Floor Statements

I thank Governor Johanns. It is terrific to be on the Senate floor with other former Governors. When we were doing the health care bill last year, I said everyone who voted for it ought to be sentenced to serve as Governor for 8 years and actually try to implement it. But let me try to answer the question briefly so we can hear from the other Governors.

I became Governor 30 years ago, in the early 1980s. Inflation was 20 percent. It is hard to imagine, in the early days of the Reagan administration, they had driven up interest rates to 12 percent to try to bring inflation down. We had terrible times. Of course, we still had to balance our budget. We had to live within our means. We had to have the amount of money coming in equal to the amount coming out.

Let me tell one story of the difference that has made in our State and how it could make a difference in the Federal Government. The other day, in the Environmental and Public Works Committee, the Tennessee chief highway engineer was testifying. He was there when I was Governor. He is still there. One of the Senators, the chairman, suggested perhaps some flexible Federal financing would be a good thing for Tennessee; in other words, loaning some money to the State of Tennessee to build roads.

The State engineer said: Madam Chairman, with all respect, we don't want to borrow any Federal money. The State of Tennessee has zero road debt.

That about brought the hearing to a halt because several Senators had not ever heard of such a thing.

He said: Yes, that is correct. We have zero road debt. We use all of our gas tax money to build roads, none of it to pay interest.

That means, I say to the Senator from Nebraska, when we have a tough time like we did when I became Governor, as when he was Governor, as we do in the country today, if our interest rates are low or we pay no interest, we can use that money to get through tough times. A lot of the businesses and the families today who have less debt are making their way through these tough times more easily.

On the other hand, the Federal Government, according to the President's budget, by the year 2020, would be spending more money on interest on the Federal debt than it would on our national defense. Interest on the Federal debt would be $931 billion by 2021.

What if that money could be put back in our pockets through tax cuts or used to help send kids to college or build roads in the State or energy research to lower the cost of gasoline? One way, I would say to the Senator from Nebraska, that balancing the budget helps create jobs is if we keep our interest payments down, we keep our taxes down, we can spend our money wisely on things that count.

Mr. President, I appreciate what the Senator from Illinois said and I congratulate him not necessarily for the specifics of what he said but for his general demeanor and attitude throughout this entire discussion about the deficit and the debt. He has been one of those Senators--there have been some on both sides of the aisle--who have made some difficult choices and some difficult decisions and recognizes that at a time when Washington is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend, we have a serious problem and we have to look at our entire fiscal condition in order to solve the problem. The people of this country expect us to do that. So Senator Durbin has, by his willingness to make some hard decisions, set a pretty good example for all of us in the Senate.

Today, my hope is the meeting the President has with our congressional leaders of both sides succeeds, because if they succeed, our country succeeds. The country expects us to do that. I hope they think big. I hope they swing for the fences and get a result and bring it back to us and let us consider it and hopefully enact it and get on to other business. The debt is a major long-term problem, not just for our grandchildren but for us today. We have a bigger issue facing us which is the fact that we have had persistent unemployment in an economy that is not growing, and that is hurting too many people. So the sooner we swing for the fences and get a result and get our debt under control and deal with it in a bipartisan way, the better for the country and the quicker we will be able to get on to the larger question of jobs.

Of course, economists have made clear to us getting the debt under control has a lot to do with jobs. When our total debt is as high as it is today--nearly 100 percent of our gross domestic product--that probably costs us 1 million jobs a year. We can't solve all of that in 1 day or 1 month, but we can take a big step in the right direction, and that is what our countrymen and women want us to do.

I am glad I was able to be here to hear part of the Senator's speech and I am glad I have a chance to commend him for his leadership on this vexing and important problem we need to deal with.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank Senator Schumer for his leadership, as well as Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman. I will make my full remarks following the vote, but I do want to say this bill helps the Senate do its job under the Constitution. Article 2, section 2 tells us to designate those persons where we do not give advice and consent. We are reducing that total by 169, we are expediting about 272 more, and we are removing about 2,600 from the officer corps.

This is a good example of bipartisan work here, and I want to thank my colleagues for improving the bill, amending it, and pointing out things to us that needed to be changed. One of those individuals has been Senator DeMint, and I yield the remainder of our time before the vote to Senator DeMint to speak on his amendment.

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Oklahoma on his remarks and participation in this debate.

Before long, we should have--whenever the majority leader decides--a vote on the Coburn amendment. We are in a position on this resolution that relevant amendments are in order. At the moment, we don't have any others. If we don't have others, then we will proceed to the final bill later this afternoon when the majority leader decides we should do that. We passed the bill this morning with 79 votes. I will have more to say about this resolution in a moment.

I wish to say something that is directly relevant to what the Senator from Oklahoma talked about. We keep

talking about duplication, which is an important part of our oversight responsibilities. Sometimes that leads to the elimination of government bureaucracies, which is a rare event.

Ronald Reagan once said a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life that we will ever see on this Earth. I had an example of that this morning, I say to the Senator from Oklahoma, in a Rules Committee hearing. The purpose of the hearing was to review the qualifications of three excellent men and women who were nominated by the President to serve on the Election Assistance Commission. But what I said at the hearing and what I would like to say on the floor--with all due respect to those excellent nominees--instead of considering the nominees, we should be abolishing the Commission because it doesn't have anything to do. It has finished its work and it ought to be abolished.

The Election Assistance Commission was commissioned in 2003. Since then, the Rules Committee didn't have one single oversight hearing on the Commission. My predecessor asked for an oversight hearing, but we didn't have one. I asked for one earlier this spring, and we didn't have one. At a time when we are borrowing 40 cents out of every $1 that Washington spends, we should not have been there this morning considering new appointments to a commission that is out of work. We should have been there considering recommending to this body that the Commission cease to exist.

This is why. It was created by the Help America Vote Act in 2002. It was authorized for 3 years and given certain tasks. The primary task was to distribute Federal payments to the States to help them upgrade their voting systems. We appropriated $3.2 billion for these payments. That has been distributed. Given our current financial situation, it is very unlikely that any more Federal payments will be forthcoming. We don't have any more money for that purpose. President Obama seems to agree with this, since in his last two budgets he has requested no funds for this purpose.

The Commission was also directed to develop voluntary voting system guidelines and a testing and certification program for voting machines. The actual work involved in this process is performed by another agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which develops the guidelines, and the independent laboratories that conduct that testing. So in the spirit of Senator Coburn's comments, we don't need two agencies assigned the same responsibility.

Finally, the Commission was to act as a clearinghouse to collect and distribute information on best practices in election administration. Yet the intended beneficiaries of this service don't seem to have much use for it. The National Association of Secretaries of State--every State has one--a bipartisan organization made up of our country's chief State elections officials, has twice voted in favor of a resolution calling for abolition of this agency, the Election Assistance Commission.

So here we have a classic example of: I am the government. I am here to give you help you don't want. As a former State official myself--I was Governor of Tennessee--I have a little bit of a bias. I don't see the need for a Federal clearinghouse of best practices for secretaries of state. I don't know why the secretaries of state themselves can't do that. When I was a Governor, I didn't need a Federal agency telling me the best practices of the Governor of Oklahoma so I could use them in Tennessee. We had regular Governors' conferences, and we got to know each other pretty well. If Governor Graham of Florida had a good idea about education, I borrowed that. If I had a good idea on education, Governor Clinton borrowed that, and it worked pretty well. We didn't have to fly to Washington to have a clearinghouse.

So the tasks of this Commission have either been completed or can be performed by more appropriate entities. This is in the spirit of Senator Coburn's amendment. The Commission did its job. We should thank the Commission and their staff for their service.

But if the completion of their appointed task isn't enough of a reason to close it down, the Commission also appears to have a serious management problem or two. Though its mission has dwindled, its staff has grown. It has less to do but has more people doing it. The Commission had a staff of 20 in 2004. Last year, it had three times that many. It had 64 people--more staff needed for less work.

I am sure there are some very good people there. There must be, because the average salary--according to Congressman Gregg Harper of the House of Representatives--for all the members of the Election Assistance Commission is over $100,000 a year. This year's budget submission from the Commission proposes spending $5.4 million to manage $3.4 million worth of programs. Does that make any sense, when the cost of overhead and staff salaries exceeds the programs they have to administer? Clearly, something is wrong.

That is precisely the kind of small thing in the big picture we are dealing with that adds up and up and up and creates an environment in which we seem to be content in spending more and more and borrowing 40 cents of every $1 we spend.

Finally, the Commission has an unfortunate history of hiring discrimination. The Office of Special Counsel found they engaged in illegal discrimination when, during the search for a general counsel, an employment offer was made and then withdrawn when the Democratic Commissioners discovered the applicant was a Republican. This resulted in a substantial financial settlement being awarded to the applicant; thereby forcing taxpayers to bear the cost of the illegal acts of Commissioners. Amazingly, it has been reported that in a subsequent interview with another applicant for the same position, one of these Commissioners again tainted the hiring process by asking the applicant what the Department of Labor has termed ``inappropriate questions about his military service.''

Apparently, the Commissioner didn't want Republicans or members of the military working at the Commission. The Department of Labor has reportedly found the applicant's claim of discrimination to be meritorious and, if not resolved, this case may be referred to the Office of Special Counsel.

I said this morning that the three men and women whom President Obama nominated seem to have exceptional backgrounds, and they are not to blame for any of these incidents. But what I also said was, since they seem to be exceptionally good nominees, maybe we should find a commission where there is something for them to do, instead of a commission that has finished its job and where we are just perpetuating it with employees who, on average, make $100,000 a year in salary, according to Congressman Harper.

Even if we were to assume these nominees before us could right the ship and correct the problems, the question remains: Where would the ship sail, and why would they make the trip? Do we need the Commission, with its main job completed? Couldn't any remaining duties be better performed somewhere else? Can a government program ever be terminated?

As I said at the beginning of these remarks, Ronald Reagan once said: A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life that we will ever see. Shouldn't we try to use this opportunity to prove that Ronald Reagan was, in that case, wrong?

I congratulate the Senator from Oklahoma for his work on duplication. This isn't the first time. This is one of the many times he has spoken and acted on the subject. I offer this example of the Election Assistance Commission as one small step we could take in the right direction by, in the appropriate way, canceling the Commission instead of confirming three new nominees to it.

I thank the Chair and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I believe Senator Harkin is coming in the next few minutes. In the meantime, I thought I would comment on the legislation that has been before the body since late last week--to reduce the number of Senate confirmations of Presidential nominations, so the Senate can exercise its constitutional duty of advice and consent more effectively.

This all goes back to our U.S. Constitution, article II, section 2, which says that one of the most important duties of the Senate is ``its advice and consent responsibility.'' That is one of the well-known functions of the Senate. Many have written about advice and consent.

The Constitution says the President shall nominate, with the advice and consent of the Senate, ambassadors, ministers, judges, and other officers of the United States. Today, there are about 1,400 of those officers. When President Kennedy was President, there were about 286, more or less. Under President Clinton, there were about 914, more or less. It continually goes up. This includes a large number of part-time advisory positions, such as the Library Advisory Board and a variety of other boards. That is why the Founders put into the Constitution another provision, which says Congress may, by law, vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper in the President alone, in the courts of law, and heads of departments.

It is up to us to make sure we don't trivialize the constitutional responsibility we have, so we define the number of men and women whom the President nominates, who require advice and consent, and we define the ones who don't. We have not done a good job deciding which ones did not. Over the last few days, the Senate has decided to remove 169 of the 1,400 nominations from the advise and consent requirement. It is debating, right now, removing another 272 full-time or part-time positions and putting them in an expedited process, so we will have affected 450 or so of the 1,400 nominations, either by removing them from advice and consent or speeding up the process. This will permit us to focus more attention on the job we are sent to do, which is to do a good job of evaluating the most important offices.

Just one indication of how we have been trivializing the responsibility to decide who does deserve advice and consent and who doesn't is that only about 3 percent of all the Presidential nominations in the last Congress actually were deemed important enough to have a rollcall vote on the floor of the Senate. Ninety-seven percent were deemed not important enough. Of course, they were not. They were valuable people, but they were part-time advisory board members who were part of a board where an executive director, for example, already reported to someone who was confirmed by the President.

We had examples of positions being confirmed by the Senate who reported to someone, who reported to someone, who reported to someone, who reported to someone else--all of them confirmed by advice and consent. So we made a modest step in the direction of helping us execute and exercise our Constitutional duty under article II, section 2, in a more effective way.

This resolution we are debating, unlike the bill this morning, does not remove one single person from the right of advice and consent. It expedites it in the following way: The President's nomination would come to the desk here--and this is after the President has done all his vetting--and then the relevant committee, say, the Finance Committee or the Judiciary Committee, would go through its usual exercise of asking the nominee to answer questions and provide all that information. When that nomination first comes here, that information is listed on the Senate Executive Calendar that we Senators and staffers read. Then, when the information is all gathered by the relevant committee, that is indicated. Then there is a full 10 days for all of us to look at that. If a single Senator says he or she would like for this nominee to go on to the committee for a hearing and then for the traditional markup, that happens. But if all 100 Senators say they looked at the information and it is not necessary to go to that extra time, expense, and delay, then it moves to the Executive Calendar, and the majority leader can bring it up whenever he or she wishes.

What we have done is, in approximately 450 cases, we have affected the 1,400 nominations that are subject to advice and consent. We have either eliminated the requirement or we have expedited the process and made it possible for us to focus more attention on those deserving the most important attention.

One other aspect--and I see the Senator from Oregon here and perhaps he wishes to speak, so I will conclude my remarks with this. There is one other important aspect that we deal with here. It may be the most important thing we can do. The first one I discussed was slowing down the trivialization of the Senate's advice and consent constitutional duty. That is what the first part of what we are doing does. The bill did that, which we have already passed. The resolution does that, which we are now debating.

The second aspect that was dealt with in the bill this morning is dealing with the phenomenon of what I call innocent until nominated. We have developed a practice in this town of making or having the President select an otherwise unsuspecting distinguished citizen from Sioux City or Nashville or Bangor or Sacramento and after going through an FBI check and other things, nominated that person for some position deserving of advice and consent. By the time that person makes his or her way through all the executive vetting process, by the time people pore over the tax returns and answer multiple questions--often the same question asked in different ways--they have likely got an inaccuracy in there somewhere. Then their name is sent up here and the committee investigates them and asks them many of the same questions and they might have an inconsistency. Then they show up for a publicized hearing with their family and, all of a sudden, they are made out to be a common criminal because they made a mistake trying to decipher these forms.

A former majority leader of the Senate, Howard Baker, and his wife,

former Senator Nancy Kassebaum, went to Japan a few years ago as President George H.W. Bush's nominee as Ambassador to Japan--Senator Baker was. All of us knew Senator Baker. He was voted by the Senate the most admired Senator by the Democrats as well as the Republicans when he was here. All the Senators who were here at the time knew Senator Kassebaum, his wife. Yet Senator Baker told me he had to spend $250,000 in legal and accounting fees just to make his way carefully through the nomination process, with all the executive vetting and all the vetting the committees did, just so he would not make a mistake and just so he would not be subject to this ``innocent until nominated'' syndrome.

The bill we passed this morning simply establishes a process. If the bill should pass the House and be signed by the President, then we would have a working group of people appointed by the Senate--people appointed by the executive branch--and we would work together to try to simplify the executive forms and the congressional forms that we use to see if we can have a smart form, a simple form that perhaps we could all use; and then at least, for the most part, a nominee, when nominated by the President, could fill out a single form, which could then be used by all of us who need to know basic information, such as what was their income last year. We can ask the question: Do we need to know every single residence address they ever had in their life if they are going to be on an advisory board, for example, for the United States?

That practice will have to be done with respect to the constitutional separation of powers. The executive branch will have to create its own documents. The Senate will have to create its own. If we work together and create a smart form--and Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman have made important contributions to the process of how candidates are vetted, and the forms--we will not only have slowed down the trivialization of the Senate's duty of advice and consent by doing a better job deciding who not to confirm, we will also have reduced the phenomenon of innocent until nominated, which has not only made it difficult for Presidents to staff the government, delayed their ability to form a government, but unnecessarily harassed otherwise honorable men and women who are asked to serve their government.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I make a point of order that the amendment offered by the Senator from Iowa is not relevant.

Thank you, Mr. President. This situation recalls the debate we had at the beginning of the year when a number of Senators felt as though we needed to make the Senate a more effective institution, which is always a noble goal, but we had some differences of opinion about how to do that. One group of Senators, including Senator Udall, Senator Harkin, and others, renewed the effort to basically say the Senate would be a majoritarian body which would decide questions with 51 votes. To most Americans, that sounds like the normal order of business, and it is. We grow up in the first, second, and third grades selecting the class president. If someone gets a majority of the votes, that person wins. But in the Senate, over its history, we have had a different process because the Senate serves a different function.

The House is a majoritarian institution. If a party wins a majority in the House, a freight train rolls through the House and the bill is passed and sent to the Senate. The Senate, throughout its history, has been the saucer into which the tea is poured to cool it a little bit. In other words, it takes a little more deliberation here to pass something. That can be very frustrating. It can slow things down, but the process was designed that way. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any need for two different bodies.

So we have one body which can change with every election every 2 years and pass something such as the health care law by a majority vote. Let's take another example: Ending the secret ballot in union elections, which the House of Representatives, under Democratic control, did pass. But it didn't pass the Senate, because in the Senate, there are rules in which we need 60 votes to pass most important pieces of legislation. The shoe is on the other foot too. If the Republican House of Representatives were to pass, let's say, a tort reform bill that our Democratic friends didn't like, we would have a hard time passing it over here. It would take 60 votes, and that would mean that we 47 Senate Republicans, even if we were all for it, would have to persuade 13 or 14 of our Democratic friends to join us.

The theory of the Senate is that it forces consensus. It doesn't always work that way, but that is the idea. We have had a pretty good example of it with the legislation we have been debating over the last few days. We have a coalition of Democrats and Republicans who agreed we needed to change the Senate nominations process and we had the support of both the Democratic and Republican leaders. Because of this coalition we were able to move the bill to the floor without the cloture motion. We were able to allow any relevant amendment to come to the floor. We were able to pass a bill earlier today and it looks as though we are going to be able to pass a resolution this evening that will complete our work. The bill this morning got 79 votes. I hope the resolution this afternoon gets at least that many votes. That is the way the Senate should work.

I am glad the amendment offered by the Senator from Iowa, on behalf of Senator Udall, is out of order and not relevant to this discussion. Even if it were relevant, I think it would be the wrong step for us to take. I think it is better to have a Senate that forces consensus by requiring 60 votes on big issues. That avoids what Alexis de Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority in his book ``Democracy in America.'' He saw two great threats to the new American democracy at that time; one was Russia, as he said, and he turned out to be prescient on that. The other one was the possibility of the tyranny of the majority--that the majority would get control and simply run over minority rights. That cannot be done in the Senate because there have to be 60 votes on big issues for the issues to pass. That means when one sets out to pass most pieces of legislation, if one wants to do it in a purely partisan way, one is not likely to succeed. If one wants to do it in a way that gets a result, one is going to have to form a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, as we have here with these nominations reforms.

This discussion by Senator Udall, Senator Harkin, and others wasn't for naught because it initiated a debate that ended up with some changes in Senate procedures which we think are for the better. One of these changes was the abolition of secret holds, which some Senators in this body, including Senator Wyden and Senator Grassley, have been advocating for years--more than a decade. That was done. The discussions earlier this year with Senator Harkin and Senator Udall resulted in

the legislation we passed earlier today, which helps the Senate exercise its constitutional duty to advice and consent by doing a better job of deciding which nominations do not deserve advice and consent. So we eliminated the requirement for advice and consent on 169 positions of the 1,400 that now require Senate confirmation. Most of those were part-time advisory boards. We didn't need those to be confirmed.

We eliminated nearly 3,000 advice-and-consent requirements on public health officers and the NOAA Officer Corps. They are very valuable Federal employees, but we were confirming them in groups of 300 nominees at times. No Senator knew whom he or she was confirming, and that trivializes the whole constitutional duty of advice and consent, which is in the Constitution of the United States in article II, section 2.

Another reform we are making and will proceed with is reducing the phenomenon of innocent until nominated. I have spoken about this several times on the floor. It is a situation whereby we take an unsuspecting citizen of the United States that the President recruits to a position in the government. Then that person begins to go through this gauntlet of complicated forms that have built up over the years. It first started with the executive branch, where a person is asked to fill out every place they have lived since they were 17 years of age and define income three different ways. And by the time they get to the Senate committee whose job it is to investigate and confirm that person and they fill out all their forms, the person is bound to make some mistake. Then they are hauled up in front of the Committee with the spotlights on them and they have told a lie inadvertently.

I mentioned earlier today the former Senate majority leader, Howard Baker, who was voted most admired Senator by Democrats and Republicans. He had to spend $250,000 of his own money on lawyers when President Bush nominated him to be the Ambassador to Japan--absolutely ridiculous. Republicans and Democrats who have served in personnel offices and Chiefs of Staff to the last several Presidents all have said this practice of innocent until nominated is a great disservice to the American Government.

I see Senator Schumer on the floor. He and I will be meeting with the White House personnel director as soon as this legislation is approved by the House and signed by the President. We hope the working group that will be set up under the legislation will produce what we call a smart form, so that if the President asks a citizen to serve their government, that person can fill out a single form for most questions. Then, the various offices of the executive branch that need the information can get the same information. When the nomination is sent to the Senate, perhaps even we can take some of that information and use the same form to get it for us. It doesn't interfere with the separation of powers. The executive can do whatever it wishes to do. We in the Senate can do whatever we wish to do.

We have made some progress as a result of those discussions earlier in the year. It is modest progress, but I think any time we eliminate confirmation for 169 positions out of 1,400, any time we expedite about 270 more, any time we stop the practice of confirming box loads of nominees without even knowing who is in there, then we have done something to avoid the trivialization of our constitutional duty to advice and consent. If we can make a further step with avoiding the innocent until nominated phenomenon, the work Senator Harkin, Senator Udall, and others have done will have made some progress. The work of Senators Harkin, Udall and other will have made progress even though we didn't adopt their rule to turn the Senate into a majoritarian institution.

I appreciate the spirit with which Senator Harkin offered the amendment. He and Senator Udall worked on the amendment. I think they helped reduce some steps which will help make the Senate a more effective institution. We still have a ways to go and we will continue to work on those things.

I see Senator Schumer is here. I compliment him for his work on this and in the way he has gone about it. He and I, working with the majority leader and the Republican leader, have created an environment for this bill that didn't require enforcement of a cloture motion. An environment that allowed all relevant amendments to come to the floor, that allowed all the debate Senators seemed to want and that passed the bill. We hope we are coming to a point where we can pass the resolution and take these steps to improve the effectiveness of the Senate.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I thank the majority leader and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, for the way they worked on this legislation. Not just on this bill, but when they were the respective whips of their parties several years ago, each of them working on trying to help improve the Senate's ability to do its oversight by doing a better job with our advice-and-consent responsibility. That is one of our better known responsibilities. It is a constitutional responsibility. It is in Article II, Section 2. But as a part of that advice-and-consent responsibility, the Senate has the opportunity to define which other positions the President may appoint. That is what this is about.

Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman have also worked for many years, and they will be here in a few minutes to open the debate. Senator Schumer and I will come to the floor about at 2:40 and make our statements on behalf of the Rules Committee.

I thank the majority leader and Republican leader for doing this because this is not the most glamorous piece of legislation. What I am about to say is not so glamorous either. But this bill has come to the floor by unanimous consent. That means there were 100 Members of this body who could have objected, and none have.

I thank the Senators--many of whom have very different views on this bill--for agreeing to this agreement by which we are proceeding. We are not proceeding under a cloture vote; we are proceeding the way the Senate really ought to work day-in and day-out. Members have the opportunity to offer relevant amendments. I am sure many will. I thank the Republican leader and the majority leader for their forbearance in that way. We have to have an element of trust for each other.

I am going to do my best to make sure the relevant amendments that come before us, Democratic or Republican, are voted on.

I thank all those involved. I hope Senators will be preparing their relevant amendments if they are not already filed and were not already enumerated in the agreement.

I will refrain from making my remarks until my colleague, Senator Schumer, the chairman of the Rules Committee, comes to the floor at 2:40. We will await the arrival of Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman, who are the chairman and ranking member of the committee that reported the bill to the Senate.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senators from Maine and Connecticut not just for their comments today but for their work for nearly a decade on this issue. This is hard, slogging work in the Senate. It is not easy to do. As I mentioned earlier, it is not one bit glamorous, but it helps make the Senate a more effective institution. If we are more effective, then we can deal better with our debt, then we can deal better with Libya, then we can deal better with creating jobs, then we can earn more respect from the people who elect us. So I thank them for their leadership.

I thank Senator McConnell and Senator Reid for creating the environment in which this can happen.

I thank all my colleagues, many of whom did not exercise all their rights, and allowed the bill to come to the floor in this agreement by unanimous consent. We have not had this privilege very often in the Senate. It is a good way for the Senate to work. It is the right way for the Senate to work. What it means is, over the next day or two, however long it takes, Senators may bring their relevant amendments to the floor and they may call them up without asking unanimous consent to set aside a pending amendment.

Then we will have a debate, and then we will vote on them. When we are through voting, we will vote on the bill. I would encourage my colleagues to prepare to bring their amendments to the floor. I am going to defer my remarks until this afternoon, when Senator Schumer, the chairman of the Rules Committee, will come to the floor at 2:40. I will speak following him. We will talk about the resolution, which is the other half of the bill.

But this is legislation about making Senate oversight, as Senator Lieberman said, more effective, not less effective. It is about putting a stop to the trivializing of our constitutional duty for advice and consent. It is about ending the phenomenon of innocent until nominated, which is what happens to distinguished citizens of this country who are asked to serve in the Federal Government and, to their great horror, discover they are heading through a maze of conflicting forms and questionnaires, until finally they are dragged before a tribunal in the Senate and caught in an inadvertent error and made out to be a criminal, when they thought they were an upstanding citizen, having served in their hometowns for a long time.

We should stop that business, and every administration in recent years has asked us to do it. So this is the right thing to do. It is a modest step but an important step. It is a signal that we can do our business well, that we can treat American citizens with respect, that we can focus our attention where it needs to be focused and not focus our attention where it is not.

Senator Collins mentioned there are several thousand public health officers and others who are now confirmed by the Senate. That is the rough equivalent of confirming forest rangers or staff members of the Senate or agricultural extension officers. I mean, they are all valuable positions, but did our Founders expect that we would be sending the FBI to ask whether they lived beyond their means before they took their job and then conduct diligent inquiries there and before some committee of the Senate?

Well, of course not. So we are going to end up with about 1,200 nominations from the President, to whom we need to devote advice and consent. One indication of why it is so necessary to do this is, nobody can tell us how many Presidential appointments there are that need advice and consent. The Congressional Research Service at first said 1,200, and then when our staffs began looking at it, it is more like 1,400.

In the last Congress, how many of these important advice-and-consent positions actually deserved a rollcall vote? Three percent. So we only had time to give a rollcall vote to 3 percent of the men and women whom we have decided need the extraordinary constitutional process of advice and consent. We need to elevate the advice-and-consent process back to where it ought to be, do our jobs correctly, treat people who are nominated by the President with dignity and hope the President can staff his government appropriately so we do not have to. As Senator Collins said, it has been 6 months while we wait to get the President's defense team in place.

That is partly the President's own fault, but it is partly our fault, and we need to work together. We have a process in this bill where we will work together to try to speed that up. So I am glad I had the opportunity to hear Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins. This is not the first time they have tried to do this. But they will succeed in doing this because they have broad bipartisan support and an era of cooperation within the Senate.

We will have some debate. We still have some disagreements about which positions should be in and which positions should be out. That is why we have relevant amendments. That is why we bring them up. That is why we vote on them. That is why we will eventually come to a final result on the bill.

I thank them for their leadership, for their eloquence, and for their public spiritedness.

Mr. President, I congratulate Senator Schumer for his diligent work on this effort to help the Senate do a better job with its responsibilities of advice and consent.

As the chairman of the Rules Committee, he and I have been working together at the direction of Senator Reid and Senator McConnell to come up with a consensus about how to do this. Our colleagues, all 100, have agreed that we can move on to the bill and debate any relevant amendment, which has not happened very often around here, and is exactly the way the Senate ought to work.

So I thank Senator Schumer for taking on this difficult task. It is not a glamorous task, but it is one that hopefully will make the Senate more effective. If we are more effective, we can do a better job of dealing with the debt, of helping to make it easier and cheaper to create private sector jobs, of

coming up with an energy policy that helps us find more American energy and use less, and regain respect from the American people who have given us the privilege of serving here.

I start this discussion with our Constitution, which, as the late Senator Byrd used to suggest, we should all carry around with us. Perhaps the most celebrated constitutional duty of the United States Senate is our responsibility to provide advice and consent. It is in article II, section 2, of the Constitution. It talks about the President there, but it says: ``He shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate'' and among other things--to appoint a number of people. But it also says:

. . . the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such

inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President

alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

So this discussion is about that part of our constitutional responsibility, deciding what inferior officers should be vested--the appointment of which should be vested in the President alone or in heads of departments. I will talk more about that in a moment. But there are really three major goals of this legislation.

One is to stop the trivializing of the constitutional duty of advice and consent. We are providing our advice and consent on so many Presidential nominations that the President is not able to spend as much time as he should on getting them to us rapidly.

It is slowing down the organization of government. We, in turn, are not able to spend as much time as we should reviewing the qualifications of the important officers of the government that the President needs to appoint, and we are not serving ourselves well. We are trivializing the constitutional duty of advice and consent.

The second thing we are doing--and in this, the Executive, the President and the Congress, are equally to blame--is creating an environment that I would describe as being ``innocent until nominated'' in which we take some self-respecting U.S. citizen, and the President invites them to come take a position in the Federal Government of honor and dignity, and suddenly they find themselves immersed in a series of duplicative interrogations from all directions in which they must fill out forms that define words such as ``income'' in different ways, all of which is designed to lead them before a committee, not to really assess their qualifications but to see if they can be trapped and turned into an apparent criminal. In other words, they are innocent until nominated.

Every former administration's officials in recent memory have come to us and said we need to work together. No. 1, we need to stop the trivializing of the Senate's advice and consent responsibility; No. 2, we need to do something about this environment of innocent until nominated.

Finally, this legislation--which, as I said, has been moved to the floor for debate with the consent of all 100 Members of the Senate--is really the third step in the discussion that began in January about what steps we can take to make the Senate a more effective place. One step was to get rid of secret holds. Another step was to limit the reading of the minutes as a dilatory tactic.

This is the third step, appointed by the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell. They asked Senator Schumer and I to form a working group. We have come forward with a bill and a resolution, which we will debate today and tomorrow--until we finish--and it will streamline executive nominations and hopefully give us a chance to do more oversight on the positions that need the oversight and not waste our time with positions that don't. At the same time, it will make it easier for the next President to staff his or her government promptly so that they can deal with questions of war and the economy as they come up and not have to wait 6 months or 9 months after they have taken office to deal with those questions. And it will make it more inviting for good citizens of this country to accept a President's invitation to come serve in the Federal Government.

As I mentioned, this came about earlier this year when we were about to have a showdown over the filibuster. The Senator from Oregon was part of that debate. I hope he feels some credit for moving this discussion to where it is today. This is not all that the Senator from Oregon or the Senator from New Mexico or others want, but I think what we quickly learn in the Senate is that a few small steps in the right direction is one good way to get where you want to go. This will be a third step.

Basically, this is what we will be doing. We are affecting about 451 Presidential appointments. This represents about one-third of all Senate-confirmed positions. That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. Let me qualify it in this way. Here is what has happened over the last several years.

In 1960, President Kennedy had to fill 286 positions in the ranks of Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, Assistant Secretary, and Administrator.

By the time President Clinton came into office, there were 914 positions with those titles. That is according to the Volcker Commission Report, which recommended the kinds of things we are considering today.

Since then, CRS has counted more than 1,200 Presidential appointments requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, and our staffs on the Rules Committee and the Homeland Security Committee found more than 1,400. So we are in the embarrassing position of having to answer the question--if somebody were to say: Here is this enormously important position of the Senate, this constitutional duty to provide advice and consent, and how many Presidential appointments are subject to advice and consent? The answer would be that we don't know. CRS says it is 1,200. Our staffs say it is 1,410.

Another indication that we are not giving them sufficient attention-- at least to the ones we should--is the number of rollcall votes on Presidential appointments requiring advice and consent. You would think that if a Presidential appointment were important enough to require a full FBI check, which is very expensive, time consuming, and takes several months; and then a nomination by the President and all of the vetting that goes with that; and then the work of the White House personnel office and all the time spent with that; and then it comes to the Senate and goes to our committees, and our committees have their own questionnaire and their own investigator and their own schedule for hearings and their own schedule for voting, and then they report it to the floor--you would think if it were important enough to go through all of that in order to get our advice and consent, we would take time to vote on it, would you not? Well, in the last Congress, this Senate voted on 3 percent of the nominations that require advice and consent. That is one indication that we are doing too many--we are trivializing the duty. So not only do we not know how many there are--we think, now that our staffs have worked through this, there are about 1,410--97 percent of them are not important enough to vote on; we just pass them by unanimous consent.

As Senator Enzi said earlier today in another setting, and I don't think he minds my bringing this up, sometimes we approve these nominations in blocks--280 at a time--without knowing anything about them. So we are pretending we are giving advice and consent when we are not.

An example of that would be the positions of the several thousand members of the Public Health Service Officer Corps and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Officer Corps. They are all subject to advice and consent. They come through in the box loads. They are all very valuable public servants, I am sure, but to subject the Public Health Service Officer Corps and the National Oceanic Administration Officer Corps to a full Senate advice and consent would be the approximate equivalent of requiring advice and consent of agricultural extension officers or forest rangers or members of the Senate staff. They all have important jobs, but they are not supposed to rise to the level of advice and consent, which is why the U.S. Constitution specifically said that we should select ``inferior officers,'' in its words, whom the President himself--the President alone--or heads of departments may appoint.

Now, what is an ``inferior officer''? Well, words have meaning, and Justice

Scalia gave a definition to the words ``inferior officer'' in the case of Edmund v. United States in 1997. Justice Scalia said:

We think it is evident that inferior officers are officers

whose work is directed and supervised at some level by others

who were appointed by the Presidential nomination with the

advice and consent of the Senate.

That makes pretty good sense. If you are working for someone who is appointed by the President and subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, then you are accountable to the Senate and the people of the United States through your superior. That makes you an inferior officer. You may be important, but you are subordinate to someone else whose appointment was subject to advice and consent.

Here is what we have done in the legislation.

First, we have a bill from the Homeland Security Committee, and then we have a resolution that comes from our Rules Committee. Of the 451 positions that are affected, in addition to the thousands of members of the officer corps I mentioned, 248 are part-time board and commission positions that could be expedited and would keep their advice and consent rolls and remain Senate-confirmed. I will talk more about that in a minute. Then 118 other part-time board and commission positions will no longer require Senate confirmation. And then 85 positions that are full-time would not require advice and consent for confirmation.

After all is said and done, when you include the fact that 248 positions we affected are merely expedited and still subject to advice and consent if a single U.S. Senator says it is necessary--they are still subject to it under any event and to the full investigation if a single Senator says it is necessary--we will still have more than 1,200 Senate-confirmed executive branch nominations. So, as Senator Collins said on the floor today, after this is done, if our bill and resolution are passed, more than 90 percent of the full-time positions that now are subject to advice and consent will still be subject to it, as will more than 85 percent of the part-time positions.

Why is it important that we have so many positions that are subject to advice and consent? One could argue, why don't you narrow it simply to the Cabinet members or the Cabinet members and their deputies? Why slow the President down in his work by requiring so many to come over, because even after we are through this, after everything Senators Schumer, Collins, Lieberman, and I recommended to the Senate was adopted, the Senate will have 1,200 persons it could put through this gauntlet of advice and consent and make its point.

Many Senators choose to use these confirmation proceedings to exercise our prerogative as elected Members of Congress to get information, to assert our views or to influence the direction of government. For example, Senator McConnell has been holding President Obama's trade nominees until President Obama sends his free-trade agreements to Congress. Senator Grassley and Senator Chambliss held up the Solicitor General's nomination because it had been 2 years and their request for documents from the Department of Justice had not been forthcoming. After they held up the Solicitor General's nomination in the advice and consent process, they got their documents.

I suggest that having 1,200 opportunities to hold a Presidential nominee hostage is enough for any Senator to work his or her will in order to make a point and that to go beyond that is to begin to trivialize the whole process.

As I mentioned earlier, our legislation has two parts. In the first part--the part we are debating now, the bill--there are approximately 200 positions that now are subject to Presidential confirmation that would not be subject to Presidential confirmation. These would be 85 full-time positions, including legislative affairs and public affairs positions, chief financial officers, information technology positions, and others. These are all important positions, but let's think of it this way:

I was once a Cabinet member. It took me about 3 months--well, 4 or 5, from December through March--after I was announced and confirmed by the Senate, and then I had the opportunity to ask the President to send to the Senate all of the subordinate officials who required Senate confirmation. That means the President had to vet those people. That means the Senate had to go through its whole process, once information got here, and vet those people. It had to schedule a hearing. It had to report out the name. That had to come to the Senate. That had to be voted on on the floor.

So there I was, sitting--confirmed in March or April, after I had been announced in December as the President's Education Secretary--but it took me until toward the end of the year to get most of the President's team in place in the Department of Education. Who does that serve? Who does that serve well? Wouldn't it be better if I could appoint my own legislative affairs officer who could then come up and deal with Congress from April on instead of having to wait until later?

This is important for citizens to know. If you are in a position subject to advice and consent, you are not to go to the Department until you are confirmed or you will not be confirmed because it would be considered to be an insult to the Senate. So you have Cabinet members, particularly at the beginning of an administration, sitting there almost alone, without any new members of the President's team to help them implement policy.

That affects the voters in a bad way. Let's say all the voters in a country get upset with President Obama and elect a Republican President whose job it is to bring the deficit down. Let us pose a hypothetical. In comes the new Republican President and it takes 2 or 3 months to confirm the Secretaries of the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and then with other key people it might take 6 or 8 months. The people of this country are saying: Wait, I voted in November and here we are coming into the next summer and the government still isn't formed and the deficit is still bad. I am very frustrated with my government.

This legislation is set to deal with that. The bill itself takes about 200 positions and removes advice and consent, with 118 of those being part-time advisory commission members.

The second part of the bill we will be discussing takes 248 nominations and expedites them. These are all part time. This might be the Goldwater Scholarship Foundation or the National Council on the Arts. What it does is create a new procedure in the Senate, where the President's nomination simply comes to the desk--the President has already vetted this person; the person has to answer the questions of the relevant committee in the Senate--and unless some Senator objects, once that is done, the vote can come to the floor within 10 days. Yet, if one Senator objects, all 248 of those nominations can go through the full process. So with those we believe we are, at least, speeding up things.

To summarize, for 451 nominations in this bill, we take about 118 part-time positions and remove them from advice and consent. These include, for example, 15 members of the National Board of Education Sciences, 20 members of the National Museum and Library Services Board, and 7 Commissioners of the Mississippi River Commission.

I am sure the National Museum and Library Services part-time advisory board does good work for us and for this country, but is it necessary for the Senate to spend its time providing advice and consent on these part-time advisory members of the National Museum and Library Services Board when we ought to be reducing the debt, inquiring into the policies of a Cabinet member or working on some other legislation?

Then, in the resolution, 248 part-time positions are expedited. As I mentioned earlier, nearly 3,000 members of the Public Health Service Corps are taken out of the process of advice and consent.

Let me speak for just a moment about the other part of the legislation. I talked about how the bill and the resolution will take 451 of approximately 1,410 Presidential nominees subject to advice and consent and take about half of those and expedite them and take the other half and take away the advice and consent requirement, leaving 1,200 persons whose nominations actually require advice and consent. What happens to those persons? Let me give an example, and it is a personal example I have repeated on the Senate floor before.

In December of 1990, President Bush announced in the White House that he was going to nominate me to be the U.S. Education Secretary. I was excited about that. I was then the President of the University of Tennessee. I sold my house, my wife and I packed up, and we moved our children to schools in Washington. I came up here prepared to serve and help the President be the education President, but I forgot about Senate confirmation. I should have known. I should have known because I used to work in the Senate years ago. But I forgot about the Senate confirmation and all its splendor. So when I got up here, I was, after a while, summoned before the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--on which I now serve--and with my family sitting there, the Senator from Ohio, the late Senator Metzenbaum, said: Well, Governor Alexander, I have heard some very disturbing things about you, but I don't think I will bring them up here.

Well, Senator Kassebaum from Kansas turned around and said: Howard, you did just bring it up so why don't you go ahead and talk about it. I said: Senator, if you have heard any disturbing things, I would like to know about them because I would like to answer the question. But he decided not to do that, and in his wisdom--and it was his right-- Senator Metzenbaum held my nomination up for 3\1/2\ months. I didn't know what to do about that so I went around and finally saw Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and told him the story of what had happened. I said: What is your advice? He said: Keep your mouth shut. You have no cards to play. I said: What do you mean? He said: Let me tell you my story. He said President Ford had nominated him to be on--I think it was the Federal Trade Commission in the 1970s. Warren Rudman was then the attorney general of New Hampshire, a well-respected citizen. The Senator from New Hampshire put a secret hold on Warren Rudman's nomination and so days and weeks went by and no action was taken in the Senate on the attorney general of New Hampshire. He was greatly embarrassed by the whole thing. I said: Well, what did you finally do? He said: Well, I asked the President to withdraw my name. I said: Is that the end of the story? He said: No. I then ran against the so-and-so in the next election and beat him, and that is how I got in the Senate.

Well, not every citizen can run for the Senate and defeat the Senator who they think doesn't treat them fairly in the confirmation process. But there is a lot about the confirmation process that can be fixed and still leave all of us with the right to hold up, to vote against, and to defeat 1,200 different nominations by the President.

Take, for example, what happened in President Obama's first year. According to news accounts, in March of 2009, there were key vacant positions at the Treasury Department--an Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax, Trade and Tariff Policy, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs. The first choice for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury withdrew her name from consideration 4 months after the President's selection in the biggest economic crisis we had had since the Great Depression.

According to one news source, the list of vacancies on the Treasury Department Web site showed:

The Main Treasury building is a lonely place, conjuring up

visions of Geithner signing dollar bills one by one . . .

watering the plants, and answering the phones when he is not

crafting a bank rescue plan.

Of course, there are other career employees available--at least one holdover Assistant Secretary and various Czars in the White House. This kind of delay actually encourages the unhealthy appointment of Czars in the White House because the President can just do that, but even one of the Czars expressed concern about the slow filling up of the Treasury Department.

Of course, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat and voted for President Obama or not, you certainly don't want a President whose Treasury Secretary isn't equipped to deal with the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The President brought some of this difficulty on himself, and our legislation recognizes that--not just this President but previous Presidents and the next President. Part of the President's difficulty in filling jobs--and this is one that has afflicted every President since Watergate--is the maze of investigations and forms that prospective senior officials must complete and the risk they run of then being trapped and humiliated and disqualified by an unintentional and harmless mistake.

I voted against Secretary Geithner's nomination because I thought it was a bad example for the man in charge of collecting taxes not to have paid them, and I didn't think his excuse for not paying them was plausible. But that doesn't mean I think that every minor tax discrepancy in our Byzantine Tax Code--that reaches 3.7 million words and is badly in need of reform--should disqualify any citizen for public office. I think very few Americans with complex tax forms can make their way through our maze of investigations and come out without a single change in what they did.

Take the case of the former mayor of Dallas, Ron Kirk. He was President Obama's nominee to be the U.S. Trade Representative. Headlines in the newspaper said Kirk paid back taxes. Why? Primarily because he had failed to list his income and then take a charitable deduction on speaking fees he gave away to charity. Let me say that again. He failed to list his income and then take a charitable deduction on speaking fees he gave away to charity.

Common sense suggests Mr. Kirk and his tax adviser did what was appropriate. After all, he didn't keep the money. The IRS apparently has a more convoluted rule for dealing with such things. In any event, the matter is so trivial as to be irrelevant to his suitability to be the Trade Representative.

Tax audits are only the beginning. There is an FBI full field investigation. Should we be having FBI field investigations for part- time advisory board members on the Museum Library Corporation? Instead of investigating terrorists or catching bank robbers, should we be paying FBI agents to go out and ask your neighbors: Does he or she live beyond their means--all this in order to serve on a part-time advisory board for the Federal Government?

Then there is the Federal financial disclosures, the White House questionnaire, and of course the questions from the confirming Senate committee. All these are different, and the definitions they ask for are different. An unsuspecting nominee, as I mentioned earlier, might actually fill out a form that says what is your income in the same way each time, but the question might have been different each time. It is easy to make a mistake. Then, when you finally appear before the confirming committee, you are innocent until nominated.

Washington, DC, has become the only place where you should hire a lawyer, an accountant and an ethics officer before you find a house and put your child in school. The motto around here has become ``innocent until nominated.'' Every legal counsel in the White House since President Nixon agrees with what I have just said.

In the name of effective government, this process ought to be changed. There are some limits as to what we can do in the Senate. We have to respect separation of powers. In the end, the President has to conduct his own vetting process and, in the end, the Senate must conduct its own investigations. But we might work together to look at possible ways of reducing burdens and delays in the appointment process, and that is what the executive branch working group provided for in our legislation says. It will be chaired by the Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel, and members would include representatives from the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Government Ethics, the FBI, individuals appointed by the chair who have experience and expertise, individuals from other agencies, and other individuals from previous administrations, and they would report to us in 90 days on a smart form. A smart form would simply be a single form that would make it possible for a nominee to answer duplicative vetting questions one time.

That makes pretty good common sense. Why can't the government do that? It would submit those findings within 90 days to the President for his

consideration and to our relevant Senate committees for our consideration.

In addition, Senator Collins has asked the working group within the next 270 days to take a look at the background investigations. A big part of the delay in forming a government is the President's own background investigations.

We wish to know if somebody used to be a member of al-Qaida or has some other serious problem before they come into a government, but there are gradations of that. Whether you are Secretary of the Treasury or a member of the part-time advisory board might have a little different level of vetting, I would think. But in any event, Senator Collins wants the working group to report back to the President and to us the feasibility, in appropriate circumstances, of using non-FBI personnel to conduct background investigations for Senate-confirmed positions.

These will simply be reports, an effort between the Senate and the Executive to take a look at streamlining the process so that we can staff the government more quickly, so we can stop wasting so much time here in duplicative ways, so we can stop the expense of that wasted time, and so we can treat with respect the men and women any President invites to become a member of the administration.

Since our bill was first drafted, we have made a number of changes in response to suggestions by our colleagues both on the Democrat and Republican sides of the aisle. I suspect that is one reason why all 100 Senators have agreed to allow this bill to come to the floor and to be debated with any relevant amendment, because we are open to that. We have made some changes.

For example, I mentioned the 248 expedited part-time appointments. The concern was that while there is a Democratic President, there is a requirement in the law that a minority of those appointees be Republican members of the part-time advisory board. Well, what if a Democratic President said, I am going to appoint Republican members who I define as Republicans? We Republicans didn't like that very much. The Democrats wouldn't like it very much if they were on the other side of the fence in another administration. So the solution was this expedited process whereby we can send those 248 nominations through the Senate much more quickly; and if a single Senator thinks the President is playing games with minority nominations, he or she can insist that the nominee go through the whole advice and consent process. In fact, for any reason a single Senator can do that.

Another change we have made is to say all relevant amendments are open for debate and for voting. I am hopeful my colleagues will bring some of those to the floor this afternoon and we will begin to debate them, perhaps to vote on them today; if not vote on them today, start voting on them tomorrow.

We have also agreed that Senator DeMint, Senator Vitter, and Senator Coburn can each offer a specific amendment. I know Senator Schumer has been meeting with Democratic Senators, just as I have been meeting with Republican Senators, to see if there are any other changes. We will have the amendments. I may oppose them all, I may support them all, but at least we will be doing what the Senate ought to do, which is to bring them up. If they are good amendments and the majority of us agree or 60 of us agree, then we will change the bill and eventually vote on them.

Senator Collins mentioned earlier the amount of support we have gotten from outside groups who worked on this, and especially from those who once served in the Senate or once served in the White House in positions that had to do with personnel. My work with the White House goes back a long time. I was a young staff aide in the Nixon administration and I was a Cabinet member in the first Bush administration. So I know a lot of the men and women who have been the general counsels to Presidents, who have been the personnel directors who watched the process closely.

I think it was Boyden Gray who was counsel of the first President Bush who gave me the phrase ``innocent until nominated.'' But every single one of those men and women--I don't know of one, without exception, who doesn't think the system is broken, who doesn't think we are trivializing the advice and consent process of the Senate, who doesn't think we are doing a great disservice to our country and to individuals when we allow this ``innocent until nominated'' syndrome to persevere, and they have watched over the last 10 years as very good Senators have tried to change this without success.

Senator Reid and Senator McConnell, when they were whips, tried to do it, and they didn't succeed. Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins tried a few years ago. They didn't succeed. Senator Thompson tried to do it when he was chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and he got a few changes made but not very many. It is only this year in response to our general discussion about how to make the Senate a more effective place, and because of the strong support of Senator Reid and Senator McConnell, and because of the battle scars Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins have, having tried before and their willingness to try again, that we have gotten to this place. I think we will get to where we need to go, but I want to make sure that in this debate we don't succumb to the desire to say, oh, well, my committee wants to have this person go through the process of advice and consent for the prestige of it.

I think it is more important for a new Cabinet member to have an appointee who can serve the President and serve the country and do his or her job, and then let the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary and the Under Secretary be the ones who are accountable to the President. At least that is the recommendation of former Senator Fred Thompson who was chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. That is the recommendation of a task force formed by the Aspen Institute, which included Senator Bill Frist, our former majority leader, Chuck Robb, a Democratic Senator, Clay Johnson, who was George W. Bush's Director of Presidential Personnel, Mack McLarty, who was the White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton. They all said this urgently needs to be done.

Frank Carlucci, the former Secretary of Defense, weighed in with his support. The Bipartisan Policy Center, including former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, a Democrat, Trent Lott, our former whip and majority leader, Pete Domenici, our former Senator, and Dirk Kempthorne, former Governor, Cabinet member, and Senator, all urged us to do this.

Senator Collins asked that all these letters of support be placed in the Record, and so I will not.

I would simply conclude by saying there has been a little information around that somehow this is legislation to reduce oversight. This is legislation to make oversight more effective. If we were to propose using advice and consent for every Senate staff member, for every agricultural extension servicemember, and every forest ranger, that would be less oversight because we wouldn't have time to do anything. That, in effect, is what we are doing now with advice and consent by the bucketload of officer corps members and of part-time advisory commission members whom the President can vet and appoint, and all of whom report to somebody over whom we do have advice and consent control.

I look forward to this discussion and this debate. I am very grateful to my Republican colleagues, some of whom have questions about the bill, who have allowed the bill to come forward in the way the Senate should operate. Senators can bring their relevant amendments to the floor as long as they and the Parliamentarian agree they are relevant. They can call it up, we will debate it, and we will either vote on it then or set a time for a vote in the near future.

I expect there to be several amendments. I would urge Senators to come to the floor, and hope at the end of the day that we complete these modest but important steps toward making the Senate more effective by reducing the trivializing of advice and consent, our constitutional duty, and by reducing the syndrome that Presidential nominees are innocent until nominated.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair.

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

Mr. President, next Tuesday, the Nation's largest exporter and employer of more than 150,000 Americans will be appearing before an administrative judge in Seattle to defend itself against a claim brought by the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB. The claim is that a corporate decision to expand production of its next generation airliner in South Carolina, a right- to-work State, was a violation of Federal labor law.

Since 1947, Federal law has affirmed the right of States to enact what we call right-to-work laws, which prevent unions and employers from requiring employees to join a union, as well as pay dues or fees, in order to obtain or keep their job.

In Tennessee, for example, manufacturers such as Nissan, Volkswagen, and General Motors have built factories and increased their production of cars made and sold in the United States, in large part due to the environment offered by Tennessee's right-to-work law.

The President recently visited a Chrysler plant in Toledo, OH, where he stated that the auto bailout helped to restore the American automobile industry. I respectfully disagree. I think that what restored the American automobile industry was the right-to-work laws in 22 States, by creating a more competitive environment in those 22 States, as well as in the Midwest and other States where the laws don't exist, and permitting manufacturers to be able to make the cars and trucks in the United States that they sell in the United States.

Unfortunately, American companies and our 22 right-to-work States are under assault from a government agency that is driven by an antibusiness, antigrowth, and antijobs agenda. This may be the most important battle over labor laws in the United States today. That is why Senator Graham, Senator DeMint, and I--actually, we have 35 Senators cosponsoring the bill--introduced legislation to preserve the law's current protection of state right-to-work laws and prevent the NLRB from moving forward in their case against this company and others.

The Job Protection Act will prevent the NLRB from ordering a company to relocate jobs, will guarantee employer rights to decide where to do business, and will protect employer free speech associated with the costs and benefits of a unionized workforce.

The company that will be tried on Tuesday is Boeing--a solid and upstanding American success story. Over the last century, Boeing has built the passenger planes that allow Americans to travel the world; built the warplanes and weaponry that enable our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen to defend freedom; built the spacecrafts that send our astronauts into orbit and to the Moon; and built the satellites that deliver communications around the globe.

Boeing's newest commercial passenger airliner is the 787 Dreamliner. It is a shining example of American innovation and entrepreneurship. It has been designed with a paramount focus on efficiency and performance, to allow a mid-sized aircraft to travel as far as a jumbo jet, while using 20 percent less fuel and producing 20 percent less emissions than today's similarly sized aircraft, and while traveling at roughly the same speed as a 747 or 777.

It has also been a tremendous commercial success despite these difficult economic times. Since 2004, 56 customers, spanning 6 continents, have placed orders for 835 Dreamliners, valued at $162 billion.

President Obama has recognized the leadership of this company. He named the chief executive officer of Boeing, Mr. Jim McNerney, as cochairman of the President's Export Council. And more recently, he nominated Mr. John Bryson, who serves on the Boeing Board of Directors, to be the Nation's Commerce Secretary.

The Dreamliner's success prompted Boeing to decide in 2009--2 years ago--to establish a second assembly line for the airliner in South Carolina. This is in addition to its current assembly line in Washington State. South Carolina is a right-to-work State and Washington is not.

On Tuesday, the NLRB acting general counsel will ask an administrative judge in Seattle to stop Boeing from expanding production in South Carolina, arguing that the decision was made in retaliation for past strikes by union employees in Washington. That claim ignores these facts: No union jobs are being lost here; nobody is being demoted; no personnel are being moved; and no benefits, salaries, or work hours are being cut back as a result of this expansion. It further ignores the fact that Boeing's decision was announced, as I have said, nearly 2 years ago.

Down in South Carolina, 1,200 construction jobs have been created and over 500 new workers have been hired by Boeing to work at this assembly plant, which is supposed to open next month, in July. At the same time, Boeing has actually added 2,000 new jobs in Washington State since the announced expansion in South Carolina. That is 2,000 new union jobs in Washington State.

South Carolina, of course, is a right-to-work State, where employees may choose to join or not join the union. Suspending Boeing's expansion will result in billions of dollars of lost economic development and jobs to that State. But, the NLRB's acting general counsel doesn't seem to care about these facts, or the impact of this case on those jobs. Recently, several Boeing employees in South Carolina, whose jobs are hanging in the balance, asked to intervene in the case. The acting general counsel opposed the request, stating that ``these Boeing employees in South Carolina have no cognizable interest in participating in the proceeding sufficient to justify their intervention.''

It is hard to imagine anybody with a more direct interest in this than the Boeing workers in South Carolina.

Facts like these don't seem to matter when you have an agenda. This case is about more than airplanes, more than Boeing, and more than South Carolina. This case is about the future of our economy and our competitiveness as a nation. It is the latest attempt by this administration to chip away at right-to-work laws, to change the rules and give unions more leverage over employers, and to allow politically influenced bureaucrats in Washington determine the means of production for private industry in the United States.

If the acting general counsel's request is affirmed following next week's hearing, it will be prima facie illegal for a company that has experienced repeated strikes to move production to a State with a right-to-work law. The CEO of Boeing pointed out that this will not only hurt the 22 right-to-work States. It will also hurt States that do not have right-to-work laws. Those non-right-to-work States will suffer because a company that operates in their State and is unionized will effectively be prevented from growing or expanding to a right-to-work State, therefore hindering the ability of any State to attract new manufacturers and create new jobs.

So, instead of making it easier and cheaper to create jobs in the United States, manufacturers will be further incentivized to expand or open new facilities in Mexico, China, or India to meet their growing needs. Boeing and its 787 Dreamliner are shining examples of what is right in America and what is necessary to rebuild and grow our country's economy.

This new jetliner assembly plant in South Carolina is the first one to be built in the U.S. in 40 years. We need to remember that Boeing sells airplanes everywhere in the world and it can make airplanes anywhere in the world. But, we would like for Boeing and other manufacturers to make in the United States what they sell in the United States, so that jobs can stay and grow in this country, instead of moving overseas.

As this Administration's Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, correctly observed in his March testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation:

Manufacturing is essential to America's economic

competitiveness. . . . [it] is a vital source of good middle-

class jobs. It is a key driver of innovation.

With 9.1 percent unemployment, with a soft economy, government and Washington must allow manufacturers such as Boeing to prosper, innovate, and create jobs. We need to make it easier and cheaper for those manufacturers to make in the United States what they sell in the United States.

Expanding new production lines in South Carolina was a business decision made by Boeing's executives and board members, on behalf of their shareholders, who believed it was in the company's best interests. As I mentioned, those board members and executives are well respected, including by the President of the United States, who has invited many them to be a part of his Administration.

But under this Administration, the NLRB Acting General Counsel seems only concerned about the interests and agenda of organized labor--an agenda that has been soundly rejected by the vast majority of private sector workers in both right-to-work and non-right-to-work States across the country in recent years.

All eyes will be on Seattle next Tuesday, when one of our Nation's greatest assets and contributors to our economic future will be put on trial for investing, creating, and innovating at a time when we are in the middle of an economic recession. This will be a true test of whether manufacturers are able to make in the United States what they sell in the United States, or whether they will be encouraged to make overseas what they sell in the United States. It will test whether they put jobs over there, instead of creating them here. And it will test whether the Administration's economic policy is exporting airplanes or exporting jobs.

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

Mr. President, on Wednesday I traveled to Greene and Washington Counties in Upper East Tennessee--up near Virginia and North Carolina--to visit with the victims of tornadoes that swept across our State on April 27 and to see firsthand how the recovery is going.

What I found was what I expected to find. In Washington County and Greene County, the citizens are not complaining. They are cleaning up, and they are helping each other. I also found out there are some things that still need to be ironed out, but so far the recovery from a devastating disaster is going well in East Tennessee. The real work is being done by people affected by those storms and by volunteers, and I think it says that Tennesseans are doing what Tennesseans usually do.

I first met with Alan Broyles, who is the mayor of Greene County, and Bill Brown, who is director of Greene County's Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency. Seven people lost their lives in Greene County. We visited the Camp Creek and the Horse Creek communities. We saw many of the homes that have been completely leveled, and debris was still being removed. We saw one home where a couple--the Harrisons had been helping neighbors into their basement when the tornadoes swept through and killed both Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, but spared the lives of the neighbors in the basement. There were two crosses there next to what was left of the basement structure of the home.

At the Camp Creek Elementary School where FEMA has set up a disaster recovery center, I met Pamela Ward and her mother-in-law, Betty Ward. Mrs. Ward's home had been completely destroyed by the tornado, and her husband Kevin and their three daughters were staying in a hotel after discovering that the insurance on their home only paid off their mortgage. Mr. Brown and Q. Winfield, who is FEMA's Federal Coordinating Officer for Tennessee, immediately began working to help the Wards. By the next day, Mr. Winfield had called to let me know that FEMA had approved the maximum award to help Pamela Ward and her family get back on their feet.

I also visited Washington County, where I met with Dan Eldridge, who is the mayor of the county, as well as local emergency management officials and families affected by the disaster. One resident was killed in a tornado that touched down in Washington County. Hundreds of homes were damaged. However, it was clear that families and volunteers had been hard at work putting their community back together. Rebuilding had begun, and the debris had already been removed in many areas.

FEMA is doing an excellent job working with State and local officials, but the generosity of the volunteers and the entire community working in a collective way with the churches to help families get back on their feet is an amazing sight. It is still very important for victims to register with FEMA by calling 1-800-321-FEMA (3362). Families are also eligible for other forms of disaster assistance, including loans from the Small Business Administration and unemployment and food stamp benefits. While we cannot make these families whole, there are people who still need help, and we have to make sure they know help is available. I want to make sure that whatever the Federal Government is able to do, it is doing.

Over the past year, Tennessee has experienced disasters of historic proportions. We know very well we are not the only State or the only community where this has happened. Beginning with the 1,000-year flood that struck middle and west Tennessee last May, to the devastating tornado outbreak and river flooding this year in both the eastern and western parts of our State, 74 of Tennessee's 95 counties are currently Presidentially declared disaster areas. Thousands of people are still recovering, and many are only just beginning to put their lives back together. In spite of everything this past year has thrown at us, Tennesseans are going about their business helping themselves and helping others in remarkable and inspiring ways.

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

Mr. President, I will not object. I say to Senator Sessions, I think Senator Hatch is expected to come down. That is the only one I know of.

Mr. President, I congratulate Senator Sessions and Senator Coburn for their principled remarks about the phenomenon of Washington spending. We are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend. We cannot keep spending money we do not have. And we want to save Medicare. So those two major difficult decisions are things that we need to work on together--to stop spending money we do not have and saving Medicare. We can do both if we put our minds to it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Mr. President, if you would let me know when 1 minute remains, I would appreciate it.

Mr. President, last month the Acting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against the nation's largest exporter, the Boeing company--a company with 170,000-some employees, 150,000 of which in the United States, who sells airplanes around the world and makes them in the United States. The complaint basically said there was prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination because Boeing has decided to expand and build a production plant in South Carolina. Boeing's main operation is in Washington State, a State without a right-to-work law. In contrast, South Carolina is a State with a right-to-work law. This is notwithstanding the fact that Boeing has already added 2,000 employees in Washington State since announcing its expansion. At the same time, it has nearly finished this new plant in South Carolina, spending $1 billion, hiring 1,500 construction workers and over 500 employees to work in the facility. Then, all of a sudden, here comes this complaint.

This is not just a South Carolina matter. It affects the entire country and many of us have spoken out about it. I want to review it just for a moment.

This complaint against Boeing is just one indication of the Administration's anti-business, anti-growth, and anti-jobs agenda. That is why Senators Graham, DeMint, and I--actually there are 35 Senators who are cosponsoring this bill--have introduced the Job Protection Act, to protect right-to-work states and employers from an independent government body run amok.

Our bill preserves the Federal law's current protection of state right-to-work laws in the National Labor Relations Act and provides necessary clarity to prevent the NLRB from moving forward in its case against Boeing or attempting a similar strategy against other companies.

Now it seems the NLRB wants to change the rules governing how and when a company can relocate from one State to another. According to a May 10 internal memorandum from the NLRB General Counsel's Office, they want to give unions power over major business decisions and require companies, such as Boeing, to collectively bargain if it wants to relocate a facility.

As was explained by James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics, and Hans A. Von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in a recent article in National Review Online:

NLRB wants to force companies to provide detailed economic

justifications (including underlying cost or benefit

considerations) for relocation decisions to allow unions to

bargain over them--or lose the right to make those decisions

without bargaining over them. . . . Either way, businesses

would have to negotiate their investment plans with union

bosses.

Sherk and von Spakovsky describe this as a ``heads I win, tails you lose'' scenario for unions. These decisions belong in the corporate boardroom, not at the collective bargaining table.

The goal of this NLRB is to place the interests of organized labor over those of business, shareholders, and economic growth. Their means is to change well-

established law governing business decisions under the National Labor Relations Act.

The Supreme Court has reasoned that ``an employer must have some degree of certainty beforehand as to when it may proceed to reach decisions without fear of later evaluations labeling its conduct an unfair labor practice. Under the Dubuque Packing case and subsequent NLRB jurisprudence, a company may make a major business decision, such as relocation, outside of collective bargaining. Accordingly, the burden is initially on the NLRB's General Counsel to establish that an employer's decision to relocate work is unaccompanied by a basic change in the nature of the employer's operation, such as being part of an overarching restructuring plan.

The Dubuque test was most recently applied by the NLRB in holding that an employer, Embarq Corporation, did not violate the law by refusing to provide information about or bargain over a planned relocation of its Nevada call center to Florida. Both of those happen to be right-to-work States, as Tennessee is.

In a concurring opinion, NLRB Chairman Liebman expressed her desire to change the rules governing relocation decisions and collective bargaining. The Chairman noted her displeasure that, in her words, ``the law does not compel the production of'' information fully explaining the underlying cost or benefit considerations of a company's relocation decision. The Chairman then suggested requiring employers to provide unions with economic justification wherever there was a ``reasonable likelihood'' that labor-cost concessions might affect an impending decision to relocate.

In practice, the burden would shift to the employer, before making its relocation, to advise and explain to its union the basis for its decision, supported by detailed economic justification. Then, if it does turn on labor costs, the employer would be required to provide the union with information supporting the labor cost/savings underlying its decision. If the employer failed to provide such information and labor costs were a factor, it would be precluded from making those decisions without collective bargaining.

Following this decision against Embarq Corporation, the NLRB Associate General Counsel issued an internal memorandum on May 10 suggesting that Chairman Liebman's new test should now be examined and considered in all cases concerning relocations that come before the board.

Now, I am all for requiring employers to provide advance notice to their labor organizations and offering the economic reasons for a proposed relocation, a shutdown, or a transfer of existing or future work. Providing notice and reasoning is already required under existing law and jurisprudence. We included this in our Job Protection Act to make sure the spirit of the law was maintained. But, what the NLRB and Associate General Counsel are now proposing goes much further, changes understood law, and places an unreasonable burden on employers.

As was observed by Sherk and Spakovsky, this new test would raise the costs to businesses by dragging on collective bargaining, by preventing them from legally executing a decision that is in the best interests of their shareholders until bargaining hits an impasse, and by forcing them to provide detailed economic justification and negotiate their investment plans with union bosses before having the right to execute a relocation plan. Effectively, it would give a union a seat at the board of directors through the force of law and tip the scales of justice in their favor. If employers do not comply, then they will lose the right to later claim their relocation decision did not have to be collectively bargained under the National Labor Relations Act.

So as with the NLRB Acting General Counsel's action against Boeing, this potential new posture by the Office of the General Counsel represents a departure from well-established law. They do not like the outcome, so they want to change the rules and give unions greater leverage over their employers, who provide the jobs in the first place. They are more concerned about producing outcomes that facilitate the collective bargaining process, rather than those that foster economic growth, exports, and jobs.

Those decisions are best left to the owners, officers, shareholders, and directors of businesses, not organized labor or the Federal Government. This potential change in well-established law would be another blow to manufacturing growth and expansion in the United States and further incentive for manufacturers to expand or open a new facility in Mexico, in China, or in India to meet their growing need.

Republicans are not the only ones who are outraged by the direction the NLRB seems to be headed. William Gould, who chaired the NLRB during the Clinton administration, was recently quoted in Slate magazine expressing his unease with the board's action. Specifically, he said, ``The Boeing case is unprecedented,'' and he ``doesn't agree with what the [Acting] General Counsel has done [by] . . . trying to equate an employer's concern with strikes that disrupt production and make it difficult to meet deadlines . . . with hostility toward trade unionism.'' That is the Clinton Administration's NLRB General Counsel.

Coming back to the Boeing issue, which is set to be heard by an administrative judge on June 14, recent comments in the press from an NLRB spokeswoman shed further light on how the board's agenda flies in the face of the very concept of capitalism.

On May 19, various press outlets quoted this spokeswoman suggesting that the NLRB Acting General Counsel would drop his case against Boeing if the company agreed to build 10 planes in Washington, rather than 7. Specifically she said:

We are not telling Boeing they can't build planes in South

Carolina. We are talking about one specific piece of work:

three planes a month. If they keep those three planes a month

in Washington, there is no problem.

So they can build planes in South Carolina, just not the three they had planned. So now the Federal Government or the NLRB is sitting on Boeing's board and determining the means of production for American industry while the economy continues to struggle. In Tennessee, we have had 24 months of 9 percent unemployment.

Our job is to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to create jobs. The NLRB is not acting in the best interests of American workers through its continued attempts to depart from well-established law and dictate integral business decisions to companies.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a memorandum from the Associate General Counsel of NLRB, dated May 10, as well as an article from National Review Online, dated May 16.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that morning business be extended until 9 p.m. with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, Senator Corker and I had the privilege of being in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Monday for the opening of Volkswagen's North American plant. It was a great day for our country. Here is a major global manufacturer making in the United States what it plans to sell in the United States. We salute Volkswagen. I salute Chattanooga and Tennessee. One-third of the manufacturing jobs in our State are auto jobs. There was a new Volkswagen Passat that gets 43 miles a gallon. That is good news for Americans who are paying $4 or more a gallon for gasoline.

But as I was there at that celebration for these new fuel-efficient cars, and earlier this week at a hearing of the Energy Committee, I was thinking: What if I were to say to you or to anyone I might see, while you are worrying about $4 gasoline: Did you know that we have enough unused fuel sitting over here, that is not oil, to power 40 percent of our light cars and trucks at a lower cost?

That is right. We have enough unused power every night to power 40 percent of our light cars and trucks. Every night. We can do that by simply plugging them into the wall. I am talking about electric cars and light trucks that almost every major manufacturer is now beginning to make, and we do not have to build one new powerplant to do it.

Last week Senator Merkley and I appeared before the Energy Committee to talk about our legislation, the Promoting Electric Vehicles Act. I said to the Committee: The main differences between the bill this year and the one the Committee reported last year by a vote of 19 to 4, a good bipartisan vote, is that the price of gasoline is higher than it was last year and our bill costs less than it did last year.

Encouraging electric vehicles is an appropriate short-term role for the Federal Government. Our legislation establishes short-term incentives for the wide adoption of vehicles in 8 to 15 pilot communities. Our legislation advances battery research. The $1 billion that we save relative to last year's bill, we save by avoiding duplicating other research programs.

Finally, if you believe that the solution to $4 gasoline and high energy prices is finding more American energy and using less of it, as I do, electric cars and trucks are the best way to use less.

Electrifying half our cars and trucks can reduce the use of our foreign oil by one-third, saving money on how we fuel our transportation system and cutting into the billions of dollars we send overseas for foreign oil. So instead of making the speech for the rest of my time, let me tell a short story. It is a story of Ross Perot, the famous Texan, and how he made his money.

Back in the sixties, he noticed that the big banks down in Dallas were locking their doors at 5 o'clock, and the banks had all of these big computers in the back room, and they were locking them up too. They were not using them at night.

So Mr. Perot made a deal with the banks. He said: Sell me your unused computer time. And they did at cheap rates. Then he went to the States and talked to the Governors--this is before I was a Governor--and he made a deal with the States to use that cheap computer time to manage Medicaid data. He made $1 billion.

In the same way, we have an enormous amount of unused electricity at night. A conservative estimate is that we have an amount of energy that is unused at night that is equal to the output of 65 to 70 nuclear power plants between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. If we were to use that resource to plug in cars and trucks at night, we could electrify 43 percent of our cars and trucks without building one new powerplant. It is a very ambitious goal, to imagine electrifying half our cars and trucks. It would take a long time to do it, but it is the best way to reduce our use of foreign oil.

I suspect that is the greatest unused resource in the United States. What if someone proposed building 60 or 65 nuclear powerplants. Actually, I proposed

building 100. But if we tried to build 60 or 65 more, it would take us 30 or 40 years and cost us $\1/2\ trillion. That is if we could even do it.

Another reason I think this will work is because it is easy for consumers, and I am one. For 2 years, I drove a Toyota Prius, and it had an A123 battery in it. I increased my mileage to about 80 or 90 miles a gallon. I just plugged it in at night at home. Very simple. I now have a Nissan Leaf. It is all electric. I have an apartment nearby the Capitol. I just plug it in at night. I don't even have a charger. I just plug it into the wall, and I can drive it about 2 hours every day and plug it in at night. I have not bought any gas since January, since I got my Leaf in Washington, DC.

I have had no problems, either with the modified Toyota Prius that I drove for 2 years, or with the Nissan Leaf that I have driven now for about half a year. Almost every car company is making electric cars today or will soon have them on the market.

So if the extra electricity is available--and electric vehicles are easy to use, and car companies are making them, then why do we need for the government to be involved? That is a good question. For one thing, it is the urgency of the problem: $4 gasoline is killing our economy. It is throwing a big wet blanket over it.

The only solution is find more, use less. This is the best way to use less. To my Republican colleagues, I have said before our Committee, and I would say today what we have been saying for 3 years in our caucus: Find more and use less.

We have criticized Democrats for wanting to use less without really wanting to find more, and we are subject to the same criticism if we want to find more--which I think we should--offshore, on Federal lands, and in Alaska, and then we do not have a credible way to use less. Electric cars and trucks are the best way to use less.

Another criticism is that our bill interferes with the marketplace. It does, but in a short-term and limited way. Short-term incentives for new technologies--to jump-start nuclear energy, to jump-start natural gas truck fleets, to jump-start electric cars and trucks in 4 to 5 years--I think are appropriate, given the urgency of the problem. If I am here in 5 years, I will be the first to say this should be the end of it. If I am not, I will come back and argue for its repeal.

Finally, conservative groups across the country have said national security demands that we do this. Gary Bauer, president of American Values, as well as Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, endorsed our bill last year, saying that national security concerns overwhelm any opposition to it, and it is the best way to displace our use of oil. That was them talking.

Can we afford it? Well, our proposal is $1 billion cheaper, it is an authorization bill, and we should be setting priorities.

There is some suggestion that this committee should also appropriate the money. I would respectfully suggest that we are in a 2-year period where we have no earmarks because authorizers didn't like appropriators authorizing. Well, let's be consistent and say to authorizers, ``You shouldn't be appropriating.'' Let's just do the job of authorizing. Senator Merkley and I have agreed that we will not try to pass this bill when it comes to the floor unless we can agree to do it in a way that does not add to the debt.

So, in summary, I would say it is time to address $4 gasoline and high energy prices. To do that, we need to find more American energy-- offshore, on Federal lands, and in Alaska--but we also need to use less. The single best way to use less is to jump-start the use of electric cars and trucks. Electricity is just a delivery system. The fuel comes from a whole variety of things: natural gas, coal, and other things.

So we jump-start the use of that huge resource that we have just sitting there unused every single night. Our committee approved this bill once before. The problem is worse today than it was when they approved it last year. The bill costs less than it did when they approved it last year. It is an appropriate role for the Federal Government. We will work to make sure if this body were to pass it that it does not increase the debt.

I urge my colleagues to report the bill to the floor and to consider encouraging electric cars and trucks as the single best way to use less energy and reduce the use and reduce the cost of gasoline.

I thank the Senator from Alabama for his courtesy and for listening to my remarks.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, we have been debating tax subsidies to the big oil companies. The bill proposed by the Senator from New Jersey would have limited it to just the big five oil companies even though many of the tax breaks or tax credits or deductions they receive are the same tax credits that every other company may take--Starbucks, Microsoft, Caterpillar, Google, and Hollywood film producers for example. Many of the other credits look a lot like the R&D tax credit or other tax credits all American businesses may receive. Well, I am one Senator who is very intrigued with the idea of looking at all of the tax breaks in the Tax Code. There are currently about $1.2 trillion a year in what we call tax expenditures, and those are intended to be for tax breaks we think are desirable. I am ready to look at all of them and use the money to reduce the tax rate and/or reduce the Federal debt. But if we are going to talk about energy subsidies--tax subsidies--we ought to talk about all energy subsidies. Senator John Cornyn of Texas has asked the Congressional Research Service to do just this. It is an excellent study, and I commend Senator Cornyn for asking for it. This is some of what it finds.

According to the report, fossil fuels contributed about 78 percent of our energy production in 2009 and received about 13 percent of the Federal tax support for energy. However, during that same time 10.6 percent of our energy production was from renewables and 77.4 percent of our energy tax subsidies went to renewables. So if we are to compare the subsidy per unit of energy, the estimated Federal support per million Btu's of fossil fuels was 4 cents, while support for renewables was $1.97 per million Btu's.

So Federal subsidies for renewables are almost 50 times as great per unit of energy as Federal subsidies for fossil fuels. This would be distorted because included within renewables is hydroelectric power. Most people think of renewables as ethanol, solar, or wind and those are the renewables that actually get the subsidies while hydroelectric does not.

So at least 50 times as great per unit of energy is the Federal taxpayer support for renewable energy compared with fossil fuel energy. So why aren't we including in our debate subsidies for all renewables? Specifically, if we are talking about Big Oil, why don't we talk about Big Wind? The Senate seems an appropriate place to talk about Big Wind.

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 created what is called the production tax credit for energy produced using renewable resources. Most of this money has gone to subsidize Big Wind. It is a policy that was supposed to last a few years. It has lasted two decades.

Today, the production tax credit for wind gives 2.1 cents for every kilowatt hour of wind electricity produced by a wind turbine during the first 10 years of operation. Let's put this into a context that is current. The new Shepherd's Flat Wind Farm in Oregon will have 338 of these huge wind turbines, producing enough power to run approximately 250,000 homes and will cost the American taxpayer about $57 million a year in subsidies for that electricity produced. If we allocated the tax credit per home, taxpayers will be paying $2,300 over the next 10 years for each of the homes served by the Shepherd's Flat Wind Farm in Oregon.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that $1.3 billion in Federal loan guarantees to this project means Big Wind will have its risk of default also financed by the taxpayer. Fossil fuel companies don't have that advantage. Nuclear power companies don't have that advantage, even though their electricity is completely clean--no sulfur, no nitrogen, no mercury, no carbon. If, like nuclear or fossil loan guarantees do, the wind farm in Oregon had to pay the risk of default up front as a fee, it would cost another $130 million. That is money out of the pockets of taxpayers.

The total cost of the wind production tax credit over the next 10 years will cost the American taxpayers more than $26 billion. Let me say that again. American taxpayers are subsidizing big wind over the next 10 years by more than $26 billion with one tax credit. In fact, the tax breaks for the five big oil companies we have been debating on the Senate floor this week actually cost less than all of the money we give to big wind. The tax breaks for the five big oil companies amount to about $21 billion over 10 years.

According to the Energy Information Administration in 2007, big wind received an $18.82 subsidy per megawatt hour--25 times as much per megawatt hour as subsidies for all other forms of electricity combined. But wind is about the least efficient means of energy production we have. It accounts for just about 2 percent of our electricity. It is available only when the wind blows, which is about one-third of the time. The Tennessee Valley Authority says it is reliable even less than that, meaning we can have it when we need it only about 12-15 percent of the time.

Wind farms take up a huge amount of space. Turbines are 50 stories high. Their flashing lights can be seen for 20 miles. An unbroken line of turbines along the 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail would produce no more electricity than four nuclear reactors on 4 square miles of land.

Wind is generally the strongest and land is available where the electricity isn't actually needed. So we have thousands of miles of new transmission lines proposed to get the energy from where it is produced to where it needs to go. Those often go through conservation areas, and according to the National Academy of Sciences wind power is more expensive than other forms of electricity, such as coal, nuclear, biomass, geothermal, and natural gas.

We haven't even talked about the fact these wind turbines only last about 25 years. The question is, Who is going to take them down? Wind farms also kill as many as 275,000 birds each year, according to the American Bird Conservancy. They can interfere with radar systems, and many who live near them say they are very noisy.

So I ask the question: If wind has all these drawbacks, is a mature technology, and receives subsidies greater than any other form of energy per unit of actual energy produced, why are we subsidizing it with billions of dollars and not including it in this debate? Why are we talking about Big Oil and not talking about Big Wind?

I believe there are appropriate uses of temporary incentives and subsidies to help jump-start innovation and the development of new technology--such as jump-starting electric cars or natural gas fleets of trucks or loan guarantees for nuclear powerplants and other forms of clean energy--as long as these are short term. I believe research and development is an appropriate role for the Federal Government whether it is in recycling used nuclear fuel or finding alternative biofuels made from crops we don't eat. I believe it is entirely appropriate for there to be research for offshore wind farms, which we don't know as much about and which might actually prove to be a useful supplement in the Northeast. But my point is, if we are going to debate subsidies to Big Oil, we ought to be debating all the energy subsidies including those to Big Wind.

There is a difference between the Republican plan and the Democratic plan for $4 gasoline and high energy prices. The Democratic cure for high prices is basically to raise the price. They want to tax energy more, but that makes energy cost more. Republicans want to find more American energy and use less energy. We might sum it up this way: Republicans want to find more and use less; Democrats want to find less and tax more.

The Democratic plan, according to Senator Schumer of New York, was never intended to talk about lowering gas prices. Senator Reid agreed, Senator Baucus agreed, Senator Landrieu agreed, and Senator Begich agreed, but why aren't we talking about trying to find a way to lower gasoline prices when it is $4 a gallon and going up?

The Republican plan is very specific: Find more American oil and more American natural gas. We can find that offshore where 30 percent of our domestic oil and 25 percent of our natural gas is produced. We can find it on Federal lands, and we can find it in Alaska.

The other part of our equation is to use less. We have some agreement with the Obama administration on some of these ideas. There are a number of them: jump-start electric cars. Senator Merkley and I have a bill that is before the Energy Committee tomorrow to do just that. I believe electrifying our cars and trucks is the single best way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. There is legislation to jump- start natural gas for trucks, biofuels from crops we don't eat, and fuel efficiency. All these are various ways to use less.

Senators Thune and Barrasso have performed a service by setting the record straight to show that the United States produces a lot of oil. We are actually the third largest oil producer in the world. So I ask this question: If less Libyan oil can raise gasoline prices--which it did--then more American oil should help lower gasoline prices. At least for every dollar of American oil we produce, it is one less dollar we have to send overseas for foreign oil.

So, Madam President, the Republican plan is to find more American oil and natural gas and to use less. My suggestion is, if we are going to be talking about tax subsidies for Big Oil, let's talk about tax subsidies for all energy. The Senate floor seems an especially appropriate place, if we are going to talk about Big Oil, to also talk about tax subsidies for Big Wind.

Madam President, I commend to my colleagues a report of the Congressional Research Service sent to Senator John Cornyn of Texas dated May 16 entitled ``Energy Production by Source and Energy Tax Incentives'' from Molly Sherlock.

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

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

Madam President, I see the Senator from Kansas is here, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I congratulate the Senator from Oklahoma for making an obvious and compelling point, which is that the problem is high gasoline prices. Why is the Democratic solution to raise them more? That is all their tax would do.

The Republican plan for dealing with high gasoline prices is to find more American energy and use less. The Democratic plan seems to be to find less and tax more. That is not going to solve the problem. We need to use less. We agree with that.

There are a variety of ways to do that: through conservation and electric cars, which I favor, and finding research for crops--for alternative fuels from crops we don't need. More important, we need to find more American energy and natural gas offshore, on Federal lands, and in Alaska. That will not completely solve the problem of high gasoline prices, but it will help. If less oil from Libya is a factor in raising gasoline prices, more oil from the United States would be a factor in lowering gasoline prices. We are, after all, the third largest producer of oil in the world.

I thank the Senator from Oklahoma for an excellent point. The Democratic proposal is to find less American energy and to tax more.

nlrb and boeing

Madam President, I wish to speak about the events of the last few weeks that have followed the decision by the National Labor Relations Board general counsel to file a complaint against the Boeing Company, alleging basically that the fact that they are expanding their production of airliners at a new plant in South Carolina, which is a right-to-work State, is prima facie evidence of an unfair labor practice. This would, in effect, establish for the first time since the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, the idea that it is against the Federal law for a company that is producing in a union State to move or expand its facilities in a right-to-work State, of which there are 22.

We are talking about the first new plant in 40 years to build large airplanes. The Boeing Company builds most of its planes in Washington State. It is the Nation's largest exporter. It has 170,000 employees around the world, and 155,000 of them are employees in the United States. These are good jobs.

But at the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee hearing on Thursday, the general counsel of Boeing said the company expects to lose their appeal of the general counsel's complaint when it is heard before an administrative judge on June 14. Then they expect to lose the appeal of that decision to the National Labor Relations Board because the company assumes that the general counsel is following the same view of the law that the President's appointees on the NLRB are following. However, then Boeing expects to win the case when it goes to the U.S. court of appeals or, perhaps, even to the Supreme Court. But it will take 2 to 5 years for all that to happen.

I ask, what happens to American jobs in the meantime? Well, first, this complaint against Boeing will slow the number of good, new jobs into my State of Tennessee, which has a 9-percent unemployment rate, and it has had that for 2 years. I have watched our State grow over the last 30 years,

from the time I was Governor. We had a hearing last week that Senator Harkin called, chairman of the Health, Education, and Labor Committee, about middle-class incomes. What I said at the hearing was that the effect on middle-class income in Tennessee--the State I know the most about--is that 30 years ago we were the third poorest State. Because the auto industry chose to come to our State, partly because it was a central location in the population market and because it is a right-to- work State with a different sort of labor environment in it than other States--because the auto industry came to Tennessee, middle incomes have gone up.

One-third of the manufacturing jobs in our State are now auto jobs. Nissan is there. General Motors is there. Volkswagen just came there. Hundreds of suppliers have come to Tennessee. They like the environment. They like the road system. They like the central location. But they like the right-to-work law.

Suddenly any supplier or any manufacturer who wants to create a new facility in 1 of the 22 right-to-work States, including Tennessee, according to the National Labor Relations Board counsel, is going to have to think twice because that company, which could be a small company, may not want to spend 2 to 5 years before the National Labor Relations Board. I think this counsel knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to freeze job expansion in the United States at a time when we need job expansion the most.

There is an unintended consequence to this. If jobs cannot move into Tennessee and other right-to-work States because of the Boeing complaint, they may not move into the States that do not have a right- to-work law. Why is that? According to Jim McNerney, the CEO of Boeing:

An unintended consequence of the Boeing complaint [is that]

forward thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new

plants in unionized States--lest they be forever restricted

from placing future plants across the country.

If you want to put a plant in, say, Michigan, which is a unionized State, you might not do that because under the general counsel of the NLRB's rule of law, you then could not move to South Carolina or Tennessee or Arkansas or any other State with a right-to-work law.

If you cannot go to a unionized State, and if you cannot go to a right-to-work State, then where do you go if you want to make things? You go overseas. This action by the NLRB general counsel is the single most important action I can imagine that would make it more difficult to create good, new jobs in Tennessee and would make it more likely that manufacturing jobs would go overseas.

The President of the United States asked the chief executive of Boeing, Mr. McNerney, to chair the President's Export Council. I presume what President Obama would like for Mr. McNerney to do is to export airplanes, not export jobs. But what the NLRB ruling will do is cause the export of jobs, not the export of airplanes.

Boeing has 170,000 employees. About 90 percent of them are in the United States. But Boeing sells its airplanes everywhere in the world, and Boeing can make its airplanes anywhere in the world. There may be other countries that come to Boeing and to other manufacturers in the United States and say: We want you to make in our country what you sell in our country. After this NLRB decision, they may be more tempted to do that.

Fortunately, there are other trends suggesting that manufacturing companies around the world may be more likely in the next few years to make here what they sell in the United States. That is what President Carter said to the Governors 30 years ago: Governors, go to Japan. Persuade them to make in the United States what they sell in the United States. Off I went to Tokyo. I asked Nissan to come to Tennessee, as most States. They chose us because of our central location and right- to-work law, just as other auto jobs have done that. Nissan tells me soon 85 percent of what they sell in the United States will be made in the United States. Thirty years ago they were making almost none of what they sold in the United States in the United States. They were making it in Japan. We were worried then Japan was going to take us over. That has changed. Now they are making here what they sell here.

The Economist article this week says there may be a manufacturing renaissance coming. What is happening in China where they are making things today is a lot like what happened in Japan 30 years ago. As China becomes more prosperous, wages will go up. As Japan became more prosperous 30 years ago, wages went up. In the auto industry, where wages only constitute maybe 20 percent of the total cost of what a supplier may have to spend to make a part for a Volkswagen assembly plant, wages get to be less important.

People look at other things. Manufacturing would look at a variety of actions by a government before the manufacturer decides where to make the airplane or where to make the car or where to make the appliance that might be sold in a country.

They are going to have plenty of incentives naturally to make a lot of products in the United States because the country that produces 25 percent of all the money in the world, which we do, is going to be buying a lot of stuff unless we do our best to throw a big wet blanket on making here what we sell here, which is precisely what this administration has been doing.

We have a high corporate income tax. Give the President the credit. He said maybe we want to change that. We should because it makes it better for manufacturers to make products overseas.

The health care law takes profits away from companies that they might use to create new jobs here. I have had heads of restaurant companies tell me they are not going to invest anymore in the United States because the health care taxes take away all of their profits. Regulations make credit harder to get, and regulations drive up energy and gasoline prices. All of this makes it harder to make here what manufacturers sell here.

Now we have a regulation from the National Labor Relations Board that may have the effect of law for 2 to 5 years that says it is prima facie evidence of an unfair labor practice if a company that is producing in a union State expands or moves to a right-to-work State. This is an assault on every middle-income Tennessean and on millions of middle- income Americans who have manufacturing jobs--certainly, everyone in the 22 right-to-work States. But as the Boeing chief executive said, it could be just as much of a disincentive to a State such as Michigan or Illinois or some other State that does not have a right-to-work law because why would you put a plant in Michigan if later you would not be allowed to put it in Tennessee?

If General Motors has plants in both right-to-work and non-right-to- work States, we are going to make it more difficult for General Motors to expand in America. Where are they going to expand? They can expand overseas. They can be making there what they sell there instead of making it here.

Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle like to talk about outsourcing jobs. This is the mother of all outsourcing jobs plan--the idea that it is prima facie evidence for a company that expands in a right-to-work State, that is an unfair labor practice.

For the next 2 to 5 years, we have the unhealthy situation for jobs that any manufacturer who wants to expand will have to think twice about expanding in a right-to-work State and then think at least once about coming in the first place to a State that does not have a right- to-work law. The only other option I can see for those jobs is to make them overseas. That will not only slow job growth in the United States where we desperately need it, but it will be speeding up the sending of American jobs overseas.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record two articles--one by George Will this week on the South Carolina Boeing plant and the action of the National Labor Relations Board complaint, and the second, an article from the Economist magazine.

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

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call time be equally divided.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I yield the floor.