013.

Second, it is interfering with the marketplace. The subsidy to wind developers is so great they are actually paying distributors of electricity, in some cases, to take their wind power, which undercuts other forms of electricity on which we rely. Why is that so important? We cannot rely on wind power, because it only works when the wind blows. It often blows at night when we really do not need it. We have a wind farm in Tennessee. It is the only one in the Southeastern United States. Why? Because the wind doesn't blow much in the Southeastern United States.

In Tennessee, somebody has a big contract with extra subsidies by the government to put these gigantic towers on top of our scenic mountains. And how much electricity does it produce? Not very much. Of course, these turbines only generate electricity about 19 percent of the time, and it produces even less electricity when we actually need it. You can fly over it or drive by these giant windmills at 4 p.m. in the afternoon in the summer when everybody has their air conditioning on and they need electricity, and not a single windmill is turning. You might go at night and it is turning, but they don't need the extra electricity at 7 or 8 or 9 o'clock at night. That is the problem around the country. It is a puny amount of unreliable, expensive electricity.

The idea that the United States of America, using 20 to 25 percent of all the electricity in the world, would produce the largest amount of clean and reliable electricity by windmills is the energy equivalent of going to war in sail boats when nuclear submarines are available.

Let's let wind power, after 20 years, find its place in our market. There are clearly places where it should be fine. But there is no need to subsidize it from the Federal Government; to cause the ratepayers of Tennessee, for example, to pay more to import electricity produced by wind from South Dakota when we should be using those dollars either to lower our rates, to pay for air pollution control equipment, and to build nuclear power plants--of which we have several in the Tennessee Valley. They are clean--they emit no sulfur, no nitrogen, no mercury, and no carbon. That is the cleanest form of reliable energy we have in the United States.

There may be some places where windmills work, but not along the tops of the Tennessee mountains or even in the valleys of Tennessee. The idea of continuing to waste $50 billion of taxpayer money over the next several years to subsidize a mature technology at a time when the government is going broke is as brazen as a bank robbery in the middle of the day on Main Street. I hope we put a spotlight on this $50 billion giveaway. I hope it becomes the poster child for what is wrong with spending in Washington, DC. I hope the Congress will come to its senses this month and next month and say no to those who come forward with their hand out for this $50 billion giveaway.

The Filibuster

Madam President, on Tuesday I spoke about the filibuster. I inadvertently made a mistake I would like to correct. When I was looking at the history of filling the tree, which is the gag rule that the majority leader uses to stop Republicans from offering amendments-- we just saw it again today. We had a banking bill. There was a budget point of order that killed the bill. We had a couple of amendments on the Republican side that would fix the budget point of order, and then we could have passed the bill. But the majority leader imposed the gag rule, he filled the tree, and here we are.

I was talking about that, and I said that Senator Robert Dole was the first leader to fill the tree, and I was wrong about that. I was reading some information that the Congressional Research Service had given me, and I did not read it right. When the CRS went back and looked at its information, it would appear that in 1980, Senator Robert Byrd used this filling of the tree on the Tonnage Measurement Simplification Act, H.R. 1197.

That reminds me of a story Senator Baker used to tell me when he was suddenly elected majority leader in 1981, and Senator Byrd became the minority leader unexpectedly. Senator Baker went to Senator Byrd and said: Senator Byrd, I will never know the rules as well as you do. I'll make a deal with you. I won't surprise you if you won't surprise me.

Senator Byrd said to Senator Baker: Let me think about it.

He thought about it overnight and said: It's a deal. And they worked that way for 4 years. Senator Byrd knew the rules.

In 1980, apparently, at least so far as the research shows, he was the first one to use this arcane procedure of filling the tree. Filling the tree sounds very strange, but it is very simple. It means the majority leader can use it to cut off debate over here.

If you bring up a banking bill, and it has a budget problem, and one of us

says we can fix that problem, that we have an amendment, if he has filled the tree, we cannot offer amendments. If some Senator--let's not pick on the majority leader--brings up a bill, and, let's say, it is an appropriations bill and it does not include money to rebuild the Center Hill Dam or the Wolf Creek Dam--which is not safe at the moment--and I want to stand up and say, Madam President, my constituents would like to see some money to make this dam safe because if it fails it will flood Nashville--if the tree is filled, I cannot do my job.

On our side of the aisle we do not like filling the tree. We are in the minority, and we believe the majority has the right to set the agenda and that we in the minority have the right to offer amendments. The good news is a number of us on both sides of the aisle are working, with the knowledge of the majority leader and the Republican leader, to see if we can make some suggestions privately to Senator Reid and Senator McConnell that they can consider and, hopefully, agree that they are good suggestions, and as we begin the new year we will be able to move bills to the floor.

I know the majority leader would like to be able to do that more easily, and maybe some of the fault for that is on our side. We on our side, then, would have a right to do what the minority especially wants to be able to do, which is to offer amendments, because this body is established for the purpose of protecting the rights of the minority.

The Congressional Research Service is looking further into the record, but we do have a record of how majority leaders have used this procedure from 1985 to the present. This data supports my larger point which is--what was used rarely is now used too frequently.

According to CRS, these are the numbers. Since 1985, Senator Bob Dole filled the tree, used the gag rule, seven times; Senator Byrd used it three times; Senator Mitchell used it three times; Senator Lott, when he was majority leader, used the gag rule 11 times--that is, cut off amendments--Senator Daschle only one time; Senator Frist 15 times. Those are the majority leaders. So since 1985 all of those majority leaders used it a combined 40 times.

Our current majority leader, Senator Reid, has used it, as of yesterday, 69 times since he became leader in 2007. This trend, this gagging the minority, is the primary cause of the Senate's dysfunction.

I wanted to correct the record. I made a mistake, and I am glad to come and correct it. I don't want Senator Dole to get the credit for that when it appears Senator Byrd actually figured it out. I want to conclude with an optimistic point. I think most of us--and I would include the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire in the chair because we have been together in discussions, bipartisan discussions where we have talked about this--most of us believe we are fortunate to be here. We know we are basically political accidents. Since we are here we want to do our jobs. We would like to advocate the things that people sent us here to do.

So if we have a bill, and we are in the majority, we would like to get the bill on the floor. If we have something to say, an amendment, if we are in the minority, we would like to have a chance to offer that amendment. So what a number of us are doing, we have been talking about how we can do two simple things: How can we make it easier for the majority leader to get bills to the floor? And how can we make it easier for the minority especially to be able to offer amendments?

If we can do those two things at the beginning of the year, I think the Senate will begin to function much more effectively. It will be a better place to work. We will get our job done in a better way. There will be less finger-pointing, and there will be more results. There will be a change in behavior, which is what we need instead of a change in rules, and it will inspire the confidence of the people of the United States about the kind of job we are doing.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. President, while the Senator from California is still on the Senate floor, I want to thank her for her comments on the Senate rules.

I would agree this is something we should be able to talk amongst ourselves and work out. Some of us who have been here for a little while and watch the Senate know it is a unique institution. Fundamentally, most of us on both sides of the aisle know we are not functioning as effectively as we should. And there are only two things that need to happen: We need to get bills to the floor, and then we need to have amendments. Historically, it has been the responsibility of the majority to decide what comes to the floor, and historically the minority--whoever that happens to be--has an opportunity to have amendments.

Over the last 25 years, a couple of things have happened. One is the motion to proceed has been used to block bills coming to the floor. That happened rarely 25 years ago. But, on the other hand, something else happened over the last 25 years: a procedure called filling the tree--which is really a gag rule on amendments--was once rarely used but is now abused. During his tenure, Senator Bob Dole used the so- called filling the tree procedure, and used it seven times. Later, Senator Byrd used it three times when he was the majority leader. Senator Mitchell used it three times; Senator Lott, 11; Senator Daschle, only once, this gag rule; Senator Frist, 15. All those leaders used it 40 times. Our majority leader, Senator Reid, has used it 68 times.

So we can all come up with statistics on both sides, but shouldn't we just resolve that what we would like to do is show the country we are grown-up, responsible adults; that we can sit down and say, yes, we can agree on ways to make sure that most bills come to the floor and Senators get to offer most of the amendments they want to offer on the bill? I think we can do that. I think there is a spirit on both sides of the aisle to do that, and I am working toward that goal and I know a number of Democrats and Republicans are doing that. I appreciate the spirit of the Senator's remarks on the rules.

The Senator from California also mentioned the fiscal cliff, and I would like to talk about that in two ways. I have a little different perspective.

The campaign is over. Congratulations to President Obama. He won it. He won the campaign. Isn't this an opportunity for the President to now shift gears, to become President of the United States--to do for the debt that we have, for the social safety net programs that are in jeopardy, to show the same kind of leadership on those issues that President Eisenhower did on the Korean war; that President Lincoln did on the Civil War; that President Reagan did working with Tip O'Neill as was mentioned on Social Security--that was a difficult thing to do back in the early 1980s--and President Clinton did on welfare reform.

Robert Merry, who wrote the biography of James K. Polk, said the other day: In the history of the United States every great crisis has been solved by Presidential leadership or not at all.

A number of us have made our suggestions about what to do about the fact that our debt is too big, we are spending money we don't have, and one way or the other we have to fix it. It is that simple. We shouldn't be borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend. So we have to fix it. And a number of us have said on the Republican side: We will hold our noses and do some things we normally wouldn't do.

If the President will come forward with a reasonable proposal on restraining entitlement spending, we will help

raise revenues and we will put the two together, and that makes a budget agreement that the new Foreign Minister of Australia described in this way: The United States of America is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence, one budget agreement away from stopping all talk in the Pacific area of America's decline, one budget agreement away from showing that we can govern ourselves.

So why don't we do that? Well, I was Governor of a State. That is a much smaller potatoes job--I know that--than being President. But if we needed better roads--which we did--and I waited around for the legislature to come up with a road program, we would still be driving on dirt roads. If I wanted to recruit the Japanese industry to Tennessee--which we did--and I waited around for the legislature to decide which country to go, we wouldn't have any of the auto jobs we now have. If we needed to reward outstanding teaching, and I waited around for the legislature to decide how to be the first State to pay more for teaching well, we wouldn't be doing it at all--which we are now leading the country in doing.

I am trying to say that the way our constitutional system works, at the smaller level in a State with the Governor, or at the national level with the President, the President sets the agenda.

Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, George Reedy, said: The President's job is, No. 1, to see an urgent need; No. 2, to develop a strategy to deal with the need; No. 3, persuade at least half the people he is right. Well, President Obama has done 1 and 3, but he hasn't done 2. We are all sitting around waiting for the President's proposal on what to do about fixing the debt. He has told us what he wants to do about taxes, but he has not yet said what to do about spending on runaway entitlement programs which we all know we have to fix. If he will do that, we will get a result.

We are not the President. We wanted to be. We tried to be. Some of us have even run for the office, but we are not. He is. It is a great privilege. He won the election. We congratulate him for that. So let's have the President's proposal. We need Presidential leadership on the question.

And it is not just an abstract matter of a budget agreement so that the Australian Foreign Minister is happy with the United States, his ally.

I know a lot of people in Tennessee--hundreds of thousands of them actually--who can't wait until they are 65 years old in order to get Medicare so they can be assured they can afford their health care bills. There are hundreds of thousands of people in our State for whom Social Security is their only or most of their income.

What do we say to them? Do we say to them that we are going to ignore the fact--let's just take Medicare--that they are not going to be able to depend on Medicare unless we take some steps to save it? I mean, we can all count. We know, from the Urban Institute, the average two- earner couple who retires this year will have paid about $122,000 into Medicare during their lifetime and are going to take $387,000 out, that simply can't continue. One way or another we have to make certain that the millions of Americans who are looking forward to Medicare can count on it when they become eligible for Medicare. We have the same responsibility with Social Security.

So I would hope the President would recognize there are a lot of us on both sides of the aisle who want to reach a budget agreement. We are waiting for his leadership. He is not sitting around a table as one Senator anymore. He is the President. He is the agenda setter. We need his proposal. Then we can react to it and then we can agree on it. He is not the Speaker. He is not the majority leader of the Senate or the minority leader. He is the President of the United States.

Just as President Eisenhower, President Reagan, President Lincoln, all of the Presidents who have led in resolving great crises, I hope President Obama will as well.

I want him to succeed in resolving this crisis, and the crisis includes not just raising taxes on rich people--I mean, of course, most people are in favor of raising taxes on the guy with the bigger house down the street. It includes finding a way to fix the debt.

I would make one other point on the fiscal cliff. I mentioned that I thought the campaign was over, but the President was in Michigan yesterday on what looked like a campaign event. It seems to me, that time would have been better spent here in Washington, D.C. working on the fiscal cliff, but he was in Michigan. By my way of thinking, he was doing two things: First, he was encouraging the people of Michigan to continue to deny working people the right to get or keep a job without having to pay union dues; and, second, to continue to perpetuate a system that will keep our auto industry from being able to compete in the world marketplace.

Michigan is on the verge of becoming the 24th right-to-work State in the United States. The state Senate and the House each passed separate bills in Michigan last week. They passed a final bill today, and I understand the Governor is about to consider whether to sign it. This is what it will do:

It will ensure that employees in Michigan do not have to pay union dues in order to get or keep a job.

The President said yesterday that Michigan legislators shouldn't be taking away the people's right to bargain for better wages or working conditions. But no one, in passing a right-to-work law, is taking away workers' rights. They're actually giving them a new right--the right not to have to pay union dues in order to get or keep a job. Workers have the right to collectively bargain. Federal laws have recognized that since the 1930s. But since 1947, the Federal Government has also said that States have the right to determine whether to a state may prohibit compulsory unionism. So if Michigan goes the way of the right- to-work law, 24 States have made that decision.

The President also said that these right-to-work laws ``have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.'' I would respectfully disagree with that based upon my life's experience. Thirty years ago, Tennessee was the third poorest State. I was looking around for a way to increase family incomes and to attract new jobs. So I went off to Japan to recruit Nissan. We had virtually no auto jobs in Tennessee at the time. They took a look at a map of the United States at night with the lights on, showing that most of the people lived in the east. While most of the people lived in the east, the center of the market is where you wanted to be if you are making big heavy things, and the center of the market had moved toward the southeast. So Tennessee and Kentucky were more in the center of the market than Michigan or other states where autos had normally been manufactured. So Nissan looked aggressively at Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. But then they looked at something else.

None of the States north of us had a right-to-work law. They had a very different labor environment. So Nissan came to Tennessee. They weren't the only ones. General Motors and the United Auto Workers partnership came to Tennessee with a Saturn plant. They still have an important General Motors plant there where the workers are members of the United Auto Workers, but it is in a right-to-work State. Over the last 30 years, there have probably been a dozen large assembly plants built in the Southeastern United States. There are about 1,000 suppliers in our State today.

What has been the effect of the arrival of the auto industry in Tennessee, attracted by, among other things, our right-to-work law? One-third of our manufacturing jobs today are auto-related jobs. And what has been the effect on the United States? It has maintained a competitive environment where those who want to sell cars in the United States can make them in the United States. Without that competitive environment, my guess is that most of those cars would be made in Mexico or some other place around the world.

If you don't believe me, read David Halberstam's work in 1986, a book called ``The Reckoning'' about the American auto industry. In Mr. Halberstam's words, the big three carmakers and the United Auto Workers, had enjoyed setting wages, setting prices, and ultimately became uncompetitive. They laughed at these little Datsuns that Nissan was selling on the

west coast and these little Beetles that Volkswagen was selling in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. They ignored the warning of Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, the president of the American Motors Corporation, who said there is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success. He said that in the 1960s. And what happened? The American automobile industry nearly collapsed.

I believe what saved the industry, as much as anything else, was the right-to-work laws and the existence of a competitive environment in the Southeastern United States, where workers could make cars efficiently, be paid well for their work, and make them here in the United States, instead of in Japan. What President Carter said to me when I was Governor of Tennessee was: Governors, go to Japan, persuade them to make in the United States what they want to sell in the United States. They did that and they did well. In fact, the Nissan plant has, for year in and year out, been the most efficient and successful auto plant in North America.

The right-to-work law has been about jobs and it has made a difference in Tennessee. I am not entirely sure why Michigan has had a difficult time with its economy lately, but perhaps not being a right- to-work state is one reason. Michigan's right to adopt this law has been an important part of our law in Tennessee. I have literally grown up with it. I remember, as a 7-year-old, Senator Taft arguing the Taft- Hartley Act, or at least I heard my parents talk about it. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act gave States the right to say that workers in their State did not have to pay union dues to get or keep a job.

And I well remember Everett Dirksen's arguments on the Senate floor in the mid-1960s. President Johnson, at the behest of union leaders, wanted to repeal Section 14(b). Dirksen rose up against it. He said:

It is the right of the State to do it if it so desires; if

the Governor signs the bill, or if they override the

Governor's veto. That should be their prerogative in a

country where the States and those who represented the States

in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were safeguarded by

that residual clause in the Constitution. The right of States

to prohibit compulsory union membership has been challenged

repeatedly by union officials. But that right has been upheld

consistently by the judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme

Court.

Finally, as a Tennessean, I could be upset that Indiana, and now it appears Michigan, has adopted right-to-work laws. That puts Tennessee at less of a competitive advantage. I believe in States rights. I believe States have the right to be wrong as well as the right to be right. With all these Midwestern States having the right to be wrong and not having right-to-work laws, we benefited enormously in our State by the arrival of the auto industries and other manufacturers.

But for our country to exist over the next 20 or 30 years in a very competitive world, where jobs can be anywhere, where things can be manufactured anywhere, we want at least those things that are going to be sold here to be made here. Having a right-to-work law which permits the UAW and General Motors to have a partnership at one plant in Tennessee and Nissan and Volkswagen to have a nonunion plant at another place in Tennessee, by vote of the employees, I submit, will make us a stronger, competitive country.

It has everything to do with economics, and I wish the President yesterday had spent his time on the fiscal cliff instead of going to Michigan and arguing in favor of denying workers their right get or keep a job without having to pay union dues, and denying efforts to keep our American automobile industry as competitive as it needs to be in the world marketplace.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 20 minutes.

Will the Chair please let me know when 5 minutes remains?

Mr. President, I want to speak this afternoon about the Senate as an institution; about its majority leader, Senator Reid, who is my friend; about various conversations we have been having in the Senate and discussions about what the majority leader has said about how the Senate should operate. I know the majority leader cares about this institution. I believe it. He has said it. He shows it. He has one of the most difficult jobs anybody could possibly have.

One time he told me: My job is to make everybody mad. In many ways it is, when you have a body of 100 that operates by unanimous consent and every one of us is equal. It is a very difficult job to be the minority leader, which the Republican leader is today. It is a more difficult job to be the majority leader.

I emphasize this because I know Senator Reid cares about this institution, and I know Senator Reid does not want to go down in history as the man who ended the Senate. But if he persists in doing what he says he will do--which is to break the rules of the Senate to change the filibuster rules--that will be his legacy. He will go down in history as the Senator who ended the Senate.

You might say: Senator Alexander, that is a very serious charge to make about a majority leader whom you know and respect and who you just said cares about this institution. It is a serious charge to make. The only reason I would say it is because Senator Reid said it himself.

Shortly after I came to the Senate, in 2005, we Republicans, including this Senator, were very upset about what we believed were unfair efforts by Democrats to keep President Bush from securing an up- or-down vote on his judicial nominees. We were in the majority, we Republicans. We had a Republican President of the United States. We believed that attacks on the President's nominees were extraordinarily unfair, and the other side was using the rules of the Senate to prevent an up-or-down vote. They were filibustering President Bush's nominees.

We could not change their minds, so a number of Senators persuaded Senator Frist, my colleague from Tennessee who was then the majority leader, that we should then change the filibuster rules in order to get an up-or-down vote on the judges. We knew our goal was right, so we were going to, if we had to, break the rules to change the rules.

As you might guess, the minority, the Democrats at the time, erupted in indignation. They said this has not been done in the 240 or 250 years of the Senate. They pointed out the differences between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Almost every distinguished Member of the Democratic side of the Senate--the majority leader; Senator Biden, now the Vice President of the United States; Senator Obama, now the President of the United States; Senator Clinton, now the Secretary of State of the United States--denounced this evil Republican plan to change the rules of the Senate, to in effect break the rules of the Senate--because the rule says we can only change the rules with 67 votes--in order to change the filibuster rule.

Here is what the majority leader said in his book, ``The Good Fight.''

The storm had been gathering all year and word from

conservative columnists and in conservative circles was that

Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the majority leader, had

decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the

filibuster for judicial nominations. And once you opened that

Pandora's box it was just a matter of time before a Senate

leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to

eliminate the filibuster for regular business as well. And

that, simply put, would be the end of the United States

Senate.

That is Senator Reid when he was the minority leader of the Senate.

Today another storm is gathering, and the shoes are reversed. The majority leader is the one who wants to invoke what he then called the nuclear option. That was the Democrats' name for what the Republicans were trying to do, and we are the ones who are saying: Please don't do that; stop and think about this; this is not what you want to do to the Senate.

People who are listening might say: Wait a minute. This filibuster business has gotten out of hand. What is wrong with having a majority vote in the Senate? Don't we learn in the first grade--at least we did in Maryville, TN--if we have an election for the class president everyone raises their hands and whoever gets the majority wins. That is the American way.

That is the American way except it is not the way of the Senate from the beginning of our country. We had a Frenchman who wandered through this country in the 1830s, a young man called de Tocqueville. He wrote a book called ``Democracy In America,'' which is still the finest exposition of our democracy that we have because it was an outsider's look at us. He saw two great dangers to the United States at the time. One was Russia. He was prescient about that. But the second was what he called the tyranny of the majority--that in a great, big, complicated country like this that somehow the majority, in its passions and suddenness and enthusiasm, would run over the minorities. Somehow he must have known we would be a nation filled with minorities; that we would be almost a minority nation, and somehow those minorities needed protection.

What has happened over all those years is that the Senate has stood, as Senator Byrd used to say, as the necessary fence that protected minorities in America from the tyranny of the majority. That is why we have a Senate, so if a freight train runs through the House it cannot run through here.

It has to slow down and stop and we have to think about it.

That is why we have a tradition in the Senate of unlimited amendment and unlimited debate on any subject until 60 of us decide that is enough--which is what we are about to do with the Defense authorization bill. We have had, under the leadership of Senator McCain and Senator Levin, the chairman--and I give Senator Reid great credit for this as well--I think it is 90 amendments that have been dealt with. We will have a cloture vote tomorrow. It will probably pass. I will vote for it. That means it is time to end the debate, time to limit the discussion and come to a conclusion. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work.

Here is an image of the difference between the House and the Senate. Most of us know of the work of Robert Caro, who has written the book on Lyndon Johnson. When I first came to the Senate 10 years ago I read that first chapter in Caro's book, the chapter called ``The Desks Of The Senate.'' I imagine the Presiding Officer has had a chance to read that as well. I still say to new Senators or anybody else interested in this body, if they really want to understand the Senate, read Robert Caro's chapter ``The Desks Of The Senate.''

He talked about all these desks and how after an election--just as they will this time--they move two from over here to over there because Democrats won a couple of seats, and that is the way this works. This is the image of the Senate where everybody is equal, and it takes 60 to get a result. The idea is unlimited debate and consideration to protect the minority. It also reminds us that the people who are out of the majority right now may not be out tomorrow.

What is the image of the House? The image of the House is that all legislation goes to the House Rules Committee. I have been there. David Dreier took me there. He is the chairman of the House Rules Committee. It is an ornate office. Every piece of legislation in the House has to go through the Rules Committee. Republicans have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives but, guess what, the composition of the Rules Committee is eight Republicans, four Democrats. What if the Democrats gained a one-vote majority in the House? Eight Democrats and four Republicans.

What would happen is any piece of legislation the majority wants to push would run through the House like a freight train. That is not what the U.S. Senate is about. That is why Senator Dodd, in his farewell address, said to those who have never been the minority in the Senate, please be careful before changing these filibuster rules.

In January, we will have 30 Democratic Members of the U.S. Senate who have never been in the minority. They have not had a chance to experience what some of us have had a chance to experience. While I have not been in the Senate all that long by Senate standards--I have been here 10 years--I have watched the Senate for a long time. I first came here in 1967 as a legislative aide to Howard Baker. Everett Dirksen was the Republican leader and Mike Mansfield was the Democratic leader. The Senate has never worked perfectly. Every majority and minority leader will say that.

In the 1960s it was Senator Williams from Delaware who would object and slow down things. In the 1970s it was Senator Allen from Alabama. He would tie up the Senate in complete knots. Because of the individual rights a Senator has, it was just one Senator. In the 1980s it was Senator Metzenbaum. He held up my own nomination to be U.S. Education Secretary for 3 or 4 months, and there was nothing I could do about it. I thought that was very unfair, but it was part of this process whereby a Senator can slow down things.

How do leaders respond to that? Well, in 2005 I was as angry as anyone about the Bush judges who were not getting an up-or-down vote, but I did not think it was right to break or change the rules of the U.S. Senate. I didn't want to turn the Senate into the House of Representatives.

I made two speeches on the floor and suggested what became, in effect, the Gang of 14. I didn't participate in the gang because my colleague Senator Frist was the Republican leader, and out of respect to him I didn't want to undermine him. Fourteen Senators, including Senator Pryor and Senator McCain on this side, got together and said we cannot let this happen. They met and worked and agreed they would not change the rules and would not filibuster. So when that happened, that meant there could not be a change of the rules by the Republicans and there could not be a filibuster by the Democrats if these 14 Senators agreed with one another. They then created a compromise solution which is where we are today.

There have been other ways that leaders have responded. During the Panama Canal debates in 1978 and 1979, I believe Senator Byrd and Senator Baker were the leaders. I believe Senator Byrd was the majority leader. The opponents of the Panama Canal--and this was a time when the Panama Canal was very unpopular with a lot of people. According to Senator Byrd, opponents centered their efforts of winning approval of killer amendments. We all know what those are. I believe one of the main reasons the majority leader does not like bills to come to the floor is because he thinks some of the amendments offered by the minority are going to be unpleasant for Democrats, or even Republicans, to vote for. Well, my feeling about that is: Why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you don't want to sing? We come here to debate, amend, and vote.

Here is what Senator Byrd said: Opponents centered their efforts on winning approval of killer amendments. I made it clear that only the leadership amendments and certain clarifying reservations and understandings would be acceptable. Opponents attempted to circumvent this strategy by offering amendments that were phrased in such a way that Senators would find them difficult to turn down.

At first glance many of the amendments seemed innocuous and pro- American. Had they succeeded, however, they would have effectively killed the treaty--this is Senator Byrd. In all 145 amendments, 26 reservations, 18 understandings, 3 declarations--for a total of 192 changes--were proposed. 88 of these were voted on. In the final analysis, nothing passed that was not acceptable to the joint leadership.

In other words, the joint leadership sat up there, let everybody vote, let them ventilate, have their say, do their job, and then they defeated them. They either tabled their amendment or they beat them. That is what they were able to do. That is very different from way we are operating today, and that is the way I respectfully suggest we should operate.

In the 1980s--and I mentioned it was never perfect--during the Byrd- Baker era, basically the leaders would put a bill on the floor. If it was a bill like the one we are currently considering--the Defense authorization bill--and it had the support of the chairman and ranking minority member, they would simply open the bill for amendments. They might get 300 amendments. They would then ask for unanimous consent to close off amendments and, of course, they would get it because if anybody objected, they would tell them to throw their amendment in there and then they would start voting.

For example, during the Panama Canal debate, they would table a lot and vote a lot. They would stay up on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. Pretty soon Senators would be thinking about going home or seeing their grandchildren or maybe their amendment was not so important and their bill would either be passed or defeated, but everybody went home thinking: I have had a chance to be a U.S. Senator. I may be in the minority, I may be in the majority, but I have given voice to the feelings of the people of my State which is what I was elected to do.

So is the filibuster rule a problem? No, the filibuster rule is not the problem. The problem is if I come down to the floor with an amendment, the majority leader uses a procedural motion to cut me off and I don't get to vote on it. I don't get to talk about it and I don't get to vote on it.

To his great credit, he is not doing that with the Defense authorization bill. He did not do that with the postal reform bill. There have been a number of other bills this year that proved the Senate can work. There is even an

amendment by the Senator from Kentucky that Members of both sides did not want to vote on. It had to do with cutting off aid to three Middle Eastern countries. The administration did not want to vote, but we finally voted and what happened? We had a huge, great debate. Many Senators spoke their feelings, and in the end the vote was 81-10 and the amendment failed. It did not do any damage to anybody. In fact, it made the Senate look more like what it should be.

The filibuster is and has been democracy's greatest show: the right to talk your head off. We need to get back to the situation where we have committee bills like the Defense authorization bill where we bring them to the floor and the majority leader asks for amendments. Let us all put our amendments in and let us start voting. Let's get back to the time where the majority leader and the minority leader, or the committee chairman and the ranking member, have a product they are invested in and they work together to keep it intact. If they do that, they usually defeat Republican amendments or Democratic amendments, or occasionally an amendment will come along that has so much support that it seems like an improvement to the bill, and it is adopted.

My purpose today is not to make a hard job harder. I said at the beginning the majority leader has the toughest job in town and maybe one of the toughest in the country. My hope is that maybe if he has a few minutes tonight, he would go back home and reread his own book. He and I agreed at that time that that would be a bad result. And remember the words he said in 2005 about the value of the filibuster, the value of having a body that protected the minority rights and how damaging it would be to make the Senate like the House.

I hope the majority leader and the Republican leader could quietly meet and talk this through. Senator Schumer and I and many others spent a lot of time on this 2 years ago. It took 6 months and we thought we had an agreement, but somehow it broke down. There is no reason it should break down. We can operate the Senate under the rules we have. We can get bills through committee. We can get them to the floor. We can let anybody have an amendment and we can talk about it, vote on it, and pass it or defeat it. That is what we should be doing.

I know the majority leader cares about this institution. I know he cares about it deeply. He spent his life here devoted to it. I know he is responding to a variety of suggestions from Members of his caucus as to what is best to do. I think it is the responsibility of the leaders of both sides and people who have seen this body for a while to remind everyone, particularly those who have never been in the minority, that this is a body to protect the minority. Any of us can be in the minority at some time. I know he does not want to destroy the U.S. Senate, but in his words: If we change the filibuster rule, it would be the end of the United States Senate. I don't want that to happen. I don't want that to be the majority leader's legacy, and I don't believe he wants that. I, as one Senator, am willing to encourage the Republican leader and the majority leader to work together, solve this problem, and get our attention focused back on the big problem facing our country, which is how to get a budget agreement that gets our economy moving again.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to put into the Record a few articles: a excerpt from the majority leader's book, an article from The Hill by Martin Paone--who used to work here and makes the points I have been making--an article by Richard Arenberg, who worked on Senate and House staffs for 30 or 40 years. We find that people who have worked in the Senate and leave it, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, seem to have the same view.

I wish also to put in Senator Byrd's statement which he made during his last appearance before the Senate Rules Committee before he died. I was there and he urged us not to break down this fence. His comments go hand in hand with those of Senator Chris Dodd's final address to the Senate on November 30, 2010. And finally, I include a copy of an address I gave at the Heritage Foundation on this subject 2 years ago.

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

Mr. President, I see the Senator from Louisiana. I know she expects to speak about 5:30. I want to say to her through the Chair I will be finished by then.

Fungal Meningitis

I see the Senator from Connecticut I believe is still here. I compliment him on his participation this morning in a hearing in which we both participated. It was a sad hearing, really. It was about the fungal meningitis--the Senator from Minnesota was there as well--the fungal meningitis outbreak that in our State, Tennessee, has become a nightmare. It has claimed thirteen lives, 81 very ill in many cases, and a thousand others who worry they might become ill.

It became obvious as we went through the discussion that something, incredibly, slipped through the cracks. We have more than 60,000 what I would call drugstores, pharmacies in the country; maybe more than a thousand in Tennessee. Many of them are doing this pharmaceutical compounding. You go in and get a prescription filled. They might adjust the prescription, or an FDA-approved drug based upon your prescription. That is normal and necessary. Then over here on the other side are the big manufacturers of drugs. As the Senator from Connecticut has pointed out, they are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

But then there are these entities in the middle, and there was one in Massachusetts that was apparently masquerading as a compounding pharmacy--it was really a drug manufacturer, but it was not complying with the rules of a drug manufacturer. As a result, it provided tainted medicine all over the country. Had it not been for remarkable work by the Tennessee Public Health Department in conjunction with Vanderbilt University and the Centers for Disease Control, there could have been many more deaths and many more injuries.

We saw an example of government. We saw an incompetent State Board of Pharmacy in Massachusetts, a confused Food and Drug Administration, and we saw a textbook model of what ought to be done by the Centers for Disease Control and the Tennessee Department of Health.

I am committed to work with Senator Harkin, the chairman of our committee, and other members of our committee throughout the rest of this year on this issue. I hope the Senator from Minnesota and I, and the Senator from Connecticut, and Senators Burr and Roberts, who have been working on this for some time, can begin the new year with a bipartisan bill that can put somebody on the flagpole for this so we can continue, when we go to the hospital or go to the pharmacy or outpatient clinic, to not worry about whether the medicines we are receiving are tainted or unsafe.

I thought it was an excellent hearing. I look forward to working on it. I have some ideas about a model for this regulation.

I found as Governor years ago, if you give a committee responsibility for getting something done they often end up pointing fingers at each other. If you put somebody on the flagpole, it often gets done because you will know what happened. I think that is why Admiral Rickover created such a good system with nuclear submarines. We have never had a nuclear related death on a nuclear Navy submarine since the 1950s. I think I know why. It is because the Admiral interviewed every one of those captains of the submarines and the Navy made it clear to them if there was a problem with a nuclear reactor that went unfound or unfixed on their submarines their career was in deep trouble, and so we have never had any trouble.

Wind Power

If I may move to another subject, there's been a lot of talk this week about the fiscal cliff. The President and Congressional leaders are meeting tomorrow, as they should, about how we can reduce our debt. That will require, in my judgment, reform of our entitlement programs. Saving our Medicare Program, for example. The average couple who is 65 years of age when they retire pays $119,000 into the Medicare Program. They will take out $357,000. That kind of program is not sustainable. For the next generation of older Americans there will not be a Medicare Program unless we work on that.

We need to work together to find a way to restrain entitlements, produce revenues if that is what is necessary, and come to a result. In the meantime we have to be saving money--42 cents out of every dollar we spend is borrowed--so that is what brings me to the floor today.

Supporters of wind power have used this week to proclaim it ``Wind Week'' in Washington, DC, launching an event to try to persuade us to extend one more time--this would be the eighth time--the Wind Production Tax Credit which, if we were to do so, just for 1 year, would cost another $12.1 billion over 10 years.

I want to suggest a different name for this week. Let's call it the ``Wind Down Wind Week.'' It is time to end a 20-year-old temporary subsidy that has already been renewed seven times. The reason is very simple. We can't afford it. The Joint Tax Committee says the 1-year extension will cost that $12.1 billion--but it is not just a 1-year extension. The developers of wind power will get the tax credit for 10 years. That is a lot of money. It is one-third of the Tennessee State budget. It is 2 times what we spend each year on energy research. This money could be used to help reduce the debt instead of fund this subsidy. The cost $12.1 billion is on top of the $16 billion in Federal subsidies and grants already given to wind developers and their Wall Street backers between 2009 and 2013, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the Unites States Treasury.

How can we justify this? We hear a lot about big oil. What about big wind? Big wind received, according to the Energy Information Agency, an $18.82 federal subsidy per megawatt hour--25 times per megawatt hour as all other forms of electricity production combined. Given our fiscal crisis we should

eliminate special tax breaks for big oil and big wind.

The big wind tax break was put in place in 1992. It was to be a temporary measure. It was intended to boost a new technology. Now, 20 years later, President Obama's respected Energy Secretary says wind is a mature technology. What do we have after 20 years and billions of dollars of subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity. Our country uses nearly 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. Wind produces 3 percent of that. And of course it only produces electricity when the wind blows and it is not easy to store it. So it is of limited use in a country that needs huge amounts of low-cost, clean, reliable electricity. Relying on wind power is the energy equivalent of going to war in a sailboat when nuclear submarines are available.

The wind subsidy is so large that wind developers are now paying distributors to take their wind power, undercutting the baseload energy plants that are necessary to provide the reliable, low-cost electricity our country needs. On top of that, there are better ways to produce clean electricity, better ways than subsidizing a technology that destroys the environment in the name of saving the environment.

For example, it would take a row of 50-story wind turbines along the entire length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, 2,178 miles, to equal the energy production of 4 nuclear reactors. The best way to produce cheap, clean energy in the United States is to let the marketplace do it. Let the marketplace produce large amounts of clean, reliable energy for all businesses and households--not to just subsidize jobs for a technology that can stand on its own and produces only a small amount of unreliable electricity.

Let's use this week to celebrate. But let's celebrate the end of the temporary 20-year-old wind production tax credit and use the $12.1 billion saved to reduce the Federal debt.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, some say the reason for a do-nothing Senate--or the cure for it--is that we need to change the rules. I say we need a change in behavior, and I wish to offer a single example.

We have a big spending and borrowing problem: 42 cents out of every dollar we are borrowing. We are headed off a fiscal cliff. The minority leader has described that.

The Australian Foreign Minister has said the United States of America is

one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence, so one would think we would have a budget. Then one would think we would deal with the appropriations bills which are the basic work of the Senate.

I and others on both sides of the aisle came to the floor earlier this year to compliment the majority and minority leaders for their decision to bring all 12 appropriations bills to the floor. The committee did its work; 11 of the 12 have been reported to the floor. The House did its work; 11 of the 12 were reported to the floor, and 6 were passed. But the majority leader said we are not going to consider any appropriations bills--no appropriations bills.

Being elected to the Senate and not being allowed to vote on appropriations bills is like being invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. We need a Republican majority. If we have one we can have a budget, and if we have one we will bring appropriations bills to the floor. We will debate them, we will amend them, we will vote on them, and we will do our jobs.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I ask unanimous consent that the following article from the Wall Street Journal on September 18, 2012, on the cost to taxpayers for the wind production tax credit be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, the majority leader is coming to the floor at 6:30, and I will yield to him at that time.

I would like to thank Neena Imam, who is sitting with me, for serving on my staff for the past two years as a fellow with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has done a terrific job working for me on energy and environmental policy.

Mr. President, today is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman's birthday, the Nobel Prize Laureate. One of his most important statements, in my opinion, was this, ``Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.'' It was reported by several media outlets that Governor Mitt Romney has taken the position that the wind production tax credit should be allowed to expire at the end of the year. He must have known Milton Friedman's birthday was coming today. I wouldn't presume to speak for Milton Friedman, but I think he would applaud Governor Romney's position. It shows his seriousness about our fiscal problems in the United States. It's time to end a temporary tax credit that was put into law in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush was in office and when Milton Friedman was

only 80 years old. The wind production tax credit was a temporary tax break, in 1992 to encourage wind power. We give wind developers 2.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of wind electricity produced. And now it's about to expire at the end of the year. It needs to be extended again the developers say. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. They tell us just one more time. But it is an argument like this that has got us into the fiscal mess we have as a Nation.

The United States of America, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the U.S. Treasury, is spending $14 billion on subsidizing giant wind turbines over a five-year period, $6 billion of it is this production tax credit. That's why I am so pleased to see Governor Romney support the idea of more responsibility in our spending. We spend too much money in Washington that we do not have, and it has to stop. There are many reasons we don't need this particular provision of the tax code.

First, we can't afford it. From 2009 through 2013, the tax credit will cost taxpayers $6 billion over five years, and the grants will cost another $8 billion over that same five years. At a time when the federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, we cannot justify such a subsidy, especially for what the U.S. Energy Secretary calls a ``mature technology.''

Second, despite all the money, it produces a relatively small amount of electricity, producing only 2.3 percent of our electricity in the United States. We're a big country. We use 25 percent of all the electricity in the world. We're not going to operate our country through windmills.

Third, these massive turbines too often destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment. Some are 50 stories high--taller than the Statue of Liberty--with blades as long as a football field, weighing seven tons and spinning at 150 miles an hour, with blinking lights visible for 20 miles. These aren't your grandma's windmills. These gigantic turbines are three times as tall as the sky boxes at University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. There is a new movie called ``Windfall'' about residents in upstate New York who are upset and have left their homes because of these big wind turbines.

Mr. President, the majority leader has come to the floor, and I will forgo my remarks at this time so he has a chance to say what he wishes to say.

Mr. President, 5 minutes would do it.

I thank the majority leader for his courtesy, and I will continue.

The fourth reason that we don't need to allow these production tax credits for wind to be renewed is that they have not created as many American jobs as expected. An American University study reported in 2009 that the first $1 billion of stimulus grants to wind went to foreign manufacturing companies.

And what did we get in return for these billions of dollars of subsidies? A puny amount of unreliable electricity generated mostly at night when we don't use it.

I mentioned a little earlier that our country is a big country. It uses lots of electricity. The Senator from Rhode Island was talking about the problems in India that are being caused by failure of the grid. We need large amounts of reliable baseload electricity to power this country. We're very fortunate that we have, through unconventional natural gas discoveries, found that we're going to have a lot of cheap natural gas in the United States, and we can make electricity from natural gas power plants at a low cost and with very little air pollution.

Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity, and 20 percent of the total electricity generated in the U.S. It needs to be a part of our future energy mix. Coal should also be part of our energy future, as long as coal plants have pollution control equipment on them to reduce the sulfur, nitrogen and mercury. I was one of those senators who voted to require coal plants that operate in the future to have pollution control equipment on them. This means in a few years every operating coal plant in the United States will be clean except for carbon, and I am convinced that such programs as ARPA-E at the Department of Energy will find what I think is the holy grail of energy technologies.

One of the companies that ARPA-E invests federal research dollars in is experimenting with growing micro-organisms on electrodes. These bacteria can turn carbon dioxide into fuel. In other words, they create a commercial energy use for the carbon that comes from our coal plants. And when that happens, the United States will have massive amounts of cheap, clean, reliable electricity. And we won't be powering our country with windmills.

We should congratulate Dr. Friedman for his great career, for his wisdom in pointing out to us that nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program, and applaud Governor Romney for recognizing that and calling for the end of this tax credit.

We're coming upon something we call the fiscal cliff. I know the senator from Colorado is very interested in this, spending a lot of time working in a bipartisan way to try to find a way to deal with it. My friend, the Foreign Minister of Australia, is a great fan of the United States, and he said to the United States that we're one budget agreement away from restoring our global preeminence--One budget agreement away from restoring our global preeminence.

Now, to get that agreement what do we have to do? We have to deal with appropriations bills at the end of the year, a problem we may have solved today with a solution the leaders recommended. We have to deal with the Bush tax cuts, and multiple items that expire at the end of the year such as the tax extenders that need to be renewed or not, and the alternative minimum tax which started out as a tax on rich people and now threatens to impact millions of Americans. There's appropriate payment to doctors who provide medical care, we call this the doc fix. There is the sequester that none of us likes. There's the problem of the debt limit, the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. All of this is happening at the end of the year.

This is a good time to get serious about with dealing with the fiscal cliff, and let a 20 year, temporary tax break to encourage wind energy--which costs the American people $6 billion over five years--to expire and let wind stand on its own. I would suggest that for the $6 billion in savings we put $2 of every $3 we save into reducing the debt and $1 into energy research to see if we can find even more amounts of cheap, clean energy.

So it is a good occasion to celebrate Milton Friedman's 100th birthday, and it is a good occasion to applaud Governor Romney for following Milton Friedman's advice: ``Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.''

I thank the Presiding Officer. I thank the majority leader for his courtesy.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my Republican colleagues.

Mr. President, the Senator from Washington said Republicans often change the subject. That is exactly what we intend to do. We intend to change the subject from raising taxes to creating jobs.

In terms of taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office report recently released--this is hard to believe. You have to go back and read it again, but 20 percent of Americans who pay individual taxes pay 94 percent of all the taxes. Twenty percent of Americans pay 94 percent of the taxes. The President and his allies are about the only ones in the country right now who are going out across the country and saying: The way to solve this 5 years of recession and the bad economy we have experienced is to raise taxes on the people who create millions of jobs. That is their argument, that the way to deal with the bad economy we are in is to raise taxes on the people who create millions of jobs.

We do not believe that. We are prepared to keep the tax rates where they are while we deal with what we need to deal with, which is the fiscal cliff that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board talks about, where he says, if we do not deal with it at the end of the year, we will produce, according to the Congressional Budget Office as well, a recession in the first 6 months of 2013, which means more loss of jobs.

So the subject we are here to talk about this morning is how to avoid that. The question we are going ask is, why not bring up the appropriations bills and do our job under the Constitution to limit spending and get a head start on the business of putting the fiscal problems we have behind us. Nothing could create jobs more rapidly than for us to bring Washington into some solvency, create some certainty. People have said: We are not going to invest, we are not going to hire until we can see whether Congress can act.

As far as the appropriations bills, here are the basics: We have 12 of them that we are supposed to pass every year. A bipartisan group of us went to the floor a few months ago and praised the majority leader and the Republican leader for their agreement to try to bring them to the floor and pass them. That has only happened twice in 12 years. So we worked hard to do that. Nine of the 12 appropriations bills are ready for the Senate to consider. In other words, they have been all the way through the committee process. They are ready for the Senate to consider.

Only the majority leader can bring them to the floor. Yet he said 2 weeks ago suddenly: No appropriations bills this year. That is 38 percent of the budget. That is more than $1 trillion. That is our job to do. It is the way we control spending. Yet we are not even going to deal with it. So this morning we are going to talk about the consequences of that and hope the majority leader will change his mind and bring these bills to the floor.

The House is doing its job. The House has acted on eleven of their 12 bills and the House has passed 7. While they may be at a different overall spending level than we are, we have a well-established procedure for dealing with that called the conference, which is the way we normally deal with differences between the two Houses.

So suddenly we are saying, no budget, no appropriations bills. That is why we are on the floor today. I wish to begin by asking the Senator from Georgia, who is a former leader of the Republicans in the Georgia legislature, who has been here for a number of years, and who has been one of the leaders in this body of working across party lines to try to cause the Senate to do its job, whether he can think of a good reason why we should not be dealing with appropriations bills this year.

I thank the Senator from Georgia for his clear statement about solving the appropriations problems, solving the fiscal problems, creating an environment in which the private sector in this country is willing to create more jobs, and how failing to do that, in the words of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, would be ``destructive.'' In the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, it would create a recession in the first 6 months of 2013.

The Senator from Missouri is the former No. 2 leader in the House of Representatives and now he is a part of the Senate Republican leadership, so he has some special knowledge about how the two Houses work together.

The majority leader gave as his reason why he could not bring up the appropriations bill, one, that it did not fit the Budget Control Act. Well, the Budget Control Act, which we passed, I voted for it, set a limit on appropriations, and the Senate is marking up its bills to that number. The House is marking up to a number a little below. The majority leader said: Well, they are at one number, the Senate is at another number, so we will not do anything.

I would ask the Senator from Missouri, I thought it was a pretty normal procedure for the House of Representatives to do what it thought it ought to do, and the Senate to do what it thought it ought to do. There is something called a conference of the Senate and the House to work out the differences.

Well, I can't imagine how that would be. In fact, this is such a breathtaking assertion by the majority leader, it is hard to grasp it.

Here we are in a fiscal mess. Everybody says that. They will say it is for a different reason on that side than we do, but everybody acknowledges it. Everybody acknowledges as well that while the rest of the world is in trouble, we are just in a little less trouble and we can get out of our trouble more easily than the rest of the world; that the single biggest decision about whether the United States deals with its fiscal crisis and gets the economy moving again is whether the President and the Congress can govern. That is what everyone says, and we know it is true. In other words, this isn't out of our hands. This isn't out of our control. In fact, it is within our hands. All we have to do is come to some agreement about how much money we can spend, reform the taxes, reduce the debt, control entitlement spending, and this country will take off like a rocket.

The retiring head of the World Bank last month told a briefing of about 35 Democratic and Republican Senators--all of whom are concerned about this, all of whom are committed to working on it--that people who are making decisions about whether to hire people or whether to invest more money in the United States have stopped. They have stopped because of the uncertainty. And what are they waiting on? They are waiting to see whether we can function. They are waiting to see whether we can govern. They have stopped to wait and see.

This is not an encouraging indication about whether the United States can govern. We had some encouragement earlier in the year. That is why several of us from both sides of the aisle came to the floor and complimented the majority leader, complimented the Republican leader, and said: We applaud your agreement to do the appropriations bills.

It says right here in the Constitution, Section 9 of Article I, that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law. In other words, Article I--this is our job. People say I use the Grand Ole Opry as an analogy too often sometimes, but why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you didn't want to sing? Appropriating money is what we do.

If the Senator doesn't like the Solyndra loan, then I am supposed to come up here and make that argument if I agree with that. If Senator Blunt has a flood problem out in Missouri, he can make the argument that he made last year: Put some more money in to take care of the flood victims; take some more money out of here to pay for it.

If we want less of this or more of that, the way we do that is by going through the appropriations process, coming to the floor, offering amendments, and representing the people who elected us and sent us here. What are we supposed to say when we go home and they say: We think there should be more money for the Center Hill Dam on the Caney Fork River or more money for the levees down along the Mississippi and there ought to be less money for loans like Solyndra. Are we supposed to say: Well, sorry, we are not in business in the Senate because the one person who can put an appropriations bill on the floor has announced suddenly that he is not going to do it.

It is not because we don't have time to do it. Look, we could be doing it today. I will bet we don't even have a vote today, much less debate something interesting. We have been wasting the entire month. We could have taken up almost every one--most of the nine appropriations bills that are ready to be enacted and put them on the floor to vote.

The Senator from Missouri is a part of the Republican leadership. He has that honor. There is a different way to run the Senate, and maybe that should be a major factor in the election this year. Maybe people would like to see the Senate work on the $1 trillion that is a part of the appropriations bills, bring amendments and bills to the floor in a bipartisan way, let Senators from every State vote on those, and vote them up or down. That would be one way to run the Senate.

And I wonder if that kind of discussion has been going on in the Republican leadership. If we were fortunate enough to have a majority and move a few desks from that side over to this side as a result of the election, how do you think Senator McConnell and the Republican leadership would conduct business in the Senate?

If the Senator would yield, I have heard Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, speak both in our Republican caucus and in meetings with Democrats in committee and publicly. I believe he has made it absolutely clear that if he were fortunate enough to be the majority leader, that he would bring appropriations bills to the floor, that he would see that a large number of amendments from both sides of the aisle were offered, and that we would be working longer, working later, and getting more done.

We are all good friends here. People sometimes talk about lack of civility in the Senate. The fact is the Senate is probably the most civil place in the United States. We are excessively nice to each other. We have disagreements, but we are nice to each other. But what is disappointing is that it is not functioning. The Senate is not functioning the way it is supposed to.

It would be as if the President announced: Well, I am not going to the office for a month or two; or if the Supreme Court said: Well, it has gotten to be February, and we think we will stop deciding cases and go home, we will go on vacation. What would the American people say? Well, that is what is happening here. And it is not that we don't have the time. We have it right now. We have it this minute that we could do be doing it.

What makes it especially disappointing is that earlier this year there was what I call an outbreak of good government. We had the majority leader and the Republican leader saying: Let's bring all the appropriations bills to the floor, and people on both sides were applauding them. And then we had some discussions, and lo and behold, suddenly we had bills coming to the floor that made a difference in the lives of Americans: the FAA bill, which is about airline safety, the farm bill, the highway bill, and the Postal Service bill. And thanks to suggestions by the Senator from Michigan, Mr. Levin, and others, we began to adopt an agreement: Let's allow all relevant amendments to the bill be considered. So we began to vote a lot. I think one bill had 73 amendments. And then there were even some amendments that weren't relevant.

It began to look like the time in the 1980s when Senators Byrd and Baker ran the Senate. Senator Byrd or Senator Baker would come to the floor and say: All right, here is a bill that is supported by the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican, or vice versa. They put it on the floor, and they would ask for amendments. They might get 300, and then they would say: I ask unanimous consent to have no more amendments. And of course they would get it because everybody who wanted an amendment had offered one. Then they would start to vote, and the majority leader would say: OK, we are going to stay here until we finish. And they did. Now, it never was perfect. It is always a little messy. That is the way the Senate is. But they got a lot of work done. That is what makes this so disappointing.

I would be happy to do that. Actually, Bob Zoellick, the retiring head of the World Bank, reported this story to 35 or 40 of us--both parties--to find out how to do what we are talking about, which is to deal with the fiscal cliff issues coming at the end of the year. He repeated Bob Carr, the new Foreign Minister in Australia, who said in a speech in Washington that the United States is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence.

All of us believe the United States is the preeminent country in the world. That statement comes from a great friend of the United States who wants us to succeed and who knows we can.

If we want to get our economy moving again and help the world get its economy moving again, the main thing we need to do is make this fiscal agreement, deal with the debt, deal with tax reform, deal with the payroll taxes, deal with the sequester, and deal with the appropriations bills. This is the single most important thing we can do to get our economy moving again instead of heading into a depression. He put it that way to reassert, establish, claim, renew--whatever adjective or verb we want to use. The way to maintain America's global preeminence is to get a budget agreement at the end of the year. We were off to such a promising start this year and now we slid backwards.

I will let the Senator from Missouri make the final remarks in the colloquy. It is my hope the majority leader will decide to use the rest of our time this week and next week to deal with appropriations bills, and then when we come back in September we could deal with more. It doesn't take long. Let's just put them on the Senate floor and get to work. We can agree on a reasonable number of amendments. We showed we could do that before, and the American people would appreciate us doing our job.

Remember, 9 of the 12 are ready to go. It affects 38 percent of the budget. That is more than $1 trillion in spending. That would be one more indication we are capable of governing ourselves, which is the single most important signal that those who invest and create jobs in America need to see and hear from Washington, DC.

I thank the Senator from Missouri for his leadership and for coming to the Senate floor.

Mr. President, we yield back the remainder of our time.

I see the Senator from Nebraska is here. I wonder if he is here to be a part of our colloquy or to make another statement.

Mr. President, on July 11, I addressed the Fund for American Studies annual Congressional Scholarship Award Dinner here in Washington. I ask consent to have this transcript of my remarks printed in the Record.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, would the Chair please let me know when there is a couple of minutes remaining.

I thank the Chair.

Senate Responsibility

Mr. President, earlier this year I came to the floor with a group of Republican and Democratic Senators to congratulate the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, as well as the leaders of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran. The reason for the congratulations was this: They said they were going to do their best to bring all of the appropriations bills to the floor and pass them. That may not seem like such a monumental pledge or promise, but it, in fact, is, because only twice since the year 2000 has the Senate gone through the whole process of bringing all 12 appropriations bills to the Senate floor and enacting them in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1.

Why is that so important? Well, we are in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we spend. One way to deal with that is through the appropriations process. That is our first constitutional responsibility. Judges judge; we appropriate. That is the first thing we do. We have control of the people's money. The appropriations bills I am talking about, the 12 of them together, constitute a pretty big number. More than a third--38 percent--of all the dollars we spend in the Federal Government go through those 12 bills. It used to be a lot more.

So when the majority leader and the Republican leader said, Yes, we are going to do our best to bring all of those appropriations bills to the floor, I thought the Senate had taken an important step in functioning the way the American people expect the Senate to function. The American people expect us to get about the serious business of this country so that, in the words of the Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, we can show the people we recognize that we are really one budget agreement away from reasserting America's preeminence in the world. We have that within our power.

The economy of the country, the economy of other countries depends, to a great extent, on our ability to govern ourselves properly. So I was very encouraged when the majority leader and the Republican leader said, Yes, we are going to do our best to bring all 12 of those bills to the floor.

I regret to say I am equally disappointed that the majority leader suddenly announced last week he won't bring any appropriations bills to the floor. The reasons he gives are very puzzling to me. First he says, Well, the House is using a different number than the Senate. What is so new about that? That is why we have the House and the Senate. They are one kind of body and

we are another kind. They have their opinion; we have ours. We vote on our opinions. Then we have a procedure called the conference in which we come together and we get a result. We have had so few conferences lately that maybe some people have forgotten we do that, but we have a way to do it.

Then the majority leader said, Well, they in the House violated the Budget Control Act. The Budget Control Act was simply something we agreed on--I voted for it--to try to put some limits on the growth of discretionary spending in the budget. If we stick to that over the next 10 years, the discretionary spending--not the two-thirds of the budget that is entitlement spending but this one-third we are talking about-- will only grow at an little bit more than the rate of inflation. If our whole budget grew at that rate, we wouldn't have a fiscal problem.

Those aren't good reasons. We have a way to reconcile our differences. The Budget Control Act is only limits. The Senate actually has exceeded those limits, according to my colleague Senator Corker, already three times in this year. So there is no excuse whatsoever for not bringing up appropriations bills on the floor of the Senate.

If we think the Solyndra loan was a bad idea, that is the place to take it out. Or, if we want to spend more money for national defense, that is the place to put it in. Or if we think we are wasting money on national parks or too much government land, that is the place to take it out. Are those bills ready to come to the floor? Yes, they are. In the Senate, we have been doing our job in our committees. Let me be exactly right about this, but I believe we have nine of our appropriations bills that are ready to come to the floor, that we are ready to go to work on right now. The House of Representatives has already passed 11 of the 12 appropriations bills through committee and 6 of those have been passed by the House. So this month, we could be debating any of those appropriations bills. We could have amendment after amendment after amendment. We could reduce our spending. We could increase our spending. We could say to the American people: We are doing our job.

That brings me to my second disappointment. I was greatly encouraged this year--and a lot of the credit goes to Senators on the Democratic side as well as some on our side--who are saying, Wait a minute. We are grownups. We recognize we are political accidents. We have been given the great privilege of representing the people of our State and swearing an oath to our Constitution of the United States so we can help lead this country. So we want to go to work. We want to go to work.

What does the Senate do? Well, the Senate brings bills up through committee, it brings bills to the floor, and then, as the late Senator Byrd used to say, almost any amendment comes to the floor and we debate it and we vote on it, and then we either pass the bill or we don't pass the bill. That is what the Senate does.

We on our side have been saying to the majority leader: Mr. Majority Leader, let us offer our amendments. Don't silence the voices of the people in our States that we represent. So he has been allowing that to happen more. Of course, he has the procedural ability to stop that. The Senator from Michigan said: Let's try just having relevant amendments, so we said: OK, let's try that. So we began to make some progress.

There was a dispute over district judges. We resolved that. We have been confirming them. The Postal Service bill, the farm bill, the FDA bill, the highway bill--these are all important pieces of legislation that affect almost every American family, and what did we do? They went through committee; they had the expertise of the members who work on those committees; they came to the floor; we had a lot of amendments, we voted on them, and they were passed by the Senate. In other words, we did what we should do.

I thought we were on a lot better track until the last 2 or 3 weeks. Suddenly, what has happened? Suddenly, all that ends. We revert to political exercises--little bills of no real importance compared to the bills we should be debating. We have a jobs bill, the DISCLOSE Act bill, and the bill we are about to go to that the Senator from Michigan is proposing. The problem with those bills is they have not been through committee. They are not going to pass the House. Everybody knows that. So we are wasting our time at a time when we could be debating all of the appropriations bills of the U.S. Government. At a time when the U.S. Government is borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we are spending, we are not even going to do our job and consider appropriations bills on the floor and amend them. What will the whole world think? What will our constituents think about our ability to govern ourselves if we can't pass--even consider--an appropriations bill in the U.S. Senate?

On top of that, we haven't had a budget for over 1,000 days. I remember when Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, came back and met with a group of Senators. She came back from Iraq early after their government was formed and she said, They can't even get a budget over there in Iraq. Senators looked around at each other, and here we have been a Republic for a long time and we can't get one, either. So I am very disappointed by the fact that after such a promising surge of activity that was bipartisan and that got results, we have suddenly reverted back to forgetting that we have a way to deal with our differences.

It is not because we don't have anything to do. Where is the cybersecurity bill? Where is the Defense authorization bill? Where are the appropriations bills? They are all ready to be considered, at a time when we are in a fiscal crisis, looking at a fiscal cliff which, if we don't solve, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board yesterday, it will plunge us into a recession in the first 6 months of 2013. Those are the stakes we are playing with.

There is also a third area in which I must express my severe disappointment. We worked hard at the beginning of this Congress to accommodate a number of Senators who felt we needed changes in the rules, and we made some changes. But we preserved the Senate's integrity as a different sort of institution--as a place where the party that has 51 votes doesn't run over anybody else.

Alexis de Tocqueville said the two greatest problems he foresaw with the American democracy--this was back in the 1830s--were, No. 1, Russia; and No. 2, the tyranny of the majority. Well, the Senate, as Senator Byrd used to so eloquently say, is the single most important institution in our country, to protect minority rights and minority points of view. Sometimes we are in the minority on this side, and we will notice there are some fewer desks. Then after an election, maybe more people vote for Democrats and they come in and they pick up the desks and they move them over to that side. Whichever side is in the minority in the Senate still has rights, and those aren't just the rights of the Senators themselves, those are their rights to speak the voices of Tennessee or Maryland or Nevada or New York or Kentucky. It is those voices that need to be heard on the floor of the Senate. And when we can't debate, when we can't offer amendments and we can't vote, those voices are silenced.

So to my great surprise, the majority leader--and as I said, I came to the floor more than once to compliment him for this--said at the beginning of this Congress that he wouldn't seek to change the rules of the Senate except according to the regular order--except according to the rules of the Senate which say we have to have 67 votes. That is what the rules say. We agreed on that. What that meant was we needed a change in behavior, not a change in the rules, to show that the Senate could function.

Last night on television, apparently the majority leader said that in the next Congress--he had changed his mind and that if he is the majority leader, he will seek to change the rules of the Senate by 51 votes. That will destroy the Senate. That will make it no different than the House. I would say to my friends on the other side, if they want to make the Senate like the House where a freight train can run through it with 51 votes, they might not like it so well when the freight train is the tea party express, which it could be. Republicans could be in control of the Senate after this session. Republicans could have a President, and then where would ObamaCare be?

Where will a whole series of things be? There will be a great many Senators on the other side who will say, Wait a minute, let's slow down the train. Let's think about what we are doing. That was the original intention of the Founders of this country. The House is majoritarian and 51 votes control. A freight train can run through it day in and day out. But when it gets to the Senate we stop and think and minority rights are protected. As a result of that, usually that forces us to have a supermajority 60, 65, or 70 votes--in order to do anything big, such as the time when finally the civil rights bill was enacted in the 1960s. Senator Russell, who led the debate against the Civil Rights Act, filibustered it. He was finally defeated. He flew home to Georgia and said, It is now the law of the land; we support it. That is why President Johnson wrote the bill in the office of the Republican leader, even though the President was a Democrat. He wanted bipartisan support.

President Johnson knew he had the votes in the 1960s to pass the Civil Rights Act without Republican support, but he had the bill written in the office of Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader. I remember I was a young aide at that time. The Senators were in there and the aides were in there. Pretty soon everyone was invested in it. When it passed, as I said, Senator Russell went home to Georgia and said, it is the law of the land. We have to support it.

Now we are coming up on what the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has called the fiscal cliff. This is a convergence of big issues ranging from the debt ceiling to how we pay doctors to the spiraling, out-of-control entitlements we have, to the need for a simplified Tax Code, to the need for lower rates. We have been working on this in various ways across party lines for several months.

There is a growing consensus that the time to act is after the election. It will require Presidential leadership, whether it is newly inaugurated President Obama or a new President Romney, and our job will be to see that the newly inaugurated President succeeds, whether he is a Republican President or a Democratic President, because if he does, then our country succeeds.

What are the stakes? The Foreign Minister of Australia, Bob Carr, put it very well when he said in a speech here--and he is a great friend of the United States and I have known him for 25 years--he said: The United States is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence--one budget deal away from reasserting our global preeminence.

But if we cannot even bring up an appropriations bill to debate it, to amend it, to vote on it, and to pass it, if we suddenly are dealing with bills that have not gone to committee that are nothing more than a political exercise, if we are sitting around in the Senate with nothing to do of significance--and there is only one person who can bring up issues here; that is, the majority leader--how is that going to convey to the American people we are capable of governing ourselves? I think it sends a clear message that we are failing to do that.

So having expressed my disappointment, I wish to express my respect for the majority leader and to say again how much I appreciated the efforts he made at the beginning of the Congress to say we would not change the rules of this institution, except according to the rules, and the effort he said he would make at the beginning of this year to bring up the appropriations bills and the efforts he has made to allow more amendments on a whole series of bills this year and say: Can we not go back to that, even though this is a Presidential election year?

The stakes are too high. As far as voting on amendments, that is why we are here. Why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you do not want to sing? That is why we are here. We are here to express the views of ourselves and the people we represent to make sure their voice is heard, and then we are here to get results.

I hope my record is a pretty good record of working to get results. I sometimes say to my friends--they will say: You are being bipartisan. I am not interested in being bipartisan. I am interested in results. I learned in the public schools of Maryville, TN, how to count, and I know it takes 60 votes to get results. So anything important we do is going to require Democrats and Republicans. We are going to need a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, not 51 or 53 or 54, no matter who is in charge next year. We are going to need a coalition of 60 or 65 or 70 who will come around some of the most difficult issues we have had to face in terms of tax reform, in terms of deficit reduction, in terms of reining in entitlements--a whole series of issues. We are going to have to remember our pledge to the Constitution that we take at the beginning of each 6-year term, and we are going to have to honor that pledge.

That is the Senate I hope to see. That is the Senate I am working to create. I wish to create an environment in which the Democratic leader and the Republican leader can succeed on big issues in helping us put together results on the serious problems. I wish to make the Australian Foreign Minister--a great friend of the United States--I wish to show him we can answer his question and that we realize, just like he does, that we are one budget agreement away from reasserting America's global preeminence and that we in the Senate are perfectly capable of doing it.

By not bringing up appropriations bills, by reverting to political exercises, by leaving off the table many amendments that need debate, and by even suggesting we would change the nature of the Senate so a freight train could run through it with 51 votes, none of that encourages confidence in the ability of the United States to govern that I think exists.

I know my colleagues pretty well. I work hard with people on both sides. I respect them all and their opinions and I do not question their motives. It is my personal judgment that 80, 85 percent of us on both sides of the aisle want a result on the big fiscal issues and on every other big issue that comes here, and I would like to do my best to create an environment in which that could happen.

I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, I am awaiting Senator Durbin and Senator Enzi. I will be happy to listen to the Senator from Louisiana if she would like to continue for a while until they come. I plan to speak for a few minutes after they speak on a different subject.

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor in support of Senator Enzi of Wyoming, Senator Durbin of Illinois, and a group of other Senators and House Members who are working on legislation called the Marketplace Fairness Act.

I am going to let them do their own speaking. I am their chief self- appointed cheerleader. Senator Enzi has been working on this ever since he has been in the Senate. He has a special passion for it as a former owner of a shoe store in Wyoming.

Let me see if I can phrase it this way. If I were to ask the question, What do Governor Chris Christie, Governor Mitch Daniels, Governor Jeb Bush, Governor Haley Barbour, Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, and Governor Paul LePage of Maine all have in common, one might say they are all Republicans, and that is true. One might say they are all conservatives, and that is true.

The other thing one could say about those Governors and Republicans and conservatives is that they all support the Enzi-Durbin Marketplace Fairness Act. What is the Marketplace Fairness Act and why do they support it? The Marketplace Fairness Act is an 11-page bill about a two-word issue, and the issue is States rights.

The reason I am such a strong supporter and a cosponsor of what they are doing is because when I, in my former life, used to be Governor of Tennessee, nothing would make me angrier than Washington politicians who would try to tell me what to do about my own business. We have a legislature in Tennessee and in Wyoming and we have a Governor and we know what services we want and we have a range of options of taxes to pay for that. It was always my position we could make our own decisions about how to do that.

What Senators Enzi and Durbin and others of us are saying is that States have a right to decide what taxes they impose and from whom to collect them. If the States of Tennessee or Wyoming say: We are going to have a sales tax and we are only collecting it from half the people, it has the right to be wrong. That is what I mean by States rights.

If I were in Tennessee, I would say: Surely, you will not have a State sales tax and only collect it from some of the people. You would collect it from all the people who owe it. Surely, you will treat all your businesses that are in a similarly situated situation the same way. That would be my position if I were Governor or in the legislature, but I will let them decide that.

What we have advanced in the Senate, which has 13 cosponsors, is a piece of legislation that makes it clear States can decide for themselves whether to collect State sales taxes from some of the people who owe it or from all the people who owe it. I will give an example and then I will sit down and listen to Senator Enzi and let him talk.

This past week I had a birthday, and my wife gave me an ice cream maker

from Williams-Sonoma, which I am sure is going to add a few pounds as the months go on. So there we were over the Fourth of July holiday, and I wanted to get some of the stuff one needs to make ice cream. You can buy ice cream starter from Williams-Sonoma and it comes in a can and it makes the project a lot easier and you can buy chocolate syrup and they will mail it right to your house. You can do all these things online, of course, or I could have driven back to Nashville and gone to the store in Nashville and bought it all there. If I had bought all that stuff in Nashville, I would have paid Nashville's 9.25 percent sales tax. If I buy it online, I wouldn't have to pay the tax when I bought it, except that Williams-Sonoma collects it. So I went on the Internet, put it on my credit card, and there was the amount of money it cost to buy the stuff for my ice cream maker. Right at the end of it, it added the tax on, the same sales tax I owed and would have paid if I had been at Williams-Sonoma in Nashville. So I pushed the button, off it went, they collected the tax from my credit card, sent it to the State of Tennessee, and it was done.

Twenty years ago, that wouldn't have happened with an out-of-State seller. It was too cumbersome. The technology wasn't advanced, the Internet wasn't as fast, and the States had not gotten their acts together. It was all very confusing, and the Supreme Court said you can't impose that on States--requiring an out-of-State seller to collect the sales tax that is owed--even though it may be owed. Today, it is different. It is as easy to figure out the tax as it is to Google the weather in your hometown. In fact, it is easier. It is easier to have the tax collected online than it is to go into the store and do it.

In any event, in the State of Tennessee, Governor Haslam and the Lieutenant Governor--and I can guarantee we are a conservative State-- want the right to decide that for themselves. I know what they are going to do, if they have the right to collect the sales tax from everybody who owes it instead of just some of the people who owe it. They are going to lower the tax rate for everybody. They might get rid of the only vestige of an income tax we have, or the food tax might go down. They might spend some more money for teachers' salaries. That is their business.

But I am here to say that Senators Enzi and Durbin and others have solved a big problem for this country, and the reason why this bill is inevitable and why I hope it will pass this week or next week or the next week--and why I believe the House of Representatives is going to pass it as well--is because it is a simple 11-page bill about a 2-word issue: States rights. That is why Governor Christie and Governor Daniels and Governor Bush and Congressman Pence and many Republicans and many conservatives are saying let's pass it. Let's get out of the way and let States make their own decisions, and then the States can decide from whom they want to collect their sales taxes.

I congratulate Senator Enzi--and Senator Durbin--on his work and I look forward to working with Senator Enzi and I hope this year we can continue to turn this bill the Senator has worked on for more than a dozen years into a law.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.