Floor Statements

Mr. President, I wonder if I might respond through the Chair to the majority leader.

I have been consulting with the chairman of our committee, and on the

Republican side, we understand what the majority leader is saying. What I hear him saying is that we have some important work we have to do this week. He wants to move to the Defense authorization bill before the end of the week. We have a conference report that includes a continuing resolution. He wants that acted on before the end of the week.

Our hope is that we can deal with the Energy and Water bill today and tomorrow. I am beginning to ask our Republican Senators--and Senator Feinstein can speak for herself, but she is doing the same with Democratic members--I am asking them to get their proposed amendments to the floor this afternoon, if at all possible, so we can give the majority leader some idea of how many amendments there might be so he can evaluate how to proceed. So we appreciate the opportunity to do that. We believe that doing the appropriations bill is the basic work of the Senate. This is important both from a defense and a nondefense point of view. It had broad support in our committee, and so far, I have not found anyone on our side who isn't agreeable to moving quickly on it. I will know more at the end of the afternoon, and I will report to the majority leader about the Republican side.

I ask my colleagues who are listening to please bring their amendments to the floor this afternoon as soon as possible.

I thank the chairman.

Mr. President, that is exactly right. Just so Senators know, Senator Reid has filled the tree, but what we hope to persuade him is that we know the number of amendments we have and that he doesn't need to do that. He is perfectly able to withdraw that. And I know several of our Republican colleagues are discussing this afternoon how many amendments they want to offer, and it is my hope that we will soon be able to start voting on those amendments, vote on them tomorrow, and finish the bill sometime tomorrow.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I ask consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, last week the Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Enzi, and the Senator from Illinois, the Democratic whip, introduced a piece of legislation which is called the Marketplace Fairness Act. In doing so, I think they solved a problem that has persisted in almost every State in the Union and that Congress has had a difficult time dealing with for the last 10 years. The problem is what do we do about State sales taxes which everybody owes every time they make a purchase.

If you buy a television set at the local appliance store in Tennessee you owe Tennessee sales tax. If you buy it online you still owe the sales tax. The difference has been that the local retailer is required to collect the sales tax, and does, and sends it to the State, but the online vendor, let's say Amazon, is not required to collect the sales tax and so it does not.

So, like most individuals--I bought a television set from Amazon earlier this year. At the end of the year, I would need to file a form with our State government and say I bought it, acknowledge that they didn't collect the sales tax, tell the State I owe the sales tax on my purchase, and pay it. The truth is most Americans do not do that. That is a $23 billion a year tax avoidance, a great big tax loophole.

One may ask why has that loophole not been closed. We hear a lot of talk about loopholes around here and we know States want to have dollars right now, either to lower taxes or pay for services, and most of us think we should not prefer one business over another business or one taxpayer over another taxpayer. The problem is 20 years ago the technology did not exist to make it easy for an online or remote vendor to collect the sales tax in the same way the local shoestore or local vendor collects it, so the Supreme Court said it would be an undue burden on interstate commerce.

Here is the loophole in practical terms. I called the owner of the Nashville Boot Company last week after we introduced the bill, Frank Harwell. At the beginning he sold cowboy boots online. I think it is the Nashville Cowboy Boot company. But he sold boots online, and he said he sold as much as $400,000 a year of cowboy boots online. That was his major business. When he began, he was about the only one doing that, and I assume if you wanted cowboy boots, Nashville sounded like a good place to buy them, so he was doing all right. Now he said there are about 200 people selling boots online and so he does most of his boot selling out of his store. He has a store in Belle Meade Plaza right next to where I take my granddaughter to breakfast on Saturday mornings.

This is what he says happens to him. He says people come into the Nashville Cowboy Boot company store and they try on the cowboy boots and then they go home and buy them online because they don't have to pay the sales tax. They owe the sales tax, but, as I said, the online sellers are not required to collect it and many taxpayers fail to pay it even though they owe it.

Now we are not talking about Internet tax here. The Senate had a great big debate on the Internet access tax a few years ago. I was right in the middle of that. By the time we got through with it, we had a compromise and we put a moratorium on new Internet access taxes. So we are not talking about taxing the Internet or a new Internet tax. We are talking about the plain old State sales tax that everybody--except in five States, one of them being New Hampshire, which doesn't have a sales tax--in 45 States owes.

I have been very pleased with the reception I have heard to the bill introduced by Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin. It has five Republican cosponsors. I am one of them. It has five Democratic cosponsors. We hope there will be more. Many of the people who saw problems with earlier attempts to fix the bill believe this legislation solves the problem. Some of the early bills were large. This bill is 10 pages. It is very simple. If the problem was it was too complicated for remote sellers to collect the online tax, they fixed that. They have said if Tennessee wants to require remote sellers like Amazon to do the same thing the local boot company does, it has to provide Amazon with software that will make it simple for Amazon to collect the tax.

When I want to know the weather in my hometown outside of Maryville, TN, I simply put in weather and the ZIP Code 37886, and back comes the information. That is all a remote vendor will have to do. It will put in Lamar Alexander, cowboy boots, whatever they cost, the ZIP Code, and the computer software will figure out the state and local sales tax and report it to the vendor, and the vendor will send the money electronically to whatever State. So the old problems don't exist.

I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal today which I thought was very well balanced. It takes a whole page. States require online retailers to collect sales tax. Yes, it is fair. No, it protects small firms. I am not going to put this in the Record, but I do want to take issue with one argument among those who said: No, it protects small firms. Two arguments, really.

One, the Enzi-Durbin legislation has a $500,000 exemption. So my friend in Nashville, who was the only, and I guess for a while, leading seller of cowboy boots online never made more than $400,000 in revenues. He said, I could tell that. So if he doesn't have more than $400,000 or $500,000 in revenue, he is not even affected by this legislation that gives States the option to decide what to do.

Second, this says the legislation would overturn the Supreme Court ruling of 20 years ago. That is not accurate. It does not overturn anything. What the Supreme Court said 20 years ago was that with the state of technology that existed with so many different taxing jurisdictions, it was an undue burden on interstate commerce for States to require online sellers to collect the tax that was owed. This is what the Court said:

This aspect of our decision is made easier by the fact that

the underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be

better qualified to resolve, but also one that Congress has

the ultimate power to resolve. No matter how we evaluate the

burdens that use taxes impose on interstate commerce,

Congress remains free to disagree with our conclusions.

Then it said:

Accordingly, Congress is now free to decide whether, when,

and to what extent the States may burden interstate mail-

order concerns with a duty to collect use taxes.

This is not overturning anything. It is simply responding to the invitation by the Supreme Court 20 years ago that said: As we look at it, this is too big a burden. That was back when there were thousands of taxing districts and no easy way to collect the money. But it did say that Congress had the right to decide what represents a burden. What this bill says is, there are two ways States may do this. There is the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement where about half the States have joined together and said, we will create a single way to allow online vendors to operate, or the State of Kentucky may say, we don't like what they are doing, we will create our own way. As long as it is a simple way, a single return, a single audit, and the State provides the software, then the State has that option. That is why Amazon decided last week that it supported the Enzi-Durbin bill.

On the Republican or conservative side, there have been a lot of people who said, wait, this is about taxes. Well, it is about taxes, but it is about taxes in a way that conservatives like to talk about. We like to say we don't like it when the government policy prefers some taxpayers over others, or some businesses over others. We also, on this side of the aisle, believe in States' rights, and this bill doesn't decide anything. It simply empowers States to make their own decisions about taxes.

In our State, for example, we have one of the lowest tax burdens, but we have the highest State sales tax. If we are able to collect $300 million, $400 million, $500 million more in Tennessee from this tax that is now avoided because of the loophole, there could be proposals to reduce the sales tax rate or reduce some other tax. Certainly the money will help to avoid the arrival of a State income tax, which is about the most hated word in our tax vocabulary in Tennessee.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record some of the responses that have come since last week. The Memphis Commercial Appeal editorial which urged that Congress close this longstanding loophole in the current tax law. ``It's the right thing to do.''

Greg Johnson, a conservative columnist in the Knoxville News Sentinel said: ``Online sales tax bill would level the playing field.'' His article refers to the fact that 10 years ago William F. Buckley, Jr., whom he calls the father of modern conservatism, opined to the National Review about this problem and that it needed a result.

The same sort of argument was made by Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, who wrote an article last week and said this needs to be fixed and supports a bill such as the one we introduced.

There is also an editorial from the Seattle Times, an editorial from the Paris Post-Intelligencer, an editorial from the Denver Post, and one from Belleville in Illinois. All of these make the same points.

Mr. President, this is a States rights argument. It is about allowing States to close a loophole--a tax loophole. It is about stopping the subsidization of some taxpayers over other taxpayers, stopping the subsidization of some businesses over others. About the only ones left complaining are the taxpayers and businesses that enjoy being subsidized by other taxpayers and other businesses, and that, in our opinion, is not the correct tax policy.

I am very pleased with the work of Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin. I will conclude where I started. I think they have solved the problem. As more Senators look at the fairness of the Marketplace Fairness Act and look at the options it gives each State, I hope we will have more cosponsors. If I were running an online retailer in this country, I would begin to make my plans to collect the sales taxes that are already owed and return them to the States because States will have the right under this legislation to do it.

I thank the President and I yield the floor. I note the absence of a quorum.

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

As she usually does, the Senator from California said directly what the situation is. We on the Republican side understand that the majority leader has some important business he has to make sure the Senate finishes this week. We, as would many Democrats, want us to get to the Defense authorization bill before we go home. Senator Reid wishes to do that. We respect that and we agree with that.

Senator Reid wishes to make sure we have a chance to deal with the conference report that the House is expected to pass on Thursday, which contains a continuing resolution to fund the government to mid- December. We understand that as well.

That gives us a little time here, a day or two, to consider the Energy and Water appropriations bill that Senator Feinstein has described. It has broad consensus here in the Senate. It has no mandatory spending in it. It has an important defense component-- nuclear weapons nonproliferation. It has a great many nondefense items that are important to the growth of our country. It seems on the Republican side--I can speak for that--there is broad consensus. At Senator Reid's request I checked with many of our Republican Senators, asked them how many amendments they have and whether they thought they could bring them to the floor today or tomorrow morning so we could deal with them tomorrow, at the latest Thursday morning. So far the news has been encouraging. There have not been that many amendments and all the Senators with whom I have talked have said if they have amendments they believe there is no reason why, as long as they are given a short period of time to talk and a chance to vote on them--and they are germane, of course; they will have to be germane to fit with the rules of the Senate--they will be fine with that.

We are going to be checking tonight with all Republican offices. We do not want to encourage any more amendments but we want to know about them if there are any so I can go to Senator Feinstein and Senator Reid and say here are the amendments the Republican Senators want to offer, we are ready to go, we can deal with it tomorrow and Thursday and hopefully we will be able to do our basic work. Our basic work is to do appropriations work in this body. That is our constitutional responsibility.

So I thank Senator Feinstein for the way she approaches this. I understand where the majority leader is, and so far, I am encouraged. I will gather information. I will make my report to you and Senator Reid, and then we will see where you want to go.

I thank the Senator from California. She is a delight to work with. Without disparaging any other Member of the Senate, it is nice to work with former mayors or county executives or even Governors because we are accustomed to making decisions and talking directly and coming to a result. That is what we are able to do. Even when we disagree--which we sometimes do--Senator Feinstein and I are able to keep working on these issues and still try to come to a result. So it is a real privilege to work with Senator Feinstein. I thank her for her courtesy and diligence.

Last week we spent an hour and a half on a very small part of this budget--actually, not even part of the budget but a related matter-- making sure we understood all sides of the issues. I don't think in the whole hour and a half there was ever a Republican or Democratic comment. We were trying to find out the right thing to do for our country, which I think is the goal of each of us.

There is no need to repeat what the chairman said and said very accurately. I will summarize and comment on a few of the points. I will highlight the areas of agreement, which are, for the most part, a couple of areas where we have different points of view which we are still working on. She emphasized--and I thought it was important to emphasize--that except for disaster spending, this Energy and Water bill is slightly below the spending levels of last year. When we add in disaster funding, which I will talk about in a minute, it is above that level.

There is no mandatory spending in the bill. Sometimes our bills get complicated by what we call automatic or mandatory spending. If it is included within an appropriations bill. Some of us wonder why, since we cannot do anything to change it in the appropriations process, but it is there. There is not any of that here. As the Senator emphasized, our bill is divided into two major parts--the security part or the defense part, and the nonsecurity part or the nondefense part. The security part is up; we are spending more. The reason for that is, in the first place, we asked the leaders of the committee to reallocate some money toward our subcommittee so we could try to, as much as we could, live up to our commitment to fund nuclear weapons modernization, an important issue that came up when the Senate ratified the new START treaty.

In other words, the new START treaty was about limiting the number of nuclear weapons here and in Russia, making sure we could inspect what the Russians are doing and, at the same time, we wanted to make sure what we have left works. This is about making sure what we have works. We made a commitment to try to go to certain levels. We are moving in that direction. We have not gotten there yet, but that is one reason, perhaps the main reason, we spend more on the security part.

On the nonsecurity part, as the Senator said, except for disaster spending, it is down. We are spending 3 percent less than we did before. I want to say a word about disaster funding. In the Budget Control Act, in August, a subject of great debate around here--one of the things done was to create a formula over the last 10 years that determines how much money we may be able to spend on disasters. The thought was that disaster spending, like other emergency spending, was getting out of control, and we need to think about it. Obviously, whenever there is a flood, hurricane, or other terrible disaster, we rush to help. But that is real money too, and it has to come from somewhere. This formula that was created says that during this fiscal year--the one about a month and a half old--that we may spend about $11.3 billion based on spending over the last 10 years. After that, we will have to reduce spending somewhere if we are going to spend more on disasters.

With respect to disaster relief, our bill is part of that. It is in the Corps of Engineers. We moved quickly in our subcommittee and in the Appropriations Committee to deal with the epic flooding the Senator described on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers this past year, which, in some cases, exceeded the flood heights of the massive 1927 and 1933 floods.

To give an idea of how unusual these floods were, at our meeting of the Environment and Public Works Committee 3 weeks ago, 14 Senators in both parties came to the committee to say to the authorizing committee--the EPW Committee--we needed to do more to deal with the floods--14 Senators. I have never seen that many Senators testify before a committee before on behalf of any subject. That is how much we are concerned about it, and that is how much people in the areas affected are concerned about it.

In the Appropriations Committee, we had a discussion about how much of that disaster funding to fund. We recommended $1.04 billion. There was an amendment by the Senator from Missouri that said it needs to be more because we know it will be more than that. We said, in a bipartisan way--I remember the chairman and ranking member said we don't have the estimates definite yet from the Corps of Engineers or from FEMA, so we are only going to fund those areas that are declared to be Presidential disasters, No. 1, and where we have definite estimates, No. 2. When we have more definite estimates of additional damage, we will recommend the funding.

We defeated the amendment offered by the Senator from Missouri with the promise that as real damage estimates come in, they will be met. Well, the Senator and I will be offering an amendment to address this increase. I want my colleagues to be aware of this because, particularly on our side of the aisle, we have had a good deal of discussion about funding for disasters.

In the amendment we will be offering, part of the money fits within the formula we agreed to in the Budget Control Act. About $550 million will not, and we will have to find some other place in the budget to reduce spending in order to properly fund this disaster spending. I doubt if there is any Senator who would not want to fund that because this is spending to be prepared for the next disaster. This will be money for preparedness, sandbags. I can guarantee, if the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers flood next year, and sandbags are not available because we could not find the money somewhere else, there will be 28 Senators at the next meeting of the EPW Committee, not just 14.

So this is an urgent request. We are suggesting a way to reduce spending. So with the disaster funding, the only

thing that drives our total recommendations above last year's spending, we are, No. 1, staying within the cap created by the Budget Control Committee; and, No. 2, for the amount of money for the sandbags and other preparedness, we are going to recommend a way to reduce spending somewhere else in order to be prepared for the next flood.

With respect to the security allocation, Senator Feinstein mentioned that one part of our budget has to do with national security and another has to do with nonsecurity. Most people, when they think of energy, don't think of the national security parts. It is among the most important national defense requirements we have. As she said, it includes modernizing all of our nuclear weapons to make sure they work. It includes trying to make sure they don't spread around the world. That stands up at the top--those two items--of our national defense posture.

There was a letter that came from Members of the House of Representatives that seemed to be critical of the Senate for using ``defense money given to water-related projects.'' I want to clear that up. There must have been some confusion on the other side of the Capitol because under the rules of the Budget Control Committee, we cannot use defense money for water projects, period. That is against the rules. Not only did we not do it, we could not do it if we wanted to. In fact, we came up with $100 million more for nuclear weapons modernization than the House did.

So perhaps the House letter was sent to the wrong address. It should have been sent on that side of the Capitol and not sent to the Senate. We understand very well we should not be using defense money for water projects or water project money for defense money. We have not done that. We are not allowed to do that. We cannot cut weapons to fund water projects.

Now, as I said earlier, as Senator Feinstein and I and Senators Cochran and Inouye all said, we would support the President's request for appropriate funding for nuclear weapons modernization, which is why Senator Feinstein and I asked our ranking member and chairman to allocate more money to the security side of our budget, and they did that.

As a result of that, security spending for weapons activities is up 5 percent--$100 million more than the House was able to provide for Energy and Water appropriations.

It is the single largest percentage increase compared to all appropriations subcommittees with security spending in the budget. But it is still $400 million less than the President's full request and $400 million less than I would like to see spent on nuclear weapons modernization. I am concerned about that.

I am committed to continue to work with the full committee, the House, and the administration to come as close as we possibly can to the President's number on nuclear weapons modernization. I want to make it clear that we have bent over backward to make it a top priority--or the top priority to begin with--and have had good cooperation from the senior members of our committee.

Senator Feinstein has worked hard to put this bill together in a fair and accommodating manner. She mentioned the Office of Science and talked about clean energy. Recently, I was at one of our National Laboratories, Sandia in New Mexico. The Director of Science there reminded me that almost every major physical and biological invention of any importance in the United States since World War II has been funded by government-sponsored research--almost all through our 17 or 18 National Laboratories or our 50 or 60 top research universities. These are our real secret weapons for job growth. It was out of the laboratories and out of this kind of government research that came the Internet, the Human Genome Project, nuclear power itself--whether it is nuclear weapons or the 104 civilian reactors or the 104 reactors that run our Navy ships--and stealth technology came of this. It is hard to think of any major invention or discovery in physical or biological sciences that didn't have some government-sponsored research. So when we talk about spending the same amount of money this year that we did last year for the Office of Science, we are talking about a major effort of any jobs bill that the Senate could possibly pass.

If we are talking about jobs growth, this is a very big, important part of it. Low taxes is a part of it, fewer regulations, the right national labor relations policies are a part, but any progrowth plan for the United States has to include government-sponsored research. No other country in the world has anything like our 18 laboratories or our 50 or 60 top research universities. If we want a high standard of living--you know, we still produce about 25 percent of all the money in the world--we would do well to invest every spare dollar we have there, as long as it is wisely spent. So as long as we are cutting over here, I am all for that. I don't want to see a situation where we have runaway entitlement spending and as a result of that we squeeze the inventions that give us the job growth we need.

I made a speech at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2008 where I suggested we have a new Manhattan project for clean energy independence, focusing on electric cars and trucks, carbon capture, solar power, nuclear waste, advanced biofuels, green building fusion. I am a big supporter of research as an appropriate role for the Federal Government, and we will talk more, as we have time over the next 2 days, I hope, about the wisdom of the proper priorities in spending. I would say yes to more for research and no to more for subsidies.

The New York Times had a big article on Saturday where it talked about rich subsidies powering solar and wind projects, and these are for companies that can pay us back. These are extravagant subsidies, which I think are completely unnecessary, particularly at a budget time such as this. If we have any extra dollars, let's put them into the secret weapons at the research universities and the national laboratories and tackle the big challenges, such as the 500-mile battery for cars or finding a solar panel that is so cheap it is $1 per kilowatt installed.

I agree with Senator Feinstein that Dr. Chu is on the right track with his energy remarks. I was suggesting in my remarks that we pick these grand challenges, such as used nuclear fuel, as one--what to do with it, where do we dispose of the waste. Dr. Chu is doing that, with batteries, with solar, with others, and I think it is a good way to concentrate the focus of the Federal Government and the Energy Department to solve the problems of rising gasoline prices, electricity prices, and do it in a way that helps clean the air.

During our debate, I hope we have a chance to talk about more for research and less for permanent subsidies in the energy area, and I hope we have a way to talk about restraining entitlement spending so we can have sufficient funds to fund our secret weapons that have produced almost every major biological and physical discovery since World War II. We have broad support for that here. We passed the America COMPETES Act in 2007 which set a path for funding for sciences. We had 35 Democrats and 35 Republicans as cosponsors of that bill. It was introduced by the Democratic leader and the Republican leader, and when we changed parties after an election, it was introduced by the Republican leader and the Democratic leader. So we have bipartisan support for that. We need to make sure it is part of the debate.

The Corps of Engineers, the Senator talked about. Those are critical ideas. Those are the areas she and I agree on. I will spend a moment, if I may, on some areas where we have some more work to do before we have an agreement. One is in the area of nuclear power. Here is what I agree with her about nuclear power. One is that it is a remarkable statistic that 20 percent of our electricity is produced by one of our greatest inventions--nuclear power--and that it is 70 percent of our electricity without carbon but also without nitrogen or sulfur or mercury pollution.

We had a big debate here in the Senate last week about clean air. Well, if all of our power were nuclear power, as almost all of it is in France, we wouldn't have a clean air debate because our powerplants wouldn't be producing any mercury or producing any nitrogen or sulfur oxides as well as carbon. So nuclear is a remarkable advantage for the United States and one which we should continue to take advantage of.

I am disappointed we do not fund in this bill the first steps of a several-year program to jump-start the small nuclear reactor program. This is not just our idea. France, Russia, Brazil, and other countries around the world are working on this. There are 60 countries that want to introduce nuclear energy onto their grid for the first time. We have the phenomenon like South Korea building a nuclear powerplant for the United Arab Emirates. So if we don't do it, that doesn't mean no one will do it; it just means we will be at the back of the line with an invention we invented and that today produces 20 percent of our electricity and 70 percent of our clean electricity.

Now, the ``it'' we are talking about are these smaller reactors. We already produce a lot of small reactors for the more than 100 Navy vessels, but they are of a little different kind. But small reactors that might be 100 to 300 megawatts would be cheaper, they would be made in the United States, and they could be put together like LEGO blocks would. They could be hauled back and forth from wherever they were produced to different places. They might be especially useful on a military base or around a national laboratory, where you don't need 1,200 new megawatts of electricity. And they might be better for an investor-owned utility to buy, because they would only have to spend one-fourth or one-fifth or one-sixth as much money. The big reactors we now build are $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion, $8 billion or more. Quite a big number. So the President and Dr. Chu have recommended we move ahead with the small reactor program. The House of Representatives agrees, I agree, and we are trying to work a way out here where we can join that parade--in fact, lead the parade.

I think the way to do it is to take seriously Senator Feinstein's concern about used nuclear fuel. She is exactly right, we have blindfolds on our eyes if we think it is responsible for us to move ahead producing so much nuclear power--even if it is just a football field 20 feet deep--without a permanent place to put the spent fuel. It is safe to keep it there, in my opinion. And not just mine. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Secretary Chu, the President's Nobel prize- winning Energy Secretary, say it is safe for 100 years. But what that says to me is that it is safe while we figure out the right way to dispose of it. I am convinced our scientists can figure out an even better way of disposing of it than France does, for example, which reprocesses nuclear fuel and then stores it there. I suspect we will be able, in the next 10 or 15 years, to figure out a way to recycle, reuse nuclear fuel, and reduce the waste by 95 percent. But we will still need a permanent place to store it.

What I am committed to do, working with Senator Feinstein--and I am delighted she has this intense level of interest--and Senators Bingaman and Murkowski, the ranking members of the Energy Committee, is trying to create an inexorable process toward a result on finding a proper place to store used nuclear fuel. I hope we can do that within a year. That doesn't mean we will have all the decisions made, but it means we could have, I believe, a process established that will produce a result.

I am hoping at the same time we can move ahead with small nuclear reactors, because by 2020, the idea is we would only have two or three. And between now and then, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would need this help in creating the proper license and approving the design and working through all the things one has to do. It is going to have to do that anyway, because someone will bring one over from Korea or France or Russia or Brazil and they will apply for a license in the United States and we will be using their reactors instead of ours.

Another area of disagreement is there are some provisions in the bill, which I won't go into at great length, but I don't think they belong in an appropriations bill, with all respect. They are based on several recommendations of the 90-day commission created by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Since our bill was reported, the NRC has taken several steps to prioritize their recommendations.

Of the five representations that are in language in our bill, the Commission only considered one to be of that urgent a priority. It is going to do the rest of them in the regular order of things. I think we should let our experts do their job. Perhaps this calls attention to the importance of it, but I would rather let the Nuclear Regulatory Commission do its job and us to concentrate our efforts on finding a place to put used nuclear fuel.

One other area I suspect within the next few days we will have a discussion about is the subsidy cost for renewable energy projects, but I think I will delay that until we have an opportunity to discuss it on the floor, and to have some discussions about the loan guarantee program, which hasn't worked as intended. The loan guarantee program was supposed to help put a priority on certain forms of energy and loan monies to companies that could pay it back, not to companies that couldn't pay it back. Apparently, that has been an issue.

There is also a provision in the bill about requiring grantees of the Department of Energy to change lightbulbs in their factories if they do not meet the standards for the new lightbulbs. This will be costly, it is inconsistent with current law, and I hope we can remove it as the bill moves forward.

In a bill this large and this important, I think Chairman Feinstein and other members of the subcommittee and the full committee have come up with a good result, a result about which there is a consensus between us, with very few areas of disagreement, a result that is below last year's spending level, except for disaster spending, and a result that gives a special emphasis to nuclear weapons modernization that we are committed to and that the President asked for and that does better than the House number but still doesn't reach, I will acknowledge, where I had hoped we could go.

It has been a great privilege to work with Chairman Feinstein. I like the idea that we have an appropriations bill on the floor. This is the basic work of government. We ought to do this before we do anything else. If we can't have an appropriations bill to fund the basic work of government, people might say, can you do anything at all? So we have done our part, we have the bill here, and I thank the majority leader for bringing it up. I hope our colleagues will give us the chance to move forward the bill this week, to bring their amendments to the floor, debate on them, have a final vote, and pass it into law and do something we can be proud of.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator. I am not going to respond at great length because I want to eventually find us in agreement about this, but I appreciate it. Your points are very important and very good points.

On safety and nuclear power, I think it is always important to start off by pointing out that a nuclear reactor is a big, complex operation and obviously there is some risk to it. But nuclear power has the best safety record of any form of energy production in the United States. There has never been a death in connection with any 1 of our 104 civilian reactors. There hasn't been one with the more than 100 Navy reactors where we have sailors actually living on top of reactors. We have all heard about Three Mile Island, which is the most important nuclear accident we have had in the United States, but no one was even hurt in Three Mile Island.

I see the Senator from Pennsylvania is presiding today. When I say that to people around the country, they say: What do you mean no one was hurt at Three Mile Island? No one was hurt. There have been tests on families who lived around there, and no one was even hurt either from any kind of explosion or from radioactivity at a later time.

So we always have to look for better ways to be safe, but we have that safe record. We do have the Chairman of the NRC saying this used fuel is stored safely for 100 years, and we have our scientists telling us in 10 or 15 years we can find a way to recycle. Within that time, we ought to find a place to put it. We have a place to put it if we could go ahead with Yucca Mountain, but that has been stopped for a variety of reasons, some of them political. Let us say they are all principled. But for whatever reason, it is stuck.

The other thing I would say is, there is a certain urgency about this. As the Senator said, 20 percent of our electricity is nuclear power, 70 percent of our clean energy. What if we didn't have that 20 percent? We don't have to look far to see. In Japan they have shut down temporarily enough of their reactors as a result of Fukushima to be without 20 percent of their electricity. What have they been doing? Their car manufacturers have been working on the weekends. That is 5 million workers in Japan. Temperatures are turned to 82 during the summer heat; 22,000 people have been brought into the hospitals from heat stroke. The Emperor and Empress are wandering around the Imperial Palace with candlesticks and flashlights.

We don't want the United States of America like that. This is an important part of our ability to create jobs and to have lots of low- cost electricity. We use 25 percent of all the energy in the world in the United States.

As far as subsidies go, after we get through finding a place to put used nuclear fuel, maybe this is the second area on which the Senator from California and I can work which would be to do something about energy subsidies. Estimates are the Federal Government probably spends about $20 billion a year on energy subsidies of one kind or another.

The Energy Information Administration did a study 3 years ago on where that money goes, and this is where it goes: Subsidies for wind dwarf everything else. It is not Big Oil, it is big wind, $18.82 per megawatt hour subsidy for wind turbines; $3.67 for solar; $1.36 for landfill gas; 67 cents per megawatt hour for hydroelectric; 18 cents for biomass; 12 cents for coal; and almost 0 for nuclear.

It is often cited the insurance program the nuclear powerplants have as a subsidy. It is a Federal law that never has cost the taxpayer a penny. It simply requires all the nuclear operators to put in, I believe, $11 billion or $12 billion per reactor in case there is an incident. They all share in the result, which might be a pretty good way to do with oil producers that are drilling in the gulf, make them all worry about each other's plant and not just their own. So I believe nuclear power is safe.

As far as subsidies go, I would like to move some of those subsidies into the energy research column and maybe into the reduce the debt column.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a copy of the New York Times article.

I was reading in the New York Times on Saturday: Rich subsidies powering solar and wind projects; big rise in company aid; companies are virtually assured of profits. This is the New York Times. This isn't the conservative Washington, DC, Journal saying this. It is a very thorough article that talks about something I have been concerned about for a long time. It said:

Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth

almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of a solar

plant halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on a

former cattle ranch.

It quotes the head of NRG, a very substantial company, saying:

I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20

years in the power industry that involved less risk than

these projects. It is just filling the desert with panels.

From 2007 to 2010, Federal subsidies jumped to $14.7

billion from $5.1 billion, according to a recent study.

It goes on and on.

My own research shows, the Joint Tax Committee said that over the next 10 years taxpayer funding for wind--which our energy secretary testified is a mature technology--will cost the taxpayers $26 billion over the next 10 years. Wouldn't that money be better spent on energy research for clean energy, for finding ways to deal with used nuclear fuel, for getting a 500-mile battery, for getting an installed dollar kilowatt or reducing the debt at a time when we are borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend?

So I am absolutely committed to working with Senator Feinstein on finding a way to deal with the problem of used nuclear fuel. We urgently need to do that. We are fortunate it is safe where it is while we do that, and I hope we can find a way to agree that over the next few years we can move ahead so we at least get started on small modular reactors.

I am also willing to work with the chairman or anyone else, any other Senator who is willing to take a good, hard look at energy substitutes of all kinds and say, OK, let's take look at our own positions on that, especially in light of the budget deficit, and let's take that money and put some of it into energy research so we can get up to where we need to be and use the rest of it to reduce the debt.

So this is a good discussion and one I look forward to continuing, and I am delighted to have a chance to continue it with someone I respect as much as the Senator from California.

Sure.

Mr. President, I believe I have 8 minutes. I would ask the Chair to let me know when I have 1 minute remaining.

The Senator from Kentucky wants to overturn a clean air rule which would limit the amount of soot and ozone, the pollution that causes smog, from blowing from Kentucky and other states into Tennessee or that blows from Tennessee into North Carolina. This is no solution to a serious problem.

I want to give the four reasons why I am going to vote no, and why I believe Senator Pryor of Arkansas and I have a better solution, which is to put the rule into law and give the utilities enough time to comply with it.

Reason No. 1, auto jobs. The first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee 30 years ago was to go down to the Air Quality Board and get an air quality permit so it could operate its paint plant. Fortunately, our air was clean enough to allow that to happen. Nissan came, and so did tens of thousands of jobs. If it had not gotten the permit, the jobs would not be there.

Volkswagen has come to Tennessee. We want to make sure its suppliers can get an air quality permit so they do not have to go to other States. So the first reason we need to stop air from blowing into Tennessee from other States is auto jobs.

Second, the Sevier County Chamber of Commerce, right next to the Great Smoky Mountains--that is where Dolly Parton grew up--I walk in to see them, and they say their No. 1 goal is clean air. That is because 9 million tourists come to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not the Great Smoggy Mountains. This is not a group or a hotbed of liberal regulators. These are the most Republican counties in Tennessee. Where I come from, which is the next county over, we have not elected a Democrat to Congress since Abraham Lincoln was President, but we like to breathe clean air. Our tourists do as well.

Tourist jobs are the second reason I am going to vote against the Paul amendment and why I support the Alexander-Pryor amendment.

Three, the American Lung Association tells us that dirty air blowing into Tennessee makes us unhealthier. It causes some of us to die, especially children and our older citizens. No. 4, this is no solution. It has no chance of succeeding. It will not pass the Senate. The President will veto it if it does. And what will it do? It will throw it back to bureaucrats and lawyers and bureaucracy and uncertainty and delay. That is not a solution. So the only reason for it is as a political message. What kind of message is it, that we favor dirty air blowing from Kentucky into Tennessee or Tennessee into North Carolina? That we favor not doing our job, but turning it back to bureaucrats, lawyers, uncertainty and delay? That is not a solution.

If we want a message amendment, there are many better choices. The Obama administration, particularly the EPA, is a happy hunting ground of unreasonable regulations. There is the boiler MACT rule, which must have been created on another planet. There is the cement MACT rule, which would increase the amount of pollution in the air. There is the ozone rule, which the President himself had to withdraw. There is the power plants coolant rule, which seems to have no benefits. There is even talk of a farm dust rule, which Senator Johanns is talking about. So why aren't we talking about those rules instead of a proposal to make it easier for dirty air to blow into our State, make us unhealthier, drive away tourists, and cost us auto jobs? The Senator from Kentucky says it will cost. His sources say 2 percent. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest public utility in the country, says it is $1 to $2 a month--$1 to $2 a month. That is a reasonable cost for what we are getting.

TVA has said they are closing 18 coal-fired units, but will continue to operate 38 coal-fired units. They are putting pollution control equipment on all of them. That means we are healthier, that means more jobs, that means more tourists. The Senator from Kentucky says emissions are declining. That is true, except in Kentucky they are not declining. Soot went up by 20,000 tons in Kentucky, according to the EPA, between 2009 and 2010. Some of that might blow into Tennessee, drive away jobs, drive away tourists, and make us unhealthy.

The Bush administration had a similar rule to this in 2005. That rule required nearly identical reductions in these two pollutants. Utilities have known since that time--for 6 years--these reduction were coming. Most utilities, like TVA, have complied with it or are beginning to comply with it. If we overturn the rule, it is no solution at all. I am ready for Congress to step up and accept its responsibility and do its job.

Someone said to me: Is that part of your new independence? No. I have had bipartisan clean air legislation in this Congress every year since I have been here, because I think it is our job, not the bureaucrats' job. I was elected to work on jobs and health, not pass the buck to the bureaucrats and lawyers. So I invite my colleagues to join Senator Pryor and me. Let's put the rule into law. Let's give utilities enough time to comply. They do not have to comply on January 1, 2012. They have to comply 15 months after that in March 2013. We would extend it that time another year giving them two years to comply.

We are going to have a President elected next year. Whoever it is, his or her EPA will write new rules for communities across the country about how clean their air needs to be. If we make it harder for them to do their job, by allowing dirty air to blow into Nashville and Chattanooga and Memphis and Knoxville from other States, then when Volkswagen suppliers come to the State office to get their clean air permit, they will not get it, and those jobs will go somewhere else.

There is a lot I admire about our neighbors in Kentucky, including their two distinguished Senators. But I do not want their dirty air blowing into Tennessee. And I know North Carolina does not want our dirty air blowing into North Carolina, because they have been suing us for several years about it.

The American people are tired of messaging. I want to see the Great Smoky Mountains, not the Great Smoggy Mountains. I want tourists to come to Tennessee, admire the mountains, and leave their money. I want the Volkswagen suppliers to be able to locate their plants in Tennessee. I want all Tennesseans to be able to grow up healthy and not have to worry about

dirty air blowing in from other parts of the country.

The Alexander-Pryor amendment would limit that dirty air. It would help our communities. It would make us healthier. It will create jobs. Let's do our job. I ask my colleagues to vote no on the Paul amendment and become a cosponsor of the Alexander-Pryor amendment to clean up the air and do it in a way that helps utilities provide electricity at the lowest possible cost to the ratepayer.

I yield the floor.

I ask consent to extend the colloquy into Democratic time.

I wish to congratulate Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin and say how pleased I am to join as a cosponsor of their legislation. Here is what I want to congratulate them for. Senator Enzi said he came to this as a former mayor, as a former shoe shop owner, and as a former legislator. I come as a former Governor.

In our constitutional framework, I have always thought it was our business in Tennessee to decide what services we wanted to provide and what taxes we wanted to levy to pay for them. For example, we have a high sales tax, but we have no income tax. That is different from most States. We have a low overall tax burden. For me, this is, as Senator Durbin and I have discussed, a matter of States rights.

I think the most important thing I could say today is that they have solved the problem with this legislation. This problem has been there for a long time. It has had the opposition of conservatives worried about taxes. It has had the opposition of Amazon and other online sellers.

Twenty years ago, when technology for businesses to compute and collect taxes was not nearly as innovative as it is today, the Supreme Court said that without congressional approval, states could not require out-of-state businesses to collect sales taxes because this created too much of a burden on interstate commerce. Senator

Enzi and Senator Durbin, with this legislation, in my opinion, have solved the problem, and this is going to happen.

I am not presumptuous enough to predict what the Congress will do and what the President will sign, but I think I have been around long enough and I have watched Congress enough to say this is going to happen. And if I were Governor, if I were an online retailer, or if I were a catalog retailer, I would make my plans to conduct my business in this way. Why do I say that? Well, for one thing, times have changed.

This morning, I got up and looked up the weather in my hometown. So I went online and put in weather, 37886--that is my ZIP Code--and back came the information. Under the bill Senator Durbin and Senator Enzi have proposed, the State would create a system for Amazon, let's say as an example, an online seller. All they would have to do, if I buy a $300 or $400 television set, is they put my name in, they put in my ZIP code, and the software the State has provided will tell them what the tax is and will even electronically transfer the tax money back to the State. In other words, Amazon will do the same thing the appliance store in Maryville, TN, will do, and that is what we intended to happen.

I mean, when we passed a sales tax in Tennessee--I wasn't around then, but I was around when it has been raised--we didn't intend to exempt some people over others. We didn't intend to subsidize some businesses over others. We made a general decision that when we buy things in Tennessee, all sellers would collect the sales tax. We have a local sales tax and we have a State sales tax, and that is our right to decide.

Some of the opposition in the past has come from conservative groups. It was important, just yesterday, to see the chairman of the American Conservative Union write a very strong article in support of a House version of this same bill. I talked with him yesterday, Mr. Al Cardenas, a businessman from Florida, and he is reviewing our bill.

Ten years ago, William F. Buckley wrote about this problem and said that it was a loophole that needed to be solved and when States decided to subsidize some taxpayers over others and some businesses over others, that was not good conservative philosophy.

So when you have Amazon supporting in a strong letter that Senator Enzi read, and when you have the chairman of the American Conservative Union on the same day announcing his support for the same principles, I think you have solved the problem.

As Amazon just said in their letter, they are in business to compete and they can sell their goods, they claim, cheaper online than they can buy them in Senator Enzi's store in Gillette, WY. Maybe they can, maybe they can't, but at least they will have a level playing field, and both the store in Gillette, WY, and the online seller will do the very same thing. They will collect the sales tax that is already owed from the purchaser and they will send it directly to the State, which has been the way things have worked for a long time.

This is an issue about preserving the States' right to collect or not to collect their own sales tax. It is about closing a tax loophole. It is about stopping the subsidization of some businesses over others, of some taxpayers over others.

I will conclude my remarks in a moment, but first here is what William F. Buckley said about it:

The mattress maker in Connecticut . . . does not like it if

out-of-State businesses are, in practical terms, subsidized;

that's what the non-tax amounts to. Local concerns are

complaining about traffic in mattresses and books and records

and computer equipment which, ordered through the Internet,

come in, so to speak, duty free.

Of course, Governors and legislators are up in arms as well. This loophole costs States $23 billion. Tennessee could use this money to ward off a State income tax which we don't have and we don't want. Wyoming could use the revenue to reduce its property tax. Other States might reduce rising college tuitions, or they might reward outstanding teachers.

This has been a problem for the last 20 years, but Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin, with their legislation, have solved the problem.

I will stop where I started. This is not a new tax, it is an existing tax. It is not a tax on the Internet; it is on all sales. Senator Enzi and Senator Durbin, with their legislation, have solved the problem, and I predict that because of the voluntary agreements and the ease of out-of-State vendors doing the same thing Main Street vendors do, that very soon we will eliminate these subsidies and close this loophole. I congratulate them for their years of work in this area. I am happy to join 10 Senators--5 Republicans, 5 Democrats--in cosponsoring this legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to include for the Record the article by Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union; the essay by William F. Buckley; and a letter from Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, endorsing the Enzi-Durbin legislation.

Oh, yes.

I thank the Senator from Illinois.

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

Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, later this week the Senate will vote on a resolution to disapprove the Clean Air Act rule designed to limit the blowing of powerplant pollution from one State to another. In my opinion, overturning the rule would throw the matter back to regulators, back to courts, back to lawsuits, and back into a delay.

Senator Pryor of Arkansas and I are introducing today S. 1815. We have sent it to the desk. It is bipartisan legislation that will provide what we believe is a better approach, and that approach is to enact the clean air rule into law but give utilities 1 additional year in which to comply with it. Our approach would provide certainty and cleaner air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

The motion to overturn the clean air rule will be offered by the junior Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul.

Tennesseans admire much about our Kentucky neighbors. We admire their bluegrass, we admire their basketball, we admire their distinguished Senators. But Tennesseans don't want Kentucky's State income tax, and we don't want Kentucky's dirty air. We also know our neighbors in North Carolina don't want Tennessee's dirty air blowing into North Carolina because they have told us that through lawsuits in the courts, which they have won.

Air pollution blowing from one State into another makes our citizens sick, especially our younger Tennesseans and our older Tennesseans. Air pollution blowing from other States into our State is a jobs issue. Pollution makes our Great Smoky Mountains more like the ``Great Smoggy Mountains.'' We like to see our mountains and we like for the 9 million visitors who come to visit us every year to stay a long time and to spend a lot of money because that supports our schools and it supports our State revenue.

Dirty air blowing into Tennessee from other States makes it harder for us to create jobs in yet another way. I remember 30 years ago when I was Governor of Tennessee and the Nissan corporation came to our State. The very first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee was to go down to the State Air Quality Board and ask for an air quality permit in order to operate its paint plant. Fortunately, the air quality in the Nashville area was clean enough that Nissan could locate there. If Nissan hadn't been able to obtain an air quality permit to operate its paint plant, it would have been in Georgia or some other State. As a result the auto jobs which have come to Tennessee in the tens of thousands over the last 30 years would most likely have went to some other State.

So dirty air blowing from Kentucky into Tennessee or Tennessee into North Carolina or from any State into another State makes it harder for the recipient State's communities to get their quality permits. It makes it harder, for example, for us to say to Volkswagen and its suppliers: We can provide a home to you because our air is clean enough so that you can get our air quality permit.

Mr. President, in 2005, the Bush administration first put into place the predecessor to the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that we will be voting on later this week. Federal courts found that the Bush rule was flawed in some technical respects and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to write a new rule, which some now seek to overturn by means of the Congressional Review Act. The Bush clean air rule that was put in place in 2005 has now been there for 6 years. Many utilities have already taken steps to comply with it.

The pollution standards in the new rule we will be voting on are about the same as those established in the 2005 Bush rule. As an example of costs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Nation's largest public utility, tells us that complying with the amended rule will cost its ratepayers between $1 and $2 a month.

We often hear, and I will have to say that a lot of those comments often come from our side of the aisle, that it is the job of Congress, not the bureaucrats and the courts, to write the clean air rules. The commonsense legislation that Senator Pryor and I offer today is an opportunity for Congress to do its job in a way that will clean the air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

Mr. President, later this week the Senate will vote on a resolution to disapprove the Clean Air Act rule designed to limit the blowing of powerplant pollution from one State to another. In my opinion, overturning the rule would throw the matter back to regulators, back to courts, back to lawsuits, and back into a delay.

Senator Pryor of Arkansas and I are introducing today S. 1815. We have sent it to the desk. It is bipartisan legislation that will provide what we believe is a better approach, and that approach is to enact the clean air rule into law but give utilities 1 additional year in which to comply with it. Our approach would provide certainty and cleaner air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

The motion to overturn the clean air rule will be offered by the junior Senator from Kentucky, Mr. Paul.

Tennesseans admire much about our Kentucky neighbors. We admire their bluegrass, we admire their basketball, we admire their distinguished Senators. But Tennesseans don't want Kentucky's State income tax, and we don't want Kentucky's dirty air. We also know our neighbors in North Carolina don't want Tennessee's dirty air blowing into North Carolina because they have told us that through lawsuits in the courts, which they have won.

Air pollution blowing from one State into another makes our citizens sick, especially our younger Tennesseans and our older Tennesseans. Air pollution blowing from other States into our State is a jobs issue. Pollution makes our Great Smoky Mountains more like the ``Great Smoggy Mountains.'' We like to see our mountains and we like for the 9 million visitors who come to visit us every year to stay a long time and to spend a lot of money because that supports our schools and it supports our State revenue.

Dirty air blowing into Tennessee from other States makes it harder for us to create jobs in yet another way. I remember 30 years ago when I was Governor of Tennessee and the Nissan corporation came to our State. The very first thing Nissan did when it came to Tennessee was to go down to the State Air Quality Board and ask for an air quality permit in order to operate its paint plant. Fortunately, the air quality in the Nashville area was clean enough that Nissan could locate there. If Nissan hadn't been able to obtain an air quality permit to operate its paint plant, it would have been in Georgia or some other State. As a result the auto jobs which have come to Tennessee in the tens of thousands over the last 30 years would most likely have went to some other State.

So dirty air blowing from Kentucky into Tennessee or Tennessee into North Carolina or from any State into another State makes it harder for the recipient State's communities to get their quality permits. It makes it harder, for example, for us to say to Volkswagen and its suppliers: We can provide a home to you because our air is clean enough so that you can get our air quality permit.

Mr. President, in 2005, the Bush administration first put into place the predecessor to the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that we will be voting on later this week. Federal courts found that the Bush rule was flawed in some technical respects and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to write a new rule, which some now seek to overturn by means of the Congressional Review Act. The Bush clean air rule that was put in place in 2005 has now been there for 6 years. Many utilities have already taken steps to comply with it.

The pollution standards in the new rule we will be voting on are about the same as those established in the 2005 Bush rule. As an example of costs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Nation's largest public utility, tells us that complying with the amended rule will cost its ratepayers between $1 and $2 a month.

We often hear, and I will have to say that a lot of those comments often come from our side of the aisle, that it is the job of Congress, not the bureaucrats and the courts, to write the clean air rules. The commonsense legislation that Senator Pryor and I offer today is an opportunity for Congress to do its job in a way that will clean the air at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers.

Mr. President, Senator Corker and I wish to recognize Kathy Cloninger for her outstanding service as the chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of the USA for the past 8 years and her 28 years of service to the Girl Scouts movement.

Kathy is a shining example of American leadership and service. She has devoted her life to girls and to one of America's most treasured institutions. We honor her today for a career that has been dedicated to building girls of courage, confidence, and character who make the world a better place.

Kathy's journey with Girl Scouts began in 1983 and spanned more than two decades of service as the head of Girl Scout councils in Tennessee, Texas, and Colorado. During her tenure as CEO of the Girl Scouts of Cumberland, TN, Girl Scout membership in our region rose to more than 25,000 girls--an increase of nearly 40 percent. She was also responsible for creating an outreach program that tripled the number of African-American Girl Scouts, increased the participation of Hispanic girls, and brought more than 1,000 girls in public housing into the program.

Since assuming her role as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA in 2004, Kathy has transformed the Girl Scout movement. Under her guidance, the Girl Scouts accomplished the remarkable task of successfully merging 315 councils down to 112 high-performance councils nationwide. Kathy has unified the Girl Scout movement around a common mission and business strategy, laying a sound foundation for success as the organization looks towards its 100th anniversary and beyond.

Kathy's service goes well beyond Girl Scouts. She has received numerous awards for her work on behalf of youth empowerment and the nonprofit community, including Nonprofit CEO of the Year 2000 from the Center for Nonprofit Management. In 2010, Kathy was named one of the ``21 Leaders for the 21st Century'' by Women's eNews.

Mr. President, we ask our colleagues to join us in thanking Kathy Cloninger for nearly 30 years of service to the

Girl Scouts and our country. Kathy leaves Girl Scouts on the eve of its 100th anniversary, with a mission and program that is as critically important today as it was 100 years ago. We wish her the best in all of her continuing work for girls nationwide, and we welcome her back home to Tennessee.

Are we in morning business?

Mr. President, I am delighted the Senator from Colorado is in the chair when I speak. I want to speak on a subject where he is the foremost expert on the day-to-day operation of school systems. He will appreciate and understand what I am about to say in ways that many people will not.

Yesterday I had a telephone conversation with a member of an editorial board of a prominent newspaper in this country who asked me this question. She said: Senator Alexander, how can you and the National Education Association possibly be together on the teacher evaluation question? How can you justify that? Then she said: When has the NEA ever done anything to encourage the evaluation of school teachers? That is a good question. Both questions are good questions. What she was referring to, of course, was the draft announced yesterday by Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi, who are the ranking members of the Senate committee that handles education.

It included a provision on evaluation of teachers and principals. At my suggestion, and that of others, but contrary to the suggestion of a number of people, it does not include an order from Washington that all 15,000 school districts have a teacher and principal evaluation system. It does not include a definition of what it should be, and it doesn't include the opportunity for the Education Secretary, whoever it may be, to then issue a number of regulations defining what a teacher and principal evaluation system would be in Denver or in Maryville or in Nashville. What it does include is the following: For the first time it specifically allows a State to spend its title II money that is the $2.5 billion of Federal funds that goes to States. It allows that money to be spent to design and implement a principal-teacher evaluation system that is related to student achievement.

In my view, that is the holy grail of public education. If we could ever figure out how to do that and to get everybody to do it, I think it would do more than any other single thing we could do to help our children learn what they need to know and be able to do, except some law that would make everybody better parents, and I don't know how to pass such a law. So that is the first thing the Harkin-Enzi draft includes about teacher and principal evaluation.

In Tennessee, for example, that would mean there would be about $41 million this year that could be spent for that purpose. There are about 63,000 teachers in Tennessee, so that is about $660 per teacher per year of Federal funds that could be used to design and implement a teacher and principal evaluation system related to student achievement. This is the first time that has been specifically allowed.

Secondly, there is something in the draft legislation called the Teacher Incentive Fund. Many school superintendents, such as the distinguished Senator from Colorado, know that program very well. We know in Tennessee because of the work in Memphis. Basically it is a grant that was included as a result of language in No Child Left Behind. Secretary Spellings then beefed up the program, got the money appropriated, and it recognizes the difficulty of figuring out how to reward and evaluate teachers in a fair way, especially if you are going to base compensation on that. It says, if you want to do it, we will give you some money to help you try to do it. So you can do it one way in Knoxville, another way in Denver, another way in Los Angeles. Hopefully what will happen over time is we will find lots of fair ways to reward outstanding teaching and determine outstanding teaching, and smaller school districts and other school districts can borrow ideas from one another. That has been a big success. Secretary Duncan supports it. It has support all the way around. President Obama has supported it.

The third thing that is available for helping develop teacher evaluation systems is a program called Race To The Top. There is $700 million in Federal money for fiscal year 2011. That is a lot of money. States had to compete based upon, among other things, their ability to develop teacher and principal evaluation systems. I can brag about this because I had nothing to do with it, at least recently. My State of Tennessee won that competition. It won $500 million, which has been spent to develop and implement an evaluation program for all the teachers in Tennessee.

Then there is another item in this draft which fits in here. I would call it the Secretary's report card. All previous Education Secretaries--and I am one of them--have tried to use the bully pulpit. So have Presidents. When I was Governor of Tennessee and we were working on a master teacher program, President Reagan came to Tennessee to say it was a good idea. That was very helpful to me at that time. He didn't say this is how you should do it. He said, I recognize what you are doing and I applaud it and encourage it.

Bill Bennett, when he was the Secretary of Education for President Reagan, went to Chicago and said they had the worst schools in the country. That made a lot of news.

But when a Secretary uses that bully pulpit, he can make a difference. We have a very good Education Secretary right now, Arne Duncan. What he now has at his disposal no one else has had before. He has 8 or 9 years of reporting requirements of schools all across the country, and there are about 100,000 public schools for which he has this information. He can go around the country and say: This is good. This is bad. I will put the spotlight here. I will brag on this. Let's do more of this. He can do that in a way that nobody ever could before.

So this is what is in the draft we are talking about that would for the first time get the Federal Government significantly involved in creating an environment for teacher-principal evaluations related to student achievement. One is $2.5 billion of Federal dollars in title II. All of it can be used for this purpose if States want to. No. 2, there is the Teachers Incentive Fund. That was $399 million this year. Race to the Top was nearly $700 million. Then there is the Secretary's Report Card.

I responded to my editor, who called me, and said: Look, I know something about this. In 1983 and 1984, when I was Governor of Tennessee, we became the first State in the country to create a statewide system for rewarding outstanding teaching and paying those teachers based upon that.

At that time, in Tennessee--or anywhere in the country--not one teacher made one penny more for being a good teacher. Not one teacher made one penny more for being a good teacher. So that is what we did in 1983 and 1984.

She said: How hard could that be? Everybody knows some teachers are better than others. We all know that when we put our children into school. Everybody knows that. Why can't we evaluate teachers? How hard could that be?

Well, I was a little bit amused by that because those were exactly the same kinds of questions I was asking in frustration 30 years ago. I would say it to every college of education in the country. I could not find a single one that would help me in any significant way evaluate outstanding teaching.

Now, that may sound like an overstatement. But it is not much of an overstatement.

I had dean after dean, education professor after education professor say: You cannot do that. You cannot determine that one teacher is better than another one, especially if you plan to reward them, compensate them based upon that.

I found that patently ridiculous--patently ridiculous.

Just like the editor was trying to tell me every parent knows that. My mother put me in one first grade instead of another first grade in Maryville, TN, because she thought one teacher was better than the other. She had an opinion about that. She was a teacher herself, so perhaps she knew.

We all have those judgments to make. IBM hires a lot of education people. They have teachers and they know some are better than others and they pay them correspondingly. Colleges and universities hire a lot of teachers. They pay teachers all the way up the ladder, from lower amounts to very high amounts for distinguished professors. They can find a way to make a distinction, but somehow we got into this rut 30 years ago that said: We cannot make any distinction among teachers based upon their ability to teach, especially related to student achievement, and then we especially cannot take the next step and pay some more than others.

The reason I thought that was such an urgent problem 30 years ago was because we cannot trap women in our schools anymore to teach. Women are in the marketplace now. That is what we did for many years. So if we want to attract and keep the very best men and women teaching in our classrooms, we need to be able to recognize excellence when we find it, to encourage it, and to reward it with compensation.

I can remember sitting around with a group of Governors in 1980 when the late Bill Clement, Governor of Texas, said to mostly a group of Democratic Governors: When is one of you--and he used another word--so- and-sos going to get the courage to take on the NEA? What he meant was, every single one of us knew that the National Education Association had its foot on everyone who tried to pay some teachers more than others.

Well, I was young and maybe did not know better, so in my second term I created a bipartisan commission with the Democratic leaders of the legislature, and we set out to figure out a number of things about education, including a master teacher program. The long and the short of it was, we did that. It took a year and a half of my time as Governor. I must have spent 40 or 50 percent of my time every day engaged in an ongoing brawl, mainly with the National Education Association, as to whether we could do this.

They defeated my proposals in the first year. I came back in the second year and won by one vote, and we put in place a voluntary program that before long up to 10,000 Tennessee teachers voluntarily went into a career ladder program, became master teachers, and many got 10-month and 11-month and 12-month contracts. It raised their pay. It improved their retirement. It gave them distinction. I have teacher after teacher come to see me today to thank me for that, including the current leadership of the Tennessee Education Association, whose organization killed the program after I left office.

So it is appropriate to ask: Senator Alexander, why are you and the National Education Association in cahoots on any sort of teacher evaluation proposal?

Well, I want to say briefly why. A lot has happened since 1983, 1984. Governor Hunt, Democratic Governor of North Carolina, and others have worked to create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers both participated in that. That was a step forward in recognizing and certifying outstanding teachers.

AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, has always been open to this proposal. I remember the late Albert Shanker telling me: Well, if we have master plumbers, we can have master teachers, especially if you are going to pay them more. He invited me to come out to his national convention in Los Angeles to talk about it.

President Bush and Secretary Spellings, with the Teacher Incentive Fund, and President Obama and Secretary Duncan, who have taken a lead on this, despite the fact that it is not popular with many of the constituents of their party, have stuck their necks out on this, and I applaud them for that.

The Gates Foundation has put money behind it. Bill Gates has told me personally this is one of the two things he wants to do in education with the time and the money he has.

So there is a consensus. Everybody might not say, as I do, it is the ``Holy Grail'' of K-12, but there is a consensus that finding fair ways to reward outstanding teaching through teacher and principal evaluation related to student achievement is urgently important.

So it is very tempting just to pass a law in Washington to say: Let's order it. Let's just do it. Well, that is not the way things work in the United States of America. We did that with professional development. The law now says, with all that $2.5 billion: Do it. Have professional development programs.

I do not know what the Senator from Colorado thinks, but my view--and I do not think Secretary Duncan would mind my repeating his comments often--that is the biggest waste of money we have in the Federal education program. It is not well used. We say: Do it, and so they have all these programs. Teachers know it is a waste of time, and everybody knows it is a waste of time. We are not spending that money wisely.

So why are we to think, if we just say, create a teacher evaluation system all across the country in 15,000 school districts, people will just say, OK, they have to do it to get the money, and they will just do it? I think it would be the kiss of death for the whole movement. Although it is tempting to do it that way.

Then, yesterday, on my way up here, in my little hometown of Maryville, TN, I picked up the newspaper and it reminded me of why I so strongly believe it is a good idea to create an environment in which school districts and States can create teacher and principal evaluation systems and it is a bad idea to order it, define it, and regulate it from Washington.

Here is the headline. I mentioned this yesterday in my remarks on the floor: ``Evaluation of Teachers Contentious.''

Now, here is the State of Tennessee--Mr. President, could I ask unanimous consent for 3 more minutes?

I thank the Senator from Kansas, and I will kind of speed up my comments a little bit. But I might take 4 minutes, unless that is a problem.

I thank the Senator from Kansas because I would like to make my point, if I may.

Remember, the State of Tennessee won Race to the Top. It has been working on teacher evaluation for 25 years. It developed the Sanders Model, which was the first real way that we related student achievement to teacher performance. May sound easy. It is pretty hard. Nobody else would do it.

This professor at the University of Tennessee's Agriculture Department, a statistician, said: I think I can do it. He did it, and it is being used all around the country in many places--but not everyplace. Some do not have confidence in it.

So Tennessee wins $500 million in Race to the Top--to do what? Have a teacher and principal evaluation program. Here they are doing it. Twenty-five years of experience, and it is the front page news: ``Evaluation of Teachers Contentious''--all the struggles with that program.

Then we get here into what is involved. It says:

Under the new system--

This is the Tennessee system of evaluation--

tenured teachers will be evaluated at least four times each

year. Nontenured teachers will be evaluated at least six

times each year. . . .

Teacher effectiveness ratings are calculated using a

formula that is 50 percent qualitative and 50 percent

quantitative. The quantitative portion combines student

growth (35 percent) and student achievement (15 percent).

Now, they are having a tough time down in Maryville, TN, and Nashville, TN, about implementing their own proposal. It says:

State officials are also traveling across the state to meet

with stakeholders.

The state Department of Education's Advisory Group will

bring revision recommendations to [the] Education

Commissioner. . . .

That's Kevin Huffman, one of the best in the country.

Based on the proposed revisions, the recommendations might

need to be brought before the State Board of Education.

Do we really want them to come to Washington after they get through with that and say: OK, now we have it figured out. We are having a really hard time doing it. You tell us what to do. You define what we ought to do. And may we please have your permission to do things this way instead of that way? I think not. I think that would be the kiss of death for any movement for teacher-principal evaluation.

So my plea is that we show some restraint, that we recognize that just a little movement here makes a big difference there when we are dealing with 3.2 million teachers, when we are dealing with 100,000 schools, and 15,000 school districts.

Secretary Duncan, whom I greatly admire, says:

A comprehensive evaluation system based on multiple

measures, including student achievement, is essential for

education reform to move forward. We cannot retreat from

reform.

He is exactly right. But that does not mean we need a national school board. That is what a Governor, a legislator, a school district, local people ought to be doing, working with teachers.

So the NEA and I may have the same position today on whether to have a mandate definition and regulation from Washington on teacher evaluation. We may agree. I cannot speak for them. But I will be watching--as I did 30 years ago, as I did 15 years ago, as I did 20 years ago as Education Secretary--to see what they are doing in Tennessee.

Are they making it easier for Kevin Huffman and the Governor and the legislature to implement this award-winning teacher evaluation program or are they making it harder?

So I hope we will have a good, full debate as we move to the markup in the next few days. I respect the enthusiasm of all those who want to begin a process for teacher and principal evaluation. I would like to believe that no one wants it to move more than I do. I have watched it for 30 years. I have fought everyone who is against it for 30 years, and I strongly believe the right way to do it is to recognize that education is like jobs. Both are national concerns, both are of interest to the Federal Government, but we cannot create them from here. We have to create an environment in which local people, State people, can create better schools and create better jobs, and, in this case, a mandate definition and regulation from Washington, a national school board, would be a terrible error.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I thank the Senator from Kansas for his courtesy.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, last month several Republican Senators came to the floor and offered legislation to fix No Child Left Behind, the legislation that was passed nearly 10 years ago to try to address our Nation's 100,000 public schools. In that legislation, we sought to fix problems with the legislation, not just to create another big reauthorization bill. The ideas we had were not all our ideas. They included many ideas from President Obama and his excellent Education Secretary, Secretary Duncan, as well as Democratic and Republican Members of Congress. They included having more realistic goals for No Child Left Behind. The original goal set in 2001 would, according to Secretary Duncan, create an unworkable situation where 80,000 of the 100,000 schools might be identified as failing in the next few years.

A second goal of our legislation was to move decisions about deciding whether schools and teachers were succeeding or failing out of Washington, DC, and back to State and local governments. A lot has happened in the last 10 years in the States--really the last 20 or 25 but especially in the last 10 years. We have better reporting requirements from No Child Left Behind. We have new State common standards, higher academic standards. We have new State tests that have been created--not here but by the States to do that. And now States are working together to create accountability systems. So there is a much better chance that States and local school districts can create an environment where students learn what they need to know and be able to do.

Our legislation encourages States to create what I think is the holy grail of public education; that is, principal-teacher evaluation related to student achievement. I know from experience that is hard to do. In 1983 and 1984, when I was Governor of Tennessee, we became the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. It took us a year and a half and a huge battle with the National Education Association in order to put it in place, but 10,000 teachers became master teachers. It was a good first step. Tennessee is already doing it again.

Here is my local newspaper: Evaluation of teachers contentious. There is nothing more contentious, and the last thing we need is Washington sticking its nose into that, other than to create an environment where State and local governments can use Federal money to pay for their own State and local programs. We propose consolidating programs, making it easier for school districts to transfer Federal money and expand choices and expand charter schools.

Now, today, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate education committee--the HELP Committee, as we call it--have introduced another draft piece of legislation to fix No Child Left Behind. I intend to vote to move this bill out of committee, although it is not yet the kind of legislation that I would be willing to vote to send to the President, but it is a good place to start.

There is a good deal of agreement in terms of what we want to do in our legislation from a few weeks ago and the Harkin-Enzi bill. Among the agreements is moving decisions about whether schools are succeeding or failing out of Washington. Another is to encourage principal-teacher evaluation without mandating, defining, and regulating it from Washington, DC. Another good provision is to encourage but not define and mandate and regulate using measures of growth of students--not just whether they achieved something but whether they are making rapid progress toward a goal. The idea is to make that in terms of whether schools and students are succeeding.

There are many provisions in the Harkin-Enzi bill that have been suggested by both Democrats and Republicans, but there are a number of provisions--not in our legislation--that I don't support, and I am going to seek to amend them. I have indicated to Senators that I intend to offer seven amendments which, in my view, would take out of the legislation provisions that tend to create a national school board. One is the so-called achievement gap. One is the so-called highly qualified teachers provision. These are all provisions that substitute the judgment of people in Washington for that of mayors, local school boards, governors, and legislators. So I don't think we need a national school board, and neither do most Americans.

Some will say: Well, then, why would you support a bill that you don't entirely agree with? The reason is we have a process in Congress. This isn't like the health care bill a few years ago when we had 40 Republican Senators and Speaker Pelosi was in charge of the House of Representatives. We now have 47 Republican Senators, we have a Republican House of Representatives, and we need to get started fixing this problem. We need to do something a little different around here. Instead of just beating our chests, we need to find a way to put our heads together, head toward a reasonable result, come up with a solution, and offer it to the President and to the American people.

There is no reason in the world why we can't, with the amount of agreement we already have, send to the President by Christmas legislation fixing No Child Left Behind. We should do it because if we don't, Congress's inaction will mean we will transform the U.S. Education Secretary into a waiver-granting czar for 80,000 schools in this country which, according to this law, will be identified as failing.

Well, if we were to have an education czar, or if we were to have a chairman of a national education school board, Secretary Arne Duncan would be a good one. But I don't think we want one in the United States of America. So I think we should act before Christmas in order to avoid creating a waiver education czar, and we should act before Christmas in a way that does not create a national school board.

There is one other suggestion I would make to the authors of this bill. In our earlier meetings with the President, Congressman George Miller of California, who was a key leader in developing No Child Left Behind, said this bill to fix No Child Left Behind ought to be a lean bill. I agree with Congressman Miller. The legislation Republicans introduced a few weeks ago totaled 221 pages in its five bills. The comparable section of the Harkin-Enzi draft is 517 pages. I urge us to follow Congressman Miller's advice in the final result and be much more succinct than that.

So despite these concerns, I will vote on Wednesday or Thursday, whenever we finish, in favor of bringing this base bill out of the HELP Committee and on to the Senate floor where we can have full amendments. I am going to do my best to improve it in committee and on the Senate floor to make it more like the legislation we introduced a month ago. I am going to continue to do that in the conference we have with the House of Representatives. I think it is time we recognize the American people expect us to step up to major issues, to put our best ideas together, and come up with a result. We are part way there. There is a good place to start.

I thank Senator Harkin and Senator Enzi for the work they have done, as well as Representative Kline and Representative Miller, and I thank the President and Secretary Duncan for their attitude. I look forward to working with them to come to a conclusion.

One last thing: We talk a lot about jobs around here. Every American knows better schools mean better jobs, and they all know schools are a lot like

jobs. We can't create them from Washington, but we can create an environment in which people in their own communities, and families and States can create better schools and better jobs. This is a good place to start.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter of support which also outlines my objections to the legislation that was introduced today, and a copy of an article from the Maryville Alcoa Daily Times today which reminds us of how difficult it is to evaluate teachers fairly and how wise we would be if we satisfied ourselves with creating an environment in which that could happen but did not mandate it, define it, and regulate it from Washington, DC.

Madam President, our country has endured a 9-percent unemployment rate for a longer period of time than at any other time since

the Great Depression. Yet, unfortunately, the Democratic leader is reluctant to address this problem of joblessness in a serious way.

One way to address it would have been to take the three trade agreements, which were negotiated 4 and 5 years ago--one with Colombia, one with South Korea, one with Panama--and send them up to the Senate and House and let us ratify them and let us move ahead to avoid losing 350,000 jobs--that is an estimate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--or create as many as a quarter of a million jobs--that is the estimate of the White House. Yet those three trade agreements had been sitting on the President's desk since the day he took office nearly 3 years ago. They arrived yesterday--or Monday, I suppose it was--and they are here waiting for us to act on them.

Every day we do not act on them delays the day when we avoid losing 350,000 jobs or create 250,000 jobs. That has been the case every day for the last nearly 1,000 days. That would be a good way to address the jobs issue, but we have not. Instead, we had the President going around the country during the summer blaming Republicans for not acting on the three trade agreements when, in fact, the President had not sent them to us. There is no way the Congress can act on them until the President forwards them, which he now has. And if he has, why are we not debating them today? That would be a good way to deal with the jobs issue.

Here is another example. On September 8, the President came before the Congress and proposed his jobs bill. He said, if I counted correctly, and I was sitting respectfully in the second row, almost in the front row--I think he said as many as 17 times: Pass this jobs bill now. And if that were not enough, he has said it almost every day since then. The Republican leader mentioned it a few times. He was in Dallas yesterday. Pass this jobs bill now; I am ready to enact it, said the President of the United States. Well, it has been sitting there on the Democratic leader's desk for the last couple of weeks, ever since the President sent it up here. He spoke about it on September 8.

The person in this body whose job it is to set the agenda is the Democratic leader, a member of the President's own Democratic Party. Why doesn't he bring it up? So yesterday the Republican leader said: I will show courtesy to the President. I will ask the Senate to do what the President has asked that we do, which is pass this jobs bill now, and the Democratic leader objected.

So here for the second time we have the President running around the country saying one thing, and then we try to do it, and his leader in the Senate objects. What are we doing instead? Well, a couple weeks ago the Democrats manufactured a crisis over disaster aid when we could have been debating the trade bill, the jobs bill, and we could have been offering the Republican proposals we have to encourage trade, to give this President and future Presidents new trade authority, to reform the tax law, and to have a timeout on regulations that are throwing a big, wet blanket, making it more expensive and harder to create new jobs in America. That would have been the kind of debate we could have had on the Republican proposals we believe would make a difference in this urgent jobs situation which has given us 9-percent unemployment for a longer period of time than at any other time since the Great Depression.

So now this week, what are we doing? Well, we are debating a piece of legislation. The Democratic leader has decided this is the important piece of legislation to deal with jobs this week. And what will it do? It will give a punch in the nose to China, our second largest trading partner, our third largest export market, our fastest growing export market, and the second largest economy in the world. History teaches us what will happen. We saw that during the Great Depression. Perhaps it was the cause of the Great Depression. We remember the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the trade war that developed, the reciprocal punches in the nose that countries gave to themselves over trade, plunging the world into a depression.

So here we are in a fragile moment, when headlines are saying we may be about to dip into a second recession, and what do we do? The Democratic majority says their best idea about creating jobs is to punch in the nose our second largest trade partner, our third largest export market, and our fastest growing export market, even though we know exactly what they will do to us. History teaches us they will punch us right back in the nose, and the result will be a trade war, which destroys jobs rather than creates jobs.

Such legislation as that now pending on this floor is not how the world's strongest economy, the United States of America, should conduct itself. Such legislation is a sign of weakness or lack of self- confidence or defeatism that is not worthy of the United States of America.

In Tennessee, we see the advantages of trading with the world, including with China. China is our third largest export market, after Canada and Mexico. Our leading exports are chemicals and agricultural products. Tennessee exports to China totaled $1.85 billion, a 43- percent increase over 2009. A little over 7 percent of all of our exports went to China. In Tennessee, 116,000 jobs are related to the export of manufactured goods; 5.3 million jobs in America. At a time of joblessness, why should we be punching in the nose someone to whom we might sell goods and that would create jobs in the United States?

What should we do instead? Of course, there is legitimate concern about the way China values its currency. The administration should work with China to change that. China should accelerate the appreciation of its currency. But what else should the United States of America do? We might take a lesson from history.

I remember 30 years ago, when I was just beginning my time as Governor of Tennessee, China was not the country in the news. It was Japan. There were books written: Japan, No. 1. The United States was, as it is today, the world's largest economy, but everybody was predicting: Watch out for Japan. Japan is becoming No. 1. The United States cannot keep up with Japan, it was said. Their autos, their computers, their electronic goods, their other sophisticated goods were going to overwhelm our markets, and we would quickly fall behind.

There was in the early 1980s a $46 billion trade deficit with Japan. What did we do? Well, we did not act defeatist. We did not play games. We did not act as if we were the fifteenth largest economy in the world instead of the first. We asserted ourselves. We went to Japan and said to them: Make in the United States what you sell in the United States and take down your trade barriers so we can sell in your country what we make in ours.

I went there myself. I remember vividly going to Tokyo in 1979, in November. I met with the Nissan officials. They were considering locating a manufacturing plant in the United States. At that time, they were making all of the Nissan cars and all the Nissan trucks in Japan that they sold in the United States. But they wanted to be in this market, which was and is the most profitable automobile market in the world. So we said to them: Make here what you sell here. And they did. They came to the United States. And where are we 30 years later? Nissan is saying to us that they have operated for 25 years now the most efficient automobile and truck plant in North America, and they are going to be making 85 percent of what they sell in the United States here in the United States.

Nothing has done more to create higher incomes and better jobs in Tennessee than the arrival of Nissan and the Japanese industry, followed by the American auto industry, in our State over the last 30 years. That is how a strong and confident country asserts itself in world competition. That is not just true with automobiles, it is true with many other manufacturing companies that have come to our State from Japan and from other places. That is exactly the way we ought to deal with China.

Our administration can assert itself in a variety of ways about the currency issue. But we should not act as though we are afraid of China anymore than we were afraid of Japan 30 years ago. We should seize this as a moment of opportunity. We should not escalate a trade war that no one will win. We should grow trade in sales and investment in China and urge them to make

in the United States what they sell in the United States. If they should do that, that will create jobs here rather than destroy jobs, as history teaches us a trade war will do.

I hope the Senate will decisively reject the legislation that is being proposed to initiate a trade war with China.

Madam President, in February of last year, we had a fairly extraordinary event at the Blair House here in Washington. The President invited a large number of Members of Congress--must have been 20 or 30 of us around the table. He sat there the whole day, and we sat around the table and we talked about health care. It was called the Health Care Summit.

A great many Americans watched that live on television, and because of the Internet and other explosions of new media, they still watch some of the things that were said that day. The reason I know that is because people have come up to me often and talked about an exchange I had with the President of the United States.

The issue was about health care premiums in the individual market. Citing a Congressional Budget Office letter, I said to the President: ``Mr. President, respectfully, your new health care law that you propose is going to increase individual premiums.''

He stopped me and said:

Now Lamar, let's get our facts straight. You are wrong

about that.

He proceeded to explain to me why I was wrong and he was right. With all respect, I believe I was right and even just a little year later, what the Congressional Budget Office was saying then, which was that individual premiums would go up as a result of the health care law, the last 17 months have shown that we were exactly right. This last week the Kaiser Family Foundation released a survey that showed the average family premium for employer-sponsored insurance was $15,000 in 2011, a 9-percent increase over the previous year. Let me quickly say that employer-sponsored insurance is not the same as the individual insurance I was talking about with the President a year ago. But it is the same subject. Republicans were saying that we opposed the health care bill because it would increase premiums, and what we wanted to do was to lower the cost of health care for Americans by going step by step in that direction rather than expanding an expensive health care system that was already too expensive for more Americans, and doing it in a way that would increase premiums for many Americans.

ABC News said the Kaiser Family Foundation report ``underlines that many of the promises surrounding President Obama's health care legislation remain unfulfilled. Though the White House argues that change is coming.''

Even the New York Times on September 27 said: The steep increase in rates is particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is still sputtering. Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire. And health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for many Americans.

I reported on this Senate floor my conversations with the chief executive officers of restaurant chains around the country. Together they are the second largest employer in the country after the government, and they employ a great many young people and low-income people, the kind of men and women who are looking for jobs today. What they were telling me was that the mandates of the health care law will make it more difficult for them to hire people. In one specific example, one of the largest of the restaurant chains was saying that he operates his store with 90 employees today, and because of the health care mandates, he will seek to operate his store with 70 employees a day. That is not a way to increase the number of jobs.

But there are other provisions in the health care law that cause premiums to go up, which was the point of my discussion with the President in February of 2010.

The CMS Chief Actuary predicted in 2010, saying that by 2014--still a couple of years away, 3 years away--growth in private health insurance premiums is expected to accelerate to 9.4 percent, 4.4 percent higher than in the absence of health reform.

The President had said in his discussion with me that under the law he proposed, the individual market would cost 40 to 20 percent less. That was also in the Congressional Budget Office letter. But those reductions were overwhelmed by other costs that were identified in the CBO letter that would produce a 27- to 30-percent increase. So the net result, according to the predictions in November 2009 by the Congressional Budget Office, was there would be an increase in individual premiums of 10 to 13 percent.

These individual market premiums, premiums that individuals buy without an employer's help, are not the largest share of insurance policies in America, but they affect roughly 12 to 15 million Americans. That is a lot of people who are having their insurance costs go up.

Aon Hewitt's recently released 2011 Health Insurance Trend Driver Survey reports that for 2011, individual health care plans reported estimated 4.7-percent increases directly due to the new health care law.

Then according to the September 8, 2010 Wall Street Journal article:

Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some

Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming

weeks, complicating Democrats' efforts to trumpet their

significant achievement before the mid-term elections. Aetna,

some Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and other smaller carriers

have asked for premium increases of between 1 and 9 percent

to pay for extra benefits required under the law.

In the same article it says Aetna said that extra benefits forced it to seek rate increases for individual plans of 5 to 7 percent in California, and 5.5 to 6 to 8 percent in Nevada. That was precisely the discussion I was having with the President in February 2010, when I said that under the health care law, because of the mandates in the law, individual health care premium costs will go up.

In Wisconsin and North Carolina, according to that same article, Celtic Insurance Company says half of the 18-percent increase it is seeking comes from complying with health care mandates.

Then in a September 16 article last year in the Hartford Courant, ConnectiCare is seeking an average 22-percent hike for its individual market HMO plans. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut say in a letter, it expects the Federal health reform law to increase rates by as much as 22.9 percent for just a single provision.

These increases happen for predictable reasons. Because of the requirements in the law for minimum credible coverage--in other words, if you are required to buy a better kind of health insurance, if you are required to buy a Cadillac instead of a Chevrolet, it is going cost more. And it does cost more.

Another factor that will cause insurance premiums to rise is the new taxes on insurance, lifesaving medical devices and medicines in the health reform law. Someone has to pay for those costs, and the ones who are going to pay for them are the people who buy health insurance.

Then there is the question of what we call cost shift. When we add 25 million Americans to Medicaid, premiums will increase because the costs will shift to private insurers to help pay for those costs. That is according to the Chief Actuary of CMS which is in this administration.

Then, finally, age rating is going to cause insurance premiums to go up. What it basically says is that older Americans will not have to pay as much, so younger Americans are going to have to pay more. It is no surprise that under the new health care law, health insurance premiums are going up, becoming an even bigger drag on employment and on family budgets. This was predicted by the Congressional Budget Office while we were debating the health care law. It was predicted by Republicans who offered an alternative to take steps to decrease costs in health care, instead of this big, comprehensive law that expanded the system that already costs too much.

It offers even more reasons why we should repeal or make significant changes in the health care law if we want to create an environment in which we can make it easier and cheaper to grow private sector jobs, and in which more Americans can afford a reasonable cost health insurance.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult problem. No Member of this body has done more in the last year to try to highlight the problem of the Federal debt. Through his cap plan, which has been a part of almost every discussion we have had seriously about it, through his effort--more recently to support efforts to try to achieve $4 trillion in debt reduction as a part of the select committee, and his suggestion today that allowing Americans to understand something that most of us hadn't focused on--that during our lifetimes we are paying in $110,000, $120,000 into Medicare and taking out, during our lifetimes, $350,000 or so, and that is a problem that has to be solved.

I have been doing research lately on our debt situation. Fundamentally speaking, our problem lies with health care costs. It lies with families, businesses, and with the U.S. Government. Our discretionary spending--the kind we appropriate every year--on everything from national parks and national defense to roads and bridges, that is about 39 percent of the budget. If we stick to our guns on the agreement we made in early August, that will only grow at a little less than the rate of inflation. But it would go over to the mandatory spending, which is about 55 percent of our spending. It is going to go up three times the rate of inflation, and the fastest growing part of that mandatory spending is Medicare and Medicaid.

So we need to save our Medicare and Medicaid system so Americans can rely on them. I think Senator Corker shows respect for the voters of Tennessee and for Americans by assuming that if they understand the problem, they will support a serious effort to deal with a solution. I compliment him for that leadership.

Mr. President, I congratulate the junior Senator from Tennessee for his usual good judgment and insight in working on a difficult problem. No Member of this body has done more in the last year to try to highlight the problem of the Federal debt. Through his cap plan, which has been a part of almost every discussion we have had seriously about it, through his effort--more recently to support efforts to try to achieve $4 trillion in debt reduction as a part of the select committee, and his suggestion today that allowing Americans to understand something that most of us hadn't focused on--that during our lifetimes we are paying in $110,000, $120,000 into Medicare and taking out, during our lifetimes, $350,000 or so, and that is a problem that has to be solved.

I have been doing research lately on our debt situation. Fundamentally speaking, our problem lies with health care costs. It lies with families, businesses, and with the U.S. Government. Our discretionary spending--the kind we appropriate every year--on everything from national parks and national defense to roads and bridges, that is about 39 percent of the budget. If we stick to our guns on the agreement we made in early August, that will only grow at a little less than the rate of inflation. But it would go over to the mandatory spending, which is about 55 percent of our spending. It is going to go up three times the rate of inflation, and the fastest growing part of that mandatory spending is Medicare and Medicaid.

So we need to save our Medicare and Medicaid system so Americans can rely on them. I think Senator Corker shows respect for the voters of Tennessee and for Americans by assuming that if they understand the problem, they will support a serious effort to deal with a solution. I compliment him for that leadership.