Floor Statements

Mr. President, may I be informed when 6 minutes of my 7 minutes has expired?

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, here is what we know of the so-called stimulus bill.

This bill will give American workers $8 a week in their paychecks in exchange for passing along a $1 trillion debt to our grandchildren. The entire New Deal, in today's dollars, cost only half of what this bill costs.

We know that if we were to spend $1 million a day, every day since Jesus Christ was born, we would still spend less money than the cost of this bill.

We know that if you were to add the cost of this bill to the national debt that we already have, it would cost each American household more than $100,000 to pay off our country's debt.

We know that in the bill there is $50 million that could be used to save red-bellied harvest mice in the San Francisco area, something that Speaker Pelosi has supported.

We know that in the bill there is $8 billion for a levitating train from Disneyland to Las Vegas that the majority leader is very interested in.

We also know that people are hurting. That we need to do something to help the economy. And that something includes a real stimulus bill. But we know this is not the right approach.

Mostly, this is spending, not stimulus. Most of the spending in the bill does not come soon enough to help create jobs quickly. Most of the tax cuts in the bill--such as the $8 per week for working families--are welcome but not stimulative.

We know this is a lot of money. An example of how much money is that it took us until about 1980, from the beginning of our Republic, to accumulate a debt that equals the amount of this bill. Or to look at it another way: The entire annual Federal budget in the early 1980s was about the amount we are spending in this bill.

We know this is not temporary. Even though stimulus bills, as defined by Speaker Pelosi, are to be timely, temporary, and targeted, this is not. We know that because of the mandatory spending it adds to the long-term budget. We know that because the Senate rejected Senator McCain's amendment which said that after two consecutive quarters of economic growth above 2 percent, the new spending would stop. So this bill is not temporary.

We know we are bailing out States with much more money than they

need. In my State of Tennessee, it had a $900 million dollar shortfall. That is a lot of money for our State. But our legislature and Governor are handling that, with some pain. Yet we are giving Tennessee almost $4 billion, as if we had the money to spend.

We know we are not seriously thinking about how much spending is too much spending in Washington, and how much debt is too much debt. We know that we establish policies in this bill--huge policies in education, energy, and health--in 2 weeks, without careful consideration that deserve enormous consideration.

I used to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Its budget today is about $68 billion. We are adding $40 billion a year to that Department for the next 2 years. Does that mean we are completely satisfied with what is happening in kindergarten through the 12th grade? If we are to add $40 billion a year, should we not be asking what can we do differently to reward outstanding teachers, to add charter schools, to offer parents more choices for afterschool programs for their children? Surely, we can have a debate about education, or energy, or health care if we are going to spend that much new money.

We know there has been a lack of bipartisanship. The refrain seems to be: We won the election; we'll write the bill. That was not the tone of the election. That was not what we looked forward to on the Republican side of the aisle.

We know what we should have done instead. We know we shouldn't have spent the whole piggy bank on a spending bill that doesn't include much stimulus. We know that we should have reserved as many of those scarce dollars as we could to focus on fixing housing first and making sure that we don't underestimate the difficulty we have in getting toxic assets out of the financial institutions in this country so they can start lending again and on Main Street we can start doing business again. We know those are the things we should have done instead.

This bill doesn't pass muster with truth in labeling. It claims not to have earmarks, although that levitating train from Las Vegas to Disneyland looks a lot like an earmark.

We know that the two provisions in the bill that seemed to do the most to help were cut by the conference report in substantial ways. I am speaking of Senator Isakson's $15,000 tax credit for home buyers who would buy homes in the next year, which was gutted. And Senator Mikulski's and Senator Brownback's effort to give encouragement to automobile and truck buyers all over America to revive the automobile industry.

We know that if we are to add $87 billion over 2 years to Medicaid for the States that we may be making the program so rich that we will never be able to decide what to do about it when we have our national health care debate. We are preempting that discussion without very much debate.

I know what bipartisanship is. I have participated in it. When I was Governor of Tennessee, I worked with a Democratic legislature. We became the first State to pay teachers more for teaching well. I said what I thought we ought to do and the Democratic speaker said what he thought we ought to do. We sat down together.

I thank the Chair.

We took some of Speaker McWherter's ideas and some of my ideas. We came to a conclusion and we together announced the result.

President Bush and the Congress did the same thing with No Child Left Behind when President Bush working with Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller. Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici gave us a good example with the energy bill. Seventy of us cosponsored the America Competes Act. And the Gang of 14 helped keep the Senate functioning and produced good Supreme Court nominees.

I am disappointed that we have not risen to the occasion. This bill should have been easy to do in a bipartisan way. I hope that this is not a symbol of what is to come with more difficult pieces of legislation, like health care, climate change, and entitlements.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

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

I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to lead a colloquy among my colleagues for up to 30 minutes.

Mr. President, the stimulus bill is the subject of discussion. There are some things we know about it and some we don't. We know, for example, it is a massive amount of money, almost $800 billion. These are numbers we throw around. But according to the Politico newspaper last month, this is more than we spent on Iraq, more than we spent on Afghanistan, more than we spent going to the Moon in today's dollars, and more than the Federal Government spent in the entire New Deal in today's dollars. It's a massive amount of money. It is not like some of the money we were authorizing to be spent in October and November, when we were giving the Department of the Treasury, in effect, a line of credit to help financial institutions begin to lend again so people could get auto loans. This is money we are spending. It goes out the door. We have to pay it back. It adds to the national debt. It took from the founding of our country all the way to the late 1970s to accumulate a national debt as large as the amount of money we are spending in this bill. We have been moving rapidly on this legislation. It is not only spending. The amount of money spent for education is such that it may be the largest Federal education bill we have ever passed in terms of dollars. The amount of money spent for energy is enough that it will be one of the largest Energy bills. The amount of money spent for Medicaid in the House and Senate bills, nearly $90 billion over 2 years to the States, may completely distort the discussion we are about to have on national health care policy. These are all topics that normally we would take weeks to consider.

For example, if we are going to add $40 billion to a Department of Education that only spends $68 billion today, we would ask the question: $40 billion for more of the same, or do we have some better ideas about how we might reward outstanding teachers or give teachers more discretion or parents more choices of schools?

I ask the assistant Republican leader from Arizona, this is one of the most important, massive bills. Republicans want a stimulus package. We have made clear we think we ought to start by fixing housing first, letting people keep more of their own money, and confining the spending to only those projects that create jobs.

I ask the Senator from Arizona, where are we? Has he had an opportunity to read the legislation to know how much is being spent, how much is actually targeted for jobs, and how temporary that targeting might be?

As I listen to the Senator, what occurs to me is, we have some laws about truth in labeling, truth in packaging. This bill wouldn't meet any definition I have ever seen. The whole argument for this legislation is, we are in an economic downturn. We Republicans know that. Americans are hurting. We feel that too. So we thought, what can we do to help make a difference? The thought was, fix housing first. We suggested lower interest rate mortgages. We suggested, with the leadership of Senator Isakson, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers for the next 2 years to create more demand to stabilize home values. Those ideas would have been actually stimulative. But most of the legislation the Senator from Arizona talks about is very different. Medicaid would come up in the regular appropriations process.

As I am thinking about it, what has the Senator heard about one of the aspects of this bill that would be actually stimulative, the one I mentioned, Senator Isakson's proposal for a tax credit of $15,000 for home buyers, so that if they bought a home, they would get $15,000 off their taxes, cash in their pocket, as a way of stimulating the market? Is that in the compromise legislation?

Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from Arizona one more question.

Over the last couple days, we have heard testimony from the Secretary of Treasury about the importance of moving now to help strengthen financial institutions so they can lend money, so people can buy cars, buy homes, send their kids to college. We have heard about the importance of the housing plan that is coming. We have heard numbers of $1 trillion, $2.5 trillion. We have had testimony from experts outside the administration who have estimated that the so-called bad bank option for taking toxic assets out of banks might need $2 trillion and that we ought to capitalize that bank at several hundred billion dollars.

I ask the Senator, is it possible, if we spend the whole piggy bank on this so-called stimulus package, we will not have the dollars left to get the economy moving again by fixing housing and strengthening our financial institutions?

Or to put it another way: Don't dump the water out on the street and fertilize the field if you need to throw it on the house.

We have a limited amount of water, a limited amount of money. I note the Senator from Arizona as well as I both voted to give President Obama the money he needed to work on housing and to work on financial institutions, and we may have to do it again. So it is not just a matter of saying no to proposals; it is a matter of being greatly disappointed this legislation is not targeted, is not temporary.

The Senator from Wyoming is in the Chamber. He has been an outstanding spokesman on the importance of the stimulus legislation, how to fashion that. I ask the Senator from Wyoming, as he looks at this legislation--and I know we have not yet seen the entire compromise--but how satisfied is he the legislation focuses on the problem that will actually create new jobs for Americans in a short period of time?

Mr. President, I wonder if I might ask the Senator, he has been especially effective as a spokesman for the importance of fixing housing first. Many of us, especially on this side, believe housing got us into this mess and helping housing restart will get us out of the mess. Can you explain why there seems to be, in a nearly $1 trillion bill, so little focus on housing?

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership, especially as a spokesman on the importance of fixing housing first, which we believe the American people have gotten that message, but apparently the majority writing this bill has not gotten that message.

The Senator from South Dakota has arrived. He is vice chairman of the Republican conference, one of the leaders, too, in this debate. I have heard him speak about the importance of this legislation for stimulus being temporary and targeted. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, I believe we borrowed that phrase from the Speaker of the House, who said last year that stimulus packages, programs to create jobs for the American people, should meet the test of temporary, timely, and targeted.

I ask the Senator from South Dakota, specifically in light of the McCain amendment, which was offered--which you may want to describe-- whether he looks at this compromise which is coming our way as temporary, timely, and targeted on the problem of creating jobs for Americans?

Mr. President, if I could ask the Senator from South Dakota: As I recall, Senator McCain offered one amendment which almost all of us voted for, which was very targeted and cost about $400 billion, but he also offered another amendment which would have guaranteed that whatever was passed actually be temporary.

And we are going down to the bank and borrowing the money in their name?

I thank the Senator from South Dakota. I imagine my 30 minutes has expired, but seeing none of my colleagues, I ask unanimous consent for up to 10 more minutes.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota for his eloquent words. The numbers being thrown around are so huge-- and numbers get thrown around so often in Washington, DC--that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between $1 million and $1 trillion or $1 billion or $10.

One thing I was thinking of as the Senator from South Dakota was speaking, I believe he said as much as 10 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States would be the size of this year's Federal deficit. What that means is, this country--even in these

bad times--is such a marvelous country that we will produce about 25 percent of all of the money in the world just for Americans, 5 percent of the people in the world. So what we are saying is, just this year we are going to run up a debt of 10 percent of 25 percent of all of the money in the world and add it to the national debt we already have and which we already know we are going to be increasing because of the responsibilities we have to try to help fix housing and encourage the financial institutions to support the efforts that the President is making to get the economy moving again.

What we are asking is, why would we spend the whole piggybank on a $1 trillion piece of legislation that isn't targeted to create jobs when we have so many other pressing responsibilities for this limited amount of borrowed money--namely, fixing housing and getting lending moving again? That is where we would put our attention. So we have a lot of questions about the bill.

As the Senator from South Dakota said, Republicans offered our legislation, which was voted down, and it focused on housing, it focused on letting people keep more of their own money and on a limited amount of spending for targeted, job-creating infrastructure projects. That saved $500 or $600 billion which could have been reserved for housing, for lending, or to reduce the debt. But this bill, I am afraid--and we will know more about it as it comes--is mostly spending instead of mostly stimulus. Not enough of the jobs come quickly enough to make as much difference as this borrowed money should make. Even most of the tax cuts in the bill aren't stimulative. They may be welcome, they may leave 13 more dollars in your paycheck each week. But is running up the debt this much more worth that? This is a lot of money--according to one report, more than the Federal Government spent in the entire New Deal, more than we spent in Iraq, more than we spent in Afghanistan, and we should spend this money carefully.

As the Senators from South Dakota and Arizona have pointed out, what happens after 2 years? The Senate rejected our amendment that said once the economy recovers, the new spending stops so we don't continue to run up an unimaginable debt.

States are having trouble and in a shortfall. Tennessee has a $900 million shortfall this year. But we are sending Tennessee, according to the latest estimates--even with the cuts and the compromise--about $3.8 billion. We are establishing policy without even thinking about it. In this legislation, which has never been to the authorization committees, we are having possibly the largest, I believe, Federal education bill in our history in terms of dollars. We are having one of the largest health care bills. We are having one of the largest energy bills. That is not the way we make energy, education, and health care policy--just by passing an appropriations bill with a huge amount of money.

We are very disappointed about the lack of bipartisanship. We respect our new President. We want him to succeed because if he succeeds, our country succeeds. We expected that in this first major piece of legislation, a number of us would sit down on both sides of the aisle and compare our notes and say: Let's go forward. We know the Democrats have the majority and we have the minority, and so more of their ideas are going to be included than more of our ideas, but 58 Democrats and 3 Republicans is not a bipartisan effort. That is not the way we do things around here.

The way we do things in a bipartisan way around here is when we had the Energy bill in 2005 and Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman worked side by side. All ideas were considered. We had our votes. It took weeks and we got a big result. Another example is when we passed the America COMPETES Act and we worked side by side, or even with a contentious area such as intelligence surveillance when Senator Bond and Senator Rockefeller worked side by side and we came to a conclusion together. The American people gained more confidence in what we could do and in the result that we came to. I am afraid in this case we have not had that kind of bipartisanship.

What I fear is that this is not a good sign for the future because this is the easy piece of legislation. This is the first major proposal from the President. This is just a spending bill, albeit a massive spending bill. Next comes health care and controlling entitlements and whether we want to authorize more money to take bad assets out of banks and to help housing. Next comes whether we want to pass this version of climate change or that version of climate change. All of these are difficult pieces of legislation.

I have said on this floor before that President Bush technically did not have to have broad-based congressional support to wage the war in Iraq because he was the Commander in Chief. So he went ahead, and it made the war more difficult. It made his Presidency less successful. ``We won the election, we will write the bill'' is not a recipe for resolving a difficult problem or for a successful Presidency.

I would hope we can either do as the South Dakota Senator said, which is start over again on this bill and retarget it, make it temporary, make it timely, and save hundreds of billions of dollars while focusing on housing and lending. That somehow we can get the Congress on track with the President so that when we say bipartisan, we do bipartisan, and we don't have an attitude that says, in effect: We won the election; we will write the bill.

Unless the Senator from South Dakota has additional comments--I am finished with mine, so I yield the floor and yield to him.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota for his effective leadership in helping the American people understand the full implications of this legislation on American families. I ask that I be informed when I have 1 minute remaining.

A number of things have been said about the so-called stimulus package, which I feel, many of us feel, is more of a spending bill than a stimulus bill. But there is no doubt about the fact that it increases our national debt.

The debt is not some abstract thing. Our national debt is $10.7 trillion. This adds to the national debt as much money as--well, let's put it this way. It took from the beginning of the Republic until 1982 to have a cumulative debt of $850 billion. And this bill is more than that. This is a lot of money. We are adding the $820 or 830 billion that we have heard about plus the interest over the next 10 years. That adds about $10,000 to each family's share of the debt. Well, with that $10,000 you can pay in-state tuition for 1.5 years at the University of Tennessee. You could pay for 21 years of public school lunches every day for the average middle school student. You could buy a gallon of milk a week for 57 years. That is a lot of money.

I wish to make three points today as we think about this stimulus bill which, I believe, is more of a spending bill. First, this bill makes a number of policy decisions on education, health, and energy that ought not to be made in such a bill, but ought to be separately debated and considered.

No. 2, we should have all of the proposed spending on the table. Mr. Geithner is coming up to Congress this week to tell us how much we need for banks. Then we need more for housing. Then we need more for the war. I think if we knew all of the money we are about to have to borrow, our appetite for spending $1.2 trillion, mostly on projects that do not create jobs in the next few months, would diminish.

And, third, this is not the kind of bipartisanship that I expected. As I listened to the President, I thought he wanted to change the way Washington works. The way Washington works in a bipartisan way is for us to sit down and talk with one another and come up with something both Republicans and Democrats can agree upon; not we won the election, we will write the bill and let's see if we can pick off two or three Senators.

First, a number of policy decisions. The first version of the Senate bill actually doubled Federal spending for education without any discussion. I used to be the Secretary of Education. Today, that Department has about a $68 billion budget. The original version of the Senate bill doubles that. It took 40 years to get to $68 billion. But the original Senate bill would increase education spending by $140 billion over the next two years--on top of that $68 billion we're already spending per year. So the bill would double the $68 billion this year, and keep it doubled next year. Then it is supposed to go back down to $68 billion the year after that, which seems unlikely.

But there was no discussion about this. Would you not think, if they were going to double the Federal commitment to education, we would have a discussion about what would be best to spend it on? I mean, are we so delighted with the performance in kindergarten through the 12th grade and our preschool programs that we have nothing to do but say, let's double the money for more of the same?

Even the small things that have crept into the legislation, some of which President Obama has said he supports, should be fully debated. For example, we have some new Senators at the forefront of federal support for the Teacher Incentive Fund. We have a new Secretary of Education who supports this effort to help reward outstanding teaching and outstanding school leading, but not a penny was included in the Senate bill.

What about charter schools? A lot of us on both sides of the aisle want to give teachers the freedom to use their own common sense and good judgment in dealing with the children who are brought to them. That is what a public charter school does. Not a penny in the Senate bill.

So education is the first policy area that should have been debated separately. Then on health care, the House added nearly $90 billion for Medicaid. The President has said we need to make health care available to every American. We Republicans agree with that. So we are ready to have a debate about that. That will cost some money.

One of the major proposals, in fact, the one that has the most bipartisan support, the Wyden-Bennett legislation, would get rid of the Medicaid Program and replace it with individual accounts. This preempts that decision by giving $90 billion more to the States.

So the States get $90 billion. That is a lot of money. Tennessee's share of that would be $1.5 or $2 billion. That is going to make the program so rich the States will not want to give it up, and we will not be able to have a full discussion about health care when that comes around.

Then an energy bill. Last year, I asked the Energy Information Administration to estimate what kind of subsidies we were doing for renewable energy, because it seemed to me it was all going to wind and nothing else. I was about right.

EIA said: We are subsidizing wind at 27 times greater than all other forms of renewable energy per kilowatt hour; 53 times greater than subsidies for coal per kilowatt hour; and 15 times greater than the subsidy for nuclear, which produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity.

That was in the middle of last year. That was at a time when we only were committed to $11.5 billion to give to rich people and big banks, some of which we are bailing out, that get big tax credits when they build wind turbines. So that was $11.5 billion in the middle of last year.

Then in October of last year we passed legislation that brought that up to $16 billion over the next 10 years, and this bill brings to $25.7 billion the amount of taxpayer dollars that we are paying rich people and banks so they can get big tax credits for building wind turbines.

As far as the beautiful mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, I don't want those things littering our area, particularly because the wind doesn't blow there enough to make it efficient. But even in areas where it does make sense, do we really need, without any discussion, to go from $11.5 billion last year to $26 billion this year with a national windmill policy? Why don't we have a debate about energy, and let's have a technology-neutral way to encourage all forms of renewable energy, especially emerging forms.

We have an education bill, a health care bill, and an energy bill, but we don't have a stimulus bill. We shouldn't have all this on the table.

Mr. Geithner has apparently delayed his recommendation about what we do about credit and banks until we have had the vote on this stimulus bill. This was supposed to be a transparent administration. To be transparent, let's put it all out there. How much do we need to appropriate for banks? I voted for that twice now. I might vote for it again if I think we need to do it. It was not an easy vote, but I did it. How much do we need to spend on housing? How much do we need to spend on the war in Afghanistan and to finish the war in Iraq? How much do we need to spend on the health care plan the President and we in Congress have said we want to work on? And how will we shape all this into some control of entitlement spending? It would be nice if we had it all on the table.

If we knew, as the testimony suggested before the Budget Committee last week, that we really need to appropriate $400 or $500 or $600 billion to take care of $2 trillion of toxic assets in banks to get the economy moving again, we might have less appetite for lumping an energy bill and an education bill and a health care bill and a lot of projects that don't really stimulate the economy in with this borrowed money.

Finally, on this side of the aisle, just as on that side of the aisle, we like the new President. He was our colleague. He came to see us. We walked out of that meeting between the President and Republican Senators saying: Here is an accomplished man who wants to help our country. We want him to succeed because if he does our country will succeed. But we want to be a part of it. We expected to be a part of it.

President Bush technically didn't need the Congress to wage the war in

Iraq. So he didn't get support, for example, for the Iraq Study Group principles when Senator Salazar and I----

When Senator Salazar and I and 17 Senators and more than 60 House Members of both parties suggested it. He could do it, but without that support, it made the war harder and the Presidency less successful.

This stimulus bill is the easy thing to do. What the White House and the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate need to recognize is that if you want to be bipartisan, we want our ideas considered. If you want 20 Republicans, you are probably going to lose 10 Democrats. That is the way things work around here. So the majority can either say: We won the election and we will write the bill and try to pick off two or three Republicans, or we can sit down together and make it work. We are ready to do that to make it work. But when you get to banks and housing and entitlements and health care and the war, it is going to get harder. I hope this is not an example of the kind of bipartisanship we will have. This is borrowed money. This is a spending bill, not a stimulus bill. It would be better if all of the money we are going to be asked to spend were on the table.

And it also would be better if we all had the opportunity to see exactly what the total bill is before we vote on this part of it.

I seek recognition for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, will you please let me know when 60 seconds remains.

I have been listening to the debate as well. I think it is important that all our colleagues and the American people understand what we mean by bipartisanship, because there is a disconnect between the tone I have been hearing for the last week from the administration and from the majority and from the substance I have been hearing. Here is what I heard. I heard we are going to work together to try to deal with this economy. First we are going to have to stimulate the economy. We all know next week the Secretary of the Treasury is coming forward to do something about banking and then maybe about housing. Then there is an appropriations bill, and then we have health care, which the Senator from Montana has been hard at work on. We have a great many things to do.

So what do we mean by bipartisan? I thought what we meant, we thought what we meant, was that the President would define an agenda and then we would sit down together and take our best ideas. The President put his out there. We think we have a better idea. We said fix housing first. Housing got us into this mess. Housing can get us out of it.

So we offered a way to offer up to 40 million Americans a 4- or 4.5- percent mortgage, 30-year rate, saving them an average of $400 a month. We brought it up. Senator Ensign proposed it. Not one single Democratic vote.

Senator Isakson has been offering an amendment for the last year and a half to give $15,000 in tax credits to home buyers. That was accepted. I hope it survives the conference.

But the tone has changed overnight. Suddenly the President, instead of inviting us to work with him, is saying basically: We won the election, we will write the bill. The attitude seems to be: Let's see if we can pick off one Republican or two Republicans or three Republicans. Then the tone is, well, suddenly: The tired old ideas. I didn't hear the President talk about his tax cut proposal for 2 years during his campaign as a tired old idea. It is still a part of his proposal. It is also a part of our proposal.

We have offered ways to fix housing first. No. 1, we suggest letting people keep more of their own money, as the President has suggested. Senator McCain's own bill, which received not one single Democratic vote, offered to spend $420 billion, and it included a cut in the payroll tax for 1 year and a cut in the lower rates of taxation.

Then we would like to do as Alice Rivlin, the former head of the Budget Office, suggested. We would like to take all of the spending that does not create jobs now and put it off and do it later. If we are going to borrow money at a time when we are heavily in debt, it ought to be targeted, timely, and temporary.

Senator McCain yesterday offered legislation that received almost every Republican vote but no Democratic votes, that would have made it temporary. It would have said whatever spending we have, we will have it until the economy recovers. But once it starts to recover for 2 quarters--the gross domestic product goes up for 2 quarters, then the spending stops.

What has happened? This is the easy piece of legislation. This is one that most of us agree needs to be done. What we were expecting in this era of bipartisanship, given the President's campaign and his comments, was that he would offer his idea, we would offer ours, and we would put them together and come up with a result.

Ours are: Fix housing first. That is not in the bill. Ours are: Make it temporary. They rejected that without a Democratic vote yesterday.

Ours are: Let's get the spending off the bill that does not create jobs now.

My staff finds that only about $135 billion of the $900 billion goes to things that happen in the first couple of years--building roads, improving national parks, other things that create jobs now.

The American people did not hear in the last campaign that the kind of change they were voting for was that the first thing we would do when we got to Washington is borrow $1 trillion, add it to the debt, and then take the position: We won the election, we will write the bill. If that is the tone, if that is the substance for the next several years, that will not make a very successful Presidency. That will not be good for our country. We want this President to be successful because we need him to be successful for our country to recover.

Madam President, this morning a number of us went to the National Prayer Breakfast--I saw the Senator from North Carolina there--which is always a wonderful event. It was especially a good event today because our new President was there for the first time. I think we would agree that he got a tremendous reception. We prayed for him, we cheered him. We recognize he has become President at a difficult time in our Nation's history. And we want him to succeed. Because if he succeeds, our country succeeds, which is why this debate on this bill is so disappointing. This is the first big proposal by the new administration.

One New York Times columnist said, it is the first test. And what is this about? We all know what is it about, the economy is in tough shape. Many people have lost their jobs. Homes are being repossessed. IRA accounts are lower. People are worried.

So we are hoping that in this first test we--the President and the Congress--will get an A-plus, flying colors. What are we seeking to do? We are seeking to get the economy moving again. Is that not right? Is that not what this is about? Is that not what a stimulus bill is?

We have got a bad economy. We have housing foreclosures. Whatever action we take, we want to get the economy moving again. And we want to keep in mind while we are doing this that we have a big debt in this country. I do not mean just the Federal Government has a debt, because it is a Government debt owed by the people of this country.

USA Today the other day did an estimate that showed each of our American families has a share of about $500,000 of that debt and future obligations based on promises the government has already made. So the Alexander family has got a $500,000 share of that debt and future obligations. The Grassley family does. The Hagan family does. The Baucus family does. We each have that. So we have to keep that in mind.

What shall we do? The Senator from Montana said, everyone seems to agree, we need to spend some money. And the proposal that has come toward us certainly does meet that test. It would spend $900 billion. And if you add the interest to that over 10 years, which is the way we usually think about things, that is $1.2 or $1.3 trillion.

How much money is this we are talking about spending? Well, the former chairman of the Budget Committee, the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Domenici, called me yesterday. He has been doing some figuring, and he figured it took from the beginning of the Republic when George Washington was the President until the early 1980s for the United States of America to pile up a cumulative debt of $850 billion.

What we are proposing to do is to spend in this one bill, by the end of this week or next week, as much money as the debt this country piled up between George Washington's Presidency and Ronald Reagan's Presidency. That is a lot of money. According to the newspaper Politico, it is more than we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is more money than we have spent, in today's dollars, going to the Moon. It is more money than the Government spent on the New Deal in today's dollars. It is almost as much money as NASA has spent in its entire existence. We are proposing to spend that in this one bill, nearly $1 trillion.

The Senator from Montana said, well, we are all concerned about the debt. I wonder if we are if the first thing we are going to do is borrow $1 trillion. This is not money we have in the drawer here. It is not over here in the Senate cloakroom. It is out in the future somewhere. We are going to borrow half of it from the Chinese and other people around the world, and then somebody--us, our children, and our grandchildren--is going to have to pay it back.

So what standards should we use if we are going to borrow some money to get the economy started, money that we are going to have to pay back, a lot of money? Well, the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi, gave us a standard for what a real stimulus package is. Last year, when we saw the beginnings of this downturn and we acted in a bipartisan way to swiftly try to spend some money to be of some help, she said: It must be timely, targeted, and temporary.

This is timely. But it is not targeted. It is not temporary, which is what I wish to talk about. Last night we had a chance to help make it more targeted and more temporary. Senator McCain offered an amendment to the Senate that said, we are for a stimulus package. We believe it ought to be targeted, for example, on housing and letting people keep more of their own money, and on plans and programs that will create jobs in the first year. That would be what we are for in terms of stimulus.

But he said, let me make one other suggestion, and he offered an amendment to us which would say this: When the economy recovers, the stimulus spending stops. That was the McCain amendment. When the economy recovers, the stimulus spending stops. Because if what we are doing here is borrowing money from every American family and spending it with a hope that it helps the economy get going this year, once the economy gets going, has not the rationale disappeared for spending that money?

We spend a lot of other money around here. We know that we have annual appropriations bills. We have got banks in trouble. We have got housing in trouble. So the McCain amendment said: After two quarters of a 2-percent increase in the gross domestic product, the money that we have borrowed to spend to get the economy going again stops.

That got 44 votes. So this body has already decided that this is not a temporary stimulus bill.

It is ongoing. So let no one think the trillion dollars proposed to be spent is temporary. Let no one think it is about stimulus. I guess every time you spend a government dollar, there is a little bit of stimulus, I suppose. But I asked

my staff working on appropriations to go over the $900 billion. Here is what they found. They said there is approximately $135 billion of spending that will directly create jobs, including building construction, road construction, locks and dams, environmental cleanup, and national cemetery repair. And only $53 billion of the $135 billion is spent in the next 18 months. If this is a bill about creating jobs this year, if that is the reason we are taking this extravagant debt and adding more to it than we spent in the entire New Deal in today's dollars, that is not very targeted. The bill is neither temporary nor targeted.

What is our responsibility on the Republican side to deal with this? Our responsibility is to offer a better idea.

Our President has said--and we agree--that one way we need to change Washington is that we need to work across the aisle to get results on big issues, results that work. That is why I am in government. I did that when I was a Republican Governor in Tennessee with a Democratic legislature. I believe I have a good record of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate, whether it is President Bush or President Obama. I worked with Senator Lieberman and now with Senator Barrasso and Senator Pryor to create a bipartisan breakfast every Tuesday morning. The Senator from North Carolina came to the breakfast the last 2 weeks. We have talked about the debt and how the entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--are creating a crisis in that debt. Social Security is a part of the problem. Medicaid and Medicare is a bigger part. Almost 70 percent of all the money we spend in the Federal Government within about 7 or 8 years will go to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. That leaves only 30 percent for everything else. It also suggests that by the year 2015, we will be spending 100 percent of our annual gross domestic product; it would take that much money to pay off our debt.

Let me remind colleagues that the United States produces year in and year out about 25 or 28 percent of all the money in the world. So we are headed toward a situation where, in a few years, it would take 25 percent to 28 percent of all the money produced in the world in 1 year to pay off the national debt of the United States.

In a budget hearing the other day with Senators Conrad and Gregg, we asked the witnesses: What is the problem? How much debt can you have? They said: That is kind of general, but 40 percent is where the United States is, 40 percent of GDP. All of this we are talking about in the next few weeks may take us up to 60 percent. That is getting close to trouble. Eighty percent is trouble, and 100 percent is a big problem.

Unlike the 1960s or the 1970s, when we owed our debt to ourselves, when it was much smaller, now we owe half of it to people around the world who may or may not want to continue buying our debt.

Our debt has to be in our minds when we think about borrowing money. We need to apply the Pelosi principle to the stimulus. Temporary? No, it is not. Yesterday, 44 votes said yes. The rest said no, we would like for it to go on a long time. Targeted? No, it is not. Only $135 billion out of $900 billion is aimed toward creating jobs. Only $53 billion of that is spent in the next 18 months.

So what can we do to improve this? On our side, we have a number of proposals to do that. The pending amendment of Senator McCain is one. The amendment by Senator Ensign, which will be voted on today, is another. The amendment by Senator Isakson that was agreed to yesterday is the third.

Here is basically what we think we should be doing with this borrowed money: No. 1, we would fix housing first. We would reorient the stimulus bill away from spending money indefinitely, mostly on programs that do not create jobs in the first year, and spend it instead to restart housing because housing is what got us into this problem. Housing will help get us out of the problem. We have some specific ideas about doing that.

Second, we would let the American people keep more of the money they have. That is stimulative. Letting them keep it permanently is the most stimulative thing we could do. Senator McCain proposes reducing the payroll tax and reducing the lowest level of income tax rates. Those are for working people, people who make less--not more--money.

The third thing we would do is cut the size of the bill and focus it on those projects that create jobs now.

When we say fix housing first, we mean, to begin with, the $15,000 housing credit. If you want to buy a house during the year 2009, you get a $15,000 tax credit. That is real money. You can put it in your pocket this year, if you buy a house.

The second thing we would propose is the Ensign amendment, which would lower mortgage interest rates for all creditworthy Americans. Forty million Americans could take advantage of a rate that would be between 4 and 4.5 percent. We would put a cap on it, so it would not cost taxpayers more than about $300 billion, but most economists with whom we have talked say it is more like $30 billion.

What would be the value of a lower interest rate backed by the Treasury? It would mean, all across the country, instant jobs. People could borrow money. They would have incentive to do so because the average savings of someone who refinanced their home and got a 4- to 4.5-percent interest rate would be approximately $400 a month for 30 years, over the 30-year term of the rate. That is like a permanent tax cut. That money would be in their pockets. It could be spent. It would help stabilize the value of that home. That would help stabilize the value of homes on that block. That would put to work builders and contractors and plumbers and brokers and bankers. That would give banks origination fees so they could have income. And having income, they might have enough money and confidence to start lending. Then this economy could keep moving at a relatively small cost. That is what we mean by fixing housing first.

Senator McCain and Senator Graham have in their proposals legislation to help those individuals whose homes are being foreclosed.

If we could sit down in a bipartisan way and agree that we want to follow the Pelosi principle and make this temporary and targeted and that we should start by fixing housing first, I believe we could agree across the aisle to deal with housing and create instant jobs. We might have less debate about tax cuts, although the President has suggested that we reduce some middle-income taxes. We have suggested the same.

The third thing would be, as Alice Rivlin, former Budget Director for a Democratic President, said: We really ought to have two bills. One would be a bill for long-term investments, many of which I fought for for years in terms of American competitiveness. They are good for the country but don't take effect right away. The other bill, which we need to move on quickly, would be those programs, such as road construction, building construction, locks and dams, and national park maintenance, that would create jobs today. Then we could come to the American people and say: Mr. and Mrs. America, you have a big debt, $500,000 per family, but we, across party lines, have looked at the situation. We need a stimulus. Perhaps it should be $400 billion or $500 billion at the start. But we will not start with how much we are going to spend; we are going to start with what can we do that would work.

Fix housing first, lower interest rate mortgages, a $15,000 tax credit for home buyers, help for those in foreclosures. Next, keep more of your own money in your pockets. That is the payroll tax and cutting rates. Finally, we might spend $100 billion or $150 billion by accelerating Government programs we will have to do anyway and get those jobs coming this year. That would be a responsible, bipartisan way to go about this.

This bill, as it is presently headed toward passage, is a colossal mistake. It is not temporary. It is not targeted. It is not primarily creating jobs. It is not a stimulus bill. It is mostly a spending bill. It is not money we have; it is money we are borrowing. It is a huge amount of money, more money in today's dollars than the Government spent on the New Deal, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the war in Vietnam, almost as much as we have spent on NASA over its life, a huge amount of borrowed money not targeted. Although it is timely, we are rushing it through.

I am disappointed. I had expected better. I have heard the President say he wants to work on entitlements. We take him at his word. We have had two straight Tuesday morning breakfasts where we have sat around the table and said: This is going to be hard to do. We trust the President to get in here with us, and we will figure this out. But this is a bill written in the House. It looks as if they just got down in the drawer, and every spending program they could think of for the last 40 years that didn't pass, they stuck it in. It might be good 20 years from now. It might be good tomorrow. But it is in there.

We won the election. We will write the bill. ``We won the election, we write the bill'' may technically work on a few pieces of legislation. But it will not help move our country forward. It will not be the basis for a successful Presidency. We won the election. We write the bill. This is easy, spending a trillion dollars. The majority just says: Hey, we have some money to spend. Let's grab all the programs we can think of and off we go. But what is coming is really hard.

Next week, the Secretary of the Treasury is likely to tell us we need several hundred billion to deal with toxic assets in banks. I am one of six Republican Senators who voted to give the new President the second amount of $350 billion so he could have that in his pocket to deal with this crisis. But it doesn't increase my appetite to help with the next $400 or $500 billion if we are going to start out by wasting nearly a trillion on programs not needed to fix the economy today.

And probably, since we are not dealing with housing in any significant way in this bill, the new administration may say: We decided we need to get housing going again. I think I would be inclined to say: Mr. Democratic Leader, Mr. President, that is what we said last week. But you said we had to pass a bill in a week. Why didn't we wait a week and see what the Treasury Secretary had to say about banking credits or about housing?

Then the next week we have $900 billion on an appropriations bill. And then, as Senator Baucus has said--and he is exactly right--health care is coming down the pike. I can't figure out a way that the health care bill, even the one I cosponsored with Senators Wyden and Bennett, is not going to cost us a lot more.

So why don't we put this all on the table and work across party lines? Technically, you don't have to do it. Technically, President Bush didn't have to have congressional approval to wage a war in Iraq. But he found and our Nation found that he would have a much more successful Presidency and we would have probably had a much easier war if we could have found some way to work together.

I am disappointed with this, beginning on a stimulus bill that does not meet the Pelosi principle of timely, targeted, and temporary. It is a colossal mistake in the way it is headed. We should fix housing first. Let people keep more of their own money. Strip out the spending programs that don't create jobs now. Deal with them separately, and get in the habit of accepting each other's best ideas on dealing with the biggest problems. We stand ready to do that.

We admire the new President and the tone he has set. We want him to succeed. This bill will not help our country succeed unless it is drastically amended this week.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I cosponsored Senator Wyden and Senator Bennett Healthy Americans Act last year to support a legitimate bipartisan effort that combines ``private markets'' and ``universal access.'' I am willing to do so again this year, because health care reform is too big of an issue for one party to tackle on its own. Our only chance of achieving true, meaningful reform is if both parties work together.

However, I do have reservations about this legislation--I see it as a work in progress and would not vote for it in its current form. For example, the current budget figures are unrealistic. In order to maintain budget neutrality, as drafted, the bill would shift a new burden on middle-income Americans. We have not yet discovered a way to solve this problem without increasing the cost of the bill.

Another problem I have with the bill is that the mandated level of standard benefits is too high. As drafted, typically young, healthy Americans would be forced to pay for a richer level of coverage than they might now choose or possibly be able to afford.

I commend the efforts of Senators Wyden and Bennett to reach across party lines on this important issue, and look forward to working with both of them to further improve this proposal.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to engage in a colloquy with my colleagues for 30 minutes, if that is acceptable to the Democratic leader.

I thank the Senator from Hawaii.

Mr. President, Republicans believe we ought to fix housing first, and we would like to talk about that for the next 30 minutes. Mr. Kyl, the Senator from Arizona, is here for that purpose. Senator Ensign is here, who is the author of an amendment that would provide 4 to 4.5 percent mortgages for up to 40 million Americans so they could buy new homes or refinance their homes. Senator Isakson is here, who is the author of an amendment to provide a $15,000 tax credit for the next year to home buyers. We believe these proposals would provide instant jobs. Housing got us into this economic mess and housing will help get us out of the economic mess.

The Republican leader, Senator McConnell, stated that this is a big spending bill. I was on the telephone last night with the former budget chairman, Senator Domenici of New Mexico, who has been counting in his retirement. He said it took our country from the time of its founding until the mid-1980s to build up a national debt of $850 billion, which was the size of this so-called stimulus package when it came over here. So we are talking about real borrowed money, and our goal is to reorient the whole discussion: first, to housing; second, to letting taxpayers keep more of their own money; and, third, to get out of the bill those items that don't belong in the bill.

The former Congressional Budget Office director in a previous Democratic administration, Alice Rivlin, said we needed two bills: one that would include legislation that created jobs now, and the second would be legislation that might take care of long-term investments that might help our country. She also said there should be a very high standard before we borrow money to spend on anything. Especially, as the Republican leader said, at a time when next week we may be hearing from Secretary Geithner that we need several hundred billion more for banks, and then more for housing, and then more for the annual appropriations bill, and then, on down the road, more for a health care bill.

I see the Senator from Arizona, and he is a leading member of the Finance Committee, and as we think about reorienting toward housing, it would seem to me, Senator Kyl, that we should focus whatever money we do have on the problem we have, rather than borrowing money to dribble away on good-sounding projects that don't actually create jobs.

I thank my colleague for so clearly outlining the nature of the problem.

I ask the Chair to let me know when we are about 3 minutes from the expiration of the time.

There are two proposals we want to discuss which will be voted on here which will help fix housing first. The first is by the Senator from Nevada, Mr. Ensign. Senator Ensign's idea will create instant jobs and give a jolt to the economy by giving an opportunity for lower mortgage interest rates to those persons who can afford to buy or refinance their home.

There are other proposals, such as one by Senator McCain, to help people who are in trouble with their mortgage. The focus of my colleague is primarily on creditworthy Americans who could refinance their homes, save money, and get the economy moving?

If I understand the proposal, if I am a creditworthy person, I can either refinance my home or buy a new home at this lower interest rate, which today would be between 4 and 4.5 percent for a 30- year mortgage. I would have that fixed mortgage all during that 30-year period of time.

I thank Senator Ensign for his leadership and the others on his proposal for their leadership. We hope it will attract significant Democratic support because I have heard a number of them say we need to reorient this toward housing.

Senator Isakson was in the real estate business, and he often reminds us that this is not the first housing crisis we have had. As I understand, Senator Isakson, the proposal you made, which would be a tax credit to homeowners, was originally tried in the 1970s and worked?

I thank the Senator from Georgia. Just to make sure it is clear, sometimes we confuse tax deduction and tax credit. This is a $15,000 tax credit. That means cash money, real money, that you can, instead of paying it to the IRS, put in your pocket. Am I correct?

You can invest it in your house. The Senator from Wyoming is here.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, please let me know when 2 minutes is remaining.

I thank the Senator from Georgia. We have now heard a proposal to give to all creditworthy Americans, which can be up to 40 million, the opportunity to buy or refinance a house with a Treasury-backed 4- to 4.5-percent mortgage. We have heard Senator Isakson's proposal to give everyone who buys a home within this next year up to a $15,000 tax credit.

The Senator from Wyoming was a small businessman before he came to the Senate and is our only accountant here. What is the Senator's reaction to that, and how does he see housing fitting into the economic stimulus package that is being discussed?

Mr. President, how much time is remaining?

I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership and his understanding of business that has come the hard way, through experience in his town.

The Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, is on the Senate floor to speak on a different amendment. But he, too, has a proposal that will deal with fixing housing first. So our point is this: We understand Americans are hurting, that our economy is in a slump. But we also understand that if we do not deal with the national debt, we will be doing the worst thing that we could ever do to the working men and women of America: that is, having long-term inflation where dollars do not amount to anything and you cannot buy anything.

So our focus, instead of adding to the debt by over $1 trillion, is to reorient the stimulus package toward a true stimulus and fix housing first. That is what the 4-percent mortgage for creditworthy Americans is for. That is what the $15,000 tax credit for home buyers is for. That is what the Republican proposals to help people with foreclosures are for. That is part 1, fix housing first.

Part 2 is let people keep more of their own money. Those are tax reductions. Then part 3 is take off this bill all of the spending items that do not have anything to do with creating jobs now. So we welcome the calls for bipartisan work. We are ready to work. We have good ideas: fix housing first, let people keep more of their own money, and focus the bill on spending projects that create jobs today, not those that do not.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, next week the Senate begins the debate of the so-called stimulus package. I wish to talk about that for a few minutes. It is $1.2 trillion of borrowed taxpayer money to be spent in an effort to help get our economy restarted. Here is my position on it, and I believe the position of most Republicans and of some Democrats. We believe that in order for the stimulus to be effective, it should be reoriented on housing. First, fix the real problem: housing. If housing is restarted, if home values are stabilized, and if people are buying homes, that will do more to help restart the economy than anything else. Second, we should let people keep more of their own money. A true stimulus is permanent tax relief. If people have more of their own money in their pockets, they will have more confidence. They will be able to buy more. After reorienting toward housing, that will also help restart the economy.

Since we are borrowing so much of this money, especially, we believe it ought to be oriented directly toward those items that would specifically create jobs now. It should not go toward good sounding ideas such as Head Start and Pell grants for college students that we may want to take up later, maybe as early as the following week, in a regular appropriations bill. So that is our belief: reorient the stimulus toward housing, let people keep more of their own money, and get the stuff out of the bill that has nothing to do with creating jobs now, in the next few months or in the first year.

We know Americans are hurting. Every single Senator knows that. Our country's economic turmoil is hitting every family where it matters, in the family budgets. More than 860,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in 2008, more than double the 2007 level. Manufacturing is at a 28-year low. Tennessee is a State that relies heavily on manufacturing. The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, too high. It has been higher. I can remember at a time when I was Governor of Tennessee in 1982, the unemployment rate was 12 percent, but 7.2 percent is too high. There were 1.9 million jobs lost in the last 4 months of 2008. The long-term unemployed, people out of work for 27 weeks or more, rose to 2.6 million in December of 2008. So there are a number of steps we need to take as a government, and we have been taking them.

At a hearing this week, where the Presiding Officer and I are both members of the Budget Committee--and we probably agree those hearings were excellent--Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, reminded us of the steps the Government is already taking. The Federal Reserve negotiated the sale of Bear Sterns to JPMorgan Chase, $29 billion, to form a new limited liability company. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agencies that guaranteed half the home loans in the country, were taken over by their regulator and the Treasury put up $100 billion to stabilize that situation. The Federal Reserve extended $60 billion in a line of credit to the American International Group, the insurance company called AIG. We had a debate in October where on both sides of the aisle, two-thirds of Republicans as well as many Democrats voted to give the Secretary of the Treasury $700 billion to invest in troubled assets or to use in a variety of ways to try to keep our economy from going straight down. It has gone down, but it didn't go straight down; we believe this is partly because of the action the Congress and the President took at that time.

What we had was, in effect, a wreck on the highway. There is an old Roy Acuff song by that title. I think that is the best way to explain what was happening. It was like a wreck on the interstate outside Knoxville and suddenly traffic is backed up all the way to Lenoir City or even Kingston. One lane was the money for the bank loan, the next lane was the money for your auto loan, and the next lane was for meeting payroll. As long as that wreck was on the highway, none of the money could get where it needed to go, and nobody could borrow on anything. It is better today than it would have been, but we still have a deeply serious problem.

The law we passed in October temporarily raised the insurance for deposits from $100,000 to $250,000. Steps were taken to guarantee money market funds. The Treasury, Federal Reserve, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced agreements with Citibank and Bank of America. They created a liquidity program for the banking system.

The Federal Government, in all of its variety of agencies, has been very busy since October using taxpayer dollars, where necessary, or the Federal Reserve balance sheet, or Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation funds collected from banks to try to create a situation in which our economy can restart.

We know, having visited with President Obama and his team of advisers, that they are thinking of even more things we may need to do. But next week in the Senate we will be talking about whether it is a good idea to borrow $1.2 trillion and spend it as the Appropriations and Finance Committees

have recommended we spend it as a way of trying to restart the economy. What I am here today to say is: we believe there ought to be a stimulus, but we believe it ought to be reoriented toward housing, that it ought to be reoriented toward permanent tax cuts, and that we ought to take out of this so-called stimulus anything that doesn't stimulate jobs now.

Let me try to give an idea of how much money $1.2 trillion is. It is more money than we spent on the Vietnam war in today's dollars. This comes from an article in Politico this week. It is more money than we spent on the invasion of Iraq. It is more money than we spent on the entire New Deal in today's dollars, and a lot more money than we spent on the Marshall plan. It is nearly as much money as we've spent on NASA ever since it started. It is a lot more money than we spent going to the Moon. This is a lot of money. We throw dollars around up here. Years ago Senator Dirksen said: A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money. This is a trillion, a number that is hard for us to imagine. It is borrowed money, which I will get to in a moment.

Let me give one example of how I have been trying to describe how much money $1.2 trillion is. The Presiding Officer was Governor of Virginia. I was Governor of Tennessee. I looked around the Budget Committee the other day and almost every member there had been in State government in one way or another. In other words, we used to deal with real dollars. We couldn't print anything. At the end of the year, we had to balance our budgets. Sometimes we had to veto $25,000 programs for epilepsy. I had to do that in 1981, 1982, and 1983, when we had an economic turndown. That is why this amount of money is hard for me to get my arms around. I think it is hard for most Americans.

Let me give you an idea about how much money it is. The previous Governor of Tennessee, one who came after me, Governor Sundquist, thought we needed a State income tax. He recommended Tennessee should have a State income tax. It was about 4 percent. It would have raised about $400 million a year. There was never a more unpopular act in our State than the Governor Sundquist proposal that we have a State income tax. Many people said he was courageous for recommending it, but it was rejected. People wouldn't even invite him to dinner for a few months. I would, but many other people wouldn't. That was $400 million a year. The State of Tennessee will receive almost $4 billion of this money. I am sure it will make life easier for the current Governor and the current legislature, but think about that. The State only collects close to $12 billion a year in State tax dollars, and it is going to get $4 billion over the next 2 years from this so-called stimulus package. This would be the equivalent of imposing about a 20-percent new income tax on the people of Tennessee for 2 years to raise that same amount of money. There would be a revolution in Tennessee if we did this. That is the amount of money we're talking about.

We are not talking about giving the State of Tennessee $40 million or $4 million or $400 million. Its shortfall this year is $900 million, which is the worst it has ever had. We are talking about shipping $4 billion of borrowed taxpayer money to Tennessee. My point is, that is a lot of money.

There is another aspect to this amount of money. I listed a number of things that the Federal Reserve Board and the Congress have done to try to create a better economic situation, to get housing going, to help stabilize banks, and even to deal with automobile companies. Almost all of those dollars we used either came from the Federal Reserve Board, which is not part of the Federal budget, not part of taxpayer dollars, or it was an investment.

In Tennessee, people don't like the word ``bailout.'' It has come to be right up there with the top number. I voted twice, because I thought our country needed it, first to give President Bush, then to give President Obama the amount of money he needed to actually invest in banks or nonfinance companies so we could get the credit moving again. But in that case, we were investing dollars. We were not spending dollars. We hope and believe that we will get almost all of those dollars back for the taxpayer. When those dollars are put in a bank, for example, they pay 5 percent or 8 percent or even 10 percent interest, in some cases, back to the taxpayer. Maybe we will lose some of that money, but we don't intend to. It is not our goal. That is the purpose of it, investment. In this case, this is money gone.

This is borrowed taxpayer dollars, more than $1.2 trillion. I get to $1.2 trillion because the Senate bill is $900 billion, and the interest over the next 10 years is another $300 billion. That is the real cost of the stimulus package over the next 10 years. It is borrowed money.

Let me go to the borrowed money part.

We print money in Washington. We Governors cannot. That is one of the adjustments you make when you come here. It just takes a little while to do, and I understand the difference. The truth is, there is a reasonable level of debt a strong industrial country such as the United States can tolerate and still continue to grow. As the country grows, the debt reduces as a percentage of our output.

While it might be important for the State of Tennessee, as we always did, to balance our budget and almost never have any debt--and we did not even have an income tax--the Federal Government structure is different. I recognize that. But there is some reasonable limit to the amount of debt we should have, and there are good reasons there is a reasonable limit to that.

I think it is important to understand exactly what the debt we have is. USA Today did a story last year that talked about each family's share of Government debt and Government obligations. By ``obligations,'' I mean what we owe for programs such as Medicare, what we owe for Medicaid, what we owe veterans. It is real money. It is money we are obligated to pay. It comes down to more than $500,000 per family a year.

So I think the way to talk about this stimulus package is: Should we ask every American family to increase their $531,000 debt in order to spend money for a stimulus package to try to restart the economy? I believe we should increase our debt for some purposes, such as restarting housing or permanent tax cuts--that actually allows people to keep their own money. Or possibly increase our debt for programs that would, perhaps, actually do things in the next 6 months or 12 months to stimulate the economy. There are roads, and bridges, and national park maintenance that could happen right now that would create jobs that would be genuinely stimulative. But that is a very severe test we should ask the American people.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the USA Today article detailing the obligation every American family owes be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Now, there is another problem of running up too much debt. At the hearing where the Acting President pro tempore, the Senator from Virginia, and I were at earlier this week, I asked a question of the three witnesses: What can we learn from the rest of the world about how much debt is too much debt for the United States of America? The general answer was, today our debt is measured at about 40 percent of our annual gross domestic product. The estimates they gave suggested if the stimulus packages and if the other things that are going on continue to happen, we will be up to 60 or 70 percent of GDP. If the entitlement growth--the automatic spending we have in the Government from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--keeps growing, and we keep adding at the rate we are doing, we will soon be at 100 percent of GDP. In other words, every year, government debt could equal everything we produced in this great country of ours--which produces 25 percent of all the wealth in the world every single year. We forget how fortunate we are. Twenty-five percent of all the wealth in the world, every single year, is produced in the United States of America and distributed among just 5 percent of the people in the world, which is us, those of us who live here. So we would have to take all that production for a whole year and use it to pay off our national debt.

Those economists who were testifying before us said that is too high. Forty percent is OK. They thought 60 percent is getting into a little bit of a problem. Eighty percent is too much, and 100 percent is a real problem. The practical problem is, as that number goes up--for example, as the entitlement spending goes up and other debt goes up--it squeezes out our ability to do anything else. I worked last year across party lines with Senator Bingaman and many others, and Senator Warner worked in the private sector in this way, to try to do something about American competitiveness. We put into the law that we needed to double our investments in scientific research, and if we wanted to keep this high standard of living, we have a lot of work to do in high technology.

If we keep spending all the money on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and debt, we are not going to have anything left for the great universities in the country on a yearly basis or for investments in our future. Those are annual investments. We will be squeezing them out. That is another problem with debt. With a lower debt, we have more money for not just the investments in our future but for our national parks, our clean air, and the other things we need to do to have a desirable country.

Let me go back to the stimulus package and ask: What do we need to do? We need to, in the words of Senator Gregg--and I believe it is fair to characterize Senator Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee, in the testimony this week--we need to reorient the stimulus package toward real estate, toward housing, and toward credit having to do with banks. First, fix the problem: housing.

Every big mess has a way into it, and I believe--and many

on this side, and I think some on the other side also

believe--the way into it is housing. How would one fix that?

Well, one suggestion by Glenn Hubbard--former chairman of the

Council of Economic Advisors and now at Columbia University

is have the Treasury back, for a period of a year or 18

months, a 4-percent, 30-year fixed rate mortgage for

creditworthy customers.

In other words, a bank in Nashville would say to you, if you are creditworthy: We will give you a 30-year mortgage at 4 percent. If today's prevailing rate were 5.2 or 5.3 percent--which it is in the marketplace--the Government would make up the difference, and it would probably guarantee the loan. That would create a new demand for housing.

I was talking with someone in the mortgage business yesterday who pointed out that for one of our large lenders in America, when the rates went down naturally after the Federal Reserve action a few weeks ago, the number of mortgages issued by that bank quadrupled.

So if we were to say to the American people: If you are creditworthy, you can buy a house; you can get a 4-percent mortgage for a principal residence, and we are going to keep that option open for a year. That will cost us some money. That could be part of this stimulus. It would create demand in housing. It would create liquidity. It would get banks lending. We believe it would make a real difference. It would be a better way to start the stimulus package.

A second idea, as Senator Isakson and others have suggested, is to create a tax credit for home buyers. We would say $15,000. So if you are sitting around thinking today, well, homes in Richmond have actually gotten down to a pretty good level, and I like that house--you could get a $15,000 tax credit when you buy the house, and when you file your income tax return, you get $15,000 back. This is real money, and you do not have to pay it back. If you had a combination of a 4- percent mortgage and a $15,000 tax credit for the next year, maybe we could get housing stabilized, maybe we could get demand stirring, and maybe we could get people confidence that there is liquidity in the market. That might not solve every problem, but it is the place to start. We would say first, fix housing. That is the way to restart the economy.

Senator Gregg has suggested we take some of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's ideas about helping people who are stuck in houses that are about to be foreclosed on and help to relieve those foreclosures. There may be a way for us to encourage servicers for all of these mortgages out across the country to modify the loans as some banks are now doing. By modifying the loan, they simply say to you: What can you afford to pay? As long as you can pay that and pay the interest on a regular basis, we will change the loan to fit you. That way there is no foreclosure. The loan does not go bad. The houses on that same street do not go down in value because your house is foreclosed on. We suggest we should spend the next week talking about reorienting the money that we seek to spend to stimulate the economy on housing first.

Second, we suggest the next component of a stimulus package should be tax relief that would help create jobs now. My own view is that temporary tax relief is nice. I like having the money in my pocket, but it does not stimulate very much. Permanent tax relief, the economists tell us--money you can depend on for the future--builds confidence and stimulates the economy.

For example, the small business expensing provision, which would spur investments by doubling the amount that small business owners can immediately write off on their taxes for capital investments and for purchases of new equipment in 2009. Another example is the bonus depreciation provision, that would be helpful. Middle-class tax relief--this is the permanent tax relief I was talking about--by lowering the 15-percent bracket to 10 percent and the 10-percent bracket to 5 percent. Those are examples of permanent tax relief or business tax relief that could help create jobs now.

Third, we should not spend this kind of money on many of these programs. We should not borrow this money when each family already owes over a half a million dollars. We should not borrow the money to spend on programs we do not have to have. That is not a wise use of our dollars. We ought to take all of that out of this stimulus bill.

For example, there are small examples: buying new cars, money for contraceptives, rehabilitating off-road trails, honey bee insurance. We can find items like that which don't create jobs now. But the fact is, I am more concerned about the $190 billion of entitlement spending, the automatic spending that is in this $1.2 trillion. Every estimate is that $130 billion, $140 billion, $150 billion of that will never get out of the budget. The House put in almost $100 billion of new Medicaid spending for the States.

Well, Governors and legislators are going to like that except we are never going to be able to reform the Medicaid Program. The Federal contribution to it is so rich that States cannot afford to take a fresh look at it. What is Tennessee going to do after it gets $2 billion--$1 billion a year--for the Medicaid Program for the next 2 years and, then, in the third year, gets zero of that money? That sort of money ought not to be in a so-called stimulus package.

We need some truth in packaging. If it stimulates--and all of us can think of things that do--then put it in; if it does not, keep it out. Historic preservation fund grants, I love those, but they are not going to stimulate jobs in the next few months. Head Start, I was the principal sponsor of that. Pell grants, I was a college president. Next week, after the stimulus, we will be talking about how much we can afford in our budget to increase those. Federal spending for Pell grants has doubled in the last 6 years, but those things do not belong in a stimulus budget.

Some things do. There are highways that can be built. There are Corps of Engineers projects that can be completed. There are National Park Service infrastructure projects that can be worked on next month. These are important improvement programs. That would help stimulate as well. We should be able to make an intelligent distinction between those things that can actually stimulate and those things that are just good- sounding things that we might vote for if we had the money and if we did not have to borrow so much of it. That is our third suggestion about what we should do.

One other suggestion--here is an area where we actually have potential, I believe, for bipartisan support. We should do something, when we debate the stimulus package, about automatic spending, entitlement spending, and by that we mean Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

As I mentioned earlier, by the year 2015--not so far away--that will be 70 percent of our budget. In other words, when we come here, we get to vote to appropriate 30 percent of the taxpayer dollars we spend because 70 percent is automatically spent on those entitlement programs. That is forcing our debt up to 100 percent of gross domestic product.

We had a breakfast on Tuesday here, the bipartisan breakfast we have on Tuesday mornings. It is a chance for us to get together across party lines. It was evenly divided, actually. There were 24 Members who came. The whole subject was the Senator Conrad-Senator Gregg proposal to create a commission that would come up with a way to deal with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and present it to us. We would vote it up or down, and some way we would be forced to deal with this entitlement growth problem.

Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, said in a speech a week ago today that he was ready to deal with the entitlement programs, but he was disappointed it was not dealt with in the last 2 years. He pledged to President Obama he would give him more support on dealing with it than the Democrats gave to President Bush during the last few years. You will remember President Bush tried in the beginning of his second term to deal with Social Security. He wanted private accounts. The Democrats said no to private accounts. So they just went down their parallel tracks and never got anywhere. Somehow they never got together and said: Well, let's drop private accounts, or let's try to do this; we can't do that.

President Obama has made clear he is serious about this. Senator McConnell has made clear we are serious about it. We have a Conrad- Gregg proposal. We had 24 Senators meeting last Tuesday. We are meeting again next Tuesday. We believe something ought to be in this stimulus package that at least begins the process of dealing with entitlements in the long term so we can say to the American people: Yes, we are going to borrow some amount of money--maybe hundreds of billions of dollars--to stimulate the economy, and we know it contributes to the debt, but we are at least taking a step toward dealing with the long- term excessive debt we are experiencing in our country.

Finally, after listening to the Budget Committee hearings this week, the conclusion I came to was that I wish we were doing it all now. Here is what I mean by that. I spoke a little earlier about all the things we have tried to do since October at the Washington level--some by Congress, some by the Federal Reserve, and some by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--to restart the economy. Whether it was dealing with the banks or the auto companies or troubled assets, there has been a lot of effort here.

After listening to the testimony in the Budget Committee, it seems perfectly obvious that we are going to have to do more. We are going to have to do more in housing. We would like to suggest we at least start addressing housing in this stimulus package, but if we don't do it here, President Obama and his team are going to have to recommend some steps for us to take in housing because that is how you restart the economy.

Everyone who looks at the Nation's banks and financial institutions knows we are going to have to do something there. We passed a bill in October called the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, providing money to Treasury to address troubled assets. We thought it was going to be used to go get those bad assets off of the bank balance sheets so they could get back in good shape and lend again. That is what happens when banks fail or get in trouble. In normal times, the FDIC swoops in and takes the troubled assets out, sells them to another bank, and it closes on Friday and opens on Monday. Depositors are protected, and sometimes stockholders lose, but we go on and barely notice it. However, that is not what the money we passed was used for. It was used, basically, to give money to banks to capitalize, and the reason, apparently, was they were in such bad shape, they had to have it. So maybe it wasn't a bad thing to do, but it wasn't what we thought was going to be done, and now we still have the problem of bad assets.

We asked the witnesses: How many troubled assets do we have in all of these banks? They said $1 trillion or $2 trillion. I am not talking about a stimulus package; I am talking about troubled assets in financial institutions in the United States. We said: Well, then, what are we supposed to do about that? They suggested that the ideas we are likely to hear--they did not represent the administration, but the administration is listening to many of the same people--was that they may recommend, for example, some entity that will actually take the troubled assets out of the banks at some price, and then the banks are free to go ahead and with confidence start lending again. And we can start borrowing again, the economy goes again, but then we still have this entity over here. If it is going to buy $1 trillion or $2 trillion worth of bad assets, where does it get the money? Some of it is going to come from the taxpayers. How much of it? One witness said as much as we can afford to put in. So maybe $500 billion, $600 billion, $700 billion, $800 billion more dollars, not to spend as the stimulus package does but to invest in assets that we hope to sell for at least as much as we paid for them. That could happen. We might lose some money, we might make some money, but we are not spending it. But it is a lot of money, and it is taxpayers dollars, and there will be a lot of concern in Virginia and in Tennessee and in every State when we have to do that on top of what we have done before--on top of this stimulus. So why aren't we considering that today? Why aren't we considering that bad bank or what we are going to have to do about troubled assets?

So I think a better way to do it would be to say: Let's bring in the amount of money for troubled assets--is it $500 billion?--let's bring in the money to reorient toward housing, $200 billion or $300 billion, and then let's see what projects really do stimulate. Let's do it all together, and then let's see how much money we are talking about so that we are not surprised and the people we represent are not surprised. I would like to see us do it all at once.

So next week in the Senate is a very important week. There is a good deal of talk about bipartisanship. We appreciate President Obama's efforts on that. In my view, he and his team have been genuine in their outreach to Republicans. Just because we don't agree with their ideas doesn't mean there is not a bipartisan spirit here. And as time goes on, maybe we will get into a situation where even though the Democrats have enough votes to pass most bills and we have enough votes to stop cold some bills and to slow down any bill, that is not the way we work. If we come up with a better idea, maybe the majority will adopt it and create a bill that builds confidence in the country.

President Bush technically didn't need Congress's approval, except on appropriations, to wage the war in Iraq. Some of us thought it would be better if he had it, though, so Senator Salazar and I, along with 17 Senators and about 60 House Members across party lines, suggested that we adopt a resolution approving the principles of the Iraq Study Group as a way to conclude the war in Iraq honorably. President Bush didn't like that, and Majority Leader Reid wouldn't bring it up for a vote. We might have been the only group that unified Senator Reid and President Bush on the Iraq war, but we couldn't get it done.

I think it is a shame we couldn't because Secretary Rice and Secretary Gates told me not long ago they thought where we were going to end up in Iraq under Secretary Gates' administration is about where the Iraq Study Group said we should. If we had adopted that as a Congress, perhaps the war would have been easier, and our enemies would have gotten a clearer message, and our troops would have gotten more support, and President Bush would have had a more successful Presidency.

So we won the election, and we passed the bill. That is the recipe for passing many bills, but it is not the recipe for a successful Presidency. I think President Obama knows that, and that is why he has gone out of his way to visit with us and talk with us. I hope--with the stimulus package, with entitlements coming down the road and health care plans coming down the road--that the ideas we have

on this side of the aisle, if they are good, are adopted on the other side of the aisle and we genuinely can work together in a legislative way. I think that can happen, and I would like for it to happen starting next week.

Next week is important for the Senate and important for the American people. We on the Republican side of the aisle believe we need a stimulus package, but we believe it needs to be the right stimulus package.

First, it should fix the problem, and the problem is housing. That would help restart the economy. And we have specific ideas about how to do that which I have suggested.

Second, we should let people keep more of their own money. That means permanent tax cuts. That is a way to build confidence.

Third, because we are borrowing this extraordinary amount of money and because we have other requirements for borrowed dollars, we should be very careful about what we borrow and what we spend it for and only spend it for those items that genuinely stimulate the economy and create jobs in the very near term. That is the truth in packaging.

If we adopt those three principles, then I think there will be genuine bipartisan support next week for a stimulus. If we don't, there won't be. That is why we have the Senate. That is why we have the debate. That is why I think we are here.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks an article by R. Glenn Hubbard and Christopher J. Mayer detailing the proposal for a 4.5-percent mortgage loan over 30 years.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record as well an article from the Wall Street Journal this week called ``A 40-Year Wish List'' as an example of the kinds of items that are in the stimulus bill that ought not to be if we are careful about the money we are borrowing to spend.

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

Mr. President, on Friday, at the National Press Club, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell delivered an important address that everyone concerned about the future of our country ought to read.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks Senator McConnell's speech.

Mr. President, Senator McConnell congratulated the President for reminding many in Washington, including many Republicans, that the American people want their leaders to work together to solve problems, not to set traps. He suggested that among the issues on which we could cooperate are reducing the national debt, energy independence, and lowering taxes. Specifically, Senator McConnell urged the President to follow up on his pledge to put the power of the Democratic majorities to work on entitlement spending, the automatic spending that threatens within just 9 years to consume nearly 70 percent of the Federal budget and to create a national debt that equals our Nation's annual gross domestic product. Already, each American's share of the national debt is $35,000.

In order to do that, Senator McConnell said the President will have to reject the hyperpartisanship that exists in some quarters of Congress and engage Republicans on the merits of our ideas.

Senator McConnell said that as Republican leader of the Senate, he would make this a firm principle of his dealings with the new administration, and he said that if the new President follows up on his promise to address entitlement spending, Democrats can expect more consideration from the Republicans than the last President received from them.

This is a major statement by an experienced Senate leader who has proven he knows how to stop bad legislation but is offering to go to work with the new President to shape and improve good and needed legislation, if the new majorities will meet Republicans on the merits of our ideas.

Some time ago, Senator McConnell invited President Obama to come to the Senate and meet with Senate Republicans. And we all hope that soon he may do that.

The kind of cooperation Senator McConnell talked about in his speech on Friday did not happen often in the last few years. It did on energy, it did on American competitiveness, to some degree on foreign intelligence issues. Earlier, it happened on education and some other issues. But when President Bush, for example, made reforming Social Security the major thrust of his second term, Democrats said no. Neither side moved off their position, and so deficit spending and our national debt kept going up.

If any subject over the last few years deserved cooperation, it was the war in Iraq. Senator Salazar and I assembled 17 Senators, 9 Democrats, and 8 Republicans, and there were 63 Members of the House almost evenly divided between the parties who sponsored a resolution to set as a goal for the country to end the war on the principles recommended by the Iraq Study Group.

President Bush would not support our legislation. The Democratic leaders refused to bring it to a vote. I remember telling both President Bush and Senator Reid I believed we were the only ones who actually united them on Iraq. They were both against what we were trying to do. But if either President Bush had supported our resolution or if Senator Reid had allowed it to come to a vote, I believe the resolution would have been enacted, sending a message to our troops, to our country, and to our enemy that we were united in bringing an honorable and successful end to that conflict.

Ironically, we are now headed in Iraq toward a conclusion that now seems to have the general support of both President Bush and President Obama, presided over by the same Secretary of Defense, who has served them both. That is approximately the same result that was recommended by the Iraq Study Group.

That is not just my opinion. Toward the end of last year I asked both Secretary Gates and Secretary Rice whether the path toward conclusion of the Iraq war that was agreed upon by the Iraqis and the United States and is now basically being recommended by President Obama, whether that was the path recommended by the Iraq Study Group, and each of them said yes.

There is a lesson here for the new administration. Technically, President Bush did not need Congress's approval to wage the war in Iraq. He is the Commander in Chief. But if he had won that congressional approval for the last 2 years of the war, that would have made the war easier, perhaps more successful, and certainly the Bush Presidency more successful.

Technically, President Obama, with large Democratic majorities in Congress, does not need Republicans to pass most legislation. ``We won the election; we will write the bill,'' said Speaker Pelosi. That is the way to pass many bills, but as President Bush found out, it is not the way to have a successful Presidency.

The President and the Democratic majorities on their own can pass many bills, and we Republicans, with 41 or 42 votes in the Senate, can block some things and slow down almost anything. But most of us Republicans agree with Senator McConnell: That is not what we are here to do. And what President Obama said in his inaugural address is that is not the kind of Presidency he wishes to have.

The new President is off to a good start in his relationships with Republican Members of the Senate. Even the Senate Democratic majority is showing some encouraging signs of letting the Senate function as it is supposed to function, as a guardian against the tyranny of the majority, warned of by de Tocqueville, by allowing debates, by allowing amendments and rollcalls on major pieces of legislation. That is what we are here for; we are here to represent the men and women who live in our States on those issues.

Tomorrow morning, there is a bipartisan breakfast, the first one of this year. We had them during the last 2 years. At that breakfast, we will be discussing the resolution of Senator Conrad and Senator Gregg to create a Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action. In other words, to get serious about dealing with runaway entitlement spending. Already we have, I

believe, 26 Members of the Senate, almost evenly split among Democrats and Republicans, who have accepted to come to that breakfast tomorrow morning. That is an unusual number of Senators for such an event.

Republicans and Democrats will not always agree. We emphasize different principles. We have different solutions. We are here because we were nominated in partisan conventions or partisan elections. We are here to contend, we are here to debate, we are here to offer our ideas. But to get here, almost all of us had to earn Independent votes and some votes from the other party.

When we got here, we all took an oath to represent all our constituents.

What will make this Presidency and this Congress different is if after we conclude delivering our sermons to one another, we put aside the 20 percent on which we disagree, and see if we can come to some result on the 80 percent on which we agree, as Senator Enzi of Wyoming likes to say.

This will not happen if the majority takes the position: We won the election, we will write the bill; or if the Democratic leader seeks to muzzle our constituents by not allowing amendments and debates and votes on the Senate floor. It can happen, as the Republican leader, Senator McConnell, said in his address on Friday, if we in the Senate act like grownups and have the courage to put aside hyperpartisanship and reject the advice of groups that protect narrow interests and find ways to work together to solve the real problems that are facing our country today.

Exhibit 1

[From the Office of Senator Mitch McConnell, Jan. 23, 2009]

Meeting Challenges: A Way Forward for Congress

Remarks of U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell

(as prepared for delivery) National Press Club, January 23,

2009.

``Thank you, Donna. I also want to thank John Donnelly of

Congressional Quarterly for inviting me here today. I'm

delighted to be here, and I'm honored to be joined by such a

distinguished group of reporters.

``For more than a century, the National Press Club has

served a vital national purpose as a forum for newsmakers and

those who cover them. A free press is essential to our

Democracy. And today I thought I'd come over here to look for

some free press.

``This past Tuesday, millions of Americans who are old

enough to remember past inaugurations were reminded of one of

the great hallmarks of our republic, and millions of young

people experienced for the first time the rejuvenating effect

of the peaceful transfer of power. Of all our civic rituals,

few elicit the same feelings of national pride at home or

more admiration abroad.

``But the inauguration of President Obama was somehow

different, and not only because we were moved at seeing an

African American take the oath of office from the steps of a

building built by slaves. This year's inauguration was

different because this year's election was different.

``For the first time in awhile, America has a president who

isn't viewed by most people as an overly polarizing figure.

Americans are intrigued by President Obama's promise of post-

partisanship. And this afternoon I'd like to share some of my

thoughts on the possibility of a new era of cooperation.

``As others have noted, the President does not govern

alone.

He can't sign a bill Congress hasn't already passed. He

can't spend money Congress hasn't appropriated. If President

Obama's promise of post-partisanship is to be realized, he'll

first need some cooperation from Congress.

``And so, in the spirit of overcoming divisions, let me

start out by saying that I agree with President Obama's

assertion on Tuesday that many of today's problems are simply

too great for us to pass over in the interest of protecting

narrow interests. The normal constituencies must be widened.

``On issue after issue, members of both parties have too

often fallen into the habit of asking narrow interest groups

what they think should be done about something before

thinking about what the average American thinks should be

done.

``This is how a group like CodePink could end up having so

much influence in a national debate about the conduct of a

war. This is why a prominent labor leader thinks he can tell

a reporter that he expects `payback' from Democrats for the

support he gave them during last year's elections. And this

is how vulgar insults hurled from overcaffeinated activists

can suddenly pass for legitimate political discourse.

``When these things happen, it's easy to see why cynicism

about government persists.

``And it's easy to see why something needs to change.

``Both sides are guilty. Republicans need to reevaluate the

way decisions are made in Washington, and so do Democrats.

But one thing is clear: every decision cannot be made based

on a political calculation--because the usual interest groups

so seldom agree.

``President Obama seems to understand this. His campaign

was based on the notion that ordinary Americans would have a

seat at the table in his administration. And broadening the

old constituencies is, as he has suggested, one sure way to

uphold that pledge.

``Once we do this, there are many issues on which we can

cooperate. President Obama mentioned several of them on the

campaign trail: reducing the national debt, increasing energy

independence, and lowering taxes. There are others.

But achieving any one of them will be impossible without

cooperation between both parties in Congress and between

Congress and the White House.

``Now, I realize that if you told most people Mitch

McConnell was down at the National Press Club hoping for

bipartisanship, they'd tell you that's like an insurance

agent hoping for an earthquake. Most people don't exactly

view me as the Mr. Rogers of the Senate. But, respectfully, I

think reporters too often confuse being conservative with

being partisan. And while my voting record clearly reflects

my core values, it also reflects a long commitment to working

with others.

``Senator Feinstein has been my closest collaborator in

fighting human rights abuses in Burma. For years, I worked

alongside Senator Dodd on the Senate Rules Committee, where

we teamed up to pass the Help America Vote Act. And more

recently, I took a lead role in brokering a bipartisan

financial rescue plan just a few weeks before my own

reelection bid in November.

``I fought for the rescue package because I thought the

country needed it, even though my party could have done

without it--and I ended up paying for my efforts. Soon after

the deal was struck, one of the very people who had sat at

the negotiating table with me ended up running ads against me

on that very issue. He saw that it made me vulnerable back

home, and tried to capitalize on it politically, which I

certainly didn't expect. But these are the risks that

politicians have to take from time to time in order to

achieve something worthwhile. And it's a risk I was willing

to take.

``There was, of course, a time when working on a bipartisan

basis to achieve big things for the nation didn't mean

exposing oneself to attack ads by one's own colleagues. For

years, the Senate was a place where real friendships across

party lines were common. One thinks of the breakfast meetings

between Mike Mansfield and George Aiken; or Jim Eastland and

Gaylord Nelson--men as far apart ideologically as you could

find--spending time together after a long day's work. My

Senate mentor, John Sherman Cooper, had a close relationship

with President Kennedy.

``These friendships were always good for the Senate, and

occasionally they paid major dividends for the whole country.

One of the great examples of this in the modern era is the

Social Security fix of 1983, brokered by Pat Moynihan and Bob

Dole. And it's an example we could learn a lot from today.

``As Moynihan later recalled it, the genesis of that

particular achievement came on the morning of January 3,

1983. Dole had published an op-ed piece in that day's edition

of the `New York Times' in which he said that Republicans

were eager to accomplish big things in the coming year.

``He cited Social Security as a case in point, arguing that

the looming insolvency of Social Security should overwhelm

every other domestic priority. By accelerating already-

scheduled taxes and reducing future benefit increases, Dole

said, Social Security could be made solvent for decades.

``At some point later in the day, Moynihan approached Dole

on the Senate floor. If Dole really thought Social Security

could be saved, he said, why not try to do it together? Well,

13 days later, an agreement was reached, and the Social

Security crisis had passed.

``Twenty years later, Bob Dole could say that he had been

the longest serving Republican Leader in history and the

Republican nominee for president of the United States. But

when a reporter asked him what he considered his proudest

accomplishments in a lifetime of public service, the first

thing that came to mind was the Social Security fix of 1983.

Dole explained it this way: 'Those things that are lasting

are bipartisan. If you don't have a consensus, it's not going

to last.'

``This kind of bipartisan consensus has been increasingly

rare in recent years, and the nation has suffered as a

result. We saw this four years ago, when President Bush,

newly reelected and with expanded Republican majorities in

Congress, had the courage to put Social Security reform on

the agenda. When he asked for bipartisan help, not one

Democrat in Congress stepped forward. Every single one of

them turned his or her back, reflexively choosing politics

over governing--and the nation lost out on an opportunity to

fix a crucial program in desperate need of reform.

``Today, Democrats have substantial majorities in the

Senate and the House. They control the White House. And now

Democrats assume responsibility for a number of pressing

problems--including the one they refused to face in 2005.

The problem with entitlement spending has not gone away.

``On Social Security in particular, the situation is

increasingly dire: in 1950, 16 workers paid for every one

person who received Social Security benefits. Today, it's

about 3 workers per beneficiary. And within 10 years

times, more money will be coming out of the Social Security

fund than going in.

``Looking at entitlements in general, Social Security,

Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs will soon consume

about twice the percentage of the federal budget they did

four decades ago. If we don't rein this spending in, soon

we'll have only have a fraction left for things like defense,

roads, bridges, and special ed. And this is not a problem

that raising taxes will solve. In order to meet all our

current entitlement promises, we'd have to extract $495,000

from every American household.

``The expansion of entitlement spending is a looming crisis

that has been overlooked for too long. And with control of

the White House and big majorities in Congress, Democrats now

owe it to the American people to put their power to work on

this vital issue. And here's my pledge: If they do so, they

can expect more cooperation from Republicans than the last

President received from them.

``President Obama has said he wants to tackle the

entitlements crisis. But in order to succeed, he'll have to

continue to reject the hyper partisanship that exists in some

quarters of Congress. And he will have to engage Republicans

on the merits of our ideas.

``The good news is that most people think ideas should be

assessed on their merits, not on the senator or the president

who proposes them. Our new President seems to think the same

thing. And as Senate Republican Leader, I also pledge to make

this is a firm principle in my dealings with the Obama

Administration.

``President Obama's campaign reminded many in Washington,

including many Republicans, of the aspirations that the

Americans people have about their government.

People want their leaders to work together to solve

problems, not to set traps. The challenge now is for both

parties to cooperate, not just in word but in deed.

``In all this, politics will have its place. But at this

moment, achieving big things for the country is where my

ambitions lie. Voters from both parties think Washington is

broken. And that's a shame. But if both parties have helped

create this cynical view of government, then both parties

will have to work to correct it. And we can start, once the

current debate over the Stimulus is through, by working to

reform Social Security and Medicare.

``In this and in other efforts, there will be

disagreements. But they can be principled disagreements, and

the result of principled disagreement is often principled

cooperation. The result won't satisfy everyone. As Bob Dole

said of the 1983 Social Security fix, `No one got everything,

and everyone got something.'

``But many of the domestic problems we face are simply too

great to kick the can down the road any longer. We need to

summon the courage to act on issues that are of grave concern

to our nation's future. And the long-term sustainability of

entitlements is one of them.

``As Republicans look for common ground in this and other

areas where legislative progress can be made, some will no

doubt accuse us of compromise. But those who do so will be

confusing compromise with cooperation. And anyone who

belittles cooperation resigns him or herself to a state of

permanent legislative gridlock. And that is simply no longer

acceptable to the American people.

``President Obama has shown himself to be a man of

legislative ambition. He reaffirmed this on Tuesday when he

called on the country to recognize collective failures, and

when he called on politicians to step up to the unpleasant

tasks and seek first the interests of the whole.

``Make no mistake: Some of our new President's proposals

will be met with strong, principled resistance from me and

from others. But many of his ambitions show real potential

for bipartisan cooperation. And if we see sensible,

bipartisan proposals, Republicans will choose bipartisan

solutions over partisan failures every time.

``Thank you very much.''

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

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Arizona as usual for his very clear explanation of the issues. He is one of the legal scholars in the Senate with a great deal of experience. There is no need for me to go through the details of what he has just explained, so let me think about it and talk about it in a little bit different way.

On Tuesday, a couple million people here and millions all over the world watched an eloquent ceremony from our Nation's Capital, the very moving speech by President Obama, and were reassured by his eloquence in a time of difficulty for our country. Among all of the difficulties we have, of course, the most important seems to be--or is--our economic troubles. The new President promised he would make his first order of business to get this economy moving again, get people working again, and to create new jobs. So it then becomes extremely important to say that is what the new President said, and we agree with him.

I think we agree with that on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. The Democrats are in charge of the Congress, so it is important to see what their priorities are for fulfilling the President's promise to get the economy moving again. Would it be cutting payroll taxes so people have more money in their pockets? Would it be building new roads and bridges to try to create new jobs quickly? Would it be to extend unemployment benefits? Would it be new investments in energy research and development? All of those, one might expect, would be priorities. The President has talked about many of those ideas. But no, it is none of those.

The first priority of the new Democratic Congress, which was already passed by the House and brought to the floor of the Senate without even being considered by a committee, and which we are debating today, is a trial lawyer bailout. Let's give our friends the trial lawyers a big bailout as the first order of business in our effort to help the economy. That is exactly what the Democrats' bill does.

Why does it do that? The bill Senator Kyl talked about attempts to regulate a solution that is fair to employees and fair to business about a pay discrimination lawsuit, whether you are a woman or whether you are a man. You need to have a reasonable amount of time for the employee to file the cause of action, the act of discrimination, but you have to have a reasonable amount of time for the employer to know that the chances of that lawsuit being brought are limited. That is a part of every aspect of our law, and we call it the statute of limitations. You cannot sit in your backyard for 20 or 30 years with a cause of action in your pocket and then run up to the courthouse and say: Oops, I should have brought this 30 years ago, but I noticed now all the witnesses are dead, nobody is around to defend this; I am going to bring it now. That is, in effect, what we are talking about today.

We have differences in our responses to the Supreme Court decision about

what the reasonableness of a statute of limitations on a cause of action on pay discrimination might be. On this side of the aisle, Senator Hutchison's amendment on which we will be voting on later this morning says: Let's expand the current law and say that an employee should bring the lawsuit, not just within 180 days as the Supreme Court and the law now says, but whenever that employee could have known or reasonably should have known about the lawsuit. So that gives the employee even more fairness than the law exists today.

On the other side of the aisle the solution is: Let's, in effect, abolish the statute of limitations and have never-ending lawsuits.

What would the effect of this be in practical terms? I can speculate what the effect will be. I think it means that employers will have to keep more records. We are not talking about General Motors and General Electric here. They have big staffs who already keep lots of records and big law firms, in effect, that work for their companies. We are talking about the shoe shop owner, the filling station owner, and the small business owner who works 10 or 12 hours a day every day of the week. We are talking about the men and women in America on whom we are relying to create the largest number of jobs to spur the economic recovery that our new President talked about and that we all want.

What are we saying to them? We are saying: Mr. and Mrs. Small Business Person, we want you to keep a lot more records. That means you might have to spend money you are earning to hire an employee to keep records going back interminably so you can defend a lawsuit. We want you to be careful about pay for performance, rewarding one person over another person, because under the law proposed by that side, years later, some son or daughter or relative of that person may say: Somebody wasn't fair to mama or daddy and bring a lawsuit after everybody is gone, particularly whoever knew about whatever this situation was.

So employers and small business people will be discouraged from being more competitive by saying to one employee over another employee that we are going to have pay for performance, which is never easy to do. The legitimate complaints, people who are real victims of real pay discrimination, also are going to be hurt. The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission had 75,000 or so claims and most of them were not meritorious. That means everybody is delayed in terms of the meritorious claims, and this will open the floodgates and slow justice for the real victims.

It will mean, if you are a small businessman in America and this law passes, if Senator Hutchison's amendment is not adopted, you better get ready to hire a recordkeeper, you better get ready to pay some settlements to lawyers because, for the interminable future, a lawyer and someone who used to work for you or is a relative of that person may come in and allege pay discrimination, even though it was 25 years ago and they knew it all the time.

What does that mean for you? You better set aside $25,000, $50,000, $200,000 of money that you could use to hire more people or pay a dividend or get the economy moving again to bail out the trial lawyers.

I am disappointed with the proposal on the other side of the aisle. I fully support Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has a proposal that I hope we adopt at 11:30 this morning that is fair to employees and that is fair to small businesses.

I would think the majority would have something better to offer the American people in response to the new President's eloquent suggestion that it is time to get the economy moving again than a bailout for their friends, the trial lawyers.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I would appreciate being reminded when 4 minutes is up so that I may reserve the last 30 seconds of my time.

The DeMint amendment would take away from States the right to decide whether they want to be a right-to-work State or a State that allows for an agency shop or a union shop. Now, on this very Senate floor, in 1947, after World War II, Mr. Conservative, Robert A. Taft, the leader of the Republicans, stood before the American people and said the law that was passed in 1935--the National Labor Relations Act--was wrong because it took away from States the right to make that decision, and there was a tumultuous argument on the Senate floor.

Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, and it gave the States the right to decide whether an employee would have to pay union dues or join a union in order to have a job. Since then, 22 States, including the State of Tennessee, have decided, yes; we want to be a right-to-work State under the principles supported by the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, but he wants to make that a national law.

I don't trust Washington on this issue. What do you suppose would happen in the Senate if today we voted about whether to have a national right-to-work law or a national agency shop or a union shop? I think I know what the result would be, and I know what would happen.

Thirty years ago I was the Governor of Tennessee and we were the third poorest State and we had no auto jobs. Nissan wanted to come somewhere in the United States, and they chose Tennessee because we had a right-to-work law. Tennessee had the right to make that decision, even though other States chose not to have a right-to-work law. Then Saturn built a plant, and the Saturn employees chose to belong to the UAW and the Nissan employees said, no; we don't want to be in a union. Since that time, 13 major companies have come to the States that have right-to-work laws, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

If we let the prevailing Washington view decide whether a State should have a right-to-work, union shop, open shop, or agency shop law, we wouldn't have had that advantage, and we might not even have had an auto industry in the United States today. That competition between the States brought the companies that came here, hired American workers, built cars in our country, and now build half of our cars. These companies are providing the competition that will help the Detroit part of our industry survive, I think, more so than Government bailouts.

So I say to my Republican colleagues especially, be careful what you ask for. Do you want to ask the Congress to vote on whether States have the right to choose a right-to-work law? I do not. I don't think you get any smarter about that issue by coming to Washington, DC. Democratic and Republican Governors and legislatures in Tennessee for a long time have thought we were perfectly capable of making that decision.

So I would urge my colleagues to say Robert Taft was right in 1947 and 1948. We don't want Washington telling Tennessee, North Carolina, Minnesota, or Maryland what their labor laws ought to be. Let Tennessee decide whether it wants a right-to-work law. I can think of nothing more fundamental to the prosperity of my State than preserving the principle that States have the option to decide whether or not to have a right-to-work law. So I respectfully oppose the DeMint amendment.

Madam President, how much time do I have remaining? I am supposed to have 30 seconds left.

Madam President, if I were speaking in Tennessee, I would give the Senator from South Carolina an A-plus for his statement because it is exactly the law I want Tennessee to have. But what we are talking about here today is whether we want Washington to tell each State whether it can have a right-to-work law or agency shop or a union shop law. If Washington were to do that, Tennessee would not have a right-to-work law. We would not have permission to do that. We would not have an auto industry which is one-third of all of our manufacturing jobs.

So I want my Republican colleagues, if I may say so, to be very careful here. Do we really want Washington telling us that the principle is they are going to say whether we can have a right-to-work law? I don't want them telling me that.

Does that mean 1 minute?

When I was Governor of Tennessee--and I see the former Governor of Missouri here--nothing used to make me madder, to be blunt about it, than some Washington Congressman or Senator holding a press conference and telling me what to do because usually they would tell me what to do and not send the money, and then I would have to send the money on to the mayor, raise taxes, lower taxes. I would have to do something myself. We are perfectly capable of deciding whether we need a right-to-work law.

Last year, the Senator from New Jersey was trying to ship New Jersey's laws to Tennessee with a national law. I cannot stand up and say we want a national right-to-work law and then argue against having New Jersey's laws in Tennessee, for States and counties that don't want those laws. So we want to fit those to our own circumstances.

I greatly respect my colleague and friend, the Senator from South Carolina. On principle, he is right. There is another principle-- federalism--that we can decide for ourselves. We would undermine that principle.

I urge my colleagues to vote against the DeMint amendment.

Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for his remarks. Unless the Republican leader has some remarks, I would like to say a couple things.

Mr. President, in August 1963, I was a law student and a summer intern in the U.S. Department of Justice here in Washington. I was standing at the back of a huge crowd on a hot day when Dr. King spoke of his dream that one day his children would be judged not ``by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.''

The inauguration of our former colleague, Barack Obama, the day after Dr. King's birthday, symbolizes both remarkable progress on America's most intractable problem--race--and a reaffirmation of our country's most unique characteristic--a fervent belief that anything is possible.

I thought about this in the same way 4 years ago at almost this time. I formed a speech in my head that I wanted to make, but I did not make it. Senators are rarely guilty of unexpressed thoughts. I have said many things I wish I had not said, but this is one time I wish I had said, 4 years ago, what I was thinking. So I wish to say it today, right after President Obama's inauguration. And I am especially delighted Senator Martinez happens to be here too.

What I was thinking 4 years ago as the new Senators were sworn in was that here were three Members of the new class who had especially unique characteristics, and they had special people in the gallery that day.

I, with Senator Carper and some others, had been asked by the leaders to work on the orientation for the new Senators. So we had gotten to know the new Senators, including Salazar and Obama and Martinez, during that period of time.

So here is what I was thinking that day--and let's take them one by one. Here was Senator Salazar from Colorado with a Spanish surname, but he will be quick to tell you that his family has been here for 14 generations and helped to found Santa Fe. He has had a distinguished career here now. On that day 4 years ago, his mother was in the gallery.

Senator Martinez was sworn in 4 years ago as a new Member of the Senate, in this case from Florida. His story, which he has just published in a remarkably good book which I have given to many of my friends, is the story of a young boy growing up very happily in Cuba whose parents took him to the airport one day, after having bought him a new suit, when he was 14 years of age, and put him on an airplane to Miami, not knowing if they would ever see him again. He was in a foster home there, then moved to Orlando. The story is all in the book. He went to Florida State, met his wife Kitty, became the mayor of Orlando, then became a member of President Bush's Cabinet, then a Member of the U.S. Senate. A very remarkable story. His mother, who put him on the airplane in Cuba, was here that day.

These same 4 years ago when we swore in these new Members of the Senate, we also had the Senator from Illinois. We all now know his story very well: a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas. I don't need to repeat that extraordinary story, about which he has written so well in his autobiography. But what struck me was that his grandmother was in the gallery that day. It was either his grandmother or his grandfather, but I believe it was his grandmother. His father's parent was in the gallery that day on the first trip, I believe, from Africa to this country to see the son of an immigrant sworn into the U.S. Senate.

So I thought 4 years ago, and I think again today on this day on which we swear in Barack Obama as President, what a remarkable country this is. Here in this Senate 4 years ago, the 14th-generation American Ken Salazar is now going into President Obama's Cabinet as Secretary of the Interior. Mel Martinez, having had a long career in public life as mayor in Orlando, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, as U.S. Senator, is going on to other things in his life. Former Senator Obama, of course, is now the President of the United States. But what was remarkable to me was 4 years ago they came to this Senate, and in that gallery were their parents--and in one case a grandparent-- reaffirming what I think Barack Obama's inauguration represents for us today. It was historic in the sense that it helped us symbolize the overcoming of one of our most intractable problems, the problem of race. But just as

important, it symbolized once again the characteristic that makes this country more remarkable than any other country, the idea that anything is possible.

People in other parts of the world look at the United States, and they don't always approve of us, but they know one thing is different about us: that we are not a country based on blood or race or the color of our skin or where our grandparents came from; that we are based upon our common belief in a few ideas, most of which are incorporated in two founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But one of those ideas is just in our character, and that is this irrational, fervent belief that in this country, anything is possible. Senator Martinez, Senator Salazar, and former Senator Barack Obama all represent that beautifully, and that makes this a very special day.

I thank the President, I yield the floor.