Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his courtesy in allowing Senator Corker and me a chance to speak about Judge Fowlkes from Tennessee. I do not intend to get into a lengthy dispute with the Senator from Vermont about the relative merits of the two political parties approving judges. But I do have to admire his persistence and creativity in always coming up with a way in how Democrats approve more Republican judges than Republicans approved Democratic judges.

I notice that our ranking member, Senator Grassley, will put a statement in the Record today making a clear statement about what the record is. But if I may borrow from that: Today's vote will be the 152nd nominee of President Obama confirmed to district and circuit judges. We have also confirmed two Supreme Court nominees during President Obama's term. The last time the Senate confirmed two Supreme Court nominees was during President Bush's second term. During President Bush's entire second term, the Senate confirmed a total of only 119 district and circuit court nominees. With Judge Fowlkes' confirmation today, we will have confirmed 33 more district and circuit nominees for President Obama than we did for President Bush in similar circumstances.

That is according to Senator Grassley's comments, which will be printed in the Record. I would have to say to my friend from Vermont, my memory is good enough that about this time 4 years ago, when we had a Republican President, I think I remember the majority leader of the Senate, Senator Reid, and Senator Leahy both suggesting it was time that we slowed things down and not confirm any more circuit judges until we saw how the election came out in November. So we are basically, in our opinion, applying, in the fairest possible way in the Senate, the Thurmond-Leahy rule that has been developed over time.

If there are excellent nominees by the President to the circuit courts, well, the election is only 4 months away. If he is reelected, they can be confirmed in November and December. If he is not, then his successor will have a chance to make those nominations.

Let me speak today about a matter that I believe we have great agreement on in the Senate, with the President,

and that is the nomination of the President of Judge John Fowlkes to fill a vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.

As the Governor of Tennessee, I had the responsibility of appointing about 50 judges over 8 years. I looked for good intelligence, good temperament, good understanding of the law, and respect for those who came before the court. I did not feel it was my responsibility ever to inquire how a judge might decide on a particular case before he took the position.

So I took some time to look into Judge Fowlkes' background when President Obama nominated him. I was delighted with what I found. I am pleased to recommend him to our colleagues. His performance has been praised throughout his career in the community of Memphis and Shelby County where he is best known. His leadership, his citizenship, his high professionalism, his courtesy to others are the words I often hear. I have letters from bar association members who say he has a creative and independent mind; from others in Memphis who say he is passionate about the community in which he lives, appearing at civic events repeatedly, committing over 50 hours of service annually to the Memphis Area Legal Services, and actively supporting the Boy Scouts.

So it is with great pleasure that I recommend to our colleagues today President Obama's nominee, Judge John Fowlkes, to fill a vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee.

Mr. President, I am disappointed in the final version of this bill. If I had been present, I would have voted against it for a number of reasons, including the fact that it violates the Budget Control Act, it does not use the money produced from the pension reforms to shore up the financial strength of pension systems, and it fails to prevent the EPA from regulating coal ash as a hazardous material.

Vote Explanation

Mr. President, I congratulate Senators Harkin and Enzi, their staffs, and all who worked for 15 months on this important piece of legislation. I have watched the Senate for a long time--first as a staff member and then as a Senator--and it has always been a little messy and complicated. There are always disagreements. That is the purpose of the Senate, to work out arguments. But over the last few months, this Senate has done a much better job of operating in the way the American people expect us to operate. We are all here to try to get results after we state our positions. This bill especially affects the health and safety of millions of Americans. Almost every American family buys the prescription drugs and medical devices we are talking about in this legislation. I am glad to see this happen for two reasons--one, because of the result, and two, because of the way the Senate has worked. It is a fine example of what I hope to see happen more often.

I also thank the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the minority leader, Senator McConnell, for creating an environment in which we could have a large number of amendments, debate, and discussion. I think we all appreciate that very much and want to create an environment in which they can provide that kind of leadership.

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, on Monday, at the Library of Congress, was the 150th anniversary celebration of the creation of land-grant universities and the National Academy of Sciences. The assemblage also took a moment to throw a bouquet to Andrew Carnegie for founding so many free public libraries.

I am on the floor to ask this question: What was in the water in Washington, DC, 150 years ago, in 1862 and 1863? During the 2 years after the telegraph dispatched the Pony Express in 1861, Congress and President Lincoln enacted the Morrill Act creating land-grant colleges, authorized the Transcontinental Railroad--reducing the time for getting from New York to San Francisco from 6 months to 6 days--as well as the National Academy of Sciences, and enacted the Homestead Act. They also agreed on a conscription law with teeth, a National Banking Act, establishing a national currency, a new internal revenue law, and created the Department of Agriculture. To top it off, on December 2, 1863 the last section of the Statute of Freedom was put in place on top of the Capitol dome, with a great celebration.

Mr. President, if I were the Republican national chairman, I might suggest that this transforming burst of governing was simply a matter of turning the government completely over to

Republicans and sending home half of the Democrats. By the end of the 37th Congress in 1863, southern Democratic U.S. Senators could not obstruct any of these laws because their States had seceded from the Union and they could not to vote. According to the Senate Historian, that left 48 Senators voting at the end of that session--27 Republicans, 12 Democrats, and 9 Unionists, oppositionists, or Senators who called themselves the ``know nothings.''

Perhaps this burst of governing came from the energy of a new political party or the brilliance of the new President, Abraham Lincoln, or maybe a Congress that was simply more efficient in those days. The Morrill Act that created land-grant colleges passed both the Senate and House in the same week, in June 1862. The President signed the bill into law 2 weeks later. The National Academy of Sciences was introduced on February 20, 1863. It passed the Senate and the House and was signed by the President all on the same day, March 3. Back in those days, the President would obligingly travel down Pennsylvania Avenue and sit in an office in the Capitol waiting for bills to be brought to him for signature.

Maybe it was a result of the state of the American condition at the time--the absence of a 24-hour media, special interest groups, and instant communication on the Internet. Or maybe it was that Members of Congress had more time to think great thoughts while traveling to the sessions. It would take Senator Sam Houston 6 weeks to travel from his home in Texas to occupy his Senate desk in Washington, DC.

There is no doubt it helped that there was a crisis, the Civil War. Americans have always risen to our best in the midst of a crisis. Making the crisis worse, many thought the new President was incompetent. In January 1863, former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis ``reported general agreement on the utter incompetence of the President. He is shattered, dazed and utterly foolish.'' This is from David Herbert Donald's book ``Lincoln.'' The editor of the Cincinnati Commercial was more explicit when he wrote that President Lincoln was ``an awful, woeful ass. If Lincoln was not a damn fool, we could get along yet.'' The President, in turn, considered many of his generals incompetent. And he and Mrs. Lincoln were suffering a personal crisis at the time, grieving the death of their son, Willie. The war crisis clearly helped to enact transforming legislation in 1862 and 1863. One impetus for passage of the law creating land-grant colleges was to provide military training.

Among the first assignments of the National Academy of Sciences was to find some way to protect the iron hulls of the Union Navy warships from corrosion.

GEN Grenville Dodge told President Lincoln that the Transcontinental Railroad was a ``military necessity,'' even though Representative Justin Morrill, a visionary in other matters, said he saw no need for the railroad to go further than the silver mines in Nevada because it would only be traveling through uninhabited territories.

The war caused the bickering Republicans, who remained in Congress, to pull together. The editor of the Chicago Tribune explained:

[If we fail], then all is lost. Union, party cause, freedom

and abolition of slavery . . . let us first get the ship out

of the breakers, then court martial the officers if they

deserve it.

Mr. President, it helped to have a crisis.

Unfortunately, the formula for the passage of transforming legislation 150 years ago is not neatly explained as a crisis, plus a brilliant President, plus a high-minded Congress efficiently enacting big ideas developed in Washington, DC. The real story is much more American than that. As has usually been the case, these big American ideas came from outside Washington, they took a long time in coming, and enacting them into law was a long and messy process.

Jonathan Baldwin Turner's address before the Illinois Teachers Institute in 1850 proposed the creation of an ``industrial university'' 12 years before enactment of the Morrill Act. Representative Morrill first introduced the idea in 1857. After much struggle, it passed in 1959, but President Buchanan vetoed it. Two years later, Morrill succeeded. And even though the obstructionist Southerners were gone, eastern and western Republicans argued vigorously over land grants, as well as where the new Transcontinental Railroad should go.

The roots of the National Academy of Sciences can be traced to a group of Cambridge scientists meeting in the 1850s or to earlier philosophical organizations before that or even all the way back to Benjamin Franklin. California entrepreneurs and speculators and politicians--some of them were all three--were the ones who persisted in the 1850s until, in 1862, the Pacific Railroad Act became law.

So the formula for success for these transforming laws 150 years ago was typically American: big ideas bubbling up from around the country, plus entrepreneurial persistence, plus a crisis equals transforming results.

How does that formula apply today to improving the American condition? Well, to begin with, we have a handy crisis. Washington is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends. By this rate, by 2025, every penny of tax revenue will go for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the national debt, leaving nothing left-- unless we borrow more--for national defense, national laboratories, national parks, research, or education. A second crisis, many fear, is that our country will be unable to compete in the future with the emerging Asian economies. So what transforming steps should the United States take to meet these new challenges?

My own view is that rather than creating new institutions, as America did in the 1850s and 1860s, it would be wiser for us to spend our time making the institutions we already have work.

Let me discuss just two examples--first, our basic governmental institutions. The new Foreign Minister of Australia, Bob Carr, a great friend of the United States, expressed recently in Washington, DC, that the United States is one budget deal away from reasserting its preeminence in the world. He means, of course, that the world is watching, actually hoping, that at the end of the year the United States will demonstrate that we actually can govern ourselves by resolving the fiscal mess we have in a way that reforms taxes, controls spending, and reduces debt. We do not need a new government to do this. We need for our newly elected President, whether his name be Romney or Obama, to lead.

President Lyndon B. Johnson's Press Secretary, George Reedy, once defined Presidential leadership as seeing an urgent need, developing a strategy to meet that need, and persuading at least half the people that you are right.

We don't need to change the rules of the United States Senate; we simply need a change in behavior--one that focuses less on playing games and more on getting results. The new Congress, next year's Congress, whether it be Republican or Democratic, must make its goal to dispute, amend, debate, vote upon the President's proposed agenda, and then help the President succeed, because if he succeeds our country succeeds.

We might well remember the words of that Chicago Tribune editorial writer in 1862 who said:

Let us first get the ship out of the breakers . . . then

court martial the officers if they deserve it.

The second institutions we should refurbish and make work are our colleges and universities--all 6,000 of them, not just the land-grant universities that we celebrate this week. Again, we do not need new institutions; we need to reassert the greatness of the ones we have. Our universities, along with our national labs, are our secret weapons for innovation, and innovation is our secret weapon for producing 25 percent of all the money in the world for just 5 percent of the world's population. The list of what it would take to strengthen our colleges and universities is short and mostly agreed upon. First, stop sending home every year 17,000 of the 50,000 international students who graduate from U.S. universities with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Give them a green card and let them stay here to create jobs in the United States.

Next, double funding for advanced research, as the America COMPETES Act, which passed with huge bipartisan

support in the Senate, has already authorized.

Third, repeal the Federal Medicaid mandates that force States to spend money on Medicaid that otherwise would go to higher education. This has resulted in dramatic decreases in State support and increases in tuition to try to maintain quality.

Next, while Congress is repealing the Medicaid mandates, it should literally cut in half the stack of regulations that hampers institutional autonomy and wastes dollars that should be spent on students and research.

Finally, the institutions themselves should look for ways to save money, such as full utilization of facilities during the summer, 3-year degrees for some students, and reforms to teacher tenure.

In the 1960s, Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, offered this advice to the big three Detroit automobile manufacturers:

Nothing is more vulnerable than entrenched success.

The big three did not pay attention to that advice, and we see what happened. It is good advice for universities today.

In conclusion, I wish to say a word about the Carnegie libraries. My experience is that most ideas fail for lack of the idea; or to put it positively, that a great idea eventually carries itself into reality. Andrew Carnegie's great idea was building public libraries. All of us know of their importance.

I remember when the New York Times wrote an article about me. They said, Mr. Alexander grew up in a lower middle-class family at the edge of the Tennessee mountains. When I called home later that week to talk with my mother, she was reading Thessalonians to gather strength for what she considered to be a slur on the family. She said to me: Son, we never thought of ourselves that way. You had a library card from the day you were 3 and a music lesson from the day you were 4. You had everything you needed that was important.

Andrew Carnegie's gift and the Federal laws 150 years ago creating land grant universities and the National Academy of Sciences and the transcontinental railroad and the Homestead Act all have this in common. They were not command-and-control Federal Government actions from Washington, DC. They were big ideas that, when implemented, empowered Americans to do things for themselves--to travel, to own a home, to educate themselves, and to learn by using a library.

For example, my empowered mother took me to the A. K. Harper Memorial Library in Maryville, TN, when I was 3 years old in order to get my library card. ``Mrs. Alexander,'' the librarian said to her, ``we don't give library cards to 3-year-olds.'' ``Well, you should,'' she said to them. And they did.

So on this anniversary for the congressional enactment of transforming and empowering ideas, there should be more hope than despair. We still have most of the world's great universities. They still attract most of the brightest students from everywhere, insourcing brainpower and creating wealth.

According to a recent Harvard School of Business survey of 10,000 of its alumni on U.S. competitiveness, if you are in business in this country, it is still hard to beat America's entrepreneurial environment, proximity to customers, low levels of corruption, access to skilled labor, safety for people and property, and protection of intellectual property.

We have a remarkable system of government created by geniuses that many countries struggle to emulate. So why not celebrate this anniversary by taking steps to ensure that 25 or 50 or 100 years from now we have even more of the greatest universities in the world?

Let me read exactly what Australia's Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, a friend of the United States, said in his speech in April:

America could be one budget deal away, in the context of economic recovery, one budget deal away from banishing the notion of American declinism. Think about that, one budget deal, an exercise of statesmanship up the road, in the context of an economic bounce-back and all of a sudden, with energy independence crystallizing, with technological innovation, resurgence of American manufacturing, people who spoke about American decline could be revising their thesis.

So as we celebrate the transforming legislation of 150 years ago, why not take the advice of our friend from Australia? Why not take advantage of our opportunity at the end of this year to enact a budget that will reassert Americans' preeminence in the world?

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from California, and the Senator from Maryland especially for his courtesy.

I would agree the EPA has become a happy hunting ground for goofy regulations. But as the late William F. Buckley once said, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And on this rule--this clean air rule and the earlier interstate rule--I believe EPA is right.

The effect of upholding this rule will be to finally require that most coal plants everywhere in America will have to install two kinds of pollution control equipment: scrubbers and SCRs. This will basically finish the job of capturing sulfur and nitrogen oxides, fine particles, and the 187 toxic pollutants that were specifically identified by Congress in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has already committed to install this equipment by 2018. But TVA alone can't clean up Tennessee's air, because dirty air blows in from other States. So let me say what upholding this rule will do for the people of Tennessee.

First, it will hasten the day when Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville are not three of the top five worst asthma cities--which they are today--and Nashville is not competing to be in the top 10.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks an article which appeared in the Tennessean this week by Dr. William Lawson of Vanderbilt University, who treats patients with respiratory diseases in Nashville.

In the article Dr. Lawson says:

Pollution from these power plants means my patients suffer

more. Pollution increases their chances of being

hospitalized. Some of these toxic emissions even cause cancer

and can interfere with our children's neurological

development.

Secondly, upholding this rule means that visitors will soon not even think of calling the Great Smoky Mountains the Great Smoggy Mountains because it is one of the most polluted national parks in America. We want those 9 million visitors to keep coming every year with their dollars and their jobs.

Instead of seeing 24 miles on a bad air day from Clingman's Dome, our highest peak, this rule should mean we will gradually move toward seeing 100 miles from Clingman's Dome as the air cleans up and we look through the natural blue haze.

Third, this rule should mean fewer health advisory warnings for our streams that say ``don't eat the fish because of mercury contamination.'' Half of the manmade mercury in the United States comes from coal plants, and as much as 70 percent of the mercury pollution in our local environment, such as streams and rivers, can come from nearby coal plants.

Fourth, we have seen that had Nissan been unable to get an air quality permit in Nashville in 1980, it would have gone to Georgia. And if Senator Corker had not, as mayor of Chattanooga, improved the air quality in that city in the mid 2000s, the Volkswagen site there would be a vacant lot today.

We know every Tennessee metropolitan area is struggling to stay within legal clean air standards and we don't want the Memphis megasite to stay a vacant lot because dirty air blowing in from Mississippi and Arkansas makes the Memphis air too dirty for new industry to locate there.

We know these rules will add a few dollars to our electric bills, but in our case, most of that is going to happen anyway because the Tennessee Valley Authority has already agreed to put this pollution control equipment on its coal-fired powerplants. We know we can reduce the effect of these expenses on monthly electric bills because States may give utilities a fourth year to comply with the rule, and the President may, under the law, give them a fifth and sixth year. And Senator Pryor and I intend to ask the President to give that fifth and sixth year to reduce costs on electric bills.

We know long term this rule will secure a place in America's clean energy future for clean coal. For example, the largest public utility, TVA, the largest private utility, Southern Company, both plan to put pollution control equipment on their coal plants and to make at least one-third of their electricity from coal over the long term.

In 1990--22 years ago--Congress told the EPA to make this rule when it passed the Clean Air Act amendments. In 2008, the Court told the EPA to make this rule.

Over the years, I have learned that cleaner air not only means better health, but also means better jobs for Tennesseans, and I am proud to stand up on behalf of the people of Tennessee to uphold this clean air rule.

Exhibit 1

[From the Tennessean, June 18, 2012]

Air Rule Will Literally Save Us

(By William Lawson, M.D.)

Power plant pollution makes people sick and can cut lives

short. That is why cleaning up coal-fired power plants is a

long overdue, lifesaving necessity that thankfully Sen. Lamar

Alexander has embraced to secure both a healthy and sound

economic future for our state.

I treat patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary

disease (COPD), idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and other lung

diseases in those whose lungs are especially vulnerable to

the power-plant emissions. But they are not the only ones at

risk. My children and yours also are highly susceptible to

the long-term repercussions of having to breathe dirty air

growing up, which science tells us can prevent lungs from

maturing properly. We desperately need Sen. Alexander and

Sen. Bob Corker to ensure they receive protection from these

toxic pollutants now, not years from now.

Protecting them is the recently adopted Power Plant Mercury

and Air Toxics Standards, as required under the Clean Air

Act. Astonishingly, a campaign is under way to block these

public-health protections. Until these standards take effect,

coal-fired power plants have no national limits on the amount

of mercury or acid gases they may pump out of their

smokestacks and into the air we breathe. These standards will

prevent 370 premature deaths every year just in Tennessee and

will provide $3 billion in annual health benefits by 2016.

TVA is already well on its way to meeting these air

standards, but some in the Senate are working to make it

easier for corporate polluters to block the rule from ever

taking effect.

Allowing the new emissions standard to move forward will

prevent 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths

nationally every year. This reduction in harmful plant

emissions will also eliminate 540,000 missed work days on an

annual basis, thereby reducing health-care costs and

enhancing our overall quality of life.

Pollution from these power plants means my patients suffer

more. Pollution increases their chances of being

hospitalized. Some of these toxic emissions even cause cancer

and can interfere with our children's neurological

development. The public health benefits are just too

significant to ignore. Healthy air and good health have a

crystal-clear relationship.

Every day, I see in my patients how avoiding even just one

asthma attack, acute respiratory infection or even the

briefest hospital stay would dramatically enhance their

quality of life. A healthier future is ours to have if we

stand behind our leaders who are committed to make that

tomorrow a reality.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to congratulate Dr. Robert Bell on his outstanding record of service to Tennessee. Dr. Bell will be retiring as president of Tennessee Technological University at the end of this month and has served the university for 36 years.

He has served as president of Tennessee Tech since 2000, and before becoming the university's president, he served as both a professor and dean of the College of Business.

During his time at Tennessee Tech, Dr. Bell has fostered both an increase in student enrollment and university recognition, while ensuring that student education remained affordable.

His contributions to Tennessee extend beyond the university level. He has served as a member of the board of directors for the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence since 1993 and chairs the Cookeville Industrial Development Board. He is also a proud member of the executive committee of the Middle Tennessee Boy Scouts of America, an organization dedicated to helping young men achieve their potential.

I want to add my appreciation for his years of service to Tennessee Tech and wish him well in his retirement.

I ask to have the following resolution printed in the Record.

The resolution follows.

A Resolution of Appreciation for the Service of Dr. Robert R. Bell to

the Tennessee Board of Regents

Whereas, Dr. Robert R. Bell has thirty-six years of service

with the Tennessee Board of Regents system and Tennessee Tech

University, serving as a professor in TTU's College of

Business, then as dean, then as President of the University

since 2000,

Whereas, as President of TTU, he oversaw 12 straight years

of enrollment growth, with TTU's enrollment approaching

12,000,

Whereas, he chaired a TBR Vision of Teaching Excellence

committee in 2004 to establish future teaching standards and

led his University to develop and expand extended education,

distance learning and virtual classrooms,

Whereas, he supported the Regents Online Degree Program and

championed degree innovations at TTU to increase access to

education and to respond to industry needs in order to

improve the education and economic progress in the state,

Whereas, as President he set his sights on a program to

prepare the state's teachers, from Pre-K to college levels,

to teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics by

establishing The Millard Oakley STEM Center and providing it

a state-of-the-art home in the new 26,000-square-foot Ray

Morris Hall in 2010,

Whereas, he recognized the need for a nursing school in

rural Tennessee and garnered support from the state

legislature, U.S. Congress and private and corporate donors

to fund the construction of a multi-million dollar Nursing

and Health Services Building,

Whereas, he kept his promise as President to upgrade

facilities to increase recruitment and retention and oversaw

the construction and completion of two residence halls--New

Hall South and New Hall North,

Whereas, under his guidance TTU established Learning

Villages, which aim to bring students and faculty together

around a common interest and bridge the gap between the

living and learning segments of campus and to encourage

college completion,

Whereas, the University's endowment has doubled during

Bell's presidency to nearly $60 million,

Whereas, under his leadership in a difficult economic

environment, TTU has remained affordable. Students graduate

with the lightest debt load in the region, according to U.S.

News & World Report, and sixty percent of 2010 TTU graduates

left school debt free,

Whereas, the Tennessee Board of Regents grants President

Emeritus status to Dr. Robert R. Bell for his continued

support of the system, now, therefore, be it

Resolved That the Tennessee Board of Regents expresses its

sincere appreciation to Dr. Robert R. Bell for his

outstanding contributions and leadership to the system and

wishes him the very best in his retirement.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 2191.

Mr. President, if my colleagues think it is a good idea to give rich developers of wind turbines a double dip into the Federal Treasury at a time when we are borrowing 40 cents of every $1, then this provision in the farm bill is for you. If you think a single dip into the Treasury is justified, then this amendment is for you.

The farm bill gives new loans, new loan guarantees for wind turbines. That is on top of the 14 billion Federal tax dollars we are spending over 5 years for wind turbines--$6 billion through the production tax credit and the other $8 billion through the section 603 grants. This simply says: No double-dipping. Only one dip. If you do the tax credit, you can't do the farm bill.

Vote yes if you don't like double-dipping into the Federal Treasury.

How much time do we have?

I wonder if the majority leader would permit me to make a brief statement.

Mr. President, I thank the majority leader. I simply wanted to say I did not object to a voice vote on Mr. Hurwitz's confirmation, but I wished to make this statement.

Last night, I voted for cloture because when I became a Senator, Democrats were blocking an up-or-down vote on President Bush's judicial nominees. I said then that I would not do that and did not like doing that. I have held to that in almost every case since then. I believe nominees for circuit judges, in all but extraordinary cases, and district judges in every case ought to have an up-or-down vote by the Senate.

So while I voted for cloture last night, if we had a vote today, I would have voted no against confirmation because of my concerns about Mr. Hurwitz's record on right-to-life issues.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, over the last several years, first as Governor of Tennessee and later as a U.S. Senator, I have learned that healthier air also means better jobs for Tennesseans. That is why I intend to vote to uphold a clean air rule that requires utilities in other States to install the same pollution control equipment the Tennessee Valley Authority is already installing on coal-fired power plants in the TVA region.

TVA alone can't clean up our air. Tennessee is bordered by more States than any other State. We are literally surrounded by our neighbors' smokestacks. If we in Tennessee want more Nissan and Volkswagen plants, we will have to stop dirty air from blowing into Tennessee, and here is why. Back in 1980, I was Governor and Nissan came to Tennessee. The first thing the Nissan executives did was to go down to the State air quality board and apply for an air quality permit for their paint emissions plant. If the air in the Nashville area had been so dirty that Nissan couldn't have gotten an air quality permit for additional emissions, Nissan would have gone to Georgia and we would not be able to say today that one-third of our manufacturing jobs in Tennessee are auto jobs.

Every one of Tennessee's major metropolitan areas is struggling today to meet the standards that govern whether industries can acquire the air quality permits they need to locate in our State.

I once asked the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce leaders to name their top priority. They said to me: Clean air. Now, Sevierville is not necessarily a hotbed of leftwing radicals. Sevier County is the most Republican county in the State. It is nestled right up against the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is where Dolly Parton was born. I live in the next county, right up next to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

East Tennesseans know that 9 million visitors come each year to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not to see the Great Smoggy Mountains, and we want those tourist dollars and the jobs they bring to keep coming. Despite a lot of progress, the Great Smokies is still one of the most polluted national parks in America. Standing on Clingman's Dome--our highest peak, about 6,643 feet--you should be able to see about 100 miles through the natural blue haze about which the Cherokees used to sing. Yet today, on a smoggy day you can see only 24 miles.

There are 546 Tennesseans who work today in coal mining in our State, according to the Energy Information Administration. Every single one of those jobs is important. This has been an important tradition in a few counties in East Tennessee. At the same time, there are 1,200 Tennesseans who work at the Alstom plants in Knoxville and Chattanooga that will supply the country with most of the pollution-control equipment required by this rule. Every one of those Tennesseans' jobs is important too. Of the top five worst cities for asthma in the United States, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, three are in Tennessee. They are Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. Only last year Nashville dropped out of the top 10 worst U.S. cities for asthma. Because of the high levels of mercury, health advisories warn against eating fish caught in many of Tennessee's streams.

According to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, nationally mercury causes brain damage in more than 315,000 children each year. It also contributes to mental retardation. Half of the manmade mercury in the United States comes from coal-fired power plants. This new rule requires removing 90 percent of this mercury. The rule also controls 186 other hazardous pollutants, including arsenic, acid gases, and toxic metals.

Utilities have known this was coming since 1990 because these 187 pollutants, including mercury, are specifically identified in the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act as air pollutants that need to be controlled by utilities. Now the Federal courts have added their weight and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to control these pollutants.

An added benefit of the rule is that the equipment installed to control these hazardous pollutants will also capture fine particles, a major source of respiratory disease that is primarily regulated under another part of the Clean Air Act. This new equipment will add a few dollars a month to residential electric bills. The EPA estimates a 3- percent increase nationwide. But because the Tennessee Valley Authority has already made a commitment to install these pollution controls, the customers of TVA will pay this rate increase anyway--with the rule or without the rule. To reduce the costs, the Senator from Arkansas, Senator Pryor, and I will introduce legislation to allow utilities 6 years to comply with the rule, which is a timeline many utilities have requested. Earlier today the Senator from Oklahoma, who is sponsoring a resolution to overturn the rule, referred to the legislation Senator Pryor and I offered as a cover amendment and suggested in some way that it wasn't a sincere effort. I greatly respect the Senator from Oklahoma. Sometimes we have different points of view, but I have different points of view with the Senator from Minnesota, the Senator from Arkansas, not to mention Senators from almost everyplace in the country. But I respect those different points of view just as I respect Senator Inhofe's different point of view, and I hope he will respect mine. Here is my point of view: Ever since I have been in the Senate, I have introduced legislation to clean up the air in Tennessee. Why have I done that? Because we don't want the Great Smoggy Mountains, we want the Great Smoky Mountains. We don't want to perpetually have three of the top five asthma cities in the country. We don't like health advisory warnings on our streams so we can't eat our fish.

We especially don't want the Memphis Chamber of Commerce to recruit another big auto plant to the big Memphis megasite and then learn that they can't come here because the Memphis area has dirty air and the auto manufacturer can't get a necessary air permit. It would be even worse if that dirty air is blowing in from another State.

So what this rule is about is requiring our neighbors, and the rest of the country, to do the same thing we are already doing. If they don't do it, we have no chance in the world to ever have clean air in Tennessee. Also, if we don't, we will have worse health and fewer jobs.

Now as far as the 6 years goes, the law gives States the right to add a fourth year to the 3 years the utilities have to comply with the law. Today Federal law gives the President of the United States the right to add 2 more years to that, so that is 6 years. In the law today the President and the States could make sure utilities have 6 years to comply with this rule. I believe that makes sense.

If I were the king and could wave a magic wand, that is what I would do. Why would I do that? Because we will be getting environmental benefits over the 6 years. So what will happen is utilities will assess their coal plants, decide which ones are too old or too expensive to operate, decide within 3 years to close those they will not continue to operate, and then they will have 6 years to spread the costs of implementing the expensive pollution-control equipment--most of it is called SCRs and scrubbers--on their coal-fired powerplants.

Most of the utilities have suggested this 6-year timeline as the single best way to clean the air and to do it in a way that has the least impact on electric bills.

So we will introduce our legislation to give utility executives 6 years to implement the rule, but we will also write President Obama a letter and urge him to grant the 6 years so utility executives can have that certainty. Some are saying this rule is anticoal. I say it is pro- coal in this sense because it guarantees coal a future in our clean energy mix. As I have said, the Tennessee Valley Authority has decided to

put the pollution control equipment it needs to make coal clean on all of the coal plants it continues to operate. That doesn't count carbon; that counts all of the hazardous pollution. It counts sulfur, nitrogen, sulfur, mercury, and those sorts of things.

That means, long term, the TVA will be able to produce more than one- third of its electricity from clean coal. That guarantees its future for the foreseeable future in our region, and this is the largest public utility in the world. The rest of our electricity in the Tennessee Valley will come from even cleaner natural gas and from pollution-free nuclear power and hydropower.

Ever since Tennesseans elected me to the Senate, which was about 10 years ago, I have worked hard to clean up our air. Tennesseans know that. Most of them agree with me. They thank me for it when I go home on weekends. They do that because they know if I do not help clean up our air in Tennessee, and if I don't stop dirty air from blowing into our State from other States who don't have pollution controls on their coal plants, that it jeopardizes our health and it jeopardizes our opportunity to continue to be one of the Nation's leading States in attracting auto jobs and in attracting tourists.

I notice on the Senate floor the Senator from Arkansas, Mr. Pryor, and I thank him for his leadership on the issue and for his practical attitude. I believe we have the same goals, which are, No. 1, clean the air but keep the electric bills down at the lowest possible cost, and we believe we have the most constructive proposal to do that. We hope President Obama will agree with us.

First, we hope the Senate will agree with us and uphold the rule; second, that the President will agree with us and grant 6 years; and, third, if he does not, that the Congress will agree with us and pass a law giving utilities 6 years to spread out the costs.

I thank the President.

I yield the floor.

I wish to congratulate the Senator from Arkansas for his very clear explanation of what we are about here. The United States produces 25 percent of all the wealth in the world every year. In order to do that, we use about 20 to 25 percent of all of the electricity in the world. We need low-cost, reliable, large amounts of clean electricity and we need for coal to have a secure part of the future of our clean energy mix.

I have said for years, we know what to do about sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and the hazardous pollutants. We have the pollution control equipment to capture all of those. We can make the coal clean, except for carbon, so let's put that over here on the side for a minute. We can make the coal clean and we should do it. We should have done it in a law over the last few years. We have had 15 Senators equally divided on both sides of the aisle trying to pass a law. We couldn't get it done so we defaulted to the EPA, so now they have had to do the rule. But the Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1990 we told EPA to write this rule. In the law, it listed the pollutants that have to be controlled. In 2005, President Bush tried to write this rule but a Federal Court threw it out and in 2008 said to the EPA, you have to do it, the way the law says to do it. So Congress has told them to do it, the courts have told them to do it, and now they have done it according to the law. If we don't like the rule, we have to change the law, which we are not doing with the resolution of disapproval.

The constructive thing we can do is let the rule go forward. Let's have clean coal be a part of our clean energy mix, and then let's allow utilities what they many of them have asked for, 6 years to implement the rule. Hopefully, our legislation will pass. Hopefully, just the mere introduction of it, particularly by those of us who support the rule, will persuade President Obama that it would be a reasonable Executive Order for him to make, to assure people across the country that we will have no interruption in the reliability of our electricity and that we will have no great increase in costs in most parts of the country.

I agree with the Senator from Arkansas when he said that coal needs to be a very important part of our future. This regulation will make coal in our region an important part of our electricity production. If the TVA is the biggest public utility in the country, and it is going to produce a third of its electricity from coal with pollution-control equipment on the plants. That is clean coal.

But the real holy grail of energy for me is the scientist who discovers the way to turn carbon from existing coal plants into something commercially useful. It will probably be in energy. In the Department of Energy right now they have an interesting experiment where they are applying a biologic process--really, bugs--to electrodes, turning it into oil. Imagine what would happen if all the coal plants in our country could turn the carbon they produce into other kinds of energy. Then, suddenly, we would have this 400-year supply of coal, and the carbon, as well as all the other parts, would be clean and we could use even more coal than the one-third it is likely to represent.

I appreciate very much the leadership of the Senator from Arkansas, his advocacy, and his clear statement of opinion. I wish to say to both our Republican and Democratic colleagues, if you are looking for a way to have clean coal, clean air, and do it at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer, let's do what most of the utilities have asked for and give them a timeline of 6 years to implement the rule. The easiest way to do it would be for the President to introduce the Executive Order, and each State to give the utility one more year, because that authority is already a part of the Federal law.

Mr. President, it was a pleasure to hear the Senator from Minnesota speak on the farm bill. I congratulate Senator Roberts and Senator Stabenow for their hard work, as well as the Senator from Minnesota. I would like to take 10 minutes to speak on a related matter.

American agriculture is an area where we lead the world with innovation. I want to talk about innovation of a different type, and I want to refer specifically to a May 20 column in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman that caught my attention.

I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks, Mr. Friedman's column be printed in the Record.

Mr. Friedman said he had just returned from Seattle, where he saw a stunning amount of innovation. He said it filled him both with exhilaration and with dread. The question is, Is the United States prepared to deal with the innovation we may be seeing around the world over the next decade?

Yesterday I heard Robert Zoellick, the retiring President of the World Bank, brief a number of us about the problems we are going to have at the end of the year and whether the U.S. Congress and President can rise to the challenge of governing so we can show the rest of the world we are capable of that. Mr. Zoellick says he travels a lot--that is an understatement given his reputation and the jobs he's held over the last 20 years--and he said that two-thirds of global growth over the last 10 years has come from developing countries and that advanced countries, such as Japan, and Europe and, to some extent, the United States have been stagnant or drifting. Mr. Friedman's column says that we should try to remember the things that made us great and preserve as many of those as we can. He said we need a plan, and then he suggested what he called a magic combination: No. 1, immigration of high-IQ risk- takers, as he called them; No. 2, government-funded research; and No. 3, cutting-edge higher education. That was the plan. That was the magic combination.

He said:

This is not a call to ignore hard budget choices we have to

make. It's a call to make sure that we give education,

immigration and research their proper place in the

discussion.

My purpose as a Senator, as a Republican Senator, is to say that I believe he is exactly right. No. 1, I believe that is the right plan-- or at least the beginning of it; No. 2, I believe there is more going on in the direction that he recommended than most people know; and No. 3, I believe that finishing the work on what needs to be done to implement the plan he outlined is perfectly obvious and well within our grasp. Let's take the ideas one by one.

First, the idea, as he called it, of immigration of high-IQ risk- takers--we call this ``pin the green card on the STEM graduate.'' This idea is supported, I would judge, by most Members of the Senate. Each year 50,000 of the brightest students in the world are attracted to our great universities' graduate programs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and then each year we send 17,000 of those graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics back home. We make them go home so they can create jobs in the countries they came from rather than in the United States.

A number of us have introduced legislation to change that. It came from a recommendation from legislation called America COMPETES, which passed first in 2007 and was reauthorized in 2010. This was legislation sponsored by the Democratic and Republican leaders that had 35 Republican sponsors and 35 Democratic sponsors, and it included the 20 things a distinguished group told us we should do as a Congress to help America compete in the next generation. We have done two-thirds of them. One of the priorities was to double the federal funding for general scientific research over 10 years, and we've made some good progress in that direction.

Part of the unfinished agenda is the idea in America COMPETES of pinning a green card on the science, technology, engineering, and management graduate. There are at least six proposals before the Senate today--one sponsored by Senator Coons and myself, one by Senator Cornyn, one by Senator Coons and Senator Rubio, another by Senators Warner and Moran. Senators Coons, Rubio, Warner, and Moran have another one. Senator Bennet has yet another one. Many of us say: Let's go ahead and pin the green card on the high-IQ risk-taker and let those men and women create jobs here in the United States when they graduate.

What should we do about it? Stop insisting that we need to pass every single aspect of the immigration law at one time and go ahead and pass this one bill; realize that we can do some things better in the Senate step by step.

The second idea, advanced research--it is hard to think of a major innovation in the biology or sciences that doesn't have some aspect-- has not had some support from government-sponsored research since World War II. Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow tells us that half our economic growth since World War II has come from these technological advances. Maybe one of the best examples is unconventional gas--we call it shale gas. It has been around for a century. A lot of people have been trying to do it, but even Mitchell Energy, the people who stuck it out in advanced shale gas, said it couldn't have happened without the Department of Energy and it could not have happened without the invention of 3 D drilling from Sandia National Laboratory.

Yesterday I visited with the head of what we call ARPA-E. Most of us know about a little organization called DARPA, which has been around for 50 years in the Department of Defense. Out of it has come such things as the Internet, stealth technology--a whole series of major innovations that affect the lives of people every day. So the idea was, let's try that in the Department of Energy. That came out of America COMPETES as well. ARPA-E takes promising ideas, brings them into the government, funds them for 3 years, and then spits them out again into the marketplace to see if they can survive. In other words, it is the kind of government-applied research that most of us can support. It had the support of 35 Democrats and 35 Republicans.

Yesterday I was briefed on just three of their innovations.

One company has doubled the density of a battery, a lithium battery. That means an electric car, for example, could go twice as far with a battery or it could go the same distance with a battery that costs half as much and weighs half as much.

A second idea was a laser drill for geothermal. The laser drilling precedes the normal drill and can do remarkable things, which will probably make a massive difference in exploration for oil and gas over time. Then a third, which I would describe as the holy grail of energy advanced research, is

the idea of taking carbon, such as that which comes from coal plants, and turning it into something that can be used commercially. Think of the difference that could make for our country if we were able to find a way to do that.

There is a promising way to do that in ARPA-E, which is to take what they call ``bugs,'' a biologic solution, apply it to electrodes, and turn it into oil. So this may work or it may not work in a commercial sense, but this is the kind of amazing research they are doing.

What do we do about that? I would suggest that all we have to do is double clean energy research, a sort of Manhattan Project for these kinds of ideas, and pay for it by reducing the permanent subsidies for other energy programs, whether they are Big Oil or Big Wind.

Finally, the third idea of Mr. Friedman is one I have talked about for years, and that has to do with the effect of Medicaid mandates on public higher education. He puts it this way, that the State governments ``medicate, educate, and incarcerate.'' The courts tell the States they have to spend this much on prisons, and we in the Federal Government tell the States they have to spend this much on Medicaid. There is nothing left for education, and the various orders to States today are ruining public higher education by driving up tuition, driving up loans, and hurting what I believe is America's secret weapon in our technological future.

What to do about that? End the Medicaid mandates. Let the Governors and legislators decide how to spend money. I guarantee if they do, they will come closer than when I was Governor of Tennessee and we paid 70 percent of the cost of a student's education and the student paid 30 percent. Today it is the reverse. The State pays 30 percent and the student pays 70 percent.

The students are protesting at the University of California because the State has cut $1 billion from what is probably the greatest public university in the world over the last 3 or 4 years. They probably have no idea the reason for that is Medicaid mandates from Washington that soak up the money that otherwise would go to keep tuition low and the quality high at the University of California.

My purpose in coming to the Senate floor is simply to say, first, that I think Mr. Friedman is right. He is right on the money. Second, I think more is going on than meets eye; and, third, finishing the job is well within our grasp.

We can pass the green card bill and pin the green card on the STEM graduate. There are six different versions before us in the Senate. We can double energy research and pay for it by reducing wasteful subsidies, and we can end Medicaid mandates and give our colleges and universities and community colleges a chance to prosper again and create the kind of future we want. That is the plan for the kind of innovation we need in America.

I salute Mr. Friedman for suggesting it, but I hope the rest of the country will recognize that in all three cases the Senate is headed in exactly that direction with legislation that we have already passed or introduced. I hope that on both sides of the aisle we will work together to finish the job.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following Mr. Friedman's article, an article I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, which was published on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, and talks about the damaging effects of Washington mandates for Medicaid on State governments and how it is damaging public higher education, be printed in the Record.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, on July 1, 7 million students getting new loans to go to college, the rate for interest will go from 3.4 to 6.8. This is an amendment to get a result. This is the House-passed bill. President Obama

says he wants to freeze the rate for a year. Governor Romney says he wants to freeze the rate for a year. The House of Representatives has voted to freeze the rate for a year. A vote yes on the House-passed bill will permit us to send it to them and quickly send it to the President, he will sign it, and we solve the problem.

Mr. President, we have 2 minutes left. I will use one of them.

Our friends on the other side have their usual solution to almost any problem: Let's put some more taxes on small business men and women in America during a time of the greatest recession we have had.

We have a better idea for how to pay for this bill. We will take some of the savings the Congressional Budget Office said they found when they took over the student health program in the health care bill-- instead of giving the students the benefit of those savings, they spent it on government. They spent $8.3 billion on the health care bill. We will give back to the students enough money to pay for this freezing of the rate.

We will not tax the small businesspeople. We will have a little left over, and we will reduce the debt. Then we can send our bill to the House, they will pass it like that, send it to the President, and the problem is solved.

How much time is remaining?

It is reassuring to me my friend on the other side of the aisle is reading the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. I am sure that will have some constructive benefit over the next several months. But here is the bottom line, a result. This is the same as the House-passed bill which freezes interest at 3.4 percent for a year. We send it to the House, down to the President, he signs it, the problem is solved. Instead of raising taxes on small businesspeople, we give back to students the money they should have had the benefit of when the other side took over the whole student loan program before.

If you want a result, please vote yes. If you want more debate and delay, vote no.

Our case is so compelling, Mr. President. We yield back the rest of our time.

Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for bringing up this bill. He and the Republican leader have put on the floor a piece of legislation that affects nearly every American family. This will not have the fireworks some things we do have, because we have a lot of agreement on it, which is one reason it is on the floor. It has gone through the committee. Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi have worked carefully with all of the Republicans, all of the Democrats on the committee, and many other people on a complex piece of legislation for a year, to bring to the floor the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act--a bill that is likely to succeed.

We take our medicines for granted. During the Civil War, the Capitol was used as a hospital--this Capitol. Two thousand cots were set up in the House and Senate Chambers and the Rotunda. The first group of wounded arrived from the Second Battle of Bull Run and later from Antietam in September of 1862. Those soldiers did not have the benefit of antibiotics or other modern medicines that we take for granted today, and that contributed to a horrible number of deaths in the Civil War.

Still, as the 20th century dawned, disease cast a long shadow over the United States of America. A child born in 1900 could expect to live an average of 47 years. Infectious diseases took many children before they reached their teens. In 1900 pneumonia and influenza were the leading causes of death, followed by tuberculosis and diarrhea.

Physicians had few weapons to fight diseases. The medicines at the time included such things as mercury for syphilis and ringworm; digitalis and amyl nitrate for the heart; quinine for malaria; and plant-based purgatives. For most of human history, diabetes meant death, but insulin was introduced in 1923 commercially, and within a few years enough insulin was being produced to meet the needs of diabetes patients around the world.

It is hard to remember this, but vaccines began to be commercially produced only during the time of World War I. It was not until the time of World War II that we saw the introduction of widespread and effective antimicrobial therapies with the development and mass production of penicillin. Since then, the sky has seemed to be the limit.

Half of Americans take at least one prescription drug every day. One in six takes three or more. Many take over-the-counter medicines. It is a real miracle what has happened in terms of our lives with the introduction of medicines, and we rely upon the Food and Drug Administration to keep those medicines safe and effective, which is what this legislation is about.

I would like to renew my compliments to Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi for bringing this bill to the floor in a condition where they have already worked out most of the issues. This bill is complex. It is long. It has 11 titles. It will help safe and effective drugs, medical devices, and biosimilar products get to the market and, more importantly, get them to the market more quickly so people who need help can use these medicines and devices.

We are reauthorizing two user fees. These things have absurd names. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act is called PDUFA, and the Medical Device User Fee Modernization Act is called MDUFMA. There are two new ones, which are GDUFA and BSUFA. It is really absurd. I promise to never again use those phrases for these user fee programs. But they are critically important programs that give the Food and Drug Administration needed resources to review new medically necessary products.

For example, there is the Better Pharmaceuticals for Children Act. It is a part of what we are doing this week. I cosponsored it with Senators Reed of Rhode Island, Murray, and Roberts. I thank them for the ability to work with them.

This makes permanent the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act and the Pediatric Research Equity Act. One is an incentive, and one requires pharmaceutical companies under certain circumstances, when they develop new drugs for adults, to figure out the effect that those drugs will have on children. Too often, we do not know the answer to that, and the drugs are either ineffective or can have bad results. It also reauthorizes the Pediatric Medical Device and Safety and Improvements Act to promote pediatric medical device development.

Another critical part of the bill has to do with the medical device approval process. The United States is a world leader in medical devices. In Tennessee we have lots of them, especially in Memphis. We need to improve the regulatory process. There are many who believe the FDA is over-regulating medical devices. That has a negative effect on the industry's ability to raise capital and create jobs. It does not make those devices any safer in the United States than they are in Europe. This will help address those problems. For example, it will allow customization of medical devices for small populations--that means five people or fewer--without going through a very burdensome approval process, and it changes the humanitarian device exemption to encourage and incent the development of devices to treat patients with rare diseases--that would be groups of patients of fewer than 4,000 people.

There is another problem that is addressed in this legislation. It is the generation of antibiotics dealing with antibiotic resistance. We know there is a growing problem with antibiotic resistance as bacteria continuously mutate and evolve in their resistance to the drugs and the medicines we develop. While efforts have been made to preserve existing antibiotics, drug development has not kept up with the pace. These changes will provide meaningful market incentives and reduce regulatory burdens.

In addition, I am very pleased with the results of our work in dealing with drug shortages. That is a part of this bill. It will give the FDA additional tools to help prevent drug shortages and require FDA to look internally at

regulations to see if the FDA is making the problem worse.

Senator Casey and I worked together on a review of Federal initiatives to combat prescription drug abuse and to issue a report on those. Tennessee, my State, ranks second in the Nation for prescription drug use. Our Governor, Bill Haslam, and our legislature took action this year to deal with that. We intend to help them.

In closing, I would like to commend Senators Harkin and Enzi. I see the Senator from Washington on the floor. I do not want to take much more time because I know she is about to speak. She has been integrally involved in the development of this legislation over the last year, especially the Better Pharmaceuticals and Devices for Children Act. I mentioned that a little earlier. It incentivizes drug manufacturers to study their products and how they affect children, and in return, they get to keep the exclusive use of those products for a little while longer. That means they do not go to generic quite as quickly. That has been tried in this legislation since it was first authorized and reauthorized and reauthorized. It has worked. It has been a very good example of an innovation in legislation that has achieved the desired result.

The Pediatric Research Equity Act gives the FDA authority to require pediatric studies in some cases and the Pediatric Medical Device Safety and Improvement Act promotes the development of pediatric medical devices.

So the importance of the legislation is it takes a big step forward in making it clear what drugs that are created for adults will do when offered or provided to children. Currently, just under half of the drugs prescribed to children have been studied and labeled for children, but that is a significant improvement over where we were when these programs started fifteen years ago. Children's bodies react very differently to medicines. Children are not just small adults. Sometimes side effects are different. Physicians have to guess what dosages are appropriate, whether a therapy that might be effective for an adult is also effective for a child. Sometimes there are examples of overdosing or previously unknown side effects. In one case in Tennessee in 1999, seven babies were prescribed an antibiotic to treat whooping cough. They became so seriously ill, they needed stomach surgery. The CDC-- Centers for Disease Control--later linked their illness to the antibiotic, which had never been tested in young children. Children differ widely in sizes and growth rates, so for medical devices doctors must either `jerry-rig' devices or be forced to use a more invasive treatment.

Prior to the passage of these laws that we are working on today, and reauthorizing, 80 percent of drugs used for children were used off- label; that is, we did not really know how they affected children. Now we can use those drugs--half of our drugs today--safely and effectively because we do know that. The Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act is the carrot that FDA uses to encourage pediatric studies, while the Pediatric Research Equity Act is the stick to mandate studies. Together these two laws have been a success. According to the Institute of Medicine, as of October 2010, the FDA has approved 425 labeling changes as a result of studies or analyses done under these laws. In 1975, only about 20 percent of drugs prescribed to children had been studied and labeled for children, in 2007 that number had risen to about one-third, and today it is roughly half.

The Pediatric Medical Device Safety and Improvement Act was enacted in 2007 to encourage manufacturers to bring more pediatric devices to the market and strengthen FDA post-market surveillance of devices used in children. This law allows manufacturers to profit under the humanitarian device exemption for devices specifically designed to meet a pediatric need affecting fewer than 4,000 children per year. In addition to three humanitarian device exemption pediatric products, GAO reports that 15 new devices have been approved for children since 2007.

I am happy to come here today to join with Senator Murray, Senator Harkin, Senator Enzi, Senator Reed of Rhode Island, and Senator Roberts to offer what I believe is a piece of legislation that affects nearly every American family. It takes one more step in the dramatic story of how we have gone from a country with almost no medicines to a country in which almost everyone takes some medicine and a situation where the lifetime of the average American has increased from 47 years of age to 78 years--its present level today.

I see the Senator from Washington on the floor. I wish to recognize and thank her for her leadership on the legislation.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, at noon the Senate will be voting on two of President Obama's nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. These are important positions. They have long terms. They come at a time when our economy is in trouble and doing its best to recover. In these votes, the Senate will be acting in the way it should, and let me say why I am saying that.

On Tuesday of this week, someone most of us know--Marty Paone, who was the Democratic secretary in the Senate for 13 years, until 2008-- wrote an article in the Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper. The headline is ``Senate rule changes come with risk,'' but all I want to refer to today is a description of the Senate that is on our Senate Web site. Marty describes our own Web site in the article and says:

. . . [t]he legislative process on the Senate Floor [as] a

balance between the rights guaranteed to Senators under the

standing rules and the need for Senators to forgo some of

these rights in order to expedite business.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article I just referred to following my remarks.

Mr. President, what is reflected on the Senate Web site is the action the Senate is about to take at noon today.

There has been at least one vacancy--and sometimes two--on the Federal Reserve Board since 2006. That is 6 years ago. That is one whole Senate term. The Federal Reserve Board has seven Governors nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. So during that whole 6 year-period, it has had one or two of those seven positions vacant. And this has been during a time--since 2008--of the greatest economic crisis we have had since the Great Depression.

The President tried once to nominate someone to that position who wasn't accepted by the Senate. So in January the President took the unusual step of nominating a well-qualified Republican, Jay Powell, as well as a well-qualified Democrat.

There is a good deal of unease in the Republican caucus--as I am sure was reflected in some of the comments on the floor--about the response the Federal Reserve Board has taken to the economic crisis since 2008. Senators on this side of the aisle who have those concerns have a perfect right to filibuster, to object, and perhaps to kill these two nominations. But the Republican Senators have realized that if we were to do that to President Obama's nominees today, then if there were a President Romney after the first of the year, the Democrats very likely would say: We will object to President Romney's nominees, and there would still be vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board at a time of economic crisis.

Just as the President took a step toward making government work by nominating a well-qualified Republican to one of these two Federal Reserve Governor positions, I want to acknowledge the fact that Republican Senators who feel strongly about this issue have taken a step forward and forgone--in the words of our Senate Web site--some of their rights so that we can move straight to a vote today, up or down, at 60-votes, on each of the two nominees.

The article to which I referred said that sometimes in the Senate, even though we all have many rights, we have to forgo some of those rights in order to make the place work. That has been happening more lately. Republican Senators in the minority have been occasionally forgoing some of our rights to slow down a bill coming to the floor or to insist on an amendment that is not relevant. The majority leader has on some occasions forgone his right to block our amendments. We would like for him to do that more often, but it has been happening more lately.

I think of the scheduling difficulty Senator Reid and Senator McConnell had on district judges a few weeks ago. Instead of letting that issue blow up the Senate, they met privately and agreed they would proceed at a schedule the two of them determined. As a result, we have been considering and confirming district judges at a regular rate.

Their agreement permitted us to move to a jobs bill, which benefitted startup companies, to move ahead. The House Republicans had already passed the bill, then we passed it, and the President of the United States then signed it into law.

The Senate moved forward on the FAA authorization bill after many efforts and failed attempts to do so.

We have a 2-year highway bill which the Senate has passed and which is now in conference. I would like for it to be a 7-year bill, but we have made progress and passed a 2-year bill.

The Senate had a big debate on the Postal Service. I would have liked to have seen a stronger bill come out of the Senate, and I hope the House will send us back a stronger bill. But we had 39 relevant amendments to that bill considered, we worked on it, and we are moving toward dealing with the big debt the Postal Service has.

This week we considered an extension of the Ex-Im Bank and took up a bill passed by the Republican House. We offered and voted on five relevant amendments to the Ex-Im Bank bill and disposed of the bill that same day.

The majority leader says we have the FDA bill coming up--very important because it affects medicines that Americans everywhere depend on. Senator Enzi and Senator Harkin have worked that bill through the HELP Committee. It has broad support on both sides of the aisle. The majority leader may allow it to come up only with relevant amendments, and we may be able to consider it and pass it.

Earlier this year several of us came to the floor and complimented Senator Reid, the majority leader, and Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, for saying that they want to do their best to pass all the appropriations bills this year. That is the basic work of the Senate--paying our bills and doing our oversight. Only twice since the year 2000 has the Senate passed every single appropriations bill.

I don't want to make too much of this progress, but it is a little progress, and it is an example of the Senate working the way the Senate is supposed to work.

Now, let's be honest about the fact that this is a more partisan country than it was even 10 years ago, and that partisanship is reflected in the Senate. By any definition there is a narrower range of views on the Republican side of the aisle and a narrower range of views on the Democratic side of the aisle. But we still have our job to do. Our job is not just to stand and express our views. If our job was to only stand and express our views, each one of us would always be right and we wouldn't get anything done. The second part of the job is to take our views, put them together, and see if we can get a result.

Some people say: Well, you are interested in bipartisanship.

I am not so interested in bipartisanship. That interests me very little, to tell you the truth. I am interested in results. I learned in the Maryville city schools how to count, and I can count to 60. I know that if it takes 60 votes to get anything done in this Senate, it is going to have to take some on that side and some on this side to get to 60. And I know the American people are expecting results--results on the debt, results on tax reform, results on fixing No Child Left Behind, results on finding a place to put used nuclear fuel. I want to be a part of getting those results. We have too many problems to solve for us to think we have finished our job simply by announcing our positions, stating our principles, and sitting down. We need to take those principles and put them together and see whether they can mesh and get a result.

It is not easy to get elected to the Senate. It is very hard to get here. Most candidates campaign for a long time, and their campaigns are intense for 2 years. They usually have terrific opposition, and people say things about them that they don't like. We end up with some very talented men and women among the hundred in the Senate.

It kind of reminds me of country music. A lot of the artists in Nashville I know play in every bar they can find and every State fair they can find for 20 years, and finally they might get invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. Well, being in the Senate for a lot of the last year was like being invited to join the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing. The majority leader would bring up a bill and block the amendments because he would say the Republicans were keeping him from bringing up bills. Our side would say: Well, we are not going to let you bring it up unless you let us have amendments. So we would be sitting around, twiddling our thumbs, and wasting time when there was a lot to do. That is why I am so glad to see some things changing here in the Senate over the last few weeks.

We all have our wishes about what will happen in the November election. I hope that after November we will see President Romney and that we will see more desks on this side of the aisle, a Republican majority. My friends on the other side expect and hope the President will be reelected, and they would like to enlarge their majority on the other side of the aisle. We don't know whether there will be a Republican or a Democratic President. We don't know whether there will be 51 or 52 Republican Senators or 51 or 52 Democratic Senators. We do know pretty well that there probably won't be many more than 51 or 52 or 53 Democratic Senators or 51 or 52 or 53 Republican Senators, and we all can count, and we all know that is not 60.

We also know we are going to get to the end of the year and we are going to have taxes to reform, debt to reduce, highways to deal with, nuclear waste to do something about, the payroll tax credit expiration, and the biggest tax increase in history facing us. We know the country's lack of confidence in the future will be greatly relieved if it has more confidence in the ability of Washington, DC, to govern this country.

We see what is happening in Europe. We can look at ourselves, and we know we have trillions of dollars sitting on the side lines of the United States. Part of the reason that money is sitting there is to wait to see whether the Senators can do our jobs. Well, doing our jobs may require forgoing some of our rights. That is what it says on our Web site--that we have the rights, that we can insist on them. And sometimes we will. But to get things done in the Senate, sometimes we will forgo some of our minority rights and the majority leader, we hope, will forgo some of his rights. Then we will be able to move to a bill, amend it, vote on it, and get some results. That is what the American people would like for us to do.

We are moving today to vote on a Democratic and a Republican nomination by the President. We are doing it without any obstruction by Republicans in the minority, who are very well aware and hope there will be a President Romney after January who will have a number of Federal Reserve appointments to make. And President Romney will hope his nominees are entitled to the same respect President Obama's nominees are.

If these two nominees are confirmed today, the Federal Reserve Board will have a full complement of seven for the first time since 2006. The Federal Reserve will have a full Board at a time of great economic crisis for our country and as we come up on the end of the year when we will have a fiscal cliff--according to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--that will cause Congressional action to take care of.

So I am here today only to say that I admire the nominees. I know one of them well, Jay Powell, who was Under Secretary of the Treasury for the first President Bush, an administration in which I served. He has a fine reputation. He should be a fine member. I want to acknowledge the fact that the President chose to break the stalemate by nominating Mr. Powell, a Republican, as well as a Democrat. I want to acknowledge the fact that several of my Republican colleagues, who have deep concerns about the actions of the Federal Reserve Board during this economic crisis over the last few years, have forgone some of their rights and allowed us to have an up-or-down vote at noon.

That, taken with the other actions of the last few months, should give a little bit of confidence to the American people that we in the Senate are perfectly able to assert our principles, to stand on our principles, not to give up on our principles. But then, after we have made our speeches, to sit down and come to a result that may not be perfect, it may not be ideal to each of our principles, but will be good for our country.

Exhibit 1

[From the Hill, May 15, 2012]

Senate Rule Changes Come With Risk

(By Martin P. Paone)

It's an election year, and the Senate can't agree on how to

keep the student loan interest rate from doubling on July 1

from 3.4 percent to 6.8. While both sides agree that it

should be done, how to pay for it is the stumbling block. A

party-line cloture vote failure has once again brought calls

for changing the Senate's rules by majority vote at the

beginning of the next Congress, bypassing the two-thirds

cloture requirement if there's opposition.

The Senate's membership has changed considerably in the

last decade, but the Senate rules, with the exception of some

changes that were enacted in the Ethics in Government Act,

have not undergone any major changes since the Senate went on

TV in 1986. While the House has its Rules Committee, which

allows the majority to exert its will and control the flow of

legislation, the Senate has a tradition of protecting the

rights of the minority and of unfettered debate. Its own

website describes ``[t]he legislative process on the Senate

floor [as] a balance between the rights guaranteed to

Senators under the standing rules and the need for senators

to forgo some of these rights in order to expedite

business.''

The Senate has for centuries functioned by this compact of

selectively forgoing one's rights, but now that compact, to

some, seems to have broken down--hence the call to enact

rules changes at the beginning of the next Congress by

majority vote. These calls have come from Democrats, but they

are quick to admit that it should apply regardless of who is

in the majority at the time.

Such changes can certainly quicken the process and allow

for the majority to pass legislation and confirm presidential

nominees with little hindrance. While the initial rules

reforms will probably be limited to restricting debate on a

motion to proceed and other less dramatic changes, eventually

such majority rules changes at the beginning of a Congress

will result in a majority-controlled body similar to the

House. Once the Pandora's Box of granting the majority the

unfettered ability to change the rules every two years has

been opened, having seen how the current situation has

escalated, tit for tat over the last 30 years, it is

difficult to believe that strict majority rule would not be

the ultimate result. Thereafter, a member of the minority in

the Senate will be just as impotent as his or her House

counterparts.

Filibusters and the forcing of a cloture vote have been

repeatedly used to stop legislation and nominations and to

waste time. This is why the number of successful cloture

votes, many on noncontroversial nominations and on motions to

proceed to bills, has gone up dramatically in recent years.

By requiring the cloture vote and then voting for it, the

minority has been able to waste considerable time and thus

reduce the amount of time available to act on other items of

the president's agenda.

The call for changing the Senate's rules by majority vote

at the beginning of a Congress is not new; it was attempted

without success in 1953 and 1957 and in 1959. When faced with

such an effort, then-Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson

negotiated a cloture change back down to two-thirds of those

present and voting, but as part of the compromise he had to

add Paragraph 2 to Senate Rule V, which states ``The rules of

the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next

Congress unless they are changed as provided in these

rules.''

So is it time to ignore the existing rules and change them

at the beginning of the next Congress by a majority vote?

Perhaps it is time--so many other changes have occurred in

our lives in the recent past, why shouldn't the Senate change

the way it does business? However, should that occur, one

must be prepared to live with the eventual outcome of a

Senate where the majority rules and the rights of the

minority have been severely curtailed.

While I can sympathize with those demanding such changes,

it's the manner of their implementation that keeps reminding

me of the exchange between Sir Thomas Moore and his son-in-

law, William Roper, in the movie ``A Man For All Seasons'':

Roper: ``So, now you give the devil the benefit of law!''

Moore: ``Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through

the law to get after the devil?''

Roper: ``Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do

that!''

Moore: ``Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil

turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws

all being flat? . . . Yes, I'd give the devil benefit of law,

for my own safety's sake!''

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

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask consent the Senator from Delaware, Senator Coons, and I could have a colloquy for up to 15 minutes.

The Senator from Delaware is not yet on the floor but I know he is coming. Because I know other Senators wish to speak at 2 o'clock, I am going to go ahead with my remarks. When he comes I will let him go ahead with his.

Each year, approximately 50,000 foreign students receive advanced degrees from universities in this country in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We call those in shorthand STEM degrees--science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Of those 50,000 students, at least 17,000 go home to other parts of the world. These are some of the brightest men and women in the world. They are attracted to the best universities in the world. I always say our universities, our great research universities especially, are our secret weapons for job growth. Since World War II, many estimates by the National Academy of Sciences suggest that more than half of our new jobs have come from increases in technology. It is very hard to think of any important new innovation in biology or in the sciences that has not had some sort of government-sponsored research over that time. So our research universities are job factories and our advanced degree holders are the ones who come up with the great ideas.

As a former president of the University of Tennessee, which is a fine research university, I know that increasingly in the science, technology, engineering, and math programs in those universities many of the students are from other countries. These students line up in India and compete, hoping they will get a chance to come to the United States. They have done the same in China. They do this everywhere in the world. About 17,000 of those 50,000 who come for advanced degrees go home each year.

Yesterday, Senator Coons and I introduced legislation that would help those 17,000 students, and we hope more who may come, to come to the United States, get their advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math, and then stay here and create jobs in our country instead of going home and creating them in other countries.

I will have to admit there is a value to students who go home. It is probably our best foreign diplomacy, to have someone come from another country, live here, learn our values, go home and explain those at home. But we want the next Google to be created here, not in China. We want the brightest people in the world. If we are going to attract them here and provide education for them, we want to give them every opportunity to come here. And today we make them go home because of our immigration policy.

The legislation Senator Coons and I introduced yesterday now has the support already of at least two other Senators, Senator Lugar and Senator Isakson, who have asked to cosponsor. It would, No. 1, create a new student visa for citizens of other nations who want to come here and pursue a master's or doctoral degree in science, technology, engineering, and math. No. 2, once they get that degree, the new visa created in this bill would allow them to remain here for 12 months, to look for a job. And, No. 3, once they are employed, the bill establishes a procedure to allow students to change their immigration status and to receive a green card. Finally, these new green cards would not count toward any existing green card limit.

This idea is not new. It has as much support outside of the Senate Chamber as any idea I know about--from companies such as Microsoft, which tells us they have 2,600 jobs available that require computer science degrees that start at $104,000 a year. They would like to have these students work here and create jobs for us. We know from our own experience the importance of these green-card holders.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, is probably the greatest engineering laboratory in the world. Who runs it? Dr. Jeffrey Wadsworth ran it. He had a green card from the United Kingdom. Dr. Thom Mason, who is there now, had a green card from Canada. Thomas Zacharia, the current Deputy Director at ORNL and the father of supercomputing, has a green card from India.

We want them here, not in India, not in the United Kingdom, not in Canada.

I greatly appreciate the leadership of Senator Coons of Delaware on this issue. He has worked hard on it. He has been a leader on it.

I only have one more thing to say about it before I step aside and let him talk about his ideas. In 2005, we began to work on something called the America COMPETES Act in this body. In 2007 we passed it. It was sponsored by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader. It had 35 Democratic sponsors and 35 Republican sponsors. It passed the House. It was reauthorized last year. We asked the best minds in our Nation to tell us what would be the 20 things we could do as a Congress to make sure we are competitive in the future so that we can keep this high standard of living we have come to enjoy. It is a very high standard of living. We have about 5 percent of all the people in the world. We have about 25 percent of all the wealth in the world that we produce each year. How can we keep doing that?

They gave us these 20 ideas and we passed many of them. It is one of the great successes of our Congress over the last several years, working together. One piece of unfinished business from the America COMPETES Act of 2005 and 2007 was to pin a green card on the foreign student who gets a graduate degree in science, math, technology,or engineering.

The legislation Senator Coons and I offered yesterday would do that. I greatly value his leadership and his approach. I hope we can work with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take this idea, turn it into a law, and give our country more of an opportunity to create new jobs as we move forward.

I already asked permission for the next 15 minutes that Senator Coons and I would be in a colloquy. I wish to defer to him for his comments at this time.

Mr. President, Senator Coons is one of the most eloquent speakers we have in the Senate. He did a beautiful job in explaining the bill. I hope it attracts support from both Republicans and Democrats. He mentioned the fact there are other immigration issues--and there are. There are a number of ones I wish to work on and get something done. I was here when we tried to get a comprehensive immigration plan a few years ago. It had strong bipartisan support, but one of the lessons we learned in that effort was that we do not do comprehensive well here in the Senate. Sometimes it is better to go step by step. That has been true for a long time.

We remember Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser, but Henry Clay's greatest compromise was not passed by Henry Clay. He failed. It nearly ruined his health and he went to Massachusetts to recover from it. A Senator named Stephen A. Douglas, from Illinois, the home of our assistant Democratic leader, came to the floor and introduced the Clay compromise section by section and each section passed with a different coalition, with Senator Sam Houston being the only Senator who voted for each one of them. So my hope is that with the broad support we have for this very simple idea--pin a green card on the lapel of a gifted graduate of an advanced program in science, technology, engineering, and math, and allow them to stay here and create jobs here instead of forcing them to go home--I hope we have such strong support for this idea that we can go ahead and pass it, and then we can follow that up with the other necessary steps we need to take on immigration, and hopefully we can do that with a coalition that represents Democrats and Republicans as well. This is a great idea.

Somebody might say: Well, why don't they just do it the way we do it now? Right now, it is H 1B visas. As everyone who is an employer knows, they are complicated, burdensome, and there are not enough of them. This is simple. It is a new visa. They get it if they are admitted, and they get to stay 12 months while they look for a job. If they get a job, they get a green card, and there is no cap on the number, and that is the idea.

I thank Senator Coons for his leadership. I look forward to turning this good idea, this piece of unfinished business in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, into law.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I yield the floor.

Well, Mr. President, what I wish to request is-- Senator Coons and I were hoping to introduce a piece of legislation on another matter and talk about it. I think, given the focus on the budget here, I am going to suggest to Senator Coons, who will be coming here at 12:45, that we just mention our bill. If he could have time to do that, and then we would stay focused on the budget, and we will talk about the other matter tomorrow.

So what I wish to do, if I may suggest, is ask that I have 5 minutes to speak on the budget and maybe 5 minutes to speak on the other matter, for Senator Coons to be recognized for 5 minutes, and that would take all of the time I would ask for.

Mr. President, I think that is a reasonable request. I wonder if I might ask on behalf of Senator Coons that if he should come to the floor during that period, he be recognized for 1 minute to simply stand up and say he was planning to do this, but we will defer the introduction of our bill until tomorrow out of respect for the budget discussion.

Mr. President, am I now recognized for 5 minutes?

Thank you, Mr. President. Please let me know when 30 seconds is remaining.

Mr. President, Senator Coons will come to the floor in a few minutes. He and I have been working together on legislation that many Senators on both sides of the aisle support.

Very simply, it pins a green card on the lapel of any foreign student who is involved in science, engineering, technology graduate programs who gets a degree and who wants to stay in the United States and work. What we would like for them to do, instead of going home to create the next Google in India or China or some other country, is to stay here and create it here.

The legislation has broad support. It is a recommendation of the American Competes Act which I worked on and many others did in 2005 and 2007. We will come to the floor and talk about that tomorrow. But I wanted to salute Senator Coons for his leadership on this issue and recognize it.

Now I will turn to the budget with my remaining time.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said the worst mistake President Obama made was not embracing his own fiscal commission's recommendations to reduce our debt by $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Today, our national debt is more than $15.6 trillion, which is nearly $1.9 trillion higher than it was when the fiscal commission released its recommendations and $6.4 trillion higher than when President Obama was sworn in. In January 2013, the first thing the next President will have to do is to ask the Congress to increase the debt ceiling. The fundamental problem is that Washington does not know how to balance its checkbook.

The President has proposed a budget that raises taxes by $1.9 trillion over the next 10 years and still spends more than it takes in every year, instead of endorsing the fiscal commission's recommendations--or any other plan to address our Nation's fiscal crisis. According to the Congressional Budget Office, under the President's budget, interest on our debt will triple over the next 10 years, and by 2022 we will be spending more in interest than we spend on national defense.

This is an irresponsible proposal, and instead of playing politics we should be working together on a plan to address the debt, which is the most urgent problem facing our country and, according to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, the biggest threat to our national security.

The Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission plan, the Domenici-Rivlin plan, and the Gang of Six proposal all offer bipartisan blueprints for how to address it. Each of these proposals would reform the Tax Code and restructure entitlement spending--the main source of our dangerous Federal debt--so that seniors can count on Medicare and Social Security and taxpayers can afford them.

Mandatory entitlement spending, which is 58 percent of the Federal budget, is growing at nearly 3 times inflation and bankrupting our country. Discretionary spending, which funds our national defense, our highways, our national parks, and National Laboratories, is only 36 percent of the Federal budget and is growing at the rate of inflation. Focusing our budget cutting on discretionary spending is just a way for Congress--to use the President's words--to kick the can down the road. The real work is reducing the growth of mandatory spending.

Although the Senate is not debating its own budget resolution, going 1,113 days without passing a budget, we are debating several proposals. I do not agree with every one of these, but I do support the House- passed budget because it is a serious proposal to cut out-of-control spending and help solve our fiscal crisis.

I will also support the proposal offered by Senator Toomey. Even though it cuts nondefense discretionary spending to 2006 levels, which I believe is too low, it reforms mandatory entitlement spending, it closes tax loopholes, it lowers tax rates, and it would save Medicare for future generations.

Senator Toomey and I have also discussed the possibility of allowing States to have the option of choosing per capita caps on their average Medicaid expenditures per beneficiary as an alternative to traditional block grants, and I am encouraged by these discussions.

Last August, I supported the Budget Control Act because it was an opportunity to take an important step in the right direction.

Thank you, Mr. President.

The House-passed budget and the budget proposed by Senator Toomey are opportunities to take the next step after the Budget Control Act. I look forward to working with them to adopt a responsible budget that grows the economy and reduces our debt.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, this week is the 13th annual National Charter Schools Week. On Tuesday, Senator Landrieu of Louisiana and I joined with 10 other Senators in submitting a resolution praising teachers, administrators, parents, and students who are part of the charter school movement across our country.

Let me begin by explaining exactly what a charter school is because sometimes we stand here in the Senate and start talking without explaining the subject. A charter school is the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering. I visited there 4 years ago during spring break. Most of the students in Memphis were somewhere else, but not the students at the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering. These were sophomores studying advanced placement biology. These were children who had been in other schools the year before that were deemed to be low- performing schools. In other words, these were among the students in Memphis considered least likely to succeed. But they were fortunate. They were allowed to go to this charter school. Their parents had chosen this charter school.

Here is what was different about the school. The union rules, the State rules, and the Federal rules had been relaxed so that the teachers had the freedom to do what they thought those children needed in that school. In this case, many of these children didn't have as much at home as other children did, so the teachers decided that the school ought to be open 12 hours a day, that it ought to be open on Saturday morning, and that it ought to be open more weeks a year than other schools. And the students were there on spring break studying advanced placement biology, which is not what many sophomores do in many schools in this country. And these children were succeeding.

The charter school was able to pay some teachers more than others. It was able to have some classes that were smaller than others. It meant that some scheduled classes were longer than others and some children got special attention that needed it.

You may say: Well, that makes so much common sense. Why aren't teachers able to do that in every public school in America? That is a very good question because, in a way, every one of our 100,000 public schools in America should be a charter school in the sense that the real definition of a charter school is one that gives teachers the freedom to use their own good sense and judgment with the children whom parents choose to send to that school.

I have a personal interest in charter schools. Twenty years ago, I was the U.S. Secretary of Education. I was in my final year. The last thing I did in 1992 as Secretary was to write a letter to all the school superintendents in America urging them to try what a small number of Minnesota public schools were doing in what they were then calling startup schools. These were the first charter schools in America. Their origin was primarily from those who were part of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party in Minnesota. But at the same time, on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum, there were many who were calling for getting rid of teacher union rules and State rules and regulations that were making it harder for teachers to teach. So there was a happy convergence of support for this idea of startup schools.

I remember that Albert Shanker, the late head of the American Federation of Teachers, supported the idea from the beginning. But many of those in the teachers unions opposed him. Many of those in the education establishment didn't like it. They were afraid of what might happen.

Well, here is what has happened over the last 20 years. Instead of a handful of schools in Minnesota, we now have about 5,600 charter schools in America today. About 5 percent of all of our public schools are charter schools. The way they work is very simple. They are public schools, and the money the State and local government would ordinarily spend on their district school follows each child to the charter school. So it is just a public school organized in a different way.

The first one, as I said, was in 1992--City Academy High School in St. Paul, MN. In 1997, President Clinton called for creating 3,000 charter schools by 2002. This was after the first President Bush had called for creating ``break the mold'' schools in every school district in America--another name for what we call charter schools today. And then in 2002 the second President Bush called for $200 million to support charter schools. Today, 41 States have charter schools, and the schools serve more than 2 million students--about 4 percent of the 50 million students in our public schools today.

I am proud to say that our own State of Tennessee has had a strong charter school movement since 2002, and only recently has the State charter law been amended to remove the cap on the number of schools in the State and limitations on student eligibility. We currently have 40 charter schools operating in Tennessee--25 in Memphis and 11 in Nashville--with nearly 10,000 students attending these schools. Our First to the Top plan--Tennessee won the President's Race to the Top plan for education--included $14 million to expand high-performing charter schools. The Achievement School District, which Governor Bill Haslam created, has approved three charter operators to turn around priority schools that are failing, and we can expect more to be approved next year.

So the question often is asked, well, are charter schools really helping students? And in some ways the jury is still out. Charter schools are relatively new, and there are many factors that go into the success of a student in a school, the No. 1 factor being what happens at home. But there are good and encouraging indications.

A recent study by Stanford University found that two-thirds of the charter schools in Tennessee have been improving student performance in reading or math at a faster rate than competing traditional district public schools. Sixty-seven percent of charter schools in Tennessee have been improving the overall growth of their students for the last 3 years.

But that means that 30 percent of the charter schools weren't performing as well or were performing worse. So the fact is, not every charter school is going to be successful. Not every startup business is successful. But we have a model in our country that reminds us of what can happen when we have autonomous institutions where administrators and teachers have the privilege of using their own judgment and common sense to make things happen, and we call that higher education.

In the United States of America, we have around 6,000 institutions of higher education. There are all kinds--Yeshiva University, Nashville Auto Diesel College, Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee, Notre Dame, or Stanford. There are many different kinds-- for-profit, nonprofit, public, nonpublic. But they are all largely autonomous and the students choose the schools they attend. And what has happened? Everyone in the world agrees that we have not only the best colleges in America, but we have almost all of the very best colleges.

So our goal should be to gradually increase the number of charter schools. At the same time, it is important that there should be some accountability. I know that in Tennessee they have a tough review board, and if a charter school is not working, it is closed down. That should be the case in many other places. You might ask: Why would you go through that struggle? Well, we should be doing that with some of the non-charter public schools as well, and we are beginning to that with so-called turnaround schools.

Charter schools should be held to the same standards as other public schools. And charter schools shouldn't be allowed to pick and choose; they should be required to enroll all eligible students. If more students want to come than they have room for, there could be some fair method for choosing the students, such as a lottery. That makes a very good case. If charter schools are so popular that more families want their children to go to them, then we need even more charter schools.

I am happy to come to the floor today to praise the teachers and the

innovators, Presidents of both parties, including President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who have strongly supported charter schools, just as President Bush and President Clinton and the first President Bush did.

This is a movement that has broad bipartisan support. It has grown from a handful of schools in Minnesota 20 years ago to 5 percent of all of our public schools in the country today. What we have found is that when you give teachers more freedom to use good judgment and when you give parents more choices of schools, good things happen. The charter school movement is proving that. This is a week to salute their hard work and to hope that over the next year, 5 years, 10 years, more and more public schools become charter schools, where teachers are free to exercise their judgment and parents are free to choose the schools their children attend.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I enjoyed listening to the Senator from Rhode Island, as I always do. His passion for education is always on his sleeve and always front and center and I admire him for that.

There are a couple of things I wish to make clear. If you are a student and you already have a student loan, what we are talking about has nothing to do with your loan. In other words, your rate on that loan is not going up. What we are talking about only affects new loans. So before you think about not going to college next year because of all this talk about student loan rates going up, that is not a problem. We are only talking about new loans.

Second, for 60 percent of the students who get new loans, we are not talking

about you either. So you don't have to worry about student loan rates going up.

Third, for those of you about whom we are talking, the 40 percent who have these subsidized undergraduate student loans, what we are talking about saving you is $7 a month in interest payments over the next 10 years. Now $7 a month can add up, which is why Governor Romney as well as President Obama, Republicans as well as Democrats, wants to keep the interest rate at the rate it is now for new loans, 3.4 percent, for another year. But it is $7 a month in savings. It is important to know that.

It is also important to know that there is an easy way to get this done. The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would keep the interest rate at 3.4 percent for these 40 percent of new loans for one more year. All the majority leader has to do is bring up the House-passed bill and enact it here in the Senate. In other words, we agree on extending the interest rate. We only have a difference of opinion about how to pay for it.

I have offered an alternative supported by many Republicans, which is the same as the House bill, which simply says we want to keep the interest rate where it is for another year, 3.4 percent, and we want to do the logical thing to pay for it. We want to give back to students the money that the government is taking from them to help pay for the new health care law.

You may think: what in the world does the health care bill have to do with student loans? That is what many of us thought when the health care law was being debated. Because, what our friends on the other side of the aisle did during the health care law debate was take over the whole student loan program and almost turn the U.S. Secretary of Education into the U.S. banking commissioner. He has the job of making more than $100 billion in new student loans every year. Their idea was the government can make these loans better than the banks. Our friends on the other side of the aisle said to the students: The banks are overcharging you. We are going to take it over and we will be doing you a favor.

What did the Democrats do? They took it over, but they didn't do the students a favor. According to the Congressional Budget Office, there was $61 billion of savings from taking over the loan program, much of which was money that the students should not have been paying. When the federal government took it over, what did the Democrats do? They spent it on other programs, all except for $10 billion, including $8.7 billion helping to pay for the new health care law.

The way the Congressional Budget Office looks at it, $61 billion in savings resulted from--and these are my words--the government borrowing money at 2.8 percent interest and loaning it to students at 6.8 percent interest. We now want to take that profit from overcharging students and give it back to students. That is the way to pay for extending the 3.4 percent interest rate that we are talking about for another year.

We are in agreement on this. Republicans as well as Democrats, Governor Romney as well as President Obama, say keep the 3.4 percent rate at 3.4 percent for another year. Students should know that it does not affect anybody who has a loan today and that it will save you $7 a month for a new subsidized loan. We want to do that. But the way we want to pay for it is by giving back the money that the other side of the aisle took from you to help pay for the health care bill. That is the right way to do it, instead of the typical reaction we often hear from the other side, which is we have something we want to do so we will simply raise taxes on people and businesses creating jobs in the middle of a recession.

I yield the floor.