Floor Statements

Madam President, General Motors' decision to put the Spring Hill plant in Tennessee on standby is a blow to many employees who work there and to their families, but hopefully it will be a short- term problem. I have discussed with Governor Phil Bredesen how I can be of as much help as possible to the families who are affected, as well as the suppliers and the dealers. For the longer term, though, there is no reason in the world why the New GM cannot build cars and trucks at Spring Hill, TN, more competitively than any other location in America. Tennessee offers hundreds of suppliers, one of the country's best four- lane highway systems, a right-to-work law, thousands of trained workers, and low taxes. The Saturn plant was said to be the largest U.S. capital investment in history, and since then, General Motors has spent hundreds of millions of dollars modernizing it. For the same reasons Saturn and Nissan, Volkswagen, and their suppliers located here, Tennessee will continue to be a major automotive center.

What is more, General Motors has a proud history in Tennessee. As Governor of our State in 1985, I wrote the full-page ad for the Wall Street Journal. I took almost all of our economic development funds for advertising that year, and the ad proudly said this: ``Saturn finally found a home in Spring Hill, Tennessee.'' Saturn was the most sought- after plant in America then. A Saturn car had not been built then. Yet the name was better known than Pontiac, which had been on the market for 60 years. Saturn, together with the arrival of Nissan a few years earlier, helped to attract auto industry to a State--Tennessee--that had almost no auto jobs and to a region that had very few auto jobs. Today, nearly 150,000 jobs--or about one-third of Tennessee's manufacturing jobs--are auto related, almost all of them at suppliers to the 12 auto-assembly plants that are now located in the Southeastern United States.

Madam President, I would like to look ahead a little bit toward the New GM and the Government ownership of 60 percent of what we are calling the new General Motors. We are told that when General Motors emerges from bankruptcy in 60 or 90 days, the U.S. Treasury will own 60 percent of the New GM. To avoid the possibility of the Government owning New GM for years, I will introduce legislation authorizing the Treasury to distribute to individual taxpayers all of its stock in the New GM and in Chrysler as soon as is practical following the emergence of the New GM from bankruptcy proceedings. So instead of the Treasury owning shares in the New GM and Chrysler, you would own them if you were one of 154 million Americans who filed individual Federal tax forms on April 15.

The stock certificates would be in your name, not that of your Government. To keep it simple, and to help the little guy also have an ownership stake in America's future, Treasury would give each taxpayer an equal number of the available auto shares.

The Treasury Department has said it wants to sell its auto shares as soon as possible, but Fritz Henderson, the president and CEO of General Motors, told Senators and Congressmen in a telephone call this morning, in which I participated, that while it is the Treasury's decision to make, this is a ``very large amount'' of stock, and that the orderly offering of these shares to establish a market might have to be ``managed down over a period of years.'' Another option, of course, might be to sell blocks of the New GM stock to one or more large investors, but that might also take years.

So I want the Treasury also to have the option of getting the ownership of these companies out of the hands of Washington and back in the hands of the marketplace in months rather than years. Distributing New GM shares and Chrysler shares to individual taxpayers is the way to do that.

Those shares might not be worth very much today, but put them away and 1 day they might help pay for a college education. For example, General Motors' 610 million shares were only worth 75 cents just before bankruptcy, but they were worth $40 per share 2 years ago.

I would not interfere with the loans the Federal Reserve Board made to companies in trouble. The Fed is independent. Its loans are collateralized. It makes money for the Treasury. I am only talking about the taxpayer bailouts that Congress has authorized since last October that have resulted in Government ownership of auto company assets.

Under my proposal, the fiduciary duty that management owes to owners would be owed to the more than 154 million Americans owning New GM stock and not to a few Washington politicians and bureaucrats.

You know what would happen if the Treasury owned 60 percent of the New GM for the next several years: Members of Congress would start holding hearings and saying things such as: ``We are the owners and we demand to know why are you building this model? Why are you closing the plant in North

Carolina and not in Tennessee? Why are workers not paid more? What about these work rules? Why is this battery being built in South Korea and this engine being shipped from Mexico?''

When the company negotiates with the Federal Government on such things as, for example, fuel efficiency standards, won't it be negotiating with itself? And as the elections approach, might not the White House be tempted to build plants in States it might carry instead of States it might not?

As the New York Times editorialized this morning:

It was only March when the Obama administration let GM

slide toward bankruptcy by denying it more taxpayer money,

partly on the grounds that the company was too heavily

dependent on SUVs, while its biggest stab at fuel economy,

the Volt, was too expensive to work in the near future.

Not long after that, we saw the President of the United States fire the president of General Motors. So if it is going to take years to sell the Treasury's New GM stock and Chrysler stock, the best way to help those auto companies succeed and recover the taxpayers' more than $50 billion in loans may well be to simply give all the Government stock to taxpayers and get Washington out of the business of owning and running auto companies--the sooner the better.

Here is one disadvantage. Giving the stock to taxpayers might well add a few billion dollars to the Federal debt. But whose debt is it, anyway? The 154 million taxpayers'. So why not give individual taxpayers the ride up, if there is to be one.

Some will say another disadvantage is that the old GM will not be able to sell its tax breaks to an acquiring company. But these tax breaks would be just another bailout paid by taxpayers. It would be better to distribute the Treasury's stock to individual taxpayers and let the marketplace decide what happens, rather than spend billions more on bailouts.

Here are the advantages as I see them. No. 1, 154 million new investor cheerleaders. Think fan base of the Green Bay Packers, whose ownership is distributed among the people of Green Bay. This new investor fan base could produce customers for the auto companies.

No. 2, better odds for success. Does anyone think Washington can run car companies? Did you ever ride in a Lada, a clunky Soviet car made by a government-run company? The standing joke was: How do you double the value of a Lada? Answer: Fill up the tank with gas.

No. 3, fairness. Decisions about these auto companies would be made by collective decisions of people in a marketplace rather than by lobbyists with access to Washington.

No. 4, any benefits are more likely to go to taxpayers rather than to some Government program. For example, the law says that all proceeds made from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, TARP, purchased assets should go to reduce Government debt. Yet that is not happening because Treasury has not purchased toxic assets yet and has not made any profit yet. My proposal would make sure taxpayers get the profit rather than recycling this money into more bailouts.

Finally, this is the fastest way back to the wise principle, if you can find it in the Yellow Pages the Government probably should not be doing it. More than the money, it is the principle of the thing.

The other day a visiting European automobile executive said to me, with a laugh, that he had come to ``the new American automotive capital: Washington, DC.''

To get our economy moving again, let's get our auto companies out of the hands of Washington and back into the marketplace--the sooner the better.

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

Mr. President, today I am joining with Senator Bunning and other senators to introduce a resolution to declare a National Day of Remembrance in honor of the thousands of men and women that supported our nuclear efforts during the Cold War.

The dedicated employees of the Department of Energy and its contractors were instrumental in our winning the Cold War. These employees worked in laboratories and factories related to nuclear weapons, under hazardous conditions that were sometimes not well understood. They put their health and their lives in jeopardy in the service of their country, often without knowing it.

Tennessee has more workers that were made sick through their exposure to nuclear weapon hazards than any other state in the union. That is why one of my priorities in the U.S. Senate has been to help get our Cold War heroes and their families the compensation they deserve--from a major overhaul of the sick worker's program in 2004, to legislation that introduced last year to ensure that compensation for the families of sick nuclear worker won't be taken away in cases where sick workers or their eligible survivors die before their claims are processed.

While the compensation program can provide some financial assistance, it can never fully make up for what was lost.

I would also like to take a moment to mention one particular heroine among these Cold War heroes: Janine Lynn Anderson, a dedicated advocate for all the American nuclear weapons workers. Janine worked tirelessly for over a decade to ensure that nuclear weapons workers were not forgotten after the Cold War was won. Sadly, Janine passed away just a week ago on May 2. She will be missed.

It was her idea that these patriotic men and women be recognized through a National Day of Remembrance, for their contribution, service, and sacrifice towards the defense of this great nation.

That is why it is particularly appropriate that today we introduce this resolution to designate October 30, 2009 as a National Day of Remembrance in honor of these Cold War heroes. I look forward to working with my colleagues from both parties to pass this resolution soon.

Thank you, Mr. President. Will the Chair please let me know when I have consumed 10 minutes?

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, after 100 days, there have been a lot of report cards on the Obama administration. I would like, with respect, to offer one on a subject both the President and I think is of crucial importance: the education of the American people.

As a good teacher would--or as my late friend Alex Haley used to say: Find the good and praise it--I would like to start with the good grades on this report card. So to begin with, I give President Obama an A-plus for recruiting. His best appointee, in my opinion, is the new Education Secretary, Arne Duncan from Chicago. The Acting President pro tempore might agree with that. The new Education Secretary grew up, as I did, in a family where the mom was a preschool teacher--my mother in the mountains of Tennessee, his on the South Side of Chicago. He has a background for leadership. He has an agenda for rewarding outstanding teaching, an agenda for encouraging the largest number of charter schools possible, an agenda for encouraging States to set higher standards. He has a close relationship with the President. He is truly a blue-chip recruit. On the subject of rewarding outstanding teaching and charter schools, if he succeeds with that in 4 years or 8 years, it could be a Nixon to China exercise in education. So an A-plus for recruiting.

Then, here is another A-plus: for rewarding outstanding teaching. This is the greatest need we have in kindergarten through the 12th grade in America. Every problem we are faced with--after you deal with the question of having a good parent--has to do with a good teacher. Whether we are talking about a gifted child or the needs of a child with a disability or of a child who has come from a home where a book has never been read to them or whether they are in the mountains of Tennessee or on the South Side of Chicago, put a child with the best possible teacher, and the child almost always succeeds.

In 1983, when Tennessee became the first State to pay teachers more for

teaching well, not one teacher was being paid more for being a good teacher. Many good people have worked hard on that: Governor Jim Hunt, Governor Bob Graham, Senator Bennet of Colorado, Senator Corker of Tennessee when he was mayor of Chattanooga. But it is hard to do, to find ways to reward outstanding school leadership and outstanding teaching, to pay some teachers more than others. But if we do not, we will not be able to attract and keep the best men and women in our classrooms and in our schools.

The President's new budget increases from about $100 million to $500 million the Teacher Incentive Fund, which has been a big success across this country. Thirty-four grantees--cities, school districts--across the country are experimenting with different ways of rewarding outstanding teaching. There is not necessarily one way to do it. It almost always has to be worked out locally. Most of these cities are working with their unions to make this happen. Memphis city schools are using their funds to train principles. Philadelphia's grant application was co-written by the local teachers union. The Northern New Mexico Network for Rural Education is working with four school districts.

As I said earlier, if Secretary Duncan and the President can leave a legacy of dozens or hundreds of school districts, or even States, where outstanding teachers are paid more for their skills--not just for being there a long time or for going back to school--that would be the single most important legacy they could leave.

Then, here is one more good grade: an A-minus for charter schools. Charter schools also have a little history behind them. They began in Minnesota. The last act I took as Education Secretary, in 1992, was to write every school superintendent in the country and encourage them to start charter schools. Albert Shanker, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, asked ``If we can have a Saturn plant, why not a Saturn school?''

What he meant was, why not start from scratch and take the union rules and the Government regulations off teachers and let them use their own good judgment to deal with the children who are assigned to them. The charter school is a pro-teacher idea. It has greatly expanded over the years, but it still runs into substantial opposition, usually from the National Education Association or other educators who do not like it. But these are public schools. These are designed to free teachers so they can use their judgment to help children. Secretary Duncan and the President are committed to them.

The Secretary and I cowrote an op-ed for a Tennessee newspaper 2 weeks ago, which apparently helped to influence the vote of the legislature to begin to move along raising the cap on charter schools in Tennessee. I hope it did. I thank the Secretary for his bipartisan support and commitment. Again, if he is able to succeed, working with the President, and leaves a large number of public charter schools in our country when he leaves office, it will again be a ``Nixon to China'' experience and the country will be deeply grateful. The only reason why it is an A-minus is there is not much support in the budget for the major obstacle in creating more charter schools, which is support for financing for new facilities.

Now for the bad news. Every parent has had this experience with the child's report card. Here is a D. That is for spending $80 billion over the next 2 years for more of the same in the Department of Education without even asking the question: Is what we are doing working? That is hard for me to imagine.

The budget for the Department of Education would be at about $70 billion, so we are adding $40 billion to it this year and $40 billion next year for more of the same. Is everybody delighted with the way our K-12 grade system is working in America? I don't think so. We are challenged by it. We need to change it. So then why in the world would we put more money in for more of the same?

The only thing that saves the grade from being an F is that there is $5 billion for the Secretary's Race to the Top, which is a good idea based on the agenda I described.

What would we have done with the money? Well, I would have suggested we give a Pell Grant for Kids to every middle- and low-income child in the country and $500 for a state-approved afterschool program. Let the parents choose: for music, for art, for catchup, for academic improvement. It would have poured billions into the school districts. It would have created some competition and middle- and lower income children would be given more options. That would be what we could have done.

Here is another unfortunate grade: D-minus. That is for the DC voucher program. I see the Senator from Illinois. I had this all prepared. I had no idea he would be here. He has been a major participant in this. What keeps this from being an F is that the President and the Secretary have said they will continue funds for the 1,700 children in the District of Columbia who are now in high school and who are continuing, but after that, it is gone. This is a death sentence for the program. This is a death sentence for the model of giving low-income parents choices of better schools--schools such as middle- and higher income parents have. It is the model that made our higher education system the best in the world.

Senator Lieberman has said he will have a hearing on this DC voucher program. I hope he does.

I will after I am finished. Well, of course, I will. I will be glad to do that as a courtesy to my friend.

I would say, first, the Senator from Illinois missed my first two grades, which were A-pluses to the President for recruiting--for blue chip recruiting of Arne Duncan and for the teacher incentive program, so he may have come in as I was giving the bad news.

I am aware there are--the answer is yes.

Well, I am not going to get into a detailed analysis with the Senator. I would say this: My view of American education is that we should give parents and students the opportunity to choose among the schools they go to. If there are four times as many children and parents who apply for this program than can be accepted, that would indicate to me that these parents and these families and these children think this is an opportunity they would like to have to improve their lives and improve their future.

Oh, of course we should.

I thank the Senator for his questions. I know he is the most ardent supporter of the idea of not using Federal dollars to give poor children the same choices that middle- and higher income children have. I respect that difference of opinion. I am going to go on with my remarks. But I believe it is a wise--

Thank you very much. I am going to continue with the time on the Republican side, if I may. I look forward to a longer discussion with the Senator from Illinois on this subject. I would hope that when Senator Lieberman holds his hearing, we will have a full discussion of why it is a good idea to say to poor kids and poor families: You can't have a choice of a better school, but people with money can. That is not the way we operate our college system.

This is our Nation's Capital. We are 3 years into a program. I have met with many of the children. Their lives are not going to be instantly changed in 3 years. There was much in the analysis that was completed by the Department of Education that showed the choices they made were helping the students academically and otherwise, and I will be glad to come back to the floor and discuss that when I have more time.

But let me go on to my concern beyond the DC voucher program to the bad news. I regret to say this, but the bad news has to do with Pell Grants and student loans. Pell Grants, of course, are the 5 million grants or scholarships that were made to low-income students this year to help them pay for college, with $19 billion that we have appropriated for that purpose this last year. Almost on the day it was announced that we had a $1.8 trillion deficit for this 1 year--four times bigger than it was last year--the President's budget wants to add $293 billion over 10 years to entitlement spending. That is automatic spending. That is the reason the country's debt is so high. Sixty percent of our spending is entitlement spending. I think the punishment for the administration should be that they should all be made to stay after school and write on the blackboard, each, 100 times: I will never, ever again add to entitlement spending, even for a worthy purpose. It is no gift to students to give them a scholarship to live in a country they can't afford to live in because it has an interest payment of $800 billion a year, which it would in the 10th year of the President's budget.

It is not as if the Congress has been stingy with Pell grants. They have gone from $7.7 billion 10 years ago to $19 billion today, and 5 million students are getting them. All we say today is if we don't have the money we have appropriated, we can't spend it on scholarships.

The President's proposal would say we are going to spend it whether we have it or not. Spend it whether we have it, despite the fact that our debt has grown to such levels that we couldn't even qualify to be admitted to the European Union, which is a huge embarrassment. That deserves an F and a stay after school and detention, as far as I am concerned.

Here is another F, and it is for student loans. There are 15 million of those student loans--about $75 billion--and what the President's budget proposes to do is turn this great recruit--this blue chip recruit, who I think has a good chance of being ``Educator of the Year,'' into ``Banker of the Year.'' He wants another Washington takeover, this time of student loans. Instead of letting 12 million students decide they would prefer to borrow from 2,000 institutions on 4,400 campuses all across America, they are saying: No--everybody just line up at the U.S. Department of Education to get your student loan.

The only justification for that, that I can see, is the administration says it might save the taxpayers money because the Federal Government can borrow cheaper than the banks can. Well, if that is true, then we ought to not have any private financial institutions in America; we ought to turn every financial institution into a national bank and let the President run them. Andrew Jackson, the founder of the Democratic Party, would turn over in his grave because he ran against the national bank during his whole political career.

It makes no sense to turn the U.S. Department of Education into a national bank for student loans. It should not be done. The savings are illusory. In the President's budget they say $94 billion is what will be saved, but they leave out the administrative costs which could go as high as $32 billion, and they leave out the fact that what they are doing is borrowing money at one-quarter of 1 percent and loaning it to the students at 6.8 percent.

So they are taking money from the students and using it to pay somebody else a scholarship, with the Congressman taking the credit. There needs to be some truth in lending here so that when students line up to get their student loans, somebody says: Did you know that the interest you are paying by working an extra job or by going at night is being used to pay somebody else's scholarship? If we take that part out of it, we could leave the program just like it is.

Twelve million out of fifteen million students prefer to have a private choice. They have had 15 years to choose either the public option or the private choice, and they have consistently decided they would rather deal with the community bank than a Federal agency.

Well, I am about through with the report card. The rest I would put under ``incomplete.'' There is still a lot of good-faith effort: Deregulating higher education is a goal of mine and Senator Mikulski's as well, and the new Secretary of Education has said he will work on that. More flexibility in No Child Left Behind is a goal of mine; it may be of the Secretary's as well. We can work on that.

My respectful suggestion to the President would be, instead of trying to make a tackle out of this wide receiver you recruited, instead of making Banker of the Year out of your Education Secretary, why don't you let him work on the education agenda? Why don't you let him focus on paying teachers more for teaching well and charter schools? If he runs out of things to do, to help parents, he could work on a tax system that is more favorable to parents with children; we used to have that in this country.

He could work on encouraging perinatal care so every child has a medical home or helping nurses to help parents in their homes so children can grow up healthy or to make sure we do nothing to discourage home schooling for dedicated parents or helping adults learn English. There are lines in Nashville and in Boston and in other cities of adults who wish to learn English.

He could encourage worksite daycare for parents who work and might take their child to work with them so they would be closer together. All that would be to help better parenting or to help create better teachers or better school leaders.

The Pell Grant for Kids I mentioned for afterschool programs or higher standards in data collection, I know the Secretary is interested in that. Teach for America, that is an important part of new energy in our schools. The Secretary, instead of trying to be ``Banker of the Year,'' could take on the teachers colleges which have had a hard time spending their time on such things as how to give parents more choices, how to reward outstanding teaching, how to make charter schools successful, or how to help newly arrived children learn English. He could expand the UTeach Program started at the University of Texas and which our America COMPETES legislation put into national law. That needs to be implemented.

Then, the summer academies, to help outstanding teachers and outstanding students of U.S. history so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American. That would be a good thing to do.

I look forward to working with this new Secretary of Education. I give the President credit. I give him an A-plus for his recruiting. I give him an A-plus for his agenda for rewarding outstanding teaching and a high grade for his focus on charter schools. I am grateful for that. I stand ready to work with him.

I give him horrible grades for stopping the DC voucher program and another Government takeover, this one of student loans, and of taking money away from students who are getting loans to pay for scholarships for other students. That is not right. I think, in this day and age, when we are adding $1.8 trillion to the debt in 1 year, it is certainly no time to add $293 billion in entitlement spending to the budget over 10 years. The whole administration ought to write on the blackboard: I will never, ever again add to entitlement spending.

I look forward to working with the President and his outstanding new Secretary on that incomplete agenda. Many of the items I mentioned are things in which they are interested in as well and things which all of us in the Senate would want to do to help improve our system of elementary and secondary education, as well as our excellent colleges and universities.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to join the majority leader in wishing happy birthday to Jim Jeffords. Jim is a friend of all of ours. I see the Senator from Arizona in the Chamber. We all served together. I served with Senator Jeffords when I was Education Secretary and he was ranking member of the Education Committee. We all know his deep concern for education, especially for children with disabilities. We wish him the very best on his 75th birthday.

Mr. President, even though President Obama has said we should look forward, some in Congress insist on looking backward to a broader investigation of interrogation tactics that were used against 9/11 terrorists to find out whether even more airplanes were on their way to kill even more Americans.

These interrogation tactics are now well known. They had been approved by the National Security Council, approved by the Department of Justice, were known to senior Democratic and Republican Members of Congress who, CIA records now show, were briefed some 40 times. The CIA has not used the tactics in question for several years. They are not being used today. The Congress has since enacted laws that make clear that interrogation tactics used by the military are limited to those contained in the Army Field Manual. The President extended those same limitations to intelligence agencies this year by Executive order.

The President is following his own advice about looking forward by asking the National Security Council to review what tactics would be appropriate when terrorists are captured who might have information about imminent attacks on Americans. The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own review of tactics and is considering expanding the briefing process for interrogation tactics.

Despite these investigations, some still say, let's have ``a full- blown criminal'' investigation.

That raises these questions: Investigation of whom? Where do we draw the line? Where is the logical place to stop?

On Thursday, I asked these questions of the Attorney General, Eric Holder, at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. He found it difficult to give me specific answers.

To begin with, the Attorney General did not answer my question about what directions he had received from the White House concerning interrogations.

Then, he would only answer ``hypothetically'' when I asked if we are going to investigate lawyers for giving their opinions, shouldn't we also investigate intelligence agents who created the interrogation techniques and asked for the opinions, or officials who approved the techniques, or Members of Congress who knew about or approved or even encouraged the interrogation tactics?

The Attorney General could not remember whether he knew or approved of renditions that occurred during the Clinton administration when he was Deputy Attorney General--renditions that took captured terrorists to other countries, for example, perhaps to Egypt, for custody, maybe for interrogation. He did not say what precautions he took to make sure these renditions followed the law.

The Attorney General's unresponsive answers and poor memory suggest what a difficult path it will be if the Government continues to publicize and expand its investigation of interrogation tactics.

This is not a pleasant subject. When we debated it in the Senate in 2005, I was among those Senators, including Senator McCain, who disagreed with the administration. We believed it was Congress's constitutional responsibility to set the rules for dealing with detainees and we helped enact a law requiring that techniques used by the military should be limited to those in the Army Field Manual. But showing videotapes of even those techniques will not be a pretty sight.

Public officials, of course, should follow the law. But it is not necessary to have a circus to determine whether the law was followed.

If there is to be a broader investigation than currently is underway, it must be fair and evenhanded and lead wherever it may lead--perhaps to intelligence officers, perhaps to administration officials, perhaps to Members of Congress. The Attorney General himself needs to be willing to say what he knew and when he knew it and what he did about renditions during the Clinton administration when he was Deputy Attorney General.

Obsessively looking in the rear view mirror could consume our Nation's every waking moment. There is plenty about America's history that, in retrospect, we wish had not happened: Supreme Court decisions barring Blacks from public facilities, Congress filibustering anti- lynching laws, excluding Jews from major institutions, denying women the right to vote, incarcerating Japanese Americans during World War

Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the statement before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of Michael F. Scheuer, former Chief of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, in which he says:

The CIA's rendition program began in late summer, 1995. I authored it, and then ran and managed it against al-Qaeda leaders and other Sunni Islamists from August 1995 until June 1999.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wish to make a few remarks about education, a subject that is important to virtually all of us.

When figuring out what to do about education, my suggestion to those in my party is that Republicans should ask, ``What would Lincoln do?''

During the first 16 months of his Presidency, Abraham Lincoln helped enact three of the most important and successful pieces of legislation in American history: the Homestead Act, the Morrill Acts that created the land-grant colleges and universities, and the Pacific Railroad Act.

What made these laws successful, according to Harvard Professor Bill Stuntz, in an April 6 article in The Weekly Standard, was that they ``did not depend on the complex judgments made by members of congress or government regulators. [They] were meant to confer opportunities, not to solve problems . . . the necessary elbow grease was supplied by the private citizens whose prospects Lincoln improved.''

These three laws helped American farmers create the world's most productive farmland and American universities produce the most educated workforce. The transcontinental railroad knitted together this sprawling Nation.

A later version of this same thinking produced the GI bill scholarships which followed veterans to the colleges of their choice at the end of World War II. Then came Pell grants and student loans which today follow two out of three students to the colleges of their choice.

Similarly $31 billion of Federal research money is handed out each year to universities. Almost all of it is peer reviewed and competitively granted, and not parceled out by legislators and regulators. All of this might be called the Lincoln approach to Federal Government involvement in education. Conferring opportunities.

Now, compare it to the command-and-control Rooseveltian model best exemplified by our kindergarten through the 12th grade system of education. In that system, students do not choose--they are told--where to go to school. Government money goes directly to institutions, not to students. Government and unions write rules handcuffing teachers and principals and other student leaders. And virtually no teacher is paid more for teaching well.

There is yet another approach. No Federal involvement at all. Some believe that. Leave education to the States or communities.

I suppose that over the last 30 years I have embraced all three of these points of view. Some may call that unprincipled, but I prefer to align myself with former Senator Everett Dirksen, who once said: ``I am a principled man, and flexibility is one of my principles.''

During my second year as Governor in 1980, I asked President Reagan to support what I called a grand swap, give the States all of kindergarten through the 12th grade, and the Federal Government would take all of Medicaid.

The President liked that. I liked it. But it did not go very far.

In 1984, I helped make Tennessee the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. I encouraged school choice and created centers and chairs of excellence at universities. Despite this aggressive State action, I concluded at the end of my 8 years as Governor that K-12 education depended entirely upon parents, teachers, school leaders, and community. So I traveled to all 132 school districts in Tennessee, creating Better Schools Task Forces, and challenging them to create better schools.

As Education Secretary, I proposed America 2000, again emphasizing community responsibility for education, higher standards for States, and support for what we called then ``break the mold'' charter schools, and more choices for parents of low-income children.

Later on, I said we can do without a Department of Education--the Department I used to head--meaning that I thought an agency handing out scholarships to K-12 students, as well as college students, plus some effective advocacy was all we needed at the Federal level.

As a Senator, I reluctantly embraced No Child Left Behind, because it forces reporting on children who are indeed left behind, but have introduced legislation to empower States to try to do that reporting in their own way.

Putting it all together, I may not have been quite as inconsistent as I have accused myself of being.

No. 1, I believe the Federal Government should be involved in education, but I am for the Lincoln empowering model as opposed to the Rooseveltian command-and-control model.

No. 2, I believe that 95 percent of making K-12 education better depends on parents and teachers and school leaders. And, finally, while I believe it is virtually impossible for regulators and politicians in Washington to make schools better, I believe it is sometimes possible for Washington to help parents, teachers, school leaders, and communities make schools better.

So following that Lincolnian set of principles--conferring opportunities instead of making decisions--what exactly should the Federal Government do to empower parents and help them be better parents?

One, a Pell grant for kids. Give every middle- and low-income child $500 to spend after school at any State-approved education program. This would help fund music and art lessons, English lessons, other catchup and get-ahead lessons. It would pour billions into poorer school districts, programs encouraging public schools in those districts to get busy and attract students by offering the afterschool programs themselves.

A second thing would be a Federal tax system favoring parents with children. We had this during the 1950s in America. President George W. Bush did more to support this idea than most realize.

Next, perinatal care. Make sure that pregnant mothers receive care and find a medical home, a team of medical professionals that is responsible for coordinating all of the new baby's health care needs from before the pregnancy until 6 weeks after. That would be the real Head Start.

Nurses in homes. We could encourage nurses to visit homes to make sure every newly born child has a medical home. Remember, now, I am taking about what could the Federal Government be doing to help parents be better parents.

Home schooling. Our policy should be never to hinder home schooling, and to look for ways to help. Why should we punish parents who are doing their job well?

Professor Coleman at the University of Chicago used to say: School is for the purpose of helping parents do what the parents do not do as well.

We could help adults learn English. There are lines of new Americans outside federally funded programs in Tennessee to help adults learn English. Senator Kennedy has told me the same is true in Massachusetts. Encouraging our common language is a Federal role, and if parents speak English better, the child is more likely to speak English better.

Finally in this list of ideas: worksite day care. With so many parents working outside the home, there is less time for the child. One solution is worksite day care near the place where the parent works. Take the child to work. This is usually a private sector solution, but as assistance for low-income parents could make sense.

To help teachers and school leaders be better, what could the Federal Government do? One thing would be to help fund higher standards and data collection. Those should be set by States or groups of States, not by those of us in Congress. But they should be set so teachers, parents, and students know what to expect.

Probably nothing is more important than paying good teachers more for teaching well. I especially admire the work the new Secretary of Education has done in this area in Chicago. I know the new Senator from Colorado and the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Corker, in their hometowns have done this.

Every child benefits from exceptional teaching. Now that we know how to relate student achievement to the skills of the teacher or the groups of teachers, we should pay teachers for their superior skills. That means expanding the Teacher's Incentive Fund, which already exists, to help local school districts reward outstanding teaching in many different ways.

As the late Albert Shanker, president of the large American Federation for Teachers, used to say, ``If you can have master plumbers, why not master teachers?''

We should encourage charter schools. That helps teachers because it liberates the teachers and school leaders to use their own good judgment to help the children assigned to them. I am encouraged that the new Secretary of Education has encouraged charter schools.

Teach for America helps to supply new raw talent to the classroom, and I think, even more important, forms an alumni corps of support for excellence in the public schools, once those young teachers go on to whatever else they plan to do.

Teachers' colleges. They need to be improved. One way to do it would be to award peer-reviewed, competitive research grants on the agendas most of them will not touch: how to give parents more choices, how to reward outstanding teaching, how to make charter schools successful, and how to help newly arrived children learn English.

UTeach is another idea formed at the University of Texas-Austin. The America COMPETES Act that we passed in a bipartisan way in 2007 carries that nationally. It funds scholarships at universities where good students in math and science will switch to teaching.

Summer academies. Senators Reid and Kennedy, a whole group of us, have helped to create summer academies for outstanding teachers of U.S. history, as well as the sciences. These are inexpensive and enriching and they do not intrude very much into State and local responsibility.

School leaders. The biggest bang for the buck that we can do from here, or that States could do, or that school districts could do, is training school leaders. Generally, our role could be to expand the Teacher Incentive Fund and the New Leaders for New Schools Program.

Our higher education system is molded upon the Lincolnian principles. It is also the best in the world. Our K-12 system is smothered by commands and controls from Government and the unions. It is a source of constant concern. Republicans should create proposals and policies that confer opportunities for parents, teachers, students, school leaders, and researchers, and stay away from programs that create command-and- control orders from politicians and regulators.

That is a lesson from our founder, Abraham Lincoln.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in the early 1800s, a perceptive young Frenchman came to America, Alexis de Tocqueville. He marveled at our new democracy. He wrote a classic book about it. He warned more than anything about something he called ``the tyranny of the majority.'' That was his worry about the American democracy.

We now have finished 100 days for a popular new President. He has presented a blueprint for the country that is dramatically different from what we had before.

Yesterday, a member of our Republican side moved his desk to the other side potentially giving that side of the aisle 60 votes and raising the prospect that we would have no check and balance on one- party rule, the genuine risk of what de Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. So the question arises, what is the blueprint for this popular new President, and is it the kind of change we really want?

All of us can point to something, as the Republican leader did, to Afghanistan and Iraq, of which we approve. I could point to the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and his focus on paying teachers more for teaching well and encouraging charter schools, something I greatly support. But both the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from Kentucky have pointed out that the blueprint presented by our new President has too much spending, too much taxing, and too much debt.

Especially striking to me is the idea that we would have, in the 10th year of the President's budget proposal, $800 billion in interest to pay, which is more than we would be spending on defense that year, eight times as much as the Federal Government would spend on education that year, and eight times as much as it would spend on housing, $800 billion of interest to pay just on the debt.

Yet there is another part of this blueprint that worries me, and that is too much government. We read that now our Government, through taxpayers, owns half of our largest automobile companies.

In an interview I heard the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator say automakers are waiting for the Government to tell them what kind of car they ought to build. Already the President has fired the President of our largest auto company and our Government is telling the company who should be on the boards. I suppose it will be saying also what plants should be kept open or closed and what people should be paid. That is quite a bit of government. Or banks, instead of asking the Congress at the beginning of January for a $1 trillion line of credit so we could get the toxic assets out of banks and get credit flowing again, so jobs would come back and housing prices would stabilize, this new administration spent $1 trillion, a breathtaking, unimaginable amount of money, adding it to the debt. What about the banks? Well, we are going to own the banks or at least be the major shareholder in many of the biggest banks in the world. Again, that means politicians and regulators in Washington will be deciding who will be the bank president, who will be on the boards, who will get the loans, perhaps, and for what purposes the loans could be used.

Isn't that the kind of thing that got us into trouble in the first place, politicians in Washington telling banks to loan money to people who could not afford to pay it back? This too much government in the first 100 days is not just the result of the recession in which we find ourselves. This is not a crowd that believes if you can find it in the yellow pages, the Government should not be doing it. This is a deliberate choice of more Government.

As in the case of student loans, the first proposal from the President was that we take the amount of Pell grants and add that to the automatic spending in the budget, adding another $117 billion to the automatic spending over 10 years. This is something that could bankrupt our country and it didn't fly. But there is another proposal, which is still out there. That would take the entire student loan program and cancel the choices that students have, create a big new bank, a half-trillion-dollar bank, and have the Department of Education make all the loans. That is a massive takeover by the Government.

Twelve million students today choose to get their loans from private lenders. There are 2,000 of those loaning money to students who choose to attend Nashville Auto Diesel College or Harvard or Princeton, where the Senator from Missouri was an outstanding student. There are 4,400 campuses that offer this choice. The proposal would be to create a big, new, half-trillion-dollar bank that would take all of that over, that would make $75 billion of loans in a year. It would make the promising new Education Secretary a candidate for banker of the year instead of Secretary of the year. It would cause Andrew Jackson, who fought against the national bank in his day, to roll over in his grave at what his party is doing. It would be Congressmen playing a trick on students because the end result would be saying: We are going to borrow the money, the U.S. Department of Education, at one-quarter of 1 percent, and we are going to lend it to you at 6.8 percent. Then we will turn around and give aid to other people that you students are paying for, and we Congressmen will take the credit.

I don't think students will like that. It is all in the name of $94 billion in savings, but that is exaggerated because the Government already admits that it will cost $25 or $30 billion at least for the Government to manage the program, and I can't believe the Government is a better manager of a bank making 15 million loans a year than banks that are set up to do that.

If the subsidy is too high, lower it; don't cancel the program. That is the direction in which we are going. This is an administration with a blueprint for a different kind of American future. But it is not the kind of American future that Abraham Lincoln saw for the

Federal Government. In the first years of President Lincoln's administration, he not only was involved in the Civil War, but he and the Congress passed the Homestead Act and the Land Grant Colleges Act and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. They conferred opportunities on Americans everywhere, and then the Americans used their own elbow grease to make things happen.

This administration, this 100 days, is a command-and-control type of administration, with regulators and politicians running the banks, running the auto companies, and nationalizing student loans. It is an opportunity to have a new blueprint of a kind we haven't seen before, not one that confers opportunities but a planned America with less freedom, with fewer choices, fewer opportunities, a society planned and run by Washington regulators and politicians that our children and grandchildren cannot afford, not a society that confers opportunities and choices for the people.

In addition, there is the prospect of no check and balance on one- party rule which risks what the perceptive young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, said in the early 1800s was the greatest threat to the new American democracy when he warned about the tyranny of the majority.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for a couple of minutes to comment on Senator Bennet's speech.

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado on what we call in the Senate his maiden address. I also had the privilege of hearing Senator Udall's speech when he made his on renewable energy. I was glad to hear these today.

The Senator from Colorado has focused on a subject he has worked on hard and which is central to every part of our ability to improve our schools. It is one recognized by our new Education Secretary who, I think, is President Obama's best new appointee. It is the question of how do we reward outstanding teaching.

Every time we deal with education, we are ultimately reminded that it boils down to the parent and the teacher. What the parent cannot do, the teacher has to step in and finish. In so many cases, whether it is a gifted child or a child who hasn't been read to at home or a child with disabilities or a child who needs a music lesson, it takes a gifted teacher to do the best job to help the child reach his or her potential.

We are still, as the Senator said, 50 or 60 or 70 years behind in recognizing that our country has changed and that women have many opportunities outside the home. We cannot trap them into teaching. We need to attract them and keep them, as well as outstanding men.

Senator Bennet has been successful in his work in Denver and in finding ways to initiate that. The Secretary wants to do that. I worked on that in Tennessee. I have said to the Secretary of Education if he leaves after 4 or 8 years having left a legacy of many different ways of improving ways to reward outstanding teaching, he will have done more than all of the other secretaries of education put together.

As Albert Shanker once said, ``If we can have master plumbers, we can have master teachers.''

Again, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado for his focus on education in his maiden address. I was happy and privileged to be on the Senate floor to hear that.

Mr. President, not more than 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Budget Committee. I am here to speak on a personal matter more than the budget. I made my comments on the budget this morning. I was listening, though, to the Senator from Arizona and the Senator from North Dakota. I have heard the Senator from North Dakota say he is opposed to using reconciliation to run the health care bill through the Senate with 51 votes. I have heard him say that. I agree with him. I know he stood up against some in his party for doing that.

But if I am not mistaken, there were three Senate conferees, and if the Senator from North Dakota voted no, we would not have reconciliation instructions included in this conference report. I think I am correct about that.

Of course.

That is a very honest response, and I accept that. But the point is there are three conferees from the Senate, including Senator Gregg who was opposed to including reconciliation. So if the Senator from North Dakota had said no, maybe he would not have been a conferee, but there would not be reconciliation in this Budget Resolution.

Let me move to something more bipartisan than that.

Tribute to Tom Ingram

Mr. President, on May 1, Tom Ingram is leaving his post as chief of staff for the Alexander office and as staff director of the Senate Republican Conference. I know what it is to be a staff member of the Senate, having come here in 1967 as Senator Howard Baker's legislative assistant. That is back when each Senator only had one. I know that staff members are the lifeblood of this institution, that they regularly come and go, and that we Senators are grateful for their service.

But Tom Ingram's service for the Senate and for me personally is a good deal more than the usual coming and going. Tom and I first met in 1966 when I was a young volunteer on Howard Baker's Senate campaign and Tom was an even younger reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. The Tennessean was then such a Democratic newspaper that it was said that Tom was the first reporter ever assigned by that newspaper to cover a Republican candidate on a regular basis. In fairness to the Tennessean, there had not been much to cover. Senator Baker in 1966 became the first Republican Senator in Tennessee history. We had not elected a Republican Governor since the Harding sweep in 1920.

In 1974, Tom served as press secretary for what could only be described as my upstart campaign for Governor of Tennessee. We did pretty well for some young guys, winning the primary over more established figures, but losing the general election. That was the Watergate year. There were only 12 Republican Governors left in America after that debacle, and I figured my political career was over at a very young age.

But in 1978, as things tend to do in politics, times changed, and I was elected Governor, walking a thousand miles across Tennessee in a red and black plaid shirt. Tom this time was my successful campaign manager. He then managed my transition into the Governor's office, served as chief of staff and deputy to the Governor for 5 years. Then he left to form a very successful business in Nashville.

During his business career, he found time to help establish my office when I became president of the University of Tennessee. He did the same when I became the first President Bush's Education Secretary.

The long and short of it is, when Tom Ingram has been around, I have done my best work, and perhaps so has he. We know each other so well that we operate independently toward the same goal and get twice as much done than either of us could do working alone.

One of Tom's gifts is team building. An Ingram-led staff is fun to be a part of, and it is a purposeful group. He has made sure that each of us, Senator included, remember who hired us. For example, the entire Washington staff and State staff spent 3 days in Memphis a couple of weeks ago making sure that we understand as much as we can about the people and the needs of our State's biggest city and biggest county. As Tom leaves to reenter the private sector, he has taken time to make sure that the new staff is well led and well organized, and for that I am especially grateful.

Tom's greater contribution may have been to the Senate as a whole. He has helped our Republican conference develop a clearer message. And working with Bob Russell, Senator Mark Pryor's chief of staff, he created a bipartisan chiefs of staff group that has been more successful at working across party lines than their bosses have been. The Senator from Illinois and I are part of a group of Senators from both parties that meets on Tuesday mornings. There are 8, 10, 15, 20 of us sometimes. But more than half the chiefs of staff get together on a regular basis as part of this bipartisan alliance, which is a remarkable number in this already over-organized and busy place.

Tom Ingram came to the Senate expecting to stay a few months. He is leaving after 6 years. I am grateful to him for that, and the Senate is a better place.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article about the bipartisan chiefs of staff organization from Roll Call which appeared on March 10, 2009, and an article about Tom's work that appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel last year.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Budget Committee for the time. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Florida on his comments. He is exactly right, there is a major fault along the Mississippi River near Memphis, TN. There was a massive earthquake in the early 1800s that created Reelfoot Lake. The earthquake was so profound that the Mississippi River actually ran upstream in order to do that. One eyewitness to that was Davy Crockett, who was on a bear hunt that winter up in northwest Tennessee. He wrote about it in his autobiography which was intended to be his Presidential campaign autobiography. It never quite worked out. But we take it very seriously.

The University of Memphis has a center dealing with earthquakes. We will be very interested in his proposal. I was glad to have a chance to hear about it.

Mr. President, do you remember a few years ago when our Congress got mad at France and banned French fries in the House of Representatives cafeteria? We Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with the French, which is why it was so galling last month when the Democratic Congress passed a budget with such big deficits that it makes the United States literally ineligible to join France in the European Union.

Of course, we do not want to be in the European Union. We are the United States of America. But French deficits are lower than ours, and their President has been running around sounding like a Republican, lecturing our President about spending too much.

Now the debate in Congress is shifting to the size of your electric and gasoline bills and to climate change. So guess who has one of the lowest electric rates in Western Europe and the second lowest carbon emissions in the entire European Union. It is France again.

What is more, they are doing it with a technology we invented and have been reluctant to use: nuclear power.

Thirty years ago, the contrary French became reliant on nuclear power when others would not. Today, nuclear plants provide 80 percent of their electricity. They even sell electricity to Germany, whose politicians built windmills and solar panels and promised not to build nuclear plants, which was exactly the attitude in the United States between 1979 and 2008, when not one new nuclear plant was built. Still, nuclear, which provides only 20 percent of all U.S. electricity, provides 70 percent of our pollution-free electricity. So you would think that if Democrats want to talk about energy and climate change and clean air, they would put American-made nuclear power front and center. Instead, their answer is billions in subsidies for renewable energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth.

Well, we Republicans like renewable energy too. We proposed a new Manhattan Project, for example, like the one in World War II, to find ways to make solar power cost competitive and to improve advanced biofuels from crops that we do not eat. But today, renewable electricity from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth provides only about 1.5 percent of America's electricity. Double it and triple it, and we still do not have very much. So there is potentially a dangerous energy gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable energy we need.

To close that gap, Republicans say start with conservation and efficiency. We have so much electricity at night, for example, we could electrify half our cars and trucks by plugging them in

while we sleep without building one new powerplant. On that Republicans and Democrats agree. But when it comes to producing more energy, we disagree.

When Republicans say build 100 new nuclear powerplants during the next 20 years, Democrats say, well, there is no place to put the used nuclear fuel.

We say, recycle the fuel--the way France does. They say, no, we cannot.

We say, how about another Manhattan Project to remove carbon from coal plant emissions? Imaginary, they say.

We say, for a bridge to a clean energy future, find more natural gas and oil offshore. Farmers, homeowners, and factories must have natural gas, and the oil we will still need should be ours instead of sending billions of dollars overseas.

They can't wait to put another ban on offshore drilling.

We say incentives.

They say mandates.

We say keep prices down.

Democrats say put a big, new national sales tax on electric bills and gasoline.

We both want a clean energy future, but here is the real difference: Republicans want to find more American energy and use less. Democrats want to use less, and they don't want to find much more.

They talk about President Kennedy sending a man to the Moon. Their energy proposals wouldn't get America halfway to the Moon.

We Republicans didn't like it when Democrats passed a budget that gave the French bragging rights on deficits, so we are not about to let the French also outdo us on electric and gasoline bills, clean air, and climate change.

We say find more American energy and use less--energy that is as clean as possible, as reliable as possible, and at as low a cost as possible, and one place to start is with 100 new nuclear powerplants.

Mr. President, I wish to ask unanimous consent that following my remarks an article from the Washington Post and an article from the Maryville ALCOA Daily Times be printed in the Record, which I will describe for a moment.

Mr. President, the article from the Washington Post is written by James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch. James Schlesinger was the first Secretary of Energy, and he established the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Robert Hirsch is a senior energy adviser today, and he managed the Federal renewable programs. Their article is entitled ``Getting Real on Wind and Solar.''

Here is the last paragraph of the article I am including:

The United States will need an array of electric power

production options to meet its needs in the years ahead.

Solar and wind will have their place, as will other

renewables. Realistically, however, solar and wind will

probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S.

power. Some serious realism in energy planning is needed,

preferably from analysts who are not backing one horse or

another.

The other article from the Maryville ALCOA Daily Times on April 27-- today--is from my hometown. This is my hometown newspaper, and it is about a plant that means a lot to me. It is an ALCOA plant--the Aluminum Company of America plant. My father worked at the south plant until he retired. I went to school on an ALCOA scholarship. During World Wars I and II, there were as many as 12,000 and 13,000 people in our east Tennessee area who worked at ALCOA with good wages. It changed the lives of three generations of families who lived there. It would have been impossible for us to have the good schools, the good jobs, the good communities we have had without the good wages paid by the Aluminum Company of America.

Here is the headline: ``ALCOA hopes new power contract will bring smelting restart.''

Ninety-five years after ALCOA Tennessee Operations fired up

its first potline--

That is to make aluminum--

and seven weeks after the company shut down its last potline,

the question remains: Will aluminum ingots ever roll out of

the south plant again?

What will make the difference for these ALCOA plants that have provided good wages and good jobs to thousands of families in Tennessee? The price of electricity.

The newspaper says:

The deal that ALCOA is looking for is a long-range power

contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority that will allow

the Tennessee smelting operations to be cost competitive when

metal prices rebound.

When we talk about electricity, the only cost some people talk about is driving up the cost so we will use less of it. That is the idea of a carbon tax. That is the idea of driving up the price of gasoline so people will buy less of it. But if we drive up the price of electricity in Tennessee--if TVA raises its prices to ALCOA--that plant will never reopen again and those hundreds or even thousands of jobs will never come back again.

I was visited recently by a number of big companies in Tennessee that are concerned about the price of Tennessee Valley Authority electricity. They say they may not be able to stay there unless it gets more competitive. Residential rates are relatively low--average to low--but rates for companies are not low. Ironically, we are celebrating in Tennessee the arrival of two big new industries which make polysilicon, which is the material that goes into the solar panels that you put on the top of your house. Those two new plants, one of which will go in Clarksville, TN, and one of which will go in Cleveland, will each use about 120 megawatts of power when they open. From the beginning, they will be among the largest customers of the Tennessee Valley Authority for electricity. They will be using, as I said, 240 megawatts of low-cost, reliable electricity produced by coal, nuclear, and hydropower in our region. They could not rely on the one wind farm that exists in the Southeastern United States, which is in Tennessee and which only produces 5 megawatts of unreliable, expensive power--because the wind blows much of the time at night, when TVA already has 7,000 megawatts of extra power. So the solar plants that we need for the renewable energy of the future will have to rely today on coal, nuclear, and natural gas.

It is important, as we debate the so-called renewable electricity standard, as we talk about climate change and clean energy--and I have had legislation on those subjects every congress that I have been a Senator--to realize that cost is important if we don't want to keep jobs from going overseas and if we want people to be able to afford their electric bills. I mentioned that TVA's electric rates are average to low, but last December, 10 percent of the electricity customers of the Nashville Electric Service said they couldn't afford to pay their bills. When we come down here and start talking about proposals that are going to drive up the cost, and when we say we are going to deliberately drive up the cost, I think that is the wrong policy.

We are an inventive country. We can conserve. We can double the number of nuclear powerplants we have. We can double the energy research that we are doing on solar and other renewable energies, and we can do it with the objective of having low-cost electricity. That is the way to keep our jobs. That is the way to avoid poverty. That is the way to produce the largest amount of clean electricity for the future. We need a bridge to a clean energy future. Yes, of course, that includes renewable energy, but it is only 1.5 percent of what we have today. So to talk about driving the price up and relying on a national windmill policy, for example, to drive this big productive country is unrealistic.

I thank the President, and I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

[From the Washington Post, Apr. 24, 2009]

Getting Real on Wind and Solar

(By James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch)

Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun

doesn't always shine and that the wind doesn't always blow.

That means that solar cells and wind energy systems don't

always provide electric power. Nevertheless, solar and wind

energy seem to have captured the public's support as

potentially being the primary or total answer to our electric

power needs.

Solar cells and wind turbines are appealing because they

are ``renewables'' with promising implications and because

they emit no carbon dioxide during operation, which is

certainly a plus. But because both are intermittent electric

power generators, they cannot produce electricity ``on

demand,'' something that the public requires. We expect the

lights to go on when we flip a switch, and we do not expect

our computers to shut down as nature dictates.

Solar and wind electricity are available only part of the

time that consumers demand power. Solar cells produce no

electric power at night, and clouds greatly reduce their

output. The wind doesn't blow at a constant rate, and

sometimes it does not blow at all.

If large-scale electric energy storage were viable, solar

and wind intermittency would be less of a problem. However,

large-scale electric energy storage is possible only in the

few locations where there are hydroelectric dams. But when we

use hydroelectric dams for electric energy storage, we reduce

their electric power output, which would otherwise have been

used by consumers. In other words, we suffer a loss to gain

power on demand from wind and solar.

At locations without such hydroelectric dams, which is most

places, solar and wind electricity systems must be backed up

100 percent by other forms of generation to ensure against

blackouts. In today's world, that backup power can only come

from fossil fuels.

Because of this need for full fossil fuel backup, the

public will pay a large premium for solar and wind--paying

once for the solar and wind system (made financially feasible

through substantial subsidies) and again for the fossil fuel

system, which must be kept running at a low level at all

times to be able to quickly ramp up in cases of sudden

declines in sunshine and wind. Thus, the total cost of such a

system includes the cost of the solar and wind machines,

their subsidies, and the cost of the full backup power system

running in ``spinning reserve.''

Finally, since solar and wind conditions are most favorable

in the Southwest and the center of the country, costly

transmission lines will be needed to move that lower-cost

solar and wind energy to population centers on the coasts.

There must be considerable redundancy in those new

transmission lines to guard against damage due to natural

disasters and terrorism, leading to considerable additional

costs.

The climate change benefits that accrue from solar and wind

power with 100 percent fossil fuel backup are associated with

the fossil fuels not used at the standby power plants.

Because solar and wind have the capacity to deliver only 30

to 40 percent of their full power ratings in even the best

locations, they provide a carbon dioxide reduction of less

than 30 to 40 percent, considering the fossil fuels needed

for the ``spinning reserve.'' That's far less than the 100

percent that many people believe, and it all comes with a

high cost premium.

The United States will need an array of electric power

production options to meet its needs in the years ahead.

Solar and wind will have their places, as will other

renewables. Realistically, however, solar and wind will

probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S.

power. Some serious realism in energy planning is needed,

preferably from analysts who are not backing one horse or

another.

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

Madam President, I wish to speak on behalf of a motion to instruct the conferees, which I have here. Do I need to send this to the desk?

I will speak on behalf of it and send it at the appropriate time.

This should be a relatively easy motion for our colleagues to support because it simply instructs the conferees to support a position that the entire Senate adopted unanimously. That provision during our budget debate was to accept the position of maintaining a competitive student loan program that provides students and institutions of higher education with a comprehensive choice of loan products and services.

I ask the Chair if she will let me know when I have 2 minutes remaining.

I thank the Chair.

Madam President, there are three reasons in support of maintaining a competitive student loan system. The first is that 12 million students rely on it today in New Hampshire, in Tennessee, in North Dakota--all across our country.

Second is that now is not the time to be creating a new half- trillion-dollar national bank that would run up the debt, a bank that would replace 2,000 private lenders, and make $75 billion in new loans a year. That is not a proper function of the U.S. Department of Education.

And third, the cost savings that is alleged is--and I will be gentle in my words--a trick on students to make Congressmen look good.

What we are going to be doing if we do not preserve this choice is saying to all the students who get a loan that we are going to take money from them and then give it to other students so that Congressmen can go home and brag that he or she has increased the amount of the Pell grants. Let me be specific in what I say.

I was the U.S. Secretary of Education in 1991 and 1992 when we created something called the Direct Loan Program. We have a federal student loan program. Most people who go to college are familiar with it. About two-thirds of the students at our 6,000 different institutions from the University of New Hampshire to the Nashville Auto Diesel College to Harvard to San Francisco State have a Federal grant or a loan. When you get a student loan, you take it to the institution of your choice.

We now have 2,000 lenders who help provide all those different kinds of loans. They give financial aid counseling, they give interest rate deductions, they help students and families plan on how to pay for college. In other words, they service the loans and then the Government supports that by guaranteeing almost all of the loans.

We set up a separate program which we called direct lending. That was, you could come straight to the Government to get your loan. In other words, we created a government bank run by the Department of Education. We said to the students and to the institutions: You make the choice. You may either have a private student loan guaranteed by the Government through your local bank or financial institution, or you may come to the U.S. Department of Education to get your loan.

We have had more than 15 years of experience with that now, and what have the students and institutions said? Three out of four say we like the regular student loan program, we like the choice, we like the private lender. Since we are getting the loan, we like the idea of going to a bank to get a loan because that is what banks do. If you want a car, you go to a car dealer. That may be changing. You may have to go to the Department of Treasury to get a loan the way the country is going. For 15, 16 years we market tested this and so we have that direct loan program.

The situation right now is we have 12 million students at 4,400 different institutions getting $52 billion in loans by their choice from banks instead of from the Government. One-fourth get it from the Government. It has been that way for a long time.

What the President's proposal wants to do is to take all those choices away from the students and say: Line up outside the Department of Education to get your student loan, all 15 million of you. There will be 4,400 institutions and 12 million students who may not like that.

Second point. Is a national bank a good idea? We read in the paper that the Government is going to take stocks in the biggest banks. So we are going to nationalize the banks. Then we read in the paper the Government is going to take stock in General Motors and Chrysler-- hopefully that is not true--so we are going to have the Government deciding what kind of car we are going to be making, what kind of plants we will have, where the plants are going to be. I cannot think of a worse organization to do that.

This is a proposal to say: All right, now the Government is going to be your bank. It is going to be the bank for your student loans. We are going to create a new national bank. It would have over a half trillion dollars in outstanding student loans. It would make 15 million student loans every year, $75 billion in loans a year. We will run all this out of the U.S. Department of Education, a wonderful Department. I was myself there for 2 years. But what do we know about being a national bank? Not very much. Andrew Jackson would roll over in his grave about the idea of a national bank of this size.

My final point. This proposal, with all due respect, is a trick on students to make Congressmen look good, and here is why.

The budget we originally got said we will take $94 billion in savings and we will spend it on Pell grants. Let's think about that a minute. Common sense will tell you that the Department of Education is not going to know more, is not going to be able to replace 2,000 lenders at a cheaper cost. That simply is not going to work. That is what common sense would tell you.

The Congressional Budget Office has told us that in order for the Department of Education to administer these loans, it would cost about $28 billion over the next 10 years. That is the computation I have made. They estimate that the cost of administering the current Direct Loan Program is about $700 million a year. So if they did them all, that would be at least $2.8 billion a year.

Conservatively speaking, you don't have $94 billion in savings; you have 94 minus 28. So you have around 66. So you have $66 billion that goes somewhere out to banks, maybe to reduce loans, maybe to reduce interest rates, maybe to administer the loan program. But the bottom line is, if the Government takes this program over, it is going to be borrowing money at one-half of 1 percent and loaning it out to 15 million students at 6.8 percent. Borrowing at one-half of 1 percent and loaning it out at 6.8. On every student loan--and I hope all 15 million students listen to this--your friendly Government is going to take back 6.5 percent

of the 6.8 percent interest you are paying. What is it going to do? The Congressman or Congresswoman can go home to Tennessee or wherever and say: I increased Pell grants. But they won't tell you: I took money from this student to give it to that student. That is not the way to do it.

What we should do, if that spread is too high right now, is let's cut it down--

--if the savings is estimated at $90 billion. We know it is closer to 60. Maybe it is 20, maybe it is 30, maybe it is 35. Maybe we should lower the interest rate to 3 or 4 percent or 5 percent or whatever is the appropriate rate. But that does not justify creating a national bank in the Department of Education to try to handle 15 million loans.

So my argument, Madam President, is this: There are colleagues on both sides of the aisle--and there are a number of Democrats--who strongly support the idea of competition and choice in higher education. That is why we have the best higher education system in the world. We have competition and choice all the way through it. The grants and the loans don't go to colleges; they go to the students, and the students choose the college. They can go to Nashville Auto Diesel College if they want or they can go to Harvard; it follows them to the school of their choice. They ought to be able to go to the lending institution of their choice and not line up outside of the Department of Education to get 15 million loans every year. That is not right. It is not the way our country ought to work. So the first is to preserve choice for the 15 million students who now have it at 4,400 institutions.

The second reason is, let's not be creating another nationalized asset in America. We need to be thinking of ways of getting the Government out of the private sector. I mean, this recession is not for the purpose of the Government taking over every auto company, every bank, all the student loans, and every business that is in trouble. We need to be thinking of ways of going the other direction. That is the America we know. That is the America we want. So we don't need a new national bank.

Arne Duncan is the new Secretary of Education. I think he is the President's best appointee. He ought to be working on paying teachers more for teaching well, creating more charter schools, helping states create higher standards. That is his agenda. I don't think he came from Chicago to Washington to be named banker of the year, which is what he would be doing if he became a national bank president for student loans. That is what this proposal would do unless the Senate sticks to its position.

Finally, I don't want to be a part of any situation which has Congressmen and Senators playing a trick on 15 million students and saying: I am going to borrow money at a quarter of 1 percent and loan it to you at 6.8, and then I am going to take credit for giving the rest of it away. I think that will come home to roost, and it ought to come home to roost.

I appreciate the opportunity to make this motion to instruct, and I hope it will come to a vote. I hope it has the kind of bipartisan support it had before. I hope the President will think of all the other things there are to do that need attention, such as fixing the banks, getting credit flowing, restoring the auto companies, and leave the student loan system to continue to work in the way it should work.

Madam President, I send to the desk my motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. President, I say to the Senator, thank you very much. I accept that.

All the motion does is instruct the conferees to do what the Senate has already unanimously agreed to do to preserve the competitive student loan system.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes in morning business, and would the Chair please let me know when I have 2 minutes left.